St John of the Cross is like a sponge full of Christianity: you can squeeze it all out and the full mystical theory remains. Consequently, for fifteen years or so I hated St John of the Cross and called him a Buddhist. I loved St Theresa and read her again and again. She is first a Christian, only secondarily a mystic. Then I found that I had wasted fifteen years so far as prayer was concerned.
By ‘prayer’ in this context Abbot Chapman did not of course mean petitionary prayer. He was speaking about what is called the prayer of quiet, the prayer of waiting upon the Lord in a state of alert passivity and permitting the deepest elements within the mind to come to the surface. Dionysius the Areopagite, in Mystical Theology and his other books, had constantly insisted upon the fact that in order to become directly acquainted with God, rather than merely to know about God, one must go beyond symbols and concepts. These are actually obstacles, according to Dionysius, to the immediate experience of the divine. Empirically this has been found to be true by all the spiritual masters, of both the Western and the Oriental worlds. A striking example comes from the writings of Jean Jacques Olier, who was a very well-known spiritual director of the seventeenth century, a product of the Counter Reformation and of the revival of mystical theology in France at the time of Louis XIII.
He wrote: ‘The holy light of faith is so pure that special illuminations are impure compared with it, even thoughts of the saints or of the Blessed Virgin or of Jesus Christ in His Humanity are alike hindrances to the sight of the pure God.’ This seems, particularly from a Counter Reformation theologian, a very strange and daring statement, and yet it does represent a perfectly clear restatement of what had been said again and again by the mystics of the past. What Olier calls ‘the sight of the pure God’ is, psychologically speaking, the mystical experience. This is one thing, and belief in propositions about God, belief in dogmas and theological statements and liturgies inspired by these statements, is something entirely different.
In this context I would like to quote the words of an eminent contemporary Dominican theologian, Father Victor White, who is a particularly interesting writer, as he is both a theologian and a psychotherapist who worked a great deal with Jung, and as he is very well acquainted with modern psychological theories and practice. He says:
Freud’s conception of religion as a universal neurosis [is not] entirely without truth and value—once we have understood his terminology. We must remember that for him, not only religion, but dreams, unbidden phantasies, slips of the tongue and pen—everything short of an unrealizable idea of complete consciousness is somehow abnormal and pathological (cf. Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, passim). But theology will also confirm that religion, in the sense of creeds and external cults, arises from man’s relative unconsciousness, from his incomprehension of—and disharmony with—the creative mind behind the universe, and from his own inner conflicts and divisions. Such religion, in theological language, is the result of man’s fall from original innocence and integrity, his remoteness on this earth from Divine vision.
The religion of direct experience of the divine has been regarded as the privilege of a very few people. I personally don’t think this is necessarily true at all. I think that practically everyone is capable of this immediate experience, provided he sets about it in the right way and is prepared to do what is necessary. We have simply taken for granted that the mystics represent a very small minority among a huge majority who must be content with the religion of creeds and symbols and sacred books and liturgies and organizations.
Belief is a matter of very great importance. One of the great best sellers of recent years is called The Power of Belief. This is a very good title, because belief is a very great source of power. It has power for the believer himself and permits the believing person to exercise power over others. It does in a sense move mountains. Belief, like any other source of power, can be used for both evil and good, and just as well for evil as for good. We have seen in our very own time the terrifying spectacle of Hitler very nearly conquering the entire world through the power of belief in something which was not only manifestly untrue but profoundly evil.
This tremendous fact of belief, which is so constantly cultivated within the symbol-manipulating religions, is essentially ambivalent. The consequence is that religion as a system of beliefs has always been an ambivalent force. It gives birth simultaneously to humility and to what the medieval poets call the ‘proud prelate’, the ecclesiastical tyrant. It gives birth to the highest form of art and to the lowest form of superstition. It lights the fires of charity, and it also lights the fires of the Inquisition and the fire that burned Servetus in the Geneva of Calvin. It gives birth to St Francis and Elizabeth Fry, but it also gives birth to Torquemada and Kramer and Springer, the authors of the Malleus Maleficorum, the great handbook of witch hunters published about the same year Columbus discovered America. It gives birth to George Fox, but it also gives birth to Archbishop Laud. This tremendous force of religion as a theological system has always been ambivalent precisely because of the strange nature of belief itself and because of the strange capacity of man, when he embarks on his philosophical speculations, for coming up with extremely strange and fantastic answers.
Myths, on the whole, have been much less dangerous than theological systems because they are less precise and have fewer pretensions. Where you have theological systems it is claimed that these propositions about events in the past and events in the future and the structure of the universe are absolutely true; consequently reluctance to accept them is regarded as a rebellion against God, worthy of the most undying punishment. And we see that in fact these systems have, as a matter of historical record, been used as justification for almost every act of aggression and imperialistic expansion. There is hardly a single large-scale crime in history which has not been committed in the name of God. This was summed up many centuries ago in the hexameter of Lucretius: ‘Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum’ (such great evils was religion able to persuade men to commit). He should have added, ‘Tantum religio potuit suadere bonorum’ (such great goods also could it persuade men to commit). Nevertheless, the good has had to be paid for by a great deal of evil.
This strife-producing quality of religion as a system of theological symbols has brought about not only the jihads and crusades of one religion against another, it has produced an enormous amount of internal friction within the same religion. The odium theologicum, the theological hatred, is notorious for its virulence, and the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were of a degree of ferocity which passes all belief. In this context I think we should remember that we are accustomed now to say, ‘O, what great evils Naturalism as a philosophy has brought upon the world!’—but in point of historical fact, supernaturalism has brought about just as great evils and perhaps even greater ones. We must not allow ourselves to be carried away by this kind of rhetoric.
I mentioned before the extraordinary capacity of philosophers and theologians to produce fantastic ideas which they then dignify with the name of dogma or revelation. As an example of this I would like to cite a few facts about one of the fundamental ideas in Christianity, the idea of the atonement. Such information as I have here is based upon the excellent article, a long essay on the subject, in Hastings’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. The essay is by Dr Adams Brown, who at one time was professor of theology at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. He has set forth the history of this doctrine very lucidly and summed it up very cogently at the end. Let me quickly go through it, because it illustrates clearly the dangers of symbol-manipulating religion.
In the earliest period of Christianity, Christ’s death was regarded either as a covenant sacrifice comparable to the sacrifice of the pascal lamb in the Jewish religion or as a ransom, exactly comparable to the price paid by a slave to obtain his freedom or to the price paid by a war prisoner for his release. Both of these ideas are hinted at in the Gospels. Later on, in post-Gospel theology, there came the notion that Christ’s death was the bloody expiation for original sin. This was based on the very ancient idea that any wrongdoing required expiation by suffering on the part of the sinner himself or on the part of a substitute for the sinner. In the Old Testament we read that David’s sin in making a census of his people was punished by a plague which killed seventy thousand of his subjects but didn’t kill David.
In Patristic times we find a profound difference on this subject between the Greek theologians and the Latin theologians. The Greek theologians were not primarily concerned with the death of Christ; they were concerned with life, and the death
