The School of Charity. Evelyn Underhill
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we begin the overhaul of our spiritual equipment not by thinking about our own needs and shortcomings, but by looking up and out at this One Reality, this Unchanging God, and so gaining a standard of comparison, a “control.” That remarkable naturalist and philosopher, Dr. Beebe, whose patient study of living things seems to have brought him so near to the sources of life, says in his latest book Nonsuch, “As a panacea for a host of human ills, worries and fears, I should like to advocate a law that every toothbrush should have a small telescope in its handle, and the two used equally.” As far as the life of religion is concerned, if we always used the telescope before we used the toothbrush—looked first at the sky of stars, the great ranges of the beauty and majesty of God, and only then at our own small souls and their condition, needs, and sins—the essential work of the toothbrush would be much better done; and without that self-conscious conviction of its overwhelming importance, and the special peculiarities and requirements of our own set of teeth, which the angels must surely find amusing. “Where I left myself I found God; where I found myself, I lost God,” says Meister Eckhart. Our eyes are not in focus for His Reality, until they are out of focus for our own petty concerns.
What then is the nature of that Eternal God, the Substance of all that is, so far as we are able to apprehend Him? What is the quality of that mysterious starlight the telescope helps us to discern? We are Christians; and so we accept, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the Christian account of His character. God is Love, or rather Charity; generous, out-flowing, self-giving love, Agape. When all the qualities which human thought attributes to Reality are set aside, this remains. Charity is the colour of the Divine personality, the spectrum of Holiness. We believe that the tendency to give, to share, to cherish, is the mainspring of the universe, ultimate cause of all that is, and reveals the Nature of God: and therefore that when we are most generous we are most living and most real. “Who dwelleth in Charity dwelleth in God, and God in him”; our true life develops within a spiritual world which lives and glows in virtue of His Eternal Charity. To enter the Divine order then, achieve the full life for which we are made, means entering an existence which only has meaning as the channel and expression of an infinite, self-spending love. This is not piety. It is not altruism. It is the clue to our human situation.
The Creed, our list of the spiritual truths to which our inner life must be conformed, is all about a God who is Charity, a Charity that is God. It tells us that what we call creation is the never-ceasing action of a self-spending personal love; and all the experiences and acts of religion are simply our small experience of, and response to, the pressure and the call of that same creative Love which rules the stars. “Behold, Lord, from whence such love proceedeth!” exclaims Thomas à Kempis. It proceeds from the very heart of the universe. For Christians this is the ultimate fact, which must govern the whole conduct of life. We are each created, sought, possessed and maintained by a living Reality that is Charity; truly known by us in and through His free, generous self-giving, and in no other way. The life which we are called upon to manifest in space and time is a living spark of this generous Love. That means that the true demand of religion will never be a demand for correct behaviour or correct belief; but for generosity, as the controlling factor in every relation between man and God and man and man. To look at ourselves and our lives after looking at this great truth is surely enough to bring self-satisfied piety down with a run.
When we look out towards this Love that moves the stars and stirs in the child’s heart, and claims our total allegiance and remember that this alone is Reality and we are only real so far as we conform to its demands, we see our human situation from a fresh angle; and perceive that it is both more humble and dependent, and more splendid, than we had dreamed. We are surrounded and penetrated by great spiritual forces, of which we hardly know anything. Yet the outward events of our life cannot be understood, except in their relation to that unseen and intensely living world, the Infinite Charity which penetrates and supports us, the God whom we resist and yet for whom we thirst; who is ever at work, transforming the self-centred desire of the natural creature into the wide-spreading, outpouring love of the citizen of Heaven.
CHAPTER II
ONE GOD, CREATOR
The Divine action bathes the whole universe. It penetrates all creatures, it hovers above them. Wherever they are, it is. It goes before them, it is with them, it follows them. They need but let themselves be borne upon its waves.—De Caussade.
The governing thought of the Creed is truly the first and last word of religion. It covers our whole response to reality. “I believe in One God”—not “I want,” or “I feel,” but “He Is”—all the rest flows from that, or is a special exhibition of it. Christian history is not the story of a number of individual religious experiences and developments. It describes the self-revelation and self-giving of that one infinitely generous God in whom, because of that revelation and self-giving, the soul believes. All the various forms of prayer and contemplation, or the disciplines of the spiritual life, only matter because they help, deepen, and purify our humble communion with this One God, infinite in His richness, delicacy and power; who is touching, calling and changing His creatures in countless ways, by the unceasing action of creative love. He is there first, over-passing in His Perfection all our partial discoveries. That which we really know about God, is not what we have been clever enough to find out, but what the Divine Charity has secretly revealed.
And so we go on to make our first statement about this One God who is the controlling reality of life, and try to see what this should mean for our prayer ; that is, our small effort to correspond with Him. Christianity says that this One God is best defined as “Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things, visible and invisible.” No limits are placed to the Divine fatherhood. The universe in its wholeness, and with all its disconcerting contrasts—the world of beauty, the world of science, the world of love, and those mysterious deeps of being of which the spirit can sometimes in prayer discern the fringe—these, visible and invisible, the very heavenly and the very earthy, are the creations of the Divine Charity; the living, acting, overflowing generosity of God.
In practice, of course, no one can grasp this mighty declaration: nor indeed should we expect to be able to grasp it. If the Reality of God were small enough to be grasped, it would not be great enough to be adored; and so our holiest privilege Would go. “I count not myself to have grasped ; but as one that has been grasped, I press on,” says St. Paul. But if all real knowledge here is a humbly delighted knowledge of our own ignorance—if, as the dying artist said, “The word we shall use most when we get to heaven will be ‘Oh!’”—still we can realize something of what it means, to consider our world from this point of view. It means that everything we are given to deal with—including ourselves and our psychological material, however intractable—is the result of the creative action of a personal Love, who despises nothing that He has made. We, then, cannot take the risk of despising anything; and any temptation to do so must be attributed to our ignorance, stupidity or self-love, and recognized as something which distorts our vision of Reality.
“He shewed me a little thing” says Julian of Norwich, “the quantity of a hazel nut in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. . . . In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it.”
That is a saint’s comment on the first article of her Creed. It is a vision that takes much living-out in a world in which injustice and greed are everywhere manifest; full too of tendencies which we are able to recognize as evil, and of misery and failure which seem the direct result of corporate stupidity and self-love, offering us ceaseless opportunities for the expression of disapproval and disgust, and often tempting to despair. “All-thing hath the Being by the Love of God,” says Julian again. And then we think of a natural order shot through with suffering, marred at every point by imperfection, maintained by mutual destruction ; a natural order which includes large populations of vermin, and the flora and fauna of infectious disease. It is easy to be both sentimental and theological over the more charming and agreeable aspects of Nature.