Credo Quia Possibile

I

THERE is something almost unfilial in the stolid indifference with which we pass by old Christian dogmas. Earnest generations thought, prayed, yearned, over their interpretation of the meaning of life, and fashioned dogmas which they believed would light the steps of their children and their children’s children to endless generations, yet we scarce look to see what these dogmas may mean. Creeds of a thousand years are no more heeded than old letters garnered in the garret; yet it may happen that among those old yellowing sheets, franked and sealed, are love-letters which, however dull and childish they may seem to the fancy-free, rekindle old fires in the hearts of those who have loved and lost, or loved in vain.

The dogma-makers lived on our earth, they had faculties like ours, they loved and suffered, they were amazed and confounded; they, too, tried to discover a formula that should prove the key to the mystery of life. The same mystery that confronted them confronts us still. To some men those old dogmas brought peace, self-mastery, power; why may we not linger a little to examine them?

We are not free to use dogmas that postulate facts inconsistent with the discoveries of science; but science and religion have different duties. Science seeks a formula that shall square with human experience and satisfy the reason; religion seeks a formula that shall minister to what in our ignorance we call the soul’s needs and quicken the emotions. May we not find in the old dogmas something not forbidden by science that may still minister to the soul’s needs?

The Christian creed says, Credo in Spiritum Sanctum. Is there nothing in human experience to justify this dogma? At one time in the Middle Ages there was a sect of men who came under the potent influence of this aspect of the Godhead. They believed that to each Person of the Trinity was allotted his period of divine dominion. God the Father had had his reign, God the Son was still reigning. Both reigns had had their special characters, but neither had been wholly adequate to the soul’s needs, therefore there was ground for hope that the Holy Ghost would soon begin to reign, and that the season of children, of lilies, of good men triumphant, was at hand. Were not Abate Gioacchino del Fiore and his disciples right, in thinking that the hope of good tidings for the soul lay in worship of the Holy Spirit? The conception of God the Creator has its difficulties. The Beginning is the deep, permanent mystery; and the creation of a world in which pain and suffering mark every individual life, renders the claims of a Creator to man’s gratitude very questionable. Also the idea that Jesus of Nazareth is God is very difficult. But when we turn toward the third Person, to that aspect of Deity which has never yielded to man’s anthropomorphic needs, which at best has been represented by a dove, a bringer of peace, do we not discern more light?

II

We look through the telescope at night and see thousands upon thousands of suns, glorious in the surrounding dark. Their majesty inspires us with mingled feelings: fear before the vast unknown, reverence before the very great, exaltation at being a part of this mighty whole. But what, in the end, do we take away except bewilderment at the eternal commotion of the heavens, at the fiery progress of the stars and their restless whirling? There is no peace in the empyrean; there is turmoil, effort, energy. Do we perceive there the presence of God the Father or God the Son? Yet if there is a Divine Spirit, how fit a workingplace is this majestic universe for its incessant toil.

We look through the microscope; physicists, chemists, biologists, pry into the inner recesses of matter, only to find energy — energy heaving, tossing, turbulent, imprisoned, perhaps, or bound to other energy, but everywhere, in the egg, in spermatozoa, in the minutest particles of matter, animal, vegetable or inorganic, restless energy, eternal effort. If we turn to the history of past life upon our globe, what do we find but records of energy, whether physical, chemical, or of that seemingly peculiar form which marks living organisms, everywhere energy leaving its trace in innumerable forms. In this history of life, according to our human standards, there has been a long procession, in which the principle of organic life, from the earliest period of vegetable existence, has advanced through manifold forms, upward, upward, in the depths of the sea, in the air, on land, by devious routes and strange passages, up, up, to the fish, to the bird, to four-footed beasts, and finally to man. Gradually, steadily, those mysterious forces which determine the nature of things, have been shaping gases and solids, crystals, drops of water, the pistil and stamens of the plant, the heart, lungs, eye, hand, and brain of man. In all organic life there are cells in restless energy; cells piled on cells, cells in many kinds of combination, all taking shape according to the will of some strenuous, persistent, experimenting force. The cells of the clover arrange themselves to fashion the flower which shall secrete honey, the cells of the bee to create an insect which shall gather it, the cells of the man to form a creature with an appetite for that honey and also with a yearning to find something divine in the universe. Everywhere that man can peer he finds energy intent upon changing all that is into new forms. This process, different as it looks in the very large and in the very small, in distant stars, in the tides of ocean, in the flora, in sea creatures or in mammals, seems to be one and the same, proceeding through myriad forms of activity, always seeking to effect a change.

If this seeming is true, if all our world, all our universe, is the workroom, or playground it may be, for the same energy, may we not judge it, must we not judge it, by the only part of the pattern that is open to our judgment, by human life within our experience? How can corporeal creatures like ourselves, busily at work turning food into living tissue, entertain but the most remote understanding of elementary gases? What do we know of the ambitions, the enthusiasms, the discouragement, of coral insects? All things that are, seem to be made of the same elements which, by their physicochemical energy after infinite experiments, have given to the human brain consciousness; but we, who are the products of happier combinations, cannot understand these same potential energies compounded in lower forms. We must judge the whole process by ourselves, by man. This is the inner meaning of the Greek saying, Know thyself. If we know ourselves, we shall know all.

If, then, this universal process, when we see it at work in the only matters intelligible to us, in ourselves, seems to be an effort to rise, to attain the better, to bring the nobler to birth, — seems to be a struggle to renounce the lower and mount to a higher plane, — must we not suppose that the laborious energies at work throughout the universe are stirring to do the same? Let us look at bits of the pattern that we may perceive what is the design. Take a mother whose life is in her son’s life, whose thoughts are all of him, whose hopes are his, who dotes upon his happiness; bid her choose for him between a higher life linked with pain and sorrow, and a lower life loaded with pleasures and worldly success, and will she hesitate? The upward energy that works through all her being will not let her choose a lower plane for her son.

Take the son of such a mother at a time when, young blood flowing through his veins, he has fallen in love. The law of all organic nature is, Be fruitful and multiply. The tree bears fruit, the vines bring forth grapes, the herring spawns, the lioness bears her cubs; all creatures obey the great command, all hand on the miraculous torch of life. But the young lover sees deeper into the heart of things; —

He hears the pulsing reverberations of the animal command; and he hears also commands less audible, yet to his soul still more imperious. He must consecrate himself to the highest, he must, even if he is compelled to turn his back on all the happiness that looks so fair before him, the sweet blue eyes, ‘the soft, enkerchief’d hair.’ Here, in the mother’s heart, in the young man’s heart, where life beats at its fastest, the need of breaking free from the lower is most peremptory. Such is the pattern wrought by this energy as it appears in human life. Biologists call this force blind, but to the ignorant it seems to see its path ‘as birds their trackless way.’

III

What can we infer of this energy which drives the stars headlong, which heaves the ocean, which pushes the sap from branch to twig, and determines the subtle movements in the cortex of the cerebrum, but that it is working to change what is into something higher? All this turmoil, this commotion of earth and heavens, is a discontent, and a struggle. May we not here see, in this endeavor to supplant the lower by the higher, a Holy Spirit at work?

What the source or origin of the universe may be lies beyond human guessing; but there seems to be an imprisoned power struggling to detach itself from base integuments, striving to dominate some hindering medium, aspiring to make the universe anew. Matter, or whatever we call the substance of the phenomena on which our consciousness has dawned, however far from any apparent sympathy with man, however muddy its vesture, however hideous its aspect, is under the control of some energy, which displays itself in heat, light, motion, thought, and love. Even if the proper dogmatic adjective for this energy is physicochemical, may not the adjective divine be appropriate also? What limit can human foresight assign to its achievements? And as we watch this energy at work in what seems to us our best and noblest, may we not infer that love is the medium in which this upward impulse finds the least impediment, the least hindrance to its free motions; or, differently put, that love is the highest expression of the universal force which, everywhere and without ceasing, is striving to create a universe of a higher order?

It sounds arrogant and foolish for man to make himself the measure of the universe, to assert that his thoughts and acts are the fruit and crown of things; but he has no choice. He seeks everywhere, and finds nothing that he can call higher or nobler than the expression of this energy in good men. And there can be no more solemn or admonishing sanction for high endeavor than the knowledge that we are the standard-bearers of the divine spirit. It is ennobling to think that if we advance our standards, the divine advances; if we fall back, by so much the divine loses in the battle; that the divine energy manifesting itself in us is one with the energy that whirls the stolid worlds.

Is not this the Holy Spirit that Abate Gioacchino dimly apprehended? Is not this the force that dawned, as in a dream, upon the consciousness of those mystics who have felt a conviction that they were face to face with God? By some favoring juncture of circumstances these holy men suddenly became sensitive to the meaning of the cosmic process, and their souls cried out, Lo, God is here! Is not that which we call prayer the unconscious bending ourselves to act in concord with this universal energy, as heliotropic plants turn to the light? This potential element in the stuff that composes our universe has been able to evolve a lover’s abnegation, a mother’s devotion, it has created the imagination of a Shakespeare, it moves to music, and clothes itself in light; surely it is divine. Would it be higher or holier if we could hear the rush of Cherubim or see the gleam upon a Seraph’s wings?

Man cannot hope, within his narrow compass of sense, to feel the fullness of the divine spirit. He cannot open his soul wide enough to comprehend what this universal endeavor is, seemingly infinite in extent, infinite in patience, infinite in perseverance. But if of the divine we demand heroism in the face of danger, has there not been, even in the contracted limits of human history, heroism sufficient? If of the divine we demand suffering, we have but to let our thoughts rest for an instant upon the long ages of animal life upon this globe, one long track of blood, in order to shudder at the cruelty endured.

Is not this struggle of the higher against the lower, whether under the waters of ocean, in pre-glacial jungles, or in our own hearts, as wonderful and splendid as the conflict of Michael and the host of heaven against the rebellious angels? Surely, yes.

Suppose that man is the highest life in all the universe, suppose that his race and all animal life is doomed to destruction as our planet cools off, is it not better to have endeavored and suffered than never to have endeavored at all? Possibly, somewhere, a memory may live of how the human race rose from bestiality and lust, to devotion to beauty, truth, and love. But even if no memory of man shall continue after he has perished, still, throughout the universe, the restless energy that animated him will continue undaunted, making its experiments, striving to change that which is into that which, according to our human judgment, shall be better. Is not this a Divine Spirit, whether it works through visible, tangible, ponderable things, or through spiritual essences; whether it be an archangel or physicochemical activity that has created the soul of man?

Is not this the aspect of the Trinity that must, as the disciples of Joachim believed, outlive the other aspects, and do most to satisfy the yearning desire of man to find something holy in the universe? May we not all repeat: Credo in Spiritum Sanctum ?