This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic.
The main page is here.
MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.
My introductory post is here.
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Previously, Cat wrote on Chapter 2:
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock," Jesus says to each soul (Rev. 3:20), which seems to reinforce the idea of him being external. But wait! He goes on to say, "If anyone hears my voice, and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me." But we do not provide this meal to Jesus. He is the meal on the other side of the door, just as he is the door (or the true gate), and he is the house, and he is all in all. He is already in everything, and longs to be recognized. Our part in fostering this friendship is not to invite him where he is not, but to recognize and welcome him where he already is.
He is the meal, and He is the house, and He is the door. I really like all that Cat says about this. Lingering over it, I find myself wondering what it means for there to be an if... anyone opens the door. He is a voice on the outside of the door, and a meal inside of the door, and He is even the door, and yet He is not a door that opens of its own accord.
The soul must hear the voice. The soul must open the door. The soul must eat the meal. What can these be other than free acts of the will, if the metaphor is to hold? Acts of aligning our will to the will of God---but under God's own power soaking and penetrating everything already, like a compass in a magnetic field? We must be exerting a constant contrary effort if we are to keep pointing our own way, and I suppose we are.
Perhaps He is a door that opens of its own accord, and the soul is straining to keep it shut.
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Benson's Purgative Way (to be followed by the Illuminative Way, next chapter) is written as if it were a linear progression, a path. There is a bit of hedging with words like "usually" and the sort, leaving room for some unusual folks to experience purgation differently. For example:
And extremely often, the first sign... lies in a consciousness that there is beginning for her an experience which the world calls Disillusionment....This then is usually the first stage of Purgation: she [the soul*] becomes disillusioned with human things, and finds that however Christian they may be, they are not, after all, Christ.
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The next stage of Purgation lies in what may be called, in a sense, the Disillusionment with Divine things. The earthly side has failed her, or rather has fallen off from the reality; now it begins to seem to her as if the Divine has failed her too.
...
There follows... a third stage before the Way of Purgation is wholly passed. She now has to learn the last lesson of all, and become disillusioned with herself.
There isn't any hedging, however, in the placement of the Way of Purgation before the Way of Illumination in the structure of the book.
I think perhaps that Benson is showing us that, while the precise journey along the Way of Purgation can vary---perhaps some of us skip over the "first" or "second" stages mentioned in the book, perhaps some of us have to go through a stage he hasn't mentioned, perhaps we take the stages out of order, perhaps we retrace our steps over and over again---no Illumination is possible without some Purgation that precedes it.
I think we'll know more about this when we have dived deeply into the next chapter. But my thought is that we don't necessarily become entirely purged before we can begin to be illuminated at all; rather that every illumination must be preceded by a thorough purgation of whatever bit is standing in the way of the light. We'll see if I am on the right track when we have finished reading Chapter 4 and can look at the thematic whole that is made from chapters 2, 3, and 4.
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There's a reason why I find myself wondering if some of us have to go through a stage Benson hasn't mentioned. I am apparently not the only person (based on some of the discussion in our little Facebook reading group) who has trouble identifying with the first two stages. I mean, I do know people who were brought to a crisis of faith when they were
brought face to face with some catastrophe in external matters...an unworthy priest, a disunited congregation, some scandal in Christian life.... She had thought that the Church must be perfect, because it was the Church of Christ, or the priesthood stainless...
I am only revealing my own hubris and inborn cynicism, but I cannot imagine being taken in by the idea that the priesthood is stainless.
I can imagine other people being shaken to their core by serious scandal. I know it happens. There's a reason scandal is a sin and that is because it is in fact dangerous to people. I am not trying to trivialize it. I'm just saying I don't think I ever had the illusion that the human things in the Church were perfect, or that they had to be.
Nor, to move on to the second stage, did I have the illusion (at least not intellectually) that my feelings at any given moment were a reliable source of information of what really is good or what really is true, such that a drying-up of my prayerful feelings should bring about a crisis of faith. (Although it definitely can bring about a crisis of fidelity, as one is much less likely to go through with one's morning prayer if one is not feeling particularly warm towards the practice at the time. My solution to that has been to drink my coffee first.)
Nor do I think it makes any sense at all to place the blame on Christ that, after years of asking "only say the word and my soul shall be healed,"
behold! she is the same as ever.
(Lord. Say the word already.)
I wrote in the margin of my book, "If intellect supersedes emotion, it's not THAT hard."
One possibility here is that Robert Hugh Benson was fairly careful about following the Rule of Three and didn't want to list any more "stages" in the Way of Purgation.
Another possibility is that he mostly covered an emotional aspect of the first two stages (disillusionment with human things, and disillusionment with divine things) for reasons of his own particular experience and emphasis.
Because how could there not be an intellectual purgation as well?
Those of us who are unsentimental by nature don't risk building a plush Christ out of pious feelings and attractive liturgy and china-doll priests.
But we do risk building a wooden Christ out of unshakeable principles and reasonable arguments.
Some of us do not run the risk of becoming cynical because we have lost our illusion that romance is truth. We never thought that, so we are unlikely to say with Benson's soul, "Perhaps, after all, experience is the only truth worth having."
But we do run the risk, when our principles and arguments fail to save us, of saying with Pilate, "What is truth?"
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The third stage of Benson's purgative way is placed last for a good reason: it's really the ultimate end of purgation, the stripping of the self, the very interior of our interiors, the opening of the last door to let Christ into the very center. And I do not think I understand it much at all; and a plausible explanation for that is, well, not being done with it.
[I return to this paragraph as editor and I notice: There's the intellectual hubris raising its head again. Here I am suggesting that a lack of holiness is, in some way, equivalent to a lack of understanding. The soul defends itself even in the examination of itself.]
I do understand [argh, there I go again] the temptation of ceasing to progress through despair and how the despair is "pride under the very subtle guise of extravagant humility:" for if "I must sink back again to the common level," well, then, I get to be the uncommon fish in the common pond, don't I? The nicest of the damned? Or if I say "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man"---well, could I not be motivated by simply no longer wanting to hear the voice that I hear accusing me?
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I just have two more little notes I want to make, both of which look forward to later chapters.
The latter, first: We have just seen that we are supposed to be disillusioned from the idea that "human things... however Christian they may be, they are not, after all, Christ." And yet, when we arrive at part II, we are going to learn how we literally find Christ in... humans. The priest, the saint, the sinner, the average man, the sufferer... and the Church, which is a body of humans, and the Eucharist (this being a bit easier for Catholics and perhaps Lutherans and a few other Christians who will not call it Merely A Human Thing; Catholics, at least, will say that it is A Human). So when we get to part II it will be interesting to see precisely how Benson means to say Christ is in each of these things that is not part of the illusion.
The other, nearer. I am drawn to re-reading the Gospel episode alluded to here:
Now is the very instant in which the beloved soul, having learnt her last lesson of the Purgative Way, is fit to "cast herself into the sea" to come to Jesus.
The footnote is to John 21:7, just after the disciples cast the net to the right side of the boat on the direction of the unrecognized Jesus, and catch all the fish. The translation I have at hand says:
The disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, "It is the Lord!" When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on his clothes, for he was stripped for work, and sprang into the sea.
I find myself a little hung up on the pause: "he put on his clothes, for he was stripped for work" before casting himself into the sea. Is it something we should emulate, or an acknowledgment of some imperfect hesitancy? Hard to say. Anyway, the whole episode strikes me as worthy of keeping in mind as we turn to what follows the soul's "casting herself into the sea," that is, the Illuminative Way.
Next up: Chapter 4, "The Illuminative Way," with commentary by Cat.
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*I'm inclined to attribute the use of the gendered pronoun here to a tradition of Christian spiritual writing in Romance languages, in which the noun meaning "soul" is grammatically feminine; it also has two practical benefits, distinguishing by pronouns "she" the soul from "He" (Christ), and subtly recalling the relationship in which Christ is Bridegroom.
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