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Page 26
(ii) But this is not peculiar to the spiritual sphere; it is a paradox
that is true, in some sense, of life on every plane--civic,
intellectual, artistic, human. The man that desires to bring his
intellectual and personal powers to their highest pitch must
continually be sinking them, so to speak, in the current of his fellows,
continually exhausting, using, and wearing them out. He must risk, and
indeed inevitably lose, in a very real sense, his personal point of
view, if he is to have a point of view that is worth possessing; he must
be content to see his theories and his thoughts modified, merged,
changed, and destroyed, if his thought is to be of value. For, so far as
he withdraws himself from his fellows into a physical or mental
isolation, so far he approaches egotistic madness. He cannot grow unless
he decreases; he cannot remain himself unless he ceases to be himself.
So, too, is it in civic and artistic life. The citizen who truly lives
to the State of which he is a member--the man to whom his country raises
a monument, for example--is one, always, who has _lost himself_ for his
nation, whether he has died in battle or sacrificed himself in politics
or philanthropy. And the citizen who has merely hugged his citizenship
to himself, who has enjoyed all the privileges he can get and paid
nothing for them,--least of all himself--who has, so to say, _gained the
whole world_, has simultaneously lost himself indeed and is forgotten
within a year of his death. So with the artist. The man who has made his
art serve him, who has employed it, let us say, purely for the sake of
the money he could get out of it, who has kept it within severe limits,
who has been merely prudent and orderly and restrained, this man has, in
a sense, _saved his own life_; yet simultaneously he has lost it. But
the man to whom art is a passion, to whom nothing else is comparatively
of any value, who has plunged himself in his art, has dedicated to it
his days and his nights, has sacrificed to it every power of his being
and every energy of his mind and body, this man has indeed _lost
himself_. Yet he lives in his art as the other has not, he has _saved
himself_ in a sense of which the other knows nothing; and exactly in
proportion as he has succeeded in his self-abnegation, so far has he
attained, as we say, immortality. There is not, then, one sphere of life
in which the paradox is not true. The great historical lovers in
romance, the pioneers of science, the immortals in every plane, are
precisely those that have fulfilled on lower levels the spiritual
aphorism of Jesus Christ.
(iii) Turn, then, once more to the Catholic Church and see how in the
Life which she offers, as in none other, there is presented to us a
means of fulfilling our end.
For it is she alone who even demands in the spiritual sphere a complete
and entire abnegation of self. From every other Christian body comes the
cry, Save your soul, assert your individuality, follow your conscience,
form your opinions; while she, and she alone, demands from her children
the sacrifice of their intellect, the submitting of their judgment, the
informing of their conscience by hers, and the obedience of their will
to her lightest command. For she, and she alone, is conscious of
possessing that Divinity, in complete submission to which lies the
salvation of Humanity. For she, as the coherent and organic mystical
Body of Christ, calls upon those who look to her to become, not merely
her children, but her very members; not to obey her as soldiers obey a
leader or citizens a Government, but as the hands and eyes and feet obey
a brain. Once, therefore, I understand this, I understand too how it is
that by being lost in her I save myself; that I lose only that which
hinders my activity, not that which fosters it. For when is my hand most
itself? When separated from the body, by paralysis or amputation? Or
when, in vital union with the brain, with every fibre alert and every
nerve alive, it obeys in every gesture and receives in every sensation a
life infinitely vaster and higher than any which it might, temporarily,
enjoy in independence? It is true that its capacity for pain is the
greater when it is so united, and that it would cease to suffer if once
its separation were accomplished; yet, simultaneously, it would lose all
that for which God made it and, _saving itself_, would be _lost_ indeed.
_I live_, then, the perfect Catholic may say, as none other can say,
when I have ceased to be myself. And _yet not I_, since I have lost my
Individualism. No longer do I claim any activity at all on my own
behalf; no longer do I demand to form my opinions, to follow my own
conscience apart from that informing of it that comes from God, or to
live my own life. Yet in losing my Individualism I have won my
Individuality, for I have found my true place at last. I have _lost the
whole world?_ Yes, so far as that world is separate from or antagonistic
to God's will; but I have _gained my own soul_ and attained immortality.
For it is _not I that live, but Christ that liveth in me_.
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