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II
The Necessity of a Renewal of Techniques
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2024
Extract
Nevertheless we must pay attention to what there is, so to speak, legitimate in our contemporaries’ pretence. Let us listen to their complaints.
Appeals like that of Katherine Mansfield to her husband awake in us an emotion which demands to be taken seriously. ‘Do you like living the old mechanical life at the mercy of everything? Living only with a minute portion of yourself?' There is incompleteness, as if non-existence in the personal sense, division, if the modern world encourages ‘personages’ and excites push', if it gives too much weight to too much of the ego-one set of selves coming into conflict with another set, and au obscuring the self deep within us—if the abundance of shoots, going off anarchically in all directions, is exhausting the sap of the tree of life in us, we are not wrong to hope from religious practice some remedy for this evil, nor to be astonished and disturbed if, on the contrary, the evil overtakes religious practice itself.
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- Copyright © 1955 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Quoted by Louis Pauwels, p. 250.
2 A striking expression of this mistery and of aspiraton towards self-fulfilment, ibid., pp. 10, 14-16, 22, 69-73, 78-9, 231-3.
3 I have developed this point a little in L'Art Sacre of September, 1953 'of what spirit will you be?' there, certain pictures make it abvious. it is the real reason for the decadence of religious art. Affections of being 'modern' will not change it. Quite the contrary
4 See the excellent volume of Etudes carmitaines which is devoted to this subject.
5 I refer to the traditional doctrine (specially Greek) of ‘spiritual senses', on which the essential things are said in the book by Mouroux quoted above.
6 A part assigned considerable importance by Mouroux particularly in the chapter on ‘spiritual perception'. It would have been interesting to exploit in this chapter the results of modern psychological studies, which have shown how the affective is necessary to the success of all the actions of life
7 My next article will pose the question of a ‘Christian yoga'.
8 In all spheres fidelity to the traditional spirit obliges us to make such distinctions. so on the subject of mortifications, D. Dubarle, in L'Ascese chrltienne,Cahier de la v Spirituelle, pp. 244-259. And on the subject of worship, my article, ‘The Unanirno Prayer’ in L'Art Sacre, November, 1953. If one cries out at ‘subjectivism', at ‘psychologism‘, ‘ if one imagines that the vocation of religious of the old Orders and of those of the faithful who attach themselves spiritually to them carries essentially the sponeousness of ancient times, if one rejects (that is self-evident) the reflective consciousness as a contamination of ‘modern spirituality', this is quite the contrary of the simplicity preached.
9 One is stupefied when one considers the contrast between the incalculable practical and value of this principle and feeble (or non-existent) part it plays in spiritual doctrines and spiritual formation. The learned keep it for themselves in a state of thesis. It has been set forth magisterially by Jean Laporte, ‘Free will and attention according to St Thomas Aquinas', Revue ie Mttaph. et de Morale, 1931-1934 (an article each year).