It is not only out of affection for our English brethren that we have so willingly agreed to write the editorial of this first number of The Life of the Spirit. It is also an opportunity to put into Practice a dogma, which is dear to us and which We strive constantly to bring home to our readers in La Vie Spirituelle: the dogma of the Communion of Saints. As Fr Congar pointed out recently (Vie Intettectuelle, April, 1946), the fact that we belong to one Church, to a Communion of Saints, not only means that we have one head, or that we live, each on his own, by one faith expressed in the same acts of worship; it also means that between the parts of this whole which we make up, there exist relations of exchange, intercommunication, mutual help, etc… . Can we imagine a body in which the members, although linked to the same head, have no vital connexion with one another? Such a thing is unthinkable.

The time is ripe for reintroducing readers of English to the growth of the spiritual life according to an English idiom coined from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. This idiom has largely been lost to the English tongue through the deservedly victorious attack of the Spanish and French “spiritualities” which have carried the day since the counter-reformation. St Teresa, St John of the Cross, St Francis de Sales and the vast horde of spiritual writers thrown together by the French controversies, Jansenism and Quietism, these have soaked into English writing on the same topic and the healthy, robust, if a trifle easy-going, spiritual writings of Rolle, Mother Julian, Hilton and the Cloud have been left to the academic scholars of middle English and to the rising tide of dabblers in “mysticism.” In view of the multiplicity of men who have become interested in this exotic-sounding subject, it is imperative to publish some form of introduction to the English Mystics if they are to be used as spiritual guides.

A certain uneasiness is felt, at the present day, on the subject of religious life. I am not referring to the criticism of unbelievers, but to the doubts, more or less openly expressed, even in the most religious circles, as to its actual value and its methods.

Young Catholic men and women continue to be profoundly attracted to it and vocations among them are numerous, but the temperaments and even the virtues of today find difficulty in adapting themselves to a system of life which was accepted unquestioningly by former generations.

The most immediate and most general problem is that of health. The great Orders, and the austere cloistered Orders in particular, are somewhat anxious. Their Rule, which represented a minimum nearly always overstepped by generous souls, tends to become a maximum only attained with difficulty by the boldest or the most robust.

Those who have an inside view of these things; those who have the training of young religious, are even more troubled to see that certain methods of formation, apparently essential to the system of religious life, have become less efficacious and are no longer inspiring to a great number of their most ardent recruits.

St Thomas did not write a special treatise on mystical theology. In the golden age of Scholasticism there were no hard and fast divisions between systematic, moral, ascetical and mystical theology; but systematic theology furnished the rules by which to deal with the practical questions of the spiritual life. And so the Angelic Doctor gives us the principles of mystical theology, embedded in the Prima Secundæ of his Summa Theologica, which deals with man, made in the image of God, and with his virtues and vices in general (especially question 68, on the Gifts of the Holy Ghost) and in the Secunda Secundæ, which treats of particular virtues and states of life (especially questions 180 to 182, on the Contemplative and Active Life) and in his whole teaching on Grace and the Virtues.

The mystical life is nothing less than the life of grace lived at its highest level.

I invite you, dear brethren, on this Feast day to pay a visit with me in all reverence to the shrine of St Thomas's soul. The key of entry lies ready to hand; it is in his written works.

Perfect lucidity, unruffled serenity, transparent candour, austere simplicity, complete self-effacement—these are the qualities which emerge eloquent from the pages of St Thomas, and tell us that here is a man utterly devoted to truth. Ego voz, said the Precursor John the Baptist. May we not say this also of the Angelic Doctor—that he is a voice, a disembodied voice which, if it were possible, would tell us nothing of the speaker, and bear witness only to the truth? Is there a single word in all the volumes that he wrote which betrays anything of the pride of personal opinion, anything of the sense of triumph over opponents, anything of the glow of self-satisfaction in discovery and achievement? There is an impersonal quality in the writings of St Thomas—not a coldness, no, that would be to mistake him entirely—an impersonal quality which comes not of self-impoverishment, but of self-abandonment, of self bendenment to truth.

This title of Christ is obviously true in that God is infinite and since Christ is God, therefore Christ is our all. But there is a sense in which it is difficult to reach a happy mean; and it is this sense that we shall now consider.

No one would deny that we love things other than God: creatures, friends, goods, art, power, our own selves. None of these are God, yet there is not wrong-doing in loving them. We need not go into the ordinary theology of the due measure of love to creatures. All our loves are conditioned by circumstance; none are absolute. God alone has absolute dominion over us.

The problem becomes more subtle when we are seeking perfection. Should God be all, and all else nothing? Are we being traitors to our bond by loving God and creatures? Have we not given up all to follow Christ; and to return to creatures, is that not apostasy? The doctrine of the “Nada,” St John of the Cross's word for utter self-abnegation, is very logical from one point of view: the less we give to creatures, the more we give to God; but is this what God asks?