sustained, the distractions may worry for a while near that centre, but are gradually edged off until they pass out of the field of view. But should they succeed not only in attracting but in holding our interest, then the liturgical elements drop out of consciousness, and the tone of the whole field becomes secular, the distraction has become complete. For the time being the religious field of consciousness has passed out of view and a secular field has replaced it. By an effort of conative attention we may divert the focus of our mind from the distraction and bring it back to that point of the Mass which is in progress, thus shifting back the field, but such an effort must needs be strenuous when the distracting thoughts are of much interest to us and have been allowed free play. Our sense of the duty of attentive prayer may help us to recover our mental place, just as any vivid emotion roused by the secular train of ideas may hopelessly obstruct us. The power to distract, the power to excite a devotion which is apparent in consciousness, is, psychologically speaking, the power to excite spontaneous interest. That which holds our spontaneous interest determines for the nonce the centre of our field of consciousness and its general tones. Now, interest is not the same as delectation, for a vivid interest may well be very painful, so this determination of the field by interest is not the same as the victorious delectation of the Jansenist. Moreover, it only determines the spontaneous attention, conative attention can largely shape and alter the resultant field. Still this attraction, and especially in the nascent state, is such a power in consciousness that it is a commonplace of ascetical experience that distractions, unless promptly expelled, tend to oust prayer from consciousness altogether. So effectively troublesome are they that St. Teresa considered that to acquire the habit of recollection in prayer one must not grow tired of persevering in trying gradually to obtain the mastery over oneself. This self-denial will profit any nun by making her senses serve her soul. . . For the love of God, Sisters, reckon your time well spent in acquiring this habit. I, know that, with His help, if you practise it for a year, or perhaps for only six months, you will gain it.' Recollection, in St. Teresa's sense, is the power to pray, not without distractions, but without being liable to be over 1 St. Teresa, Way of Perfection, chap. xxix. 6. come by distractions. It is the acquirement of a conative attention so energetic that the religious field is kept intact and consistent amid all possible disturbances. If her nuns needed a year, or at least six months, of spiritual exercise to gain this power of self-concentration, how psychically energetic the distraction must be as compared with prayer! But who that has prayed has not experienced this? We have seen how potent is the new idea springing into consciousness. It is a change, and we are curiously avid of change. The idea effects a lodgment before we are well aware of its nature, and our spontaneous attention is hooked before the automatic attention of mere curiosity has had time to die down. Once we are interested our whole field tends to shift so as to leave the new notion in the focus. If it is incompatible with a religious frame of mind there is conflict and possible rout. No man can serve two masters,' no one can rest in God with an admiring eye on the world. One interest must oust the other. How was it, psychologically, that a distraction or temptation is able to break up a religious field of consciousness with such facility? To answer this question we must examine more closely the structure of the religious field and see wherein it differs from the secular field of consciousness. We have seen how the dynamism of the nascent idea can disturb the centres of instability in the normal consciousness; we will find both factors of change strengthened in the specifically religious consciousness. Besides those psychic elements which constitute the normal field, we have all those others which come into the category of faith and its adjuncts. Between the latter and the former there are many sources of friction, conflicts between our passions and our religious obligations, between our scientific theories and the articles of the Creed, between our vicious propensities and our spiritual aspirations. We have a row with our parish priest and get doubts as to the infallibility of the Church. All through our mental makeup there are points of conflict. It goes against our grain to fast, to confess our sins to some priest who does not share our political views or whose conversation we do not relish. Countless are the possible points of friction, all tending to form possible centres of instability. The more worldly and external are our lives, the more extroverted are our proper selves, the more are these centres multiplied. The miracle is, not that the worldly Catholic loses the faith, but that he does not. Within the specifically religious, as distinct from the general field of consciousness, there are many possibilities of centres of instability. We will take the religious field as actualized in some prayer or meditation, so as to consider it apart from the general field which it interpenetrates more or less. In any well-developed religious exercise we get a concentration of the given of faith in consciousness, we get the centre of attention, spontaneous or conative, fixed on some faith-element of consciousness seen in its appropriate setting. The first point to remark is the extraordinary potential richness and variety in this specifically religious field. The central point of attention may be only one fact of faith, but for the Catholic no one fact of faith is ever solitary, it is linked up with every dogma and sends out fibres into every pious practice. The Catholic faith is a psychic bloc, it has no water-tight compartments or autonomous tracts. Our attention may shift from one fact of faith to another and our conscious field vary accordingly, but we see in the measure of our knowledge that such element is partof one great whole. Our field becomes as it were the surface of a sphere where each point, each outline is related to a centre beyond our vision, yet towards which our vision is ever tending and striving. This variety in unity and unity in variety of the given of faith in the Catholic consciousness appear in every expression of the Catholic faith which we find in Creeds, in liturgy, in ascetics, in the Summa of Aquinas, in a High Mass, in The Imitation of Christ, in a Gothic cathedral, and in the Divina Commedia. The faith is one, not merely in the original deposit, but in all the developments which the Catholic mind has drawn from the facts of faith since Apostolic times. There has been an ever-increasing richness in the content of the Catholic consciousness and an ever-growing sense of unity of mind as the inter-relation of each deduction and application of dogma is perceived. What is heresy but some alleged deduction from the facts of faith which the Catholic consciousness cannot assimilate and unite with its content? There is some irreducible antagonism with the given of faith or its corollaries; the collective Catholic consciousness expels the novelty, and the individual must do likewise. He may not see how the new idea conflicts with his existent field, but sooner or later it will worry it to pieces. Heresy begins in an apologetic and ends in a cataclysm. A Catholic desires to meet the objections of modern agnostics, he makes play with a doctrine of immanence and, before he knows it, he has not left one article of the Creed unshaken. Terrible is the unity of the faith in the Catholic consciousness, at once so strong and so fragile, no force can crush it, one doubt can shatter it. less This linkage of the faith-elements in consciousness which constitutes their psychologic unity, whether perceived or not, is one great source of those centres of instability in the psychic mass; the other is found in the antagonism between the natural temperament and the exigencies of faith, the passions and the duties of religion. If our dispositions to pride, to avarice, to lust, to hatred, envy, and sloth come in conflict with those duties which our faith enjoins and enacts, we have a state of conscious stress set up. Our lower self may prevail, and by prevailing grow dominant. The man to whom grave sin has become a habit, may yet retain his faith, but its force in his consciousness, its energy in shaping his life, grows and less. If he continues it sinks into the oblivion of the deeper memory and he becomes, for all practical purposes, as a man without faith. Yet it is there, and may be recalled by some such process as we studied in the conversion psychose. But suppose, before this sinner's faith drops into practical oblivion, some doubt as to its validity is suggested to his mind stressed to psychic disintegration by his passions, we have all the conditions present for a violent perversion-psychose. Passion is doubt's most terrible ally. Although this source of faith-failure is perhaps the more abundant, weakness in the linkages is more important from the point of view of our study, since the passion perversion-psychose depends for its crisis on a shattered linkage. The points where the psychic elements of faith interlock are not all in the same psychic plane. We have, as it were, on the surface of our sphere of faith those facts of faith which belong to the deposit with all those moral, liturgical, devotional, and sacramental concomitants which are psychologically allied to them and accompany them into that special field which is formed when any of these facts of faith are focussed by our attention, spontaneous or conative. Behind this surface of the sphere lies the wholeregion of theological and ascetical deduction and inference, with their developments. It is in this region that we find the wider synthesis which enables us to mentally connect. the seemingly disparate elements on the surface of our sphere. Here we resolve the doubts which might wreck the surface linkage, and see the reasonableness of the apparently irrational. Again, from the conclusions of theology we direct and govern external action, and from the principles which that science abstracts from the facts. of faith, we get a clearer and more vivid knowledge of these facts, Credo ut intelligam. If we fail to accommodate the conclusions of theology with the facts of faith, we have at once a centre of instability formed. If we adhere to our conclusions we must reject or modify the fact, unless we can refer both fact and conclusion to a still higher synthesis. If this reference cannot be made and we still adhere to our inference, we are forced to choose between the facts of faith which we accept and those which we reject. Should we make this choice, we are heretics (alpeois: choice). We have rent the seamless garment of the given of faith. He If we take any historic heresy we will find the heresiarch started as a Catholic of exceptional orthodoxy. Some aspects in the facts of faith impressed him vividly, and he drew from them some too absolute conclusion. formulated and preached this in season and out of season, until some one pointed out that his doctrine was in conflict with some other fact of faith. Put to the choice the heresiarch adheres to his view and challenges the opposing fact of faith. His opponents denounce his doctrine as heresy, and if it is not wholly irreconcilable reduce the peccant formula to one which retains the truth and does not conflict with other facts of faith. Thus does a new definition come into being and faith is developed by the correction of heresy. So, too, is the given of faith developed by the discussions in the schools of theology, and conclusions from the facts of faith connected and inter-related. In everyday meditation the same process takes place consciously or unconsciously, and the Catholic mind tries to understand more and more the facts of faith and apply them to daily life. The analytical factor in our consciousness selects certain aspects from the concrete given of faith and collates |