This book was published October 6, 1947. It reached me in December, I think, and since December I have been struggling with its contents. I have tried to consult several noted theologians on it. The answer one of them gave was that it certainly was an exasperating book and impossible to review. Yet I feel that where the scholarly and learned fear to tread, I might as well stumble in, because whatever I may have to say against this book, I can’t get rid of the feeling that it has significance, although Canon Bernard Iddings Bell’s statement that “it is one of the half-dozen most significant books on religion published in the twentieth century” is too prophetic for me as one writing when not yet half of the century is finished. The only thing that surprises me is the fact that I have not yet seen any controversy about it. Yet any book written by an “Anglo-Catholic” who is steeped in Oriental mysticism as well as an extremely well read man in Western mystics and theologians of all shades should make us perk up.
I am not sure whether I have assimilated its contents, but I am sure that I find its message profoundly disquieting and challenging. In many ways I find Alan Watts kindred to Friedrich Heiler, especially in his profound respect and love for Catholicism, which is yet coupled with a haunting apprehension that Catholicism has not achieved maturity and is perfectible. Which, of course, puts this book ipso facto on the proscribed list. “Whereas Protestantism has largely degenerated from religion into moralism, Catholicism (which for Watts includes naturally Orthodox and Anglican Churches) retains certain essential elements of religion but… for the most part uncomprehended both within and without the Church … official Catholicism [being] little concerned either to explain or to experience … its … dogmatic symbols, it resembles an algebraic formula of great intricacy, internal rationality and even beauty, but with little indication of the realities to which its terms refer.” Mr. Watts is very much aware of the outsider’s criticism of traditional and institutional religion: “The repellent externals of modern Church life (here he includes all sects)—organizational busy-ness, inadequate teaching, excessive moralism, doctrinal obscurantism, lack of conviction, absence of reality, the very disunity of the Church[es—I would add]—all are rooted in the fact that the modern Christian has no sense of union with God.”
Throwing out superficial remedies concocted by man, Watts predicts that the age of religious realism, of mystical, immediate experience is at hand, the age of the Spirit. “Technique is not enough. Mere discipline is not enough. There are dozens and dozens of plodding Christians, clergy and laity, who say their prayers, [make their] meditations, repeat the Divine Office, make their confessions, attend or celebrate Mass, and from time to time go on retreats. Others fling themselves into social service … giving all their time and wealth to the poor [yet] it profiteth me nothing.” According to our author we are like monkeys imitating an orchestra, but never getting the measure of music. “A human being can master all techniques yet never be an inspired musician.”
Mr. Watts is not the only one who feels that a new “influence” has to stimulate a new deployment of the faith, that a season is over again and a new spring being called for. From the Hebrew background and apostolic and evangelical simplicity, through the reflex reactions caused by the meeting with Hellenism, with the Imperium, with the Germanic, Celtic and Slavic men, with the synthesis of Aristotle and the Arabs down to the meeting with Humanism, Industrialism and Marxism, the living Body of Christ has always had healthy reactions of either growth, profound re-deployment or protective growth. This author seems to feel that the Far East will make its contribution superior to all previous ones. Father Huonder, S.J., a Swiss, made the same observation twenty years ago. Abbe Monchauin left France a few years ago after decades of study of the Indian sages and lives now as a Sadu in an Indian village, seeking the key to the open gate that still bars the path through which India can enter theology and bring about what Origen, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Bernard and Eckhardt have done for the past. The tragic thing is that so much of the extent of fertilizing influence is bound up with the mental size and the ethical magnitude of the human agent that brings about the change. Had Origen and Eckhardt been as great as Augustine and Thomas the assimilation would have been vaster. The daring of Mr. Watts is praiseworthy, and while his syntheses may hardly be a success, it would be well for us, if we remembered Saint Thomas more as a daring pioneer, and with him Saint Augustine, and learned less to look on the results of his efforts than on the effort itself.
His great idea is the conquest of what he feels to be a latent dualism in what he thinks to be the initial exploration of Christian truth. The non-duality, instead of oneness of God, brings into harmony those things that have beset the ages, all Christian thinkers from the Apostolic Fathers to Karl Barth, orthodox and heretic alike, for it resolves the problem of evil, of hell, of sin, of incarnation. While it starts with a resolution of the ontological problems of theology, it overflows into practical life and establishes a new mysticism which is able to make action and contemplation one and the same. Watt’s “incarnational” theology resolves above all the glaring opposition of world and Spirit, futility of the seen things versus extra-worldly purpose of man’s being.
There is no doubt that this book was written with some kind of inspiration and a deep and loving passion for the things of the Spirit. The joy of discovery and the imagery of a creative thinker is all over it. That it is repetitious, that it is prone to simplification, that it often jars by substituting a word or a concept to bridge chasms of facts are shortcomings which the enthusiasm of discovery will excuse. I hope that no adverse criticism will discourage the author and his school of thought to filter into our hermetically closed West fresh waters and seeds from the East. Many of his judgments deserve corrections, e.g., when he identifies Pre-reformatory Catholicism with symbolic and childlike Christianity and makes therefore Protestantism (and its stimulated counter-growth Post-Tridentine Catholicism) to be adolescent Christianity and both stages necessary—and therefore good-stages on the way to maturity. He does not do anything worse than the romantic theologians and historians of early nineteenth century Germany, or Marx or Spengler, or Toynbee! Joachim of Fiore (or Flora) seems to have been the first one to classify the “ages” of the Mystical Body. The Petrine Church of Rome, the Pauline Church of Geneva and Wittenberg, the Joannine Church of Moscow are similar constructions, not alien to Dostoevski, Bulgakov and perhaps Soloviev.
Watts seems to see the periods rather in the Church of the Father, of the Son, and now the era of the Holy Spirit. Ever since Dostoevski in his “Grand Inquisitor” created the classical symbol of the “anti-Roman” affectus, this question has haunted modern minds. We seem to have no Summa, no comprehensive answer, in spite of our Chestertonians, who tell us that sanity and supernatural truth are “evidently” the same thing, or that the Baltimore catechism is the thing that will set all minds at rest. But we will always have our Job, our Abelard, our Eckhart, our Pascal, our John Henry Newman and our Romano Guardini. The men around Dieu Vivant—de Lubac, Daneliou, Urs von Balthasar, all Jesuits by the way—are witness of this eternal conflict. They annoy people with pat replies, but they are needed.
The vast field plowed up by Mr. Watts makes it impossible through sheer extent for this reviewer to do him justice. This cornucopia is so overflowing of originality that a report would burst the seams of any review and a synthesis require a greater mind than the author’s. I am resigned to the task of showing a few trophies from this new continent, but I could not draw a map well oriented and correct. Mr. Watts has created work for a whole school of scholars, inside and outside our wails. We owe him prayers and thanks for his courage, skill, and diligence.
Behold the Spirit
Alan W. Watts
Pantheon. $2.75.
