Humbled in the Presence of Daisies

From a letter, April 20, 1922

It seems to me that, from sheer enthusiasm, you become unconsciously unfair both to science and to religion. Unfair to science, because if science and religion really produce interchangeable results, and you, notwithstanding, remain definitely religious, you will have, after all, to ask the scientists more than, as such, they give – indeed, I am sure, more than, as such, they can give. For all science, and in the term I include history, psychology, etc., is essentially the ceaseless seeking, the ceaseless restating, the ceaseless discovering of error, and the substituting of something nearer to  the truth. I do not see how science can be asked to start with a definite God, with a definite future life, with anything like a church; I think it cannot even end with anything more than a vague reverence and sense of a deep background – a very elementary theism will, at best, and can hardly, be reached by it: such theism will be, I believe, its maximum.

Efim Volkov, Field of Daisies. ARTGEN / Alamy Stock Photo.

Now, religion, on the contrary, begins with a full affirmation of a reality, of a reality other and more than all mankind. It is certain of God, certain of Christ, certain of the church. It is a gift from above downwards, not a groping from below upwards. It is not like science a coral reef, it is more like a golden shower from above. Assimilate religion to science, and you have leveled down to something which, though excellent for science, has taken from religion its entire force and good; you have shorn Samson of his locks with a vengeance. On the other hand, force science up to the level of religion, or think that you have done so, and science affirms far more than, as such, it can affirm, and you, on your part, are in a world of unreality. Let me illustrate this by the very example you give me of the death of Metchnikoff. His final words – “Do not fear for me, I am not afraid; I have had a divine light: science will solve the problems, the wonderful problems of existence” – I contrast with these Littre’s last months with his sense of awe, the feeling of whole new worlds coming upon him, worlds not of scientific discovery at all, but the worlds of contrition, of a sense of sin, or a sense of an immense over-againstness, of a huge other before which he felt crushed and a nothing. In the former case we have the courage, the selflessness, the optimism, of a true scientist; in the latter we have the elementary religious instincts. The two things are quite uninterchangeable: pray look out to keep, or to gain, the sense of this difference.

May I, though it is a sacred memory to me, just refer to the death of my eldest daughter in Rome? She was no scientist, but a Christian, and Catholic believer: she died loving God, with a sense of God, with an abandonment of herself into God’s hands, with a love of Christ as God with us, with a hope, with a trust, to be eternally with them. Now, of course, I do not quote this as anything but what occurs again and again among definitely religious souls, I only quote it to bring out, if I can, the difference, which very certainly is there, between the state of soul of the scientist simply as such, and the state of the definite religionist. Of course, the complete thing would be to have both, and certainly both have occurred again and again in the same soul…. For myself I must have both movements: the palace of my soul must have somehow two lifts – a lift which is always going up from below, and a lift which is always going down from above. I must both be seeking and be having. I must both move and repose. But it is as well that I should stop now: the thing is not merely to see these things but to practice them: to be is a very different affair.

The deeper we get into reality, the more numerous will be the questions we cannot answer. For myself I cannot conceive truth, or rather reality, as a geometrical figure of luminous lines, within which is sheer truth, and outside of which is sheer error; but I have to conceive such reality as light, in its center blindingly luminous, having rings around it of lesser and lesser light, growing dimmer and dimmer until we are left in utter darkness. I cannot answer the endless questions naturally provoked by my positions; but this incapacity need not prove more than that I am a finite mind, and that, although other finite minds can and will correct its weaknesses and errors, and although the realm of light can and will be indefinitely enlarged, yet its borders will continue fringed – they will never be clear-cut frontiers. For reality is more than any and all our imaginings of it. It is more than truth; it overwhelms whilst it supports us; and it will have produced one of its chief functions and effects if it keeps us thoroughly humbled in its presence – from the presence of the daisy to the presence and reality of God.

Sources:
Baron Friedrich von Hügel, Selected letters, 1896–1924, ed. Bernard Holland (J.M. Dent, 1928), 352–354.

Baron Friedrich von Hügel, The Reality of God, ed. Edmund G. Gardner (J.M. Dent, 1931), 33.