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Folk-Lore and the Supernatural
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2024
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Baron Von Hugel compared the interpenetration of nature and grace to the movements of a hand inside a glove: “God everywhere but stimulates and supports man whom He has made, and His Hand moves ever underneath and behind the tissue—a tissue which, at best, can become as it were a glove, and suggest the latent hand. The Divine Action will thus stimulate and inform the human action somewhat like the force that drives the blood within the stag's young antlers, or like the energy that pushes the tender sap-full fern-buds up through the hard, heavy ground.” All that can be seen is the outward veil. But the movements of it are of such a kind that they point to a power within, other than, on another plane of being than, the glove.
So also in the history of divine activity among men, the raising of fallen humanity according to those concrete needs which spring from the combined historic facts of original justice, original sin, and Redemption, we see only the race, each individual human being. But as in the movements of the glove, so in the activity of grace-impelled men, those movements, that activity, point beyond the visible fringes of the natural vehicle to a Presence of an altogether different kind, working, planning, for the good of men, things far above what we can conceive, or, having conceived, could achieve.
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- Copyright © 1937 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Mystical Element of Religion. 11, p. 134.Google Scholar
2 Selected Letters, p. 91.
3 i.e., of man quà fallen, redeemed, and under the imulsion of grace. That is “concrete, substantial, personal”. man; and Anafytical Psycholology and Comparative Religion know no other. These are the needs and capacities connatural to mankind-in-the-concrete, to human beings “secundum naturam individui, sicut naturale est Socrati vel Platoni esse agrotativum vel sanativum. secundum propiam complexionem”. St. Thomas, Summa Theologica. Ia, IIæ, q. 51, a. 1, corpus.
4 i.e., there is no need to prove Jung's thesis in every detail. The substance is enough, and that is proved, or rather set forth as self-evident, if, as seems to be the case, it be nothing more than that peripheral interpretation of the experimental data which is a minimum sine qua non of their coherent description. It is all Jung himself appears to claim.
5 The original doctrine in its most elementary terms is also empirically demanded, by inspection of the facts, and is by no means a pion', as is sometimes supposed by modem psychologists. Cf. Aristotle, Ds Anima, B I, (St. Thomas's Comm., 2 IZ), and the whole movement of Bk. A.
6 For example, we find a recent writer summarizing Jung's doctrine of the “Collective Psyche, by saying that, in psychoanalysis we finally get beyond “man” to “Man”; which is fantastic misrepresentation, of a careful student of empirical data, who never claims absolute philosophical validity for his terms. Comparable is the often repeated observation that Jung is “Mystical” in his synthesis.
7 The fact that Jung has notions, about the historicity of the Gospel narratives, which are as effete as mid-nineteenth century Tübingen. is, of course, clear to anyone familiar with his works. But these notions have nothing whatever to do with his psychological theory, in its substantial, empirically verifiable, theses. Moreover they only appear sporadically, as obiter dicta, springing from his very provincial Philsophico-religious milieu. His psychology stands quite apart, as anyone who will examine his experimental data, and make these very necessary discriminations, can ascertain for himself. The same applies in the case of Freud. It has become fashionable to dismiss Freud because of his ethics, and Jung because of his antiquated critical notions, and in both cases the precious substratum of empirical fact—their Psychology—has been only too often ignored. It is, indeed, time that the dangers of that ignorance were suggested. For there is just this much truth in the prejudicial fear of the “New Psychology”; whereas a Catholic theologian could work out a most powerful apologetic instrument by a synthesis of the “New Psychology” with his own philosophical and theological material; so also, nevertheless, can the non-Catholic critic forge an equally dangerous weapon of offence. For, like any in se unmoral instrument, the data of the “New Psychology” can find good or bad applications. One has only to remember Bultmann, Durkheim, Dibelius and the Gemeindetheologie to appreciate some of the possible dangerous uses. If Christianity does not take those new materials reasonably seriously then the enemies of Christianity will. We shall have the pathetic Anthropological story over again—not merely a half-defended position, but a strong “offensive” standpoint, most persuasive and intelligible for the world of 1937. discarded, unformulated and unfad, in the grime of our public libraries.
8 Cf. the first paper, on Occult Phenomenu, in Jung's Analytical Psychology, in the light of which perhaps all ordinary Spiritualistic manifestations are reducible to unconscious natural causes liited entirel to the Psyche.
9 Thus cf. the Vatican Council's definitive utterance on miracles: “Cum Dei omnipotentiam luculenter cmmonstrent, divinae revelationis signa sunt certissima et omnium intelligentiae accomodata,” (Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 1790.) And Cf. P. R. Gamgou-Lagrange, O.P., De Revelatione, 3rd Ed., Vol. 11. pp. 63–106, for an exposition of the critical basis for the cognoscibility of miracles.
10 Crawley, The Tree of Life, p. 89.
11 Frazer, , Golden Bough, 11, 137. 241, 245 sqq.Google Scholar
12 Golden Bough, 11, 342.Google Scholar
13 Golden Bough, abridged ed. 1922–1933, pp. 359, 360. Cf. p. 5, on the identity of Virubis of the grove of Nemi, for another typical and interesting case of parallelism; and Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, pp. 79–81, for the classic Demeter-Demetrius-Demetra continuity. But P. M.-J. Lagrange, O.P., Sens du Christianisme 1. 9. should be seen, for an outlined treatment of the radical syncretists, and for the general attitude of clear discrimination of reality from myth presupposed throughout this essay. (The fragmentary nature of many myth parallels has, however, a secondary importance here. Our concern is with their emotional significance, pointing to an unconscious uniformity of motif. Cf. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 223.)
14 Lewis Spence, Introduction to Mythology, p. 130. E. O. James, Origins of Sacrifice, C. 11. The Corn-Mothers.