Page 105 - FLIPBOOK - Life of Saint Gerard Majella - Vassall-Phillips

LIFE OF SAINT GERARD MAJELLA

the same moment of time was sometimes both effected and
18
apprehended, not visibly, but in a spiritual manner. He was, as we

18 This purely spiritual presence seems to be analogous to the purely
intellectual vision, which as writers on Mystical Theology — following in the
steps of St. Augustine — tell us is the highest species of vision vouchsafed by
Our Lord to His servants here below. Such an experience may be explained
without difficulty, as in the case of corporal bilocation, on some hypothesis of
sensations miraculously produced by Almighty God — with the obvious
difference that the impressions made upon the recipient of these sensations
would be made otherwise than through the sense of sight. However, it may
perhaps also be accounted for by the replication of the soul alone, or by the
enlargement of its sphere of activity. In a sermon on “The Mysteriousness of
our Present Being,” Dr. Newman speaks as though the limitation of the soul's
activity to the body were the wonder that really needs explanation.

“The body,” he writes, “is made of matter. This we see; it has a certain
extension, make, form, and solidity; by the soul we mean that invisible principle
which thinks. . . . Each man is sure that he is distinct from the body, though
joined to it, because he is one, and the body is not one, but a collection of
many things. He feels, moreover, that he is distinct from it because he uses it,
for what a man can use, in that he is superior. No one can by any possibility
mistake his body for himself. It is his; it is not he. This principle, then, which
thinks and acts in the body, and which each person feels to be himself, we call
the soul. . . . Hence we call the soul spiritual and immaterial, and say that it has
no parts, and is of no size at all. All this seems undeniable. Yet observe if all this
be true, what is meant by saying that it is in the body, any more than by saying
that a thought or a hope is in a stone or a tree? How is it joined to the body?
What keeps it one with the body? What keeps it in the body? What prevents it
any moment from separating from the body? When two things which we see
are united, they are united by some connexion which we can understand. A
chain or cable keeps a ship in its place; we lay the foundation of a building in
the earth, and the building endures. But what is it which unites soul and body?
How do they touch? How do they keep together? How is it that we do not
wander to the stars or the depths of the sea, or to and fro as chance may carry
us, white our body remains where it was on earth? . . . Certainly it is as
incomprehensible as anything can be, how soul and body can make up one
man; and unless we had the instance before our eyes, we should seem in

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