Prayer—An Interpretation
A Preface to Prayer. By Gerald Heard. (Cassell. 7s. 6c1.1
THE background of Mr. Heard's book, considered as denial not as affirmation, is given in some -sentences of the chapter entitled " What is the whole nature of prayer? " There he describes the attitude of dogmatic theology " in our western tradition " to other theologies as " due to the fact that in the Pauline-Johannine Christology a system was invented whereby certain events in history close to their own time and place were interpreted by their authors as containing the whole essence of history. This again was natural enough, considering the restricted view of history available to such men. It is not possible today." Mr. Heard could hardly have stated better the fundamental significance which from the first, going back indeed beyond the Pauline-Johannine Christology, Christians have seen in the appearance of Jesus Christ in history. It is this which he rejects ; when he says "it is not possible " he is greatly in error. The New Testament interpretation is one which a great many people today hold not only as possible but as affording the fullest insight which man can have into God's dealings with the world and into the divine nature as love. It is necessary to emphasise this negation of Mr. Heard's, since his conception of prayer and his conception of " the universe in which prayer so works," to give most of the title of another chapter, ire rightly brought to such a unity that one cannot disagree with him in his world-view and then agree with him in his doctrine of prayer. It is true that both as to cosmology and as to prayer there are not unimportant points where a Christian will agree with Mi. Hesard. But it is also true that unless he is prepared to throw overboard not this or that doctrine but the Christian view of God and the world, he will need at point after point to part company with Mr. Heard. I must add that when the author does talk about what belongs to Christian history and tradition he often seems to me a very unreliable guide. Of Christian mystics he has obviously a good first-hand knowledge and he shows a critical interest in the Roman Catholic Church. On Protestantism he is merely super- ficial ; worse when he says that " Protestants in all working matters of the spiritual life, ceased to be Trinitarians and Jesus Christ absorbed in His Person the whole Trinity "; it is extraordinary that he should not know how much belief in the Holy Spirit has meant In Protestant devotion. Of the failure of many or most men to "make. the effort necessary to evolve psychologically," he writes that " Christianity accepted the doctrine of predestination to explain the fact and hell as the consequence." Here he identiles Calvinism' with Christianity and describes the " fact " which brings the con- sequence in terms which I should think no Christian would accept. The refusal of the Church in the second century to follow Marion in rejecting the Old Testament he ascribes to cowardice, " because the authorities wanted success with the masses." 1- am unaware a
there being any evidence to support this explanation; what is quite certain is that the Church could not have jettisoned the Old Testa- inent without abandoning its whole philosophy of history. Attention to the Riddle of the New Testament by the late Sir Edwyn Hoskyns and Mr. Noel Davey would have given Mr. Heard the true perspective.
In his teaching about prayer the author draws very little upon the New Testament. His debt to Indian and Chinese teachers is far greater, and, among Christian mystics, to St. John of the Cross. That in some of the Christian mystics the specifically Christian ele- ment has become very thin cannot be denied. Mr. Heard can quote the late Abbot Chapman as saying that the teaching of St. John of the Cross, when " you squeezed it out " seemed to leave nothing but " Buddhism." But the prayer-life of those mystics existed in a milieu of Christian theology and worship, including the sacra- ment. That is a decisive difference between them and the far eastern teachers.
Mr. Heard conceives of prayer as " a method of empirical dis- covery, a technique for contacting and learning to know Reality." He discriminates between three kinds of prayer, the Low Prayer, where man prays for benefits for himself, the Middle Prayer, where he makes intercession for others, and the High Prayer for ;he will of God to be done. The path of prayer is one that leads " from change of conduct through change of character on to change of consciousness." When that has happened, when there is "a constant, unwavering awareness of the extra-sensory reality," a stage is reached where " petitionary prayer becomes impossible, because in the philosophic sense it is absurd." Mr. Heard agrees with Molinos as to " silence of the will " at prayer's highest level. It "is essential to those who would enter High Prayer. High Prayer is conscious- ness extended beyond all limits: it is the completion of evolution." From this comes the possibility of the final freedom and illumination when " the ignorance and illusion of self-hood falls away; the final oppoiition of seer and seen, objective and subjective is surmounted and resolved and the whole universe as it exists is comprehended as the One, the All." And so prayer has become a high art, an in- trinsic metaphysic, with a very great deal of the self, even with the disappearance of the illusion of self-hood, in it. ' To one who tries, however poorly, to pray as a Christian, the earnest pages of this book
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