Author FRIEDRICH von HUGEL
Editor GWENDOLENE GREEN
Publisher DENT and others.
As far as I am aware this book is not longer in print. As it’s title indicates it is a lengthy introduction to the Baron written by Gwendolene Green followed by a good number of letters written to his niece. This correspondence took place over a period from about 1918 through 1924. The Baron has been described as a Christian philosopher. He did write several books. He was thoroughly committed to God and to Christ and, in his case, to the Roman Catholic Church though he deprecated the idea of proselytizing for that church. It is the opinion of many that the main purpose of life for this man was to help direct others into a mature spiritual life. So, these letters could be described as letters of spiritual direction.
In them he writes of God, adoration, some remarks on mysticism and the place of the intellect in spiritual life as well as the institution of the church. Right at the bedrock of his thinking was suffering and death to self and a spiritual life that was not carried away with a great intensity such as is manifested in those who are obsessive. As far as von Hugel is concerned everything begins with God and God cannot be “diminished to a man but of larger size.” We live in the midst of God and of God in His given-ness to His creation. Von Hugel describes his own conversion as “the successful awakening in me to the fact of deep reality, encompassing me on every side, which saved me.” Gwendolene Green writes of her uncle that “he found the reality of God, and the entire given-ness, of all our spiritual life, love and prayer. To these things his soul vibrated; they made a commotion within his whole being.”
A slow reading of these letters and some other of his writings will lead us to a fullness as to what constitutes spiritual maturity. He is both mystical but intellectual and does not emphasize one against the other and all is completely suffused in a reverence for God, of His absolute ‘otherness’. So, for those who have time to read thoughtfully through these letters they will help us breath an atmosphere of God seldom experienced in the self-help Christian literature of today.
