disciple he was proud to profess himself. But in putting them together
I have been obliged to depart from the chronological order, for the
Cambridge Platonists, as they are usually called, come between. This,
however, need cause no confusion, for the Platonists had no direct
influence upon Law. Law, Nonjuror as well as mystic, remained a High
Churchman by sympathy, and hated Rationalism; while the Platonists
sprang from an Evangelical school, were never tired of extolling
Reason, and regarded Böhme as a fanciful "enthusiast.[357]" And yet,
we find so very much in common between the Platonists and William Law,
that these party differences seem merely superficial. The same exalted
type of Mysticism appears in both.
The group of philosophical divines, who had their centre in some of
the Cambridge colleges towards the middle of the seventeenth century,
furnishes one of the most interesting and important chapters in the
history of our Church. Never since the time of the early Greek Fathers
had any orthodox communion produced thinkers so independent and yet so
thoroughly loyal to the Church. And seldom has the Christian temper
found a nobler expression than in the lives and writings of such men
as Whichcote and John Smith.[358]
These men made no secret of their homage to Plato. And let it be
noticed that they were students of Plato and Plotinus more than of
Dionysius and his successors. Their Platonism is not of the debased
Oriental type, and is entirely free from self-absorbed quietism. The
_via negativa_ has disappeared as completely in their writings as in
those of Böhme; the world is for them as for him the mirror of the
Deity; but, being philosophers and not physicists, they are most
interested in claiming for religion the whole field of _intellectual_
life. They are fully convinced that there can be no ultimate
contradiction between philosophy or science and Christian faith; and
this accounts not only for their praise of "reason," but for the happy
optimism which appears everywhere in their writings. The luxurious and
indolent Restoration clergy, whose lives were shamed by the simplicity
and spirituality of the Platonists, invented the word "Latitudinarian"
to throw at them, "a long nickname which they have taught their
tongues to pronounce as roundly as if it were shorter than it is by
four or five syllables"; but they could not deny that their enemies were
loyal sons of the Church of England.[359] What the Platonists meant
by making reason the seat of authority may be seen by a few
quotations from Whichcote and Smith, who for our purpose are, I think,
the best representatives of the school. Whichcote answers Tuckney, who
had remonstrated with him for "a vein of doctrine, in which reason
hath too much given to it in the mysteries of faith";--"Too much" and
"too often" on these points! "The Scripture is full of such truths,
and I discourse on them too much and too often! Sir, I oppose not
rational to spiritual, for spiritual is most rational." Elsewhere he
writes, "He that gives reason for what he has said, has done what is
fit to be done, and the most that can be done." "Reason is the Divine
Governor of man's life; it is the very voice of God." "When the
doctrine of the Gospel becomes the reason of our mind, it will be the
principle of our life." "It ill becomes us to make our intellectual
faculties Gibeonites.[360]" How far this teaching differs from the
frigid "common-sense" morality prevalent in the eighteenth century,
may be judged from the following, which stamps Whichcote as a genuine
mystic. "Though liberty of judgment be everyone's right, yet how few
there are that make use of this right! For the use of this right doth
depend upon self-improvement by meditation, consideration,
examination, prayer, and the like. These are things antecedent and
prerequisite." John Smith, in a fine passage too long to quote in
full, says: "Reason in man being _lumen de lumine_, a light flowing
from the Fountain and Father of lights ... was to enable man to work
out of himself all those notions of God which are the true groundwork
of love and obedience to God, and conformity to Him.... But since
man's fall from God, the inward virtue and vigour of reason is much
abated, the soul having suffered a [Greek: pterorryêsis], as Plato
speaks, a _defluvium pennarum_.... And therefore, besides the truth of
natural inscription, God hath provided the truth of Divine
revelation.... But besides this outward revelation, there is also an
inward impression of it ... which is in a more special manner
attributed to God.... God only can so shine upon our glassy
understandings, as to beget in them a picture of Himself, and turn the
soul like wax or clay to the seal of His own light and love. He that
made our souls in His own image and likeness can easily find a way
into them. The Word that God speaks, having found a way into the soul,
imprints itself there as with the point of a diamond.... It is God
alone that acquaints the soul with the truths of revelation, and also
strengthens and raises the soul to better apprehensions even of
natural truth, God being that in the intellectual world which the sun
is in the sensible, as some of the ancient Fathers love to speak, and
the ancient philosophers too, who meant God by their _Intellectus
Agens_[361] whose proper work they supposed to be not so much to
enlighten the object as the faculty."
The Platonists thus lay great stress on the inner light, and identify
it with the purified reason. The best exposition of their teaching on
this head is in Smith's beautiful sermon on "The True Way or Method of
attaining to Divine Knowledge." "Divinity," he says, "is a Divine life
rather than a Divine science, to be understood rather by a spiritual
sensation than by any verbal description. A good life is the
_prolepsis_ of Divine science--the fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom. Divinity is a true efflux from the eternal light, which,
like the sunbeams, does not only enlighten, but also heat and enliven;
and therefore our Saviour hath in His beatitudes connext purity of
heart to the beatific vision." "Systems and models furnish but a poor
wan light," compared with that which shines in purified souls. "To
seek our divinity merely in books and writings is to seek the living
among the dead"; in these, "truth is often not so much enshrined as
entombed." "That which enables us to know and understand aright the
things of God, must be a living principle of holiness within us. The
sun of truth never shines into any unpurged souls.... Such as men
themselves are, such will God Himself seem to be.... Some men have too
bad hearts to have good heads.... He that will find truth must seek it
with a free judgment and a sanctified mind."
Smith was well read in mystical theology, and was aware how much his
ideal differed from that of Dionysian Mysticism. His criticism of the
_via negativa_ is so admirable that I must quote part of it. "Good men
... are content and ready to deny themselves for God. I mean not that
they should deny their own reason, as some would have it, for that
were to deny a beam of Divine light, and so to deny God, instead of
denying ourselves for Him.... By self-denial, I mean the soul's
quitting all its own interest in itself, and an entire resignation of
itself to Him as to all points of service and duty; and thus the soul
loses itself in God, and lives in the possession not so much of its
own being as of the Divinity, desiring only to be great in God, to
glory in His light, and spread itself in His fulness; to be filled
always by Him, and to empty itself again into Him; to receive all from
Him, and to expend all for Him; and so to live, not as its own, but as
God's." Wicked men "maintain a _meum_ and _tuum_ between God and
themselves," but the good man is able to make a full surrender of
himself, "triumphing in nothing more than in his own nothingness, and
in the allness of the Divinity. But, indeed, this his being nothing is
the only way to be all things; this his having nothing the truest way
of possessing all things.... The spirit of religion is always
ascending upwards; and, spreading itself through the whole essence of
the soul, loosens it from a self-confinement and narrowness, and so
renders it more capacious of Divine enjoyment.... The spirit of a good
man is always drinking in fountain-goodness, and fills itself more and
more, till it be filled with all the fulness of God." "It is not a
melancholy kind of sitting still, and slothful waiting, that speaks
men enlivened by the Spirit and power of God. It is not religion to
stifle and smother those active powers and principles which are within
us.... Good men do not walk up and down the world merely like ghosts
and shadows; but they are indeed living men, by a real participation
from Him who is indeed a quickening Spirit."
"Neither were it an happiness worth the having for a mind, like an
hermit sequestered from all things else, to spend an eternity in
self-converse and the enjoyment of such a diminutive superficial
nothing as itself is.... We read in the Gospel of such a question of
our Saviour's, What went ye out into the wilderness to see? We may
invert it, What do you return within to see? A soul confined within
the private and narrow cell of its own particular being? Such a soul
deprives itself of all that almighty and essential glory and goodness
which shines round about it, which spreads itself throughout the whole
universe; I say, it deprives itself of all this, for the enjoying of
such a poor, petty, and diminutive thing as itself is, which yet it
can never enjoy truly in such retiredness."
The English Platonists are equally sound on the subject of ecstasy.
Whichcote says: "He doth not know God at all as He is, nor is he in a
good state of religion, who doth not find in himself at times
ravishings with sweet and lovely considerations of the Divine
perfections." And Smith: "Who can tell the delights of those
mysterious converses with the Deity, when reason is turned into sense,
and faith becomes vision? The fruit of this knowledge is sweeter than
honey and the honeycomb.... By the Platonists' leave, this life and
knowledge (that of the 'contemplative man') peculiarly belongs to the
true and sober Christian. This life is nothing else but an
infant-Christ formed in his soul. But we must not mistake: this
knowledge is here but in its infancy." While we are here, "our own
imaginative powers, which are perpetually attending the best acts of
our souls, will be breathing a gross dew upon the pure glass of our
understandings."
"Heaven is first a temper, then a place," says Whichcote, and Smith
says the same about hell. "Heaven is not a thing without us, nor is
happiness anything distinct from a true conjunction of the mind with
God." "Though we could suppose ourselves to be at truce with heaven,
and all Divine displeasure laid asleep; yet would our own sins, if
they continue unmortified, make an Ætna or Vesuvius within us.[362]"
This view of the indissoluble connexion between holiness and
blessedness, as between sin and damnation, leads Smith to reject
strenuously the doctrine of imputed, as opposed to imparted,
righteousness. "God does not bid us be warmed and filled," he says,
"and deny us those necessities which our starving and hungry souls
call for.... I doubt sometimes, some of our dogmata and notions about
justification may puff us up in far higher and goodlier conceits of
ourselves than God hath of us, and that we profanely make the
unspotted righteousness of Christ to serve only as a covering wherein
to wrap our foul deformities and filthy vices, and when we have done,
think ourselves in as good credit and repute with God as we are with
ourselves, and that we are become Heaven's darlings as much as we are
our own.[363]"
These extracts will show that the English Platonists breathe a larger
air than the later Romish mystics, and teach a religion more
definitely Christian than Erigena and Eckhart. I shall now show how
this happy result was connected with a more truly spiritual view of
the external world than we have met with in the earlier part of our
survey. That the laws of nature are the laws of God, that "man, as
man, is averse to what is evil and wicked," that "evil is unnatural,"
and a "contradiction of the law of our being," which is only found in
"wicked men and devils," is one of Whichcote's "gallant themes." And
Smith sets forth the true principles of Nature-Mysticism in a splendid
passage, with which I will conclude this Lecture:--
"God made the universe and all the creatures contained therein as so
many glasses wherein He might reflect His own glory. He hath copied
forth Himself in the creation; and in this outward world we may read
the lovely characters of the Divine goodness, power, and wisdom....
But how to find God here, and feelingly to converse with Him, and
being affected with the sense of the Divine glory shining out upon the
creation, how to pass out of the sensible world into the intellectual,
is not so effectually taught by that philosophy which professed it
most, as by true religion. That which knits and unites God and the
soul together can best teach it how to ascend and descend upon those
golden links that unite, as it were, the world to God. That Divine
Wisdom, that contrived and beautified this glorious structure, can
best explain her own art, and carry up the soul back again in these
reflected beams to Him who is the Fountain of them.... Good men may
easily find every creature pointing out to that Being whose image and
superscription it bears, and climb up from those darker resemblances
of the Divine wisdom and goodness, shining out in different degrees
upon several creatures, till they sweetly repose themselves in the
bosom of the Divinity; and while they are thus conversing with this
lower world ... they find God many times secretly flowing into their
souls, and leading them silently out of the court of the temple into
the Holy Place.... Thus religion, where it is in truth and power,
renews the very spirit of our minds, and doth in a manner spiritualise
this outward creation to us.... It is nothing but a thick mist of
pride and self-love that hinders men's eyes from beholding that sun
which enlightens them and all things else.... A good man is no more
solicitous whether this or that good thing be mine, or whether my
perfections exceed the measure of this or that particular creature;
for whatsoever good he beholds anywhere, he enjoys and delights in it
as much as if it were his own, and whatever he beholds in himself, he
looks not upon it as his property, but as a common good; for all these
beams come from one and the same Fountain and Ocean of light in whom
he loves them all with an universal love.... Thus may a man walk up
and down the world as in a garden of spices, and suck a Divine
sweetness out of every flower. There is a twofold meaning in every
creature, a literal and a mystical, and the one is but the ground of
the other; and as the Jews say of their law, so a good man says of
everything that his senses offer to him--it speaks to his lower part,
but it points out something above to his mind and spirit. It is the
drowsy and muddy spirit of superstition which is fain to set some idol
at its elbow, something that may jog it and put it in mind of God.
Whereas true religion never finds itself out of the infinite sphere of
the Divinity ... it beholds itself everywhere in the midst of that
glorious unbounded Being who is indivisibly everywhere. A good man
finds every place he treads upon holy ground; to him the world is
God's temple; he is ready to say with Jacob, 'How dreadful is this
place! this is none other than the house of God, this is the gate of
heaven.'"
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 316: In R.L. Nettleship's _Remains_.]
[Footnote 317: In addition to passages quoted elsewhere, the following
sentence from Luthardt is a good statement of the symbolic theory:
"Nature is a world of symbolism, a rich hieroglyphic book: everything
visible conceals an invisible mystery, and the last mystery of all is
God." Goethe's "Alles vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss" would be
better without the "nur," from our point of view.]
[Footnote 318: Récéjac, _Essai sur les Fondements de la Connaissance
Mystique_.]
[Footnote 319: In the _Edinburgh Review_, October 1896. The article
referred to, on "The Catholic Mystics of the Middle Ages," is
beautifully written, and should be read by all who are interested in
the subject.]
[Footnote 320: This is Kant's use of the word. See Bosanquet, _History
of Æsthetic_, p. 273: "A symbol is for Kant a perception or
presentation which represents a conception neither conventionally as a
mere sign, nor directly, but in the abstract, as a scheme, but
indirectly though appropriately through a similarity between the rules
which govern our reflection in the symbol and in the thing (or idea)
symbolised." "In this sense beauty is a symbol of the moral order."
Goethe's definition is also valuable: "That is true symbolism where
the more particular represents the more general, not as a dream or
shade, but as a vivid, instantaneous revelation of the inscrutable."]
[Footnote 321: Or rather of power and dignity; for in some early
Byzantine works even Satan is represented with a nimbus.]
[Footnote 322: Emerson says rightly, "Mysticism (in a bad sense)
consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an
universal one."]
[Footnote 323: The distinction which Ruskin draws between the _fancy_
and the _imagination_ may help us to discern the true and the false in
Symbolism. "Fancy has to do with the outsides of things, and is
content therewith. She can never _feel_, but is one of the most purely
and simply intellectual of the faculties. She cannot be made serious;
no edge-tool, but she will play with: whereas the imagination is in
all things the reverse. She cannot but be serious; she sees too far,
too darkly, too solemnly, too earnestly, ever to smile.... There is
reciprocal action between the intensity of moral feeling and the power
of imagination. Hence the powers of the imagination may always be
tested by accompanying tenderness of emotion.... Imagination is quiet,
fancy restless; fancy details, imagination suggests.... All egotism is
destructive of imagination, whose play and power depend altogether on
our being able to forget ourselves.... Imagination has no respect for
sayings or opinions: it is independent" (_Modern Painters_, vol. ii.
chap. iii.).]
[Footnote 324: Cf. Harnack, _History of Dogma_, vol. ii. p. 144: "What
we nowadays understand by 'symbols' is a thing which is not that which
it represents; at that time (in the second century) 'symbol' denoted a
thing which, in some kind of way, is that which it signifies; but, on
the other hand, according to the ideas of that period, the really
heavenly element lay either in or behind the visible form without
being identical with it. Accordingly, the distinction of a symbolic
and realistic conception of the Lord's Supper is altogether to be
rejected." And vol. iv. p. 289: "The 'symbol' was never a mere type or
sign, but always embodied a mystery." So Justin Martyr uses [Greek:
symbolikôs eipein] and [Greek: eipein en mystêriô] as interchangeable
terms; and Tertullian says that the name of Joshua was _nominis futuri
sacramentum_.]
[Footnote 325: So some thinkers have felt that "the Word" is not the
best expression for the creative activity of God. The passage of
Goethe where Faust rejects "Word," "Thought," and "Power," and finally
translates, "In the beginning was the _Act_," is well known. And
Philo, in a very interesting passage, says that Nature is the language
in which God speaks; "but there is this difference, that while the
human voice is made to be _heard_, the voice of God is made to be
_seen_: what God says consists of acts, not of words" (_De Decem
Orac_. II).]
[Footnote 326: Aquinas says of the sacraments, "efficiunt quod
figurant." The Thomists held that the sacraments are "causæ" of
grace; the Scotists (Nominalists), that grace is their inseparable
concomitant. The maintenance of a real correspondence between sign and
significance seems to be essential to the idea of a sacrament, but
then the danger of degrading it into magic lies close at hand.]
[Footnote 327: In the case of irregular Baptism, the maxim holds:
"Fieri non debuit; factum valet." Cf. Bp. Churton, _The Missionary's
Foundation of Doctrine_, p. 129. The reason for this difference
between the two sacraments is quite clear.]
[Footnote 328: It is, of course, difficult to decide how far such
statements were meant to be taken literally. But there is no doubt
that both Baptism and the Eucharist were supposed to _confer_
immortality. Cf. Tert. _de Bapt._ 2 (621, Oehl.), "nonne mirandum est
lavacro dilui mortem?"; Gregory of Nyssa, _Or. cat. magn._ 35, [Greek:
mê dynasthai de phêmi dicha tês kata to loutron anagennêseôs en
anastasei genesthai ton anthrôpon]. Basil, too, calls Baptism [Greek:
dynamis eis tên anastasin]. Of the Eucharist, Ignatius uses the
phrase quoted, [Greek: pharmakon tês athanasias], and [Greek:
antidotos tou mê apothanein]; and Gregory of Nyssa uses the same
language as about Baptism. See, further, in Appendices B and C.]
[Footnote 329: E.g. [Greek: metallaxis] (Theodoret), [Greek:
metabolê] (Cyril), [Greek: metapoiêsis] (Gregory Naz.), [Greek:
metastoicheiôsis] (Theophylact). The last-named goes on to say that
"we are in the same way _transelementated_ into Christ." The Christian
Neoplatonists naturally regard the sacrament as symbolic. Origen is
inclined to hold that _every_ action should be sacramental, and that
material symbols, such as bread and wine, and participation in a
ceremonial, cannot be necessary vehicles of spiritual grace; this is
in accordance with the excessive idealism and intellectualism of his
system. Dionysius calls the elements [Greek: symbola, eikones,
antitypa, aisthêta tina anti noêtôn metalambanomena]; and Maximus,
his commentator, defines a symbol as [Greek: aisthêton ti anti
noêtou metalambanomenon].]
[Footnote 330: Harnack (_History of Dogma_, vol. vi. p. 102, English
edition) says: "In the centuries before the Reformation, a growing
value was attached not only to the sacraments, but to crosses,
amulets, relics, holy places, etc. As long as what the soul seeks is
not the rock of assurance, but means for inciting to piety, it will
create for itself a thousand holy things. It is therefore an extremely
superficial view that regards the most inward Mysticism and the
service of idols as contradictory. The opposite view, rather, is
correct." I have seldom found myself able to agree with this writer's
judgments upon Mysticism; and this one is no exception. The "most
inward Mysticism" does not occupy itself much with external
"incitements to piety," nor is this the motive with which a mystic
could ever (e.g.) receive the Eucharist. The use of amulets, etc.,
which Harnack finds to have been spreading before the Reformation, and
which was certainly very prevalent in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, had very little to do with "the most inward Mysticism." My
view as to the place of magic in the history of Mysticism is given in
this Lecture; I protest against identifying it with the essence of
Mysticism. Symbolic Mysticism soon outgrew it; introspective Mysticism
never valued it. The use of visible things as stimulants to piety is
another matter; it has its place in the systems of the Catholic
mystics, but as a very early stage in the spiritual ascent. What I
have said as to the inconsistency of a high sacramental doctrine with
the favourite injunctions to "cast away all images," which we find in
the mediæval mystics, is, I think, indisputable.]
[Footnote 331: The most recent developments of German idealistic
philosophy, as set forth in the cosmology of Lotze, and still more of
Fechner, may perhaps be described as an attempt to preserve the truth
of Animism on a much higher plane, without repudiating the
universality of law.]