THE FIRST THREE ULTIMATE QUESTIONS. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN MORALITY,
MYSTICISM, PHILOSOPHY, AND RELIGION. MYSTICISM AND THE LIMITS OF HUMAN
EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE. MYSTICISM AND THE NATURE OF EVIL
I take the ultimate questions involved in the religious positions
which are taken up by Catherine, and indeed by the Christian Mystics
generally, and which we have studied in the preceding two chapters,
to be four. In the order of their increasing difficulty they are: the
question as to the relations between Morality, Mysticism, Philosophy,
and Religion; that as to the Limits of Human Knowledge, and as to the
special character and worth of the Mystics’ claim to Trans-subjective
Cognition; that as to the Nature of Evil and the Goodness or Badness
of Human Nature; and that as to Personality,--the character of, and
the relations between, the human spirit and the Divine Spirit. The
consideration of these deepest matters in the next two chapters will, I
hope, in spite of its inevitable element of dimness and of repetition,
do much towards binding together and clarifying the convictions which
we have been slowly acquiring,--ever, in part, with a reference to
these coming ultimate alternatives and choices.
I. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN MORALITY AND MYSTICISM PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION.
Now the first of these questions has not, for most of the more
strenuous of our educated contemporaries, become, so far again, a
living question at all. A morally good and pure, a socially useful and
active life,--all this in the sense and with the range attributed to
these terms by ordinary parlance: this and this alone is, for doubtless
the predominant public present-day consciousness, the true object,
end, and measure of all healthy religion; whatever is alongside of,
or beyond, or other than, or anything but a direct and exclusive
incentive to this, is so much superstition and fanaticism. According to
this view, at least one half of Catherine’s activity at all times, and
well-nigh the whole of it during her last period, would be practically
worthless. Thus only certain elements of such a life would be retained
even for and in religion, and even these would be bereft of all that
has hitherto been held to be their specifically religious sense and
setting.
1. _Kant’s non-mystical religion._
It is doubtless Kant who, among the philosophers, has been the most
consistent and influential in inculcating such non-Mystical Religion.
“Religion,” he says in 1793, “is, on its subjective side, the cognition
of all our duties as so many Divine Commandments.” “The delusion that
we can effect something, in view of our justification before God, by
means of acts of religious worship, is religious superstition; and
the delusion that we can effect something by attempts at a supposed
intercourse with God, is religious fanaticism.… Such a feeling of the
immediate presence of the Supreme Being, and such a discrimination
between this feeling and every other, even moral, feeling, would
imply a capacity for an intuition, which is without any corresponding
organ in human nature.… If then a Church doctrine is to abolish or
to prevent all religious delusion, it must,--over and above its
statutory teachings, with which it cannot, for the present, entirely
dispense,--contain within itself a principle which shall enable it to
bring about the religion of a pure life, as the true end of the whole
movement, and then to dispense with those temporary doctrines.”[306]
It is deeply instructive to note how thoroughly this, at first sight,
solid and triumphant view, has not only continued to be refuted by the
actual practice and experience of specifically religious souls, but how
explicitly it is being discredited by precisely the more delicately
perceptive, the more truly detached and comprehensive, students and
philosophers of religion of the present day,--heirs, let us not forget
in justice to Kant, of the intervening profound development of the
historical sense, and of the history and psychology of religion.--Thus
that most vigorous, independent thinker, Prof. Simmel of Berlin,
writes in 1904: “Kant has, I think, simply passed by the essentials
of religion,--that is to say, of that reality which historically bears
the name of religion. Only the reflection, that the harmony of complete
happiness with complete morality is producible by a Divine Being
alone, is here supposed to lead us to believe in such a Being. There
is here a complete absence of that direct laying hold of the Divine
by our souls, because of our intrinsic needs, which characterizes
all genuine piety. And the religious sense is not recognized as an
organism with a unity of its own, as a growth springing from its own
root. The entirely specific character of religion, which is resolvable
neither into morality nor into a thirst after happiness: the direct
self-surrender of the soul to a higher reality, the giving and taking,
the unification and differentiation,--that quite organic unity of the
religious experience, which we can but most imperfectly indicate by
a multiplicity of some such, simultaneously valid, antitheses: this,
there is no evidence to show, was ever really known to Kant. What
was religion for Augustine and Francis of Assisi, he was unable to
reproduce in himself; indeed religion, of this type, he readily rejects
as fanaticism. Here lay the limit both of his own nature and of his own
times.”[307]
The rich mind of Prof. Troeltsch is, perhaps, more entirely just: “As
Kant’s theory of knowledge is throughout dependent upon the state of
contemporary psychology, so also is his theory of religious knowledge
dependent upon the psychology of religion predominant in his day.
Locke, Leibniz, Pascal had already recognized the essentially practical
character of all religion; and since their psychology was unable to
conceive the ‘practical’ otherwise than as the moral, it had looked
upon Religion as Morality furnished forth with its metaphysical
concomitants. And as soon as this psychology had become the very
backbone of his conception of Religion, Morality gained an entirely
one-sided predominance over Kant’s mind,--considerably, indeed, beyond
his own personal feelings and perceptions.” For he remains deeply
penetrated by “the conceptions of Regeneration and Redemption; the idea
of divine Grace and Wisdom, which accepts the totality of a soul’s
good disposition in lieu of that soul’s ever defective single good
works; the belief in a Providence which strengthens the Good throughout
the world against Evil; adoring awe in face of the majesty of the
Supersensible”: and “all these” conceptions “are no more simply moral,
they are specifically religious thoughts.”[308]
Such a fuller conception of religion is admirably insisted on by that
penetrating philosopher and historian of philosophy, Prof. Windelband:
“Actual Religion, in its complete reality, belongs to all the spheres
of life, and yet transcends them all, as something new and _sui
generis_. It is first an interior life--an apprehending, cognizing,
feeling, willing, accomplishing. But this accomplishing leads it on to
being also an exterior life: an acting out, according to their various
standards, of such feeling and willing; and an outward expression of
that inner life in general, in ritual acts and divine worship. Yet
this worship takes it beyond the little circle of the individual, and
constitutes the corporate acts of a community, a social, external
organization with visible institutions. And yet Religion ever claims to
be more than the whole series of such empirical facts and doings, it
ever transcends mere earthly experience, and is an intercourse with the
inmost nature and foundation of all reality; it is a life in and with
God, a metaphysical life. All these elements belong to the complete
concept of actual religion.”[309] I would add, that they each stimulate
the other, the external, _e.g._ being not only the expression of the
awakened internal, but also the occasion of that awakening.
And the great Dutch scholar, Prof. C. P. Tiele, unexcelled in the
knowledge of the actual course taken by the great religions of the
world, declares: “All progress, not only in Morality, but also in
Science, Philosophy, Art, necessarily exerts an influence upon that
of Religion. But … Religion is not, on that account, identical with
Ethics any more than with Philosophy or Art. All these manifestations
of the human spirit respond to certain needs of man; but none of them,
not even Morality, is capable of supplying the want which Religion
alone can satisfy.… Religion differs from the other manifestations
of the human mind” in this, that whereas “in the domain of Art, the
feelings and the imagination predominate; in that of Philosophy,
abstract thought is paramount”; and “the main object of Science is to
know accurately, whilst Ethics are chiefly concerned with the emotions
and with the fruit they yield: in Religion all these factors operate
alike, and if their equilibrium be disturbed, a morbid religious
condition is the result.”[310]
2. _Ritschlian modification of Kant’s view._
It is deeply interesting to note the particular manner in which Kant’s
impoverishment of the concept of religion has been in part retained, in
part modified, by the Ritschlian school,--I am thinking especially of
that vigorous writer, Prof. Wilhelm Hermann.
(1) If in Kant we get the belief in God derived from reflection
upon Goodness and Happiness, and as the only possible means of
their ultimate coalescence: in Hermann we still get the Categorical
Imperative, but the thirst for Happiness has been replaced by the
historic figure of Jesus Christ. “Two forces of different kinds,”
he says, “ever produce the certainty of Faith: the impression of an
Historic Figure which approaches us in Time; and the Moral Law which,
when we have heard it, we can understand in its Eternal Truth. Faith
arises, when a man recognizes, in the appearance of Jesus, that symbol
of his own existence which gives him the courage to recognize in the
Eternal, which claims him in the Moral Imperative, the source of true
life for his own self.”[311]--And these two sole co-efficients of
all entirely living religion are made to exclude, as we have already
seen, especially all Mysticism from the life of Faith. “True, outside
of Christianity, Mysticism will everywhere arise, as the very flower
of the religious development. But a Christian is bound to declare the
mystical experience of God to be a delusion. Once he has experienced
his elevation, by Christ alone, above his own previous nature, he
cannot believe that another man can attain the same result, simply by
means of recollection within his own self.… We are Christians precisely
because we have struck, in the person of Jesus, upon a fact which is
incomparably richer in content than the feelings that arise within
ourselves.” “Only because Christ is present for us can we possess
God with complete clearness and certainty.” And, with Luther,--who
remained, however, thoroughly faithful to the Primitive and Mediaeval
high esteem for the Mystical element of religion;--“right prayer is
a work of faith, and only a Christian can perform it.” And, more
moderately: “We have no desire to penetrate through Christ on to
God: for we consider that in God Himself we still find nothing but
Christ.”[312]
(2) Now it is surely plain that we have here a most understandable,
indeed respectable, reaction against all empty, sentimental
Subjectivism, and a virile affirmation of the essential importance
of the Concrete and Historical. And, in particular, the insistence
upon the supreme value and irreplaceable character and function of
Christ is profoundly true.--Yet three counter-considerations have
ever to be borne in mind.
(i) It remains certain that we do not know, or experience anything,
to which we can attribute any fuller reality, which is either purely
objective or purely subjective; and that there exists no process of
knowing or experiencing such a reality which would exclude either the
objective or the subjective factor. “Whatever claims to be fully real,”
either as apprehending subject or as apprehended object, “must be an
individual … an organic whole, which has its principle of unity in
itself.” The truly real, then, is a thing that has an inside; and the
sharp antithesis drawn, although in contrary directions, by Aristotle
and by Kant, between the Phenomenal and the Intelligible worlds, does
not exist in the reality either of our apprehending selves, or of our
apprehended fellow-men, or God.[313]--But Hermann is so haunted by the
bogey-fear of the subjective resonance within us being necessarily
useless towards, indeed obstructive of, the right apprehension
of the object thus responded to, that he is driven to follow the
will-o’-the-wisp ideal of a pure, entirely exclusive objectivity.
(ii) Bent on this will-o’-the-wisp quest of an exclusive objectivity,
he has to define all Mysticism in terms of Exclusive Mysticism, and
then to reject such an aberration. “Wherever the influence of God upon
the soul is sought and found solely in an interior experience of the
individual soul, in an excitation of the feelings which is supposed
directly to reveal the true nature of this experience, _viz._ in a
state of possession by God, and this without anything exterior being
apprehended and held fast with a clear consciousness, without the
positive content of some mental contemplation setting thoughts in
motion and raising the spiritual level of the soul’s life; _there_ is
Mystical Piety.”[314]
Now it is, of course, true that false Mysticism does attempt such an
impossible feat as the thing at which Hermann is thus aiming. But, even
here, the facts and problems are again misstated. Just now the object
presented was everything, and the apprehending subject was nothing.
Here, on the contrary, the apprehension by the subject is pressed to
the degree of requiring the soul to remain throughout reflexly aware of
its own processes.
Already in 1798 Kant had, in full acceptance of the great distinction
worked out by Leibniz in the years 1701-1709, but not published till
1765, declared: “We can be mediately conscious of an apprehension as to
which we have no direct consciousness”; and “the field of our obscure
apprehensions,--that is, apprehensions and impressions of which we are
not directly conscious, although we can conclude without doubt that we
have them,--is immeasurable, whereas clear apprehensions constitute but
a very few points within the complete extent of our mental life.”[315]
This great fact psychologists can now describe with greater knowledge
and precision: yet the observations and analyses of Pierre Janet,
William James, James Ward and others, concerning Subconsciousness,
have but confirmed and deepened the Leibnizian-Kantian apprehensions.
Without much dim apprehension, no clear perception; nothing is more
certain than this.
And it is certain, also, that this absence of reflex consciousness, of
perceiving that we are apprehending, applies not only to impressions
of sensible objects, or to apprehensions of realities inferior
in richness, in interiority, to our own nature, but also, indeed
especially, to apprehensions of realities superior, in dignity and
profundity of organization, to our own constitution. When engrossed
in a great landscape of Turner, the Parthenon sculptures, a sonata of
Beethoven, Dante’s _Paradiso_; or when lost in the contemplation of the
seemingly endless spaces of the heavens, or of the apparently boundless
times of geology; or when absorbed in the mysterious greatness of
Mind, so incommensurable with matter, and of Personality, so truly
presupposed in all these appreciations yet so transcendent of even
their collectivity--we are as little occupied with the facts of our
engrossment, our self-oblivion, our absorption, or with the aim and
use of such immensely beneficial self-oblivion, as we are, in our
ordinary, loosely-knit states, occupied with the impression which,
nevertheless, is being produced upon our senses and mind by some small
insect or slight ray of light to which we are not giving our attention,
or which may be incapable of impressing us sufficiently to be thus
attended to and clearly perceived.[316] And, as in the case of these
under-impressions, so in that of those over-impressions, we can often
judge, as to their actual occurrence and fruitfulness, only from their
after-effects, although this indirect proof will, in each case, be of
quite peculiar cogency.--All this leaves ample room for that prayer
of simple quiet, so largely practised by the Saints, and indeed for
all such states of recollection which, though the soul, on coming
from them, cannot discover definite ideas or picturings to have been
contained in them, leave the soul braced to love, work, and suffer
for God and man, beyond its previous level. Prof. William James is
too deeply versed a Psychologist not fully to understand the complete
normality of such conditions, and the entire satisfactoriness of such
tests.[317]
(iii) And finally, it is indeed true that God reveals Himself to us,
at all fully, in Human History alone, and within this history, more
fully still, in the lives and experiences of the Saints of all the
stages of religion, and, in a supreme and normative manner, in the life
and teaching of Jesus Christ; that we have thus a true immanence of
the Divine in the Human; and that it is folly to attempt the finding
or the making of any shorter way to God than that of the closest
contact with His own condescensions. Yet such a wisely Historical and
fully Christian attitude would be imperilled, not secured, by such an
excessive Christocentrism, indeed such _Panchristism_, as that of Prof.
Hermann.
We shall indeed beware of all indifferentist levelling-down of the
various religions of the world. For, as Prof. Robertson Smith, who
knew so well the chief great religions, most wisely said, “To say
that God speaks to all men alike, and gives the same communication
directly to all without the use of a revealing agency, reduces religion
to Pure Mysticism. In point of fact it is not true of any man that
what he believes and knows of God, has come to him directly through
the voice of nature and conscience.” And he adds: “History has not
taught us anything in true religion to add to the New Testament. Jesus
Christ still stands as high above us as He did above His disciples,
the perfect Master, the supreme head of the fellowship of all true
religion.”[318]
Yet we must equally guard against making even Our Lord into so
exclusive a centre and home of all that is divine, as to cause Him
to come into an entirely God-forsaken, completely God-forgetting
world, a world which did not and could not, in any degree or manner
whatsoever, rightly know, love, or serve God at all; and against so
conceiving the religion, taught and practised by Him, as to deprive it
of all affinity with, or room for, such admittedly universal forces
and resultants of the human soul and the religious sense as are dim
apprehension, formless recollection, pictureless emotion, and the
sense of the Hiddenness and Transcendence of the very God, Who is also
Immanent and Self-Revealing, in various degrees and ways, in every
place and time. Indeed, these two forces: the diffused Religiosity and
more or less inchoate religion, readily discoverable, by a generous
docility, more or less throughout the world of human souls, and the
concentrated spirituality and concrete, thoroughly characteristic
Religion, which has its culmination, after its ample preludings in the
Hebrew Prophets, in the Divine-Human figure and spirit of Jesus Christ:
are interdependent, in somewhat the way in which vague, widely spread
Subconsciousness requires, and is required by, definite, narrowly
localized Consciousness in each human mind. Precisely because there
have been and are previous and simultaneous lesser communications
of, and correspondences with, the one “Light that enlighteneth every
man that cometh into the world”; because men can and do believe
according to various, relatively preliminary, degrees and ways, in God
and a Providence, in Sin and Contrition, without a knowledge of the
Historic Christ (although never without the stimulation of some, often
world-forgotten, historic personality, and ever with some real, though
unconscious approximation to His type of life and teaching), therefore
can Christ be the very centre, and sole supreme manifestation and
measure of all this light. Not only can Christ remain supreme, even
though Moses and Elijah, Amos and Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel; and
indeed, in their own other degrees and ways, Plato and Plotinus,
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Gautama Buddha and Rabbi Akiba be all
revered as God-loved and God-loving, as, in various amounts, truly,
spiritually great: but only thus can His central importance be fully
realized.
There is certainly much in Our Lord’s own attitude, as we have already
found, to demand such a view; and Clement of Alexandria, Origen and St.
Justin Martyr have emphasized it continually. And there is no necessary
Naturalism here--for the position is entirely compatible with the
profoundest belief in the great truth that it is Grace which everywhere
produces the various degrees of God-pleasing religion to be found
scattered throughout the world. Father Tyrrell has admirably said:
“God’s salutary workings in man’s heart have always been directed,
however remotely, to the life of Grace and Glory; of ‘the Order of mere
nature,’ and its exigencies, we have no experimental knowledge … In the
present order, Theism is but embryonic Christianity, and Christianity
is but developed Theism: ‘purely natural’ religion is what might have
been, but never was.”[319]
(3) Now this must suffice as a sketch of the relations between
(Historical) Religion and Mysticism, and will have shown why I cannot
but regret that so accomplished a scholar as Prof. Morice Jastrow
should class all and every Mysticism, whether Pure or Mixed, as
so far forth a religious malady; why I rejoice that so admirably
circumspect an investigator as Prof. C. P. Tiele should, (in the
form of a strenuous insistence upon the apprehension, indeed the
ontological action of, the Infinite, by and within the human spirit,
as the very soul and mainspring of Religion), so admirably reinforce
the fundamental importance of the Mystical apprehensions; why I most
warmly endorse Prof. Rauwenhoff’s presentment of Mysticism as, with
Intellectualism and Moralism, one of the three psychological forms
of religion, which are each legitimate and necessary, and which each
require the check of the other two, if they are not to degenerate each
into some corruption special to the exclusive development of that
particular form; and why I cordially applaud the unequalled analysis
and description by Prof. Eucken of the manner in which “Universal
Religion” is at work, as an often obscure yet (in the long run) most
powerful leaven, throughout all specifically human life,--Sciences,
Art, Philosophy, and Ethics, calling for, and alone satisfied with, the
answering force and articulation of “Characteristic Religion,” each
requiring and required by the other, each already containing the other
in embryo, and both ever operating together, in proportion as Man and
Religion attain to their fulness.[320]
3. _Hermann’s impossible simplification concerning philosophy._
But what shall we say as to the relations between Religion and
Philosophy? Here again Hermann is the vigorous champion of a very
prevalent and plausible simplification. “There exists no Theory of
Knowledge for such things as we hold to be real in the strength of
faith. In such religious affirmations, the believer demolishes every
bridge between his conviction and that which Science can recognize as
real.” Indeed Hermann’s attitude is here throughout identical with that
of his master, Albrecht Ritschl: Metaphysics of any and every kind
appear everywhere, to both writers, as essentially unnecessary, unreal,
misleading, as so much inflation and delusion of soul.--Yet this again
is quite demonstrably excessive, and can indeed be explained only as an
all but inevitable recoil from the contrary metaphysical excesses of
the Hegelian school.
(1) Since the culmination of that reaction, “it has,” as Prof. H.
J. Holtzmann, himself so profoundly historical and so free from
all extreme metaphysical bent, tells us, “become quite impossible
any further to deny the metaphysical factors which had a share in
constituting such types of New Testament doctrine as the Pauline and
Joannine. Indeed, not even if we were to reduce the New Testament to
the Synoptic Gospels and the Acts on the one hand, and to the Pastoral
Epistles, the Epistle of James and the Apocalypse on the other hand,
would the elements which spring from speculative sources be entirely
eliminated. And since, again, the Old Testament religion, in its last
stage, assimilated similarly metaphysical materials from the East
and from the West; since Mohammedanism, in its Persian and Indian
branches, did the same with regard to the older civilized religions of
Middle and Eastern Asia; since also these latter religions received
a speculative articulation in even the most ancient times, so that
they are both Philosophy and Religion simultaneously: we are forced
to ask ourselves, whether so frequent a concomitant of religion is
satisfactorily explicable as a mere symptom of falsification or decay.”
And whilst answering that the primary organ for religion is Feeling
and Conscience, he points out how large an amount of Speculation was,
nevertheless, required and exercised by a St. Augustine, even after his
unforgettable experiences of the sufferings attendant upon Sin, and of
their cure by Grace alone.[321]
(2) The fact is that, if man cannot apprehend the objects,--the
historic and other facts,--of Religion, without certain subjective
organs, dispositions, and effects, any more than can all these
subjective capacities, without those objects, produce religious
convictions and acts, or be waked up into becoming efficient forces:
neither can man thus experience and effect the deepest foundations and
developments of his own true personality in and through contact with
the divine Spirit, without being more or less stimulated into some
kind of, at least rudimentary, Philosophy as to these his profoundest
experiences of reality, and as to their rights and duties towards the
rest of what he is and knows.
(3) Indeed his very Religion is already, in itself, the profoundest
Metaphysical Affirmation. As the deeply historical-minded Prof. Tiele
admits: “Every man in his sound senses, who does not lead the life of
a half-dormant animal, philosophizes in his own way”; and “religious
doctrine rests on a metaphysical foundation; unless convinced of the
reality of a supersensual world, it builds upon sand.”[322] Or as Prof.
Eucken, the most eloquent champion of this central characteristic
of all vital religion, exclaims: “If we never, as a matter of fact,
get beyond merely subjective psychological processes, and we can
nowhere trace within us the action of cosmic forces; if we in no case
experience through them an enlargement, elevation, and transformation
of our nature: then not all the endeavours of its well-meaning friends
can preserve religion from sinking to the level of a mere illusion.
Without a universal and real principle, without hyper-empirical
processes, there can be no permanence for religion.”[323]
(4) Some kind of philosophy, then, will inevitably accompany, follow,
and stimulate religion, were it only as the, necessarily ever
inadequate, attempt at giving a fitting expression to the essentially
metaphysical character of belief in a super-sensible world, in God, in
man’s spiritual capacities and in God’s redemption of man. Not because
the patient analysis of the completer human personalities, (as these
are to be found throughout the length and breadth of history), requires
the elimination of a wholesome Mysticism and a sober Metaphysic from
among the elements and effects of the fullest Manhood and Religion; but
because of the ever serious difficulties and the liability to grave
abuses attendant upon both these forces, the inevitably excessive
reactions against these abuses, and the recurrent necessity of
remodelling much of the theory and practice of both, in accordance with
the growth of our knowledge of the human mind, (a necessity which, at
first sight, seems to stultify all the hyper-empirical claims of both
these forces): only because of this have many men of sense and goodness
come to speak as though religion, even at its fullest, could and should
get on without either, contenting itself to be a somewhat sentimental,
Immanental Ethics.
(5) Yet, against such misgivings, perhaps the most immediately
impressive counter-argument is the procession, so largely made up
of men and of movements not usually reckoned as exclusively or
directly religious, whose very greatness,--one which humanity will
not let die,--is closely interwoven with Mystical and Metaphysical
affirmations. There are, among philosophers, a Spinoza and a Leibniz,
a Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, a Trendelenburg and a Lotze, with the
later stages of a John Mill, a Littré, and a Herbert Spencer; among
poets, a Pindar and Aeschylus, a Lucretius and Vergil, a Lessing and a
Goethe, a Wordsworth and a Browning; among historians, a Thucydides and
a Tacitus, a St. Simon and de Tocqueville, a Carlyle, a Jacob Grimm,
a Droysen and a Ranke; among scientists, a Copernicus and a Kepler, a
Newton, a Lyell, indeed, largely still, also a Darwin; and among men of
action, a Moltke and a Gordon, a Burke and a von Stein. Shear any of
these men of their Mystical and Metaphysical elements, and you will
have shorn Samson of his locks.
And if we can frame a contrary list of men of force and distinction,
who have represented an un- or even an anti-Mystical and
anti-Metaphysical type: Caesar and Hannibal, Napoleon and Bismarck,
Voltaire and Laplace, Hume and Bentham, Huxley and Mommsen, we must
ever remember the complex truth as to the Polarity of Life,--the strict
necessity of the movement towards an intensely close contact with
empirical reality, as well as of the movement back to recollection;
the frequent sickliness of the recollective movement, as found in the
average practice of life, which cannot but produce a reaction and
contrary excess; and hence the legitimacy of what this second type
has got of positiveness and of corrective criticism. Yet here too the
greatness will consist directly in what these men are and have, not
in what they are not; and wherever this their brutal-seeming sense of
the apparent brutalities of life is combined with an apprehension of a
higher world and of a deeper reality, _there_ something fuller and more
true has been attained than is reached by such strong but incomplete
humanity alone.
4. _Religion and Morality, their kinship and difference._
And, finally, as to Religion and Morality, we should note how that the
men, who deny all essential connection between Religion and Mysticism
and Religion and Philosophy, ever, when they do retain Religion at
all, tend to identify it with Morality, if not as to the motives, yet
as to the contents of the two forces. And yet it is not difficult to
show that, if the relation between Religion and Morality is closer than
that between Religion and Philosophy, though not as intimate as is that
between Historical-Institutional Religion and Mysticism: Religion and
Morality are nevertheless not identical.
(1) This non-identity is indicated by the broad historical fact that,
though the development of Religion tells upon that of Morality, and
_vice versa_: yet that the rate of development of these two forces is
practically never the same, even in one and the same soul, still less
in any one country or race. In each case we get various inequalities
between the two developments, which would be impossible, were the two
forces different only in name.
We reach again the same conclusion, if we note, what Dr. Edward Caird
has so well pointed out, “the imperfection of the subjective religion
of the prophets and psalmists of Israel,”--who nevertheless already
possessed a very advanced type of profoundly ethical religion,--“shown
by its inability to overcome the legal and ceremonial system of
worship to which it was opposed”; as, “in like manner, Protestantism
… has never been able decisively to conquer the system of Rome.”[324]
For this, as indeed the failure of Buddhism to absorb and supersede
Hindooism, evidently implies that Religion cannot find its full
development and equilibrium in an exclusive concentration upon Morality
Proper, as alone essential; and hence that complete Religion embraces
other things besides Morality.
Once more we find non-identity between the very Ethics directly
postulated by Religion at its deepest, and the Ethics immediately
required by the Family, Society, the State, Art, Science, and
Philosophy. As Prof. Troeltsch admirably puts it, “the special
characteristic of our modern consciousness resides in the insistence
both upon the Religious, the That-world Ends, _and_ upon the Cultural,
This-World Ends, which latter are taken as Ends-in-themselves: it
is precisely in this combination that this consciousness finds its
richness, power, and freedom, but also its painful interior tension
and its difficult problems.” “As in Christian Ethics we must recognize
the predominance of an Objective Religious End,--for here certain
relations of the soul to God are the chief commandments and the supreme
good,--so in the Cultural Ends we should frankly recognize objective
Moral Ends of an Immanental kind.” And in seeking after the right
relations between the two, we shall have to conclude that “Ethics, for
us, are not, at first, a unity but a multiplicity: man grows up amongst
a number of moral ends, the unification of which is his life’s task and
problem, and not its starting-point.” And this multiplicity “is” more
precisely “a polarity in human nature, for it contains two poles--that
of Religious and that of Humane Ethics, neither of which can be ignored
without moral damage, but which, nevertheless, cannot be brought under
a common formula.” “We can but keep a sufficient space open for the
action of both forms, so that from their interaction there may ever
result, with the least possible difficulty, the deepening of the Humane
Ends by the Christian Ethics, and the humanizing of the Christian End
by the Humane Ethics, so that life may become a service of God within
the Cultural Ends, and that the service of God may transfigure the
world.”[325]
We can perceive the difference between the two forces most clearly
in Our Lord’s life and teaching--say, the Sermon on the Mount; in
the intolerableness of every exegesis which attempts to reduce the
ultimate meaning and worth of this world-renewing religious document to
what it has of literal applicability in the field of morality proper.
Schopenhauer expressed a profound intuition in the words: “It would be
a most unworthy manner of speech to declare the sublime Founder of the
Christian Religion, whose life is proposed to us as the model of all
virtue, to have been the most reasonable of men, and that his maxims
contained but the best instruction towards an entirely reasonable
life.”[326]
(2) The fact is that Religion ever insists, even where it but seems
to be teaching certain moral rules and motives as appropriate to this
visible world of ours, upon presenting them in the setting of a fuller,
deeper world than that immediately required as the field of action and
as the justification of ordinary morality. Thus whilst, in Morality
Proper, the concepts of Responsibility, Prudence, Merit, Reward,
Irretrievableness, are necessarily primary; in Religious Ethics the
ideas of Trust, Grace, Heroism, Love, Free Pardon, Spiritual Renovation
are, as necessarily, supreme. And hence it is not accidental, although
of course not necessary, that we often find men with a keen religious
sense but with a defective moral practice or even conception, and men
with a strong moral sense and a want of religious perception; that
Mystics, with their keen sense for one element of religion, so often
seem, and sometimes are, careless of morality proper; and that, in such
recent cases (deeply instructive in their very aberrations) as that of
Nietzsche, we get a fierce anti-Moralism combined with a thirst for
a higher and deeper world than this visible one, which not all its
fantastic form, nor even all Nietzsche’s later rant against concrete
religion, can prevent from being essentially religious.[327]
(3) We have then, here, the deepest instance of the law and
necessity which we have, so often, found at the shallower levels of
the spirit’s life. For here, once more, there is one apprehension,
force, life,--This-world Morality,--which requires penetration and
development, in nowise destruction, by another, a deeper power,
That-world Ethics and Religion. Let the one weaken or blunt the edge
and impact of the other, and it has, at the same time, weakened itself.
For here again we have, not a Thing which simply exists, by persistence
in its dull unpenetratingness and dead impenetrability, but a Life,
growing by the incorporation and organization, within its ampler range,
of lesser lives, each with its own legitimate autonomy.
II. MYSTICISM AND THE LIMITS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE.
But have not even the most sober-minded of the Partial Mystics greatly
exceeded the limits of human knowledge, more or less continuously,
throughout their conclusions? Is Kant completely in the wrong? And are
not the Positivists right in restricting all certain cognition to the
experiences of the senses and to the Mathematico-Physical Sciences
built upon those experiences? And, again, is there such a thing at all
as specifically Mystical Experience or Knowledge? And, if so, what is
its worth?--I must keep the elaboration of the (ultimately connected)
question, as to the nature of the realities experienced or known--as
to the human spirit and the Divine Spirit, and their inter-relations,
hence as to Pantheism and Personality--for the next chapter, and can
here but prepare the ground for it, by the elucidation of certain
important points in general Epistemology, and of the more obvious
characteristics of Mystical apprehension.
1. _Positivist Epistemology an error._
As regards general Epistemology, we may well take up the following
positions.
(1) We cannot but reject, with Prof. Volkelt, as a mere vulgar error,
the Positivist limitation of trans-subjectively valid knowledge to
direct sense-perception and to the laws of the so-called Empirical
Sciences. For, as he shows conclusively, the only fact which is
absolutely indubitable, is that of the bare occurrence of our (possibly
utterly misleading) sensations and impressions. Some of these are, it
is true, accompanied by a certain pressure upon our minds to credit
them with trans-subjective validity; and the fact of this (possibly
quite misleading) pressure is itself part of our undeniable experience.
Yet we can, if we will, treat this pressure also as no more than a
meaningless occurrence, and not as evidencing the trans-subjective
reality which it seems to indicate. No man, it is true, has ever
succeeded in consistently carrying out such a refusal of assent,--since
no scepticism is so thorough but that it derives its very power,
against the trans-subjective validity of some of the impressions
furnished with trans-subjective pressure, from an utterly inconsistent
acceptance, as trans-subjectively valid, of other impressions furnished
with a precisely similar trans-subjective intimation. Yet the fact
remains that, in all such cases of trans-subjective pressure, the
mind has “an immediate experience of which the content is precisely
this, that we are justified in proceeding with these concepts into
what is absolutely beyond the possibility of being experienced by
us.” “Positivistic Cognition,” to which no man, Positivist included,
can systematically restrict himself, “abides absolutely within the
immediately experienced. Logical Cognition,” which every man practises
surreptitiously if not avowedly, “exceeds experience at every step,
and conceptually determines what is absolutely incapable of being
experienced, yet the justification for this kind of cognition is, here
also, an immediately experienced certitude.”[328]
We have, “then, immediately experienced presentations which of
themselves already constitute a knowledge,--our first knowledge,
and the only one possessed of absolute indubitableness.” And some
of these presentations “are accompanied by a kind of immediate
certainty or revelation that, in some way, they reach right into the
Thing-in-Itself, that they directly express something objectively
valid, present in that Thing-in-Itself”; and “this pressure ever
involves, should the contradictory of what it enunciates be admitted as
objectively existent, the self-destruction of objective reality.”--“And
this pressure can, in any one case, be resisted by the mind; an act of
endorsement, of a kind of faith, is necessary on the part of the mind:
for these presentations, furnished with such pressure, do not transform
themselves into the Things-in-Themselves directly,--we do not come to
see objective reality simply face to face.”[329] And we find thus that
“_in principle_ the entire range of reality, right down to its last
depths, lies open to cognition, proceeding according to the principle
of the necessities of thought. For he who recognizes this principle,
thereby admits that the necessities of thought have trans-subjective
significance, so that, if any affirmation concerning the ultimate
reasons and depths of Reality can be shown to be necessary in thought,
this affirmation possesses as rightful a claim to trans-subjective
validity, as any determination, necessary in thought, which concern
only such parts of the Thing-in-Itself as are the nearest neighbours to
our sense-impressions concerning it. Everywhere our principle leaves us
only the question whether thought, as a matter of fact, does or does
not react, under the given problems, with the said logical constraint
and pressure.”[330]
(2) We can next insist upon how we have thus already found that the
acquisition of even so rudimentary an outline of Reality, as to be
ever in part presupposed in the attacks of the most radical sceptics,
necessarily involves a certain emotive disposition and volitional
action. And, over and above this partially withholdable assent, such
quite elementary thinking will also ever require the concomitant
energizing of the picturing faculty. And again, the more interior and
spiritual are this thinking’s subject-matters, the more will it be
permeated by, and be inseparable from, deep feeling. It is then all
man’s faculties conjoined, it is the whole man, who normally thus
gives, without reflecting on it, his all, to gain even this elementary
nucleus of certainty as to Reality. “Even receptivity,” as Prof. Ward
well says, “is activity”; for even where non-voluntary, it is never
indifferent. “Not mere receptivity, but conative or selective activity,
is the essence of subjective reality.” Or, with Prof. Volkelt: “Purely
isolated thought,”--which, in actual life ever more or less of a
fiction, is not rarely set up by individuals as an ideal,--“is, however
intensified and interiorized, something ever only formal, something, in
the final resort, insignificant and shadowy.”--And, concurrently with
the recognition of this fact, man will come to find that “the ultimate
Substance or Power of and in the world,”--that objective reality which
is the essential counterpart to his own subjective reality,--“is
something possessed of a true, deep content and of a positive aim,
and alive according to the analogy of a willing individual. The
world would thus be a Logical Process only in the sense that this
concrete fundamental Power is bound by the ideal necessity of its own
nature.”[331]
(3) And again, I would note with Volkelt how Kant, owing to his
notoriously intense natural tendency to universal Dualism, never
admits, even as a point for preliminary settlement, the possibility
that our subjective conceptions of Objective Reality may have some true
relation to that Reality. His professed ignorance as to the nature
of that Reality changes instantaneously, quite unbeknown to himself,
into an absolutely unvarying, negative knowledge concerning that
Reality,--he simply _knows_ that it is _utterly heterogeneous_ to our
conception of it. Thus he finds the view that “God has implanted into
the human mind certain categories and concepts of a kind spontaneously
to harmonize with things,” to be “the most preposterous solution that
we could possibly choose.”[332] Thus the epistemological difference
between Presentation and Thing-in-Itself becomes a metaphysical
exclusion of each by the other. And yet we know of no fact, whether
of experience or of thought, to prevent something which is _my_
presentation existing also, in so far as it is the content of that
presentation, outside of this presentment. Indeed Psychology and
Epistemology have, driven by every reason and stopped by none, more and
more denied and refuted this excessive, indeed gratuitous, Dualism.
As Prof. Henry Jones well puts it: “The hypothesis that knowledge
consists of two elements which are so radically different as to be
capable of description only by defining each negatively in terms of
the other, the pure manifold or differences of sense, and a purely
universal or relative thought,” breaks down under the fact that “pure
thought and the manifold of sense pass into each other, the one proving
meaningless and the other helpless in its isolation.” These elements
“are only aspects of one fact, co-relates mutually penetrating each
other, distinguishable in thought, but not separable as existences.”
Hence we must not “make logical remnants do the work of an intelligence
which is never purely formal, upon a material which is nowhere a pure
manifold”: for “the difference between the primary data of thought
on the one hand, and the highest kinds of systematized knowledge on
the other, is no difference … between a mere particular and a mere
universal, or a mere content and a mere form; but it is a difference
in comprehensiveness of articulation.” However primary may be the
distinction of subjective and objective, “we are not entitled to
forget the unity of the reality in which the distinction takes place.”
If we begin with the purely subjective, we must doubtless end there;
but then, in spite of certain, never self-consistent, philosophical
hypotheses, “the purely subjective is as completely beyond our reach as
the purely objective.”[333]
Prof. Ward indeed pushes the matter, I think rightly, even a step
further. He points out how readily, owing to the ambiguous term
“consciousness,” “we confound experience with knowledge”; but holds
that experience is the wider term. “Knowledge must fall within
experience, and experience extend beyond knowledge. Thus I am not
left to infer my own being from my knowing.… Objective reality is
immediately ‘given,’ or immediately ‘there,’ not inferred.” But the
subjective reality is not immediately given, immediately there.
“There is no such parallelism between the two.… The subjective factor
in experience is not _datum_ but _recipiens_: it is not ‘there’ but
‘here’; a ‘here’ relative to that ‘there.’”[334] Nothing of this,
I think, really conflicts with the positions we have adopted from
Volkelt, since “experience” is evidently used here in a sense inclusive
of the presentations, the trans-subjective pressure and the endorsement
of the latter’s estimations,--the three elements which, according also
to Volkelt, form an organism which even the most daring subjectivism
can never consistently reject. At most, the term “experience” is more
extended in Prof. Ward, since it includes all three elements, than in
Prof. Volkelt, who restricts it to the two first.
(4) And further, we must take care to find room for the only unforced
explanation of the wondrous fact that “although,” as Dr. Volkelt
strikingly says, “the various schools of philosophy “--this is largely
true of those of theology also,--are “in part essentially determined
by historical currents, forces which follow other standards than
those of logical necessity”: yet “these points of view and modes
of thought, thus determined by” apparently non-logical “history,
subserve nevertheless logical necessity, indeed represent its” slow,
intermittent, yet real “progressive realization.” The explanation is
that “the forces of history are, unbeknown to themselves, planned,
in their depths, for agreement with the necessities and ends of
thought and of truth.” “And thus the different spheres” and levels
“of spiritual life and endeavour appear as originally intended for
each other, so that each sphere, whilst consciously striving only
after its own particular laws and standards, in reality furthers
the objects of the rest.” For “only the operative presence of such
an original, teleological inter-relation can explain how historic
forces, by their influence upon, and determination of, philosophical
thinking, can, instead of staining and spoiling it by the introduction
of religious, artistic, political, and other motives, actually
advance it most essentially.”[335]--Here then we get a still further
enlargement of the already wide range of interaction, within the human
mind, between forces which, at first sight, appear simply external
to, indeed destructive of, each other; and a corresponding increase
in the indications of the immense breadth, depth, and closeness
of inter-penetration characterizing the operative ground-plan,
the pre-existing Harmony and Teleology of the fundamental forces
of Reality. Thus once more man’s spirit appears as possessed of a
large interiority; and as met, supported and penetrated, by a Spirit
stupendously rich in spiritual energy.
(5) And finally, let us never forget that “the only experience
immediately accessible to us” men, “is our own; this, in spite of
its complexity, is the first we know.”[336] And this means that we
have direct experience and anything like adequate knowledge, (because
knowledge from within,) not of things, but of mind and will, of
spiritual life struggling within an animal life; and that in face,
say, of plant-life, and still more of a pebble or of a star, we have a
difficulty as to an at all appropriate and penetrative apprehension,
which, if opposite to, is also in a sense greater than, the difficulty
inherent to our apprehension of God Himself. For towards this latter
apprehension we have got the convergent testimony of certain great,
never quite obliterable facts without us and within ourselves.
There is the upward trend, the ever-increased complexity of
organization, the growing depth and interiority in the animate
world,--Plant-Life itself being already, very probably, possessed of a
vague consciousness, and Man, at the other end of the scale, summing up
the tendency of the whole series in a deep self-consciousness which, at
the same time, makes him alone keenly aware of the great difference,
in the midst of the true kinship, between himself and the humbler
members of that one world. For Natural Selection can but describe the
results and explain part of the method of this upward trend, but cannot
penetrate to its ultimate cause and end.
There is, again, the great, deep fact of the mutually necessary,
mutually stimulating presence and interaction, within our own mental
and spiritual life, of sense-impressions, imaginative picturings,
rational categories, emotional activities, and volitional acts;
and, again, of subject and object; and, once more, of general,
philosophic Thought and the contingencies of History. For the
immanental inter-adaptation and Teleology, that mysteriously link
together all these, profoundly disparate-seeming, realms and forces
is far too deep-down, it too much surprises, and exacts too much of
us, it too much reveals itself, precisely at the end of much labour
of our own and in our truest and most balanced moods, as the mostly
unarticulated presupposition and explanation of both the great cost
and the rich fruitfulness of every approximately complete actuation of
all our faculties, each with and in the others, and in and with their
appropriate objects, to be permanently ruled out of court as mere
sentimentalism or baseless apologetic.
And there is the deepest fact of all, the one which precisely
constitutes the specific characteristic of all true humanity, the sense
of mental oppression, of intolerable imprisonment inflicted by the
very idea of the merely contingent, the simply phenomenal and Finite,
and the accompanying noble restlessness and ready dwarfing of all
man’s best achievements by the agent’s own Ideal of Perfection. For
this latter sense is, precisely in the greater souls, so spontaneous
and so keen, so immensely operative in never leaving our, otherwise
indolent and readily self-delusive, self-complacent race fully and
long satisfied with anything that passes entirely away, or that
is admittedly merely a subjective fancy, even though this fancy be
shared by every member of the human race; and this sense operates so
explosively within Sceptics as well as Dogmatists, within would-be
Agnostic Scientists as well as in the most Intellectualist Theologians;
it so humbles, startles, and alone so braces, sweetens, widens, indeed
constitutes our humanity: as to be unforcedly explicable only by
admitting that man’s spirit’s experience is not shut up within man’s
own clear analysis or picturing of it; that it is indefinitely wider,
and somehow, in its deepest reaches, is directly touched, affected, in
part determined, by the Infinite Spirit Itself. “Man never knows how
anthropomorphic he is,” says Goethe. Yes, but it was a man, Goethe,
it is at bottom all men, in proportion as they are fully, sensitively
such, who have somehow discovered this truth; who suffer from its
continuous evidences, as spontaneously as from the toothache or from
insomnia; and whose deepest moments give them a vivid sense of how
immensely the Spirit, thus directly experienced by their spirit,
transcends, and yet also is required by and is immanent in, their keen
sense of the Finitude and Contingency present throughout the world of
sense-perception and of clear intellectual formulation.
(6) With Plato and Plotinus, Clement of Alexandria and St. Augustine,
St. Bernard, Cardinal Nicolas of Coes and Leibniz in the past; with
Cardinal Newman, Professors Maurice Blondel and Henri Bergson,
Siegwart, Eucken, Troeltsch and Tiele, Igino Petrone and Edward Caird,
in the present; with the explicit assent of practically all the great
Mystics of all ages and countries, and the implicit instinct, and at
least partial, practical admission, of all sane and developed human
souls; we will then have to postulate here, not merely an intellectual
reasoning upon finite data, which would somehow result in so operative
a sense of the Infinite; nor even simply a mental category of
Infinitude which, evoked in man by and together with the apprehension
of things finite, would, somehow, have so massive, so explosive an
effect against our finding satisfaction in the other categories,
categories which, after all, would not be more subjective, than itself:
but the ontological presence of, and the operative penetration by
the Infinite Spirit, within the human spirit. This Spirit’s presence
would produce, on occasion of man’s apprehension or volition of things
contingent and finite, the keen sense of disappointment, of contrast
with the Simultaneous, Abiding, and Infinite.--And let the reader note
that this is not Ontologism, for we here neither deduce our other ideas
from the idea of God, nor do we argue from ideas and their clarity, but
from living forces and their operativeness.
We thus get man’s spirit placed within a world of varying degrees of
depth and interiority, the different levels and kinds of which are
necessary, as so many materials, stimulants, obstacles, and objects,
for the development of that spirit’s various capacities, which
themselves again interact the one upon the other, and react upon
and within that world. For if man’s experience of God is not a mere
discursively reasoned conclusion from the data of sense, yet man’s
spirit experiences the Divine Spirit and the spirits of his fellow-men
on occasion of, and as a kind of contrast, background, and support
to, the actuation of his senses, imagination, reason, feeling, and
volition, and, at least at first and in the long run, not otherwise.
2. _No distinct faculty of Mystical apprehension._
Is there, then, strictly speaking, such a thing as a specifically
distinct, self-sufficing, purely Mystical mode of apprehending Reality?
I take it, _distinctly not_; and that all the errors of the Exclusive
Mystic proceed precisely from the contention that Mysticism does
constitute such an entirely separate, completely self-supported kind of
human experience.--This denial does not, of course, mean that soul does
not differ quite indefinitely from soul, in the amount and kind of the
recollective, intuitive, deeply emotive element possessed and exercised
by it concurrently or alternately with other elements,--the sense of
the Infinite within and without the Finite springing up in the soul on
occasion of its contact with the Contingent; nor, again, that these
more or less congenital differences and vocations amongst souls cannot
and are not still further developed by grace and heroism into types of
religious apprehension and life, so strikingly divergent, as, at first
sight, to seem hardly even supplementary the one to the other. But it
means that, in even the most purely contingent-seeming soul, and in its
apparently but Institutional and Historical assents and acts, there
ever is, there never can fail to be, _some_, however implicit, however
slight, however intermittent, sense and experience of the Infinite,
evidenced by at least some dissatisfaction with the Finite, except as
this Finitude is an occasion for growth in, and a part-expression of,
that Infinite, our true home. And, again, it means, that even the most
exclusively mystical-seeming soul ever depends, for the fulness and
healthiness of even the most purely mystical of its acts and states,
as really upon its past and present contacts with the Contingent,
Temporal, and Spacial, and with social facts and elements, as upon its
movement of concentration, and the sense and experience, evoked on
occasion of those contacts or of their memories, of the Infinite within
and around those finitudes and itself.
Only thus does Mysticism attain to its true, full dignity, which
consists precisely in being, not everything in any one soul, but
something in every soul of man; and in presenting, at its fullest, the
amplest development, among certain special natures with the help of
certain special graces and heroisms, of what, in some degree and form,
is present in every truly human soul, and in such a soul’s every, at
all genuine and complete, grace-stimulated religious act and state.
And only thus does it, as Partial Mysticism, retain all the strength
and escape the weaknesses and dangers of would-be Pure Mysticism, as
regards the mode and character of Religious Experience, Knowledge, and
Life.
3. _The first four pairs of weaknesses and strengths special to the
Mystics._
I take the Mystic’s weaknesses and strengths to go together in pairs,
and that there are seven such pairs. Only the first four shall be
considered here; the fifth and the last two couples are reserved
respectively for the following, and for the last section, of this
chapter.
(1) The Mystic finds his joy in the recollective movement and moments
of the soul; and hence ever tends, _qua_ Mystic, to ignore and neglect,
or to over-minimize, the absolutely necessary contact of the mind and
will with the things of sense. He will often write as though, could he
but completely shut off his mind from all sense-perceptions,--even of
grand scenery, or noble works of art, or scenes of human devotedness,
suffering, and peace,--it would be proportionately fuller of God.--Yet
this drift is ever more or less contradicted by his practice, often
at the very moment of such argument: for no religious writers are
more prolific in vivid imagery derived from noble sensible objects
and scenes than are the Mystics,--whose characteristic mood is an
intuition, a resting in a kind of vision of things invisible.--And
this contradiction is satisfactory, since it is quite certain that
if the mind, heart, and will could be completely absorbed, (from the
first or for any length of time), in the flight from the sensible,
it would become as dangerously empty and languid concerning things
invisible themselves as, with nothing but an outgoing occupation
with the sensible, it would become distracted and feverish. It is
this aversion from Outgoing and from the world of sense, of the
contemporaneous contingencies environing the soul, that gives to
Mysticism, as such, its shadowy character, its floating above, rather
than penetrating into, reality,--in contradiction, where this tendency
becomes too exclusive, to the Incarnational philosophy and practice of
Christianity, and indeed of every complete and sound psychology.
And yet the Incoming, what the deep religious thinker
Kierkegaard has so profoundly analyzed in his doctrine of
“Repetition,”[337]--recollection and peaceful browsing among the
materials brought in by the soul’s Outgoing,--is most essential. Indeed
it is the more difficult, and, though never alone sufficient, yet ever
the more centrally religious, of the two movements necessary for the
acquisition of spiritual experience and life.
(2) Again, the Mystic finds his full delight in all that approximates
most nearly to Simultaneity, and Eternity; and consequently turns
away, _qua_ Mystic, from the Successive and Temporal presented by
History.--Yet here also there are two movements, both necessary for
man. He will, by the one, once more in fullest sympathy with the grand
Christian love of lowliness, strive hard to get into close, and ever
closer, touch with the successivenesses of History, especially those
of Our Lord’s earthly life and of His closest followers. Without this
touch he will become empty, inflated, as St. Teresa found to be the
case with herself, when following the false principle of deliberate and
systematic abstraction from Christ’s temporal words and acts: for man’s
soul, though it does not energize in mere Clock-Time, cannot grow if
we attempt to eliminate Duration, that interpenetrative, overlapping
kind of Succession, which is already, as it were, halfway to the
Simultaneity of God. It is this aversion from Clock-Time Succession and
even from Duration which gives to Mysticism, as such, its remarkable
preference for Spacial images, and its strong bent towards concepts of
a Static and Determinist type, profoundly antagonistic though these
are to the Dynamic and Libertarian character which ever marks the
occasions and conditions for the acquiring of religious experience.
And yet, here again, the Mystic is clinging, even one-sidedly, to the
more central, more specifically religious, of the two movements. For
it is certain that God is indeed Simultaneous and Eternal; that it
is right thus to try and apprehend, what appears to us stretched out
successively in time, as simultaneously present in the one great Now
of God; and that our deepest experiences testify to History itself
being ever more than mere process, and to have within it a certain
contribution from, a certain approximation to and expression of,
Eternity.
(3) And again, the Mystic finds his joy in the sense of a Pure
Reception of the Purely Objective; that God should do all and should
receive the credit of all, is here a primary requirement.--And yet
all penetrating Psychology, Epistemology, and Ethics find this very
receptivity, however seemingly only such, to be, where healthy and
fruitful, ever an action, a conation of the soul,--an energizing and
volition which, as we have seen, are present in its very cognition of
anything affirmed by it as trans-subjective, from a grain of sand up to
the great God Himself. This antipathy to even a relative, God-willed
independence and power of self-excitation, gives Mysticism, as such,
its constant bent towards Quietism; and hence, with regard to the
means and nature of knowledge, its tendency to speak of such a purely
spiritual effect as Grace, and such purely spiritual beings as the
Soul and God, as though they were literally sensible objects sensibly
impressing themselves upon the Mystic’s purely passive senses. This
tendency reinforces the Mystic’s thirst for pictorial, simultaneous
presentation and intuition of the verities apprehended by him, but is
in curious contradiction to his even excessive conceptions concerning
the utter separateness and difference from all things material of all
such spiritual realities.--And yet, here too, it is doubtless deeply
important ever to remember, and to act in accordance with, the great
truth that God Himself is apprehended by us only if there be action
of our own, and that, from elementary moral dispositions right up to
consummate sanctity, the whole man has ever to act and will more and
more manysidedly, fully, and persistently.
But the corresponding, indeed the anterior and more centrally
religious, truth here is, that all this range of our activity could
never begin, and, if it could, would lose itself _in vacuo_, unless
there already were Reality around it and within it, as the stimulus
and object for all this energizing,--a Reality which, as Prof. Ward
has told us with respect to Epistemology, must, for a certain dim but
most true experience of ours, be simply given, not sought and found.
And indeed the operations of Grace are ever more or less penetrating
and soliciting, though nowhere forcing, the free assent of the natural
soul: we should be unable to seek God unless He had already found
us and had thus, deep down within ourselves, caused us to seek and
find Him. And hence thus again the most indispensable, the truest
form of experience underlies reasoning, and is a kind of not directly
analyzable, but indirectly most operative, intuition or instinct of the
soul.
(4) And yet the Mystic, in one of his moods (the corresponding,
contradictory mood of a Pantheistic identification of his true self
with God shall be considered in our next chapter), finds his joy in
so exalting the difference of nature between himself and God, and the
incomprehensibility of God for every finite intelligence, as,--were
we to press his words,--to cut away all ground for any experience or
knowledge sufficient to justify him in even a guess as to what God is
like or is not like, and for any attempt at intercourse with, and at
becoming like unto, One who is so utterly unlike himself.
4. _Criticism of the fourth pair, mystical “Agnosticism.”_
Now this acutely paradoxical position, of an entire certainty as to
God’s complete difference from ourselves, has been maintained and
articulated, with a consistency and vividness beyond that of any
Mystic known to me, by that most stimulating, profound, tragically
non-mystical, religious ascetic and thinker, the Lutheran Dane, Sören
Kierkegaard (1813-1855). His early friend, but philosophical opponent,
Prof. Höffding, describes him as insisting that “the suffering incident
to the religious life is necessarily involved in the very nature of the
religious relation. For the relation of the soul to God is a relation
to a Being utterly different from man, a Being which cannot confront
man as his Superlative and Ideal, and which nevertheless is to rule
within him.” “What, wonder, then,” as Kierkegaard says, “if the Jew
held that the vision of God meant death, and if the Heathen believed
that to enter upon relations with God was the beginning of insanity?”
For the man who lives for God “is a fish out of water.”[338]--We have
here what, if an error, is yet possible only to profoundly religious
souls; indeed it would be easy to point out very similar passages in
St. Catherine and St. John of the Cross. Yet Höffding is clearly in
the right in maintaining that “Qualitative or Absolute difference
abolishes all possibility of any positive relation.… If religious zeal,
in its eagerness to push the Object of religion to the highest height,
establishes a yawning abyss between this Object and the life whose
ideal It is still to remain,--such zeal contradicts itself. For a God
who is not Ideal and Exemplar, is no God.”[339]
Berkeley raised similar objections against analogous positions of the
Pseudo-Dionysius, in his Alciphron in 1732.[340] Indeed the Belgian
Jesuit, Balthazar Corderius, has a very satisfactory note on this
matter in his edition, in 1634, of the Areopagite,[341] in which
he shows how all the negative propositions of Mystical Theology,
_e.g._ “God is not Being, not Life,” presuppose a certain affirmative
position, _e.g._ “God is Being and Life, in a manner infinitely more
sublime and perfect than we are able to comprehend”; and gives reasons
and authorities, from St. Jerome to St. Thomas inclusive, for holding
that some kind and degree of direct confused knowledge (I should
prefer, with modern writers, to call it experience) of God’s existence
and nature is possessed by the human soul, independently of its
reasoning from the data of sense.
St. Thomas’s admissions are especially striking, as he usually
elaborates a position which ignores, and would logically exclude,
such “confused knowledge.” In his _Exposition and Questions on the
Book of Boetius on the Trinity_, after arguments to show that we know
indeed _that_ God is, but not _what_ He is,--at most only what He is
not, he says: “We should recognize, however, that it is impossible,
with regard to anything, to know whether it exists, unless, in some
way or other, we know _what_ it is, either with a perfect or with a
confused knowledge.… Hence also with regard to God,--we could not
know whether He exists, unless we somehow knew _what_ He is, even
though in a confused manner.” And this knowledge of _what_ He is, is
interestingly, because unconsciously, admitted in one of the passages
directed to proving that we can but know _that_ He is. “In our earthly
state we cannot attain to a knowledge of Himself beyond the fact that
He exists. And yet, among those who know _that_ He is, the one knows
this more perfectly than the other.”[342] For it is plain that, even
if the knowledge of the existence of something were possible without
any knowledge of that thing’s nature, no difference or increase in
such knowledge of the thing’s bare existence would be possible. The
different degrees in the knowledge, which is here declared to be one
concerning the bare existence of God, can, as a matter of fact, exist
only in knowledge concerning His nature. I shall have to return to this
great question further on.
Here I would only point out how well Battista Vernazza has, in her
_Dialogo_, realized the importance of a modification in such acutely
dualistic statements as those occasionally met with in the _Vita_. For,
in the _Dialogo_, the utter qualitative difference between God and the
Soul, and the Soul and the Body, which find so striking an utterance
in one of Catherine’s moods, is ever carefully limited to the soul’s
sinful acts and habits, and to the body’s unspiritualized condition; so
that the soul, when generous and faithful to God’s grace, can and does
grow less and less unlike God, and the body can, in its turn, become
more and more an instrument and expression of the soul. A pity only
that Battista has continued Catherine’s occasional over-emphasis in the
parallel matter of the knowledge of God: since, even in the _Dialogo_,
we get statements which, if pressed, would imply that even the crudest,
indeed the most immoral conception of God is, objectively, no farther
removed from the reality than is the most spiritual idea that man can
attain of Him.
It would indeed be well if the Christian Mystics who, since about
500 A.D., are more and more dependent for their formulations upon
the Areopagite, had followed, in this matter, not his more usual
and more paradoxical, but his exceptional, thoroughly sober vein
of teaching,--that contained in the third chapter of his _Mystical
Theology_, where he finds degrees of worth and approximation among the
affirmative attributions, and degrees of unfitness and distance among
the negative ones. “Are not life and goodness more cognate to Him than
air and stone? And is He not further removed from debauchery and wrath,
than from ineffableness and incomprehensibility”?[343] But such a scale
of approximations would be utterly impossible did we not somehow, at
least dimly, experience or know _what_ He is.
We shall then have to amend the Mystic’s apparent Agnosticism on three
points. We shall have to drop any hard and fast distinction between
knowledge of God’s Existence and knowledge of His Nature, since both
necessarily more or less stand and fall together. We shall have to
replace the terms as to our utter ignorance as to what He is, by terms
expressive of an experience which, if not directly and independently
clear and analyzable to the reflex, critical reason, can yet be shown
to be profoundly real and indefinitely potent in the life of man’s
whole rational and volitional being. It is this dim, deep experience
which ever causes our reflex knowledge of God to appear no knowledge at
all. And we shall reject any absolute qualitative difference between
the soul’s deepest possibilities and ideals, and God; and shall, in
its stead, maintain an absolute difference between God and all our
downward inclinations, acts, and habits, and an indefinite difference,
in worth and dignity, between God and the very best that, with His
help, we can aim at and become. With regard to every truly existent
subject-matter, we can trace the indefinitely wider range and the more
delicate penetration possessed by our dim yet true direct contact and
experience, as contrasted with our reflex analysis concerning all
such contacts and experiences; and this surplusage is at its highest
in connection with God, Who is not simply a Thing alongside of other
things, but the Spirit, our spirit’s Origin, Sustainer, and End, “in
whom we live and move and have our being.”
III. MYSTICISM AND THE QUESTION OF EVIL.
_Introductory: Exclusive and Inclusive Mysticism in Relation to
Optimism._
The four couples of weaknesses and corresponding strong points
characteristic of Mysticism that we have just considered, and the fact
that, in each case, they ever spring respectively from an attempt to
make Mysticism be the all of religion, and from a readiness to keep
it as but one of the elements more or less present in, and necessary
for, every degree and form of the full life of the human soul: make
one wish for two English terms, as useful as are the German names
“Mystik” and “Mystizismus,” for briefly indicating respectively “the
legitimate share of Feeling in the constitution of the religious life,
and the one-sidedness of a religion in which the Understanding and the
Will,” and indeed also the Memory and the Senses, with their respective
variously external occasions, vehicles, and objects, “do not come to
their rights,” as Prof. Rauwenhoff well defines the matter.[344] I
somehow shrink from the term “Mysticality” for his “Mystizismus”; and
must rest content with the three terms--of “Mysticism,” as covering
both the right and the wrong use of feeling in religion; and of “True”
or “Inclusive Mysticism,” and of “Pseudo-” or “Exclusive Mysticism,”
as denoting respectively the legitimate, and the (quantitatively or
qualitatively) mistaken, share of emotion in the religious life.
Now the four matters, which we have just considered, have allowed us
to reach an answer not all unlike that of Nicolas of Coes, Leibniz,
and Hegel,--one which, if it remained alone or quite final, would, in
face of the fulness of real life, strike us all, nowadays, as somewhat
superficial, because too Optimistic and Panlogistic in its trend. The
fifth set of difficulties and problems now to be faced will seem almost
to justify Schopenhauer at his gloomiest. Yet we must bear in mind that
our direct business here is not with the problem of Evil in general,
but only with the special helps and hindrances, afforded by Inclusive
and by Exclusive Mysticism respectively, towards apprehending the true
nature of Evil and turning even it into an occasion for a deeper good.
In this case the special helps and hindrances fall under three heads.
1. _Mysticism, too optimistic. Evil positive, but not supreme._
(1) First of all, I would strongly insist upon the following great
fact to which human life and history bear witness, if we but take and
test these latter on a large scale and with a patient persistency.
It is, that not the smoother, easier times and circumstances in the
lives of individuals and of peoples, but, on the contrary, the harder
and hardest trials of every conceivable kind, and the unshrinking,
full acceptance of these, as part of the price of conscience and of
its growing light, have ever been the occasions of the deepest trust
in and love of God to which man has attained. In Jewish History, the
Exile called forth a Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and the profound ideal of
the Suffering Servant; the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes raised
up a Judas Maccabaeus; and the troubles under the Emperor Hadrian, a
Rabbi Akiba. And in Christian History, the persecutions from Nero to
Robespierre have each occasioned the formation of heroic lovers of
Love Crucified. And such great figures do not simply manage to live,
apart from all the turmoil, in some Mystic upper region of their own;
but they face and plunge into the very heart of the strife, and get
and give spiritual strength on occasion of this closest contact with
loneliness, outrage, pain, and death. And this fact can be traced
throughout history.
Not as though suffering automatically deepens and widens man into
a true spiritual personality,--of itself it does not even tend to
this; nor as though there were not souls grown hard or low, or
frivolous or bitter, under suffering,--to leave madness and suicide
unconsidered,--souls in which it would be difficult to find any
avoidable grave fault. But that, wherever there is the fullest,
deepest, interiority of human character and influence, _there_ can
ever be found profound trials and sufferings which have been thus
utilized and transfigured. It is doubtless Our Lord’s uniquely full
and clear proclamation of this mysterious efficacity of all suffering
nobly borne; above all it is the supreme exemplification and fecundity
of this deepest law of life, afforded and imparted by His own
self-immolation, that has given its special power to Christianity,
and, in so doing, has, more profoundly than ever before or elsewhere,
brought home to us a certain Teleology here also,--the deepest ever
discovered to man. For though we fail in our attempts at explaining
how or why, with an All-knowing, All-powerful, and All-loving God,
there can be Evil at all, we can but recognize the law, which is ever
being brought home to us, of a mysterious capacity for purification and
development of man’s spiritual character, on occasion and with the help
of trouble, pain, and death itself.
(2) Now all this, we must admit, is practised and noted, directly and
in detail, only by the Ascetical and the Outward-going elements in
Religion; whereas Mysticism, as such, is optimistic, not only as is
Christianity, with respect to the end, but, in practice, with regard
to the actual state of things already encircling it as well. For so
careful a selection and so rigorous an abstraction is practised by
Mysticism, as such, towards the welter of contingencies around it, that
the rough shocks, the bitter tonics, the expansive birth-pangs of the
spirit’s deeper life, in and by means of the flux of time and sense,
of the conflict with hostile fellow-creatures, and of the claimfulness
of the lower self, are known by it only in their result, not in their
process, or rather only as this process ebbs and fades away, in such
recollective moments, into the distance.
No wonder, then, that Mysticism, as such, has ever tended to deny
all positive character to Evil. We have already found how strongly
this is the case with the prince of Mystic philosophers, Plotinus.
But even St. Augustine, with his massive experience, and (in his
other mood) even excessive realization, of the destructive force of
Evil and of the corrupt inclinations of man’s heart, has one whole
large current of teaching expressive of the purely negative character
of Evil. The two currents, the hot and concrete, and the cold and
abstract one, appear alternately in the very _Confessions_, of 397
A.D. There, ten years after his conversion, he can write: “All things
that are corrupted, are deprived of good. But, if they are deprived
of all good, they will cease to exist.… In so far, then, as they
exist, they are good.… Evil is no substance.” Notwithstanding such
Neo-Platonist interpretations, he had found Evil a terribly powerful
force; the directly autobiographical chapters of this same great book
proclaim this truth with unsurpassable vividness,--he is here fully
Christian.[345] And in his unfinished work against the Pelagianizing
Monk Julianus, in 429 A.D., he even declares--characteristically,
whilst discussing the Origin of Sin: “Such and so great was Adam’s sin,
that it was able to turn (human) nature itself into this evil.” Indeed,
already in 418, he had maintained that “this wound” (of Original Sin)
“forces all that is born of that human race to be under the Devil, so
that the latter, so to speak, plucks the fruit from the fruit-tree of
his own planting.”[346]
Pseudo-Dionysius, writing about 500 A.D., has evidently no such
massive personal experience to oppose to the Neo-Platonic influence,
an influence which, in the writings of Proclus (who died 485 A.D.), is
now at its height. “Evil,” he says, “is neither in Demons nor in us,
as an existent (positive) evil, but (only) as a failure and dearth of
the perfection of our own proper goods.”[347] He says this and more of
the same kind, but nothing as to the dread power of Evil. St. Thomas
Aquinas (who died in 1271 A.D.) is, as we know, largely under the
influence of the Negative conception: thus “the stain of sin is not
something positive, existent in the soul.… It is like a shadow, which
is the privation of light.”[348]
Catherine, though otherwise much influenced by the Negative conception,
as _e.g._ in her definition of a soul possessed by the Evil Spirit
as one suffering from a “privation of love,” finds the stain of sin,
doubtless from her own experience, to be something distinctly positive,
with considerable power of resistance and propagation.[349]--Mother
Juliana of Norwich had, in 1373, also formulated both conceptions. “I
saw not Sin, for I believe it hath no manner of substance, nor no part
of being”: Neo-Platonist theory. “Sin is so vile and so mickle for to
hate, that it may be likened to no pain.… All is good but Sin, and
naught is evil but Sin”: Christian experience.[350]
Eckhart had, still further back (he died in 1327 A.D.), insisted much
that “Evil is nothing but privation, or falling away from Being; not
an effect, but a defect”:[351] yet he also finds much work to do in
combating this somehow very powerful “defect.”--Not till we get to
Spinoza (who died in 1677) do we get the Negative conception pushed
home to its only logical conclusion: “By Reality and Perfection, I mean
the same thing.… All knowledge of Evil is inadequate knowledge.… If the
human mind had nothing but adequate ideas, it would not form any notion
of Evil.”[352]
(3) As regards the Christian Mystics, their negative conception
of evil, all but completely restricted as it was to cosmological
theory, did those Mystics themselves little or no harm; since their
tone of feeling and their volitional life, indeed a large part of
their very speculation, were determined, not by such Neo-Platonist
theories, but by the concrete experiences of Sin, Conscience, and
Grace, and by the great Christian historical manifestation of the
powers of all three.--It is clear too that our modern alternative:
“positive-negative,” is not simply identical with the scholastic
alternative: “substantial-accidental,” which latter alternative is
sometimes predominant in the minds of these ancient theorizers; and
that, once the question was formulated in the latter way, they were
profoundly right in refusing to hypostatize Evil, in denying that there
exists any distinct thing or being wholly bad.--Yet it is equally
clear how very Greek and how little Christian is such a preoccupation
(in face of the question of the nature of Evil) with the concepts
of Substance and Accident, rather than with that of Will; and how
strangely insufficient, in view of the tragic conflicts and ruins of
real life, is all, even sporadic, denial, of a certain obstructive
and destructive efficacy in the bad will, and of a mysterious, direct
perversity and formal, intentional malignity in that will at its worst.
(4) On these two points it is undeniable that Kant, (with all
his self-contradictions, insufficiencies, and positive errors on
other important matters), has adequately formulated the practical
dispositions and teachings of the fully awakened Christian
consciousness, and hence, pre-eminently, of the great Saints in the
past, although, in the matter of the perverse will, the Partial Mystics
have, even in their theory, (though usually only as part of the
doctrine of Original Sin), largely forestalled his analysis. “Nowhere
in this our world, nowhere even outside it, is anything thinkable as
good without any reservation, but the good will alone.” “That a corrupt
inclination to evil is rooted in man, does not require any formal
proof, in view of the clamorous examples furnished to all men by the
experience of human behaviour. If you would have such cases from the
so-called state of nature, where some philosophers have looked for the
chief home of man’s natural goodness, you need only compare, with such
an hypothesis, the unprovoked cruelties enacted in Tofoa, New Zealand
… and the ceaseless scenes of murder in the North-Western American
deserts, where no human being derives the slightest advantage from
them,--and you will quickly have more than sufficient evidence before
you to induce the abandonment of such a view. But if you consider that
human nature is better studied in a state of civilization, since there
its gifts have a better chance of development,--you will have to listen
to a long melancholy string of accusations: of secret falseness, even
among friends; of an inclination to hate him to whom we owe much; of
a cordiality which yet leaves the observation true that ‘there is
something in the misfortune of even our best friend which does not
altogether displease us’: so that you will quickly have enough of the
vices of culture, the most offensive of all, and will prefer to turn
away your look from human nature altogether, lest you fall yourself
into another vice,--that of hatred of mankind.”[353]
It is sad to think how completely this virile, poignant sense of the
dread realities of human life again disappeared from the teachings of
such post-Kantians as Hegel and Schleiermacher,--in other important
respects so much more satisfactory than Kant. As Mr. Tennant has well
said, in a stimulating book which, on this point at least, voices
the unsophisticated, fully awakened conscience and Christian sense
with refreshing directness, “for Jesus Christ and for the Christian
consciousness, sin means something infinitely deeper and more real than
what it can have meant for Spinoza or the followers of Hegel.”[354]
Here again we have now in Prof. Eucken, a philosopher who, free from
ultimate Pessimism, lets us hear once more those tones which are alone
adequate to the painful reality. “In great things and in small, there
exists an evil disposition beyond all simple selfishness: hatred and
envy, even where the hater’s self-interest is not touched; an antipathy
to things great and divine; a pleasure found in the disfigurement or
destruction of the Good.… Indeed the mysterious fact of Evil, as a
positive opposition to Good, has never ceased to occupy the deepest
minds.… The concept of moral guilt cannot be got rid of, try as we
may.”[355]
(5) And yet even with regard to this matter, Mysticism represents a
profound compensating truth and movement, which we cannot, without
grave detriment, lose out of the complete religious life. For in life
at large, and in human life and history in particular, it would be
sheer perversity to deny that there is much immediate, delightful,
noble Beauty, Truth, and Goodness; and these also have a right to
the soul’s careful, ruminating attention. And it is the Mystical
element that furnishes this rumination.--Again, “it is part of the
essential character of human consciousness, as a Synthesis and an
organizing Unity, that, as long as the life of that consciousness
lasts at all, not only contrast and tension, but also concentration
and equilibrium must manifest themselves. Taking life’s standard from
life itself, we cannot admit its decisive constituent to lie in tension
alone.”[356] And it is the Mystical mood that helps to establish this
equilibrium.--And finally, deep peace, an overflowing possession and
attainment, and a noble joy, are immensely, irreplaceably powerful
towards growth in personality and spiritual fruitfulness. Nothing,
then, would be more shortsighted than to try and keep the soul from a
deep, ample, recollective movement, from feeding upon and relishing,
from as it were stretching itself out and bathing in, spiritual air and
sunshine, in a rapt admiration, in a deep experience of the greatness,
the beauty, the truth, and the goodness of the World, of Life, of God.
2. _Mysticism and the Origin of Evil._
The second hindrance and help, afforded respectively by Exclusive and
by Inclusive Mysticism in the matter of Evil, concerns the question of
its Origin.
(1) Now it appears strange at first sight that, instead of first
directly realizing and picturing the undeniable, profoundly important
facts of man’s interior conflict, his continuous lapses from his own
deepest standard, and his need of a help not his own to become what
he cannot but wish to be, and of leaving the theory as to how man
came by this condition to the second place; the Mystics should so
largely,--witness Catherine--directly express only this theory, and
should face what is happening _hic et nunc_ all but exclusively under
the picture of the prehistoric beginnings of these happenings, in the
state of innocence and the lapse of the first man. For men of other
religious modalities have held this doctrine as firmly as the Mystics,
yet have mostly dwelt directly upon the central core of goodness and
the weakness and sinfulness to be found in man; whilst the Mystics
had even less scruple than other kinds of devout souls in embodying
experimental truths in concepts and symbols other than the common ones.
(2) I think that, here again, it was the Neo-Platonist literary
influence, so strong also on other points with the Mystics of the
past, and a psychological trend characteristic of the Mystical habit
of mind, which conjoined thus to concentrate the Mystics’ attention
upon the doctrines of Original Justice and of a First Lapse, and
to give to these doctrines the peculiar form and tone taken on by
them here. We have noted, for instance, in the case of Catherine
herself, how powerfully her thought and feeling, as to the first
human soul’s first lapse into sin, is influenced by the idea of each
human soul’s lapse into a body; and we have found this latter idea
to be, notwithstanding its echoes in the Deutero-Canonical Book of
Wisdom and in one non-doctrinal passage in St. Paul, not Christian
but Neo-Platonist. Yet it is this strongly anti-body idea that could
not fail to attract Mysticism, as such.--And the conception as to the
plenary righteousness of that first soul before its lapse, which she
gets from Christian theology, is similarly influenced, in her theorized
emotion and thought, by the Neo-Platonist idea of every soul having
already existed, perfectly spotless, previous to its incarnation:
a view which could not but immensely attract such a high-strung
temperament, with its immense requirement of something fixed and
picturable on which to rest. Thus here the ideal for each soul’s future
would have been already real in each soul’s past. In this past the soul
would have been, as it were, a mirror of a particular fixed size and
fixed intensity of lustre; its business here below consists in removing
the impurities adhering to this mirror’s surface, and in guarding it
against fresh stains.
(3) Now it is well known how it was St. Augustine, that mighty and
daring, yet at times ponderous, intellect, who, (so long a mental
captive of the Manichees and then so profoundly influenced by
Plotinus,) was impelled, by the experiences of his own disordered
earlier life and by his ardent African nature, to formulate by far the
most explicit and influential of the doctrines upon these difficult
matters. And if, with the aid of the Abbé Turmel’s admirable articles
on the subject, we can, with a fairly open mind, study his successive,
profoundly varying, speculations and conclusions concerning the Nature
and Origin of Sin,[357] we shall not fail to be deeply impressed with
the largely impassable maze of opposite extremes, contradictions and
difficulties of every kind, in which that adventurous mind involved
itself.--And to these difficulties immanent to the doctrine,--at
least, in the form it takes in St. Augustine’s hands,--has, of course,
to be added the serious moral danger that would at once result,
were we, by too emphatic or literal an insistence upon the true
guiltiness of Original sin, to weaken the chief axiom of all true
morality--that the concurrence of the personality, in a freely-willed
assent, is necessarily involved in the idea of sin and guilt.--And
now the ever-accumulating number and weight of even the most certain
facts and most moderate inductions of Anthropology and Ethnology are
abolishing all evidential grounds for holding a primitive high level
of human knowledge and innocence, and a single sudden plunge into a
fallen estate, as above, apparently against, all our physiological,
psychological, historical evidences and analogies, (which all point
to a gradual rise from lowly beginnings), and are reducing such a
conception to a pure postulate of Theology.
Yet Anthropology and Ethnology leave in undisturbed possession the
great truths of Faith that “man’s condition denotes a fall from the
Divine intention, a parody of God’s purpose in human history,” and that
“sin is exceedingly sinful for us in whom it is a deliberate grieving
of the Holy Spirit”; and they actually reinforce the profound verities
that “the realization of our better self is a stupendously difficult
task,” and as to “Man’s crying need of grace, and his capacity for
a gospel of Redemption.”[358] But they point, with a force great in
proportion to the highly various, cumulatively operative, immensely
interpretative character of the evidence,--to the conclusion that
“Sin,” as the Anglican Archdeacon Wilson strikingly puts it, “is …
the survival or misuse of habits and tendencies that were incidental
to an earlier stage of development.… Their sinfulness would thus lie
in their anachronism, in their resistance to the … Divine force that
makes for moral development and righteousness.” Certainly “the human
infant” appears to careful observers, as Mr. Tennant notes, “as simply
a non-moral animal,” with corresponding impulses and propensities.
According to this view “morality consists in the formation of the
non-moral material of nature into character …”; so that “if goodness
consists essentially in man’s steady moralization of the raw material
of morality, its opposite, sin, cannot consist in the material awaiting
moralization, but in the will’s failure to completely moralize it.”
“Evil” would thus be “not the result of a transition from the good, but
good and evil would” both alike “be voluntary developments from what
is ethically neutral.”[359] Dr. Wilson finds, accordingly, that “this
conflict of freedom and conscience is precisely what is related as
‘the Fall’ _sub specie historiae_.” Scripture “tells of the fall of a
creature from unconscious innocence to conscious guilt. But this fall
from innocence” would thus be, “in another sense, a rise to a higher
grade of being.”[360]
(4) It is, in any case, highly satisfactory for a Catholic to remember
that the acute form, given to the doctrine of Original Sin by St.
Augustine, has never been finally accepted by the Catholic Roman
Church; indeed, that the Tridentine Definition expressly declares that
Concupiscence does not, in strictness, possess the nature of Sin, but
arises naturally, on the withdrawal of the _donum superadditum_,--so
that Mr. Tennant can admit, in strictest accuracy, that “in this
respect, the Roman theology is more philosophical than that of
the Symbols of Protestant Christendom.”[361] It is true that the
insistence upon “Original Sin” possessing somehow “the true and proper
nature of Sin” remains a grave difficulty, even in this Tridentine
formulation of the doctrine; whilst the objections, already referred
to as accumulating against the theory in general, retain some of
their cogency against other parts of this decree.--Yet we have here
an impressive proclamation of the profoundest truths: the spiritual
greatness of God’s plan for us, the substantial goodness of the
material still ready to our hand for the execution of that plan, and
His necessary help ever ready from the first; the reality of our lapse,
away from all these, into sin, and of the effects of such lapse upon
the soul; the abiding conflict between sense and spirit, the old man
and the new, within each one of us; and the close solidarity of our
poor, upward-aspiring, downward-plunging race, in evil as well as in
good.
(5) And as to the Christian Mystics, their one particular danger
here,--that of a Static Conception of man’s spirit as somehow
constituted, from the first, a substance of a definite, final size and
dignity, which but demands the removal of disfiguring impurities, is
largely eliminated, even in theory, and all but completely overcome
in practice, by the doctrine and the practice of Pure Love. For
in “Charity” we get a directly dynamic, expansive conception and
experience: man’s spirit is, at first, potential rather than actual,
and has to be conquered and brought, as it were, to such and such
a size and close-knitness of organization, by much fight with, and
by the slow transformation of, the animal and selfish nature. Thus
Pure Love, Charity, Agape, has to fight it out, inch by inch, with
another, still positive force, impure love, concupiscence, Eros,
in all the latter’s multiform disguises. Here Purity has become
something intensely positive and of boundless capacities for growth;
as St. Thomas says, “Pure Love has no limit to its increase, for it
is a certain participation in the Infinite Love, which is the Holy
Spirit.”[362]--In this utterly real, deeply Christian way do these
Mystics overcome Neo-Platonist static abstractions, and simultaneously
regain, in their practical theory and emotional perception, the great
truth of the deep, subtle force of Evil, against which Pure Love has to
stand, in virile guard, as long as earth’s vigil lasts. And the longest
and most difficult of these conflicts is found,--here again in utterly
Christian fashion,--not in the sensual tendencies proceeding from the
body, but in the self-adoration, the solipsism of the spirit. We have
found this in Catherine: at her best she ever has something of the
large Stoic joy at being but a citizen in a divine Cosmopolis; yet but
Love and Humility, those profoundest of the Christian affections, have
indefinitely deepened the truth of the outlook, and the range of the
work to be done, in and for herself and others.
(6) Yet even apart from Pure Love, Mysticism can accurately be said to
apprehend an important truth when, along its static line of thought
and feeling, it sees each soul as, from the first, a substance of a
particular, final size. For each soul is doubtless intended, from the
first, to express a particular thought and wish of God, to form one,
never simply replaceable member in His Kingdom, to attain to a unique
kind and degree of personality: and though it can refuse to endorse and
carry out this plan, the plan remains within it, in the form of never
entirely suppressible longings. The Mystic, then, sees much here also.
3. _The warfare against Evil. Pseudo-Mysticism._
The third of the relations between Mysticism and the conception and
experience of Evil requires a further elucidation of an important
distinction, which we have already found at work all along, more or
less consciously, between the higher and the lower Mysticism, and their
respective, profoundly divergent, tempers, objects, and range.
(1) Prof. Münsterberg discriminates between these two Mysticisms with
a brilliant excessiveness, and ends by reserving the word “Mysticism”
for the rejected kind alone. “As soon as we speak of psychical
objects,--of ideas, feelings, and volitions,--as subject-matters of our
direct consciousness and experience, we have put before ourselves an
artificial product, a transformation, to which the categories of real
life no longer apply.” In this artificial product causal connections
have taken the place of final ends. But “History, Practical Life,
… Morality, Religion have nothing to do with these psychological
constructions; the categories of Psychology,” treated by Münsterberg
himself as a Natural, Determinist Science, “must not intrude into their
teleological domains. But if,” on the other hand, “the categories
belonging to Reality,” which is Spiritual and Libertarian, “are forced
on to the psychological system, a system which was framed” by our
mind “in the interest of causal explanation, we get a cheap mixture,
which satisfies neither the one aim nor the other. Just this is the
effect of Mysticism. It is the personal, emotional view applied,
not to the world of Reality, where it fits, but to the Physical and
Psychological worlds, which are constructed by the human logical will,
with a view to gaining an impersonal, unemotional causal system.…
The ideals of Ethics and Religion … have now been projected into the
atomistic structure” (of the Causal System), “and have thus become
dependent upon this system’s nature; they find their right of existence
limited to the regions where ignorance of Nature leaves blanks in the
Causal System, and have to tremble at every advance which Science
makes.” It is to this projection alone that Münsterberg would apply
the term “Mysticism,” which thus becomes exclusively “the doctrine
that the processes in the world of physical and psychical objects
are not always subject to natural laws, but are influenced, at times,
in a manner fundamentally inexplicable from the standpoint of the
causal conception of Nature.… Yet, the special interest of the Mystic
stands and falls here with his conviction that, in these extra-causal
combinations,” thus operative right within and at the level of this
causal system, “we have a” direct, demonstrable “manifestation of a
positive system of quite another kind, a System of Values, a system
dominated, not by Mechanism, but by Significance.”[363]
(2) Now we have been given here a doubtless excessively antithetic and
dualistic picture of what, in actual life, is a close-knit variety in
unity,--that interaction between, and anticipation of the whole in, the
parts, and that indication of the later stages in the earlier,--which
is so strikingly operative in the order and organization of the various
constituents and stages of the processes and growth of the human mind
and character, and which appears again in the Reality apprehended,
reproduced, and enriched by man’s powers.
Even in the humblest of our Sense-perceptions, there is already a
mind perceiving and a Mind perceived; and, in the most abstract
and artificial of our intellectual constructions, there is not
only a logical requirement, but also, underlying this requirement
as this cause’s deepest cause, an ever-growing if unarticulated
experience and sense that only by the closest contact with the most
impersonal-seeming, impersonally conceived forces of life and nature,
and by the deepest recollection within its own interior world of
mind and will, can man’s soul adequately develop and keep alive,
within itself, a solid degree and consciousness of Spirit, Free-will,
Personality, Eternity, and God. Thus, in proportion as he comes more
deeply to advance in the true occasions of his spirit’s growth, does
man still further emphasize and differentiate these two levels: the
shallower, spacial-temporal, mathematico-physical, quantitative and
determinist aspect of reality and level of apprehension; and the
deeper, alone at all adequate, experience of all the fuller degrees
of Reality and effectuations of the spirit’s life, with their
overlapping, interpenetrating Succession, (their Duration), and their
Libertarianism, Interiority, and Sense of the Infinite. He thus
emphasizes both levels, because the determinist level is found to be,
though never the source or direct cause, yet ever a necessary awakener
and purifier of the Libertarian level.
Strictly within the temporal-spacial, quantitative method and level,
indeed, we can nowhere find Teleology; but if we look back upon these
quantitative superficialities from the qualitative, durational and
personal, spiritual level and standpoint, (which alone constitute
our direct experience), we find that the quantitative, causal level
and method is everywhere inadequate to exhaust or rightly to picture
Reality, in exact proportion to this reality’s degree of fulness and of
worth. From the simplest Vegetable-Cell up to Orchids and Insectivorous
Plants; from these on to Protozoans and up, through Insects, Reptiles,
and Birds, to the most intelligent of Domestic Animals; from these on
to Man, the Savage, and up to the most cultured or saintly of human
personalities: we have everywhere, and increasingly, an inside, an
organism, a subject as well as object,--a series which is, probably
from the first, endowed with some kind of dim consciousness, and which
increasingly possessed of a more and more definite consciousness,
culminates in the full self-consciousness of the most fully human man.
And everywhere here, though in indefinitely increasing measure, it is
the individualizing and historical, the organic and soul-conceptions
and experiences which constitute the most characteristic and important
truths and reality about and in these beings. For the higher up we
get in this scale of Reality, the more does the Interior determine
and express itself in the Exterior, and the more does not only kind
differ from kind of being, but even the single individual from the
other individuals within each several kind. And yet nowhere, not even
in free-willing, most individualized, personal Man do we find the
quantitative, determinist envelope simply torn asunder and revealing
the qualitative, libertarian spirit perfectly naked and directly
testable by chronometer, measuring-rod, or crucible. The spirit is thus
ever like unto a gloved hand, which, let it move ever so spontaneously,
will ever, in the first instance, present the five senses with a glove
which, to their exclusive tests, appears as but dead and motionless
leather.
(3) Now we have already in Chapter IX studied the contrasting
attitudes of Catherine and her attendants towards one class of such
effects,--those attributed to the Divine Spirit,--and hence, in
principle, towards this whole question. Yet it is in the matter of
phenomena, taken to be directly Diabolic or Preternatural, that a
Pseudo-Mysticism has been specially fruitful in strangely materialistic
fantasies. As late as 1774 the _Institutiones Theologiae Mysticae_
of Dom Schram, O.S.B., a book which even yet enjoys considerable
authority, still solemnly described, as so many facts, cases of
Diabolical _Incubi_ and _Succubae_. Even in 1836-1842 the layman
Joseph Görres could still devote a full half of his widely influential
_Mystik_ to “Diabolical Mysticism,”--witchcraft, etc.; a large space
to “Natural Mysticism,”--divination, lycanthropy, vampires, etc.; and
a considerable part of the “Divine Mysticism,” to various directly
miraculous phenomenalisms. The Abbé Ribet could still, in his _La
Mystique Divine, distinguée de ses Contrefaçons Diaboliques_, of 1895,
give us a similarly uncritical mixture and transposition of tests
and levels. But the terrible ravages of the belief in witchcraft in
the later Middle Ages, and, only a few years back, the humiliating
fraud and craze concerning “Diana Vaughan,” are alone abundantly
sufficient to warn believers in the positive character of Evil away
from all, solidly avoidable, approaches to such dangerous forms of this
belief.[364]
(4) Yet the higher and highest Mystical attitude has never ceased
to find its fullest, most penetrating expression in the life and
teaching of devoted children of the Roman Church,--several of whom
have been proclaimed Doctors and Models by that Church herself. And by
a conjunction of four characteristics these great normative lives and
teachers still point the way, out of and beyond all false or sickly
Mysticism, on to the wholesome and the true.
(i) There is, first, the grand trust in and love of God’s beautiful,
wide world, and in and of the manifold truth and goodness present
throughout life,--realities which we have already found rightly to
be dwelt on, in certain recollective movements and moments, to the
momentary exclusion of their positively operative, yet ever weaker,
opposites. “Well I wote,” says Mother Juliana, “that heaven and earth,
and all that is made, is great, large, fair and good”; “the full-head
of joy is to behold God in all,” and “truly to enjoy in Our Lord, is a
full lovely thanking in His sight.”[365] This completely un-Manichaean
attitude,--so Christian when held as the ultimate among the divers,
sad and joyful, strenuous and contemplative moods of the soul,--is
as strongly present in Clement of Alexandria, in the Sts. Catherine
of Siena and of Genoa, in St. John of the Cross, and indeed in the
recollective moments of all the great Mystics.
(ii) There is, next, a strong insistence upon the soul having to
transcend all particular lights and impressions, in precise proportion
to their apparently extraordinary character, if it would become strong
and truly spiritual. “He that will rely on the letter of the divine
locution, or on the intellectual form of the vision, will necessarily
fall into delusion. ‘The letter killeth, the spirit quickeneth’; we
must therefore reject the literal sense, and abide in the obscurity
of faith.” “One desire only doth God allow in His presence, that of
perfectly observing His law and carrying the Cross of Christ.… That
soul, which has no other aim, will be a true ark containing the true
Manna, which is God.” “One act of the will, wrought in charity, is
more precious in the eyes of God, than that which all the visions
and revelations of heaven might effect.” “Let men cease to regard
these supernatural apprehensions … that they may be free.”[366] Here
the essence of the doctrine lies in the importance attached to this
transcendence, and not in the particular views of the Saint concerning
the character of this or that miraculous-seeming phenomenon to be
transcended.
(iii) And this essential doctrine retains all its cogency, even though
we hold the strict necessity of a contrary, alternating movement
of definite occupation with the Concrete, Contingent, Historical,
Institutional, in thought and action. For this occupation will be with
the normal, typical means, duties, and facts of human and religious
life; and, whilst fully conscious of the Supernatural working in and
with these seemingly but natural materials, will, with St. Augustine,
pray God to “grant men to perceive in little things the common-seeming
indications of things both small and great,” and, with him, will see a
greater miracle in the yearly transformation of the vine’s watery sap
into wine, and in the germination of any single seed, than even in that
of Cana.[367]
(iv) And then there is, upon the whole, a tendency to concentrate, at
these recollective stages, the soul’s attention upon Christ and God
alone. “I believe I understand,” says Mother Juliana, “the ministration
of holy Angels, as Clerks tell; but it was not shewed to me. For
Himself is nearest and meekest, highest and lowest, and doeth all.
God alone took our nature, and none but He; Christ alone worked our
salvation, and none but He.”[368] And thus we get a wholesome check
upon the Neo-Platonist countless mediations, of which the reflex is
still to be found in the Areopagite. God indeed is alone held, with
all Catholic theologians, to be capable of penetrating to the soul’s
centre, and the fight against Evil is simplified to a watch and war
against Self, in the form of an ever-increasing engrossment in the
thought of God, and in the interests of His Kingdom. “Only a soul
in union with God,” says St. John of the Cross, “is capable of this
profound loving knowledge: for this knowledge is itself that union.…
The Devil has no power to simulate anything so great.” “Self-love,”
says Père Grou, “is the sole source of all the illusions of the
spiritual life.… Jesus Christ on one occasion said to St. Catherine
of Siena: ‘My daughter, think of Me, and I will think of thee’: a
short epitome of all perfection. ‘Wheresoever thou findest self,’ says
the _Imitation_, ‘drop that self’: the soul’s degree of fidelity to
this precept is the true measure of its advancement.”[369] The highly
authorized _Manuel de Théologie Mystique_ of the Abbé Lejeune, 1897,
gives but one-sixth of its three-hundred pages to the discussion of
all quasi-miraculous phenomena, puts them all apart from the substance
of Contemplation and of the Mystical Life, and dwells much upon
the manifold dangers of such, never essential, things. The French
Oratorian, Abbé L. Laberthonnière, represents, in the _Annales de
Philosophie Chrétienne_, a spirituality as full of a delicate Mysticism
as it is free from any attachment to extraordinary phenomena. The same
can be said of the Rev. George Tyrrell’s _Hard Sayings_ and _External
Religion_. And the Abbé Sandreau has furnished us with two books of the
most solid tradition and discrimination in all these matters.[370]
(5) And we should, in justice, remember that the Phenomenalist
Mysticism, objected to by Prof. Münsterberg and so sternly transcended
by St. John of the Cross, is precisely what is still hankered after,
and treated as of spiritual worth, by present-day Spiritualism. Indeed,
even Prof. James’s in many respects valuable _Varieties of Religious
Experience_ is seriously damaged by a cognate tendency to treat
Religion, or at least Mysticism, as an abnormal faculty for perceiving
phenomena inexplicable by physical and psychical science.
(6) And finally, with respect to the personality of Evil, we must not
forget that “there are drawings to evil as to good, which are not mere
self-temptations, … but which derive from other wills than our own;
strictly, it is only persons that can tempt us.”[371]