THE TWO FINAL PROBLEMS: MYSTICISM AND PANTHEISM. THE IMMANENCE OF GOD,
AND SPIRITUAL PERSONALITY, HUMAN AND DIVINE
INTRODUCTORY.
_Impossibility of completely abstracting from the theoretical form in
the study of the experimental matter._
We now come to the last two of our final difficulties and problems--the
supposed or real relations between Inclusive or Exclusive Mysticism
and Pantheism; and the question concerning the Immanence of God and
Spiritual Personality, Human and Divine.
(1) A preliminary difficulty in this, our deepest, task arises from
the fact that, whereas the evidences of a predominantly individual,
personal, directly experimental kind, furnished by every at all deeply
religious soul, have hitherto been all but completely overlooked
by trained historical investigators, in favour of the study of the
theological concepts and formulations accepted and transmitted by
such souls, now the opposite extreme is tending to predominate, as in
Prof. William James’s _Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1902, or
in Prof. Weinel’s interesting study, _The Effects of the Spirit and
of the Spirits in the Sub-Apostolic Age_, 1899. For here, as Prof.
Bousset points out in connection with the latter book, we get an all
but complete overlooking of the fact that, even in the most individual
experience, there is always some intellectual framework or conception,
some more or less traditional form, which had previously found lodgment
in, and had been more or less accepted by, that soul; so that, though
the experience itself, where at all deep, is never the mere precipitate
of a conventionally accepted traditional intellectual form, it is
nevertheless, even when more or less in conflict with this form, never
completely independent of it.[372]--Yet though we cannot discriminate
in full detail, we can show certain peculiarities in the traditional
Jewish, Mohammedan, Christian Mysticism to be not intrinsic to the
Mystical apprehensions as such, but to come from the then prevalent
philosophies which deflected those apprehensions in those particular
ways.
(2) In view then of this inevitable inter-relation between the
experimental, personal matter and the theoretical, traditional form,
I shall first consider the Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist conceptions
concerning the relations between the General and the Particular,
between God and Individual Things, as being the two, partly rival yet
largely similar, systems that, between them, have most profoundly
influenced the intellectual starting-point, analysis, and formulation
of those experiences; and shall try to show the special attraction and
danger of these conceptions for the mystically religious temperament.
I shall next discuss the conceptions as to the relations between
God and the individual personality,--the Noûs, the Spirit, and the
Soul,--which, still largely Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist, have even
more profoundly commended themselves to those Mystics, since these
conceptions so largely met some of those Mystics’ requirements, and
indeed remain still, in part, the best analysis procurable. I shall,
thirdly, face the question as to any intrinsic tendency to Pantheism in
Mysticism as such, and as to the significance and the possible utility
of any such tendency, keeping all fuller description of the right
check upon it for my last chapter. And finally, I shall consider what
degree and form of the Divine Immanence in the human soul, of direct
Experience or Knowledge of God on the part of man, and of “Personality”
in God, appear to result from the most careful analysis of the deepest
religious consciousness, and from the requirements of the Sciences and
of Life.
I. RELATIONS BETWEEN THE GENERAL AND THE PARTICULAR, GOD AND INDIVIDUAL
THINGS, ACCORDING TO ARISTOTLE, THE NEO-PLATONISTS, AND THE MEDIEVAL
STRICT REALISTS.
1. _Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Proclus._
(1) With regard to the relations between the General and Particular,
we should note Aristotle’s final perplexities and contradictions,
arising from his failure to harmonize or to transcend, by means of
a new and self-consistent conception, the two currents, the Platonic
and the specifically Aristotelian, which make up his thought. For,
with him as with Plato, all Knowledge has to do with Reality: hence
Reality alone, in the highest, primary sense of the word, can form
the highest, primary object of Knowledge; Knowledge will be busy,
primarily, with the Essence, the Substance of things. But with him, as
against Plato, every substance is unique, whence it would follow that
all knowledge refers, at bottom, to the Individual,--individual beings
would form, not only the starting-point, but also the content and
object of knowledge.--Yet this is what Aristotle, once more at one with
Plato, stoutly denies: Science, even where it penetrates most deeply
into the Particular, is never directed to individual things as such,
but always to General Concepts; and this, not because of our human
incapacity completely to know the Individual, as such, but because the
General, in spite of the Particular being better known to us, is more
primitive and more knowable, as alone possessing that Immutability
which must characterize all objects of true knowledge.[373] The true
Essence of things consists only in what is thought in their Concept,
which concept is always some Universal; yet this Universal exists only
in Individual Beings, which are thus declared true Substances: here
are two contentions, the possibility of whose co-existence he fails
to explain. Indeed at one time it is the Form, at another it is the
Individual Being, composed of Form and Matter, which appears as real;
and Matter, again, appears both as the Indefinite General and as the
Cause of Individual Particularity.[374]
(2) Now Plato had indeed insisted upon ascending to even greater
abstraction, unity, and generality, as the sure process for attaining
to the truth of things; and had retained what is, for us, a strangely
unpersonal, abstract element, precisely in his highest concept, since
God here is hardly personal, but the Idea of Good, a Substance distinct
from all other things, yet not, on this account, an Individual. Yet
Plato’s profoundly aesthetic, social, ethical, above all religious,
consciousness forced him to the inconsistency of proclaiming that, as
the Sun is higher than the light and the eye, so the Good is higher
than (mere) Being and Knowledge; and this Supreme Idea of the Good
gives to things their Being, and to the understanding its power of
Cognition, and is the Cause of all Rightness and Beauty, the Source
of all Reality and Reason, and hence, not only a final, but also an
efficient Cause,--indeed _the_ Cause, pure and simple.[375] In the
_Philebus_ he tells us explicitly that the Good and the Divine Reason
are identical; and in the _Timaeus_ the Demiurge, the World-Former,
looks indeed to the Image of the World, in order to copy it: yet the
Demiurge is also himself this image which he copies.[376] We thus
still have a supreme Multiplicity in Unity as the characteristic of
the deepest Reality; and its chief attribute, Goodness, is not the
most abstract and aloof, but the most rich in qualities and the most
boundlessly self-communicative: “He was good, so he desired that all
things should be as like unto himself as possible.”[377] And Aristotle,
(although he places God altogether outside the visible world, and
attributes to Him there one sole action, the thinking of his own
thought, and one quasi-emotion, intellectual joy at this thinking),
still maintains, in this shrunken form, the identity of the Good and of
the Supreme Reason, Noûs, and a certain Multiplicity in Unity, and a
true self-consciousness, within Him.
(3) It is Plotinus who is the first expressly to put the Godhead,--in
strict obedience to the Abstractive scheme,--beyond all Multiplicity,
hence above the highest Reason itself, for reason ever contains at
least the duality of Subject thinking and of Object thought; above
Being, for all being has ever a multitude of determinations; and above
every part and the totality of All Things, for it is the cause of them
all. The Cause is here ever outside the effect, the Unity outside the
Multiplicity, what is thought outside of what thinks. The First is
thus purely transcendent,--with one characteristic exception: although
above Being, Energy, Thought, and Thinking, Beauty, Virtue, Life, It
is still the Good; and because of this, though utterly self-sufficing
and without action of any kind, It, “as it were,” overflows, and
this overflow produces a Second.[378] And only this Second is here
the Noûs, possessed of what Aristotle attributes to the First: it is
no sheer Unity, “all things are together there, yet are they there
discriminated”: it is contemplative Thinking of itself; it is pure and
perfect Action.[379]
(4) And Proclus who, through the Pseudo-Dionysius, is the chief
mediator between Plato and Plotinus on the one hand, and the Medieval
Mystics and Scholastics on the other, is, with his immense thirst for
Unity, necessarily absorbed by the question as to the Law according
to which all things are conjoined to a whole. And this Law is for him
the process of the Many out of the One, and their inclination back to
the One; for this process and inclination determine the connection
of all things, and the precise place occupied by each thing in that
connection. All things move in the circle of procession from their
cause, and of return to it; the simplest beings are the most perfect;
the most complex are the most imperfect.[380]
2. _The Anti-Proclian current, in the Areopagite’s view._
Now in the Pseudo-Dionysius we find an interesting oscillation between
genuine Neo-Platonism, which finds Beings perfect in proportion to the
fewness and universality of their attributes, although, with it, he
inconsistently holds Goodness,--the deepest but not the most general
attribute,--to be the most perfect of all; and Aristotelianism at its
richest, when it finds Beings perfect according to the multiplicity
and depth of their attributes. Dionysius himself becomes aware of the
dead-lock thence ensuing. “The Divine name of the Good is extended
to things being and to things not being,”--a statement forced upon
him by his keeping, with Plato and Plotinus, Goodness as the supreme
attribute, and yet driving home, more completely than they, their first
principle that Generality and Perfection rise and sink together. “The
Name of Being is extended to all things being” and stretches further
than Life. “The name of Life is extended to all things living” and
stretches further than Wisdom. “The Name of Wisdom is extended,” only,
“to all the intellectual, and rational, and sensible.”
But if so, “for what reason do we affirm,” (as he has been doing in
the previous sections), “that Life,” the less extended, “is superior
to (mere) Being,” the more extended? “and that Wisdom,” though less
extended, “is superior to mere Life,” the more extended? And he answers
in favour of depth and richness of attributes. “If any one assumed
the intellectual to be without being or life, the objection might hold
good. But if the Divine Minds,” the Angels, “both are above all other
beings, and live above all other living creatures, and think and know
above sensible perception and reasoning, and aspire beyond all other
existent and aspiring beings, to … the Beautiful and Good: then they
encircle the Good more closely.” For “the things that participate more
in the one and boundless-giving God, are more … divine, than those that
come behind them in gifts.”[381] And with abiding truth he says: “Those
who place attributes on That which is above every attribute, should
derive the affirmation from what is more cognate to It; but those who
abstract, with regard to That which is above every abstraction, should
derive the negation from what is further removed from It. Are not,
_e.g._, Life and Goodness more cognate to It than air and stone? And is
It not further removed from debauch and anger than from ineffableness
and incomprehensibility?”[382]
But more usually Dionysius shows little or no preference for any
particular attribution or denegation; all are taken to fall short so
infinitely as to eliminate any question as to degrees of failure. “The
Deity-Above-All … is neither Soul nor Mind, neither One nor Oneness,
neither Deity nor Goodness.”[383] God is thus purely transcendent.
3. _Continuators of the Proclian current._
The influence of the Areopagite was notoriously immense throughout
the Middle Ages,--indeed unchecked,--along its Proclian, Emanational,
Ultra-Unitive current,--among the Pantheists from the Christian,
Mohammedan and Jewish camps.
(1) Thus Scotus Eriugena (who died in about 877 A.D.) insists: “In
strict parlance, the Divine Nature Itself exists alone in all things,
and nothing exists which is not that Nature. The Lord and the Creature
are one and the same thing.” “It is its own Self that the Holy Trinity
loves, sees, moves within us.” One of his fundamental ideas is the
equivalence of the degrees of abstraction and those of existence; he
simply hypostatizes the logical table.[384] Eriugena was condemned.
(2) But the Pseudo-Aristotelian, really Proclian, _Liber de Causis_,
written by a Mohammedan in about 850 A.D., became, from its
translation into Latin in about 1180 A.D. onwards, an authority among
the orthodox Scholastics. It takes, as “an example of the (_true_)
doctrine as to Causes, Being, Living-Being, and Man. Here it is
necessary that the thing Being should exist first of all, and next
Living-Being, and last Man. Living-Being is the proximate, Being is
the remote cause of Man; hence Being is in a higher degree the cause
of Man than is Living-Being, since Being is the cause of Living-Being,
which latter again is the cause of Man.” … “Being, (of the kind)
which is before Eternity, is the first cause.… Being is more general
than Eternity.… Being of the kind which is with and after Eternity,
is the first of created things.… It is above Sense, and Soul, and
Intelligence.”[385]
(3) The Mohammedan Avicenna, who died in 1037 A.D., is mostly
Aristotelian in philosophy and Orthodox in religious intention, and,
translated into Latin, was much used by St. Thomas. Yet he has lapses
into pure Pantheism, such as: “The true Being that belongs to God,
is not His only, but is the Being of all things, and comes forth
abundantly from His Being. That which all things desire is Being:
Being is Goodness; the perfection of Being is the perfection of
Goodness.”[386]
(4) And the Spanish Jew, Ibn Gebirol (Avicebron), who died about 1070
A.D., is predominantly Proclian, but with a form of Pantheism which, in
parts, strikingly foreshadows Spinoza. His masterly _Fons Vitae_, as
translated into Latin, exercised a profound influence upon Duns Scotus.
“Below the first Maker there is nothing but what is both matter and
form.” “All things are resolvable into Matter and Form. If all things
were resolvable into a single root,” (that is, into Form alone), “there
would be no difference between that one root and the one Maker.” There
exists a universal Matter and a universal Form. The first, or universal
Matter, is a substance existing by itself, which sustains diversity,
and is one in number: it is capable of receiving all the different
kinds of forms. The universal Form is a substance which constitutes the
essence of all the different kinds of forms.… By means of the knowledge
of this universal Form, the knowledge of every (less general) form is
acquired,--is deduced from it and resolved into it.” “Being falls under
four categories, answering to: whether it is, what it is, what is its
quality, and why it is: but, of these, the first in order of dignity
is the category which inquires whether it is at all.”[387] We thus
get again the degree of worth strictly identical with the degree of
generality.
4. _Inconsistencies of Aquinas and Scotus._
(1) St. Thomas, the chief of the orthodox Scholastics, has embodied
the entire Dionysian writings in his own works, but labours
assiduously--and successfully, as far as his own statements are
concerned--to guard against the Pantheistic tendencies special to
strict Realism. Yet it is clear, from his frequent warnings and
difficult distinctions regarding the double sense of the proposition,
“God is sheer Being,” and from the ease with which we find Eckhart,
an entirely consistent Realist, lapse into the Pantheistic sense, how
immanent is the danger to any severe form of the system.[388] And he
fails to give us a thoroughly understandable and consistent account
as to the relations between the General and the Particular, between
Form and Matter, and between these two pairs of conceptions. Thus
“Materia signata,” matter, as bearing certain dimensions, “is the
principle of individuation”:[389] yet this _quantum_ is already an
individually determined quantity, and _this_ determination remains
unexplained. And certain forms exist separately, without matter, in
which case each single form is a separate species; as with the Angels
and, pre-eminently, with God.--Yet, as already Duns Scotus insisted,
Aquinas’ general principle seems to require the non-existence of pure
forms as distinct beings, and the partial materiality of all individual
beings.[390]
(2) And Duns Scotus teaches, in explicit return to Avicebron, that
every created substance consists of matter as well as of form, and that
there is but one, First Matter, which is identical in every particular
and derivative kind of matter. The world appears to him as a gigantic
tree, whose root is this indeterminate matter; whose branches are
the transitory substances; whose leaves the changeable accidents;
whose flowers, the rational souls; whose fruit are the Angels: and
which God has planted and which He tends. Here again the order of
Efficacity,--with the tell-tale exception of God,--is identical with
that of Generality.[391]
5. _Eckhart’s Pantheistic trend._
But it is Eckhart who consistently develops the Pantheistic trend of
a rigorous Intellectualism. The very competent and strongly Thomistic
Father Denifle shows how Eckhart strictly followed the general
scholastic doctrine, as enunciated by Avicenna: “In every creature
its Being is one thing, and is from another, its Essence is another
thing, and is not from another”; whereas in God, Being and Essence are
identical. And Denifle adds: “Eckhart will have been unable to answer
for himself the question as to what, in strictness, the ‘Esse’ is, in
distinction from the ‘Essentia’; indeed no one could have told him,
with precision.… Eckhart leaves intact the distinction between the
Essence of God and that of the creature; but, doubtless in part because
of this, he feels himself free,--in starting from an ambiguous text
of Boetius,--to break down the careful discriminations established by
St. Thomas, in view of this same text, between Universal Being, Common
to all things extant, and Divine Being, reserved by Aquinas for God
alone.”[392] “What things are nearer to each other, than anything that
_is_ and Being? There is nothing between them.” “Very Being,” the Being
of God, “is the actualizing Form of every form, everywhere.” “In one
word,” adds Denifle, “the Being of God constitutes the formal Being of
all things.”[393] The degrees of Generality and Abstract Thinkableness
are again also the degrees of Reality and Worth: “the Eternal Word
assumed to Itself, not this or that human being, but a human nature
which existed bare, unparticularized.” “Being and Knowableness are
identical.”
When speaking systematically Eckhart is strictly Plotinian: “God
and Godhead are as distinct as earth is from heaven.” “The Godhead
has left all things to God: It owns nought, wills nought, requires
nought, effects nought, produces nought.” “Thou shalt love the Godhead
as It truly is: a non-God, non-Spirit, non-Person … a sheer, pure,
clear One, severed from all duality: let us sink down into that One,
throughout eternity, from Nothing unto Nothing, so help us God.” “The
Godhead Itself remains unknown to Itself.” “It is God who energizes and
speaks one single thing,--His Son, the Holy Ghost, and all creatures.…
Where God speaks it, there it is all God; here, where man understands
it, it is God and creature.”[394] No wonder that the following are
among the propositions condemned by Pope John XXII in 1329: “God
produces me as His own Being, a Being identical, not merely similar”;
and, “I speak as falsely when I call God (the Godhead) good, as if I
call white, black.”[395]
6. _The logical goal of strict Realism._
This series of facts, which could be indefinitely extended, well
illustrates the persistence of “the fundamental doctrine common to all
forms of Realism,--of the species as an entity in the individuals,
common to all and _identical_ in each, an entity to which individual
differences adhere as accidents,” as Prof. Seth-Pattison accurately
defines the matter. “Yet when existence is in question, it is the
individual, not the universal, that is real; and the real individual
is not a compound of species and accidents, but is individual to the
inmost fibre of his being.” Not as though Nominalism were in the right.
For “each finite individual has its” special “place in the one real
universe, with all the parts of which it is inseparably connected. But
the universe is itself an individual or real whole, containing all
its parts within itself, and not a universal of the logical order,
containing its exemplifications under it.”[396] And, above all, minds,
spirits, persons,--however truly they may approximate more and more
to certain great types of rationality, virtue, and religion, which
types are thus increasingly expressive of God’s self-revealing purpose
and nature,--are ever, not merely numerically different, as between
one individual and the other, but, both in its potentialities and
especially in its spiritual actualization, no one soul can or does take
the place of any other.
And if we ask what there is in any strict Realism to attract the
Mystical sense, we shall find it, I think, in the insistence of
such Realism upon Unity, Universality, and Stability. Yet in so
far as Mysticism, in such a case Exclusive Mysticism, tends to oust
the Outgoing movement of the soul, it empties these forms of their
Multiple, Individual, and Energizing content. Inclusive Mysticism may
be truly said alone to attain to the true Mystic’s desires; for only
by the interaction of both movements, and of all the powers of the
soul, will the said soul escape the ever-increasing poverty of content
characteristic of the strict Realist’s pyramid of conceptions; a
poverty undoubtedly antagonistic to the secret aspiration of Mysticism,
which is essentially an apprehension, admiration, and love of the
infinite depths and riches of Reality--of this Reality no doubt present
everywhere, yet in indefinitely various, and mutually complementary and
stimulative forms and degrees. And the readiness with which Mysticism
expressed itself in the Nominalist Categories,--distinctly less
adequate to a healthy, Partial Mysticism than the more moderate forms
of Realism,--shows how little intrinsic was the link which seemed to
bind it to a Realism of the most rigorous kind.
II. RELATIONS BETWEEN GOD AND THE HUMAN SOUL.
In taking next the question as to the relations between God and the
Human Soul, we shall find our difficulties increased, because, here
especially, the Philosophers and even the Biblical Writers have,
with regard to religious experience, used expressions and furnished
stimulations of a generally complex and unclarified, intermittent,
and unharmonized kind; and especially because certain specifically
religious experiences and requirements have operated here with a unique
intensity, at one time in a Pantheistic, at another in a more or less
Deistic direction. The reader will specially note the points in the
following doctrines which helped on the conception that a certain
centre or highest part of the soul is God, or a part of God, Himself.
1. _Plato and Aristotle. “The Noûs.”_
(1) Plato teaches the pre-existence and the post-existence
(immortality) of the soul, as two interdependent truths. In his
earlier stage, _e.g._ the _Phaedrus_, he so little discriminates, in
his argument for immortality, between the individual soul and the
World-Soul, as to argue that “the Self-Moving” Soul generally “is the
beginning of motion, and this motion,” (specially here in connection
with the human soul), “can neither be destroyed nor begotten, since,
in that case, the heavens and all generation would collapse.” Yet
individual souls are not, according to him, emanations of the
World-Soul; but, as the particular ideas stand beside the Supreme Idea,
so do the particular souls stand beside the Soul of the Whole, in a
distinct peculiarity of their own.[397]--And again, since the soul
has lapsed from a purer, its appropriate, life into the body, and has
thus no original, intrinsic relation to this body, the activity of the
senses, indeed in strictness even that of the emotions, cannot form
part of its essential nature. Only the highest part of the soul, the
Reason, _Noûs_, which, as “sun-like, God-like,” can apprehend the sun,
God, is one and simple, as are all the ideas, immortal; whereas the
soul’s lower part consists of two elements,--the nobler, the irascible,
and the ignobler, the concupiscible passions. But how the unity of the
soul’s life can co-exist with this psychical tritomy, is a question
no doubt never formulated even to himself by Plato: we certainly have
only three beings bound together, not one being active in different
directions.[398]
(2) Aristotle, if more sober in his general doctrine, brings some
special obscurities and contradictions. For whilst the pre-existence
of the soul, taken as a whole, is formally denied, and indeed its very
origin is linked to that of the body, its rational part, the Noûs,
comes into the physical organism from outside of the matter altogether,
and an impersonal pre-existence is distinctly predicated of it,--in
strict conformity with his doctrine that the Supreme Noûs does not
directly act upon, or produce things in, the world.[399]
2. _St. Paul. The “Spirit.”_
But it is St. Paul who, in his Mystical outbursts and in the systematic
parts of his doctrine, as against the simply hortatory level of
his teaching, gives us the earliest, one of the deepest, and to
this hour by far the most influential, among the at all detailed
experiences and schemes, accepted by and operative among Christians,
as to the relations of the human soul to God. And here again, and
with characteristic intensity, certain overlapping double meanings
and conceptions, and some vivid descriptions of experiences readily
suggestive of the divinity of the soul’s highest part, repeatedly
appear.
(1) In the systematic passages we not only find the terms _Psyche_,
“Soul,” for the vital force of the body; and _Noûs_, (“Mind,”)
“Heart,” and “Conscience,” for various aspects and functions of
man’s rational and volitional nature: but a special insistence upon
_Pneuma_, “Spirit,” mostly in a quite special sense of the word.
Thus in 1 Cor. ii, 14, 15, we get an absolute contrast between the
psychic or sarkic, the simply natural man, and the Pneumatic, the
Spiritual one, all capacity for understanding the Spirit of God being
denied to the former. The Spiritual thus appears as itself already
the Divine, and the Spirit as the exclusive, characteristic property
of God, something which is foreign to man, apart from his Christian
renovation and elevation to a higher form of existence. Only with the
entrance of faith and its consequences into the mind and will of man,
does this transcendent Spirit become an immanent principle: “through
His Spirit dwelling in you.”[400]--Hence, in the more systematic
Pauline Anthropology, _Pneuma_ cannot be taken as belonging to man’s
original endowment. Certainly in 1 Cor. ii, 11, the term “the spirit
of a man” appears simply because the whole passage is dominated by a
comparison between the Divine and the human consciousness, which allows
simultaneously of the use of the conversely incorrect term, “the mind
of God,”--here, v. 16, and in Rom. xi, 34. And the term “the spirit
of the world,” 1 Cor. ii, 12, is used in contrast with “the Spirit of
God,” and as loosely as the term “the God of this world,” is applied,
in 2 Cor. iv, 4, to Satan.--Only some four passages are difficult to
interpret thus: _e.g._ “Every defilement of flesh and of spirit” (2
Cor. vii, 1); for how can God, Spirit, be defiled? Yet we can “forget
that our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit,” 1 Cor. vi, 19; and its
defilement can “grieve the Holy Spirit” (Eph. iv, 30).[401]
And note how parallel to his conception of this immanence of the
transcendent Spirit is St. Paul’s conception, based upon his personal,
mystical experience, of the indwelling of Christ in the regenerate
human soul. Saul had indeed been won to Jesus Christ, not by the
history of Jesus’ earthly life, but by the direct manifestation of
the heavenly Spirit-Christ, on the way to Damascus: whence he teaches
that only those who know Him as Spirit, can truly “be in Christ,”--an
expression formed on the model of “to be in the Spirit,” as in Mark
xii, 36, and Apoc. 1, 10.
(2) And then these terms take on, in specifically Pauline Mystical
passages, a suggestion of a local extension and environment, and
express, like the corresponding formulae “in God,” “in the Spirit,” the
conception of an abiding within as it were an element,--that of the
exalted Christ and His Divine glory. Or Christ is within us, as the
Spirit also is said to be, so that the regenerate personality, by its
closeness of intercourse with the personality of Christ, can become
one single Spirit with Him, 1 Cor. vi, 17. “As the air is the element
in which man moves, and yet again the element of life which is present
within the man: so the Pneuma-Christ is for St. Paul both the Ocean
of the Divine Being, into which the Christian, since his reception
of the Spirit, is plunged,” and in which he disports himself, “and a
stream which, derived from that Ocean, is specially introduced within
his individual life.”[402] Catherine’s profound indebtedness to this
Mystical Pauline doctrine has already been studied; here we are but
considering this doctrine in so far as suggestive, to the Mystics,
of the identity between the true self and God,--an identity readily
reached, if we press such passages as “Christ, our life”; “to live is
Christ”; “I live, not I, but Christ liveth in me.”[403]
3. _Plotinus._
Some two centuries later, Plotinus brings his profound influence to
bear in the direction of such identification. For as the First, the
One, which, as we saw, possesses, for him, no Self-consciousness,
Life, or Being, produces the Second, the Noûs, which, possessed of
all these attributes, exercises them directly in self-contemplation
alone; and yet this Second is so closely like that First as to be
“light from light”: so does the Second produce the Third, the Human
Psyche, which, though “a thing by itself,” is a “godlike (divine)
thing,” since it possesses “a more divine part, the part which is
neighbour to what is above, the Noûs, with which and from which Noûs
the Psyche exists.”--The Psyche is “an image of the Noûs”: “as outward
speech expresses inward thought, so is the Psyche a concept of the
Noûs,--a certain energy of the Noûs, as the Noûs itself is an energy
of the First Cause.” “As with fire, where we distinguish the heat that
abides within the fire and the heat that is emitted by it … so must we
conceive the Psyche not as wholly flowing forth from, but as in part
abiding in, in part proceeding from the Noûs.”[404]
And towards the end of the great Ninth Book of the Sixth Ennead, he
tells how in Ecstasy “the soul sees the Source of Life … the Ground of
Goodness, the Root of the Soul.… For we are not cut off from or outside
of It … but we breathe and consist in It: since It does not give and
then retire, but ever lifts and bears us, so long as It is what It is.”
“We must stand alone in It and must become It alone, after stripping
off all the rest that hangs about us.… There we can behold both Him and
our own selves,--ourselves, full of intellectual light, or rather as
Pure Light Itself, having become God, or rather as being simply He …
abiding altogether unmoved, having become as it were Stability Itself.”
“When man has moved out of himself away to God, like the image to its
Prototype, he has reached his journey’s end.” “And this is the life of
the Gods and of divine and blessed men … a flight of the alone to the
Alone.”[405]
4. _Eckhart’s position. Ruysbroek._
(1) Eckhart gives us both Plotinian positions--the God-likeness and
the downright Divinity of the soul. “The Spark (_das Fünkelein_)
of the Soul … is a light impressed upon its uppermost part, and an
image of the Divine Nature, which is ever at war with all that is not
divine. It is not one of the several powers of the soul.… Its name
is Synteresis,”--_i.e._ conscience. “The nine powers of the soul are
all servants of that man of the soul, and help him on to the soul’s
Source.”[406]--But in one of the condemned propositions he says: “There
is something in the soul which is Increate and Uncreatable; if the
whole soul were such, it would be (entirely) Increate and Uncreatable.
And this is the Intellect,”--standing here exactly for Plotinus’s
Noûs.[407]
(2) Ruysbroek (who died in 1381) combines a considerable fundamental
sobriety with much of St. Paul’s daring and many echoes of Plotinus.
“The unity of our spirit with God is of two kinds,--essential and
actual. According to its essence, our spirit receives, in its
innermost highest part, the visit of Christ, without means and without
intermission; for the life which we are in God, in our Eternal Image,
and that which we have and are in ourselves, according to the essence
of our being … are without distinction.--But this essential unity of
our spirit with God has no consistency in itself, but abides in God and
flows out from and depends on Him.” The actual unity of our spirit with
God, caused by Grace, confers upon us not His Image, but His Likeness,
“and though we cannot lose the Image of God, nor our natural unity with
Him,--if we lose His Likeness, His Grace, Christ, who, in this case,
comes to us with mediations and intermissions, we shall be damned.”[408]
5. _St. Teresa’s mediating view._
St. Teresa’s teachings contain interesting faint echoes of the old
perplexities and daring doctrines concerning the nature of the Spirit;
but articulate a strikingly persistent conviction that the soul holds
God Himself as distinct from His graces, possessing thus some direct
experience of this His presence. “I cannot understand what the mind
is, nor how it differs from the soul or the spirit either: all three
seem to me to be but one, though the soul sometimes leaps forth out
of itself, like a fire which has become a flame: the flame ascends
high above the fire, but it is still the same flame of the same fire.”
“Something subtle and swift seems to issue from the soul, to ascend
to its highest part and to go whither Our Lord will … it seems a
flight. This little bird of the spirit seems to have escaped out of
the prison of the body.” Indeed “the soul is then not in itself … it
seems to me to have its dwelling higher than even the highest part of
itself.”[409]--“In the beginning I did not know that God is present in
all things.… Unlearned men used to tell me that He was present only by
His grace. I could not believe that.… A most learned Dominican told me
He was present Himself … this was a great comfort to me.” “To look upon
Our Lord as being in the innermost parts of the soul … is a much more
profitable method, than that of looking upon Him as external to us.”
“The living God was in my soul.” And even, “hitherto” up to 1555, “my
life was my own; my life, since then, is the life which God lived in
me.”[410]
6. _Immanence, not Pantheism._
St. Teresa’s teaching as to God’s own presence in the soul points
plainly, I think, to the truth insisted on by the Catholic theologian
Schwab, in his admirable monograph on Gerson. “Neither speculation nor
feeling are satisfied with a Pure Transcendence of God; and hence the
whole effort of true Mysticism is directed, whilst not abolishing His
Transcendence, to embrace and experience God, His living presence,
in the innermost soul,--that is, to insist, in some way or other,
upon the Immanence of God. Reject all such endeavours as Pantheistic,
insist sharply upon the specific eternal difference between God and
the Creature: and the Speculative, Mystical depths fade away, with
all their fascination.”[411] Not in finding Pantheism already here,
with the imminent risk of falling into a cold Deism, but in a rigorous
insistence, with all the great Inclusive Mystics, upon the spiritual
and moral effects, as the tests of the reality and worth of such
experiences, and, with the Ascetical and Historical souls, upon also
the other movement--an outgoing in some kind of contact with, and
labour at, the contingencies and particularities of life and mind--will
the true safeguard for this element of the soul’s life be found.[412]
III. MYSTICISM AND PANTHEISM: THEIR DIFFERENCES AND POINTS OF LIKENESS.
But does not Mysticism, not only find God in the soul, but the soul
to be God? Is it not, as such, already Pantheism? Or, if not, what is
their difference?
1. _Plotinus and Spinoza compared._
Now Dr. Edward Caird, in his fine book, _The Evolution of Theology in
the Greek Philosophers_, 1904, tells us that “Mysticism is religion in
its most concentrated and exclusive form; it is that attitude of mind
in which all other relations are swallowed up in the relation of the
soul to God”; and that “Plotinus is the Mystic _par excellence_.”[413]
And he then proceeds to contrast Plotinus, the typical Mystic, with
Spinoza, the true Pantheist.
“Whether” or not “Spinoza, in his negation of the limits of the finite,
still leaves it open to himself to admit a reality in finite things
which is _not_ negated,” and “to conceive of the absolute substance
as manifesting itself in attributes and modes”: “it is very clear
that he does so conceive it, and that, for all those finite things
which he treats as negative and illusory in themselves, he finds in
God a ground of reality … which can be as little destroyed as the
divine substance itself.” “God, _Deus sive Natura_, is conceived as
the immanent principle of the universe, or perhaps rather the universe
is conceived as immanent in God.”--Thus to him “the movement by which
he dissolves the finite in the infinite, and the movement by which he
finds the finite again in the infinite, are equally essential. If for
him the world is nothing apart from God, God is nothing apart from His
realization in the world.” This is true Pantheism.[414]
But in Plotinus the _via negativa_ involves a negation of the finite
and determinate in all its forms; hence here it is impossible to find
the finite again in the infinite. The Absolute One is here not immanent
but transcendent.[415] “While the lower always has need of the higher,
the higher is regarded as having no need” for any purpose “of the
lower”; and “the Highest has no need of anything but Itself.” “Such
a process cannot be reversed”: “in ascending, Plotinus has drawn the
ladder after him, and left himself no possibility of descending again.
The movement, in which he is guided by definite and explicit thought,
is always upwards; while, in describing the movement downwards, he
has to take refuge in metaphors and analogies,” for the purpose of
indicating a purely self-occupied activity which only accidentally
produces an external effect, _e.g._, “the One as it were overflows, and
produces another than itself.”[416] “Thus we have the strange paradox
that the Being who is absolute, is yet conceived as in a sense external
to the relative and finite, and that He leaves the relative and finite
in a kind of unreal independence.” “On the one side, we have a life
which is nothing apart from God, and which, nevertheless, can never be
united to him, except as it loses itself altogether; and, on the other
side, an Absolute, which yet is not immanent in the life it originates,
but abides in transcendent isolation from it.… It is this contradiction
which … makes the writings of Plotinus the supreme expression of
Mysticism.”[417]
Now I think, with this admirable critic, that we cannot but take
Spinoza as the classical representative of that parallelistic
Pantheism to which most of our contemporary systems of psycho-physical
parallelism belong. As Prof. Troeltsch well puts it, “we have here a
complete parallelism between every single event in the physical world,
which event is already entirely explicable from its own antecedents
within that physical world, and every event of a psychical kind,
which, nevertheless, is itself also entirely explicable from its own
psychical antecedents alone.” And “this parallelism again is but two
sides of the one World-Substance, Which is neither Nature nor Spirit,
and Whose law is neither natural nor spiritual law, but Which is Being
in general and Law in general.” In this one World-Substance, with its
parallel self-manifestations as extension and as thought, Spinoza
finds the ultimate truth of Religion, as against the Indeterminist,
Anthropomorphic elements of all the popular religions,--errors which
have sprung, the Anthropomorphic from man’s natural inclination to
interpret Ultimate Reality, with its complete neutrality towards
the distinctions of Psychical and Physical, by the Psychic side, as
the one nearest to our own selves; and the Indeterminist from the
attribution of that indetermination to the World-Substance which, even
in Psychology, is already a simple illusion and analytical blunder.
“It is in the combination,” concludes Professor Troeltsch, “of such a
recognition of the strict determination of all natural causation, and
of such a rejection of materialism (with its denial of the independence
of the psychic world), that rests the immense power of Pantheism at
the present time.”[418] On the other hand, the supposed Pantheistic
positions of the later Lessing, of Herder, Goethe and many another
predominantly aesthetic thinker, must, although far richer and more
nearly adequate conceptions of full reality, be assigned, _qua_
Pantheism, a secondary place, as inconsistent, because already largely
Teleological, indeed Theistic Philosophies.
2. _Complete Pantheism non-religious; why approached by Mysticism._
Now the former, the full Pantheism, must, I think, be declared, with
Rauwenhoff, to be only in name a religious position at all. “In its
essence it is simply a complete Monism, a recognition of the _Pan_ in
its unity and indivisibility, and hence a simple view of the world, not
a religious conception.”[419]--Yet deeply religious souls can be more
or less, indeed profoundly, influenced by such a Monism, so that we can
get Mystics with an outlook considerably more Spinozist than Plotinian.
There can, _e.g._, be no doubt as to both the deeply religious temper
and the strongly Pantheistic conceptions of Eckhart in the Middle Ages,
and of Schleiermacher in modern times; and indeed Spinoza himself is,
apart from all questions as to the logical implications and results
of his intellectual system, and as to the justice of his attacks upon
the historical religions, a soul of massive religious intuition and
aspiration.
But further: Mystically tempered souls,--and the typical and
complete religious soul will ever possess a mystical element in its
composition,--have three special _attraits_ which necessarily bring
them into an at least apparent proximity to Pantheism.
(1) For one thing Mysticism, like Pantheism, has a great, indeed (if
left unchecked by the out-going-movement) an excessive, thirst for
Unity, for a Unity less and less possessed of Multiplicity; and the
transition from holding the Pure Transcendence of this Unity to a
conviction of its Exclusive Immanence becomes easy and insignificant,
in proportion to the emptiness of content increasingly characterizing
this Oneness.
(2) Then again, like Pantheists, Mystics dwell much upon the strict
call to abandon all self-centredness, upon the death to self, the loss
of self; and in proportion as they dwell upon this self to be thus
rejected, and as they enlarge the range of this petty self, do they
approach each other more and more.
(3) And lastly, there is a peculiarity about the Mystical habit of
mind, which inevitably approximates it to the Pantheistic mode of
thought, and which, if not continuously taken by the Mystic soul
itself as an inevitable, but most demonstrable, inadequacy, will
react upon the substance of this soul’s thought in a truly Pantheistic
sense. This peculiarity results from the Mystic’s ever-present double
tendency of absorbing himself, away from the Successive and Temporal,
in the Simultaneity and Eternity of God, conceiving thus all reality
as partaking, in proportion to its depth and greater likeness to
Him, in this _Totum Simul_ character of its ultimate Author and
End; and of clinging to such vivid picturings of this reality as
are within his, this Mystic’s reach. Now such a Simultaneity can be
pictorially represented to the mind only by the Spacial imagery of
co-existent Extensions,--say of air, water, light, or fire: and these
representations, if dwelt on as at all adequate, will necessarily
suggest a Determinism of a Mathematico-Physical, Extensional type,
_i.e._ one, and the dominant, side of Spinozistic Pantheism.--It is
here, I think, that we get the double cause for the Pantheistic-seeming
trend of almost all the Mystical imagery. For even the marked
Emanationism of much in Plotinus, and of still more in Proclus,--the
latter still showing through many a phrase in Dionysius,--appears in
their images as operating upon a fixed Extensional foundation: and
indeed these very overflowings, owing to the self-centredness and
emptiness of content of their Source, the One, and to their accidental
yet automatic character, help still further to give to the whole
outlook a strikingly materialistic, mechanical, in so far Pantheistic,
character.
3. _Points on which Mysticism has usefully approximated to Pantheism._
And yet we must not overlook the profound, irreplaceable services that
are rendered by Mysticism,--provided always it remains but one of two
great movements of the living soul,--even on the points in which it
thus approximates to Pantheism. These services, I think, are three.
(1) The first of these services has been interestingly illustrated by
Prof. A. S. Pringle Pattison, from the case of Dr. James Martineau’s
writings, and the largely unmediated co-existence there of two
different modes of conceiving God. “The first mode represents God
simply as another, higher Person; the second represents Him as
the soul of souls. The former, Deistic and Hebraic, rests upon an
inferential knowledge of God, derived either from the experience of
His resistance to our will through the forces of Nature, or from that
of His restraint upon us in the voice of Conscience,--God, in both
cases, being regarded as completely separated from the human soul, and
His existence and character apprehended and demonstrated by a process
of reasoning.--The second mode is distinctly and intensely Christian,
and consists in the apprehension of God as the Infinite including
all finite existences, as the immanent Absolute who progressively
manifests His character in the Ideals of Truth, Beauty, Righteousness,
and Love.” And Professor Pattison points out, with Professor Upton,
that it was Dr. Martineau’s almost morbid dread of Pantheism which was
responsible for the inadequate expression given to this Mystical, or
“Speculative” element in his religious philosophy. For only if we do
not resist such Mysticism, do we gain and retain a vivid experience of
how “Consciousness of imperfection and the pursuit of perfection are
alike possible to man only through the universal life of thought and
goodness in which he shares, and which, at once an indwelling presence
and an unattainable ideal, draws him on and always on.” “Personality
is” thus “not ‘unitary’ in Martineau’s sense, as occupying one side
of a relation, and unable to be also on the other. The very capacity
of knowledge and morality implies that the person … is capable of
regarding himself and all other beings from what Martineau well names
‘the station of the Father of Spirits.’”[420]
I would, however, guard here against any exclusion of a seeking
or finding of God in Nature and in Conscience: only the contrary
exclusion of the finding of God within the soul, and the insistence
upon a complete separation of Him from that soul, are inacceptable in
the “Hebraic” mood. For a coming and a going, a movement inwards and
outwards, checks and counter-checks, friction, contrast, battle and
storm, are necessary conditions and ingredients of the soul’s growth in
its sense of appurtenance to Spirit and to Peace.
(2) A further service rendered by this Pantheistic-seeming
Mysticism,--though always only so long as it remains not the only or
last word of Religion,--is that it alone discovers the truly spiritual
function and fruitfulness of Deterministic Science. For only if Man
deeply requires a profound desubjectivizing, a great shifting of the
centre of his interest, away from the petty, claimful, animal self,
with its “I against all the world,” to a great kingdom of souls, in
which Man gains his larger, spiritual, unique personality, with its
“I as part of, and for all the world,” by accepting to be but one
amongst thousands of similar constituents in a system expressive of the
thoughts of God; and only if Mathematico-Physical Science is specially
fitted to provide such a bath, and hence is so taken, with all its
apparently ruinous Determinism and seeming Godlessness: is such Science
really safe from apologetic emasculation; or from running, a mere
unrelated dilettantism, alongside of the deepest interests of the soul;
or from, in its turn, crushing or at least hampering the deepest, the
spiritual life of man. Hence all the greater Partial Mystics have got
a something about them which indicates that they have indeed passed
through fire and water, that their poor selfishness has been purified
in a bath of painfully-bracing spiritual air and light, through which
they have emerged into a larger, fuller life. And Nicolas of Coes,
Pascal, Malebranche are but three men out of many whose Mysticism and
whose Mathematico-Physical Science thus interstimulated each other and
jointly deepened their souls.
We shall find, further on, that this purificatory power of such Science
has been distinctly heightened for us now. Yet, both then and now,
there could and can be such purification only for those who realize
and practise religion as sufficiently ultimate and wide and deep to
englobe, (as one of religion’s necessary stimulants), an unweakened,
utterly alien-seeming Determinism in the middle regions of the
soul’s experience and outlook. Such an englobement can most justly
be declared to be Christianity driven fully home. For thus is Man
purified and saved,--if he already possesses the dominant religious
motive and conviction,--by a close contact with Matter; and the Cross
is plunged into the very centre of his soul’s life, operating there a
sure division between the perishing animal Individual and the abiding
spiritual Personality: the deathless Incarnational and Redemptive
religion becomes thus truly operative there.
(3) And the last service, rendered by such Mysticism, is to keep
alive in the soul the profoundly important consciousness of the
prerequisites, elements and affinities of a Universally Human kind,
which are necessary to, and present in, all Religion, however
definitely Concrete, Historical and Institutional it may have become.
Such special, characteristic Revelations, Doctrines and Institutions,
as we find them in all the great Historical Religions, and in their
full normative substance and form in Christianity and Catholicism, can
indeed alone completely develop, preserve and spread Religion in its
depth and truth; yet they ever presuppose a general, usually dim but
most real, religious sense and experience, indeed a real presence and
operation of the Infinite and of God in all men.
It is, then, not an indifferentist blindness to the profound
differences, in their degree of truth, between the religions of
the world, nor an insufficient realization of man’s strict need of
historical and institutional lights and aids for the development and
direction of that general religious sense and experience, which make
the mind revolt from sayings such as those we have already quoted from
the strongly Protestant Prof. Wilhelm Hermann, and to which we can
add the following. “Everywhere, outside of Christianity, Mysticism
will arise, as the very flower of the religious development. But
the Christian must declare such Mystical experience of God to be a
delusion.” For “what is truly Christian is _ipso facto_ not Mystical.”
“We are Christians because, in the Humanity of Jesus, we have struck
upon a fact which is of incomparably richer content, than are the
feelings that arise within our own selves.” Indeed, “I should have
failed to recognize the hand of God even in what my own dead father
did for me, had not, by means of my Christian education, God appeared
to me, in the Historic Christ.”[421]--As if it were possible to
consider Plato and Plotinus, in those religious intuitions and feelings
of theirs which helped to win an Augustine from crass Manichaeism
to a deep Spiritualism, and which continue to breathe and burn as
part-elements in countless sayings of Christian philosophers and
saints, to have been simply deluded, or mere idle subjectivists! As if
we could apprehend even Christ, without some most real, however dim and
general, sense of religion and presence of God within us to which He
could appeal! And as if Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Maccabaean Martyrs,
and many a devoted soul within Mohammedanism or in Brahmanic India,
could not and did not apprehend something of God’s providence in their
earthly father’s love towards them!
No wonder that, after all this, Hermann can,--as against Richard Rothe
who, in spite of more than one fantastic if not fanatical aberration,
had, on some of the deepest religious matters, a rarely penetrating
perception,--write in a thoroughly patronizing manner concerning
Catholic Mysticism. For this Mysticism necessarily appears to him not
as, at its best, the most massive and profound development of one type
of the ultimate religion,--a type in which one necessary element of all
balanced religious life is at the fullest expansion compatible with a
still sufficient amount and healthiness of the other necessary elements
of such a life,--but only as “a form of religion which has brought out
and rendered visible such a content of interior life as is capable of
being produced within the limits of Catholic piety.”[422] The true,
pure Protestant possesses, according to Hermann, apparently much less,
in reality much more,--the Categorical Imperative of Conscience and the
Jesus of History, as the double one-and-all of his, the only spiritual
religion.--Yet if Christianity is indeed the religion of the Divine
Founder, Who declared that he that is not against Him is for Him; or
of Paul, who could appeal to the heathen Athenians and to all men for
the truth and experience that in God “we live and move and have our
being”; or of the great Fourth Gospel, which tells us that Christ,
the True Light, enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world, a
light which to this hour cannot, for the great majority, be through
historic knowledge of the Historic Christ at all; or of Clement of
Alexandria and of Justin Martyr, who loved to find deep apprehensions
and operations of God scattered about among the Heathen; or of Aquinas,
who, in the wake of the Areopagite and others, so warmly dwells upon
how Grace does not destroy, but presupposes and perfects Nature: then
such an exclusive amalgam of Moralism and History, though doubtless a
most honest and intelligible reaction against opposite excesses, is
a sad impoverishment of Christianity, in its essential, world-wide,
Catholic character.
Indeed, to be fair, there have never been wanting richer and more
balanced Protestant thinkers strongly to emphasize this profound
many-sidedness and universality of Christianity: so, at present,
in Germany, Profs. Eucken, Troeltsch, Class, Siebeck and others;
and, in England, Prof. A. S. P. Pattison and Mr. J. R. Illingworth.
In all these cases there is ever a strong sympathy with Mysticism
properly understood, as the surest safeguard against such distressing
contractions as is this of Hermann, and that of Albrecht Ritschl before
him.
4._ Christianity excludes complete and final Pantheism._
And yet, as we have repeatedly found, Christianity has, in its
fundamental Revelation and Experience, ever implied and affirmed such a
conception of Unity, of Self-Surrender, and of the Divine Action, as to
render any Pantheistic interpretation of these things ever incomplete
and transitional.
(1) The Unity here is nowhere, even ultimately, the sheer Oneness
of a simply identical Substance, but a Unity deriving its very
close-knitness from its perfect organization of not simply identical
elements or relations.
The Self-Surrender here is not a simply final resolution, of
laboriously constituted centres of human spiritual consciousness and
personality, back into a morally indifferent All, but a means and
passage, for the soul, from a spiritually worthless self-entrenchment
within a merely psycho-physical apartness and lust to live, on to a
spiritual devotedness, an incorporation, as one necessary subject, into
the Kingdom of souls,--the abiding, living expression of the abiding,
living God.
And, above all, God’s Action is not a mechanico-physical, determinist,
simultaneous Extension, nor even an automatic, accidental, unconscious
Emanation, but, as already Plato divined,--an intuition lost again by
Aristotle, and, in his logic, denied by Plotinus,--a voluntary outgoing
and self-communication of the supreme self-conscious Spirit, God. For
Plato tells us that “the reason why Nature and this Universe of things
was framed by Him Who framed it, is that God is good … and desired
that all things should be as like Himself as it was possible for them
to be.”[423] Yet this pregnant apprehension never attains here to its
full significance, because the Divine Intelligence is conceived only as
manifesting itself in relation to something given from without,--the
pre-existing, chaotic Matter. And for Aristotle God does not love this
Givenness; for “the first Mover moves” (all things) only “as desired”
by them: He Himself desires, loves, wills nothing whatsoever, and
thinks and knows nothing but His own self alone.[424] And in Plotinus
this same transcendence is still further emphasized, for the Absolute
One here transcends even all thought and self-consciousness.
(2) It is in Christianity, after noble preludings in Judaism, that we
get the full deliberate proclamation, in the great Life and Teaching,
of the profound fact,--the Self-Manifestation of the Loving God, the
Spirit-God moving out to the spirit-man, and spirit-man only thus
capable of a return movement to the Spirit-God. As Schelling said, “God
can only give Himself to His creatures as He gives a self to them,”
and, with it, the capacity of participating in His life. We thus get
a relation begun and rendered possible by God’s utterly prevenient,
pure, _ecstatic_ love of Man, a relation which, in its essence
spiritual, personal and libertarian, leaves behind it, as but vain
travesties of such ultimate Realities, all Emanational or Parallelistic
Pantheism, useful though these latter systems are as symbols of the
Mathematico-Physical level and kind of reality and apprehension.
Yet this spiritual relation is here, unlike Plotinus’s more or less
Emanational conception of it, not indeed simply invertible, as Spinoza
would have it, (for Man is ontologically dependent upon God, whereas
God is not thus dependent upon Man), but nevertheless largely one of
true mutuality. And this mutuality of the relation is not simply a
positive enactment of God, but is expressive, in its degree and mode,
of God’s intrinsic moral nature. For God is here the Source as well
as the Object of all love; hence He Himself possesses the supreme
equivalent for this our noblest emotion, and is moved to free acts of
outgoing, in the creation and preservation, the revelation to, and
the redemption of finite spirits, as so many successive, mutually
supplementary, and increasingly fuller expressions and objects of this
His nature. “God is Love”; “God so loved the world, as to give His
only-begotten Son”; “Let us love God, for God hath first loved us”; “if
any man will do the will of God, he shall know of the doctrine if it be
from God”: God’s Infinity is here, not the negation of the relatively
independent life of His creatures, but the very reason and source of
their freedom.[425]
In the concluding chapter I hope to give a sketch of the actual
operation of the true correctives to any excessive, Plotinian or
Spinozistic, tendencies in the Mystical trend, especially when
utilizing Mathematico-Physical Science at the soul’s middle level; and
of History at the ultimate reaches of the soul’s life.
IV. THE DIVINE IMMANENCE; SPIRITUAL PERSONALITY.
1. _Panentheism._
As to our fourth question, the Divine Immanence and Personality,
our last quotations from St. Teresa give us, I think, our true
starting-point. For it is evident that, between affirming the simple
Divinity of the innermost centre of the soul, and declaring that the
soul ever experiences only the Grace of God, _i.e._ certain created
effects, sent by Him from the far-away seat of His own full presence,
there is room for a middle position which, whilst ever holding the
definite creatureliness of the soul, in all its reaches, puts God
Himself into the soul and the soul into God, in degrees and with
results which vary indeed indefinitely according to its good-will
and its call, yet which all involve and constitute a presence ever
profoundly real, ever operative before and beyond all the soul’s own
operations. These latter operations are, indeed, even possible only
through all this Divine anticipation, origination, preservation,
stimulation, and, at bottom,--in so far as man is enabled and required
by God to reach a certain real self-constitution,--through a mysterious
Self-Limitation of God’s own Action,--a Divine Self-Restraint.
There can be little doubt that such a _Panentheism_ is all that
many a daring, in strictness Pantheistic, saying of the Christian,
perhaps also of the Jewish and Mohammedan, Mystics aimed at. Only the
soul’s ineradicable capacity, need and desire for its Divine Lodger
and Sustainer would constitute, in this conception, the intrinsic
characteristic of human nature; and it is rather the too close
identification, in feeling and emotional expression, of the desire
and the Desired, of the hunger and the Food, and the too exclusive
realization of the deep truth that this desire and hunger do not cause,
but are themselves preceded and caused by, their Object,--it is the
over-vivid perception of this real dynamism, rather than any _a priori_
theory of static substances and identities--which, certainly in many
cases, has produced the appearance of Pantheism.
And again it is certain that we have to beware of taking the apparent
irruption or ingrafting,--in the case of the operations of Grace,--of
an entirely heterogeneous Force and Reality into what seems the already
completely closed circle of our natural functions and aspirations,
as the complete and ultimate truth of the situation. However utterly
different that Force may feel to all else that we are aware of within
ourselves, however entirely unmeditated may seem its manifestations:
it is clear that we should be unable to recognize even this Its
difference, to welcome or resist It, above all to find It a response to
our deepest cravings, unless we had some natural true affinity to It,
and some dim but most real experience of It from the first. Only with
such a general religiosity and vague sense, from a certain contact,
of the Infinite, is the recognition of definite, historical Religious
Facts and Figures as true, significant, binding upon my will and
conscience, explicable at all.
2. _Aquinas on our direct semi-consciousness of God’s indwelling._
St. Thomas, along one line of doctrine, has some excellent teachings
about all this group of questions. For though he tells us that “the
names which we give to God and creatures, are predicated of God”
only “according to a certain relation of the creature to God, as its
Principle and Cause, in which latter the perfections of all things
pre-exist in an excellent manner”: yet he explicitly admits, in one
place, that we necessarily have some real, immediate experience of the
Nature of God, for that “it is impossible, with regard to anything,
to know whether it exists,”--and he has admitted that natural reason
can attain to a knowledge of God’s bare existence,--“unless we somehow
know what is its nature,” at least “with a confused knowledge”; whence
“also with regard to God, we could not know whether He exists, unless
we somehow knew, even though confusedly, what He is.”[426]--God, though
transcendent, is also truly immanent in the human soul: “God is in all
things, as the agent is present in that wherein it acts. Created Being
is as true an effect of God’s Being, as to burn is the true effect of
fire. God is above all things,--by the excellence of His nature, and
yet He is intimately present within all things, as the cause of the
Being of all.”--And man has a natural exigency of the face-to-face
Vision of God, hence of the Order of Grace, however entirely its
attainment may be beyond his natural powers: “There is in man a natural
longing to know the cause, when he sees an effect: whence if the
intellect of the rational creature could not attain to the First Cause
of things,”--here in the highest form, that of the Beatific vision of
God--“the longing of its nature would remain void and vain.”[427]
But it is the great Mystical Saints and writers who continuously have,
in the very forefront of their consciousness and assumptions, not a
simply moral and aspirational, but an Ontological and Pre-established
relation between the soul and God; and not a simply discursive
apprehension, but a direct though dim Experience of the Infinite
and of God. And these positions really underlie even their most
complete-seeming negations, as we have already seen in the case of the
Areopagite.
3. _Gradual recognition of the function of subconsciousness._
Indeed, we can safely affirm that the last four centuries, and even
the last four decades, have more and more confirmed the reality and
indirect demonstrableness of such a presence and sense of the Infinite;
ever more or less obscurely, but none the less profoundly, operative
in the innermost normal consciousness of mankind: a presence and sense
which, though they can be starved and verbally denied, cannot be
completely suppressed; and which, though they do not, if unendorsed,
constitute even the most elementary faith, far less a developed
Historical or Mystical Religion, are simply necessary prerequisites to
all these latter stimulations and consolidations.
(1) As we have already found, it is only since Leibniz that we
know, systematically, how great is the range of every man’s Obscure
Presentations, his dim Experience as against his Clear or distinct
Presentations, his explicit Knowledge; and how the Clear depends even
more upon the Dim, than the Dim upon the Clear. And further discoveries
and proofs in this direction are no older than 1888.[428]
(2) Again, it is the growing experience of the difficulties and
complexities of Psychology, History, Epistemology, and of the apparent
unescapableness and yet pain of man’s mere anthropomorphisms, that
makes the persistence of his search for, and sense of, Objective Truth
and Reality, and the keenness of his suffering when he appears to
himself as imprisoned in mere subjectivity, deeply impressive. For the
more man feels, and suffers from feeling himself purely subjective,
the more is it clear that he is not merely subjective: he could never
be conscious of the fact, if he were. “Suppose that all your objects
in life were realized … would this be a great joy and happiness
to you?” John Stuart Mill asked himself; and “an irrepressible
self-consciousness distinctly answered ‘No.’”[429] Whether in bad
health just then or not, Mill was here touching the very depths of
the characteristically human sense. In all such cases only a certain
profound apprehension of Abiding Reality, the Infinite, adequately
explains the keen, operative sense of contrast and disappointment.
(3) And further, we have before us, with a fulness and delicate
discrimination undreamed of in other ages, the immense variety,
within a certain general psychological unity, of the great and small
Historical Religions, past and present, of the world. Facing all this
mass of evidence, Prof. Troeltsch can ask, more confidently than
ever: “Are not our religious requirements, requirements of Something
that one must have somehow first experienced in order to require It?
Are they not founded upon some kind of Experience as to the Object,
Which Itself first awakens the thought of an ultimate infinite meaning
attaching to existence, and Which, in the conflict with selfishness,
sensuality and self-will, draws the nobler part of the human will,
with ever new force, to Itself?” “All deep and energetic religion is
in a certain state of tension towards Culture, for the simple reason
that it is seeking something else and something higher.”[430] And
Prof. C. P. Tiele, so massively learned in all the great religions,
concludes: “‘Religion,’ says Feuerbach, ‘proceeds from man’s wishes’ …;
according to others, it is the outcome of man’s dissatisfaction with
the external world.… But why should man torment himself with wishes
which he never sees fulfilled around him, and which the rationalistic
philosopher declares to be illusions? Why? surely, because he cannot
help it.… The Infinite, very Being as opposed to continual becoming
and perishing,--or call It what you will,--_that_ is the Principle
which gives him constant unrest, because It dwells within him.” And
against Prof. Max Müller,--who had, however, on this point, arrived at
a position very like Tiele’s own,--he impressively insists that “the
origin of religion consists,” not in a “perception of the Infinite,”
but “in the fact that Man _has_ the Infinite within him.”--I would
only contend further that the instinct of the Infinite awakens
simultaneously with our sense-perceptions and categories of thinking,
and passes, together with them and with the deeper, more volitional
experiences, through every degree and stage of obscurity and relative
clearness. “Whatever name we give it,--instinct; innate, original,
or unconscious form of thought; or form of conception,--it is the
specifically human element in man.”[431] But if all this be true, then
the Mystics are amongst the great benefactors of our race: for it is
especially this presence of the Infinite in Man, and man’s universal
subjection to an operative consciousness of it, which are the deepest
cause and the constant object of the adoring awe of all truly spiritual
Mystics, in all times and places.