IN RELATION TO RELIGION
The operation of the Mystic Sense in relation to religion is commonly
called faith. Conversely, faith under another name is that operation
of the Mystic Sense which promotes health of body, which affords a
starting point for all intellectual, scientific, and other productive
pursuits, which leads character from strength to strength. The subjective
conditions under which, and the spheres in which, the Mystic Sense is
employed, differ. But the faculty itself and its _modus operandi_ are
always the same. Just as the sense of bodily sight which views the dirt
beneath our feet is the same sense which contemplates the blue sky, so
the inner sense of sight which perceives an electron, an ideal, or a
hypothesis is the same sense which sees God. It is as possible to see God
as to see a hypothesis, and as possible (not more and probably less), to
see a hypothesis as to see God.[23]
It is fitting that the most exalted operation of the Mystic Sense should
be dignified by a distinctive term, provided that in so doing no room is
given for the implication that there is a faculty, or set of faculties,
used in religion alone. A man has religious capacity because he is man,
and not because he is a specially favored individual of his kind. Man,
unless he abdicates his manhood, a task so difficult as to verge on the
impossible, must live by his Mystic Sense; he must keep touch with the
unseen, or cease to be a man. To be a man, rounded and proportioned,
complete and splendid, he must use his Mystic Sense not merely here and
there but everywhere. The Mystic Sense has as true an existence in the
whole personality, and relation to it, as the physical sense of touch,
and is as acutely sensitive to the stimulus of the spiritual phase of
reality as the body is to that of the material. It is analogous to all
the sub-divisions of the nervous system but chiefly to sight and hearing,
the most distinguished of the senses.[24]
To perceive an ideal is as real a sensation as to look at a flower.
An impression is left behind not unlike the photograph of the flower
retained on the retina of the eye and revived by act of memory and
will. But the visualizing has nothing to do with physical sense
perception, and the part of the personality thus impressed is spiritual.
To characterize tactual sensation of the body as real necessitates a
like characterization of the tactual sensation of the spirit. If it be
argued that in the latter relationship there is no certainty as to what
is phantasm and what reality, let it be remembered that the history of
science is largely a series of corrections of imperfect sense records.
A highly developed power of observation with ability for accurate
registration and correlation is the distinguishing feature of culture.
The Mystic Sense, like the bodily senses, is capable of increasingly
accurate perception by skilful and disciplined use. It takes its
beginnings in gropings like the awkward jerks of a baby’s limbs, and
develops into ordered and reliable movement by exercise and experiment,
which includes mistakes and the profit accruing to the experience.
Superstition bears the same relation to faith that a false scientific
hypothesis bears to ascertained fact. The Mystic Sense in its infant
working catches a distorted view of the ideal, as when Darwin propounded
his conception of heredity by pangenesis, and leads us astray in science;
in like manner in religion a glimpse, through a mist of ignorance and
moral deficiency, of the Absolute, eventuates in superstition. Both are
necessary stages in the training of the Mystic Sense. Similarly to the
way in which the theory of pangenesis stimulated discussion and research
so as to aid the Mystic Sense to a more accurate perception of the true
hypothesis of the manner of heredity, the superstitions of the nations
conceived in sincerity, crude and even repulsive though they be, have
contributed to the complete knowledge of God and His character which
forms our most valuable heritage.
It is not hazardous to say that the ideals and hypotheses which are still
waiting for the cognition of the Mystic Sense transcend gloriously those
thus far apprehended. This means that science is in its infancy. It is
equally true to assert that religion, so far from having fallen into
decline, is but girding itself to scale heights impatient to feel the
tread of human feet. That which is good and true in itself must persist,
whatever its crudeness and blemishes. The Mystic Sense in relation to
religion is only at the beginning of its history. Human, that is mystic,
life began at so remote a period as to be beyond the reach of research.
The operation of the Mystic Sense through many thousands of years[25]
prior to human records led the way to that ordered approach to God which
we call religion. The possibilities of its growth for the race at large
are indicated and emphasized by individual instances taken from the
common crowd. The world is just at this moment engrossed in seeing that
every one should have an opportunity of developing fine physique and of
acquiring information. It is assumed that under proper conditions a high
average may be reached. The same is to be postulated for the development
of the Mystic Sense in relation to the highest and best in religion.
Under a sufficient stimulus the average man will be able to apprehend
what now is reached only by a minority. This, however, can not come to
pass until a whole world of men strain their inner eye and quicken their
inner ear in the same direction, each contributing of his own strength to
the rest, and all to each.
The history of Christianity and its immediate progenitor, Judaism, is
the record of the highest development of the Mystic Sense in religion.
In the course of its progress the Absolute rises from a dim shadow to
the greatest Reality. It is distinctively the religion of orderly and
rational mysticism. At first, men, feeling the working of the Mystic
Sense, used it in a childish way. What was splendid in them would be
culpable in us. Abraham could consider it a call of God to slay his son:
a man of to-day could only think of it as a monstrous crime against God
and society, revolting even to contemplate. It marked a stage in the
rationalizing of faith when at the last moment Abraham saw mystically
that it was not God’s purpose that any human being should ever do at His
bidding an inhuman deed.
The most perfect individual life of faith ever lived was that of Jesus
Christ. His Mystic Sense never erred. He was never so exclusively
Divine as not to be completely human. He was God living the life of
man. He walked by faith, not by sight. Visions and ecstasies found rare
and momentary place in His experience. He reached His goal by the use
of those gifts and endowments which we have in common with Him, and
proclaimed forever to the race of men that it is the simple, steady,
patient exercise of the Mystic Sense toward a God who is revealed
as Love, which exalts human life and puts it in the way of winning
incomparable power and beauty. His reply to the query, What shall we
do, that we might work the works of God, is, This is the work of God,
that ye _believe_—believe on Him whom He hath sent. Further, He makes
the astounding prophecy, Assuredly I announce that he that believeth
on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than
these shall he do. The early Christians were distinguished from their
fellows as men who exhibited in high degree the faculty of belief so as
to be in a unique sense “Believers,” and their religion was one in which
faith played so prominent a part as to merit the name of “The Faith.”
The whole Christian era has been an era of faith or the exercise of the
Mystic Sense. No great work can be found in it, in science, literature or
religion which has not been made possible by the stimulus given to faith
by the influence of Jesus. Miracles do not cease to be miraculous when
they cease to be mysterious, and the Christian centuries are strewn with
such miracles—many of them, works of healing and moral restoration, as
great as those of Jesus. But the greater works than His still lie before
us when we have sufficiently shed materialism and committed ourselves
more implicitly to the life of faith.[26]
The disappearance into the spirit world of Jesus has made that world
human,[27] so that the Mystic Sense can be as truly at home in it as
it is in scientific research. He prepared for His withdrawal thither
by centring the attention of His friends upon it. His manifestations
after His death on the cross were primarily to the Mystic Sense of His
followers. That is to say, those unaccustomed to use the Mystic Sense in
a religious way were incapable of seeing Him. It was impossible for Him
to show Himself to the irreligious or enemies of God. This does not mean
that it was only to the Mystic Sense of believers that He manifested
Himself, but also to their bodily senses by way of the Mystic Sense.
There is much that comes to the cognizance of the Mystic Sense through
physical perception, and unless there is a refined and cultured nervous
organism there is no mystical connotation. A Peter Bell could not find
the mystical in nature.
“A primrose by a river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.”
The same primrose to a Linnæus or an Asa Gray would reveal an unseen
world. Conversely, there are some things which cannot affect our physical
being except by the way of mystical experience. Striking instances of
this sort have been suitably termed by von Hügel “psycho-physical.” They
are possible only where there is extraordinary sympathy between the
mystical and physical, the latter having been made very completely the
servant of the former. Only the mystic, or the specialist in the use of
the Mystic Sense, is eligible for such experiences. The tremendously
real fellowship with the Risen Lord of the disciples was of an ecstatic
or psycho-physical order. It degrades the Resurrection manifestations
to overemphasize their physical reality as though this, rather than the
mystical, were the important feature. Their dominant note is spiritual.
The physical perception came through the mystical. The experience of the
disciples could not be reproduced in after times with other men, for the
necessary conditions were wanting. Here and there among spiritual giants
there is a well authenticated psycho-physical experience, but it is of
phenomenal rather than of spiritual or moral value. And yet it is within
our power to see the Christ as really and effectively as the Apostles
did, though not wholly after the same manner.
St. Paul did not begin his life of faith when he had his psycho-physical
experience on the road to Damascus. He reached there a turning point
in its history. He was converted, turning his mystic powers in a new
direction. Those who were with him were not sufficiently developed to
see all that he saw or hear all that he heard.[28] His vision of Jesus
was momentary but his life of faith was continuous. If faith was at its
beginning when Abraham made his venture, it reached an illustrative
and inviting climax when St. Paul made his. It was greater for St. Paul
to espouse the cause of the Christ than to have a vision of Jesus. The
phenomenal or extraordinary does not always culminate in such courage and
devotion as his. It was because he was a mystic that he had his vision,
not because he had a vision that he became a mystic. The Apostles who
knew Jesus in the flesh had a lesser opportunity for faith than St. Paul
who saw Him but once and then after psycho-physical fashion, and who
never apprehended Him with all his bodily senses like those who saw “with
their eyes” and “beheld,” and whose “hands handled” the Word of Life. It
was fitting that St. Paul should give Christianity the impetus which made
it a world religion. The highest development of faith has assigned to it
the biggest undertaking. St. Peter with undeveloped intellectual gifts
and faith based on sight could not do what St. Paul with highly developed
reason and singular faith could do. The Risen Jesus Himself declared that
faith dependent upon physical or psycho-physical experience is of a lower
order than that in which the mystic sense is independent of phenomenal
action of the bodily sense—Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed:
blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
The great multitude of mortals will always be outside of psycho-physical
experiences. There is no religious loss in the fact. Rather the
contrary. That which gives the soul its permanent hold upon moral and
spiritual realities and regard for them in mystics is not their rare
psycho-physical experiences, but the same exercise of the Mystic Sense
in the daily round of commonplace religious duty which is open to every
human being, with like wonderful results upon character. A phenomenal
spiritual occurrence in the case of one who was not living a religious
life would be a mere wonder, perhaps even productive of spiritual
harm.[29] Such experiences are never to be sought for. If they come their
peril is not less than their inspiration.
“The trivial round, the common task,
Will furnish all we need to ask,
Room to deny ourselves, a road
To bring us daily nearer God.”
It is a great barrier to religious effort among the crowd, for those
living the life of faith, to give the impression that their experience is
one of a series of ecstasies. It is no more so than is that of a student
of science or higher mathematics. It is the life of faith open to all men
which forms the religious life of the best men and the best religious
life of all men—the constant placing of God before the Mystic Sense in
a way not dissimilar from that in which the scientist approaches his
hypothesis.
“Think not the Faith by which the just shall live
Is a dead creed, a map correct of heaven,
Far less a feeling fond and fugitive,
A thoughtless gift, withdrawn as soon as given;
It is an affirmation and an act
That bids eternal truth be present fact.”
Though the Mystic Sense is not the sole religious faculty, it holds the
primacy here as in every distinctively human activity. Used with reason
its operation becomes reasonable or rational faith. Its opposite is not
reason but sight, that is to say, the unaided findings of the bodily
senses of which sight, being the most princely, is representative. Hence
St. Paul’s contrast—we walk by faith, not by sight. Even here it is
hardly fair to say there is antagonism. Sight is the enemy of faith only
when it refuses to be an ally. Sight sees, faith in-sees and therefore
fore-sees. Sight has boundaries which it cannot pass. Faith has horizons
which retreat as it advances.
Faith has become increasingly rational as the world has grown older and
experience has been added to experience. Its explorations in the world
of ideals have been more frequent and daring with the advance of time.
Consequently the man of to-day makes his flights thitherwards with a
fulness of assurance on rational grounds or grounds of high probability
which would have been impossible to an Abraham. If the triumphs open
to faith have multiplied, so have the deterrent forces holding it back
or set in battle array to thwart or otherwise impair it. The commonest
injury wrought upon faith is the deflecting of it from the worthy to
the unworthy or less worthy. If a man’s Mystic Sense, acute in other
directions, is dormant or sluggish in religion, the reason is usually
to be found, I think, in circumstances analogous to those which make a
student of _belles lettres_, for instance, indifferent to science, or a
philosopher careless of the exploits of commerce, cases of which are not
wanting. The mind finds higher pleasure among certain persons in being
exclusive and technical than in being catholic. So the Mystic Sense can
fall short of its highest employment simply because there is not in
its possessor the will to employ it commensurately with its capacity.
The explanation why some men are not actively religious must be sought
elsewhere than in the contention that they are short a faculty. The
Mystic Sense, which by virtue of their humanity they possess, is not
employed by them religiously from whatever reason—defective interest,
prejudice, antagonism, environment. Nevertheless the same inner sense is
pushed to its fullest activity in other directions. The faculty which by
a daring leap fixes on the evolutionary hypothesis, or with imaginative
subtlety suggests the plot of a novel, is the self-same one which enables
us to say, “Our Father, which art in heaven.” The consideration of
vicious men who are irreligious does not come within the purview of this
discussion. Religion and vice are mutually exclusive, though piety and
immorality are not, so that we have the anomaly of immoral character
revelling in pious practices.
One thing remains to be said. The use of the Mystic Sense in religion,
more perhaps than in any other sphere, cannot begin and end in
individualism. It is requisite for each to submit the results of his
mystic excursions and explorations to the conclusions of the most
advanced religion. Mystic observation and experience must have the
support and purification of universal mystic experience that will
distinguish between the false and the true, phantasm and reality, and
deliver the individual from eccentricity and extravagance. In other
words, a church is more necessary than a chamber of commerce, a national
government, or an academy of science. Mystic experience must be organized
like all other experience. As the world grows older and man wiser,
organization develops and broadens. National societies and alliances
become international and a parliament of man seems a reasonable goal
toward which to press. Human life in its individual aspect finds its
fullest freedom in organization and not apart from it. The idea of the
Catholic Church is as old as Christianity. One Body, one spirit, one
Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, said St. Paul before Christianity was fifty
years old—and the use of the Mystic Sense independently of organized
Christian experience cannot hope to reach valuable results. Reformers
of religion are eccentrics and detract from their service so far as
they ignore the religious experience of the ages by assuming exclusive
positions or lifting a doctrine out of its setting. Our Lord never
broke with the faith of His fathers. His last act was to partake of the
Passover according to the law. It was the Jews who broke with Him. He
came not to destroy but to fulfill. The only setting for any one part of
the truth is all the rest of the truth. The only relationship big enough
for any one man is all the rest of mankind. When at last the disturbed
and broken Christian Church comes to rest in the large scheme of unity
planned by its Founder, then the mystical life of man will gain a power
and splendor which now is but a vision and a hope.
* * * * *
This concludes my endeavor to credit the Mystic Sense with that dignity
and position of importance which belongs to it by right. The attempt is
crude and the brilliant vision which I had at the beginning of my task
has become dimmer under the process of putting it into words. Whatever
has been written stands as a contribution of thought and experience which
cannot be of much value until it has been purified from the dross of
individualism through the findings of religion and science, and lost in
the great volume of truth to which I submit it with reverence and loyalty.
FOOTNOTES
[1] It is only partially true to say that concept follows upon percept.
Their action is simultaneous more nearly than consecutive. Conceptualism
as a complete system cannot perhaps stand but in its origin it was a
healthy reaction against both nominalism and realism, as well as a
mediator combining the good in both.
[2] Heb. xi:1.
[3] VON HÜGEL, _The Mystical Element of Religion_, vol. ii, p. 264.
[4] Mk. x:23.
[5] Mk. x:24, 25.
[6] Ψυχικὸς δὲ ἄνθρωπος οὐ δέχεται τὰ τοῦ Πνεύματος τοῦ Θεοῦ; μωρία γὰρ
αὐτῷ ἐστι, καὶ οὐ δύναται γνῶναι, ὅτι πνευματικῶς ἀνακρίνεται. 1 Cor. ii,
14.
[7] “True priority and superiority lies, not with one of these
constituents against the other, but with the total subjective—objective
interaction or resultant, which is superior, and indeed gives their place
and worth to, those interdependent parts.”—VON HÜGEL’S _Mystical Element
of Religion_, vol. ii, p. 114.
[8] TYRRELL’S _Christianity at the Cross Roads_, p. 240.
[9] Quoted by VON HÜGEL, vol. ii, p. 18.
[10] CHARLOTTE PERKINS STETSON’S _In this our World_.
[11] _The Mystical Element of Religion_, vol. ii, pp. 57, 58.
[12] ROYCE’S _The World and the Individual_, First Series, p. 58.
[13] See MACFIE’S _Science, Matter and Immortality_, an admirable volume
on this entire topic.
[14] DARWIN’S _Autobiography_.
[15] Sir JOSEPH LARMOR in his Wilde Lecture (1908) quoted by Sir OLIVER
LODGE in _Reason and Belief_, p. 172.
[16] _Reason and Belief_, p. 181.
[17] _The Mystical Element of Religion_, vol. ii, p. 265.
The author quotes KANT—“we can be mediately conscious of an apprehension
as to which we have no distinct consciousness.” “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 immeasureable, whereas clear apprehensions constitute but a very
few points within the complete extent of our mental life.”
[18] “Literature consists of those writings which interpret the meanings
of nature and life in words of charm and power, touched with the
personality of the author, in artistic forms of permanent interest.”—VAN
DYKE’S _The Spirit of America_, p. 242.
[19] “The wealthy class in Rome and all over Italy began to conform
to that conventional code of propriety by which the rich seem always
destined, in the progress of civilization, to become more and more
enslaved, till finally they lost all feeling for what is serious and
genuine in life. The new generation followed their example with alacrity,
and preached the new conventions with a passionate vehemence which must
have been highly exasperating to those of their seniors who were still
attached to the simplicity of primitive manners. Amongst those who
protested against this development there was, however, one prominent
figure of the younger age, Marcus Porcius Cato, a man of rich and noble
family, and a descendant of Cato the Censor. His puritan spirit revolted
against the tyranny of fashion to which the golden youth of Rome wished
to make him conform; he would walk in the streets without shoes or
tunic, to accustom himself, as he said, only to blush at things which
were shameful in themselves, and not merely by convention.”—FERRERO’S
_Greatness and Decline of Rome_, vol. i, pp. 135, 136.
[20] KIPLING’S _If—_.
[21] DONCASTER’S _Heredity in the Light of Recent Research_ (1910), p.
113 ff.
[22] CRASHAW.
[23] A hypothesis receives passively our quest: God moves to meet us.
[24] NEWMAN in his _Dream of Gerontius_ endows the disembodied soul with
perceptive powers analogous to those of the body, saying only the sense
of sight. Thus:
_Soul._ “I cannot of thy music rightly say
Whether I hear, or touch, or taste the tones.”
... “How comes it then
That I am hearing still, and taste, and touch,
Yet not a glimmer of that princely sense
Which binds ideas in one, and makes them live?”
_Angel._ “Nor touch nor taste, nor hearing hast thou now;
Thou livest in a world of signs and types,
The presentation of most holy truths,
Living and strong, which now encompass thee.
A disembodied soul, thou hast by right
No converse with aught beside thyself;
But, lest so stern a solitude should load
And break thy being, in mercy are vouchsafed
Some lower measures of perception,
Which seem to thee, as though through channels brought,
Through ear, or nerves, or palate, which are gone.
...
How, even now, the consummated Saints
See God in heaven, I may not explicate;
Meanwhile, let it suffice thee to possess
Such means of converse as are granted thee,
Though, till that Beatific Vision, thou art blind.”
The idea underlying the Beatific Vision is the complete apprehension of
God by the complete man. Sight is chosen to denote this bliss because it
is a princely co-ordinating sense, and our Lord spoke of the heritage of
the pure in heart as being the vision of God, a heritage let it be noted,
however, for now and not merely for hereafter. It seems reasonable to
suppose that our powers of perception after death will be those mystic
powers which we enjoy and use now, though then they will be rapidly
developed as being our only perceptive powers.
This suggests the investigation in progress of psychic phenomena by
scientific methods. The result may lead to an increase of our knowledge
regarding the nature of such phenomena. But I do not see how, if
communication with the departed be possible at all, we can expect to
reach, and be reached by, them except through the Mystic Sense. The
invocation of Saints seems to me more in line with what is probable
than some of the experiments of the day. Disembodied spirits presumably
approximate the nature of God and can approach or be approached only
after a purely spiritual or mystical fashion, excepting in those rare
psycho-physical instances which are themselves contingent upon a highly
developed mystical character and experience.
[25] Progressive civilization may be said to have begun 8,000 B. C.
[26] Two things must be remembered in connection with the interpretation
of Jno. xiv ff. In the first place, these chapters, bursting as they are
with startling promises which the critic claims have not been made good,
were addressed to a select and specially trained group of followers. For
instance, Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, constitutes
a promise that could not have been made to a heterogeneous crowd. It
presupposes an understanding of the mind of Christ that keeps prayer
within its appointed limits. A promise of this sort made to a St. John
would be fulfilled, whereas it could not be fulfilled in the case of a
man who thought that a prayer for the success of his lottery ticket, or
the triumph of a competitive business scheme stained with dishonor, might
be offered in the name of Jesus. In the second place, these chapters
were written down and became accepted Scripture not less than three
quarters of a century after they were spoken, by one who, in common with
like-minded companions, had experienced the faithfulness of our Lord’s
promises. These men knew them to be true, not merely because our Lord had
said them, but also because Christian experience, had verified them. This
is so of the entire Gospel record. That was remembered and recorded which
_Christian_ experience had verified.
[27] Similarly His advent into our human world made it Divine.
[28] Acts ix, 7; xxii, 9.
[29] The miracles of Moses before Pharaoh are illustrative of that which
abounds in history—wonders hardening further an irreligious life.