doctrine of the Atonement was afterwards built, Paul seems to be trying
to express—often by the use of traditional images, which of course
revenge themselves upon his free handling of them, as imagery so often
revenges itself upon poets—his vision of something supreme, some
enormous uplift to eternal levels, some fundamental change, achieved by,
for, in the human race. He has this vision just because, and in so far
as, this supreme thing has been achieved by, for, in him, the mystic
Paul. Behind the formula, we feel the first-hand experience. What is
this crucial change? Surely it is the fundamental mystical achievement,
the fundamental religious fact; the human soul’s conscious attainment of
God. At bottom, atonement is wanted simply and solely to help man to do
that; to enable the spirit of life to reach its goal. If we did not want
God, we should be very well satisfied as we are: but we are not
satisfied—“Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts shall find no
rest save in Thee.” No doubt Paul’s eschatological views, the whole
tendency of his time, made him connect this achievement, which he knew
at first hand, with the imminent coming of a Liberator. For him, it was
part of the preparation, the new vitality already given to those who
were destined to live the new life. Achieved in one, it permeated the
whole “new race” of spiritual men; but this is only the interpretation
which a complex of causes made him put upon the transcendent fact. The
prominence given to Paul’s legal imagery, its isolation from the general
trend of his life and thought, has made us inclined to forget all this.
But if we try to see Reality from his angle, to catch the wild accents
of his enthusiasm and his love, the theory that he seriously held
anything approaching what would be called a “commercial” theory of
atonement falls to the ground at once. That he should sometimes have
argued in this sense when cornered by Judaizing opponents, is likely
enough: and it is characteristic of the mystical temperament to ignore
the discrepancy between such intellectual exercises and the fundamental
intuition by which it lives. Life and love are as much the key-words of
Paul’s system as they are of the Fourth Gospel itself. He was the
noblest of souls; and we cannot imagine a soul with a spark of nobility
wanting atonement as a buying-off of penalty incurred, as a paying by
another of a debt which it owes, a mere saving of it from pain or any
other retribution. The living, loving soul can only want atonement as a
road-making act; a bridge thrown out to the infinite, on which man can
travel to his home in God. Now, Paul had made that journey in the
spirit. He knew already, at first hand, that Divine Reality was
accessible to him, and that this contact was the greatest thing in life.
But he knew and felt, too, that however much he, Paul, had really
achieved this new state, this fruition of Eternity, by difficult growth
from within; yet first, he could never have done it at all without the
enormous uplift of enhancing grace, that new dower of energy which was
poured in on him from beyond the confines of his own nature; and
secondly, great though the change had been, yet it was nothing compared
with the immeasurable human possibilities achieved in Christ.
For Paul, these two achievements—the victory of Christ and the victory
of the Christian soul—are intimately connected. True, one is infinitely
great, the other very little. Except Christ, “all have fallen short of
the glory”; have failed to grow up to the “fullness of the stature,” to
actualize the immense spiritual possibilities of man. Still, we are all
in the same line; partakers of the same kind of life, “grace” or
immanent Spirit, and aiming, consciously or unconsciously, at the same
goal—union with God. Now, total dependence on God, the centring of our
whole interest and attention on the Spiritual Order, is the very essence
of union with Him. Everything short of that total dependence, that
supreme rightness of relation, is trespass; a backing of the finite
against the infinite. In the death of Jesus, that total dependence, that
perfect relation, was completely achieved at last: the supreme mystic
act, the self-donation of love, was done perfectly, and in this sense
“once for all.” _Aleph, it is enough._ The spirit of man, in this “new
man,” had overcome its limitations, the downward drag of instinct, and
had leapt to the heights. This was the “redemption that is in Christ
Jesus.” In this unique vindication of humanity, this exhibition of
regnant spirit overcoming the world, Christ-Spirit crowned with
splendour all the tentative efforts of man, and, because of the
corporate nature of humanity, conferred that splendour on the race.
But there is far more in it than this. And first, the Christian’s
achievement of God, such as it is—from that of the least of believers to
that of the greatest of the mystical saints—is really and practically
conditioned by the known fact and known character of the achievement of
Christ. It is the addition of this fact, this distinct historic
happening, to the racial consciousness, which makes possible the
specially Christian apprehension of God; differentiates it, say, from
that of a Hindu or a Neoplatonic saint. A reference to the phenomena of
apperception will help us to understand this. As in the world of nature
or art our perception of each new object is governed by the images and
ideas already dominant within the mind, so, too, in the religious
sphere. If Christians had not got the idea of Calvary in their
consciousness—if the image of the surrender of Jesus, His sublime
exhibition of love and faith, were not there first as a clue, something
about which to group and arrange their spiritual intuitions—it would
make a vital difference to their interpretation of the relation of the
soul to God; and this means that the relation itself would be quite
different for the conscious self, other elements would be stressed, and
different results would flow from it. It is only because the sacrifice
of Jesus is now part of the Christian’s “apperceiving mass”—because,
coming to the contemplation of the spiritual world, he inevitably brings
the Cross with him—that he is able to make the characteristically
Christian contact with God. That Christian contact is a direct gift to
him, from the historic Person and the historic act. We approach the
Transcendent Order _with_ that, or, as Paul tersely puts it, “in
Christ”; and our fruition of Reality results, not, as some extreme
mystics have liked to think, from any “naked apprehension”—for naked
apprehension has no meaning, no content, for the mind—but from a fusion
of that which we bring with us and that to which we ascend; tradition
and experience, the past and the present. Through love of Christ the
Christian comes to the Cross, and through the Cross he enters a
spiritual region he could not reach in any other way. So we find that
even for the most transcendental of Christian contemplatives, still “in
the Cross all doth consist.” It has for him a terror and a rapture which
the judicious philosopher can never know; and reveals to him strange
secrets beyond the province of philosophy.
“Vocce legendo, en croce legendo
nel libro che c’è ensanguinato
Ca essa scrittura me fa en natura
ed en filosofia conventato;
O libro signato che dentro se’ aurato,
e tutto fiorito d’amore!”
That Cross gives the Infinite a colour which it did not have before. So,
even from the point of view of the most hardened and thorough-going
psychologist, Paul’s statement that “through one act of righteousness,
the free gift came unto all men” is literally accurate. It is true—and
that not in any conjuring-trick sense, but in a sense which fulfils on
highest levels life’s basic laws—that “by the grace of one man” “the
gift has abounded to the many,” entincturing and altering the whole
universe, and hence the whole experience, of every receptive soul;
atoning for the faulty attitude, the imperfect love, of average man.
But still this is not all. There are other laws of life gathered up in,
and redistributed from, this great lens. Essentially the idea which the
Christ of the Gospels seems to have had of His own death is the idea of
a making good of some general falling-short on life’s part: a
“filling-up of the cup” of sacrifice and surrender, to balance the other
overflowing cup of error and sin. It is not only man’s unaccomplished
aim, but God’s unaccomplished aim in life, which He is represented as
fulfilling; and the fact that this conception owes a good deal to Old
Testament prophecy need not invalidate its mystical truth. If we accept
this idea, then, as well as showing individual man the way to perfect
union with God—“building the bridge and reforming the road which leads
to the Father’s heart,” as St. Catherine of Siena has it—Christ in His
willing death is somehow performing the very object of life, in the name
of the whole race. The true business of an atoner is a constructive one.
He is called upon to heal a disharmony; bridge a gap between two things
which, though separate, desire to be one. Even the sacrificed animal of
primitive religions seems most often to be a reconciling victim, the
medium of union between the worshipper and his deity. In religions of a
mystical type, then, the Atoner or Redeemer will surely be one who makes
patent those latent possibilities of man which are at once the earnests
of his future blessedness and the causes of his present unrest. He will
achieve the completion and sublimation of our vague instinct for
sacrifice and love, and thus bridge the space between that which is most
divine in humanity and that which is most human in divinity; filling up
the measure of that “glory,” that real and divine life, of which we all
fall short, yet without which we can never be content. Is not this again
what St. Paul feels that Christ did? What he seems, at bottom, to see in
the Passion—though the imagery by which he tries to communicate it often
sounds harsh in our ears—is, the mysterious fulfilment of all cosmic
meanings; the perfect surrender to infinite ideals of Man, the compound
inhabitant of two possible orders of reality, who by this painful
self-loss achieves perfect identification with the Divine will. This
fulfilment was, as he distinctly says, the duty and destiny of the human
soul. All creation looks for it “with outstretched neck.” But all have
fallen short. Christ, the perfect man, does it, does what man was always
meant to do; and because of the corporate character of humanity, in His
utter transcendence of self-hood and of all finite categories He
inevitably lifts up, to share His union with God, all who are in union
with Him. The essence of the Atonement, then, would not lie so much in
the sacrificial act as in the lift-up of the human spirit which that act
guarantees; the new levels of life which it opens for the race. “Much
more, being reconciled, shall we be saved _in his life_,” says Paul.
“In his life” a new summit has been conquered by humanity. But are we to
stop there? Is not the attainment of that same summit, the achievement
of that life-giving surrender to the Universal Spirit—“a life-giving
life,” Ruysbroeck calls it—just what the great mystics, following as
well as they can the curve of the life of Christ, try to do according to
their measure? Theirs, after all, is the vision which sees that “there
is no other way to _life_ but the way of the Cross,” and that the human
life of Christ is “the door by which all must come in.” Thus the
spiritual victory of the Cross is for them not so much a unique, as a
pioneer act. It is the first heroic cutting of a road on which they are
to travel as far as they can; not merely the vicarious setting-right of
the balance between God and man, upset by man’s wilful sin. In their
ascent towards union with God, are not they road-makers, or at any rate
road-menders, too? Are they not forging new links between two orders of
reality, which are separate for the once-born consciousness? If so, then
we may regard each one of them as a bit of the slowly achieved atonement
of the race; that gradual pressing-on of humanity into the heart of the
Transcendent Order. For Christians, this movement was initiated by
Christ. But surely it is continued and helped by every soul in union
with Him, even those who knew not His Name; and Julian of Norwich was
right when she said that she knew she was “in the Cross with Him.”
Two things are perpetually emphasized in modern presentations of
religion. First, the stress tends more and more to be upon experience.
Nothing which authority tells us is done for us truly counts, unless we
feel and realize it as done in us. In so far as this is so, the tendency
is to a mystical concept of religion; and, speaking generally, to just
the concept of religion which is supposed to conflict with the idea of
atonement as usually understood. But, secondly, the social and corporate
character of Christianity is strongly emphasized; and, where this
corporate character is admired more than it is understood, mysticism is
harshly criticized as the religion of the spiritual individualist, a
“vertical relation,” the “flight of the alone to the Alone.” St. Paul’s
“completing opposites,” in fact, are still in the foreground of our
religious life; and so perhaps some re-statement of the solution by
which he found room for both of them, and hence both for personal
responsibility and atonement, may be possible and fruitful for us, too.
And first we notice that those enthusiasts for the corporate idea who
condemn the mystics as religious egoists seem to forget that they are
contradicting themselves; that if their vision of the Church of Christ
as a mystical _body_ be true, then the mystic’s ascent to God cannot be
a flight of the Alone. The poisonous implication of that phrase—true in
its context but always misunderstood—has stuck like mud to the white
robes of the saints. But the mystic is not merely a self going out on a
solitary quest of Reality. He can, must, and does go only as a member of
the whole body, performing as it were the function of a specialized
organ. What he does, he does for all. He is, in fact, an atoner pure and
simple: something stretched out to bridge a gap, something which makes
good in a particular direction the general falling-short. The special
kind of light or life which he receives, he receives for the race; and,
conversely, the special growth which he is able to achieve comes from
the race. He depends on it for his past; it depends on him for its
future. All are part of life’s great process of becoming; there are no
breaks. Although there is perfect individualization, there is
interpenetration too. His attainment is the attainment of the whole,
pressing on behind him, supporting him. Thus—to take an obvious
example—the achievement of peculiar sanctity by the member of a
religious order is the achievement of that order in him; and this not in
a fantastic and metaphorical sense. The support of the Rule, the
conditions of the life, the weight of tradition, the special characters
which each religious family inherits from its Patriarch, have all
contributed something to make the achievement possible; and are factors
governing the type which that achievement assumes. We recognize the
Cistercian stamp upon St. Bernard, the Dominican on Suso and Tauler, the
Carmelite on St. John of the Cross. Each such case vindicates once more
the incarnational principle; it is the true spirit of the community,
flowering in this representative of theirs, which we see. Thus, as we
may regard Christ from one point of view as supremely ideal Man
incarnate—the “heavenly man” as Paul calls Him—summing up, fulfilling,
lifting to new heights all that came before, and therefore actualizing
all that humanity was ever intended to do, and changing for ever more
the character of its future achievements; so, in a small way, we may
regard St. Teresa as Carmel, the ideal Carmel, incarnate. Each is a
concrete fact which atones for the falling-short of a whole type, and
yet is conditioned by that type. The thought of what the Carmelite life
was meant to do, the pressure of that idea seeking manifestation, did
condition Teresa’s achievement. Are we not also bound to say that the
thought of the Jewish visions of an ideal humanity, of the Son of Man
and the Suffering Servant, did condition the external accidents of the
life and death of Christ?
So as to the past. Still more as to the future are the corporate and
individual aspects of spiritual life inextricably twined together. As
that done by one is an outbirth of the whole, so that done to one may
avail for the whole. Only by staying within the circle of this thought—a
thought which surely comes very close to the doctrine of Atonement—can
we form a sane and broad idea of what the mystic, and the mystic’s
experience, mean for the race. Consider again the case of Teresa. As,
even in a time and place of considerable monastic corruption—for no one
who has read her life and letters can regard the Convent of the
Incarnation as a forcing-house of the spiritual life—still the idea of
her order conditioned her great and Godward-tending soul, and her
dedicated life filled up the measure of its glory; yet more has Teresa’s
own, separate, unique achievement conditioned the spirit of her order
ever since. All the saints which it has nourished have been salted with
her salt. All that she won has flowed out from her in life-giving
streams to others. She has been a regenerator of the religious life, has
achieved the ideal of Richard Rolle, and become a “pipe of life” through
which the living water can pass from God to man. Is not this, too,
rather near the idea of Atonement, a curiously close and faithful
imitation of Christ; especially when we consider the amount of unselfish
suffering which such a career entails?
The objective of the Christian life, we say, is union with God: that
paradoxical victory-in-surrender of love which translates us from finite
to infinite levels. Most of us in this present life and in our own
persons fall short of the glory of this. We are not all equally full of
grace; we do not all grow up to the full stature of the Sons of God; and
it is no use pretending that we do. But the mystical saint does achieve
this, and by this act of mediation—this “vicarious” achievement, if you
like to put it so—performed by a member of our social organism, the gift
does really “abound unto the many.” For what other purpose, indeed, are
these apparently elect souls bred up? What other social value can we
attribute to them than that which we see them actually possessing in
history—the value, that is, of special instruments put forth by the
race, to do or suffer something which the average self cannot do, but
which humanity as a whole, in its Godward ascent, must, can, and shall
do; ducts, too, whereby fresh spiritual energy flows in to mankind;
eyes, open to visions beyond the span of average sight; parents of new
life. Carlyle said that a hero was “a man sent hither to make the divine
mystery more impressively known to us”—to atone, in fact, for the
inadequacy of our own perception of Reality, our perpetual relapses to
lower levels of life; to make a bridge between us and the Transcendent
Order. And when the hero as mystic does this, is he not in a special
sense a close imitator of Christ?
We seem to have here the highest example of a principle which is
operative through the whole of the seething complex of life, for there
is a sense on which every great personality fulfils the function of an
atoner. On the one hand he does something towards the making good of
humanity’s “falling short” in one direction or another; on the other
hand, he gives to his fellow-men—adds to their universe—something which
they did not possess before. Burke, speaking of the social contract, has
said that society is a partnership in all science, all art, every
virtue, and all perfection; and, since the ends of such a partnership
cannot be obtained but in many generations, it is a partnership between
the living, the dead, and the unborn. “Each contract of each particular
state,” he says, “is but a clause in the great primæval contract of
eternal society, _linking the lower with the higher natures_, connecting
the visible and the invisible world, according to a fixed compact
sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral
natures each in their appointed place.” In such a partnership—linking
higher and lower, visible and invisible worlds in one—the creative
spirits in every department of life may properly be called “atoners,”
for they have a corporate and racial value which is in exact proportion
to their individual achievement of reality. Thus the great artist, or
the great musician, really redeems his fellows from slavery to a lower
level of colour, form, sound. He atones for their dullness towards that
which has always been there, and endows them with new possibilities of
vision and hearing; gives them, in fact, more abundant life; is the
Door, the Way, to a wider universe. His creative acts open new gates to
the whole race. The fact that he has lived and worked has effected a
permanent change in the stream of life, which can never again be that
which it was before. If we were more accustomed, on the one hand, to
look at the achievements of religious genius from the artistic and
creative point of view, and on the other hand, to discern the work of
the Holy Spirit in the artistic as well as the religious field, I
believe that we should find a close parallel between the work of supreme
personality redeeming spirit, and the work of the great artist redeeming
sense, from servitude to old imperfections and disharmonies.
We might almost make it the test of true greatness, this wonderful power
of flinging out the filaments of life in all directions; this way in
which noble and creative personalities of every type seem to be so much
more than themselves—to count for so much more than themselves—to be, in
their generous activities, the servants of all life. They appear to be
the sum of tendencies which preceded them; and to gather those
tendencies to a focus and distribute them again, enhanced and
re-directed, to succeeding generations of souls. Such a personality has
to the full the divine power of giving and of taking. Whilst he seems
specially original, it is always true that the past, the race, nourishes
him to an enormous extent. Christ Himself conformed to this law. The
great man is rooted in history, plaited up in the life of his own time:
absorbs from the human as well as from the spiritual. His feet are in
Time, though his head is in Eternity. He is never isolated and
ring-fenced. Where he seems so, that appearance is found on examination
to be deceptive, as Dr. Rufus Jones has shown in the case of Jacob
Boehme, and Baron von Hügel in that of George Fox. So, again, the
special act, vision, or experience of the spiritual genius never ends
with him. He is a centre of divine fecundity—it is the mystics’ own
phrase. The touch of the divine life stimulates him to creation. He is a
regenerator, a whirlpool of new forces, a parent of new things. It seems
that life’s “tendency to lag behind,” its tendency _not_ to do its best,
receives its corrective in all such great spirits; and the Christian
atonement becomes the supreme, the divine manifestation of a vital law
which we find operative on every level of existence.