_THE OPPOSITION OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS TO THE FALSELY MYSTICAL_
I. WHAT IS THE FALSELY MYSTICAL?
Two very clear answers made from different points of view deserve
attention.
1. _Nash's Definition._--In trying to set forth the "main mood and
motives of religious speculation" in the early Christian centuries,
Professor Nash takes, as perhaps the two strongest influences in
determining the type of man to whom Christian apologetics had then to
appeal, Philo and Plotinus, and says: "By what road shall the mind
enter into a deep and intimate knowledge of God? That is the decisive
question. Plotinus the Gentile and Philo the Jew are at one in their
answer. The reason must rise above reasoning. It must pass into a
state that is half a swoon and half an ecstasy before it can truly
know God. Philo gave up for the sake of his theory, the position of
the prophets. Plotinus, for the same theory, forsook the position of
Plato and Aristotle. The prophets conceived the inmost essence of
things, the being and will of God, as a creative and redemptive force
that guided and revealed itself through the career of a great national
community. Plato and Aristotle conceived the essence of life as a
labor of reason; and, for them, the labors of reason found their
sufficient refreshment and inspiration in those moments of clear
synthesis which are the reward of patient analysis. Revelation came to
the prophet through his experience of history. To the philosopher it
came through hard and steady thinking. But Philo and Plotinus together
declared these roads to be no thoroughfares. The Greek and the Jew met
on the common ground of a mysticism that sacrificed the needs of sober
reason and the needs of the nation to the necessities of the
monk."[29] Mysticism is here conceived as unethical, unhistorical, and
unrational.
2. _Herrmann's Definition._--Herrmann's definition of mysticism is the
second one to which attention is directed. He says: "When the
influence of God upon the soul is sought and found solely in an inward
experience of the individual; when certain excitements of the emotions
are taken, with no further question, as evidence that the soul is
possessed by God; when, at the same time, nothing external to the soul
is consciously and clearly perceived and firmly grasped; when no
thoughts that elevate the spiritual life are aroused by the positive
contents of an idea that rules the soul--then that is the piety of
mysticism. He who seeks in this wise that for the sake of which he is
ready to abandon all beside, has stepped beyond the pale of Christian
piety. He leaves Christ and Christ's Kingdom altogether behind him
when he enters that sphere of experience which seems to him to be the
highest."[30] The marks of mysticism for Herrmann, then, are: that it
is purely subjective; that it is merely emotional and unethical; and
hence that it has no clear object, and is abstract, unrational,
unhistorical, and so unchristian.
II. THE OBJECTIONS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS TO THE FALSELY MYSTICAL
Against this neo-platonic, falsely mystical conception of religion,
the social consciousness seems to be clearly arrayed, and, so far as
the social consciousness influences religion, it will certainly tend
to draw it away from this falsely mystical idea.
1. _Unethical._--For, in the first place, this neo-platonic conception
of religion has nothing distinctly ethical in it. The ethical is
manifestly not made the test of true religious experience, as it is in
the New Testament. The social consciousness, on the other hand, is
predominantly and emphatically ethical, and can have nothing to do
with a religion in which ethics is either omitted or is wholly
subordinate. At this point, therefore, the pressure of the social
consciousness is strongly against a neo-platonic mysticism.
2. _Does not Give a Real Personal God._--In the second place, the
social consciousness cannot get along with the falsely mystical,
because it does not give a real personal God. Let us be clear upon
this point. Is not Herrmann right when he says that all that can be
said of the God of this mysticism is "that he is not the world? Now
that is precisely all that mysticism has ever been able to say of God
as it conceives him. Plainly, the world and the conception of it are
all that moves the soul while it thinks thus of God. Only
disappointment can ensue to the soul whose yearning for God in such
case keeps on insisting that God must be something utterly different
from the world. If such a soul will reflect awhile on the nature of
the God thus reached, the fact must inevitably come to the surface
that its whole consciousness is occupied with the world now as it was
before, for evidently it has grasped no positive ideas--nothing but
negative ideas--about anything else. Mysticism frequently passes into
pantheism for this very reason, even in men of the highest religious
energy; they refuse to be satisfied with the mere longing after God,
or to remain on the way to him, but determine to reach the goal
itself, and rest with God himself."[31]
Now we have already seen that the social consciousness can find
adequate support and power and motive only in faith that its purpose
is God's purpose, that the deepest thing in the universe is an ethical
purpose, conceivable only in a personal God; and, therefore, neither
an empty negation nor pantheism can ever satisfy it.
3. _Belittles the Personal in Man._--The false mysticism, moreover,
belittles the personal in man as well as in God; for it does not treat
with real reverence either the personality, the ethical freedom, the
sense of obligation, or the reason of man. This whole thought of "a
state that is half a swoon and half an ecstasy" is a sort of swamping
of clear self-consciousness and definite moral initiative, in which
the very reality of man's personality consists. It is a heathen, not a
Christian, idea of inspiration which demands the suppression of the
human, whether in consciousness, in will, in reason, or by belittling
the sense of obligation to others. But mysticism has at least tended
toward failure in all these respects.
And yet, from the time that Paul argued with the Corinthians against
their immense overestimation of the gift of speaking with tongues,
this fascination of the merely mystical has been felt in Christianity.
(1) The very mystery and unintelligibility of the experience, (2) its
ecstatic emotion, (3) its sense of being controlled by a power beyond
one's self, and (4) its contrast with ordinary life--all these
elements make the mystical experience seem to most all the more
divine, although in so judging they are applying a pagan, not a
Christian, standard. So far as these experiences have value, it is
probably due to the strong and realistic sense which they give of
being in the presence of an overpowering being. If thoroughly
permeated and dominated with other elements, this sense is not without
its value.
But it is interesting to notice that, although Paul does not deny the
legitimacy of the gift of speaking with tongues, he nevertheless
absolutely subordinates it, and insists that the most ecstatic
religious emotions are completely worthless without love. Evidently
the considerations which weighed most with the Corinthians in valuing
the gift of unintelligible ecstatic utterance weighed little with
Paul; and one can see how Paul implicitly argues against each of those
considerations: (1) God is not an unknown, mystic force, but the
definite, concrete God of character, shown in Christ. (2) He speaks to
reason and will as well as to feeling, and he best speaks to feeling
when he speaks to the whole man. True religious emotion must have a
rational basis and must move to duty. (3) Religion, he would urge, is
a self-controlled and voluntary surrender to a personal God of
character, not a passive being swept away by an unknown emotion. (4)
God has most to give, be assured, he would have added, in the _common_
ways of life.
Now, in every one of these protests, the social consciousness
instinctively joins. It cannot rest in a conception of religion that
belittles the personal in God or man; for it is itself an emphatic
insistence upon the fully personal. And it can, least of all, get on
with the mystical ignoring of the rational and the ethical, for it
holds that the social evolution moves steadily on to a rational
like-mindedness, and to a definitely ethical civilization. Giddings
puts the sociological conclusion in a sentence: "It is the rational,
ethical consciousness that maintains social cohesion in a progressive
democracy."[32] Now that which is clearly recognized as the goal in
the relations of man to man will not be set aside as unwarranted or
subordinate in the relations of man to God. And we may depend upon it.
4. _Leaves the Historically, Concretely Christian._--Once more, the
social consciousness cannot approve of the mystical conception of
religion in its ignoring, in its highest state, the historically and
concretely Christian. With mysticism's subjective, emotional, and
abstract conception of the highest communion with God, and of the way
thereto, the historical and concrete at best can be to it only
subordinate means, more or less mysteriously connected with the
attainment of the goal, and left behind when once the goal is reached.
The social consciousness, on the other hand, requires historical
justification, and definitely builds on the facts of the historical
social evolution.
In the case of the prophets and psalmists, for example, who alone in
the ancient world most fully anticipated the modern social feeling,
the social consciousness plainly arose in the face of the concrete
historical life of a people. No result of modern Old Testament
criticism is more certain. So that, speaking of "the religious aspects
of the social struggle in Israel," McCurdy can use this strong
language: "It is not too much to say that this conflict, intense,
uninterrupted, and prolonged, is the very heart of the religion of the
Old Testament, its most regenerative and propulsive movement. To the
personal life of the soul, the only basis of a potential, world-moving
religion, it gave energy and depth, assurance and hopefulness, repose
and self-control, with an outlook clear and eternal."[33] But it was
this standpoint of the prophets that the falsely mystical conception
of religion abandoned. We may well take to heart, in our estimate of
mysticism, the gradual but steady elimination of ecstasy in the
development of Israel, and its practically total absence in those we
count in the highest sense prophets.[34]
The social consciousness, moreover, has almost entirely to do with
men, and hence naturally must lay stress on human history, rather than
on nature, as a source of religious ideas. Indeed, it will have no
doubt that what nature is made to mean religiously will be chiefly
determined by the prevalent social ideals. It can, therefore, least of
all ignore the historical in Christianity.
The social consciousness recognizes increasingly, too, with the
clearing of its own ideals and with the deepening study of the
teaching of Jesus, that it really is only demanding, in the concrete,
and in detailed application to particular problems, and to all of
them, the spirit shown in its fullness only in Christ, as Professor
Peabody's eminently sane treatment of the social teaching of Jesus
seems to me fairly to have proven. The social consciousness,
therefore, cannot help becoming more and more consciously and
emphatically Christian.
In a single sentence, because of the steps of its own long evolution,
the social consciousness instinctively distrusts the highly emotional,
unless it is manifestly under equally strong rational control, and
unless it has equal ethical insight and power, and is historically
justified. It tends, therefore, necessarily to draw away from the
falsely mystical in religion, which is lacking in all these respects.
And the same reasons, which array the social consciousness against the
falsely mystical in religion, lead it into natural sympathy with a
positive emphasis upon the personal, the ethical, and the historically
concretely Christian in religion.
[29] Nash, _Ethics and Revelation_, p. 33.
[30] Herrmann, _The Communion of the Christian with God_, pp. 19, 20.
[31] Herrmann, _Op. cit._, p. 27.
[32] Giddings, _Elements of Sociology_, p. 321; cf. also pp. 155 ff,
302, 320, 327.
[33] McCurdy, _History, Prophecy, and the Monuments_, Vol. II, p. 223;
cf. pp. 214, ff.
[34] G. A. Smith, _The Book of the Twelve Prophets_, Vol. I, pp. 30,
84, 89; Cornill, _The Prophets of Israel_, pp. 41, 46; _The Expository
Times_, Jan., Feb., 1902, article, _Prophetic Ecstasy_.