_THE EMPHASIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS UPON THE PERSONAL RELATION
IN RELIGION, AND SO UPON THE TRULY MYSTICAL_
I. THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS TENDS POSITIVELY TO EMPHASIZE THE PERSONAL
RELATION IN RELIGION
1. _Emphasizes Everywhere the Personal._--The social consciousness
sees man as preëminently the social animal, made for personal
relations, irrevocably and essentially knit up with other persons. It
deepens everywhere our sense of persons and of personal relations. It
may be itself almost defined as the sense of the fully personal.
Religion, then, if it is to be most real to men of the social
consciousness, must be personally conceived, that is, must be
distinctly seen to be a personal relation of man to God. And this
conception, as the highest we can reach, is to be followed fearlessly
to the end; only guarding it against wrong inferences from the simple
transference to God of finite conditions, and recognizing exactly in
what respects the personal relation to God is unique.[35]
The social consciousness, moreover, as we have seen, must have a
conception of religion that can really justify the social
consciousness, and, therefore, must do justice to the fully personal
in God and man; and this need also leads the social consciousness
naturally to the conception of religion as a personal relation.
2. _Requires the Laws of a Deepening Friendship in Religion._--When
this conception is carried out, it is found that growth in the
religious life, in communion with God, follows the laws of a deepening
friendship.[36] These laws can, therefore, be known and studied and
formulated; and religion, at the same time, ceases to be
unintelligible and ceases to be isolated--cut off from the rest of
life, and becomes rather that one great fundamental relation which
gives being and meaning and value to all the rest. In absolute
harmony, then, with the genesis of the social consciousness, religion,
in this conception, is bound up with the whole of life; and we catch a
glimpse of the real and final unity of life in true love, the relation
to God and the relation to man each helping everywhere the other. If
religion is truly a personal relation, and its laws are those of a
deepening friendship, then every human relation, heartily and truly
fulfilled, becomes a new outlook on God, a revelation of new
possibilities in the religious life. And, on the other hand, in that
mutual self-revelation and answering trust upon which every growing
personal relation is built, every fresh revelation of God is an
enlarging of our ideal for our relations to others. Even biblical
literature, perhaps, furnishes no more perfect example of the
interplay of the human and divine relations than Hosea's account of
his own providential leading through the human relation into the
divine, and back again from the divine to a still better human.
3. _Requires the Ideal Conditions of the Richest Life in
Religion._--And if religion is to be justified in its supreme claims
by the social consciousness, it must be felt to offer, besides, the
ideal conditions of the richest life. As a personal relation to God,
religion need not shrink from this test. Our great needs are character
and happiness. Psychology seems to me to point to two great means and
to two accompanying conditions of both character and happiness. The
means are association and work; the corresponding conditions are
reverence for personality, and objectivity--the mood of both love and
work. The great essentials, therefore, to the richest life are (1)
association in which personality is respected, and (2) work in which
one can lose himself. Now, when would these conditions become ideal?
On the one hand, as to association, when the association is with him
who is of the highest character and of the infinitely richest life,
and relation to whom is fundamental to every other personal relation;
when, secondly, God is made concrete and real to us in an adequate
personal revelation of his character, and of his love toward us; and
when, third, the association is individualized for each one, who
throws himself open to God, in God's spiritual presence in us,
constantly and intimately, and yet _unobtrusively_, coöperating with
us. And, on the other hand, as to work, when the work is God-given
work, to which one is set apart, and in which he may lose himself with
joy. These are the ideal conditions of the richest life. Just these
ideal conditions Jesus declared actualities. For the fulfilment of
just these, in the case of his disciples, he prayed in his double
petition,--"Keep them," "Sanctify them," "Keep them in thy name," that
is, through the divine association. "Sanctify them"--set them apart
unto their God-given work. "As thou hast sent me into the world, even
so have I also sent them into the world." Such a conception of
religion can fairly claim to meet, broadly and deeply, the most
exacting demands of the social consciousness for emphasis upon the
personal relation in religion.
II. THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS THUS KEEPS THE TRULY MYSTICAL
I have no predilection for the term mystical, and would gladly confine
it to what I have termed the neo-platonic or falsely mystical, were it
not that, in spite of the dictionaries and the histories of philosophy
and the histories of doctrine, the term is used in two quite different
senses. Many, it seems to me, are defending what they call the
mystical in religion, who have no idea of defending what Herrmann and
Nash call mystical. And many, on the other hand, are defending and
teaching the falsely mystical through an undefined fear that else they
will lose the truly mystical. Theology and religion both greatly need
a clear discrimination of terms here. Many are involved, in both
living and thinking, in a self-contradiction, which they feel but
cannot state; and are urging with themselves and with others a means
of religious life and a corresponding method of conception, which
really contradict their highest convictions in other lines of life and
thought. Can we find our way out of this confusion?
If one studies carefully the historical representatives of mysticism,
and especially such a strong type as Jacob Böhme, whom Erdmann calls
the "culmination of mysticism," and still keeps his head, certain
dangers in mysticism, it would seem, must become apparent. And it may
be worth while to attempt a brief, but definite, analysis of the
justifiable and unjustifiable elements in these mystical movements.
1. _The Justifiable and Unjustifiable Elements in Mysticism._--(1) The
first danger in mysticism seems to me to be the tendency to make
simple emotion the supreme test of the religious state. Whether this
emotion is thought of as ecstatic--such as some of the old mystics
called "being drunk with God," or, as quietistic--in which
imperturbability, passionlessness, become the highest good--is
comparatively indifferent. The justifiable element here is the
insistence that religion is real and is life; for feeling is perhaps
the most powerful element in the sense of reality. So James says:
"Speaking generally, the more a conceived object excites us, the more
reality it has."[37] The unjustifiable element is the perilous
subjection of the rational and ethical. Such a view must always lack
any positive and adequate conception of our active life and vocation
in the world.
(2) A second closely connected danger in mysticism is the tendency
toward mere subjectivism. There is here a justifiable element in the
emphasis on one's own personal conviction and faith; an unjustifiable
element in the tendency to underrate anything but the purely
subjective, to ignore all correcting influences from others, from the
church, and from the Scriptures.
(3) A third danger follows from this: the marked tendency to
underestimate the historical. The justifiable element here is, again,
the emphasis on personal conviction and faith; the unjustifiable
element is the tendency toward the greatest one-sidedness, and toward
emptiness, especially of ethical content. Advising our young people
simply to "listen to God," without the strongest insistence upon the
historical revelation of God at the same time, is exposing them to the
great danger of mistaking for an indubitable, divine revelation the
veriest vagary that may chance in their empty-mindedness next to come
into their thought. With the reason in supposed abeyance, the door is
thus thrown open to the grossest superstitions. Honest attempts to
deepen the religious life may thus become dangerous assaults upon true
religion.
(4) A fourth danger in mysticism is so strong a tendency toward
vagueness, that the common mind is not without warrant in identifying
mysticism and mistiness. The justifiable element here is in the real
difficulty of expressing the full content of the entire religious
experience; the unjustifiable element is, once more, the slighting of
the historical, the ethical, and the rational, especially in talking
much of the contradictions of reason, and of what is above reason.
Mysticism naturally lacks positive content.
(5) Another danger--the tendency toward pantheism--comes in partly, as
Herrmann has suggested, as a meeting of this lack of content, and
partly as the logical outcome of such an insistence upon losing
oneself in God as amounts to a being swept out of one's self--a loss
of clear and rational self-consciousness, which is next interpreted
speculatively as a real absorption in God, and is then made the goal.
This is the familiar road of Indian and neo-platonic mysticism, and
its phenomena are real enough, but probably of only the slightest
religious significance. Tennyson tells somewhere of the immense sense
of illumination that came to him once from simply repeating
monotonously his own name--"Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson." This
may be as effective as looking at the end of one's nose and
ceaselessly reiterating "Om," as does the Hindu ascetic. A still
shorter and more certain method is through nitrous-oxide-gas
intoxication, of which Professor James says: "With me, as with every
other person of whom I have heard, the key-note of the experience is
the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical
illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of
almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of
being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity, to which its normal
consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety returns, the
feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few
disjointed words and phrases as one stares at a cadaverous-looking
snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black
cinder left by an extinguished brand." "The immense emotional sense of
reconciliation," he felt to be the characteristic mood. "It is
impossible to convey," he says, "an idea of the torrential character
of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in
this experience."[38]
Now it is not safe to ignore such facts, when we are seriously trying
to estimate the religious significance of intense emotional
experiences, the reality of which we need not at all question. The
vital question is, not that of the reality of the experiences, but
that of the real cause of the experiences; and the only possible test
of this is rational and ethical. But from this test, mysticism tends
from the start to shut itself off, and so, assuming the experience to
be truly religious, ends often in virtual pantheism.
The justifiable element in this insistence upon absorption in God is
the necessary moral relation of complete surrender to God. The
unjustifiable element is in belittling the personal in both God and
man, and in making essentially religious an experience that has almost
nothing of the rational and ethical in it, and that, on that very
account, fosters the irreverent familiarity with Christ so deplored by
more than one careful student of mysticism. A natural and common and
most dangerous accompaniment of such an intense emotional experience
is the tendency afterward, to excuse sin in oneself. In the case of
the most conscientious, it is worth noting, such an emphasis upon
intense experiences tends to lead them to distrust the reality of the
normal Christian experience if they have not had these intense
emotions, or if they have had them, tends to bring them into despair
when they find these marked experiences actually proving less powerful
in effects upon life than they had expected.
(6) The last danger in mysticism, to which reference will be made, is
the tendency to extravagant symbolism. This is closely connected with
"the immense emotional sense of reconciliation," and is much stronger
by nature in some than in others. The born mystic finds his own
subjective views symbolized everywhere, and is in grave danger of
being led into an ingenious, practically unconscious intellectual
dishonesty. The justifiable element here is that sense of the unity
and worth of things which is the most fundamental conviction of our
minds. The unjustifiable element has been sufficiently indicated.
The justifiable elements in mysticism, then, may be said to include:
the insistence on the legitimate place of feeling in religion as a
real and vital experience; the emphasis on one's own conviction and
faith; the real difficulty of expressing the full meaning of the
religious experience; the demand for a complete ethical surrender to
God; and the faith in the real unity and worth of the world in God.
Now if one tries to bring together these justifiable elements in
mysticism, the truly mystical may all be summed up as simply a protest
in favor of the whole man--the entire personality. It says that men
can experience and live and feel and do much more than they can
logically formulate, define, explain, or even fully express. Living is
more than thinking.
2. _The Protest in Favor of the Whole Man._--The element to which
mysticism has tried most to do justice is feeling, and so it has been
liable to a new and dangerous one-sidedness. But the truly mystical
must be a protest alike against a narrow juiceless intellectualism,
against a narrow moralistic rigorism, and against a blind and
spineless sentimentalism. It is a protest particularly against making
the mathematico-mechanical view of the world the only view; against
making logical consistency the sole test of truth or reality; against
ignoring all data, except those which come through the intellect
alone; that is, against trying to make a part, not the whole, of man
the standard; in other words, against ignoring the data which come
through feeling and will--emotional, æsthetic, ethical, and religious
data, as well as those judgments of worth which underlie reason's
theoretical determinations.
Man stands, in fact, everywhere face to face with an actual world of
great complexity, that seems to him at first what James says the
baby's world is, "one big blooming buzzing confusion;" "and the
universe of all of us is still to a great extent such a confusion,
potentially resolvable, and demanding to be resolved, but not yet
actually resolved, into parts."[39] In one sense, man's whole task is
to think unity and order into this confusion. The problem really
becomes that of thinking the universe through in several kinds of
terms, and then finally bringing all together into one comprehensive
view. All these are alike ideals which the mind sets before itself.
The easiest of these problems is the attempt to think the world
through, in mathematico-mechanical terms. But the attempt to think the
world through in æsthetic or ethical or religious terms is equally
legitimate, though it is more difficult. Not only, then, is the
mathematico-mechanical view not the sole justifiable view, but it
really has its justification in an ideal, and success in this attempt
affords just encouragement for the hope of success in the other more
difficult problems.[40]
The truly mystical holds, then, that the narrow intellectualism is
unwarranted, because natural science, the mechanical view of the
world, is itself an ideal--the "child of duties," as Münsterberg calls
it--and so cannot legitimately rule out other ideals; because we have
just as immediate a conviction concerning the worth, as concerning the
logical consistency of the world; because a narrow intellectualism
would make conscious life but a "barren rehearsal" of the outer world,
without significance; because if we can trust the indications of our
intellect, we ought to be able to trust the indications of the rest of
our nature; and because, thus, the only possible key and standard of
truth and reality are in ourselves--the whole self, and "necessities
of thought" become necessities of a reason which means loyally to take
account of all the data of the entire man.
And the same point may be thus stated. We use the word rational in two
quite distinct senses: in the narrow sense, as meaning simply the
intellectual; in the broad sense, as indicating the demands of the
entire man. The true mysticism stands for the broadly rational.
So, too, we speak of the necessary fundamental assumption of the
honesty or sincerity of the world; but this includes two quite
distinct propositions: one, that the world must be thinkable,
conceivable, construable, a logically consistent whole, a sphere for
rational thinking,--where the test is consistency; the other, that the
world must be worth while, must not mock our highest ideals and
aspirations, must in some true and genuine sense satisfy the whole
man, be a sphere for rational living,--where the test is worth. All
our arguments go forward upon these two assumptions. Now, a true
mysticism contends that the second principle is as rational as the
first, though it must be freely granted that it is not as easy to
employ it for detailed conclusions, and it is consequently much more
liable to abuse. The true mysticism wishes to be not less, but more,
rational. It knows no shorthand substitute for the hard and steady
thinking of the philosopher, or for the historical experience of the
prophet; it needs and uses both.
In all this, it is plain that the truly mystical is a legitimate
outgrowth of the emphasis of the social consciousness upon recognition
of the entire personality. Phillips Brooks finds just this in the
intellectual life of Jesus. "The great fact concerning it is this," he
says, "that in him the intellect never works alone. You never can
separate its workings from the complete operation of the entire
nature. He never simply knows, but always loves and resolves at the
same time."[41]
3. _The Self-Controlled Recognition of Emotion._--Moreover, it
probably may be fairly claimed that all of the mystical recognition of
the emotional which is valuable or even legitimate, is preserved, and
far more safely and sanely conceived, in a strictly personal
conception of religion. It may well be doubted, if it is possible in
any other way, both to do justice to feeling in religion, and at the
same time to keep feeling in its proper place. Is it possible briefly
to indicate both the recognition of emotion and the control of emotion
in religion?
The true mysticism recognizes that the supreme joy is "joy in personal
life"--joy in entering into the revelation of a person; and it
believes with reason that a growing acquaintance with God must have
such heights and depths of meaning as no other personal relation can
have. It is not, therefore, afraid or distrustful of true emotion--of
joy or peace, of intense longing or of keen satisfaction--in the
religious life.
But the true mysticism knows at the same time that deep revelation of
a person is made only to the reverent, that the conditions are in the
highest degree ethical, and above all must be recognized to be so in
religion. It does view, then, with deep distrust an emotional emphasis
in religion that ignores the ethical. It cannot forget that Christ
thought that everything must be tested by its fruits in life. Paul,
too, insisted on applying the test of an active ministering love to
the highly valued emotional experiences of the Corinthians; and writes
to the Galatians that there is but one infallible proof of the working
of the Spirit in them--a righteous life: "love, joy, peace,
longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance."
And a true mysticism knows that the spirit, reverent of personality,
leads to a self-restraint that does not seek the emotional experience
simply as such on _any_ conditions; but, knowing the supreme
psychological conditions of happiness and character and influence, it
loses itself in an unselfish love and in absorbing work, and
understands that it must simply let the experiences come. It will have
nothing, therefore, to do with strained emotion, or with the working
up of feeling for its own sake. It seeks health, not merely the signs
of health. It prizes, therefore, the joy that simply proclaims itself
as the sign of the normal life and so positively strengthens and
cheers, but it will have nothing of the strain of emotion which is
drain.
It is interesting to notice that it is exactly this true psychological
attitude concerning the emotional life that Phillips Brooks believed
that he found perfectly reflected in Jesus. "The sensitiveness of
Jesus to pain and joy," he says, "never leads him for a moment to try
to be sad or happy with direct endeavor; nor, is there any sign that
he ever judges the real character of himself or any other man by the
sadness or the happiness that for the moment covers his life. He
simply lives, and joy and sorrow issue from his living, and cast their
brightness and their gloominess back upon his life; but there is no
sorrow and no joy that he ever sought for itself, and he always kept a
self-knowledge underneath the joy or sorrow, undisturbed by the
moment's happiness or unhappiness."[42]
How far from this objectivity and this healthful emotional life is the
atmosphere of most of our devotional books, and, one might say, of all
the manuals of ordinary mysticism! That this difficulty should
confront us in devotional literature is very natural; for such writing
commonly aims to give the emotional sense of reality in religion; and
is, therefore, particularly under the temptation to show and to
produce a straining after the emotion, as for its own sake. Moreover,
the very introspection, almost inevitably involved in the reading and
writing of devotional books, tends to bring about an artificial change
in the religious experience, and so to introduce into it the abnormal.
But the social consciousness, so far as it affects religion, not only
tends to draw away from the falsely mystical, and to emphasize the
personal, and so to keep the truly mystical, but it is even more plain
that it must tend to insist upon the ethical in religion.
[35] Cf. King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, p. 201 ff.
[36] _Op. cit._, pp. 210 ff.
[37] James, _Psychology_, Vol. II, p. 307.
[38] James, _The Will to Believe_, pp. 294, 295.
[39] _Psychology_, Briefer Course, p. 16.
[40] Cf. James, _Psychology_, Vol. II, 633-677; especially 633, 634,
667, 671, 677; Münsterberg, _Psychology and Life_, pp. 23-28.
[41] Brooks, _The Influence of Jesus_, p. 219.
[42] _The Influence of Jesus_, p. 156.