Chapter 13: The First Three Ultimate Questions

The First Three Ultimate Questions. The Relations Between Morality, Mysticism, Philosophy, And Religion. Mysticism And The Limits Of Human Experience And Knowledge. Mysticism And The Nature Of Evil

I take the ultimate questions involved in the religious positions which are taken up by Catherine, and indeed by the Christian Mystics generally, and which we have studied in the preceding two chapters, to be four. In the order of their increasing difficulty they are: the question as to the relations between Morality, Mysticism, Philosophy, and Religion; that as to the Limits of Human Knowledge, and as to the special character and worth of the Mystics’ claim to Trans-subjective Cognition; that as to the Nature of Evil and the Goodness or Badness of Human Nature; and that as to Personality,--the character of, and the relations between, the human spirit and the Divine Spirit. The consideration of these deepest matters in the next two chapters will, I hope, in spite of its inevitable element of dimness and of repetition, do much towards binding together and clarifying the convictions which we have been slowly acquiring,--ever, in part, with a reference to these coming ultimate alternatives and choices.

I. The Relations Between Morality And Mysticism Philosophy And Religion

Now the first of these questions has not, for most of the more strenuous of our educated contemporaries, become, so far again, a living question at all. A morally good and pure, a socially useful and active life,--all this in the sense and with the range attributed to these terms by ordinary parlance: this and this alone is, for doubtless the predominant public present-day consciousness, the true object, end, and measure of all healthy religion; whatever is alongside of, or beyond, or other than, or anything but a direct and exclusive incentive to this, is so much superstition and fanaticism. According to this view, at least one half of Catherine’s activity at all times, and well-nigh the whole of it during her last period, would be practically worthless. Thus only certain elements of such a life would be retained even for and in religion, and even these would be bereft of all that has hitherto been held to be their specifically religious sense and setting.

1. Kant’s non-mystical religion.

It is doubtless Kant who, among the philosophers, has been the most consistent and influential in inculcating such non-Mystical Religion. “Religion,” he says in 1793, “is, on its subjective side, the cognition of all our duties as so many Divine Commandments.” “The delusion that we can effect something, in view of our justification before God, by means of acts of religious worship, is religious superstition; and the delusion that we can effect something by attempts at a supposed intercourse with God, is religious fanaticism.… Such a feeling of the immediate presence of the Supreme Being, and such a discrimination between this feeling and every other, even moral, feeling, would imply a capacity for an intuition, which is without any corresponding organ in human nature.… If then a Church doctrine is to abolish or to prevent all religious delusion, it must,--over and above its statutory teachings, with which it cannot, for the present, entirely dispense,--contain within itself a principle which shall enable it to bring about the religion of a pure life, as the true end of the whole movement, and then to dispense with those temporary doctrines.”[306]

It is deeply instructive to note how thoroughly this, at first sight, solid and triumphant view, has not only continued to be refuted by the actual practice and experience of specifically religious souls, but how explicitly it is being discredited by precisely the more delicately perceptive, the more truly detached and comprehensive, students and philosophers of religion of the present day,--heirs, let us not forget in justice to Kant, of the intervening profound development of the historical sense, and of the history and psychology of religion.--Thus that most vigorous, independent thinker, Prof. Simmel of Berlin, writes in 1904: “Kant has, I think, simply passed by the essentials of religion,--that is to say, of that reality which historically bears the name of religion. Only the reflection, that the harmony of complete happiness with complete morality is producible by a Divine Being alone, is here supposed to lead us to believe in such a Being. There is here a complete absence of that direct laying hold of the Divine by our souls, because of our intrinsic needs, which characterizes all genuine piety. And the religious sense is not recognized as an organism with a unity of its own, as a growth springing from its own root. The entirely specific character of religion, which is resolvable neither into morality nor into a thirst after happiness: the direct self-surrender of the soul to a higher reality, the giving and taking, the unification and differentiation,--that quite organic unity of the religious experience, which we can but most imperfectly indicate by a multiplicity of some such, simultaneously valid, antitheses: this, there is no evidence to show, was ever really known to Kant. What was religion for Augustine and Francis of Assisi, he was unable to reproduce in himself; indeed religion, of this type, he readily rejects as fanaticism. Here lay the limit both of his own nature and of his own times.”[307]

The rich mind of Prof. Troeltsch is, perhaps, more entirely just: “As Kant’s theory of knowledge is throughout dependent upon the state of contemporary psychology, so also is his theory of religious knowledge dependent upon the psychology of religion predominant in his day. Locke, Leibniz, Pascal had already recognized the essentially practical character of all religion; and since their psychology was unable to conceive the ‘practical’ otherwise than as the moral, it had looked upon Religion as Morality furnished forth with its metaphysical concomitants. And as soon as this psychology had become the very backbone of his conception of Religion, Morality gained an entirely one-sided predominance over Kant’s mind,--considerably, indeed, beyond his own personal feelings and perceptions.” For he remains deeply penetrated by “the conceptions of Regeneration and Redemption; the idea of divine Grace and Wisdom, which accepts the totality of a soul’s good disposition in lieu of that soul’s ever defective single good works; the belief in a Providence which strengthens the Good throughout the world against Evil; adoring awe in face of the majesty of the Supersensible”: and “all these” conceptions “are no more simply moral, they are specifically religious thoughts.”[308]

Such a fuller conception of religion is admirably insisted on by that penetrating philosopher and historian of philosophy, Prof. Windelband: “Actual Religion, in its complete reality, belongs to all the spheres of life, and yet transcends them all, as something new and sui generis. It is first an interior life--an apprehending, cognizing, feeling, willing, accomplishing. But this accomplishing leads it on to being also an exterior life: an acting out, according to their various standards, of such feeling and willing; and an outward expression of that inner life in general, in ritual acts and divine worship. Yet this worship takes it beyond the little circle of the individual, and constitutes the corporate acts of a community, a social, external organization with visible institutions. And yet Religion ever claims to be more than the whole series of such empirical facts and doings, it ever transcends mere earthly experience, and is an intercourse with the inmost nature and foundation of all reality; it is a life in and with God, a metaphysical life. All these elements belong to the complete concept of actual religion.”[309] I would add, that they each stimulate the other, the external, e.g. being not only the expression of the awakened internal, but also the occasion of that awakening.

And the great Dutch scholar, Prof. C. P. Tiele, unexcelled in the knowledge of the actual course taken by the great religions of the world, declares: “All progress, not only in Morality, but also in Science, Philosophy, Art, necessarily exerts an influence upon that of Religion. But … Religion is not, on that account, identical with Ethics any more than with Philosophy or Art. All these manifestations of the human spirit respond to certain needs of man; but none of them, not even Morality, is capable of supplying the want which Religion alone can satisfy.… Religion differs from the other manifestations of the human mind” in this, that whereas “in the domain of Art, the feelings and the imagination predominate; in that of Philosophy, abstract thought is paramount”; and “the main object of Science is to know accurately, whilst Ethics are chiefly concerned with the emotions and with the fruit they yield: in Religion all these factors operate alike, and if their equilibrium be disturbed, a morbid religious condition is the result.”[310]

2. Ritschlian modification of Kant’s view.

It is deeply interesting to note the particular manner in which Kant’s impoverishment of the concept of religion has been in part retained, in part modified, by the Ritschlian school,--I am thinking especially of that vigorous writer, Prof. Wilhelm Hermann.

(1) If in Kant we get the belief in God derived from reflection upon Goodness and Happiness, and as the only possible means of their ultimate coalescence: in Hermann we still get the Categorical Imperative, but the thirst for Happiness has been replaced by the historic figure of Jesus Christ. “Two forces of different kinds,” he says, “ever produce the certainty of Faith: the impression of an Historic Figure which approaches us in Time; and the Moral Law which, when we have heard it, we can understand in its Eternal Truth. Faith arises, when a man recognizes, in the appearance of Jesus, that symbol of his own existence which gives him the courage to recognize in the Eternal, which claims him in the Moral Imperative, the source of true life for his own self.”[311]--And these two sole co-efficients of all entirely living religion are made to exclude, as we have already seen, especially all Mysticism from the life of Faith. “True, outside of Christianity, Mysticism will everywhere arise, as the very flower of the religious development. But a Christian is bound to declare the mystical experience of God to be a delusion. Once he has experienced his elevation, by Christ alone, above his own previous nature, he cannot believe that another man can attain the same result, simply by means of recollection within his own self.… We are Christians precisely because we have struck, in the person of Jesus, upon a fact which is incomparably richer in content than the feelings that arise within ourselves.” “Only because Christ is present for us can we possess God with complete clearness and certainty.” And, with Luther,--who remained, however, thoroughly faithful to the Primitive and Mediaeval high esteem for the Mystical element of religion;--“right prayer is a work of faith, and only a Christian can perform it.” And, more moderately: “We have no desire to penetrate through Christ on to God: for we consider that in God Himself we still find nothing but Christ.”[312]

(2) Now it is surely plain that we have here a most understandable, indeed respectable, reaction against all empty, sentimental Subjectivism, and a virile affirmation of the essential importance of the Concrete and Historical. And, in particular, the insistence upon the supreme value and irreplaceable character and function of Christ is profoundly true.--Yet three counter-considerations have ever to be borne in mind.

(i) It remains certain that we do not know, or experience anything, to which we can attribute any fuller reality, which is either purely objective or purely subjective; and that there exists no process of knowing or experiencing such a reality which would exclude either the objective or the subjective factor. “Whatever claims to be fully real,” either as apprehending subject or as apprehended object, “must be an individual … an organic whole, which has its principle of unity in itself.” The truly real, then, is a thing that has an inside; and the sharp antithesis drawn, although in contrary directions, by Aristotle and by Kant, between the Phenomenal and the Intelligible worlds, does not exist in the reality either of our apprehending selves, or of our apprehended fellow-men, or God.[313]--But Hermann is so haunted by the bogey-fear of the subjective resonance within us being necessarily useless towards, indeed obstructive of, the right apprehension of the object thus responded to, that he is driven to follow the will-o’-the-wisp ideal of a pure, entirely exclusive objectivity.

(ii) Bent on this will-o’-the-wisp quest of an exclusive objectivity, he has to define all Mysticism in terms of Exclusive Mysticism, and then to reject such an aberration. “Wherever the influence of God upon the soul is sought and found solely in an interior experience of the individual soul, in an excitation of the feelings which is supposed directly to reveal the true nature of this experience, viz. in a state of possession by God, and this without anything exterior being apprehended and held fast with a clear consciousness, without the positive content of some mental contemplation setting thoughts in motion and raising the spiritual level of the soul’s life; there is Mystical Piety.”[314]

Now it is, of course, true that false Mysticism does attempt such an impossible feat as the thing at which Hermann is thus aiming. But, even here, the facts and problems are again misstated. Just now the object presented was everything, and the apprehending subject was nothing. Here, on the contrary, the apprehension by the subject is pressed to the degree of requiring the soul to remain throughout reflexly aware of its own processes.

Already in 1798 Kant had, in full acceptance of the great distinction worked out by Leibniz in the years 1701-1709, but not published till 1765, declared: “We can be mediately conscious of an apprehension as to which we have no direct consciousness”; and “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 immeasurable, whereas clear apprehensions constitute but a very few points within the complete extent of our mental life.”[315] This great fact psychologists can now describe with greater knowledge and precision: yet the observations and analyses of Pierre Janet, William James, James Ward and others, concerning Subconsciousness, have but confirmed and deepened the Leibnizian-Kantian apprehensions. Without much dim apprehension, no clear perception; nothing is more certain than this.

And it is certain, also, that this absence of reflex consciousness, of perceiving that we are apprehending, applies not only to impressions of sensible objects, or to apprehensions of realities inferior in richness, in interiority, to our own nature, but also, indeed especially, to apprehensions of realities superior, in dignity and profundity of organization, to our own constitution. When engrossed in a great landscape of Turner, the Parthenon sculptures, a sonata of Beethoven, Dante’s Paradiso; or when lost in the contemplation of the seemingly endless spaces of the heavens, or of the apparently boundless times of geology; or when absorbed in the mysterious greatness of Mind, so incommensurable with matter, and of Personality, so truly presupposed in all these appreciations yet so transcendent of even their collectivity--we are as little occupied with the facts of our engrossment, our self-oblivion, our absorption, or with the aim and use of such immensely beneficial self-oblivion, as we are, in our ordinary, loosely-knit states, occupied with the impression which, nevertheless, is being produced upon our senses and mind by some small insect or slight ray of light to which we are not giving our attention, or which may be incapable of impressing us sufficiently to be thus attended to and clearly perceived.[316] And, as in the case of these under-impressions, so in that of those over-impressions, we can often judge, as to their actual occurrence and fruitfulness, only from their after-effects, although this indirect proof will, in each case, be of quite peculiar cogency.--All this leaves ample room for that prayer of simple quiet, so largely practised by the Saints, and indeed for all such states of recollection which, though the soul, on coming from them, cannot discover definite ideas or picturings to have been contained in them, leave the soul braced to love, work, and suffer for God and man, beyond its previous level. Prof. William James is too deeply versed a Psychologist not fully to understand the complete normality of such conditions, and the entire satisfactoriness of such tests.[317]

(iii) And finally, it is indeed true that God reveals Himself to us, at all fully, in Human History alone, and within this history, more fully still, in the lives and experiences of the Saints of all the stages of religion, and, in a supreme and normative manner, in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ; that we have thus a true immanence of the Divine in the Human; and that it is folly to attempt the finding or the making of any shorter way to God than that of the closest contact with His own condescensions. Yet such a wisely Historical and fully Christian attitude would be imperilled, not secured, by such an excessive Christocentrism, indeed such Panchristism, as that of Prof. Hermann.

We shall indeed beware of all indifferentist levelling-down of the various religions of the world. For, as Prof. Robertson Smith, who knew so well the chief great religions, most wisely said, “To say that God speaks to all men alike, and gives the same communication directly to all without the use of a revealing agency, reduces religion to Pure Mysticism. In point of fact it is not true of any man that what he believes and knows of God, has come to him directly through the voice of nature and conscience.” And he adds: “History has not taught us anything in true religion to add to the New Testament. Jesus Christ still stands as high above us as He did above His disciples, the perfect Master, the supreme head of the fellowship of all true religion.”[318]

Yet we must equally guard against making even Our Lord into so exclusive a centre and home of all that is divine, as to cause Him to come into an entirely God-forsaken, completely God-forgetting world, a world which did not and could not, in any degree or manner whatsoever, rightly know, love, or serve God at all; and against so conceiving the religion, taught and practised by Him, as to deprive it of all affinity with, or room for, such admittedly universal forces and resultants of the human soul and the religious sense as are dim apprehension, formless recollection, pictureless emotion, and the sense of the Hiddenness and Transcendence of the very God, Who is also Immanent and Self-Revealing, in various degrees and ways, in every place and time. Indeed, these two forces: the diffused Religiosity and more or less inchoate religion, readily discoverable, by a generous docility, more or less throughout the world of human souls, and the concentrated spirituality and concrete, thoroughly characteristic Religion, which has its culmination, after its ample preludings in the Hebrew Prophets, in the Divine-Human figure and spirit of Jesus Christ: are interdependent, in somewhat the way in which vague, widely spread Subconsciousness requires, and is required by, definite, narrowly localized Consciousness in each human mind. Precisely because there have been and are previous and simultaneous lesser communications of, and correspondences with, the one “Light that enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world”; because men can and do believe according to various, relatively preliminary, degrees and ways, in God and a Providence, in Sin and Contrition, without a knowledge of the Historic Christ (although never without the stimulation of some, often world-forgotten, historic personality, and ever with some real, though unconscious approximation to His type of life and teaching), therefore can Christ be the very centre, and sole supreme manifestation and measure of all this light. Not only can Christ remain supreme, even though Moses and Elijah, Amos and Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel; and indeed, in their own other degrees and ways, Plato and Plotinus, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Gautama Buddha and Rabbi Akiba be all revered as God-loved and God-loving, as, in various amounts, truly, spiritually great: but only thus can His central importance be fully realized.

There is certainly much in Our Lord’s own attitude, as we have already found, to demand such a view; and Clement of Alexandria, Origen and St. Justin Martyr have emphasized it continually. And there is no necessary Naturalism here--for the position is entirely compatible with the profoundest belief in the great truth that it is Grace which everywhere produces the various degrees of God-pleasing religion to be found scattered throughout the world. Father Tyrrell has admirably said: “God’s salutary workings in man’s heart have always been directed, however remotely, to the life of Grace and Glory; of ‘the Order of mere nature,’ and its exigencies, we have no experimental knowledge … In the present order, Theism is but embryonic Christianity, and Christianity is but developed Theism: ‘purely natural’ religion is what might have been, but never was.”[319]

(3) Now this must suffice as a sketch of the relations between (Historical) Religion and Mysticism, and will have shown why I cannot but regret that so accomplished a scholar as Prof. Morice Jastrow should class all and every Mysticism, whether Pure or Mixed, as so far forth a religious malady; why I rejoice that so admirably circumspect an investigator as Prof. C. P. Tiele should, (in the form of a strenuous insistence upon the apprehension, indeed the ontological action of, the Infinite, by and within the human spirit, as the very soul and mainspring of Religion), so admirably reinforce the fundamental importance of the Mystical apprehensions; why I most warmly endorse Prof. Rauwenhoff’s presentment of Mysticism as, with Intellectualism and Moralism, one of the three psychological forms of religion, which are each legitimate and necessary, and which each require the check of the other two, if they are not to degenerate each into some corruption special to the exclusive development of that particular form; and why I cordially applaud the unequalled analysis and description by Prof. Eucken of the manner in which “Universal Religion” is at work, as an often obscure yet (in the long run) most powerful leaven, throughout all specifically human life,--Sciences, Art, Philosophy, and Ethics, calling for, and alone satisfied with, the answering force and articulation of “Characteristic Religion,” each requiring and required by the other, each already containing the other in embryo, and both ever operating together, in proportion as Man and Religion attain to their fulness.[320]

3. Hermann’s impossible simplification concerning philosophy.

But what shall we say as to the relations between Religion and Philosophy? Here again Hermann is the vigorous champion of a very prevalent and plausible simplification. “There exists no Theory of Knowledge for such things as we hold to be real in the strength of faith. In such religious affirmations, the believer demolishes every bridge between his conviction and that which Science can recognize as real.” Indeed Hermann’s attitude is here throughout identical with that of his master, Albrecht Ritschl: Metaphysics of any and every kind appear everywhere, to both writers, as essentially unnecessary, unreal, misleading, as so much inflation and delusion of soul.--Yet this again is quite demonstrably excessive, and can indeed be explained only as an all but inevitable recoil from the contrary metaphysical excesses of the Hegelian school.

(1) Since the culmination of that reaction, “it has,” as Prof. H. J. Holtzmann, himself so profoundly historical and so free from all extreme metaphysical bent, tells us, “become quite impossible any further to deny the metaphysical factors which had a share in constituting such types of New Testament doctrine as the Pauline and Joannine. Indeed, not even if we were to reduce the New Testament to the Synoptic Gospels and the Acts on the one hand, and to the Pastoral Epistles, the Epistle of James and the Apocalypse on the other hand, would the elements which spring from speculative sources be entirely eliminated. And since, again, the Old Testament religion, in its last stage, assimilated similarly metaphysical materials from the East and from the West; since Mohammedanism, in its Persian and Indian branches, did the same with regard to the older civilized religions of Middle and Eastern Asia; since also these latter religions received a speculative articulation in even the most ancient times, so that they are both Philosophy and Religion simultaneously: we are forced to ask ourselves, whether so frequent a concomitant of religion is satisfactorily explicable as a mere symptom of falsification or decay.” And whilst answering that the primary organ for religion is Feeling and Conscience, he points out how large an amount of Speculation was, nevertheless, required and exercised by a St. Augustine, even after his unforgettable experiences of the sufferings attendant upon Sin, and of their cure by Grace alone.[321]

(2) The fact is that, if man cannot apprehend the objects,--the historic and other facts,--of Religion, without certain subjective organs, dispositions, and effects, any more than can all these subjective capacities, without those objects, produce religious convictions and acts, or be waked up into becoming efficient forces: neither can man thus experience and effect the deepest foundations and developments of his own true personality in and through contact with the divine Spirit, without being more or less stimulated into some kind of, at least rudimentary, Philosophy as to these his profoundest experiences of reality, and as to their rights and duties towards the rest of what he is and knows.

(3) Indeed his very Religion is already, in itself, the profoundest Metaphysical Affirmation. As the deeply historical-minded Prof. Tiele admits: “Every man in his sound senses, who does not lead the life of a half-dormant animal, philosophizes in his own way”; and “religious doctrine rests on a metaphysical foundation; unless convinced of the reality of a supersensual world, it builds upon sand.”[322] Or as Prof. Eucken, the most eloquent champion of this central characteristic of all vital religion, exclaims: “If we never, as a matter of fact, get beyond merely subjective psychological processes, and we can nowhere trace within us the action of cosmic forces; if we in no case experience through them an enlargement, elevation, and transformation of our nature: then not all the endeavours of its well-meaning friends can preserve religion from sinking to the level of a mere illusion. Without a universal and real principle, without hyper-empirical processes, there can be no permanence for religion.”[323]

(4) Some kind of philosophy, then, will inevitably accompany, follow, and stimulate religion, were it only as the, necessarily ever inadequate, attempt at giving a fitting expression to the essentially metaphysical character of belief in a super-sensible world, in God, in man’s spiritual capacities and in God’s redemption of man. Not because the patient analysis of the completer human personalities, (as these are to be found throughout the length and breadth of history), requires the elimination of a wholesome Mysticism and a sober Metaphysic from among the elements and effects of the fullest Manhood and Religion; but because of the ever serious difficulties and the liability to grave abuses attendant upon both these forces, the inevitably excessive reactions against these abuses, and the recurrent necessity of remodelling much of the theory and practice of both, in accordance with the growth of our knowledge of the human mind, (a necessity which, at first sight, seems to stultify all the hyper-empirical claims of both these forces): only because of this have many men of sense and goodness come to speak as though religion, even at its fullest, could and should get on without either, contenting itself to be a somewhat sentimental, Immanental Ethics.

(5) Yet, against such misgivings, perhaps the most immediately impressive counter-argument is the procession, so largely made up of men and of movements not usually reckoned as exclusively or directly religious, whose very greatness,--one which humanity will not let die,--is closely interwoven with Mystical and Metaphysical affirmations. There are, among philosophers, a Spinoza and a Leibniz, a Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, a Trendelenburg and a Lotze, with the later stages of a John Mill, a Littré, and a Herbert Spencer; among poets, a Pindar and Aeschylus, a Lucretius and Vergil, a Lessing and a Goethe, a Wordsworth and a Browning; among historians, a Thucydides and a Tacitus, a St. Simon and de Tocqueville, a Carlyle, a Jacob Grimm, a Droysen and a Ranke; among scientists, a Copernicus and a Kepler, a Newton, a Lyell, indeed, largely still, also a Darwin; and among men of action, a Moltke and a Gordon, a Burke and a von Stein. Shear any of these men of their Mystical and Metaphysical elements, and you will have shorn Samson of his locks.

And if we can frame a contrary list of men of force and distinction, who have represented an un- or even an anti-Mystical and anti-Metaphysical type: Caesar and Hannibal, Napoleon and Bismarck, Voltaire and Laplace, Hume and Bentham, Huxley and Mommsen, we must ever remember the complex truth as to the Polarity of Life,--the strict necessity of the movement towards an intensely close contact with empirical reality, as well as of the movement back to recollection; the frequent sickliness of the recollective movement, as found in the average practice of life, which cannot but produce a reaction and contrary excess; and hence the legitimacy of what this second type has got of positiveness and of corrective criticism. Yet here too the greatness will consist directly in what these men are and have, not in what they are not; and wherever this their brutal-seeming sense of the apparent brutalities of life is combined with an apprehension of a higher world and of a deeper reality, there something fuller and more true has been attained than is reached by such strong but incomplete humanity alone.

4. Religion and Morality, their kinship and difference.

And, finally, as to Religion and Morality, we should note how that the men, who deny all essential connection between Religion and Mysticism and Religion and Philosophy, ever, when they do retain Religion at all, tend to identify it with Morality, if not as to the motives, yet as to the contents of the two forces. And yet it is not difficult to show that, if the relation between Religion and Morality is closer than that between Religion and Philosophy, though not as intimate as is that between Historical-Institutional Religion and Mysticism: Religion and Morality are nevertheless not identical.

(1) This non-identity is indicated by the broad historical fact that, though the development of Religion tells upon that of Morality, and vice versa: yet that the rate of development of these two forces is practically never the same, even in one and the same soul, still less in any one country or race. In each case we get various inequalities between the two developments, which would be impossible, were the two forces different only in name.

We reach again the same conclusion, if we note, what Dr. Edward Caird has so well pointed out, “the imperfection of the subjective religion of the prophets and psalmists of Israel,”--who nevertheless already possessed a very advanced type of profoundly ethical religion,--“shown by its inability to overcome the legal and ceremonial system of worship to which it was opposed”; as, “in like manner, Protestantism … has never been able decisively to conquer the system of Rome.”[324] For this, as indeed the failure of Buddhism to absorb and supersede Hindooism, evidently implies that Religion cannot find its full development and equilibrium in an exclusive concentration upon Morality Proper, as alone essential; and hence that complete Religion embraces other things besides Morality.

Once more we find non-identity between the very Ethics directly postulated by Religion at its deepest, and the Ethics immediately required by the Family, Society, the State, Art, Science, and Philosophy. As Prof. Troeltsch admirably puts it, “the special characteristic of our modern consciousness resides in the insistence both upon the Religious, the That-world Ends, and upon the Cultural, This-World Ends, which latter are taken as Ends-in-themselves: it is precisely in this combination that this consciousness finds its richness, power, and freedom, but also its painful interior tension and its difficult problems.” “As in Christian Ethics we must recognize the predominance of an Objective Religious End,--for here certain relations of the soul to God are the chief commandments and the supreme good,--so in the Cultural Ends we should frankly recognize objective Moral Ends of an Immanental kind.” And in seeking after the right relations between the two, we shall have to conclude that “Ethics, for us, are not, at first, a unity but a multiplicity: man grows up amongst a number of moral ends, the unification of which is his life’s task and problem, and not its starting-point.” And this multiplicity “is” more precisely “a polarity in human nature, for it contains two poles--that of Religious and that of Humane Ethics, neither of which can be ignored without moral damage, but which, nevertheless, cannot be brought under a common formula.” “We can but keep a sufficient space open for the action of both forms, so that from their interaction there may ever result, with the least possible difficulty, the deepening of the Humane Ends by the Christian Ethics, and the humanizing of the Christian End by the Humane Ethics, so that life may become a service of God within the Cultural Ends, and that the service of God may transfigure the world.”[325]

We can perceive the difference between the two forces most clearly in Our Lord’s life and teaching--say, the Sermon on the Mount; in the intolerableness of every exegesis which attempts to reduce the ultimate meaning and worth of this world-renewing religious document to what it has of literal applicability in the field of morality proper. Schopenhauer expressed a profound intuition in the words: “It would be a most unworthy manner of speech to declare the sublime Founder of the Christian Religion, whose life is proposed to us as the model of all virtue, to have been the most reasonable of men, and that his maxims contained but the best instruction towards an entirely reasonable life.”[326]

(2) The fact is that Religion ever insists, even where it but seems to be teaching certain moral rules and motives as appropriate to this visible world of ours, upon presenting them in the setting of a fuller, deeper world than that immediately required as the field of action and as the justification of ordinary morality. Thus whilst, in Morality Proper, the concepts of Responsibility, Prudence, Merit, Reward, Irretrievableness, are necessarily primary; in Religious Ethics the ideas of Trust, Grace, Heroism, Love, Free Pardon, Spiritual Renovation are, as necessarily, supreme. And hence it is not accidental, although of course not necessary, that we often find men with a keen religious sense but with a defective moral practice or even conception, and men with a strong moral sense and a want of religious perception; that Mystics, with their keen sense for one element of religion, so often seem, and sometimes are, careless of morality proper; and that, in such recent cases (deeply instructive in their very aberrations) as that of Nietzsche, we get a fierce anti-Moralism combined with a thirst for a higher and deeper world than this visible one, which not all its fantastic form, nor even all Nietzsche’s later rant against concrete religion, can prevent from being essentially religious.[327]

(3) We have then, here, the deepest instance of the law and necessity which we have, so often, found at the shallower levels of the spirit’s life. For here, once more, there is one apprehension, force, life,--This-world Morality,--which requires penetration and development, in nowise destruction, by another, a deeper power, That-world Ethics and Religion. Let the one weaken or blunt the edge and impact of the other, and it has, at the same time, weakened itself. For here again we have, not a Thing which simply exists, by persistence in its dull unpenetratingness and dead impenetrability, but a Life, growing by the incorporation and organization, within its ampler range, of lesser lives, each with its own legitimate autonomy.

Ii. Mysticism And The Limits Of Human Knowledge And Experience

But have not even the most sober-minded of the Partial Mystics greatly exceeded the limits of human knowledge, more or less continuously, throughout their conclusions? Is Kant completely in the wrong? And are not the Positivists right in restricting all certain cognition to the experiences of the senses and to the Mathematico-Physical Sciences built upon those experiences? And, again, is there such a thing at all as specifically Mystical Experience or Knowledge? And, if so, what is its worth?--I must keep the elaboration of the (ultimately connected) question, as to the nature of the realities experienced or known--as to the human spirit and the Divine Spirit, and their inter-relations, hence as to Pantheism and Personality--for the next chapter, and can here but prepare the ground for it, by the elucidation of certain important points in general Epistemology, and of the more obvious characteristics of Mystical apprehension.

1. Positivist Epistemology an error.

As regards general Epistemology, we may well take up the following positions.

(1) We cannot but reject, with Prof. Volkelt, as a mere vulgar error, the Positivist limitation of trans-subjectively valid knowledge to direct sense-perception and to the laws of the so-called Empirical Sciences. For, as he shows conclusively, the only fact which is absolutely indubitable, is that of the bare occurrence of our (possibly utterly misleading) sensations and impressions. Some of these are, it is true, accompanied by a certain pressure upon our minds to credit them with trans-subjective validity; and the fact of this (possibly quite misleading) pressure is itself part of our undeniable experience. Yet we can, if we will, treat this pressure also as no more than a meaningless occurrence, and not as evidencing the trans-subjective reality which it seems to indicate. No man, it is true, has ever succeeded in consistently carrying out such a refusal of assent,--since no scepticism is so thorough but that it derives its very power, against the trans-subjective validity of some of the impressions furnished with trans-subjective pressure, from an utterly inconsistent acceptance, as trans-subjectively valid, of other impressions furnished with a precisely similar trans-subjective intimation. Yet the fact remains that, in all such cases of trans-subjective pressure, the mind has “an immediate experience of which the content is precisely this, that we are justified in proceeding with these concepts into what is absolutely beyond the possibility of being experienced by us.” “Positivistic Cognition,” to which no man, Positivist included, can systematically restrict himself, “abides absolutely within the immediately experienced. Logical Cognition,” which every man practises surreptitiously if not avowedly, “exceeds experience at every step, and conceptually determines what is absolutely incapable of being experienced, yet the justification for this kind of cognition is, here also, an immediately experienced certitude.”[328]

We have, “then, immediately experienced presentations which of themselves already constitute a knowledge,--our first knowledge, and the only one possessed of absolute indubitableness.” And some of these presentations “are accompanied by a kind of immediate certainty or revelation that, in some way, they reach right into the Thing-in-Itself, that they directly express something objectively valid, present in that Thing-in-Itself”; and “this pressure ever involves, should the contradictory of what it enunciates be admitted as objectively existent, the self-destruction of objective reality.”--“And this pressure can, in any one case, be resisted by the mind; an act of endorsement, of a kind of faith, is necessary on the part of the mind: for these presentations, furnished with such pressure, do not transform themselves into the Things-in-Themselves directly,--we do not come to see objective reality simply face to face.”[329] And we find thus that “in principle the entire range of reality, right down to its last depths, lies open to cognition, proceeding according to the principle of the necessities of thought. For he who recognizes this principle, thereby admits that the necessities of thought have trans-subjective significance, so that, if any affirmation concerning the ultimate reasons and depths of Reality can be shown to be necessary in thought, this affirmation possesses as rightful a claim to trans-subjective validity, as any determination, necessary in thought, which concern only such parts of the Thing-in-Itself as are the nearest neighbours to our sense-impressions concerning it. Everywhere our principle leaves us only the question whether thought, as a matter of fact, does or does not react, under the given problems, with the said logical constraint and pressure.”[330]

(2) We can next insist upon how we have thus already found that the acquisition of even so rudimentary an outline of Reality, as to be ever in part presupposed in the attacks of the most radical sceptics, necessarily involves a certain emotive disposition and volitional action. And, over and above this partially withholdable assent, such quite elementary thinking will also ever require the concomitant energizing of the picturing faculty. And again, the more interior and spiritual are this thinking’s subject-matters, the more will it be permeated by, and be inseparable from, deep feeling. It is then all man’s faculties conjoined, it is the whole man, who normally thus gives, without reflecting on it, his all, to gain even this elementary nucleus of certainty as to Reality. “Even receptivity,” as Prof. Ward well says, “is activity”; for even where non-voluntary, it is never indifferent. “Not mere receptivity, but conative or selective activity, is the essence of subjective reality.” Or, with Prof. Volkelt: “Purely isolated thought,”--which, in actual life ever more or less of a fiction, is not rarely set up by individuals as an ideal,--“is, however intensified and interiorized, something ever only formal, something, in the final resort, insignificant and shadowy.”--And, concurrently with the recognition of this fact, man will come to find that “the ultimate Substance or Power of and in the world,”--that objective reality which is the essential counterpart to his own subjective reality,--“is something possessed of a true, deep content and of a positive aim, and alive according to the analogy of a willing individual. The world would thus be a Logical Process only in the sense that this concrete fundamental Power is bound by the ideal necessity of its own nature.”[331]

(3) And again, I would note with Volkelt how Kant, owing to his notoriously intense natural tendency to universal Dualism, never admits, even as a point for preliminary settlement, the possibility that our subjective conceptions of Objective Reality may have some true relation to that Reality. His professed ignorance as to the nature of that Reality changes instantaneously, quite unbeknown to himself, into an absolutely unvarying, negative knowledge concerning that Reality,--he simply knows that it is utterly heterogeneous to our conception of it. Thus he finds the view that “God has implanted into the human mind certain categories and concepts of a kind spontaneously to harmonize with things,” to be “the most preposterous solution that we could possibly choose.”[332] Thus the epistemological difference between Presentation and Thing-in-Itself becomes a metaphysical exclusion of each by the other. And yet we know of no fact, whether of experience or of thought, to prevent something which is my presentation existing also, in so far as it is the content of that presentation, outside of this presentment. Indeed Psychology and Epistemology have, driven by every reason and stopped by none, more and more denied and refuted this excessive, indeed gratuitous, Dualism.

As Prof. Henry Jones well puts it: “The hypothesis that knowledge consists of two elements which are so radically different as to be capable of description only by defining each negatively in terms of the other, the pure manifold or differences of sense, and a purely universal or relative thought,” breaks down under the fact that “pure thought and the manifold of sense pass into each other, the one proving meaningless and the other helpless in its isolation.” These elements “are only aspects of one fact, co-relates mutually penetrating each other, distinguishable in thought, but not separable as existences.” Hence we must not “make logical remnants do the work of an intelligence which is never purely formal, upon a material which is nowhere a pure manifold”: for “the difference between the primary data of thought on the one hand, and the highest kinds of systematized knowledge on the other, is no difference … between a mere particular and a mere universal, or a mere content and a mere form; but it is a difference in comprehensiveness of articulation.” However primary may be the distinction of subjective and objective, “we are not entitled to forget the unity of the reality in which the distinction takes place.” If we begin with the purely subjective, we must doubtless end there; but then, in spite of certain, never self-consistent, philosophical hypotheses, “the purely subjective is as completely beyond our reach as the purely objective.”[333]

Prof. Ward indeed pushes the matter, I think rightly, even a step further. He points out how readily, owing to the ambiguous term “consciousness,” “we confound experience with knowledge”; but holds that experience is the wider term. “Knowledge must fall within experience, and experience extend beyond knowledge. Thus I am not left to infer my own being from my knowing.… Objective reality is immediately ‘given,’ or immediately ‘there,’ not inferred.” But the subjective reality is not immediately given, immediately there. “There is no such parallelism between the two.… The subjective factor in experience is not datum but recipiens: it is not ‘there’ but ‘here’; a ‘here’ relative to that ‘there.’”[334] Nothing of this, I think, really conflicts with the positions we have adopted from Volkelt, since “experience” is evidently used here in a sense inclusive of the presentations, the trans-subjective pressure and the endorsement of the latter’s estimations,--the three elements which, according also to Volkelt, form an organism which even the most daring subjectivism can never consistently reject. At most, the term “experience” is more extended in Prof. Ward, since it includes all three elements, than in Prof. Volkelt, who restricts it to the two first.

(4) And further, we must take care to find room for the only unforced explanation of the wondrous fact that “although,” as Dr. Volkelt strikingly says, “the various schools of philosophy “--this is largely true of those of theology also,--are “in part essentially determined by historical currents, forces which follow other standards than those of logical necessity”: yet “these points of view and modes of thought, thus determined by” apparently non-logical “history, subserve nevertheless logical necessity, indeed represent its” slow, intermittent, yet real “progressive realization.” The explanation is that “the forces of history are, unbeknown to themselves, planned, in their depths, for agreement with the necessities and ends of thought and of truth.” “And thus the different spheres” and levels “of spiritual life and endeavour appear as originally intended for each other, so that each sphere, whilst consciously striving only after its own particular laws and standards, in reality furthers the objects of the rest.” For “only the operative presence of such an original, teleological inter-relation can explain how historic forces, by their influence upon, and determination of, philosophical thinking, can, instead of staining and spoiling it by the introduction of religious, artistic, political, and other motives, actually advance it most essentially.”[335]--Here then we get a still further enlargement of the already wide range of interaction, within the human mind, between forces which, at first sight, appear simply external to, indeed destructive of, each other; and a corresponding increase in the indications of the immense breadth, depth, and closeness of inter-penetration characterizing the operative ground-plan, the pre-existing Harmony and Teleology of the fundamental forces of Reality. Thus once more man’s spirit appears as possessed of a large interiority; and as met, supported and penetrated, by a Spirit stupendously rich in spiritual energy.

(5) And finally, let us never forget that “the only experience immediately accessible to us” men, “is our own; this, in spite of its complexity, is the first we know.”[336] And this means that we have direct experience and anything like adequate knowledge, (because knowledge from within,) not of things, but of mind and will, of spiritual life struggling within an animal life; and that in face, say, of plant-life, and still more of a pebble or of a star, we have a difficulty as to an at all appropriate and penetrative apprehension, which, if opposite to, is also in a sense greater than, the difficulty inherent to our apprehension of God Himself. For towards this latter apprehension we have got the convergent testimony of certain great, never quite obliterable facts without us and within ourselves.

There is the upward trend, the ever-increased complexity of organization, the growing depth and interiority in the animate world,--Plant-Life itself being already, very probably, possessed of a vague consciousness, and Man, at the other end of the scale, summing up the tendency of the whole series in a deep self-consciousness which, at the same time, makes him alone keenly aware of the great difference, in the midst of the true kinship, between himself and the humbler members of that one world. For Natural Selection can but describe the results and explain part of the method of this upward trend, but cannot penetrate to its ultimate cause and end.

There is, again, the great, deep fact of the mutually necessary, mutually stimulating presence and interaction, within our own mental and spiritual life, of sense-impressions, imaginative picturings, rational categories, emotional activities, and volitional acts; and, again, of subject and object; and, once more, of general, philosophic Thought and the contingencies of History. For the immanental inter-adaptation and Teleology, that mysteriously link together all these, profoundly disparate-seeming, realms and forces is far too deep-down, it too much surprises, and exacts too much of us, it too much reveals itself, precisely at the end of much labour of our own and in our truest and most balanced moods, as the mostly unarticulated presupposition and explanation of both the great cost and the rich fruitfulness of every approximately complete actuation of all our faculties, each with and in the others, and in and with their appropriate objects, to be permanently ruled out of court as mere sentimentalism or baseless apologetic.

And there is the deepest fact of all, the one which precisely constitutes the specific characteristic of all true humanity, the sense of mental oppression, of intolerable imprisonment inflicted by the very idea of the merely contingent, the simply phenomenal and Finite, and the accompanying noble restlessness and ready dwarfing of all man’s best achievements by the agent’s own Ideal of Perfection. For this latter sense is, precisely in the greater souls, so spontaneous and so keen, so immensely operative in never leaving our, otherwise indolent and readily self-delusive, self-complacent race fully and long satisfied with anything that passes entirely away, or that is admittedly merely a subjective fancy, even though this fancy be shared by every member of the human race; and this sense operates so explosively within Sceptics as well as Dogmatists, within would-be Agnostic Scientists as well as in the most Intellectualist Theologians; it so humbles, startles, and alone so braces, sweetens, widens, indeed constitutes our humanity: as to be unforcedly explicable only by admitting that man’s spirit’s experience is not shut up within man’s own clear analysis or picturing of it; that it is indefinitely wider, and somehow, in its deepest reaches, is directly touched, affected, in part determined, by the Infinite Spirit Itself. “Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is,” says Goethe. Yes, but it was a man, Goethe, it is at bottom all men, in proportion as they are fully, sensitively such, who have somehow discovered this truth; who suffer from its continuous evidences, as spontaneously as from the toothache or from insomnia; and whose deepest moments give them a vivid sense of how immensely the Spirit, thus directly experienced by their spirit, transcends, and yet also is required by and is immanent in, their keen sense of the Finitude and Contingency present throughout the world of sense-perception and of clear intellectual formulation.

(6) With Plato and Plotinus, Clement of Alexandria and St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Cardinal Nicolas of Coes and Leibniz in the past; with Cardinal Newman, Professors Maurice Blondel and Henri Bergson, Siegwart, Eucken, Troeltsch and Tiele, Igino Petrone and Edward Caird, in the present; with the explicit assent of practically all the great Mystics of all ages and countries, and the implicit instinct, and at least partial, practical admission, of all sane and developed human souls; we will then have to postulate here, not merely an intellectual reasoning upon finite data, which would somehow result in so operative a sense of the Infinite; nor even simply a mental category of Infinitude which, evoked in man by and together with the apprehension of things finite, would, somehow, have so massive, so explosive an effect against our finding satisfaction in the other categories, categories which, after all, would not be more subjective, than itself: but the ontological presence of, and the operative penetration by the Infinite Spirit, within the human spirit. This Spirit’s presence would produce, on occasion of man’s apprehension or volition of things contingent and finite, the keen sense of disappointment, of contrast with the Simultaneous, Abiding, and Infinite.--And let the reader note that this is not Ontologism, for we here neither deduce our other ideas from the idea of God, nor do we argue from ideas and their clarity, but from living forces and their operativeness.

We thus get man’s spirit placed within a world of varying degrees of depth and interiority, the different levels and kinds of which are necessary, as so many materials, stimulants, obstacles, and objects, for the development of that spirit’s various capacities, which themselves again interact the one upon the other, and react upon and within that world. For if man’s experience of God is not a mere discursively reasoned conclusion from the data of sense, yet man’s spirit experiences the Divine Spirit and the spirits of his fellow-men on occasion of, and as a kind of contrast, background, and support to, the actuation of his senses, imagination, reason, feeling, and volition, and, at least at first and in the long run, not otherwise.

2. No distinct faculty of Mystical apprehension.

Is there, then, strictly speaking, such a thing as a specifically distinct, self-sufficing, purely Mystical mode of apprehending Reality? I take it, distinctly not; and that all the errors of the Exclusive Mystic proceed precisely from the contention that Mysticism does constitute such an entirely separate, completely self-supported kind of human experience.--This denial does not, of course, mean that soul does not differ quite indefinitely from soul, in the amount and kind of the recollective, intuitive, deeply emotive element possessed and exercised by it concurrently or alternately with other elements,--the sense of the Infinite within and without the Finite springing up in the soul on occasion of its contact with the Contingent; nor, again, that these more or less congenital differences and vocations amongst souls cannot and are not still further developed by grace and heroism into types of religious apprehension and life, so strikingly divergent, as, at first sight, to seem hardly even supplementary the one to the other. But it means that, in even the most purely contingent-seeming soul, and in its apparently but Institutional and Historical assents and acts, there ever is, there never can fail to be, some, however implicit, however slight, however intermittent, sense and experience of the Infinite, evidenced by at least some dissatisfaction with the Finite, except as this Finitude is an occasion for growth in, and a part-expression of, that Infinite, our true home. And, again, it means, that even the most exclusively mystical-seeming soul ever depends, for the fulness and healthiness of even the most purely mystical of its acts and states, as really upon its past and present contacts with the Contingent, Temporal, and Spacial, and with social facts and elements, as upon its movement of concentration, and the sense and experience, evoked on occasion of those contacts or of their memories, of the Infinite within and around those finitudes and itself.

Only thus does Mysticism attain to its true, full dignity, which consists precisely in being, not everything in any one soul, but something in every soul of man; and in presenting, at its fullest, the amplest development, among certain special natures with the help of certain special graces and heroisms, of what, in some degree and form, is present in every truly human soul, and in such a soul’s every, at all genuine and complete, grace-stimulated religious act and state. And only thus does it, as Partial Mysticism, retain all the strength and escape the weaknesses and dangers of would-be Pure Mysticism, as regards the mode and character of Religious Experience, Knowledge, and Life.

3. The first four pairs of weaknesses and strengths special to the Mystics.

I take the Mystic’s weaknesses and strengths to go together in pairs, and that there are seven such pairs. Only the first four shall be considered here; the fifth and the last two couples are reserved respectively for the following, and for the last section, of this chapter.

(1) The Mystic finds his joy in the recollective movement and moments of the soul; and hence ever tends, qua Mystic, to ignore and neglect, or to over-minimize, the absolutely necessary contact of the mind and will with the things of sense. He will often write as though, could he but completely shut off his mind from all sense-perceptions,--even of grand scenery, or noble works of art, or scenes of human devotedness, suffering, and peace,--it would be proportionately fuller of God.--Yet this drift is ever more or less contradicted by his practice, often at the very moment of such argument: for no religious writers are more prolific in vivid imagery derived from noble sensible objects and scenes than are the Mystics,--whose characteristic mood is an intuition, a resting in a kind of vision of things invisible.--And this contradiction is satisfactory, since it is quite certain that if the mind, heart, and will could be completely absorbed, (from the first or for any length of time), in the flight from the sensible, it would become as dangerously empty and languid concerning things invisible themselves as, with nothing but an outgoing occupation with the sensible, it would become distracted and feverish. It is this aversion from Outgoing and from the world of sense, of the contemporaneous contingencies environing the soul, that gives to Mysticism, as such, its shadowy character, its floating above, rather than penetrating into, reality,--in contradiction, where this tendency becomes too exclusive, to the Incarnational philosophy and practice of Christianity, and indeed of every complete and sound psychology.

And yet the Incoming, what the deep religious thinker Kierkegaard has so profoundly analyzed in his doctrine of “Repetition,”[337]--recollection and peaceful browsing among the materials brought in by the soul’s Outgoing,--is most essential. Indeed it is the more difficult, and, though never alone sufficient, yet ever the more centrally religious, of the two movements necessary for the acquisition of spiritual experience and life.

(2) Again, the Mystic finds his full delight in all that approximates most nearly to Simultaneity, and Eternity; and consequently turns away, qua Mystic, from the Successive and Temporal presented by History.--Yet here also there are two movements, both necessary for man. He will, by the one, once more in fullest sympathy with the grand Christian love of lowliness, strive hard to get into close, and ever closer, touch with the successivenesses of History, especially those of Our Lord’s earthly life and of His closest followers. Without this touch he will become empty, inflated, as St. Teresa found to be the case with herself, when following the false principle of deliberate and systematic abstraction from Christ’s temporal words and acts: for man’s soul, though it does not energize in mere Clock-Time, cannot grow if we attempt to eliminate Duration, that interpenetrative, overlapping kind of Succession, which is already, as it were, halfway to the Simultaneity of God. It is this aversion from Clock-Time Succession and even from Duration which gives to Mysticism, as such, its remarkable preference for Spacial images, and its strong bent towards concepts of a Static and Determinist type, profoundly antagonistic though these are to the Dynamic and Libertarian character which ever marks the occasions and conditions for the acquiring of religious experience.

And yet, here again, the Mystic is clinging, even one-sidedly, to the more central, more specifically religious, of the two movements. For it is certain that God is indeed Simultaneous and Eternal; that it is right thus to try and apprehend, what appears to us stretched out successively in time, as simultaneously present in the one great Now of God; and that our deepest experiences testify to History itself being ever more than mere process, and to have within it a certain contribution from, a certain approximation to and expression of, Eternity.

(3) And again, the Mystic finds his joy in the sense of a Pure Reception of the Purely Objective; that God should do all and should receive the credit of all, is here a primary requirement.--And yet all penetrating Psychology, Epistemology, and Ethics find this very receptivity, however seemingly only such, to be, where healthy and fruitful, ever an action, a conation of the soul,--an energizing and volition which, as we have seen, are present in its very cognition of anything affirmed by it as trans-subjective, from a grain of sand up to the great God Himself. This antipathy to even a relative, God-willed independence and power of self-excitation, gives Mysticism, as such, its constant bent towards Quietism; and hence, with regard to the means and nature of knowledge, its tendency to speak of such a purely spiritual effect as Grace, and such purely spiritual beings as the Soul and God, as though they were literally sensible objects sensibly impressing themselves upon the Mystic’s purely passive senses. This tendency reinforces the Mystic’s thirst for pictorial, simultaneous presentation and intuition of the verities apprehended by him, but is in curious contradiction to his even excessive conceptions concerning the utter separateness and difference from all things material of all such spiritual realities.--And yet, here too, it is doubtless deeply important ever to remember, and to act in accordance with, the great truth that God Himself is apprehended by us only if there be action of our own, and that, from elementary moral dispositions right up to consummate sanctity, the whole man has ever to act and will more and more manysidedly, fully, and persistently.

But the corresponding, indeed the anterior and more centrally religious, truth here is, that all this range of our activity could never begin, and, if it could, would lose itself in vacuo, unless there already were Reality around it and within it, as the stimulus and object for all this energizing,--a Reality which, as Prof. Ward has told us with respect to Epistemology, must, for a certain dim but most true experience of ours, be simply given, not sought and found. And indeed the operations of Grace are ever more or less penetrating and soliciting, though nowhere forcing, the free assent of the natural soul: we should be unable to seek God unless He had already found us and had thus, deep down within ourselves, caused us to seek and find Him. And hence thus again the most indispensable, the truest form of experience underlies reasoning, and is a kind of not directly analyzable, but indirectly most operative, intuition or instinct of the soul.

(4) And yet the Mystic, in one of his moods (the corresponding, contradictory mood of a Pantheistic identification of his true self with God shall be considered in our next chapter), finds his joy in so exalting the difference of nature between himself and God, and the incomprehensibility of God for every finite intelligence, as,--were we to press his words,--to cut away all ground for any experience or knowledge sufficient to justify him in even a guess as to what God is like or is not like, and for any attempt at intercourse with, and at becoming like unto, One who is so utterly unlike himself.

4. Criticism of the fourth pair, mystical “Agnosticism.”

Now this acutely paradoxical position, of an entire certainty as to God’s complete difference from ourselves, has been maintained and articulated, with a consistency and vividness beyond that of any Mystic known to me, by that most stimulating, profound, tragically non-mystical, religious ascetic and thinker, the Lutheran Dane, Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855). His early friend, but philosophical opponent, Prof. Höffding, describes him as insisting that “the suffering incident to the religious life is necessarily involved in the very nature of the religious relation. For the relation of the soul to God is a relation to a Being utterly different from man, a Being which cannot confront man as his Superlative and Ideal, and which nevertheless is to rule within him.” “What, wonder, then,” as Kierkegaard says, “if the Jew held that the vision of God meant death, and if the Heathen believed that to enter upon relations with God was the beginning of insanity?” For the man who lives for God “is a fish out of water.”[338]--We have here what, if an error, is yet possible only to profoundly religious souls; indeed it would be easy to point out very similar passages in St. Catherine and St. John of the Cross. Yet Höffding is clearly in the right in maintaining that “Qualitative or Absolute difference abolishes all possibility of any positive relation.… If religious zeal, in its eagerness to push the Object of religion to the highest height, establishes a yawning abyss between this Object and the life whose ideal It is still to remain,--such zeal contradicts itself. For a God who is not Ideal and Exemplar, is no God.”[339]

Berkeley raised similar objections against analogous positions of the Pseudo-Dionysius, in his Alciphron in 1732.[340] Indeed the Belgian Jesuit, Balthazar Corderius, has a very satisfactory note on this matter in his edition, in 1634, of the Areopagite,[341] in which he shows how all the negative propositions of Mystical Theology, e.g. “God is not Being, not Life,” presuppose a certain affirmative position, e.g. “God is Being and Life, in a manner infinitely more sublime and perfect than we are able to comprehend”; and gives reasons and authorities, from St. Jerome to St. Thomas inclusive, for holding that some kind and degree of direct confused knowledge (I should prefer, with modern writers, to call it experience) of God’s existence and nature is possessed by the human soul, independently of its reasoning from the data of sense.

St. Thomas’s admissions are especially striking, as he usually elaborates a position which ignores, and would logically exclude, such “confused knowledge.” In his Exposition and Questions on the Book of Boetius on the Trinity, after arguments to show that we know indeed that God is, but not what He is,--at most only what He is not, he says: “We should recognize, however, that it is impossible, with regard to anything, to know whether it exists, unless, in some way or other, we know what it is, either with a perfect or with a confused knowledge.… Hence also with regard to God,--we could not know whether He exists, unless we somehow knew what He is, even though in a confused manner.” And this knowledge of what He is, is interestingly, because unconsciously, admitted in one of the passages directed to proving that we can but know that He is. “In our earthly state we cannot attain to a knowledge of Himself beyond the fact that He exists. And yet, among those who know that He is, the one knows this more perfectly than the other.”[342] For it is plain that, even if the knowledge of the existence of something were possible without any knowledge of that thing’s nature, no difference or increase in such knowledge of the thing’s bare existence would be possible. The different degrees in the knowledge, which is here declared to be one concerning the bare existence of God, can, as a matter of fact, exist only in knowledge concerning His nature. I shall have to return to this great question further on.

Here I would only point out how well Battista Vernazza has, in her Dialogo, realized the importance of a modification in such acutely dualistic statements as those occasionally met with in the Vita. For, in the Dialogo, the utter qualitative difference between God and the Soul, and the Soul and the Body, which find so striking an utterance in one of Catherine’s moods, is ever carefully limited to the soul’s sinful acts and habits, and to the body’s unspiritualized condition; so that the soul, when generous and faithful to God’s grace, can and does grow less and less unlike God, and the body can, in its turn, become more and more an instrument and expression of the soul. A pity only that Battista has continued Catherine’s occasional over-emphasis in the parallel matter of the knowledge of God: since, even in the Dialogo, we get statements which, if pressed, would imply that even the crudest, indeed the most immoral conception of God is, objectively, no farther removed from the reality than is the most spiritual idea that man can attain of Him.

It would indeed be well if the Christian Mystics who, since about 500 A.D., are more and more dependent for their formulations upon the Areopagite, had followed, in this matter, not his more usual and more paradoxical, but his exceptional, thoroughly sober vein of teaching,--that contained in the third chapter of his Mystical Theology, where he finds degrees of worth and approximation among the affirmative attributions, and degrees of unfitness and distance among the negative ones. “Are not life and goodness more cognate to Him than air and stone? And is He not further removed from debauchery and wrath, than from ineffableness and incomprehensibility”?[343] But such a scale of approximations would be utterly impossible did we not somehow, at least dimly, experience or know what He is.

We shall then have to amend the Mystic’s apparent Agnosticism on three points. We shall have to drop any hard and fast distinction between knowledge of God’s Existence and knowledge of His Nature, since both necessarily more or less stand and fall together. We shall have to replace the terms as to our utter ignorance as to what He is, by terms expressive of an experience which, if not directly and independently clear and analyzable to the reflex, critical reason, can yet be shown to be profoundly real and indefinitely potent in the life of man’s whole rational and volitional being. It is this dim, deep experience which ever causes our reflex knowledge of God to appear no knowledge at all. And we shall reject any absolute qualitative difference between the soul’s deepest possibilities and ideals, and God; and shall, in its stead, maintain an absolute difference between God and all our downward inclinations, acts, and habits, and an indefinite difference, in worth and dignity, between God and the very best that, with His help, we can aim at and become. With regard to every truly existent subject-matter, we can trace the indefinitely wider range and the more delicate penetration possessed by our dim yet true direct contact and experience, as contrasted with our reflex analysis concerning all such contacts and experiences; and this surplusage is at its highest in connection with God, Who is not simply a Thing alongside of other things, but the Spirit, our spirit’s Origin, Sustainer, and End, “in whom we live and move and have our being.”

Iii. Mysticism And The Question Of Evil

Introductory: Exclusive and Inclusive Mysticism in Relation to Optimism.

The four couples of weaknesses and corresponding strong points characteristic of Mysticism that we have just considered, and the fact that, in each case, they ever spring respectively from an attempt to make Mysticism be the all of religion, and from a readiness to keep it as but one of the elements more or less present in, and necessary for, every degree and form of the full life of the human soul: make one wish for two English terms, as useful as are the German names “Mystik” and “Mystizismus,” for briefly indicating respectively “the legitimate share of Feeling in the constitution of the religious life, and the one-sidedness of a religion in which the Understanding and the Will,” and indeed also the Memory and the Senses, with their respective variously external occasions, vehicles, and objects, “do not come to their rights,” as Prof. Rauwenhoff well defines the matter.[344] I somehow shrink from the term “Mysticality” for his “Mystizismus”; and must rest content with the three terms--of “Mysticism,” as covering both the right and the wrong use of feeling in religion; and of “True” or “Inclusive Mysticism,” and of “Pseudo-” or “Exclusive Mysticism,” as denoting respectively the legitimate, and the (quantitatively or qualitatively) mistaken, share of emotion in the religious life.

Now the four matters, which we have just considered, have allowed us to reach an answer not all unlike that of Nicolas of Coes, Leibniz, and Hegel,--one which, if it remained alone or quite final, would, in face of the fulness of real life, strike us all, nowadays, as somewhat superficial, because too Optimistic and Panlogistic in its trend. The fifth set of difficulties and problems now to be faced will seem almost to justify Schopenhauer at his gloomiest. Yet we must bear in mind that our direct business here is not with the problem of Evil in general, but only with the special helps and hindrances, afforded by Inclusive and by Exclusive Mysticism respectively, towards apprehending the true nature of Evil and turning even it into an occasion for a deeper good. In this case the special helps and hindrances fall under three heads.

1. Mysticism, too optimistic. Evil positive, but not supreme.

(1) First of all, I would strongly insist upon the following great fact to which human life and history bear witness, if we but take and test these latter on a large scale and with a patient persistency. It is, that not the smoother, easier times and circumstances in the lives of individuals and of peoples, but, on the contrary, the harder and hardest trials of every conceivable kind, and the unshrinking, full acceptance of these, as part of the price of conscience and of its growing light, have ever been the occasions of the deepest trust in and love of God to which man has attained. In Jewish History, the Exile called forth a Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and the profound ideal of the Suffering Servant; the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes raised up a Judas Maccabaeus; and the troubles under the Emperor Hadrian, a Rabbi Akiba. And in Christian History, the persecutions from Nero to Robespierre have each occasioned the formation of heroic lovers of Love Crucified. And such great figures do not simply manage to live, apart from all the turmoil, in some Mystic upper region of their own; but they face and plunge into the very heart of the strife, and get and give spiritual strength on occasion of this closest contact with loneliness, outrage, pain, and death. And this fact can be traced throughout history.

Not as though suffering automatically deepens and widens man into a true spiritual personality,--of itself it does not even tend to this; nor as though there were not souls grown hard or low, or frivolous or bitter, under suffering,--to leave madness and suicide unconsidered,--souls in which it would be difficult to find any avoidable grave fault. But that, wherever there is the fullest, deepest, interiority of human character and influence, there can ever be found profound trials and sufferings which have been thus utilized and transfigured. It is doubtless Our Lord’s uniquely full and clear proclamation of this mysterious efficacity of all suffering nobly borne; above all it is the supreme exemplification and fecundity of this deepest law of life, afforded and imparted by His own self-immolation, that has given its special power to Christianity, and, in so doing, has, more profoundly than ever before or elsewhere, brought home to us a certain Teleology here also,--the deepest ever discovered to man. For though we fail in our attempts at explaining how or why, with an All-knowing, All-powerful, and All-loving God, there can be Evil at all, we can but recognize the law, which is ever being brought home to us, of a mysterious capacity for purification and development of man’s spiritual character, on occasion and with the help of trouble, pain, and death itself.

(2) Now all this, we must admit, is practised and noted, directly and in detail, only by the Ascetical and the Outward-going elements in Religion; whereas Mysticism, as such, is optimistic, not only as is Christianity, with respect to the end, but, in practice, with regard to the actual state of things already encircling it as well. For so careful a selection and so rigorous an abstraction is practised by Mysticism, as such, towards the welter of contingencies around it, that the rough shocks, the bitter tonics, the expansive birth-pangs of the spirit’s deeper life, in and by means of the flux of time and sense, of the conflict with hostile fellow-creatures, and of the claimfulness of the lower self, are known by it only in their result, not in their process, or rather only as this process ebbs and fades away, in such recollective moments, into the distance.

No wonder, then, that Mysticism, as such, has ever tended to deny all positive character to Evil. We have already found how strongly this is the case with the prince of Mystic philosophers, Plotinus. But even St. Augustine, with his massive experience, and (in his other mood) even excessive realization, of the destructive force of Evil and of the corrupt inclinations of man’s heart, has one whole large current of teaching expressive of the purely negative character of Evil. The two currents, the hot and concrete, and the cold and abstract one, appear alternately in the very Confessions, of 397 A.D. There, ten years after his conversion, he can write: “All things that are corrupted, are deprived of good. But, if they are deprived of all good, they will cease to exist.… In so far, then, as they exist, they are good.… Evil is no substance.” Notwithstanding such Neo-Platonist interpretations, he had found Evil a terribly powerful force; the directly autobiographical chapters of this same great book proclaim this truth with unsurpassable vividness,--he is here fully Christian.[345] And in his unfinished work against the Pelagianizing Monk Julianus, in 429 A.D., he even declares--characteristically, whilst discussing the Origin of Sin: “Such and so great was Adam’s sin, that it was able to turn (human) nature itself into this evil.” Indeed, already in 418, he had maintained that “this wound” (of Original Sin) “forces all that is born of that human race to be under the Devil, so that the latter, so to speak, plucks the fruit from the fruit-tree of his own planting.”[346]

Pseudo-Dionysius, writing about 500 A.D., has evidently no such massive personal experience to oppose to the Neo-Platonic influence, an influence which, in the writings of Proclus (who died 485 A.D.), is now at its height. “Evil,” he says, “is neither in Demons nor in us, as an existent (positive) evil, but (only) as a failure and dearth of the perfection of our own proper goods.”[347] He says this and more of the same kind, but nothing as to the dread power of Evil. St. Thomas Aquinas (who died in 1271 A.D.) is, as we know, largely under the influence of the Negative conception: thus “the stain of sin is not something positive, existent in the soul.… It is like a shadow, which is the privation of light.”[348]

Catherine, though otherwise much influenced by the Negative conception, as e.g. in her definition of a soul possessed by the Evil Spirit as one suffering from a “privation of love,” finds the stain of sin, doubtless from her own experience, to be something distinctly positive, with considerable power of resistance and propagation.[349]--Mother Juliana of Norwich had, in 1373, also formulated both conceptions. “I saw not Sin, for I believe it hath no manner of substance, nor no part of being”: Neo-Platonist theory. “Sin is so vile and so mickle for to hate, that it may be likened to no pain.… All is good but Sin, and naught is evil but Sin”: Christian experience.[350]

Eckhart had, still further back (he died in 1327 A.D.), insisted much that “Evil is nothing but privation, or falling away from Being; not an effect, but a defect”:[351] yet he also finds much work to do in combating this somehow very powerful “defect.”--Not till we get to Spinoza (who died in 1677) do we get the Negative conception pushed home to its only logical conclusion: “By Reality and Perfection, I mean the same thing.… All knowledge of Evil is inadequate knowledge.… If the human mind had nothing but adequate ideas, it would not form any notion of Evil.”[352]

(3) As regards the Christian Mystics, their negative conception of evil, all but completely restricted as it was to cosmological theory, did those Mystics themselves little or no harm; since their tone of feeling and their volitional life, indeed a large part of their very speculation, were determined, not by such Neo-Platonist theories, but by the concrete experiences of Sin, Conscience, and Grace, and by the great Christian historical manifestation of the powers of all three.--It is clear too that our modern alternative: “positive-negative,” is not simply identical with the scholastic alternative: “substantial-accidental,” which latter alternative is sometimes predominant in the minds of these ancient theorizers; and that, once the question was formulated in the latter way, they were profoundly right in refusing to hypostatize Evil, in denying that there exists any distinct thing or being wholly bad.--Yet it is equally clear how very Greek and how little Christian is such a preoccupation (in face of the question of the nature of Evil) with the concepts of Substance and Accident, rather than with that of Will; and how strangely insufficient, in view of the tragic conflicts and ruins of real life, is all, even sporadic, denial, of a certain obstructive and destructive efficacy in the bad will, and of a mysterious, direct perversity and formal, intentional malignity in that will at its worst.

(4) On these two points it is undeniable that Kant, (with all his self-contradictions, insufficiencies, and positive errors on other important matters), has adequately formulated the practical dispositions and teachings of the fully awakened Christian consciousness, and hence, pre-eminently, of the great Saints in the past, although, in the matter of the perverse will, the Partial Mystics have, even in their theory, (though usually only as part of the doctrine of Original Sin), largely forestalled his analysis. “Nowhere in this our world, nowhere even outside it, is anything thinkable as good without any reservation, but the good will alone.” “That a corrupt inclination to evil is rooted in man, does not require any formal proof, in view of the clamorous examples furnished to all men by the experience of human behaviour. If you would have such cases from the so-called state of nature, where some philosophers have looked for the chief home of man’s natural goodness, you need only compare, with such an hypothesis, the unprovoked cruelties enacted in Tofoa, New Zealand … and the ceaseless scenes of murder in the North-Western American deserts, where no human being derives the slightest advantage from them,--and you will quickly have more than sufficient evidence before you to induce the abandonment of such a view. But if you consider that human nature is better studied in a state of civilization, since there its gifts have a better chance of development,--you will have to listen to a long melancholy string of accusations: of secret falseness, even among friends; of an inclination to hate him to whom we owe much; of a cordiality which yet leaves the observation true that ‘there is something in the misfortune of even our best friend which does not altogether displease us’: so that you will quickly have enough of the vices of culture, the most offensive of all, and will prefer to turn away your look from human nature altogether, lest you fall yourself into another vice,--that of hatred of mankind.”[353]

It is sad to think how completely this virile, poignant sense of the dread realities of human life again disappeared from the teachings of such post-Kantians as Hegel and Schleiermacher,--in other important respects so much more satisfactory than Kant. As Mr. Tennant has well said, in a stimulating book which, on this point at least, voices the unsophisticated, fully awakened conscience and Christian sense with refreshing directness, “for Jesus Christ and for the Christian consciousness, sin means something infinitely deeper and more real than what it can have meant for Spinoza or the followers of Hegel.”[354] Here again we have now in Prof. Eucken, a philosopher who, free from ultimate Pessimism, lets us hear once more those tones which are alone adequate to the painful reality. “In great things and in small, there exists an evil disposition beyond all simple selfishness: hatred and envy, even where the hater’s self-interest is not touched; an antipathy to things great and divine; a pleasure found in the disfigurement or destruction of the Good.… Indeed the mysterious fact of Evil, as a positive opposition to Good, has never ceased to occupy the deepest minds.… The concept of moral guilt cannot be got rid of, try as we may.”[355]

(5) And yet even with regard to this matter, Mysticism represents a profound compensating truth and movement, which we cannot, without grave detriment, lose out of the complete religious life. For in life at large, and in human life and history in particular, it would be sheer perversity to deny that there is much immediate, delightful, noble Beauty, Truth, and Goodness; and these also have a right to the soul’s careful, ruminating attention. And it is the Mystical element that furnishes this rumination.--Again, “it is part of the essential character of human consciousness, as a Synthesis and an organizing Unity, that, as long as the life of that consciousness lasts at all, not only contrast and tension, but also concentration and equilibrium must manifest themselves. Taking life’s standard from life itself, we cannot admit its decisive constituent to lie in tension alone.”[356] And it is the Mystical mood that helps to establish this equilibrium.--And finally, deep peace, an overflowing possession and attainment, and a noble joy, are immensely, irreplaceably powerful towards growth in personality and spiritual fruitfulness. Nothing, then, would be more shortsighted than to try and keep the soul from a deep, ample, recollective movement, from feeding upon and relishing, from as it were stretching itself out and bathing in, spiritual air and sunshine, in a rapt admiration, in a deep experience of the greatness, the beauty, the truth, and the goodness of the World, of Life, of God.

2. Mysticism and the Origin of Evil.

The second hindrance and help, afforded respectively by Exclusive and by Inclusive Mysticism in the matter of Evil, concerns the question of its Origin.

(1) Now it appears strange at first sight that, instead of first directly realizing and picturing the undeniable, profoundly important facts of man’s interior conflict, his continuous lapses from his own deepest standard, and his need of a help not his own to become what he cannot but wish to be, and of leaving the theory as to how man came by this condition to the second place; the Mystics should so largely,--witness Catherine--directly express only this theory, and should face what is happening hic et nunc all but exclusively under the picture of the prehistoric beginnings of these happenings, in the state of innocence and the lapse of the first man. For men of other religious modalities have held this doctrine as firmly as the Mystics, yet have mostly dwelt directly upon the central core of goodness and the weakness and sinfulness to be found in man; whilst the Mystics had even less scruple than other kinds of devout souls in embodying experimental truths in concepts and symbols other than the common ones.

(2) I think that, here again, it was the Neo-Platonist literary influence, so strong also on other points with the Mystics of the past, and a psychological trend characteristic of the Mystical habit of mind, which conjoined thus to concentrate the Mystics’ attention upon the doctrines of Original Justice and of a First Lapse, and to give to these doctrines the peculiar form and tone taken on by them here. We have noted, for instance, in the case of Catherine herself, how powerfully her thought and feeling, as to the first human soul’s first lapse into sin, is influenced by the idea of each human soul’s lapse into a body; and we have found this latter idea to be, notwithstanding its echoes in the Deutero-Canonical Book of Wisdom and in one non-doctrinal passage in St. Paul, not Christian but Neo-Platonist. Yet it is this strongly anti-body idea that could not fail to attract Mysticism, as such.--And the conception as to the plenary righteousness of that first soul before its lapse, which she gets from Christian theology, is similarly influenced, in her theorized emotion and thought, by the Neo-Platonist idea of every soul having already existed, perfectly spotless, previous to its incarnation: a view which could not but immensely attract such a high-strung temperament, with its immense requirement of something fixed and picturable on which to rest. Thus here the ideal for each soul’s future would have been already real in each soul’s past. In this past the soul would have been, as it were, a mirror of a particular fixed size and fixed intensity of lustre; its business here below consists in removing the impurities adhering to this mirror’s surface, and in guarding it against fresh stains.

(3) Now it is well known how it was St. Augustine, that mighty and daring, yet at times ponderous, intellect, who, (so long a mental captive of the Manichees and then so profoundly influenced by Plotinus,) was impelled, by the experiences of his own disordered earlier life and by his ardent African nature, to formulate by far the most explicit and influential of the doctrines upon these difficult matters. And if, with the aid of the Abbé Turmel’s admirable articles on the subject, we can, with a fairly open mind, study his successive, profoundly varying, speculations and conclusions concerning the Nature and Origin of Sin,[357] we shall not fail to be deeply impressed with the largely impassable maze of opposite extremes, contradictions and difficulties of every kind, in which that adventurous mind involved itself.--And to these difficulties immanent to the doctrine,--at least, in the form it takes in St. Augustine’s hands,--has, of course, to be added the serious moral danger that would at once result, were we, by too emphatic or literal an insistence upon the true guiltiness of Original sin, to weaken the chief axiom of all true morality--that the concurrence of the personality, in a freely-willed assent, is necessarily involved in the idea of sin and guilt.--And now the ever-accumulating number and weight of even the most certain facts and most moderate inductions of Anthropology and Ethnology are abolishing all evidential grounds for holding a primitive high level of human knowledge and innocence, and a single sudden plunge into a fallen estate, as above, apparently against, all our physiological, psychological, historical evidences and analogies, (which all point to a gradual rise from lowly beginnings), and are reducing such a conception to a pure postulate of Theology.

Yet Anthropology and Ethnology leave in undisturbed possession the great truths of Faith that “man’s condition denotes a fall from the Divine intention, a parody of God’s purpose in human history,” and that “sin is exceedingly sinful for us in whom it is a deliberate grieving of the Holy Spirit”; and they actually reinforce the profound verities that “the realization of our better self is a stupendously difficult task,” and as to “Man’s crying need of grace, and his capacity for a gospel of Redemption.”[358] But they point, with a force great in proportion to the highly various, cumulatively operative, immensely interpretative character of the evidence,--to the conclusion that “Sin,” as the Anglican Archdeacon Wilson strikingly puts it, “is … the survival or misuse of habits and tendencies that were incidental to an earlier stage of development.… Their sinfulness would thus lie in their anachronism, in their resistance to the … Divine force that makes for moral development and righteousness.” Certainly “the human infant” appears to careful observers, as Mr. Tennant notes, “as simply a non-moral animal,” with corresponding impulses and propensities. According to this view “morality consists in the formation of the non-moral material of nature into character …”; so that “if goodness consists essentially in man’s steady moralization of the raw material of morality, its opposite, sin, cannot consist in the material awaiting moralization, but in the will’s failure to completely moralize it.” “Evil” would thus be “not the result of a transition from the good, but good and evil would” both alike “be voluntary developments from what is ethically neutral.”[359] Dr. Wilson finds, accordingly, that “this conflict of freedom and conscience is precisely what is related as ‘the Fall’ sub specie historiae.” Scripture “tells of the fall of a creature from unconscious innocence to conscious guilt. But this fall from innocence” would thus be, “in another sense, a rise to a higher grade of being.”[360]

(4) It is, in any case, highly satisfactory for a Catholic to remember that the acute form, given to the doctrine of Original Sin by St. Augustine, has never been finally accepted by the Catholic Roman Church; indeed, that the Tridentine Definition expressly declares that Concupiscence does not, in strictness, possess the nature of Sin, but arises naturally, on the withdrawal of the donum superadditum,--so that Mr. Tennant can admit, in strictest accuracy, that “in this respect, the Roman theology is more philosophical than that of the Symbols of Protestant Christendom.”[361] It is true that the insistence upon “Original Sin” possessing somehow “the true and proper nature of Sin” remains a grave difficulty, even in this Tridentine formulation of the doctrine; whilst the objections, already referred to as accumulating against the theory in general, retain some of their cogency against other parts of this decree.--Yet we have here an impressive proclamation of the profoundest truths: the spiritual greatness of God’s plan for us, the substantial goodness of the material still ready to our hand for the execution of that plan, and His necessary help ever ready from the first; the reality of our lapse, away from all these, into sin, and of the effects of such lapse upon the soul; the abiding conflict between sense and spirit, the old man and the new, within each one of us; and the close solidarity of our poor, upward-aspiring, downward-plunging race, in evil as well as in good.

(5) And as to the Christian Mystics, their one particular danger here,--that of a Static Conception of man’s spirit as somehow constituted, from the first, a substance of a definite, final size and dignity, which but demands the removal of disfiguring impurities, is largely eliminated, even in theory, and all but completely overcome in practice, by the doctrine and the practice of Pure Love. For in “Charity” we get a directly dynamic, expansive conception and experience: man’s spirit is, at first, potential rather than actual, and has to be conquered and brought, as it were, to such and such a size and close-knitness of organization, by much fight with, and by the slow transformation of, the animal and selfish nature. Thus Pure Love, Charity, Agape, has to fight it out, inch by inch, with another, still positive force, impure love, concupiscence, Eros, in all the latter’s multiform disguises. Here Purity has become something intensely positive and of boundless capacities for growth; as St. Thomas says, “Pure Love has no limit to its increase, for it is a certain participation in the Infinite Love, which is the Holy Spirit.”[362]--In this utterly real, deeply Christian way do these Mystics overcome Neo-Platonist static abstractions, and simultaneously regain, in their practical theory and emotional perception, the great truth of the deep, subtle force of Evil, against which Pure Love has to stand, in virile guard, as long as earth’s vigil lasts. And the longest and most difficult of these conflicts is found,--here again in utterly Christian fashion,--not in the sensual tendencies proceeding from the body, but in the self-adoration, the solipsism of the spirit. We have found this in Catherine: at her best she ever has something of the large Stoic joy at being but a citizen in a divine Cosmopolis; yet but Love and Humility, those profoundest of the Christian affections, have indefinitely deepened the truth of the outlook, and the range of the work to be done, in and for herself and others.

(6) Yet even apart from Pure Love, Mysticism can accurately be said to apprehend an important truth when, along its static line of thought and feeling, it sees each soul as, from the first, a substance of a particular, final size. For each soul is doubtless intended, from the first, to express a particular thought and wish of God, to form one, never simply replaceable member in His Kingdom, to attain to a unique kind and degree of personality: and though it can refuse to endorse and carry out this plan, the plan remains within it, in the form of never entirely suppressible longings. The Mystic, then, sees much here also.

3. The warfare against Evil. Pseudo-Mysticism.

The third of the relations between Mysticism and the conception and experience of Evil requires a further elucidation of an important distinction, which we have already found at work all along, more or less consciously, between the higher and the lower Mysticism, and their respective, profoundly divergent, tempers, objects, and range.

(1) Prof. Münsterberg discriminates between these two Mysticisms with a brilliant excessiveness, and ends by reserving the word “Mysticism” for the rejected kind alone. “As soon as we speak of psychical objects,--of ideas, feelings, and volitions,--as subject-matters of our direct consciousness and experience, we have put before ourselves an artificial product, a transformation, to which the categories of real life no longer apply.” In this artificial product causal connections have taken the place of final ends. But “History, Practical Life, … Morality, Religion have nothing to do with these psychological constructions; the categories of Psychology,” treated by Münsterberg himself as a Natural, Determinist Science, “must not intrude into their teleological domains. But if,” on the other hand, “the categories belonging to Reality,” which is Spiritual and Libertarian, “are forced on to the psychological system, a system which was framed” by our mind “in the interest of causal explanation, we get a cheap mixture, which satisfies neither the one aim nor the other. Just this is the effect of Mysticism. It is the personal, emotional view applied, not to the world of Reality, where it fits, but to the Physical and Psychological worlds, which are constructed by the human logical will, with a view to gaining an impersonal, unemotional causal system.… The ideals of Ethics and Religion … have now been projected into the atomistic structure” (of the Causal System), “and have thus become dependent upon this system’s nature; they find their right of existence limited to the regions where ignorance of Nature leaves blanks in the Causal System, and have to tremble at every advance which Science makes.” It is to this projection alone that Münsterberg would apply the term “Mysticism,” which thus becomes exclusively “the doctrine that the processes in the world of physical and psychical objects are not always subject to natural laws, but are influenced, at times, in a manner fundamentally inexplicable from the standpoint of the causal conception of Nature.… Yet, the special interest of the Mystic stands and falls here with his conviction that, in these extra-causal combinations,” thus operative right within and at the level of this causal system, “we have a” direct, demonstrable “manifestation of a positive system of quite another kind, a System of Values, a system dominated, not by Mechanism, but by Significance.”[363]

(2) Now we have been given here a doubtless excessively antithetic and dualistic picture of what, in actual life, is a close-knit variety in unity,--that interaction between, and anticipation of the whole in, the parts, and that indication of the later stages in the earlier,--which is so strikingly operative in the order and organization of the various constituents and stages of the processes and growth of the human mind and character, and which appears again in the Reality apprehended, reproduced, and enriched by man’s powers.

Even in the humblest of our Sense-perceptions, there is already a mind perceiving and a Mind perceived; and, in the most abstract and artificial of our intellectual constructions, there is not only a logical requirement, but also, underlying this requirement as this cause’s deepest cause, an ever-growing if unarticulated experience and sense that only by the closest contact with the most impersonal-seeming, impersonally conceived forces of life and nature, and by the deepest recollection within its own interior world of mind and will, can man’s soul adequately develop and keep alive, within itself, a solid degree and consciousness of Spirit, Free-will, Personality, Eternity, and God. Thus, in proportion as he comes more deeply to advance in the true occasions of his spirit’s growth, does man still further emphasize and differentiate these two levels: the shallower, spacial-temporal, mathematico-physical, quantitative and determinist aspect of reality and level of apprehension; and the deeper, alone at all adequate, experience of all the fuller degrees of Reality and effectuations of the spirit’s life, with their overlapping, interpenetrating Succession, (their Duration), and their Libertarianism, Interiority, and Sense of the Infinite. He thus emphasizes both levels, because the determinist level is found to be, though never the source or direct cause, yet ever a necessary awakener and purifier of the Libertarian level.

Strictly within the temporal-spacial, quantitative method and level, indeed, we can nowhere find Teleology; but if we look back upon these quantitative superficialities from the qualitative, durational and personal, spiritual level and standpoint, (which alone constitute our direct experience), we find that the quantitative, causal level and method is everywhere inadequate to exhaust or rightly to picture Reality, in exact proportion to this reality’s degree of fulness and of worth. From the simplest Vegetable-Cell up to Orchids and Insectivorous Plants; from these on to Protozoans and up, through Insects, Reptiles, and Birds, to the most intelligent of Domestic Animals; from these on to Man, the Savage, and up to the most cultured or saintly of human personalities: we have everywhere, and increasingly, an inside, an organism, a subject as well as object,--a series which is, probably from the first, endowed with some kind of dim consciousness, and which increasingly possessed of a more and more definite consciousness, culminates in the full self-consciousness of the most fully human man. And everywhere here, though in indefinitely increasing measure, it is the individualizing and historical, the organic and soul-conceptions and experiences which constitute the most characteristic and important truths and reality about and in these beings. For the higher up we get in this scale of Reality, the more does the Interior determine and express itself in the Exterior, and the more does not only kind differ from kind of being, but even the single individual from the other individuals within each several kind. And yet nowhere, not even in free-willing, most individualized, personal Man do we find the quantitative, determinist envelope simply torn asunder and revealing the qualitative, libertarian spirit perfectly naked and directly testable by chronometer, measuring-rod, or crucible. The spirit is thus ever like unto a gloved hand, which, let it move ever so spontaneously, will ever, in the first instance, present the five senses with a glove which, to their exclusive tests, appears as but dead and motionless leather.

(3) Now we have already in Chapter IX studied the contrasting attitudes of Catherine and her attendants towards one class of such effects,--those attributed to the Divine Spirit,--and hence, in principle, towards this whole question. Yet it is in the matter of phenomena, taken to be directly Diabolic or Preternatural, that a Pseudo-Mysticism has been specially fruitful in strangely materialistic fantasies. As late as 1774 the Institutiones Theologiae Mysticae of Dom Schram, O.S.B., a book which even yet enjoys considerable authority, still solemnly described, as so many facts, cases of Diabolical Incubi and Succubae. Even in 1836-1842 the layman Joseph Görres could still devote a full half of his widely influential Mystik to “Diabolical Mysticism,”--witchcraft, etc.; a large space to “Natural Mysticism,”--divination, lycanthropy, vampires, etc.; and a considerable part of the “Divine Mysticism,” to various directly miraculous phenomenalisms. The Abbé Ribet could still, in his La Mystique Divine, distinguée de ses Contrefaçons Diaboliques, of 1895, give us a similarly uncritical mixture and transposition of tests and levels. But the terrible ravages of the belief in witchcraft in the later Middle Ages, and, only a few years back, the humiliating fraud and craze concerning “Diana Vaughan,” are alone abundantly sufficient to warn believers in the positive character of Evil away from all, solidly avoidable, approaches to such dangerous forms of this belief.[364]

(4) Yet the higher and highest Mystical attitude has never ceased to find its fullest, most penetrating expression in the life and teaching of devoted children of the Roman Church,--several of whom have been proclaimed Doctors and Models by that Church herself. And by a conjunction of four characteristics these great normative lives and teachers still point the way, out of and beyond all false or sickly Mysticism, on to the wholesome and the true.

(i) There is, first, the grand trust in and love of God’s beautiful, wide world, and in and of the manifold truth and goodness present throughout life,--realities which we have already found rightly to be dwelt on, in certain recollective movements and moments, to the momentary exclusion of their positively operative, yet ever weaker, opposites. “Well I wote,” says Mother Juliana, “that heaven and earth, and all that is made, is great, large, fair and good”; “the full-head of joy is to behold God in all,” and “truly to enjoy in Our Lord, is a full lovely thanking in His sight.”[365] This completely un-Manichaean attitude,--so Christian when held as the ultimate among the divers, sad and joyful, strenuous and contemplative moods of the soul,--is as strongly present in Clement of Alexandria, in the Sts. Catherine of Siena and of Genoa, in St. John of the Cross, and indeed in the recollective moments of all the great Mystics.

(ii) There is, next, a strong insistence upon the soul having to transcend all particular lights and impressions, in precise proportion to their apparently extraordinary character, if it would become strong and truly spiritual. “He that will rely on the letter of the divine locution, or on the intellectual form of the vision, will necessarily fall into delusion. ‘The letter killeth, the spirit quickeneth’; we must therefore reject the literal sense, and abide in the obscurity of faith.” “One desire only doth God allow in His presence, that of perfectly observing His law and carrying the Cross of Christ.… That soul, which has no other aim, will be a true ark containing the true Manna, which is God.” “One act of the will, wrought in charity, is more precious in the eyes of God, than that which all the visions and revelations of heaven might effect.” “Let men cease to regard these supernatural apprehensions … that they may be free.”[366] Here the essence of the doctrine lies in the importance attached to this transcendence, and not in the particular views of the Saint concerning the character of this or that miraculous-seeming phenomenon to be transcended.

(iii) And this essential doctrine retains all its cogency, even though we hold the strict necessity of a contrary, alternating movement of definite occupation with the Concrete, Contingent, Historical, Institutional, in thought and action. For this occupation will be with the normal, typical means, duties, and facts of human and religious life; and, whilst fully conscious of the Supernatural working in and with these seemingly but natural materials, will, with St. Augustine, pray God to “grant men to perceive in little things the common-seeming indications of things both small and great,” and, with him, will see a greater miracle in the yearly transformation of the vine’s watery sap into wine, and in the germination of any single seed, than even in that of Cana.[367]

(iv) And then there is, upon the whole, a tendency to concentrate, at these recollective stages, the soul’s attention upon Christ and God alone. “I believe I understand,” says Mother Juliana, “the ministration of holy Angels, as Clerks tell; but it was not shewed to me. For Himself is nearest and meekest, highest and lowest, and doeth all. God alone took our nature, and none but He; Christ alone worked our salvation, and none but He.”[368] And thus we get a wholesome check upon the Neo-Platonist countless mediations, of which the reflex is still to be found in the Areopagite. God indeed is alone held, with all Catholic theologians, to be capable of penetrating to the soul’s centre, and the fight against Evil is simplified to a watch and war against Self, in the form of an ever-increasing engrossment in the thought of God, and in the interests of His Kingdom. “Only a soul in union with God,” says St. John of the Cross, “is capable of this profound loving knowledge: for this knowledge is itself that union.… The Devil has no power to simulate anything so great.” “Self-love,” says Père Grou, “is the sole source of all the illusions of the spiritual life.… Jesus Christ on one occasion said to St. Catherine of Siena: ‘My daughter, think of Me, and I will think of thee’: a short epitome of all perfection. ‘Wheresoever thou findest self,’ says the Imitation, ‘drop that self’: the soul’s degree of fidelity to this precept is the true measure of its advancement.”[369] The highly authorized Manuel de Théologie Mystique of the Abbé Lejeune, 1897, gives but one-sixth of its three-hundred pages to the discussion of all quasi-miraculous phenomena, puts them all apart from the substance of Contemplation and of the Mystical Life, and dwells much upon the manifold dangers of such, never essential, things. The French Oratorian, Abbé L. Laberthonnière, represents, in the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, a spirituality as full of a delicate Mysticism as it is free from any attachment to extraordinary phenomena. The same can be said of the Rev. George Tyrrell’s Hard Sayings and External Religion. And the Abbé Sandreau has furnished us with two books of the most solid tradition and discrimination in all these matters.[370]

(5) And we should, in justice, remember that the Phenomenalist Mysticism, objected to by Prof. Münsterberg and so sternly transcended by St. John of the Cross, is precisely what is still hankered after, and treated as of spiritual worth, by present-day Spiritualism. Indeed, even Prof. James’s in many respects valuable Varieties of Religious Experience is seriously damaged by a cognate tendency to treat Religion, or at least Mysticism, as an abnormal faculty for perceiving phenomena inexplicable by physical and psychical science.

(6) And finally, with respect to the personality of Evil, we must not forget that “there are drawings to evil as to good, which are not mere self-temptations, … but which derive from other wills than our own; strictly, it is only persons that can tempt us.”[371]