Chapter 14: The Two Final Problems: Mysticism and Pantheism

The Two Final Problems: Mysticism And Pantheism. The Immanence Of God, And Spiritual Personality, Human And Divine

Introductory

Impossibility of completely abstracting from the theoretical form in the study of the experimental matter.

We now come to the last two of our final difficulties and problems--the supposed or real relations between Inclusive or Exclusive Mysticism and Pantheism; and the question concerning the Immanence of God and Spiritual Personality, Human and Divine.

(1) A preliminary difficulty in this, our deepest, task arises from the fact that, whereas the evidences of a predominantly individual, personal, directly experimental kind, furnished by every at all deeply religious soul, have hitherto been all but completely overlooked by trained historical investigators, in favour of the study of the theological concepts and formulations accepted and transmitted by such souls, now the opposite extreme is tending to predominate, as in Prof. William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, or in Prof. Weinel’s interesting study, The Effects of the Spirit and of the Spirits in the Sub-Apostolic Age, 1899. For here, as Prof. Bousset points out in connection with the latter book, we get an all but complete overlooking of the fact that, even in the most individual experience, there is always some intellectual framework or conception, some more or less traditional form, which had previously found lodgment in, and had been more or less accepted by, that soul; so that, though the experience itself, where at all deep, is never the mere precipitate of a conventionally accepted traditional intellectual form, it is nevertheless, even when more or less in conflict with this form, never completely independent of it.[372]--Yet though we cannot discriminate in full detail, we can show certain peculiarities in the traditional Jewish, Mohammedan, Christian Mysticism to be not intrinsic to the Mystical apprehensions as such, but to come from the then prevalent philosophies which deflected those apprehensions in those particular ways.

(2) In view then of this inevitable inter-relation between the experimental, personal matter and the theoretical, traditional form, I shall first consider the Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist conceptions concerning the relations between the General and the Particular, between God and Individual Things, as being the two, partly rival yet largely similar, systems that, between them, have most profoundly influenced the intellectual starting-point, analysis, and formulation of those experiences; and shall try to show the special attraction and danger of these conceptions for the mystically religious temperament. I shall next discuss the conceptions as to the relations between God and the individual personality,--the Noûs, the Spirit, and the Soul,--which, still largely Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist, have even more profoundly commended themselves to those Mystics, since these conceptions so largely met some of those Mystics’ requirements, and indeed remain still, in part, the best analysis procurable. I shall, thirdly, face the question as to any intrinsic tendency to Pantheism in Mysticism as such, and as to the significance and the possible utility of any such tendency, keeping all fuller description of the right check upon it for my last chapter. And finally, I shall consider what degree and form of the Divine Immanence in the human soul, of direct Experience or Knowledge of God on the part of man, and of “Personality” in God, appear to result from the most careful analysis of the deepest religious consciousness, and from the requirements of the Sciences and of Life.

I. Relations Between The General And The Particular, God And Individual Things, According To Aristotle, The Neo-Platonists, And The Medieval Strict Realists

1. Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Proclus.

(1) With regard to the relations between the General and Particular, we should note Aristotle’s final perplexities and contradictions, arising from his failure to harmonize or to transcend, by means of a new and self-consistent conception, the two currents, the Platonic and the specifically Aristotelian, which make up his thought. For, with him as with Plato, all Knowledge has to do with Reality: hence Reality alone, in the highest, primary sense of the word, can form the highest, primary object of Knowledge; Knowledge will be busy, primarily, with the Essence, the Substance of things. But with him, as against Plato, every substance is unique, whence it would follow that all knowledge refers, at bottom, to the Individual,--individual beings would form, not only the starting-point, but also the content and object of knowledge.--Yet this is what Aristotle, once more at one with Plato, stoutly denies: Science, even where it penetrates most deeply into the Particular, is never directed to individual things as such, but always to General Concepts; and this, not because of our human incapacity completely to know the Individual, as such, but because the General, in spite of the Particular being better known to us, is more primitive and more knowable, as alone possessing that Immutability which must characterize all objects of true knowledge.[373] The true Essence of things consists only in what is thought in their Concept, which concept is always some Universal; yet this Universal exists only in Individual Beings, which are thus declared true Substances: here are two contentions, the possibility of whose co-existence he fails to explain. Indeed at one time it is the Form, at another it is the Individual Being, composed of Form and Matter, which appears as real; and Matter, again, appears both as the Indefinite General and as the Cause of Individual Particularity.[374]

(2) Now Plato had indeed insisted upon ascending to even greater abstraction, unity, and generality, as the sure process for attaining to the truth of things; and had retained what is, for us, a strangely unpersonal, abstract element, precisely in his highest concept, since God here is hardly personal, but the Idea of Good, a Substance distinct from all other things, yet not, on this account, an Individual. Yet Plato’s profoundly aesthetic, social, ethical, above all religious, consciousness forced him to the inconsistency of proclaiming that, as the Sun is higher than the light and the eye, so the Good is higher than (mere) Being and Knowledge; and this Supreme Idea of the Good gives to things their Being, and to the understanding its power of Cognition, and is the Cause of all Rightness and Beauty, the Source of all Reality and Reason, and hence, not only a final, but also an efficient Cause,--indeed the Cause, pure and simple.[375] In the Philebus he tells us explicitly that the Good and the Divine Reason are identical; and in the Timaeus the Demiurge, the World-Former, looks indeed to the Image of the World, in order to copy it: yet the Demiurge is also himself this image which he copies.[376] We thus still have a supreme Multiplicity in Unity as the characteristic of the deepest Reality; and its chief attribute, Goodness, is not the most abstract and aloof, but the most rich in qualities and the most boundlessly self-communicative: “He was good, so he desired that all things should be as like unto himself as possible.”[377] And Aristotle, (although he places God altogether outside the visible world, and attributes to Him there one sole action, the thinking of his own thought, and one quasi-emotion, intellectual joy at this thinking), still maintains, in this shrunken form, the identity of the Good and of the Supreme Reason, Noûs, and a certain Multiplicity in Unity, and a true self-consciousness, within Him.

(3) It is Plotinus who is the first expressly to put the Godhead,--in strict obedience to the Abstractive scheme,--beyond all Multiplicity, hence above the highest Reason itself, for reason ever contains at least the duality of Subject thinking and of Object thought; above Being, for all being has ever a multitude of determinations; and above every part and the totality of All Things, for it is the cause of them all. The Cause is here ever outside the effect, the Unity outside the Multiplicity, what is thought outside of what thinks. The First is thus purely transcendent,--with one characteristic exception: although above Being, Energy, Thought, and Thinking, Beauty, Virtue, Life, It is still the Good; and because of this, though utterly self-sufficing and without action of any kind, It, “as it were,” overflows, and this overflow produces a Second.[378] And only this Second is here the Noûs, possessed of what Aristotle attributes to the First: it is no sheer Unity, “all things are together there, yet are they there discriminated”: it is contemplative Thinking of itself; it is pure and perfect Action.[379]

(4) And Proclus who, through the Pseudo-Dionysius, is the chief mediator between Plato and Plotinus on the one hand, and the Medieval Mystics and Scholastics on the other, is, with his immense thirst for Unity, necessarily absorbed by the question as to the Law according to which all things are conjoined to a whole. And this Law is for him the process of the Many out of the One, and their inclination back to the One; for this process and inclination determine the connection of all things, and the precise place occupied by each thing in that connection. All things move in the circle of procession from their cause, and of return to it; the simplest beings are the most perfect; the most complex are the most imperfect.[380]

2. The Anti-Proclian current, in the Areopagite’s view.

Now in the Pseudo-Dionysius we find an interesting oscillation between genuine Neo-Platonism, which finds Beings perfect in proportion to the fewness and universality of their attributes, although, with it, he inconsistently holds Goodness,--the deepest but not the most general attribute,--to be the most perfect of all; and Aristotelianism at its richest, when it finds Beings perfect according to the multiplicity and depth of their attributes. Dionysius himself becomes aware of the dead-lock thence ensuing. “The Divine name of the Good is extended to things being and to things not being,”--a statement forced upon him by his keeping, with Plato and Plotinus, Goodness as the supreme attribute, and yet driving home, more completely than they, their first principle that Generality and Perfection rise and sink together. “The Name of Being is extended to all things being” and stretches further than Life. “The name of Life is extended to all things living” and stretches further than Wisdom. “The Name of Wisdom is extended,” only, “to all the intellectual, and rational, and sensible.”

But if so, “for what reason do we affirm,” (as he has been doing in the previous sections), “that Life,” the less extended, “is superior to (mere) Being,” the more extended? “and that Wisdom,” though less extended, “is superior to mere Life,” the more extended? And he answers in favour of depth and richness of attributes. “If any one assumed the intellectual to be without being or life, the objection might hold good. But if the Divine Minds,” the Angels, “both are above all other beings, and live above all other living creatures, and think and know above sensible perception and reasoning, and aspire beyond all other existent and aspiring beings, to … the Beautiful and Good: then they encircle the Good more closely.” For “the things that participate more in the one and boundless-giving God, are more … divine, than those that come behind them in gifts.”[381] And with abiding truth he says: “Those who place attributes on That which is above every attribute, should derive the affirmation from what is more cognate to It; but those who abstract, with regard to That which is above every abstraction, should derive the negation from what is further removed from It. Are not, e.g., Life and Goodness more cognate to It than air and stone? And is It not further removed from debauch and anger than from ineffableness and incomprehensibility?”[382]

But more usually Dionysius shows little or no preference for any particular attribution or denegation; all are taken to fall short so infinitely as to eliminate any question as to degrees of failure. “The Deity-Above-All … is neither Soul nor Mind, neither One nor Oneness, neither Deity nor Goodness.”[383] God is thus purely transcendent.

3. Continuators of the Proclian current.

The influence of the Areopagite was notoriously immense throughout the Middle Ages,--indeed unchecked,--along its Proclian, Emanational, Ultra-Unitive current,--among the Pantheists from the Christian, Mohammedan and Jewish camps.

(1) Thus Scotus Eriugena (who died in about 877 A.D.) insists: “In strict parlance, the Divine Nature Itself exists alone in all things, and nothing exists which is not that Nature. The Lord and the Creature are one and the same thing.” “It is its own Self that the Holy Trinity loves, sees, moves within us.” One of his fundamental ideas is the equivalence of the degrees of abstraction and those of existence; he simply hypostatizes the logical table.[384] Eriugena was condemned.

(2) But the Pseudo-Aristotelian, really Proclian, Liber de Causis, written by a Mohammedan in about 850 A.D., became, from its translation into Latin in about 1180 A.D. onwards, an authority among the orthodox Scholastics. It takes, as “an example of the (true) doctrine as to Causes, Being, Living-Being, and Man. Here it is necessary that the thing Being should exist first of all, and next Living-Being, and last Man. Living-Being is the proximate, Being is the remote cause of Man; hence Being is in a higher degree the cause of Man than is Living-Being, since Being is the cause of Living-Being, which latter again is the cause of Man.” … “Being, (of the kind) which is before Eternity, is the first cause.… Being is more general than Eternity.… Being of the kind which is with and after Eternity, is the first of created things.… It is above Sense, and Soul, and Intelligence.”[385]

(3) The Mohammedan Avicenna, who died in 1037 A.D., is mostly Aristotelian in philosophy and Orthodox in religious intention, and, translated into Latin, was much used by St. Thomas. Yet he has lapses into pure Pantheism, such as: “The true Being that belongs to God, is not His only, but is the Being of all things, and comes forth abundantly from His Being. That which all things desire is Being: Being is Goodness; the perfection of Being is the perfection of Goodness.”[386]

(4) And the Spanish Jew, Ibn Gebirol (Avicebron), who died about 1070 A.D., is predominantly Proclian, but with a form of Pantheism which, in parts, strikingly foreshadows Spinoza. His masterly Fons Vitae, as translated into Latin, exercised a profound influence upon Duns Scotus. “Below the first Maker there is nothing but what is both matter and form.” “All things are resolvable into Matter and Form. If all things were resolvable into a single root,” (that is, into Form alone), “there would be no difference between that one root and the one Maker.” There exists a universal Matter and a universal Form. The first, or universal Matter, is a substance existing by itself, which sustains diversity, and is one in number: it is capable of receiving all the different kinds of forms. The universal Form is a substance which constitutes the essence of all the different kinds of forms.… By means of the knowledge of this universal Form, the knowledge of every (less general) form is acquired,--is deduced from it and resolved into it.” “Being falls under four categories, answering to: whether it is, what it is, what is its quality, and why it is: but, of these, the first in order of dignity is the category which inquires whether it is at all.”[387] We thus get again the degree of worth strictly identical with the degree of generality.

4. Inconsistencies of Aquinas and Scotus.

(1) St. Thomas, the chief of the orthodox Scholastics, has embodied the entire Dionysian writings in his own works, but labours assiduously--and successfully, as far as his own statements are concerned--to guard against the Pantheistic tendencies special to strict Realism. Yet it is clear, from his frequent warnings and difficult distinctions regarding the double sense of the proposition, “God is sheer Being,” and from the ease with which we find Eckhart, an entirely consistent Realist, lapse into the Pantheistic sense, how immanent is the danger to any severe form of the system.[388] And he fails to give us a thoroughly understandable and consistent account as to the relations between the General and the Particular, between Form and Matter, and between these two pairs of conceptions. Thus “Materia signata,” matter, as bearing certain dimensions, “is the principle of individuation”:[389] yet this quantum is already an individually determined quantity, and this determination remains unexplained. And certain forms exist separately, without matter, in which case each single form is a separate species; as with the Angels and, pre-eminently, with God.--Yet, as already Duns Scotus insisted, Aquinas’ general principle seems to require the non-existence of pure forms as distinct beings, and the partial materiality of all individual beings.[390]

(2) And Duns Scotus teaches, in explicit return to Avicebron, that every created substance consists of matter as well as of form, and that there is but one, First Matter, which is identical in every particular and derivative kind of matter. The world appears to him as a gigantic tree, whose root is this indeterminate matter; whose branches are the transitory substances; whose leaves the changeable accidents; whose flowers, the rational souls; whose fruit are the Angels: and which God has planted and which He tends. Here again the order of Efficacity,--with the tell-tale exception of God,--is identical with that of Generality.[391]

5. Eckhart’s Pantheistic trend.

But it is Eckhart who consistently develops the Pantheistic trend of a rigorous Intellectualism. The very competent and strongly Thomistic Father Denifle shows how Eckhart strictly followed the general scholastic doctrine, as enunciated by Avicenna: “In every creature its Being is one thing, and is from another, its Essence is another thing, and is not from another”; whereas in God, Being and Essence are identical. And Denifle adds: “Eckhart will have been unable to answer for himself the question as to what, in strictness, the ‘Esse’ is, in distinction from the ‘Essentia’; indeed no one could have told him, with precision.… Eckhart leaves intact the distinction between the Essence of God and that of the creature; but, doubtless in part because of this, he feels himself free,--in starting from an ambiguous text of Boetius,--to break down the careful discriminations established by St. Thomas, in view of this same text, between Universal Being, Common to all things extant, and Divine Being, reserved by Aquinas for God alone.”[392] “What things are nearer to each other, than anything that is and Being? There is nothing between them.” “Very Being,” the Being of God, “is the actualizing Form of every form, everywhere.” “In one word,” adds Denifle, “the Being of God constitutes the formal Being of all things.”[393] The degrees of Generality and Abstract Thinkableness are again also the degrees of Reality and Worth: “the Eternal Word assumed to Itself, not this or that human being, but a human nature which existed bare, unparticularized.” “Being and Knowableness are identical.”

When speaking systematically Eckhart is strictly Plotinian: “God and Godhead are as distinct as earth is from heaven.” “The Godhead has left all things to God: It owns nought, wills nought, requires nought, effects nought, produces nought.” “Thou shalt love the Godhead as It truly is: a non-God, non-Spirit, non-Person … a sheer, pure, clear One, severed from all duality: let us sink down into that One, throughout eternity, from Nothing unto Nothing, so help us God.” “The Godhead Itself remains unknown to Itself.” “It is God who energizes and speaks one single thing,--His Son, the Holy Ghost, and all creatures.… Where God speaks it, there it is all God; here, where man understands it, it is God and creature.”[394] No wonder that the following are among the propositions condemned by Pope John XXII in 1329: “God produces me as His own Being, a Being identical, not merely similar”; and, “I speak as falsely when I call God (the Godhead) good, as if I call white, black.”[395]

6. The logical goal of strict Realism.

This series of facts, which could be indefinitely extended, well illustrates the persistence of “the fundamental doctrine common to all forms of Realism,--of the species as an entity in the individuals, common to all and identical in each, an entity to which individual differences adhere as accidents,” as Prof. Seth-Pattison accurately defines the matter. “Yet when existence is in question, it is the individual, not the universal, that is real; and the real individual is not a compound of species and accidents, but is individual to the inmost fibre of his being.” Not as though Nominalism were in the right. For “each finite individual has its” special “place in the one real universe, with all the parts of which it is inseparably connected. But the universe is itself an individual or real whole, containing all its parts within itself, and not a universal of the logical order, containing its exemplifications under it.”[396] And, above all, minds, spirits, persons,--however truly they may approximate more and more to certain great types of rationality, virtue, and religion, which types are thus increasingly expressive of God’s self-revealing purpose and nature,--are ever, not merely numerically different, as between one individual and the other, but, both in its potentialities and especially in its spiritual actualization, no one soul can or does take the place of any other.

And if we ask what there is in any strict Realism to attract the Mystical sense, we shall find it, I think, in the insistence of such Realism upon Unity, Universality, and Stability. Yet in so far as Mysticism, in such a case Exclusive Mysticism, tends to oust the Outgoing movement of the soul, it empties these forms of their Multiple, Individual, and Energizing content. Inclusive Mysticism may be truly said alone to attain to the true Mystic’s desires; for only by the interaction of both movements, and of all the powers of the soul, will the said soul escape the ever-increasing poverty of content characteristic of the strict Realist’s pyramid of conceptions; a poverty undoubtedly antagonistic to the secret aspiration of Mysticism, which is essentially an apprehension, admiration, and love of the infinite depths and riches of Reality--of this Reality no doubt present everywhere, yet in indefinitely various, and mutually complementary and stimulative forms and degrees. And the readiness with which Mysticism expressed itself in the Nominalist Categories,--distinctly less adequate to a healthy, Partial Mysticism than the more moderate forms of Realism,--shows how little intrinsic was the link which seemed to bind it to a Realism of the most rigorous kind.

Ii. Relations Between God And The Human Soul

In taking next the question as to the relations between God and the Human Soul, we shall find our difficulties increased, because, here especially, the Philosophers and even the Biblical Writers have, with regard to religious experience, used expressions and furnished stimulations of a generally complex and unclarified, intermittent, and unharmonized kind; and especially because certain specifically religious experiences and requirements have operated here with a unique intensity, at one time in a Pantheistic, at another in a more or less Deistic direction. The reader will specially note the points in the following doctrines which helped on the conception that a certain centre or highest part of the soul is God, or a part of God, Himself.

1. Plato and Aristotle. “The Noûs.”

(1) Plato teaches the pre-existence and the post-existence (immortality) of the soul, as two interdependent truths. In his earlier stage, e.g. the Phaedrus, he so little discriminates, in his argument for immortality, between the individual soul and the World-Soul, as to argue that “the Self-Moving” Soul generally “is the beginning of motion, and this motion,” (specially here in connection with the human soul), “can neither be destroyed nor begotten, since, in that case, the heavens and all generation would collapse.” Yet individual souls are not, according to him, emanations of the World-Soul; but, as the particular ideas stand beside the Supreme Idea, so do the particular souls stand beside the Soul of the Whole, in a distinct peculiarity of their own.[397]--And again, since the soul has lapsed from a purer, its appropriate, life into the body, and has thus no original, intrinsic relation to this body, the activity of the senses, indeed in strictness even that of the emotions, cannot form part of its essential nature. Only the highest part of the soul, the Reason, Noûs, which, as “sun-like, God-like,” can apprehend the sun, God, is one and simple, as are all the ideas, immortal; whereas the soul’s lower part consists of two elements,--the nobler, the irascible, and the ignobler, the concupiscible passions. But how the unity of the soul’s life can co-exist with this psychical tritomy, is a question no doubt never formulated even to himself by Plato: we certainly have only three beings bound together, not one being active in different directions.[398]

(2) Aristotle, if more sober in his general doctrine, brings some special obscurities and contradictions. For whilst the pre-existence of the soul, taken as a whole, is formally denied, and indeed its very origin is linked to that of the body, its rational part, the Noûs, comes into the physical organism from outside of the matter altogether, and an impersonal pre-existence is distinctly predicated of it,--in strict conformity with his doctrine that the Supreme Noûs does not directly act upon, or produce things in, the world.[399]

2. St. Paul. The “Spirit.”

But it is St. Paul who, in his Mystical outbursts and in the systematic parts of his doctrine, as against the simply hortatory level of his teaching, gives us the earliest, one of the deepest, and to this hour by far the most influential, among the at all detailed experiences and schemes, accepted by and operative among Christians, as to the relations of the human soul to God. And here again, and with characteristic intensity, certain overlapping double meanings and conceptions, and some vivid descriptions of experiences readily suggestive of the divinity of the soul’s highest part, repeatedly appear.

(1) In the systematic passages we not only find the terms Psyche, “Soul,” for the vital force of the body; and Noûs, (“Mind,”) “Heart,” and “Conscience,” for various aspects and functions of man’s rational and volitional nature: but a special insistence upon Pneuma, “Spirit,” mostly in a quite special sense of the word. Thus in 1 Cor. ii, 14, 15, we get an absolute contrast between the psychic or sarkic, the simply natural man, and the Pneumatic, the Spiritual one, all capacity for understanding the Spirit of God being denied to the former. The Spiritual thus appears as itself already the Divine, and the Spirit as the exclusive, characteristic property of God, something which is foreign to man, apart from his Christian renovation and elevation to a higher form of existence. Only with the entrance of faith and its consequences into the mind and will of man, does this transcendent Spirit become an immanent principle: “through His Spirit dwelling in you.”[400]--Hence, in the more systematic Pauline Anthropology, Pneuma cannot be taken as belonging to man’s original endowment. Certainly in 1 Cor. ii, 11, the term “the spirit of a man” appears simply because the whole passage is dominated by a comparison between the Divine and the human consciousness, which allows simultaneously of the use of the conversely incorrect term, “the mind of God,”--here, v. 16, and in Rom. xi, 34. And the term “the spirit of the world,” 1 Cor. ii, 12, is used in contrast with “the Spirit of God,” and as loosely as the term “the God of this world,” is applied, in 2 Cor. iv, 4, to Satan.--Only some four passages are difficult to interpret thus: e.g. “Every defilement of flesh and of spirit” (2 Cor. vii, 1); for how can God, Spirit, be defiled? Yet we can “forget that our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit,” 1 Cor. vi, 19; and its defilement can “grieve the Holy Spirit” (Eph. iv, 30).[401]

And note how parallel to his conception of this immanence of the transcendent Spirit is St. Paul’s conception, based upon his personal, mystical experience, of the indwelling of Christ in the regenerate human soul. Saul had indeed been won to Jesus Christ, not by the history of Jesus’ earthly life, but by the direct manifestation of the heavenly Spirit-Christ, on the way to Damascus: whence he teaches that only those who know Him as Spirit, can truly “be in Christ,”--an expression formed on the model of “to be in the Spirit,” as in Mark xii, 36, and Apoc. 1, 10.

(2) And then these terms take on, in specifically Pauline Mystical passages, a suggestion of a local extension and environment, and express, like the corresponding formulae “in God,” “in the Spirit,” the conception of an abiding within as it were an element,--that of the exalted Christ and His Divine glory. Or Christ is within us, as the Spirit also is said to be, so that the regenerate personality, by its closeness of intercourse with the personality of Christ, can become one single Spirit with Him, 1 Cor. vi, 17. “As the air is the element in which man moves, and yet again the element of life which is present within the man: so the Pneuma-Christ is for St. Paul both the Ocean of the Divine Being, into which the Christian, since his reception of the Spirit, is plunged,” and in which he disports himself, “and a stream which, derived from that Ocean, is specially introduced within his individual life.”[402] Catherine’s profound indebtedness to this Mystical Pauline doctrine has already been studied; here we are but considering this doctrine in so far as suggestive, to the Mystics, of the identity between the true self and God,--an identity readily reached, if we press such passages as “Christ, our life”; “to live is Christ”; “I live, not I, but Christ liveth in me.”[403]

3. Plotinus.

Some two centuries later, Plotinus brings his profound influence to bear in the direction of such identification. For as the First, the One, which, as we saw, possesses, for him, no Self-consciousness, Life, or Being, produces the Second, the Noûs, which, possessed of all these attributes, exercises them directly in self-contemplation alone; and yet this Second is so closely like that First as to be “light from light”: so does the Second produce the Third, the Human Psyche, which, though “a thing by itself,” is a “godlike (divine) thing,” since it possesses “a more divine part, the part which is neighbour to what is above, the Noûs, with which and from which Noûs the Psyche exists.”--The Psyche is “an image of the Noûs”: “as outward speech expresses inward thought, so is the Psyche a concept of the Noûs,--a certain energy of the Noûs, as the Noûs itself is an energy of the First Cause.” “As with fire, where we distinguish the heat that abides within the fire and the heat that is emitted by it … so must we conceive the Psyche not as wholly flowing forth from, but as in part abiding in, in part proceeding from the Noûs.”[404]

And towards the end of the great Ninth Book of the Sixth Ennead, he tells how in Ecstasy “the soul sees the Source of Life … the Ground of Goodness, the Root of the Soul.… For we are not cut off from or outside of It … but we breathe and consist in It: since It does not give and then retire, but ever lifts and bears us, so long as It is what It is.” “We must stand alone in It and must become It alone, after stripping off all the rest that hangs about us.… There we can behold both Him and our own selves,--ourselves, full of intellectual light, or rather as Pure Light Itself, having become God, or rather as being simply He … abiding altogether unmoved, having become as it were Stability Itself.” “When man has moved out of himself away to God, like the image to its Prototype, he has reached his journey’s end.” “And this is the life of the Gods and of divine and blessed men … a flight of the alone to the Alone.”[405]

4. Eckhart’s position. Ruysbroek.

(1) Eckhart gives us both Plotinian positions--the God-likeness and the downright Divinity of the soul. “The Spark (das Fünkelein) of the Soul … is a light impressed upon its uppermost part, and an image of the Divine Nature, which is ever at war with all that is not divine. It is not one of the several powers of the soul.… Its name is Synteresis,”--i.e. conscience. “The nine powers of the soul are all servants of that man of the soul, and help him on to the soul’s Source.”[406]--But in one of the condemned propositions he says: “There is something in the soul which is Increate and Uncreatable; if the whole soul were such, it would be (entirely) Increate and Uncreatable. And this is the Intellect,”--standing here exactly for Plotinus’s Noûs.[407]

(2) Ruysbroek (who died in 1381) combines a considerable fundamental sobriety with much of St. Paul’s daring and many echoes of Plotinus. “The unity of our spirit with God is of two kinds,--essential and actual. According to its essence, our spirit receives, in its innermost highest part, the visit of Christ, without means and without intermission; for the life which we are in God, in our Eternal Image, and that which we have and are in ourselves, according to the essence of our being … are without distinction.--But this essential unity of our spirit with God has no consistency in itself, but abides in God and flows out from and depends on Him.” The actual unity of our spirit with God, caused by Grace, confers upon us not His Image, but His Likeness, “and though we cannot lose the Image of God, nor our natural unity with Him,--if we lose His Likeness, His Grace, Christ, who, in this case, comes to us with mediations and intermissions, we shall be damned.”[408]

5. St. Teresa’s mediating view.

St. Teresa’s teachings contain interesting faint echoes of the old perplexities and daring doctrines concerning the nature of the Spirit; but articulate a strikingly persistent conviction that the soul holds God Himself as distinct from His graces, possessing thus some direct experience of this His presence. “I cannot understand what the mind is, nor how it differs from the soul or the spirit either: all three seem to me to be but one, though the soul sometimes leaps forth out of itself, like a fire which has become a flame: the flame ascends high above the fire, but it is still the same flame of the same fire.” “Something subtle and swift seems to issue from the soul, to ascend to its highest part and to go whither Our Lord will … it seems a flight. This little bird of the spirit seems to have escaped out of the prison of the body.” Indeed “the soul is then not in itself … it seems to me to have its dwelling higher than even the highest part of itself.”[409]--“In the beginning I did not know that God is present in all things.… Unlearned men used to tell me that He was present only by His grace. I could not believe that.… A most learned Dominican told me He was present Himself … this was a great comfort to me.” “To look upon Our Lord as being in the innermost parts of the soul … is a much more profitable method, than that of looking upon Him as external to us.” “The living God was in my soul.” And even, “hitherto” up to 1555, “my life was my own; my life, since then, is the life which God lived in me.”[410]

6. Immanence, not Pantheism.

St. Teresa’s teaching as to God’s own presence in the soul points plainly, I think, to the truth insisted on by the Catholic theologian Schwab, in his admirable monograph on Gerson. “Neither speculation nor feeling are satisfied with a Pure Transcendence of God; and hence the whole effort of true Mysticism is directed, whilst not abolishing His Transcendence, to embrace and experience God, His living presence, in the innermost soul,--that is, to insist, in some way or other, upon the Immanence of God. Reject all such endeavours as Pantheistic, insist sharply upon the specific eternal difference between God and the Creature: and the Speculative, Mystical depths fade away, with all their fascination.”[411] Not in finding Pantheism already here, with the imminent risk of falling into a cold Deism, but in a rigorous insistence, with all the great Inclusive Mystics, upon the spiritual and moral effects, as the tests of the reality and worth of such experiences, and, with the Ascetical and Historical souls, upon also the other movement--an outgoing in some kind of contact with, and labour at, the contingencies and particularities of life and mind--will the true safeguard for this element of the soul’s life be found.[412]

Iii. Mysticism And Pantheism: Their Differences And Points Of Likeness

But does not Mysticism, not only find God in the soul, but the soul to be God? Is it not, as such, already Pantheism? Or, if not, what is their difference?

1. Plotinus and Spinoza compared.

Now Dr. Edward Caird, in his fine book, The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, 1904, tells us that “Mysticism is religion in its most concentrated and exclusive form; it is that attitude of mind in which all other relations are swallowed up in the relation of the soul to God”; and that “Plotinus is the Mystic par excellence.”[413] And he then proceeds to contrast Plotinus, the typical Mystic, with Spinoza, the true Pantheist.

“Whether” or not “Spinoza, in his negation of the limits of the finite, still leaves it open to himself to admit a reality in finite things which is not negated,” and “to conceive of the absolute substance as manifesting itself in attributes and modes”: “it is very clear that he does so conceive it, and that, for all those finite things which he treats as negative and illusory in themselves, he finds in God a ground of reality … which can be as little destroyed as the divine substance itself.” “God, Deus sive Natura, is conceived as the immanent principle of the universe, or perhaps rather the universe is conceived as immanent in God.”--Thus to him “the movement by which he dissolves the finite in the infinite, and the movement by which he finds the finite again in the infinite, are equally essential. If for him the world is nothing apart from God, God is nothing apart from His realization in the world.” This is true Pantheism.[414]

But in Plotinus the via negativa involves a negation of the finite and determinate in all its forms; hence here it is impossible to find the finite again in the infinite. The Absolute One is here not immanent but transcendent.[415] “While the lower always has need of the higher, the higher is regarded as having no need” for any purpose “of the lower”; and “the Highest has no need of anything but Itself.” “Such a process cannot be reversed”: “in ascending, Plotinus has drawn the ladder after him, and left himself no possibility of descending again. The movement, in which he is guided by definite and explicit thought, is always upwards; while, in describing the movement downwards, he has to take refuge in metaphors and analogies,” for the purpose of indicating a purely self-occupied activity which only accidentally produces an external effect, e.g., “the One as it were overflows, and produces another than itself.”[416] “Thus we have the strange paradox that the Being who is absolute, is yet conceived as in a sense external to the relative and finite, and that He leaves the relative and finite in a kind of unreal independence.” “On the one side, we have a life which is nothing apart from God, and which, nevertheless, can never be united to him, except as it loses itself altogether; and, on the other side, an Absolute, which yet is not immanent in the life it originates, but abides in transcendent isolation from it.… It is this contradiction which … makes the writings of Plotinus the supreme expression of Mysticism.”[417]

Now I think, with this admirable critic, that we cannot but take Spinoza as the classical representative of that parallelistic Pantheism to which most of our contemporary systems of psycho-physical parallelism belong. As Prof. Troeltsch well puts it, “we have here a complete parallelism between every single event in the physical world, which event is already entirely explicable from its own antecedents within that physical world, and every event of a psychical kind, which, nevertheless, is itself also entirely explicable from its own psychical antecedents alone.” And “this parallelism again is but two sides of the one World-Substance, Which is neither Nature nor Spirit, and Whose law is neither natural nor spiritual law, but Which is Being in general and Law in general.” In this one World-Substance, with its parallel self-manifestations as extension and as thought, Spinoza finds the ultimate truth of Religion, as against the Indeterminist, Anthropomorphic elements of all the popular religions,--errors which have sprung, the Anthropomorphic from man’s natural inclination to interpret Ultimate Reality, with its complete neutrality towards the distinctions of Psychical and Physical, by the Psychic side, as the one nearest to our own selves; and the Indeterminist from the attribution of that indetermination to the World-Substance which, even in Psychology, is already a simple illusion and analytical blunder.

“It is in the combination,” concludes Professor Troeltsch, “of such a recognition of the strict determination of all natural causation, and of such a rejection of materialism (with its denial of the independence of the psychic world), that rests the immense power of Pantheism at the present time.”[418] On the other hand, the supposed Pantheistic positions of the later Lessing, of Herder, Goethe and many another predominantly aesthetic thinker, must, although far richer and more nearly adequate conceptions of full reality, be assigned, qua Pantheism, a secondary place, as inconsistent, because already largely Teleological, indeed Theistic Philosophies.

2. Complete Pantheism non-religious; why approached by Mysticism.

Now the former, the full Pantheism, must, I think, be declared, with Rauwenhoff, to be only in name a religious position at all. “In its essence it is simply a complete Monism, a recognition of the Pan in its unity and indivisibility, and hence a simple view of the world, not a religious conception.”[419]--Yet deeply religious souls can be more or less, indeed profoundly, influenced by such a Monism, so that we can get Mystics with an outlook considerably more Spinozist than Plotinian. There can, e.g., be no doubt as to both the deeply religious temper and the strongly Pantheistic conceptions of Eckhart in the Middle Ages, and of Schleiermacher in modern times; and indeed Spinoza himself is, apart from all questions as to the logical implications and results of his intellectual system, and as to the justice of his attacks upon the historical religions, a soul of massive religious intuition and aspiration.

But further: Mystically tempered souls,--and the typical and complete religious soul will ever possess a mystical element in its composition,--have three special attraits which necessarily bring them into an at least apparent proximity to Pantheism.

(1) For one thing Mysticism, like Pantheism, has a great, indeed (if left unchecked by the out-going-movement) an excessive, thirst for Unity, for a Unity less and less possessed of Multiplicity; and the transition from holding the Pure Transcendence of this Unity to a conviction of its Exclusive Immanence becomes easy and insignificant, in proportion to the emptiness of content increasingly characterizing this Oneness.

(2) Then again, like Pantheists, Mystics dwell much upon the strict call to abandon all self-centredness, upon the death to self, the loss of self; and in proportion as they dwell upon this self to be thus rejected, and as they enlarge the range of this petty self, do they approach each other more and more.

(3) And lastly, there is a peculiarity about the Mystical habit of mind, which inevitably approximates it to the Pantheistic mode of thought, and which, if not continuously taken by the Mystic soul itself as an inevitable, but most demonstrable, inadequacy, will react upon the substance of this soul’s thought in a truly Pantheistic sense. This peculiarity results from the Mystic’s ever-present double tendency of absorbing himself, away from the Successive and Temporal, in the Simultaneity and Eternity of God, conceiving thus all reality as partaking, in proportion to its depth and greater likeness to Him, in this Totum Simul character of its ultimate Author and End; and of clinging to such vivid picturings of this reality as are within his, this Mystic’s reach. Now such a Simultaneity can be pictorially represented to the mind only by the Spacial imagery of co-existent Extensions,--say of air, water, light, or fire: and these representations, if dwelt on as at all adequate, will necessarily suggest a Determinism of a Mathematico-Physical, Extensional type, i.e. one, and the dominant, side of Spinozistic Pantheism.--It is here, I think, that we get the double cause for the Pantheistic-seeming trend of almost all the Mystical imagery. For even the marked Emanationism of much in Plotinus, and of still more in Proclus,--the latter still showing through many a phrase in Dionysius,--appears in their images as operating upon a fixed Extensional foundation: and indeed these very overflowings, owing to the self-centredness and emptiness of content of their Source, the One, and to their accidental yet automatic character, help still further to give to the whole outlook a strikingly materialistic, mechanical, in so far Pantheistic, character.

3. Points on which Mysticism has usefully approximated to Pantheism.

And yet we must not overlook the profound, irreplaceable services that are rendered by Mysticism,--provided always it remains but one of two great movements of the living soul,--even on the points in which it thus approximates to Pantheism. These services, I think, are three.

(1) The first of these services has been interestingly illustrated by Prof. A. S. Pringle Pattison, from the case of Dr. James Martineau’s writings, and the largely unmediated co-existence there of two different modes of conceiving God. “The first mode represents God simply as another, higher Person; the second represents Him as the soul of souls. The former, Deistic and Hebraic, rests upon an inferential knowledge of God, derived either from the experience of His resistance to our will through the forces of Nature, or from that of His restraint upon us in the voice of Conscience,--God, in both cases, being regarded as completely separated from the human soul, and His existence and character apprehended and demonstrated by a process of reasoning.--The second mode is distinctly and intensely Christian, and consists in the apprehension of God as the Infinite including all finite existences, as the immanent Absolute who progressively manifests His character in the Ideals of Truth, Beauty, Righteousness, and Love.” And Professor Pattison points out, with Professor Upton, that it was Dr. Martineau’s almost morbid dread of Pantheism which was responsible for the inadequate expression given to this Mystical, or “Speculative” element in his religious philosophy. For only if we do not resist such Mysticism, do we gain and retain a vivid experience of how “Consciousness of imperfection and the pursuit of perfection are alike possible to man only through the universal life of thought and goodness in which he shares, and which, at once an indwelling presence and an unattainable ideal, draws him on and always on.” “Personality is” thus “not ‘unitary’ in Martineau’s sense, as occupying one side of a relation, and unable to be also on the other. The very capacity of knowledge and morality implies that the person … is capable of regarding himself and all other beings from what Martineau well names ‘the station of the Father of Spirits.’”[420]

I would, however, guard here against any exclusion of a seeking or finding of God in Nature and in Conscience: only the contrary exclusion of the finding of God within the soul, and the insistence upon a complete separation of Him from that soul, are inacceptable in the “Hebraic” mood. For a coming and a going, a movement inwards and outwards, checks and counter-checks, friction, contrast, battle and storm, are necessary conditions and ingredients of the soul’s growth in its sense of appurtenance to Spirit and to Peace.

(2) A further service rendered by this Pantheistic-seeming Mysticism,--though always only so long as it remains not the only or last word of Religion,--is that it alone discovers the truly spiritual function and fruitfulness of Deterministic Science. For only if Man deeply requires a profound desubjectivizing, a great shifting of the centre of his interest, away from the petty, claimful, animal self, with its “I against all the world,” to a great kingdom of souls, in which Man gains his larger, spiritual, unique personality, with its “I as part of, and for all the world,” by accepting to be but one amongst thousands of similar constituents in a system expressive of the thoughts of God; and only if Mathematico-Physical Science is specially fitted to provide such a bath, and hence is so taken, with all its apparently ruinous Determinism and seeming Godlessness: is such Science really safe from apologetic emasculation; or from running, a mere unrelated dilettantism, alongside of the deepest interests of the soul; or from, in its turn, crushing or at least hampering the deepest, the spiritual life of man. Hence all the greater Partial Mystics have got a something about them which indicates that they have indeed passed through fire and water, that their poor selfishness has been purified in a bath of painfully-bracing spiritual air and light, through which they have emerged into a larger, fuller life. And Nicolas of Coes, Pascal, Malebranche are but three men out of many whose Mysticism and whose Mathematico-Physical Science thus interstimulated each other and jointly deepened their souls.

We shall find, further on, that this purificatory power of such Science has been distinctly heightened for us now. Yet, both then and now, there could and can be such purification only for those who realize and practise religion as sufficiently ultimate and wide and deep to englobe, (as one of religion’s necessary stimulants), an unweakened, utterly alien-seeming Determinism in the middle regions of the soul’s experience and outlook. Such an englobement can most justly be declared to be Christianity driven fully home. For thus is Man purified and saved,--if he already possesses the dominant religious motive and conviction,--by a close contact with Matter; and the Cross is plunged into the very centre of his soul’s life, operating there a sure division between the perishing animal Individual and the abiding spiritual Personality: the deathless Incarnational and Redemptive religion becomes thus truly operative there.

(3) And the last service, rendered by such Mysticism, is to keep alive in the soul the profoundly important consciousness of the prerequisites, elements and affinities of a Universally Human kind, which are necessary to, and present in, all Religion, however definitely Concrete, Historical and Institutional it may have become. Such special, characteristic Revelations, Doctrines and Institutions, as we find them in all the great Historical Religions, and in their full normative substance and form in Christianity and Catholicism, can indeed alone completely develop, preserve and spread Religion in its depth and truth; yet they ever presuppose a general, usually dim but most real, religious sense and experience, indeed a real presence and operation of the Infinite and of God in all men.

It is, then, not an indifferentist blindness to the profound differences, in their degree of truth, between the religions of the world, nor an insufficient realization of man’s strict need of historical and institutional lights and aids for the development and direction of that general religious sense and experience, which make the mind revolt from sayings such as those we have already quoted from the strongly Protestant Prof. Wilhelm Hermann, and to which we can add the following. “Everywhere, outside of Christianity, Mysticism will arise, as the very flower of the religious development. But the Christian must declare such Mystical experience of God to be a delusion.” For “what is truly Christian is ipso facto not Mystical.” “We are Christians because, in the Humanity of Jesus, we have struck upon a fact which is of incomparably richer content, than are the feelings that arise within our own selves.” Indeed, “I should have failed to recognize the hand of God even in what my own dead father did for me, had not, by means of my Christian education, God appeared to me, in the Historic Christ.”[421]--As if it were possible to consider Plato and Plotinus, in those religious intuitions and feelings of theirs which helped to win an Augustine from crass Manichaeism to a deep Spiritualism, and which continue to breathe and burn as part-elements in countless sayings of Christian philosophers and saints, to have been simply deluded, or mere idle subjectivists! As if we could apprehend even Christ, without some most real, however dim and general, sense of religion and presence of God within us to which He could appeal! And as if Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Maccabaean Martyrs, and many a devoted soul within Mohammedanism or in Brahmanic India, could not and did not apprehend something of God’s providence in their earthly father’s love towards them!

No wonder that, after all this, Hermann can,--as against Richard Rothe who, in spite of more than one fantastic if not fanatical aberration, had, on some of the deepest religious matters, a rarely penetrating perception,--write in a thoroughly patronizing manner concerning Catholic Mysticism. For this Mysticism necessarily appears to him not as, at its best, the most massive and profound development of one type of the ultimate religion,--a type in which one necessary element of all balanced religious life is at the fullest expansion compatible with a still sufficient amount and healthiness of the other necessary elements of such a life,--but only as “a form of religion which has brought out and rendered visible such a content of interior life as is capable of being produced within the limits of Catholic piety.”[422] The true, pure Protestant possesses, according to Hermann, apparently much less, in reality much more,--the Categorical Imperative of Conscience and the Jesus of History, as the double one-and-all of his, the only spiritual religion.--Yet if Christianity is indeed the religion of the Divine Founder, Who declared that he that is not against Him is for Him; or of Paul, who could appeal to the heathen Athenians and to all men for the truth and experience that in God “we live and move and have our being”; or of the great Fourth Gospel, which tells us that Christ, the True Light, enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world, a light which to this hour cannot, for the great majority, be through historic knowledge of the Historic Christ at all; or of Clement of Alexandria and of Justin Martyr, who loved to find deep apprehensions and operations of God scattered about among the Heathen; or of Aquinas, who, in the wake of the Areopagite and others, so warmly dwells upon how Grace does not destroy, but presupposes and perfects Nature: then such an exclusive amalgam of Moralism and History, though doubtless a most honest and intelligible reaction against opposite excesses, is a sad impoverishment of Christianity, in its essential, world-wide, Catholic character.

Indeed, to be fair, there have never been wanting richer and more balanced Protestant thinkers strongly to emphasize this profound many-sidedness and universality of Christianity: so, at present, in Germany, Profs. Eucken, Troeltsch, Class, Siebeck and others; and, in England, Prof. A. S. P. Pattison and Mr. J. R. Illingworth. In all these cases there is ever a strong sympathy with Mysticism properly understood, as the surest safeguard against such distressing contractions as is this of Hermann, and that of Albrecht Ritschl before him.

4. Christianity excludes complete and final Pantheism.

And yet, as we have repeatedly found, Christianity has, in its fundamental Revelation and Experience, ever implied and affirmed such a conception of Unity, of Self-Surrender, and of the Divine Action, as to render any Pantheistic interpretation of these things ever incomplete and transitional.

(1) The Unity here is nowhere, even ultimately, the sheer Oneness of a simply identical Substance, but a Unity deriving its very close-knitness from its perfect organization of not simply identical elements or relations.

The Self-Surrender here is not a simply final resolution, of laboriously constituted centres of human spiritual consciousness and personality, back into a morally indifferent All, but a means and passage, for the soul, from a spiritually worthless self-entrenchment within a merely psycho-physical apartness and lust to live, on to a spiritual devotedness, an incorporation, as one necessary subject, into the Kingdom of souls,--the abiding, living expression of the abiding, living God.

And, above all, God’s Action is not a mechanico-physical, determinist, simultaneous Extension, nor even an automatic, accidental, unconscious Emanation, but, as already Plato divined,--an intuition lost again by Aristotle, and, in his logic, denied by Plotinus,--a voluntary outgoing and self-communication of the supreme self-conscious Spirit, God. For Plato tells us that “the reason why Nature and this Universe of things was framed by Him Who framed it, is that God is good … and desired that all things should be as like Himself as it was possible for them to be.”[423] Yet this pregnant apprehension never attains here to its full significance, because the Divine Intelligence is conceived only as manifesting itself in relation to something given from without,--the pre-existing, chaotic Matter. And for Aristotle God does not love this Givenness; for “the first Mover moves” (all things) only “as desired” by them: He Himself desires, loves, wills nothing whatsoever, and thinks and knows nothing but His own self alone.[424] And in Plotinus this same transcendence is still further emphasized, for the Absolute One here transcends even all thought and self-consciousness.

(2) It is in Christianity, after noble preludings in Judaism, that we get the full deliberate proclamation, in the great Life and Teaching, of the profound fact,--the Self-Manifestation of the Loving God, the Spirit-God moving out to the spirit-man, and spirit-man only thus capable of a return movement to the Spirit-God. As Schelling said, “God can only give Himself to His creatures as He gives a self to them,” and, with it, the capacity of participating in His life. We thus get a relation begun and rendered possible by God’s utterly prevenient, pure, ecstatic love of Man, a relation which, in its essence spiritual, personal and libertarian, leaves behind it, as but vain travesties of such ultimate Realities, all Emanational or Parallelistic Pantheism, useful though these latter systems are as symbols of the Mathematico-Physical level and kind of reality and apprehension. Yet this spiritual relation is here, unlike Plotinus’s more or less Emanational conception of it, not indeed simply invertible, as Spinoza would have it, (for Man is ontologically dependent upon God, whereas God is not thus dependent upon Man), but nevertheless largely one of true mutuality. And this mutuality of the relation is not simply a positive enactment of God, but is expressive, in its degree and mode, of God’s intrinsic moral nature. For God is here the Source as well as the Object of all love; hence He Himself possesses the supreme equivalent for this our noblest emotion, and is moved to free acts of outgoing, in the creation and preservation, the revelation to, and the redemption of finite spirits, as so many successive, mutually supplementary, and increasingly fuller expressions and objects of this His nature. “God is Love”; “God so loved the world, as to give His only-begotten Son”; “Let us love God, for God hath first loved us”; “if any man will do the will of God, he shall know of the doctrine if it be from God”: God’s Infinity is here, not the negation of the relatively independent life of His creatures, but the very reason and source of their freedom.[425]

In the concluding chapter I hope to give a sketch of the actual operation of the true correctives to any excessive, Plotinian or Spinozistic, tendencies in the Mystical trend, especially when utilizing Mathematico-Physical Science at the soul’s middle level; and of History at the ultimate reaches of the soul’s life.

Iv. The Divine Immanence; Spiritual Personality

1. Panentheism.

As to our fourth question, the Divine Immanence and Personality, our last quotations from St. Teresa give us, I think, our true starting-point. For it is evident that, between affirming the simple Divinity of the innermost centre of the soul, and declaring that the soul ever experiences only the Grace of God, i.e. certain created effects, sent by Him from the far-away seat of His own full presence, there is room for a middle position which, whilst ever holding the definite creatureliness of the soul, in all its reaches, puts God Himself into the soul and the soul into God, in degrees and with results which vary indeed indefinitely according to its good-will and its call, yet which all involve and constitute a presence ever profoundly real, ever operative before and beyond all the soul’s own operations. These latter operations are, indeed, even possible only through all this Divine anticipation, origination, preservation, stimulation, and, at bottom,--in so far as man is enabled and required by God to reach a certain real self-constitution,--through a mysterious Self-Limitation of God’s own Action,--a Divine Self-Restraint.

There can be little doubt that such a Panentheism is all that many a daring, in strictness Pantheistic, saying of the Christian, perhaps also of the Jewish and Mohammedan, Mystics aimed at. Only the soul’s ineradicable capacity, need and desire for its Divine Lodger and Sustainer would constitute, in this conception, the intrinsic characteristic of human nature; and it is rather the too close identification, in feeling and emotional expression, of the desire and the Desired, of the hunger and the Food, and the too exclusive realization of the deep truth that this desire and hunger do not cause, but are themselves preceded and caused by, their Object,--it is the over-vivid perception of this real dynamism, rather than any a priori theory of static substances and identities--which, certainly in many cases, has produced the appearance of Pantheism.

And again it is certain that we have to beware of taking the apparent irruption or ingrafting,--in the case of the operations of Grace,--of an entirely heterogeneous Force and Reality into what seems the already completely closed circle of our natural functions and aspirations, as the complete and ultimate truth of the situation. However utterly different that Force may feel to all else that we are aware of within ourselves, however entirely unmeditated may seem its manifestations: it is clear that we should be unable to recognize even this Its difference, to welcome or resist It, above all to find It a response to our deepest cravings, unless we had some natural true affinity to It, and some dim but most real experience of It from the first. Only with such a general religiosity and vague sense, from a certain contact, of the Infinite, is the recognition of definite, historical Religious Facts and Figures as true, significant, binding upon my will and conscience, explicable at all.

2. Aquinas on our direct semi-consciousness of God’s indwelling.

St. Thomas, along one line of doctrine, has some excellent teachings about all this group of questions. For though he tells us that “the names which we give to God and creatures, are predicated of God” only “according to a certain relation of the creature to God, as its Principle and Cause, in which latter the perfections of all things pre-exist in an excellent manner”: yet he explicitly admits, in one place, that we necessarily have some real, immediate experience of the Nature of God, for that “it is impossible, with regard to anything, to know whether it exists,”--and he has admitted that natural reason can attain to a knowledge of God’s bare existence,--“unless we somehow know what is its nature,” at least “with a confused knowledge”; whence “also with regard to God, we could not know whether He exists, unless we somehow knew, even though confusedly, what He is.”[426]--God, though transcendent, is also truly immanent in the human soul: “God is in all things, as the agent is present in that wherein it acts. Created Being is as true an effect of God’s Being, as to burn is the true effect of fire. God is above all things,--by the excellence of His nature, and yet He is intimately present within all things, as the cause of the Being of all.”--And man has a natural exigency of the face-to-face Vision of God, hence of the Order of Grace, however entirely its attainment may be beyond his natural powers: “There is in man a natural longing to know the cause, when he sees an effect: whence if the intellect of the rational creature could not attain to the First Cause of things,”--here in the highest form, that of the Beatific vision of God--“the longing of its nature would remain void and vain.”[427]

But it is the great Mystical Saints and writers who continuously have, in the very forefront of their consciousness and assumptions, not a simply moral and aspirational, but an Ontological and Pre-established relation between the soul and God; and not a simply discursive apprehension, but a direct though dim Experience of the Infinite and of God. And these positions really underlie even their most complete-seeming negations, as we have already seen in the case of the Areopagite.

3. Gradual recognition of the function of subconsciousness.

Indeed, we can safely affirm that the last four centuries, and even the last four decades, have more and more confirmed the reality and indirect demonstrableness of such a presence and sense of the Infinite; ever more or less obscurely, but none the less profoundly, operative in the innermost normal consciousness of mankind: a presence and sense which, though they can be starved and verbally denied, cannot be completely suppressed; and which, though they do not, if unendorsed, constitute even the most elementary faith, far less a developed Historical or Mystical Religion, are simply necessary prerequisites to all these latter stimulations and consolidations.

(1) As we have already found, it is only since Leibniz that we know, systematically, how great is the range of every man’s Obscure Presentations, his dim Experience as against his Clear or distinct Presentations, his explicit Knowledge; and how the Clear depends even more upon the Dim, than the Dim upon the Clear. And further discoveries and proofs in this direction are no older than 1888.[428]

(2) Again, it is the growing experience of the difficulties and complexities of Psychology, History, Epistemology, and of the apparent unescapableness and yet pain of man’s mere anthropomorphisms, that makes the persistence of his search for, and sense of, Objective Truth and Reality, and the keenness of his suffering when he appears to himself as imprisoned in mere subjectivity, deeply impressive. For the more man feels, and suffers from feeling himself purely subjective, the more is it clear that he is not merely subjective: he could never be conscious of the fact, if he were. “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized … would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” John Stuart Mill asked himself; and “an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered ‘No.’”[429] Whether in bad health just then or not, Mill was here touching the very depths of the characteristically human sense. In all such cases only a certain profound apprehension of Abiding Reality, the Infinite, adequately explains the keen, operative sense of contrast and disappointment.

(3) And further, we have before us, with a fulness and delicate discrimination undreamed of in other ages, the immense variety, within a certain general psychological unity, of the great and small Historical Religions, past and present, of the world. Facing all this mass of evidence, Prof. Troeltsch can ask, more confidently than ever: “Are not our religious requirements, requirements of Something that one must have somehow first experienced in order to require It? Are they not founded upon some kind of Experience as to the Object, Which Itself first awakens the thought of an ultimate infinite meaning attaching to existence, and Which, in the conflict with selfishness, sensuality and self-will, draws the nobler part of the human will, with ever new force, to Itself?” “All deep and energetic religion is in a certain state of tension towards Culture, for the simple reason that it is seeking something else and something higher.”[430] And Prof. C. P. Tiele, so massively learned in all the great religions, concludes: “‘Religion,’ says Feuerbach, ‘proceeds from man’s wishes’ …; according to others, it is the outcome of man’s dissatisfaction with the external world.… But why should man torment himself with wishes which he never sees fulfilled around him, and which the rationalistic philosopher declares to be illusions? Why? surely, because he cannot help it.… The Infinite, very Being as opposed to continual becoming and perishing,--or call It what you will,--that is the Principle which gives him constant unrest, because It dwells within him.” And against Prof. Max Müller,--who had, however, on this point, arrived at a position very like Tiele’s own,--he impressively insists that “the origin of religion consists,” not in a “perception of the Infinite,” but “in the fact that Man has the Infinite within him.”--I would only contend further that the instinct of the Infinite awakens simultaneously with our sense-perceptions and categories of thinking, and passes, together with them and with the deeper, more volitional experiences, through every degree and stage of obscurity and relative clearness. “Whatever name we give it,--instinct; innate, original, or unconscious form of thought; or form of conception,--it is the specifically human element in man.”[431] But if all this be true, then the Mystics are amongst the great benefactors of our race: for it is especially this presence of the Infinite in Man, and man’s universal subjection to an operative consciousness of it, which are the deepest cause and the constant object of the adoring awe of all truly spiritual Mystics, in all times and places.