6. Mysticism predominantly Individualistic.
Yet it is clear that the strong point of the Mystics, as such, does not lie in the direction of the great social spirituality which finds God in our neighbour and in the great human organizations, through and in which, after all, man in great part becomes and is truly man. They are, as such, Individualistic; the relation between God and the individual soul here ever tends to appear as constituted by these two forces alone. A fresh proof, if one were still wanting, that Mysticism is but one of the elements of Religion,—for Religion requires both the Social and the Individual, the Corporate and the Lonely movement and life.
It is truly inspiring to note how emphatic is the concurrence of all the deepest and most circumspect contemporary Psychology, Epistemology, Ethics, and History and Philosophy of the Sciences and of Religion, in these general conclusions, which find, within the slow and many-sided growth and upbuilding of the spiritual personality, a true and necessary place and function for all the great and permanent capabilities, aspirations and energizings of the human soul. Thus no system of religion can be complete and deeply fruitful which does not embrace, (in every possible kind of healthy development, proportion and combination), the several souls and the several types of souls who, between them, will afford a maximum of clear apprehension and precise reasoning, and of dim experience and intuitive reason; of particular attention to the Contingent (Historical Events and Persons, and Institutional Acts and Means) and of General Recollection and Contemplation and Hungering after the Infinite; and of reproductive Admiration and Loving Intellection, and of quasi-creative, truly productive Action upon and within Nature and other souls, attaining, by such Action, most nearly to the supreme attribute, the Pure Energizing of God.
Thus Pseudo-Dionysius and St. John of the Cross will, even in their most Negative doctrines, remain right and necessary in all stages of the Church’s life,—on condition, however, of being taken as but one of two great movements, of which the other, the Positive movement, must also ever receive careful attention: since only between them is attained that all-important oscillation of the religious pendulum, that interaction between the soul’s meal and the soul’s yeast, that furnishing of friction for force to overcome, and of force to overcome the friction, that material for the soul to mould, and in moulding which to develop itself, that alternate expiration and inspiration, upon which the soul’s mysterious death-in-life and life-in-death so continuously depends.
III. The Scientific Habit and Mysticism.
Introductory. Difficulty yet Necessity of finding a True Place and Function for Science in the Spiritual Life.
Now it is certain that such an oscillatory movement, such a give-and-take, such a larger Asceticism, built up out of the alternate engrossment in and abstraction from variously, yet in each case really, attractive levels, functions and objects of human life and experience, is still comparatively easy, as long as we restrict it to two out of the three great groups of energizings which are ever, at least potentially, present in the soul, and which ever inevitably help to make or mar, to develop or to stunt, the totality of the soul’s life, and hence also of the strictly spiritual life. The Historical-Institutional, and the Mystical-Volitional groups and forces, the High-Church and the Low-Church trend, the Memory- and the Will-energies, do indeed coalesce, in times of peace, with the Reason-energy, though, even then, with some difficulty. But in times of war,—on occasion of any special or excessive action on the part of this third group, the Critical-Speculative, the Broad-Church trend, and the energizing of the Understanding,—they readily combine against every degree of the latter. It is as though the fundamental vowels A and U could not but combine to oust the fundamental vowel I; or as if the primary colours Red and Blue must join to crush out the primary colour Yellow.
Indeed, it is undoubtedly just this matter of the full and continuous recognition of, and allocation of a special function to, this third element within the same great spiritual organism which englobes the other two, which is now the great central difficulty and pressing problem of more or less every degree and kind of religious life. For the admission of this third element appears frequently to be ruinous to the other two; yet the other two, when kept away from it, seem to lose their vigour and persuasive power.—And yet it is, I think, exactly at this crucial point that the conception of the spiritual life as essentially a Dynamism, a slow constitution of an ever fuller, deeper, more close-knit unity in, and by means of, the soul’s ineradicable trinity of forces, shows all its fruitfulness, if we but work down to a sufficiently large apprehension of the capacities and requirements of human nature, moved and aided by divine grace, and to a very precise delimitation of the special object and function of Mysticism.
1. Science and Religion: each autonomous at its own level; and, thus, each helpful to the other.
Erwin Rhode has well described Plato’s attitude towards Science and Mysticism respectively, and towards the question of their inter-relation. “The flight from the things of this World is, for Plato, already in itself an acquisition of those of the Beyond, and an assimilation to the Divine. For this poor world, that solicits our senses, the philosopher has, at bottom, nothing but negation. Incapable as it is of furnishing a material that can be truly known, the whole domain of the Transitory and Becoming has no intrinsic significance for Science as understood by him. The perception of things which are ever merely relative, and which simultaneously manifest contradictory qualities, has its sole use in stimulating and inviting the soul to press on to the Absolute.”[451]