(3) If then, even here below, we can so clearly demonstrate the conventionality of mere Clock-Time, and can even conceive a perfect Simultaneity as the sole form of the consciousness of God, we cannot well avoid holding that, in the other life, the clock-time convention will completely cease, and that, though the sense of Duration is not likely completely to disappear, (since, in this life at least, this sense is certainly not merely phenomenal for man, and its entire absence would apparently make man into God), the category of Simultaneity will, as a sort of strong background-consciousness, englobe and profoundly unify the sense of Duration. And, the more God-like the soul, the more would this sense of Simultaneity predominate over the sense of Duration.
2. The Ultimate Good, concrete, not abstract.
Our second question concerns the kind and degree of variety in unity which we should conceive to characterize the life of God, and of the soul in its God-likeness. Is this type and measure of all life to be conceived as a maximum of abstraction or as a maximum of concretion; as pure thought alone, or as also emotion and will; as solitary and self-centred, or as social and outgoing; and as simply reproductive, or also as operative?
(1) Now it is certain that nothing is easier, and nothing has been more common, than to take the limitations of our earthly conditions, and especially those attendant upon the strictly contemplative, and, still more, those connected with the technically ecstatic states, as so many advantages, or even as furnishing a complete scheme of the soul’s ultimate life.
As we have already repeatedly seen in less final matters, so here once more, at the end, we can trace the sad impoverishment to the spiritual outlook produced by the esteem in which the antique world generally held the psycho-physical peculiarities of trances, as directly valuable or even as prophetic of the soul’s ultimate condition; the contraposition and exaltation, already on the part of Plato and Aristotle, of a supposed non-actively contemplative, above a supposed non-contemplatively active life; the largely excessive, not fully Christianizable, doctrines of the Neo-Platonists as to the Negative, Abstractive way, when taken as self-sufficient, and as to Quiet, Passivity, and Emptiness of Soul, when understood literally; and the conception, rarely far away from the ancient thinkers, of the soul as a substance which, full-grown, fixed and stainless at the first, requires but to be kept free from stain up to the end.
And yet the diminution of vitality in the trance, and even the inattention to more than one thing at a time in Contemplation, are, in themselves, defects, at best the price paid for certain gains; the active and the contemplative life are, ultimately, but two mutually complementary sides of life, so that no life ever quite succeeds in eliminating either element, and life, caeteris paribus, is complete and perfect, in proportion as it embraces both elements, each at its fullest, and the two in a perfect interaction; the Negative, Abstractive way peremptorily requires also the other, the Affirmative, Concrete way; the Quiet, Passivity, Emptiness are really, when wholesome, an incubation for, or a rest from, Action, indeed they are themselves a profound action and peace, and the soul is primarily a Force and an Energy, and Holiness is a growth of that Energy in Love, in full Being, and in creative, spiritual Personality.
(2) Now on this whole matter the European Christian Mystics, strongly influenced by, yet also largely developing, certain doctrines of the Greeks, have, I think, made two most profound contributions to the truths of the spirit, and have seriously fallen short of reality in three respects.
The first contribution can, indeed, be credited to Aristotle, whose luminous formulations concerning Energeia, Action, (as excluding Motion, or Activity), we have already referred to. Here to be is to act, and Energeia, a being’s perfect functioning and fullest self-expression in action, is not some kind of movement or process; but, on the contrary, all movement and process is only an imperfect kind of Energeia. Man, in his life here, only catches brief glimpses of such an Action; but God is not so hampered,—He is ever completely all that He can be, His Action is kept up inexhaustibly and ever generates supreme bliss; it is an unchanging, unmoving Energeia.[286]—And St. Thomas echoes this great doctrine, for all the Christian schoolmen: “A thing is declared to be perfect, in proportion as it is in act,”—as all its potentialities are expressed in action; and hence “the First Principle must be supremely in act,” “God’s Actuality is identical with His Potentiality,” “God is Pure Action (Actus Purus).”[287]—Yet it is doubtless the Christian Mystics who have most fully experienced, and emotionally vivified, this great truth, and who cease not, in all their more characteristic teachings, from insisting upon the ever-increasing acquisition of “Action,” the fully fruitful, peaceful functioning of the whole soul, at the expense of “activity,” the restless, sterile distraction and internecine conflict of its powers. And Heaven, for them, ever consists in an unbroken Action, devoid of all “activity,” rendering the soul, in its degree, like to that Purest Action, God, who, Himself “Life,” is, as our Lord declared, “not the God of the dead but of the living.”[288]
And the second contribution can, in part, be traced back to Plato, who does not weary, in the great middle period of his writings, from insisting upon the greatness of the nobler passions, and who already apprehends a Heavenly Eros which in part conflicts with, in part transcends, the Earthly one. But here especially it is Christianity, and in particular Christian Mysticism, which have fully experienced and proclaimed that “God” is “Love,” and that the greatest of all the soul’s acts and virtues is Charity, Pure Love. And hence the Pure Act of God, and the Action of the God-like soul, are conceived not, Aristotle-like, as acts of pure intelligence alone, but as tinged through and through with a noble emotion.
(3) But in three matters the Mystics, as such and as a whole, have, here especially under the predominant influence of Greek thought, remained inadequate to the great spiritual realities, as most fully revealed to us by Christianity. The three points are so closely interconnected that it will be best first to illustrate, and then to criticise them, together.