(i) Aristotle here introduces the mischief. For it is he who in his great, simply immeasurably influential, theological tractate, Chapters VI to X of the Twelfth Book of his Metaphysic, has presented to us God as “the one first unmoved Mover” of the Universe, but Who moves it as desired by it, not as desiring it, as outside of it, not as also inside it. God here is sheer Pure Thought, Noēsis, for “contemplation is the most joyful and the best” of actions. And “Thought” here “thinks the divinest and worthiest, without change,” hence “It thinks Itself, and the Thinking is a Thinking of Thought.”[289] We have here, as Dr. Caird strikingly puts it, a God necessarily shut up within Himself, “of purer eyes than to behold, not only iniquity but even contingency and finitude, and His whole activity is one act of pure self-contemplation.” “The ideal activity which connects God with the world, appears thus as in the world and not in God.”[290]
(ii) Now we have already allowed that the Mystics avoid Aristotle’s elimination of emotion from man’s deepest action, and of emotion’s equivalent from the life of God. But they are, for the most part, much influenced in their speculations by this intensely Greek, aristocratic, intellectualist conception, in the three points of a disdain of the Contingent and Historical; of a superiority to volitional, productive energizing; and of a presentation of God as unsocial, and as occupied directly with Himself alone. We have already studied numerous examples of the first two, deeply un-Christian, errors as they have more or less influenced Christian Mysticism; the third mistake, of a purely Transcendental, Deistic God, is indeed never consistently maintained by any Christian, and Catherine, in particular, is ever dominated by the contrary great doctrine, adumbrated by Plato and fully revealed by Our Lord, of the impulse to give Itself intrinsic to Goodness, so that God, as Supreme Goodness, becomes the Supreme Self-giver, and thus the direct example and motive for our own self-donation to Him. Yet even so deeply religious a non-Christian as Plotinus, and such speculative thinkers as Eriugena and Eckhart (who certainly intended to remain Christians) continue all three mistakes, and especially insist upon a Supreme Being, Whose true centre, His Godhead, is out of all relation to anything but Himself. And even the orthodox Scholastics, and St. Thomas himself, attempt at times to combine, with the noblest Platonic and the deepest Christian teachings, certain elements, which, in strictness, have no place in an Incarnational Religion.
(iii) For, at times, the fullest, deepest Action is still not conceived, even by St. Thomas, as a Harmony, an Organization of all Man’s essential powers, the more the better. “In the active life, which is occupied with many things, there is less of beatitude than in the contemplative life, which is busy with one thing alone,—the contemplation of Truth”; “beatitude must consist essentially in the action of the intellect; and only accidentally in the action of the will.”[291] God is still primarily intelligence: “God’s intelligence is His substance”; whereas “volition must be in God, since there is intelligence in Him,” and “Love must of necessity be declared to be in God, since there is volition in Him.”[292] God is still, in a certain sense, shut up in Himself: “As He understands things other than Himself, by understanding His own essence, so He wills things other than Himself, by willing His own goodness.” “God enjoys not anything beside Himself, but enjoys Himself alone.”[293]—And we get, in correspondence to this absorption of God in Himself, an absorption of man in God, of so direct and exclusive a kind, as, if pressed, to eliminate all serious, permanent value, for our soul, in God’s actual creation of our fellow-creatures. “He who knoweth Thee and creatures, is not, on this account, happier than if he knows them not; but he is happy because of Thee alone.” And “the perfection of Love is essential to beatitude, with respect to the Love of God, not with respect to the Love of one’s neighbour. If there were but one soul alone to enjoy God, it would be blessèd, even though it were without a single fellow-creature whom it could love.”[294]
(iv) And yet St. Thomas’s own deeply Christian sense, explicit sayings of Our Lord or of St. Paul, and even, in part, certain of the fuller apprehensions of the Greeks, can make the great Dominican again uncertain, or can bring him to entirely satisfactory declarations, on each of these points. For we get the declaration that direct knowledge of individual things, and quasi-creative operativeness are essential to all true perfection. “To understand something merely in general and not in particular, is to know it imperfectly”; Our Lord Himself has taught us that “the very hairs of your head are all numbered”; hence God must “know all other individual things with a distinct and proper knowledge.”—And “a thing is most perfect, when it can make another like unto itself. But by tending to its own perfection, each thing tends to become more and more like God. Hence everything tends to be like God, in so far as it tends to be the cause of other things.”[295]—We get a full insistence, with St. Paul, (in I Cor. xiii), upon our love of God, an act of the will, as nobler than our cognition of Him; and with Plato and St. John, upon God’s forthgoing Love for His creatures, as the very crown and measure of His perfection. “Everything in nature has, as regards its own good, a certain inclination to diffuse itself amongst others, as far as possible. And this applies, in a supreme degree, to the Divine Goodness, from which all perfection is derived.” “Love, Joy, Delight can be predicated of God”; Love which, of its very essence “causes the lover to bear himself to the beloved as to his own self”: so that we must say with Dionysius that “He, the very Cause of all things, becomes ecstatic, moves out of Himself, by the abundance of His loving goodness, in the providence exercised by Him towards all things extant.”[296]
(v) And we get in St. Thomas, when he is too much dominated by the abstractive trend, a most interesting, because logically necessitated and quite unconscious, collision with certain sayings of Our Lord. For he then explains Matt. xviii, 10, “their,” the children’s, “Angels see without ceasing the face of their Father who is in Heaven” as teaching that “the action (operatio), by which Angels are conjoined to the increate Good, is, in them, unique and sempiternal”; whereas his commentators are driven to admit that the text, contrariwise, implies that these Angels have two simultaneous “operations,” and that their succouring action in nowise disturbs their intellectual contemplation. Hence, even if we press Matt. xxii, 30, that we “shall be as the Angels of God,” we still have an organism of peaceful Action, composed of intellectual, affective, volitional, productive acts operating between the soul and God, and the soul and other souls, each constituent and object working and attained in and through all the others.
(vi) Indeed all Our Lord’s Synoptic teachings, as to man’s ultimate standard and destiny, belong to this God-in-man and man-in-God type of doctrine: for there the two great commandments are strictly inseparable; God’s interest in the world is direct and detailed,—it is part of His supreme greatness that He cares for every sparrow that falls to the ground; and man, in the Kingdom of God, will sit down at a banquet, the unmistakable type of social joys.—And even the Apocalypse, which has, upon the whole, helped on so much the conception of an exclusive, unproductive entrancement of each soul singly in God alone, shows the deepest emotion when picturing all the souls, from countless tribes and nations, standing before the throne,—an emotion which can, surely, not be taken as foreign to those souls themselves.[297] But, indeed, Our Lord’s whole life and message become unintelligible, and the Church loses its deepest roots, unless the Kingdom of God is, for us human souls, as truly a part of our ultimate destiny as is God Himself, that God who fully reveals to us His own deepest nature as the Good Shepherd, the lover of each single sheep and of the flock as a whole.[298]
(4) We shall, then, do well to hold that the soul’s ultimate beatitude will consist in its own greatest possible self-realization in its God-likeness,—an Action free from all Activity, but full of a knowing, feeling, willing, receiving, giving, effectuating, all which will energize between God and the soul, and the soul and other souls,—each force and element functioning in its proper place, but each stimulated to its fullest expansion, and hence to its deepest delight, by the corresponding vitalization of the other powers and ends, and of other similar centres of rich action.
3. The pain-element of Bliss.
And our third, last question is whether our deepest this-life apprehensions and experiences give us any reason for holding that a certain equivalent for what is noblest in devoted suffering, heroic self-oblivion, patient persistence in lonely willing, will be present in the life of the Blessed. It would certainly be a gain could we discover such an equivalent, for a pure glut of happiness, an unbroken state of sheer enjoyment, can as little be made attractive to our most spiritual requirements, as the ideal of an action containing an element of, or equivalent for, devoted and fruitful effort and renunciation can lose its perennial fascination for what is most Christian within us.