(ii) Bent on this will-o’-the-wisp quest of an exclusive objectivity, he has to define all Mysticism in terms of Exclusive Mysticism, and then to reject such an aberration. “Wherever the influence of God upon the soul is sought and found solely in an interior experience of the individual soul, in an excitation of the feelings which is supposed directly to reveal the true nature of this experience, viz. in a state of possession by God, and this without anything exterior being apprehended and held fast with a clear consciousness, without the positive content of some mental contemplation setting thoughts in motion and raising the spiritual level of the soul’s life; there is Mystical Piety.”[314]
Now it is, of course, true that false Mysticism does attempt such an impossible feat as the thing at which Hermann is thus aiming. But, even here, the facts and problems are again misstated. Just now the object presented was everything, and the apprehending subject was nothing. Here, on the contrary, the apprehension by the subject is pressed to the degree of requiring the soul to remain throughout reflexly aware of its own processes.
Already in 1798 Kant had, in full acceptance of the great distinction worked out by Leibniz in the years 1701-1709, but not published till 1765, declared: “We can be mediately conscious of an apprehension as to which we have no direct consciousness”; and “the field of our obscure apprehensions,—that is, apprehensions and impressions of which we are not directly conscious, although we can conclude without doubt that we have them,—is immeasurable, whereas clear apprehensions constitute but a very few points within the complete extent of our mental life.”[315] This great fact psychologists can now describe with greater knowledge and precision: yet the observations and analyses of Pierre Janet, William James, James Ward and others, concerning Subconsciousness, have but confirmed and deepened the Leibnizian-Kantian apprehensions. Without much dim apprehension, no clear perception; nothing is more certain than this.
And it is certain, also, that this absence of reflex consciousness, of perceiving that we are apprehending, applies not only to impressions of sensible objects, or to apprehensions of realities inferior in richness, in interiority, to our own nature, but also, indeed especially, to apprehensions of realities superior, in dignity and profundity of organization, to our own constitution. When engrossed in a great landscape of Turner, the Parthenon sculptures, a sonata of Beethoven, Dante’s Paradiso; or when lost in the contemplation of the seemingly endless spaces of the heavens, or of the apparently boundless times of geology; or when absorbed in the mysterious greatness of Mind, so incommensurable with matter, and of Personality, so truly presupposed in all these appreciations yet so transcendent of even their collectivity—we are as little occupied with the facts of our engrossment, our self-oblivion, our absorption, or with the aim and use of such immensely beneficial self-oblivion, as we are, in our ordinary, loosely-knit states, occupied with the impression which, nevertheless, is being produced upon our senses and mind by some small insect or slight ray of light to which we are not giving our attention, or which may be incapable of impressing us sufficiently to be thus attended to and clearly perceived.[316] And, as in the case of these under-impressions, so in that of those over-impressions, we can often judge, as to their actual occurrence and fruitfulness, only from their after-effects, although this indirect proof will, in each case, be of quite peculiar cogency.—All this leaves ample room for that prayer of simple quiet, so largely practised by the Saints, and indeed for all such states of recollection which, though the soul, on coming from them, cannot discover definite ideas or picturings to have been contained in them, leave the soul braced to love, work, and suffer for God and man, beyond its previous level. Prof. William James is too deeply versed a Psychologist not fully to understand the complete normality of such conditions, and the entire satisfactoriness of such tests.[317]
(iii) And finally, it is indeed true that God reveals Himself to us, at all fully, in Human History alone, and within this history, more fully still, in the lives and experiences of the Saints of all the stages of religion, and, in a supreme and normative manner, in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ; that we have thus a true immanence of the Divine in the Human; and that it is folly to attempt the finding or the making of any shorter way to God than that of the closest contact with His own condescensions. Yet such a wisely Historical and fully Christian attitude would be imperilled, not secured, by such an excessive Christocentrism, indeed such Panchristism, as that of Prof. Hermann.
We shall indeed beware of all indifferentist levelling-down of the various religions of the world. For, as Prof. Robertson Smith, who knew so well the chief great religions, most wisely said, “To say that God speaks to all men alike, and gives the same communication directly to all without the use of a revealing agency, reduces religion to Pure Mysticism. In point of fact it is not true of any man that what he believes and knows of God, has come to him directly through the voice of nature and conscience.” And he adds: “History has not taught us anything in true religion to add to the New Testament. Jesus Christ still stands as high above us as He did above His disciples, the perfect Master, the supreme head of the fellowship of all true religion.”[318]
Yet we must equally guard against making even Our Lord into so exclusive a centre and home of all that is divine, as to cause Him to come into an entirely God-forsaken, completely God-forgetting world, a world which did not and could not, in any degree or manner whatsoever, rightly know, love, or serve God at all; and against so conceiving the religion, taught and practised by Him, as to deprive it of all affinity with, or room for, such admittedly universal forces and resultants of the human soul and the religious sense as are dim apprehension, formless recollection, pictureless emotion, and the sense of the Hiddenness and Transcendence of the very God, Who is also Immanent and Self-Revealing, in various degrees and ways, in every place and time. Indeed, these two forces: the diffused Religiosity and more or less inchoate religion, readily discoverable, by a generous docility, more or less throughout the world of human souls, and the concentrated spirituality and concrete, thoroughly characteristic Religion, which has its culmination, after its ample preludings in the Hebrew Prophets, in the Divine-Human figure and spirit of Jesus Christ: are interdependent, in somewhat the way in which vague, widely spread Subconsciousness requires, and is required by, definite, narrowly localized Consciousness in each human mind. Precisely because there have been and are previous and simultaneous lesser communications of, and correspondences with, the one “Light that enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world”; because men can and do believe according to various, relatively preliminary, degrees and ways, in God and a Providence, in Sin and Contrition, without a knowledge of the Historic Christ (although never without the stimulation of some, often world-forgotten, historic personality, and ever with some real, though unconscious approximation to His type of life and teaching), therefore can Christ be the very centre, and sole supreme manifestation and measure of all this light. Not only can Christ remain supreme, even though Moses and Elijah, Amos and Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel; and indeed, in their own other degrees and ways, Plato and Plotinus, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Gautama Buddha and Rabbi Akiba be all revered as God-loved and God-loving, as, in various amounts, truly, spiritually great: but only thus can His central importance be fully realized.
There is certainly much in Our Lord’s own attitude, as we have already found, to demand such a view; and Clement of Alexandria, Origen and St. Justin Martyr have emphasized it continually. And there is no necessary Naturalism here—for the position is entirely compatible with the profoundest belief in the great truth that it is Grace which everywhere produces the various degrees of God-pleasing religion to be found scattered throughout the world. Father Tyrrell has admirably said: “God’s salutary workings in man’s heart have always been directed, however remotely, to the life of Grace and Glory; of ‘the Order of mere nature,’ and its exigencies, we have no experimental knowledge … In the present order, Theism is but embryonic Christianity, and Christianity is but developed Theism: ‘purely natural’ religion is what might have been, but never was.”[319]
(3) Now this must suffice as a sketch of the relations between (Historical) Religion and Mysticism, and will have shown why I cannot but regret that so accomplished a scholar as Prof. Morice Jastrow should class all and every Mysticism, whether Pure or Mixed, as so far forth a religious malady; why I rejoice that so admirably circumspect an investigator as Prof. C. P. Tiele should, (in the form of a strenuous insistence upon the apprehension, indeed the ontological action of, the Infinite, by and within the human spirit, as the very soul and mainspring of Religion), so admirably reinforce the fundamental importance of the Mystical apprehensions; why I most warmly endorse Prof. Rauwenhoff’s presentment of Mysticism as, with Intellectualism and Moralism, one of the three psychological forms of religion, which are each legitimate and necessary, and which each require the check of the other two, if they are not to degenerate each into some corruption special to the exclusive development of that particular form; and why I cordially applaud the unequalled analysis and description by Prof. Eucken of the manner in which “Universal Religion” is at work, as an often obscure yet (in the long run) most powerful leaven, throughout all specifically human life,—Sciences, Art, Philosophy, and Ethics, calling for, and alone satisfied with, the answering force and articulation of “Characteristic Religion,” each requiring and required by the other, each already containing the other in embryo, and both ever operating together, in proportion as Man and Religion attain to their fulness.[320]