And there is the deepest fact of all, the one which precisely constitutes the specific characteristic of all true humanity, the sense of mental oppression, of intolerable imprisonment inflicted by the very idea of the merely contingent, the simply phenomenal and Finite, and the accompanying noble restlessness and ready dwarfing of all man’s best achievements by the agent’s own Ideal of Perfection. For this latter sense is, precisely in the greater souls, so spontaneous and so keen, so immensely operative in never leaving our, otherwise indolent and readily self-delusive, self-complacent race fully and long satisfied with anything that passes entirely away, or that is admittedly merely a subjective fancy, even though this fancy be shared by every member of the human race; and this sense operates so explosively within Sceptics as well as Dogmatists, within would-be Agnostic Scientists as well as in the most Intellectualist Theologians; it so humbles, startles, and alone so braces, sweetens, widens, indeed constitutes our humanity: as to be unforcedly explicable only by admitting that man’s spirit’s experience is not shut up within man’s own clear analysis or picturing of it; that it is indefinitely wider, and somehow, in its deepest reaches, is directly touched, affected, in part determined, by the Infinite Spirit Itself. “Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is,” says Goethe. Yes, but it was a man, Goethe, it is at bottom all men, in proportion as they are fully, sensitively such, who have somehow discovered this truth; who suffer from its continuous evidences, as spontaneously as from the toothache or from insomnia; and whose deepest moments give them a vivid sense of how immensely the Spirit, thus directly experienced by their spirit, transcends, and yet also is required by and is immanent in, their keen sense of the Finitude and Contingency present throughout the world of sense-perception and of clear intellectual formulation.
(6) With Plato and Plotinus, Clement of Alexandria and St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Cardinal Nicolas of Coes and Leibniz in the past; with Cardinal Newman, Professors Maurice Blondel and Henri Bergson, Siegwart, Eucken, Troeltsch and Tiele, Igino Petrone and Edward Caird, in the present; with the explicit assent of practically all the great Mystics of all ages and countries, and the implicit instinct, and at least partial, practical admission, of all sane and developed human souls; we will then have to postulate here, not merely an intellectual reasoning upon finite data, which would somehow result in so operative a sense of the Infinite; nor even simply a mental category of Infinitude which, evoked in man by and together with the apprehension of things finite, would, somehow, have so massive, so explosive an effect against our finding satisfaction in the other categories, categories which, after all, would not be more subjective, than itself: but the ontological presence of, and the operative penetration by the Infinite Spirit, within the human spirit. This Spirit’s presence would produce, on occasion of man’s apprehension or volition of things contingent and finite, the keen sense of disappointment, of contrast with the Simultaneous, Abiding, and Infinite.—And let the reader note that this is not Ontologism, for we here neither deduce our other ideas from the idea of God, nor do we argue from ideas and their clarity, but from living forces and their operativeness.
We thus get man’s spirit placed within a world of varying degrees of depth and interiority, the different levels and kinds of which are necessary, as so many materials, stimulants, obstacles, and objects, for the development of that spirit’s various capacities, which themselves again interact the one upon the other, and react upon and within that world. For if man’s experience of God is not a mere discursively reasoned conclusion from the data of sense, yet man’s spirit experiences the Divine Spirit and the spirits of his fellow-men on occasion of, and as a kind of contrast, background, and support to, the actuation of his senses, imagination, reason, feeling, and volition, and, at least at first and in the long run, not otherwise.
2. No distinct faculty of Mystical apprehension.
Is there, then, strictly speaking, such a thing as a specifically distinct, self-sufficing, purely Mystical mode of apprehending Reality? I take it, distinctly not; and that all the errors of the Exclusive Mystic proceed precisely from the contention that Mysticism does constitute such an entirely separate, completely self-supported kind of human experience.—This denial does not, of course, mean that soul does not differ quite indefinitely from soul, in the amount and kind of the recollective, intuitive, deeply emotive element possessed and exercised by it concurrently or alternately with other elements,—the sense of the Infinite within and without the Finite springing up in the soul on occasion of its contact with the Contingent; nor, again, that these more or less congenital differences and vocations amongst souls cannot and are not still further developed by grace and heroism into types of religious apprehension and life, so strikingly divergent, as, at first sight, to seem hardly even supplementary the one to the other. But it means that, in even the most purely contingent-seeming soul, and in its apparently but Institutional and Historical assents and acts, there ever is, there never can fail to be, some, however implicit, however slight, however intermittent, sense and experience of the Infinite, evidenced by at least some dissatisfaction with the Finite, except as this Finitude is an occasion for growth in, and a part-expression of, that Infinite, our true home. And, again, it means, that even the most exclusively mystical-seeming soul ever depends, for the fulness and healthiness of even the most purely mystical of its acts and states, as really upon its past and present contacts with the Contingent, Temporal, and Spacial, and with social facts and elements, as upon its movement of concentration, and the sense and experience, evoked on occasion of those contacts or of their memories, of the Infinite within and around those finitudes and itself.
Only thus does Mysticism attain to its true, full dignity, which consists precisely in being, not everything in any one soul, but something in every soul of man; and in presenting, at its fullest, the amplest development, among certain special natures with the help of certain special graces and heroisms, of what, in some degree and form, is present in every truly human soul, and in such a soul’s every, at all genuine and complete, grace-stimulated religious act and state. And only thus does it, as Partial Mysticism, retain all the strength and escape the weaknesses and dangers of would-be Pure Mysticism, as regards the mode and character of Religious Experience, Knowledge, and Life.
3. The first four pairs of weaknesses and strengths special to the Mystics.
I take the Mystic’s weaknesses and strengths to go together in pairs, and that there are seven such pairs. Only the first four shall be considered here; the fifth and the last two couples are reserved respectively for the following, and for the last section, of this chapter.
(1) The Mystic finds his joy in the recollective movement and moments of the soul; and hence ever tends, qua Mystic, to ignore and neglect, or to over-minimize, the absolutely necessary contact of the mind and will with the things of sense. He will often write as though, could he but completely shut off his mind from all sense-perceptions,—even of grand scenery, or noble works of art, or scenes of human devotedness, suffering, and peace,—it would be proportionately fuller of God.—Yet this drift is ever more or less contradicted by his practice, often at the very moment of such argument: for no religious writers are more prolific in vivid imagery derived from noble sensible objects and scenes than are the Mystics,—whose characteristic mood is an intuition, a resting in a kind of vision of things invisible.—And this contradiction is satisfactory, since it is quite certain that if the mind, heart, and will could be completely absorbed, (from the first or for any length of time), in the flight from the sensible, it would become as dangerously empty and languid concerning things invisible themselves as, with nothing but an outgoing occupation with the sensible, it would become distracted and feverish. It is this aversion from Outgoing and from the world of sense, of the contemporaneous contingencies environing the soul, that gives to Mysticism, as such, its shadowy character, its floating above, rather than penetrating into, reality,—in contradiction, where this tendency becomes too exclusive, to the Incarnational philosophy and practice of Christianity, and indeed of every complete and sound psychology.
And yet the Incoming, what the deep religious thinker Kierkegaard has so profoundly analyzed in his doctrine of “Repetition,”[337]—recollection and peaceful browsing among the materials brought in by the soul’s Outgoing,—is most essential. Indeed it is the more difficult, and, though never alone sufficient, yet ever the more centrally religious, of the two movements necessary for the acquisition of spiritual experience and life.