(2) Again, the Mystic finds his full delight in all that approximates most nearly to Simultaneity, and Eternity; and consequently turns away, qua Mystic, from the Successive and Temporal presented by History.—Yet here also there are two movements, both necessary for man. He will, by the one, once more in fullest sympathy with the grand Christian love of lowliness, strive hard to get into close, and ever closer, touch with the successivenesses of History, especially those of Our Lord’s earthly life and of His closest followers. Without this touch he will become empty, inflated, as St. Teresa found to be the case with herself, when following the false principle of deliberate and systematic abstraction from Christ’s temporal words and acts: for man’s soul, though it does not energize in mere Clock-Time, cannot grow if we attempt to eliminate Duration, that interpenetrative, overlapping kind of Succession, which is already, as it were, halfway to the Simultaneity of God. It is this aversion from Clock-Time Succession and even from Duration which gives to Mysticism, as such, its remarkable preference for Spacial images, and its strong bent towards concepts of a Static and Determinist type, profoundly antagonistic though these are to the Dynamic and Libertarian character which ever marks the occasions and conditions for the acquiring of religious experience.
And yet, here again, the Mystic is clinging, even one-sidedly, to the more central, more specifically religious, of the two movements. For it is certain that God is indeed Simultaneous and Eternal; that it is right thus to try and apprehend, what appears to us stretched out successively in time, as simultaneously present in the one great Now of God; and that our deepest experiences testify to History itself being ever more than mere process, and to have within it a certain contribution from, a certain approximation to and expression of, Eternity.
(3) And again, the Mystic finds his joy in the sense of a Pure Reception of the Purely Objective; that God should do all and should receive the credit of all, is here a primary requirement.—And yet all penetrating Psychology, Epistemology, and Ethics find this very receptivity, however seemingly only such, to be, where healthy and fruitful, ever an action, a conation of the soul,—an energizing and volition which, as we have seen, are present in its very cognition of anything affirmed by it as trans-subjective, from a grain of sand up to the great God Himself. This antipathy to even a relative, God-willed independence and power of self-excitation, gives Mysticism, as such, its constant bent towards Quietism; and hence, with regard to the means and nature of knowledge, its tendency to speak of such a purely spiritual effect as Grace, and such purely spiritual beings as the Soul and God, as though they were literally sensible objects sensibly impressing themselves upon the Mystic’s purely passive senses. This tendency reinforces the Mystic’s thirst for pictorial, simultaneous presentation and intuition of the verities apprehended by him, but is in curious contradiction to his even excessive conceptions concerning the utter separateness and difference from all things material of all such spiritual realities.—And yet, here too, it is doubtless deeply important ever to remember, and to act in accordance with, the great truth that God Himself is apprehended by us only if there be action of our own, and that, from elementary moral dispositions right up to consummate sanctity, the whole man has ever to act and will more and more manysidedly, fully, and persistently.
But the corresponding, indeed the anterior and more centrally religious, truth here is, that all this range of our activity could never begin, and, if it could, would lose itself in vacuo, unless there already were Reality around it and within it, as the stimulus and object for all this energizing,—a Reality which, as Prof. Ward has told us with respect to Epistemology, must, for a certain dim but most true experience of ours, be simply given, not sought and found. And indeed the operations of Grace are ever more or less penetrating and soliciting, though nowhere forcing, the free assent of the natural soul: we should be unable to seek God unless He had already found us and had thus, deep down within ourselves, caused us to seek and find Him. And hence thus again the most indispensable, the truest form of experience underlies reasoning, and is a kind of not directly analyzable, but indirectly most operative, intuition or instinct of the soul.
(4) And yet the Mystic, in one of his moods (the corresponding, contradictory mood of a Pantheistic identification of his true self with God shall be considered in our next chapter), finds his joy in so exalting the difference of nature between himself and God, and the incomprehensibility of God for every finite intelligence, as,—were we to press his words,—to cut away all ground for any experience or knowledge sufficient to justify him in even a guess as to what God is like or is not like, and for any attempt at intercourse with, and at becoming like unto, One who is so utterly unlike himself.
4. Criticism of the fourth pair, mystical “Agnosticism.”
Now this acutely paradoxical position, of an entire certainty as to God’s complete difference from ourselves, has been maintained and articulated, with a consistency and vividness beyond that of any Mystic known to me, by that most stimulating, profound, tragically non-mystical, religious ascetic and thinker, the Lutheran Dane, Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855). His early friend, but philosophical opponent, Prof. Höffding, describes him as insisting that “the suffering incident to the religious life is necessarily involved in the very nature of the religious relation. For the relation of the soul to God is a relation to a Being utterly different from man, a Being which cannot confront man as his Superlative and Ideal, and which nevertheless is to rule within him.” “What, wonder, then,” as Kierkegaard says, “if the Jew held that the vision of God meant death, and if the Heathen believed that to enter upon relations with God was the beginning of insanity?” For the man who lives for God “is a fish out of water.”[338]—We have here what, if an error, is yet possible only to profoundly religious souls; indeed it would be easy to point out very similar passages in St. Catherine and St. John of the Cross. Yet Höffding is clearly in the right in maintaining that “Qualitative or Absolute difference abolishes all possibility of any positive relation.… If religious zeal, in its eagerness to push the Object of religion to the highest height, establishes a yawning abyss between this Object and the life whose ideal It is still to remain,—such zeal contradicts itself. For a God who is not Ideal and Exemplar, is no God.”[339]
Berkeley raised similar objections against analogous positions of the Pseudo-Dionysius, in his Alciphron in 1732.[340] Indeed the Belgian Jesuit, Balthazar Corderius, has a very satisfactory note on this matter in his edition, in 1634, of the Areopagite,[341] in which he shows how all the negative propositions of Mystical Theology, e.g. “God is not Being, not Life,” presuppose a certain affirmative position, e.g. “God is Being and Life, in a manner infinitely more sublime and perfect than we are able to comprehend”; and gives reasons and authorities, from St. Jerome to St. Thomas inclusive, for holding that some kind and degree of direct confused knowledge (I should prefer, with modern writers, to call it experience) of God’s existence and nature is possessed by the human soul, independently of its reasoning from the data of sense.
St. Thomas’s admissions are especially striking, as he usually elaborates a position which ignores, and would logically exclude, such “confused knowledge.” In his Exposition and Questions on the Book of Boetius on the Trinity, after arguments to show that we know indeed that God is, but not what He is,—at most only what He is not, he says: “We should recognize, however, that it is impossible, with regard to anything, to know whether it exists, unless, in some way or other, we know what it is, either with a perfect or with a confused knowledge.… Hence also with regard to God,—we could not know whether He exists, unless we somehow knew what He is, even though in a confused manner.” And this knowledge of what He is, is interestingly, because unconsciously, admitted in one of the passages directed to proving that we can but know that He is. “In our earthly state we cannot attain to a knowledge of Himself beyond the fact that He exists. And yet, among those who know that He is, the one knows this more perfectly than the other.”[342] For it is plain that, even if the knowledge of the existence of something were possible without any knowledge of that thing’s nature, no difference or increase in such knowledge of the thing’s bare existence would be possible. The different degrees in the knowledge, which is here declared to be one concerning the bare existence of God, can, as a matter of fact, exist only in knowledge concerning His nature. I shall have to return to this great question further on.