Here I would only point out how well Battista Vernazza has, in her Dialogo, realized the importance of a modification in such acutely dualistic statements as those occasionally met with in the Vita. For, in the Dialogo, the utter qualitative difference between God and the Soul, and the Soul and the Body, which find so striking an utterance in one of Catherine’s moods, is ever carefully limited to the soul’s sinful acts and habits, and to the body’s unspiritualized condition; so that the soul, when generous and faithful to God’s grace, can and does grow less and less unlike God, and the body can, in its turn, become more and more an instrument and expression of the soul. A pity only that Battista has continued Catherine’s occasional over-emphasis in the parallel matter of the knowledge of God: since, even in the Dialogo, we get statements which, if pressed, would imply that even the crudest, indeed the most immoral conception of God is, objectively, no farther removed from the reality than is the most spiritual idea that man can attain of Him.
It would indeed be well if the Christian Mystics who, since about 500 A.D., are more and more dependent for their formulations upon the Areopagite, had followed, in this matter, not his more usual and more paradoxical, but his exceptional, thoroughly sober vein of teaching,—that contained in the third chapter of his Mystical Theology, where he finds degrees of worth and approximation among the affirmative attributions, and degrees of unfitness and distance among the negative ones. “Are not life and goodness more cognate to Him than air and stone? And is He not further removed from debauchery and wrath, than from ineffableness and incomprehensibility”?[343] But such a scale of approximations would be utterly impossible did we not somehow, at least dimly, experience or know what He is.
We shall then have to amend the Mystic’s apparent Agnosticism on three points. We shall have to drop any hard and fast distinction between knowledge of God’s Existence and knowledge of His Nature, since both necessarily more or less stand and fall together. We shall have to replace the terms as to our utter ignorance as to what He is, by terms expressive of an experience which, if not directly and independently clear and analyzable to the reflex, critical reason, can yet be shown to be profoundly real and indefinitely potent in the life of man’s whole rational and volitional being. It is this dim, deep experience which ever causes our reflex knowledge of God to appear no knowledge at all. And we shall reject any absolute qualitative difference between the soul’s deepest possibilities and ideals, and God; and shall, in its stead, maintain an absolute difference between God and all our downward inclinations, acts, and habits, and an indefinite difference, in worth and dignity, between God and the very best that, with His help, we can aim at and become. With regard to every truly existent subject-matter, we can trace the indefinitely wider range and the more delicate penetration possessed by our dim yet true direct contact and experience, as contrasted with our reflex analysis concerning all such contacts and experiences; and this surplusage is at its highest in connection with God, Who is not simply a Thing alongside of other things, but the Spirit, our spirit’s Origin, Sustainer, and End, “in whom we live and move and have our being.”
III. Mysticism and the Question of Evil.
Introductory: Exclusive and Inclusive Mysticism in Relation to Optimism.
The four couples of weaknesses and corresponding strong points characteristic of Mysticism that we have just considered, and the fact that, in each case, they ever spring respectively from an attempt to make Mysticism be the all of religion, and from a readiness to keep it as but one of the elements more or less present in, and necessary for, every degree and form of the full life of the human soul: make one wish for two English terms, as useful as are the German names “Mystik” and “Mystizismus,” for briefly indicating respectively “the legitimate share of Feeling in the constitution of the religious life, and the one-sidedness of a religion in which the Understanding and the Will,” and indeed also the Memory and the Senses, with their respective variously external occasions, vehicles, and objects, “do not come to their rights,” as Prof. Rauwenhoff well defines the matter.[344] I somehow shrink from the term “Mysticality” for his “Mystizismus”; and must rest content with the three terms—of “Mysticism,” as covering both the right and the wrong use of feeling in religion; and of “True” or “Inclusive Mysticism,” and of “Pseudo-” or “Exclusive Mysticism,” as denoting respectively the legitimate, and the (quantitatively or qualitatively) mistaken, share of emotion in the religious life.
Now the four matters, which we have just considered, have allowed us to reach an answer not all unlike that of Nicolas of Coes, Leibniz, and Hegel,—one which, if it remained alone or quite final, would, in face of the fulness of real life, strike us all, nowadays, as somewhat superficial, because too Optimistic and Panlogistic in its trend. The fifth set of difficulties and problems now to be faced will seem almost to justify Schopenhauer at his gloomiest. Yet we must bear in mind that our direct business here is not with the problem of Evil in general, but only with the special helps and hindrances, afforded by Inclusive and by Exclusive Mysticism respectively, towards apprehending the true nature of Evil and turning even it into an occasion for a deeper good. In this case the special helps and hindrances fall under three heads.
1. Mysticism, too optimistic. Evil positive, but not supreme.
(1) First of all, I would strongly insist upon the following great fact to which human life and history bear witness, if we but take and test these latter on a large scale and with a patient persistency. It is, that not the smoother, easier times and circumstances in the lives of individuals and of peoples, but, on the contrary, the harder and hardest trials of every conceivable kind, and the unshrinking, full acceptance of these, as part of the price of conscience and of its growing light, have ever been the occasions of the deepest trust in and love of God to which man has attained. In Jewish History, the Exile called forth a Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and the profound ideal of the Suffering Servant; the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes raised up a Judas Maccabaeus; and the troubles under the Emperor Hadrian, a Rabbi Akiba. And in Christian History, the persecutions from Nero to Robespierre have each occasioned the formation of heroic lovers of Love Crucified. And such great figures do not simply manage to live, apart from all the turmoil, in some Mystic upper region of their own; but they face and plunge into the very heart of the strife, and get and give spiritual strength on occasion of this closest contact with loneliness, outrage, pain, and death. And this fact can be traced throughout history.
Not as though suffering automatically deepens and widens man into a true spiritual personality,—of itself it does not even tend to this; nor as though there were not souls grown hard or low, or frivolous or bitter, under suffering,—to leave madness and suicide unconsidered,—souls in which it would be difficult to find any avoidable grave fault. But that, wherever there is the fullest, deepest, interiority of human character and influence, there can ever be found profound trials and sufferings which have been thus utilized and transfigured. It is doubtless Our Lord’s uniquely full and clear proclamation of this mysterious efficacity of all suffering nobly borne; above all it is the supreme exemplification and fecundity of this deepest law of life, afforded and imparted by His own self-immolation, that has given its special power to Christianity, and, in so doing, has, more profoundly than ever before or elsewhere, brought home to us a certain Teleology here also,—the deepest ever discovered to man. For though we fail in our attempts at explaining how or why, with an All-knowing, All-powerful, and All-loving God, there can be Evil at all, we can but recognize the law, which is ever being brought home to us, of a mysterious capacity for purification and development of man’s spiritual character, on occasion and with the help of trouble, pain, and death itself.