(2) Now all this, we must admit, is practised and noted, directly and in detail, only by the Ascetical and the Outward-going elements in Religion; whereas Mysticism, as such, is optimistic, not only as is Christianity, with respect to the end, but, in practice, with regard to the actual state of things already encircling it as well. For so careful a selection and so rigorous an abstraction is practised by Mysticism, as such, towards the welter of contingencies around it, that the rough shocks, the bitter tonics, the expansive birth-pangs of the spirit’s deeper life, in and by means of the flux of time and sense, of the conflict with hostile fellow-creatures, and of the claimfulness of the lower self, are known by it only in their result, not in their process, or rather only as this process ebbs and fades away, in such recollective moments, into the distance.
No wonder, then, that Mysticism, as such, has ever tended to deny all positive character to Evil. We have already found how strongly this is the case with the prince of Mystic philosophers, Plotinus. But even St. Augustine, with his massive experience, and (in his other mood) even excessive realization, of the destructive force of Evil and of the corrupt inclinations of man’s heart, has one whole large current of teaching expressive of the purely negative character of Evil. The two currents, the hot and concrete, and the cold and abstract one, appear alternately in the very Confessions, of 397 A.D. There, ten years after his conversion, he can write: “All things that are corrupted, are deprived of good. But, if they are deprived of all good, they will cease to exist.… In so far, then, as they exist, they are good.… Evil is no substance.” Notwithstanding such Neo-Platonist interpretations, he had found Evil a terribly powerful force; the directly autobiographical chapters of this same great book proclaim this truth with unsurpassable vividness,—he is here fully Christian.[345] And in his unfinished work against the Pelagianizing Monk Julianus, in 429 A.D., he even declares—characteristically, whilst discussing the Origin of Sin: “Such and so great was Adam’s sin, that it was able to turn (human) nature itself into this evil.” Indeed, already in 418, he had maintained that “this wound” (of Original Sin) “forces all that is born of that human race to be under the Devil, so that the latter, so to speak, plucks the fruit from the fruit-tree of his own planting.”[346]
Pseudo-Dionysius, writing about 500 A.D., has evidently no such massive personal experience to oppose to the Neo-Platonic influence, an influence which, in the writings of Proclus (who died 485 A.D.), is now at its height. “Evil,” he says, “is neither in Demons nor in us, as an existent (positive) evil, but (only) as a failure and dearth of the perfection of our own proper goods.”[347] He says this and more of the same kind, but nothing as to the dread power of Evil. St. Thomas Aquinas (who died in 1271 A.D.) is, as we know, largely under the influence of the Negative conception: thus “the stain of sin is not something positive, existent in the soul.… It is like a shadow, which is the privation of light.”[348]
Catherine, though otherwise much influenced by the Negative conception, as e.g. in her definition of a soul possessed by the Evil Spirit as one suffering from a “privation of love,” finds the stain of sin, doubtless from her own experience, to be something distinctly positive, with considerable power of resistance and propagation.[349]—Mother Juliana of Norwich had, in 1373, also formulated both conceptions. “I saw not Sin, for I believe it hath no manner of substance, nor no part of being”: Neo-Platonist theory. “Sin is so vile and so mickle for to hate, that it may be likened to no pain.… All is good but Sin, and naught is evil but Sin”: Christian experience.[350]
Eckhart had, still further back (he died in 1327 A.D.), insisted much that “Evil is nothing but privation, or falling away from Being; not an effect, but a defect”:[351] yet he also finds much work to do in combating this somehow very powerful “defect.”—Not till we get to Spinoza (who died in 1677) do we get the Negative conception pushed home to its only logical conclusion: “By Reality and Perfection, I mean the same thing.… All knowledge of Evil is inadequate knowledge.… If the human mind had nothing but adequate ideas, it would not form any notion of Evil.”[352]
(3) As regards the Christian Mystics, their negative conception of evil, all but completely restricted as it was to cosmological theory, did those Mystics themselves little or no harm; since their tone of feeling and their volitional life, indeed a large part of their very speculation, were determined, not by such Neo-Platonist theories, but by the concrete experiences of Sin, Conscience, and Grace, and by the great Christian historical manifestation of the powers of all three.—It is clear too that our modern alternative: “positive-negative,” is not simply identical with the scholastic alternative: “substantial-accidental,” which latter alternative is sometimes predominant in the minds of these ancient theorizers; and that, once the question was formulated in the latter way, they were profoundly right in refusing to hypostatize Evil, in denying that there exists any distinct thing or being wholly bad.—Yet it is equally clear how very Greek and how little Christian is such a preoccupation (in face of the question of the nature of Evil) with the concepts of Substance and Accident, rather than with that of Will; and how strangely insufficient, in view of the tragic conflicts and ruins of real life, is all, even sporadic, denial, of a certain obstructive and destructive efficacy in the bad will, and of a mysterious, direct perversity and formal, intentional malignity in that will at its worst.
(4) On these two points it is undeniable that Kant, (with all his self-contradictions, insufficiencies, and positive errors on other important matters), has adequately formulated the practical dispositions and teachings of the fully awakened Christian consciousness, and hence, pre-eminently, of the great Saints in the past, although, in the matter of the perverse will, the Partial Mystics have, even in their theory, (though usually only as part of the doctrine of Original Sin), largely forestalled his analysis. “Nowhere in this our world, nowhere even outside it, is anything thinkable as good without any reservation, but the good will alone.” “That a corrupt inclination to evil is rooted in man, does not require any formal proof, in view of the clamorous examples furnished to all men by the experience of human behaviour. If you would have such cases from the so-called state of nature, where some philosophers have looked for the chief home of man’s natural goodness, you need only compare, with such an hypothesis, the unprovoked cruelties enacted in Tofoa, New Zealand … and the ceaseless scenes of murder in the North-Western American deserts, where no human being derives the slightest advantage from them,—and you will quickly have more than sufficient evidence before you to induce the abandonment of such a view. But if you consider that human nature is better studied in a state of civilization, since there its gifts have a better chance of development,—you will have to listen to a long melancholy string of accusations: of secret falseness, even among friends; of an inclination to hate him to whom we owe much; of a cordiality which yet leaves the observation true that ‘there is something in the misfortune of even our best friend which does not altogether displease us’: so that you will quickly have enough of the vices of culture, the most offensive of all, and will prefer to turn away your look from human nature altogether, lest you fall yourself into another vice,—that of hatred of mankind.”[353]
It is sad to think how completely this virile, poignant sense of the dread realities of human life again disappeared from the teachings of such post-Kantians as Hegel and Schleiermacher,—in other important respects so much more satisfactory than Kant. As Mr. Tennant has well said, in a stimulating book which, on this point at least, voices the unsophisticated, fully awakened conscience and Christian sense with refreshing directness, “for Jesus Christ and for the Christian consciousness, sin means something infinitely deeper and more real than what it can have meant for Spinoza or the followers of Hegel.”[354] Here again we have now in Prof. Eucken, a philosopher who, free from ultimate Pessimism, lets us hear once more those tones which are alone adequate to the painful reality. “In great things and in small, there exists an evil disposition beyond all simple selfishness: hatred and envy, even where the hater’s self-interest is not touched; an antipathy to things great and divine; a pleasure found in the disfigurement or destruction of the Good.… Indeed the mysterious fact of Evil, as a positive opposition to Good, has never ceased to occupy the deepest minds.… The concept of moral guilt cannot be got rid of, try as we may.”[355]