(5) And yet even with regard to this matter, Mysticism represents a profound compensating truth and movement, which we cannot, without grave detriment, lose out of the complete religious life. For in life at large, and in human life and history in particular, it would be sheer perversity to deny that there is much immediate, delightful, noble Beauty, Truth, and Goodness; and these also have a right to the soul’s careful, ruminating attention. And it is the Mystical element that furnishes this rumination.—Again, “it is part of the essential character of human consciousness, as a Synthesis and an organizing Unity, that, as long as the life of that consciousness lasts at all, not only contrast and tension, but also concentration and equilibrium must manifest themselves. Taking life’s standard from life itself, we cannot admit its decisive constituent to lie in tension alone.”[356] And it is the Mystical mood that helps to establish this equilibrium.—And finally, deep peace, an overflowing possession and attainment, and a noble joy, are immensely, irreplaceably powerful towards growth in personality and spiritual fruitfulness. Nothing, then, would be more shortsighted than to try and keep the soul from a deep, ample, recollective movement, from feeding upon and relishing, from as it were stretching itself out and bathing in, spiritual air and sunshine, in a rapt admiration, in a deep experience of the greatness, the beauty, the truth, and the goodness of the World, of Life, of God.
2. Mysticism and the Origin of Evil.
The second hindrance and help, afforded respectively by Exclusive and by Inclusive Mysticism in the matter of Evil, concerns the question of its Origin.
(1) Now it appears strange at first sight that, instead of first directly realizing and picturing the undeniable, profoundly important facts of man’s interior conflict, his continuous lapses from his own deepest standard, and his need of a help not his own to become what he cannot but wish to be, and of leaving the theory as to how man came by this condition to the second place; the Mystics should so largely,—witness Catherine—directly express only this theory, and should face what is happening hic et nunc all but exclusively under the picture of the prehistoric beginnings of these happenings, in the state of innocence and the lapse of the first man. For men of other religious modalities have held this doctrine as firmly as the Mystics, yet have mostly dwelt directly upon the central core of goodness and the weakness and sinfulness to be found in man; whilst the Mystics had even less scruple than other kinds of devout souls in embodying experimental truths in concepts and symbols other than the common ones.
(2) I think that, here again, it was the Neo-Platonist literary influence, so strong also on other points with the Mystics of the past, and a psychological trend characteristic of the Mystical habit of mind, which conjoined thus to concentrate the Mystics’ attention upon the doctrines of Original Justice and of a First Lapse, and to give to these doctrines the peculiar form and tone taken on by them here. We have noted, for instance, in the case of Catherine herself, how powerfully her thought and feeling, as to the first human soul’s first lapse into sin, is influenced by the idea of each human soul’s lapse into a body; and we have found this latter idea to be, notwithstanding its echoes in the Deutero-Canonical Book of Wisdom and in one non-doctrinal passage in St. Paul, not Christian but Neo-Platonist. Yet it is this strongly anti-body idea that could not fail to attract Mysticism, as such.—And the conception as to the plenary righteousness of that first soul before its lapse, which she gets from Christian theology, is similarly influenced, in her theorized emotion and thought, by the Neo-Platonist idea of every soul having already existed, perfectly spotless, previous to its incarnation: a view which could not but immensely attract such a high-strung temperament, with its immense requirement of something fixed and picturable on which to rest. Thus here the ideal for each soul’s future would have been already real in each soul’s past. In this past the soul would have been, as it were, a mirror of a particular fixed size and fixed intensity of lustre; its business here below consists in removing the impurities adhering to this mirror’s surface, and in guarding it against fresh stains.
(3) Now it is well known how it was St. Augustine, that mighty and daring, yet at times ponderous, intellect, who, (so long a mental captive of the Manichees and then so profoundly influenced by Plotinus,) was impelled, by the experiences of his own disordered earlier life and by his ardent African nature, to formulate by far the most explicit and influential of the doctrines upon these difficult matters. And if, with the aid of the Abbé Turmel’s admirable articles on the subject, we can, with a fairly open mind, study his successive, profoundly varying, speculations and conclusions concerning the Nature and Origin of Sin,[357] we shall not fail to be deeply impressed with the largely impassable maze of opposite extremes, contradictions and difficulties of every kind, in which that adventurous mind involved itself.—And to these difficulties immanent to the doctrine,—at least, in the form it takes in St. Augustine’s hands,—has, of course, to be added the serious moral danger that would at once result, were we, by too emphatic or literal an insistence upon the true guiltiness of Original sin, to weaken the chief axiom of all true morality—that the concurrence of the personality, in a freely-willed assent, is necessarily involved in the idea of sin and guilt.—And now the ever-accumulating number and weight of even the most certain facts and most moderate inductions of Anthropology and Ethnology are abolishing all evidential grounds for holding a primitive high level of human knowledge and innocence, and a single sudden plunge into a fallen estate, as above, apparently against, all our physiological, psychological, historical evidences and analogies, (which all point to a gradual rise from lowly beginnings), and are reducing such a conception to a pure postulate of Theology.
Yet Anthropology and Ethnology leave in undisturbed possession the great truths of Faith that “man’s condition denotes a fall from the Divine intention, a parody of God’s purpose in human history,” and that “sin is exceedingly sinful for us in whom it is a deliberate grieving of the Holy Spirit”; and they actually reinforce the profound verities that “the realization of our better self is a stupendously difficult task,” and as to “Man’s crying need of grace, and his capacity for a gospel of Redemption.”[358] But they point, with a force great in proportion to the highly various, cumulatively operative, immensely interpretative character of the evidence,—to the conclusion that “Sin,” as the Anglican Archdeacon Wilson strikingly puts it, “is … the survival or misuse of habits and tendencies that were incidental to an earlier stage of development.… Their sinfulness would thus lie in their anachronism, in their resistance to the … Divine force that makes for moral development and righteousness.” Certainly “the human infant” appears to careful observers, as Mr. Tennant notes, “as simply a non-moral animal,” with corresponding impulses and propensities. According to this view “morality consists in the formation of the non-moral material of nature into character …”; so that “if goodness consists essentially in man’s steady moralization of the raw material of morality, its opposite, sin, cannot consist in the material awaiting moralization, but in the will’s failure to completely moralize it.” “Evil” would thus be “not the result of a transition from the good, but good and evil would” both alike “be voluntary developments from what is ethically neutral.”[359] Dr. Wilson finds, accordingly, that “this conflict of freedom and conscience is precisely what is related as ‘the Fall’ sub specie historiae.” Scripture “tells of the fall of a creature from unconscious innocence to conscious guilt. But this fall from innocence” would thus be, “in another sense, a rise to a higher grade of being.”[360]
(4) It is, in any case, highly satisfactory for a Catholic to remember that the acute form, given to the doctrine of Original Sin by St. Augustine, has never been finally accepted by the Catholic Roman Church; indeed, that the Tridentine Definition expressly declares that Concupiscence does not, in strictness, possess the nature of Sin, but arises naturally, on the withdrawal of the donum superadditum,—so that Mr. Tennant can admit, in strictest accuracy, that “in this respect, the Roman theology is more philosophical than that of the Symbols of Protestant Christendom.”[361] It is true that the insistence upon “Original Sin” possessing somehow “the true and proper nature of Sin” remains a grave difficulty, even in this Tridentine formulation of the doctrine; whilst the objections, already referred to as accumulating against the theory in general, retain some of their cogency against other parts of this decree.—Yet we have here an impressive proclamation of the profoundest truths: the spiritual greatness of God’s plan for us, the substantial goodness of the material still ready to our hand for the execution of that plan, and His necessary help ever ready from the first; the reality of our lapse, away from all these, into sin, and of the effects of such lapse upon the soul; the abiding conflict between sense and spirit, the old man and the new, within each one of us; and the close solidarity of our poor, upward-aspiring, downward-plunging race, in evil as well as in good.
(5) And as to the Christian Mystics, their one particular danger here,—that of a Static Conception of man’s spirit as somehow constituted, from the first, a substance of a definite, final size and dignity, which but demands the removal of disfiguring impurities, is largely eliminated, even in theory, and all but completely overcome in practice, by the doctrine and the practice of Pure Love. For in “Charity” we get a directly dynamic, expansive conception and experience: man’s spirit is, at first, potential rather than actual, and has to be conquered and brought, as it were, to such and such a size and close-knitness of organization, by much fight with, and by the slow transformation of, the animal and selfish nature. Thus Pure Love, Charity, Agape, has to fight it out, inch by inch, with another, still positive force, impure love, concupiscence, Eros, in all the latter’s multiform disguises. Here Purity has become something intensely positive and of boundless capacities for growth; as St. Thomas says, “Pure Love has no limit to its increase, for it is a certain participation in the Infinite Love, which is the Holy Spirit.”[362]—In this utterly real, deeply Christian way do these Mystics overcome Neo-Platonist static abstractions, and simultaneously regain, in their practical theory and emotional perception, the great truth of the deep, subtle force of Evil, against which Pure Love has to stand, in virile guard, as long as earth’s vigil lasts. And the longest and most difficult of these conflicts is found,—here again in utterly Christian fashion,—not in the sensual tendencies proceeding from the body, but in the self-adoration, the solipsism of the spirit. We have found this in Catherine: at her best she ever has something of the large Stoic joy at being but a citizen in a divine Cosmopolis; yet but Love and Humility, those profoundest of the Christian affections, have indefinitely deepened the truth of the outlook, and the range of the work to be done, in and for herself and others.
(6) Yet even apart from Pure Love, Mysticism can accurately be said to apprehend an important truth when, along its static line of thought and feeling, it sees each soul as, from the first, a substance of a particular, final size. For each soul is doubtless intended, from the first, to express a particular thought and wish of God, to form one, never simply replaceable member in His Kingdom, to attain to a unique kind and degree of personality: and though it can refuse to endorse and carry out this plan, the plan remains within it, in the form of never entirely suppressible longings. The Mystic, then, sees much here also.