(iii) And this essential doctrine retains all its cogency, even though we hold the strict necessity of a contrary, alternating movement of definite occupation with the Concrete, Contingent, Historical, Institutional, in thought and action. For this occupation will be with the normal, typical means, duties, and facts of human and religious life; and, whilst fully conscious of the Supernatural working in and with these seemingly but natural materials, will, with St. Augustine, pray God to “grant men to perceive in little things the common-seeming indications of things both small and great,” and, with him, will see a greater miracle in the yearly transformation of the vine’s watery sap into wine, and in the germination of any single seed, than even in that of Cana.[367]
(iv) And then there is, upon the whole, a tendency to concentrate, at these recollective stages, the soul’s attention upon Christ and God alone. “I believe I understand,” says Mother Juliana, “the ministration of holy Angels, as Clerks tell; but it was not shewed to me. For Himself is nearest and meekest, highest and lowest, and doeth all. God alone took our nature, and none but He; Christ alone worked our salvation, and none but He.”[368] And thus we get a wholesome check upon the Neo-Platonist countless mediations, of which the reflex is still to be found in the Areopagite. God indeed is alone held, with all Catholic theologians, to be capable of penetrating to the soul’s centre, and the fight against Evil is simplified to a watch and war against Self, in the form of an ever-increasing engrossment in the thought of God, and in the interests of His Kingdom. “Only a soul in union with God,” says St. John of the Cross, “is capable of this profound loving knowledge: for this knowledge is itself that union.… The Devil has no power to simulate anything so great.” “Self-love,” says Père Grou, “is the sole source of all the illusions of the spiritual life.… Jesus Christ on one occasion said to St. Catherine of Siena: ‘My daughter, think of Me, and I will think of thee’: a short epitome of all perfection. ‘Wheresoever thou findest self,’ says the Imitation, ‘drop that self’: the soul’s degree of fidelity to this precept is the true measure of its advancement.”[369] The highly authorized Manuel de Théologie Mystique of the Abbé Lejeune, 1897, gives but one-sixth of its three-hundred pages to the discussion of all quasi-miraculous phenomena, puts them all apart from the substance of Contemplation and of the Mystical Life, and dwells much upon the manifold dangers of such, never essential, things. The French Oratorian, Abbé L. Laberthonnière, represents, in the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, a spirituality as full of a delicate Mysticism as it is free from any attachment to extraordinary phenomena. The same can be said of the Rev. George Tyrrell’s Hard Sayings and External Religion. And the Abbé Sandreau has furnished us with two books of the most solid tradition and discrimination in all these matters.[370]
(5) And we should, in justice, remember that the Phenomenalist Mysticism, objected to by Prof. Münsterberg and so sternly transcended by St. John of the Cross, is precisely what is still hankered after, and treated as of spiritual worth, by present-day Spiritualism. Indeed, even Prof. James’s in many respects valuable Varieties of Religious Experience is seriously damaged by a cognate tendency to treat Religion, or at least Mysticism, as an abnormal faculty for perceiving phenomena inexplicable by physical and psychical science.
(6) And finally, with respect to the personality of Evil, we must not forget that “there are drawings to evil as to good, which are not mere self-temptations, … but which derive from other wills than our own; strictly, it is only persons that can tempt us.”[371]
CHAPTER XIV
THE TWO FINAL PROBLEMS: MYSTICISM AND PANTHEISM. THE IMMANENCE OF GOD, AND SPIRITUAL PERSONALITY, HUMAN AND DIVINE
INTRODUCTORY. Impossibility of completely abstracting from the theoretical form in the study of the experimental matter.
We now come to the last two of our final difficulties and problems—the supposed or real relations between Inclusive or Exclusive Mysticism and Pantheism; and the question concerning the Immanence of God and Spiritual Personality, Human and Divine.
(1) A preliminary difficulty in this, our deepest, task arises from the fact that, whereas the evidences of a predominantly individual, personal, directly experimental kind, furnished by every at all deeply religious soul, have hitherto been all but completely overlooked by trained historical investigators, in favour of the study of the theological concepts and formulations accepted and transmitted by such souls, now the opposite extreme is tending to predominate, as in Prof. William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, or in Prof. Weinel’s interesting study, The Effects of the Spirit and of the Spirits in the Sub-Apostolic Age, 1899. For here, as Prof. Bousset points out in connection with the latter book, we get an all but complete overlooking of the fact that, even in the most individual experience, there is always some intellectual framework or conception, some more or less traditional form, which had previously found lodgment in, and had been more or less accepted by, that soul; so that, though the experience itself, where at all deep, is never the mere precipitate of a conventionally accepted traditional intellectual form, it is nevertheless, even when more or less in conflict with this form, never completely independent of it.[372]—Yet though we cannot discriminate in full detail, we can show certain peculiarities in the traditional Jewish, Mohammedan, Christian Mysticism to be not intrinsic to the Mystical apprehensions as such, but to come from the then prevalent philosophies which deflected those apprehensions in those particular ways.
(2) In view then of this inevitable inter-relation between the experimental, personal matter and the theoretical, traditional form, I shall first consider the Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist conceptions concerning the relations between the General and the Particular, between God and Individual Things, as being the two, partly rival yet largely similar, systems that, between them, have most profoundly influenced the intellectual starting-point, analysis, and formulation of those experiences; and shall try to show the special attraction and danger of these conceptions for the mystically religious temperament. I shall next discuss the conceptions as to the relations between God and the individual personality,—the Noûs, the Spirit, and the Soul,—which, still largely Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist, have even more profoundly commended themselves to those Mystics, since these conceptions so largely met some of those Mystics’ requirements, and indeed remain still, in part, the best analysis procurable. I shall, thirdly, face the question as to any intrinsic tendency to Pantheism in Mysticism as such, and as to the significance and the possible utility of any such tendency, keeping all fuller description of the right check upon it for my last chapter. And finally, I shall consider what degree and form of the Divine Immanence in the human soul, of direct Experience or Knowledge of God on the part of man, and of “Personality” in God, appear to result from the most careful analysis of the deepest religious consciousness, and from the requirements of the Sciences and of Life.