When speaking systematically Eckhart is strictly Plotinian: “God and Godhead are as distinct as earth is from heaven.” “The Godhead has left all things to God: It owns nought, wills nought, requires nought, effects nought, produces nought.” “Thou shalt love the Godhead as It truly is: a non-God, non-Spirit, non-Person … a sheer, pure, clear One, severed from all duality: let us sink down into that One, throughout eternity, from Nothing unto Nothing, so help us God.” “The Godhead Itself remains unknown to Itself.” “It is God who energizes and speaks one single thing,—His Son, the Holy Ghost, and all creatures.… Where God speaks it, there it is all God; here, where man understands it, it is God and creature.”[394] No wonder that the following are among the propositions condemned by Pope John XXII in 1329: “God produces me as His own Being, a Being identical, not merely similar”; and, “I speak as falsely when I call God (the Godhead) good, as if I call white, black.”[395]
6. The logical goal of strict Realism.
This series of facts, which could be indefinitely extended, well illustrates the persistence of “the fundamental doctrine common to all forms of Realism,—of the species as an entity in the individuals, common to all and identical in each, an entity to which individual differences adhere as accidents,” as Prof. Seth-Pattison accurately defines the matter. “Yet when existence is in question, it is the individual, not the universal, that is real; and the real individual is not a compound of species and accidents, but is individual to the inmost fibre of his being.” Not as though Nominalism were in the right. For “each finite individual has its” special “place in the one real universe, with all the parts of which it is inseparably connected. But the universe is itself an individual or real whole, containing all its parts within itself, and not a universal of the logical order, containing its exemplifications under it.”[396] And, above all, minds, spirits, persons,—however truly they may approximate more and more to certain great types of rationality, virtue, and religion, which types are thus increasingly expressive of God’s self-revealing purpose and nature,—are ever, not merely numerically different, as between one individual and the other, but, both in its potentialities and especially in its spiritual actualization, no one soul can or does take the place of any other.
And if we ask what there is in any strict Realism to attract the Mystical sense, we shall find it, I think, in the insistence of such Realism upon Unity, Universality, and Stability. Yet in so far as Mysticism, in such a case Exclusive Mysticism, tends to oust the Outgoing movement of the soul, it empties these forms of their Multiple, Individual, and Energizing content. Inclusive Mysticism may be truly said alone to attain to the true Mystic’s desires; for only by the interaction of both movements, and of all the powers of the soul, will the said soul escape the ever-increasing poverty of content characteristic of the strict Realist’s pyramid of conceptions; a poverty undoubtedly antagonistic to the secret aspiration of Mysticism, which is essentially an apprehension, admiration, and love of the infinite depths and riches of Reality—of this Reality no doubt present everywhere, yet in indefinitely various, and mutually complementary and stimulative forms and degrees. And the readiness with which Mysticism expressed itself in the Nominalist Categories,—distinctly less adequate to a healthy, Partial Mysticism than the more moderate forms of Realism,—shows how little intrinsic was the link which seemed to bind it to a Realism of the most rigorous kind.
II. Relations between God and the Human Soul.
In taking next the question as to the relations between God and the Human Soul, we shall find our difficulties increased, because, here especially, the Philosophers and even the Biblical Writers have, with regard to religious experience, used expressions and furnished stimulations of a generally complex and unclarified, intermittent, and unharmonized kind; and especially because certain specifically religious experiences and requirements have operated here with a unique intensity, at one time in a Pantheistic, at another in a more or less Deistic direction. The reader will specially note the points in the following doctrines which helped on the conception that a certain centre or highest part of the soul is God, or a part of God, Himself.
1. Plato and Aristotle. “The Noûs.”
(1) Plato teaches the pre-existence and the post-existence (immortality) of the soul, as two interdependent truths. In his earlier stage, e.g. the Phaedrus, he so little discriminates, in his argument for immortality, between the individual soul and the World-Soul, as to argue that “the Self-Moving” Soul generally “is the beginning of motion, and this motion,” (specially here in connection with the human soul), “can neither be destroyed nor begotten, since, in that case, the heavens and all generation would collapse.” Yet individual souls are not, according to him, emanations of the World-Soul; but, as the particular ideas stand beside the Supreme Idea, so do the particular souls stand beside the Soul of the Whole, in a distinct peculiarity of their own.[397]—And again, since the soul has lapsed from a purer, its appropriate, life into the body, and has thus no original, intrinsic relation to this body, the activity of the senses, indeed in strictness even that of the emotions, cannot form part of its essential nature. Only the highest part of the soul, the Reason, Noûs, which, as “sun-like, God-like,” can apprehend the sun, God, is one and simple, as are all the ideas, immortal; whereas the soul’s lower part consists of two elements,—the nobler, the irascible, and the ignobler, the concupiscible passions. But how the unity of the soul’s life can co-exist with this psychical tritomy, is a question no doubt never formulated even to himself by Plato: we certainly have only three beings bound together, not one being active in different directions.[398]
(2) Aristotle, if more sober in his general doctrine, brings some special obscurities and contradictions. For whilst the pre-existence of the soul, taken as a whole, is formally denied, and indeed its very origin is linked to that of the body, its rational part, the Noûs, comes into the physical organism from outside of the matter altogether, and an impersonal pre-existence is distinctly predicated of it,—in strict conformity with his doctrine that the Supreme Noûs does not directly act upon, or produce things in, the world.[399]