(2) Ruysbroek (who died in 1381) combines a considerable fundamental sobriety with much of St. Paul’s daring and many echoes of Plotinus. “The unity of our spirit with God is of two kinds,—essential and actual. According to its essence, our spirit receives, in its innermost highest part, the visit of Christ, without means and without intermission; for the life which we are in God, in our Eternal Image, and that which we have and are in ourselves, according to the essence of our being … are without distinction.—But this essential unity of our spirit with God has no consistency in itself, but abides in God and flows out from and depends on Him.” The actual unity of our spirit with God, caused by Grace, confers upon us not His Image, but His Likeness, “and though we cannot lose the Image of God, nor our natural unity with Him,—if we lose His Likeness, His Grace, Christ, who, in this case, comes to us with mediations and intermissions, we shall be damned.”[408]
5. St. Teresa’s mediating view.
St. Teresa’s teachings contain interesting faint echoes of the old perplexities and daring doctrines concerning the nature of the Spirit; but articulate a strikingly persistent conviction that the soul holds God Himself as distinct from His graces, possessing thus some direct experience of this His presence. “I cannot understand what the mind is, nor how it differs from the soul or the spirit either: all three seem to me to be but one, though the soul sometimes leaps forth out of itself, like a fire which has become a flame: the flame ascends high above the fire, but it is still the same flame of the same fire.” “Something subtle and swift seems to issue from the soul, to ascend to its highest part and to go whither Our Lord will … it seems a flight. This little bird of the spirit seems to have escaped out of the prison of the body.” Indeed “the soul is then not in itself … it seems to me to have its dwelling higher than even the highest part of itself.”[409]—“In the beginning I did not know that God is present in all things.… Unlearned men used to tell me that He was present only by His grace. I could not believe that.… A most learned Dominican told me He was present Himself … this was a great comfort to me.” “To look upon Our Lord as being in the innermost parts of the soul … is a much more profitable method, than that of looking upon Him as external to us.” “The living God was in my soul.” And even, “hitherto” up to 1555, “my life was my own; my life, since then, is the life which God lived in me.”[410]
6. Immanence, not Pantheism.
St. Teresa’s teaching as to God’s own presence in the soul points plainly, I think, to the truth insisted on by the Catholic theologian Schwab, in his admirable monograph on Gerson. “Neither speculation nor feeling are satisfied with a Pure Transcendence of God; and hence the whole effort of true Mysticism is directed, whilst not abolishing His Transcendence, to embrace and experience God, His living presence, in the innermost soul,—that is, to insist, in some way or other, upon the Immanence of God. Reject all such endeavours as Pantheistic, insist sharply upon the specific eternal difference between God and the Creature: and the Speculative, Mystical depths fade away, with all their fascination.”[411] Not in finding Pantheism already here, with the imminent risk of falling into a cold Deism, but in a rigorous insistence, with all the great Inclusive Mystics, upon the spiritual and moral effects, as the tests of the reality and worth of such experiences, and, with the Ascetical and Historical souls, upon also the other movement—an outgoing in some kind of contact with, and labour at, the contingencies and particularities of life and mind—will the true safeguard for this element of the soul’s life be found.[412]
III. Mysticism and Pantheism: their Differences and Points of Likeness.
But does not Mysticism, not only find God in the soul, but the soul to be God? Is it not, as such, already Pantheism? Or, if not, what is their difference?
1. Plotinus and Spinoza compared.
Now Dr. Edward Caird, in his fine book, The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, 1904, tells us that “Mysticism is religion in its most concentrated and exclusive form; it is that attitude of mind in which all other relations are swallowed up in the relation of the soul to God”; and that “Plotinus is the Mystic par excellence.”[413] And he then proceeds to contrast Plotinus, the typical Mystic, with Spinoza, the true Pantheist.
“Whether” or not “Spinoza, in his negation of the limits of the finite, still leaves it open to himself to admit a reality in finite things which is not negated,” and “to conceive of the absolute substance as manifesting itself in attributes and modes”: “it is very clear that he does so conceive it, and that, for all those finite things which he treats as negative and illusory in themselves, he finds in God a ground of reality
… which can be as little destroyed as the divine substance
itself.” “God, Deus sive Natura, is conceived as the immanent principle of the universe, or perhaps rather the universe is conceived as immanent in God.”—Thus to him “the movement by which he dissolves the finite in the infinite, and the movement by which he finds the finite again in the infinite, are equally essential. If for him the world is nothing apart from God, God is nothing apart from His realization in the world.” This is true Pantheism.[414]