But in Plotinus the via negativa involves a negation of the finite and determinate in all its forms; hence here it is impossible to find the finite again in the infinite. The Absolute One is here not immanent but transcendent.[415] “While the lower always has need of the higher, the higher is regarded as having no need” for any purpose “of the lower”; and “the Highest has no need of anything but Itself.” “Such a process cannot be reversed”: “in ascending, Plotinus has drawn the ladder after him, and left himself no possibility of descending again. The movement, in which he is guided by definite and explicit thought, is always upwards; while, in describing the movement downwards, he has to take refuge in metaphors and analogies,” for the purpose of indicating a purely self-occupied activity which only accidentally produces an external effect, e.g., “the One as it were overflows, and produces another than itself.”[416] “Thus we have the strange paradox that the Being who is absolute, is yet conceived as in a sense external to the relative and finite, and that He leaves the relative and finite in a kind of unreal independence.” “On the one side, we have a life which is nothing apart from God, and which, nevertheless, can never be united to him, except as it loses itself altogether; and, on the other side, an Absolute, which yet is not immanent in the life it originates, but abides in transcendent isolation from it.… It is this contradiction which … makes the writings of Plotinus the supreme expression of Mysticism.”[417]
Now I think, with this admirable critic, that we cannot but take Spinoza as the classical representative of that parallelistic Pantheism to which most of our contemporary systems of psycho-physical parallelism belong. As Prof. Troeltsch well puts it, “we have here a complete parallelism between every single event in the physical world, which event is already entirely explicable from its own antecedents within that physical world, and every event of a psychical kind, which, nevertheless, is itself also entirely explicable from its own psychical antecedents alone.” And “this parallelism again is but two sides of the one World-Substance, Which is neither Nature nor Spirit, and Whose law is neither natural nor spiritual law, but Which is Being in general and Law in general.” In this one World-Substance, with its parallel self-manifestations as extension and as thought, Spinoza finds the ultimate truth of Religion, as against the Indeterminist, Anthropomorphic elements of all the popular religions,—errors which have sprung, the Anthropomorphic from man’s natural inclination to interpret Ultimate Reality, with its complete neutrality towards the distinctions of Psychical and Physical, by the Psychic side, as the one nearest to our own selves; and the Indeterminist from the attribution of that indetermination to the World-Substance which, even in Psychology, is already a simple illusion and analytical blunder.
“It is in the combination,” concludes Professor Troeltsch, “of such a recognition of the strict determination of all natural causation, and of such a rejection of materialism (with its denial of the independence of the psychic world), that rests the immense power of Pantheism at the present time.”[418] On the other hand, the supposed Pantheistic positions of the later Lessing, of Herder, Goethe and many another predominantly aesthetic thinker, must, although far richer and more nearly adequate conceptions of full reality, be assigned, qua Pantheism, a secondary place, as inconsistent, because already largely Teleological, indeed Theistic Philosophies.
2. Complete Pantheism non-religious; why approached by Mysticism.
Now the former, the full Pantheism, must, I think, be declared, with Rauwenhoff, to be only in name a religious position at all. “In its essence it is simply a complete Monism, a recognition of the Pan in its unity and indivisibility, and hence a simple view of the world, not a religious conception.”[419]—Yet deeply religious souls can be more or less, indeed profoundly, influenced by such a Monism, so that we can get Mystics with an outlook considerably more Spinozist than Plotinian. There can, e.g., be no doubt as to both the deeply religious temper and the strongly Pantheistic conceptions of Eckhart in the Middle Ages, and of Schleiermacher in modern times; and indeed Spinoza himself is, apart from all questions as to the logical implications and results of his intellectual system, and as to the justice of his attacks upon the historical religions, a soul of massive religious intuition and aspiration.
But further: Mystically tempered souls,—and the typical and complete religious soul will ever possess a mystical element in its composition,—have three special attraits which necessarily bring them into an at least apparent proximity to Pantheism.
(1) For one thing Mysticism, like Pantheism, has a great, indeed (if left unchecked by the out-going-movement) an excessive, thirst for Unity, for a Unity less and less possessed of Multiplicity; and the transition from holding the Pure Transcendence of this Unity to a conviction of its Exclusive Immanence becomes easy and insignificant, in proportion to the emptiness of content increasingly characterizing this Oneness.
(2) Then again, like Pantheists, Mystics dwell much upon the strict call to abandon all self-centredness, upon the death to self, the loss of self; and in proportion as they dwell upon this self to be thus rejected, and as they enlarge the range of this petty self, do they approach each other more and more.
(3) And lastly, there is a peculiarity about the Mystical habit of mind, which inevitably approximates it to the Pantheistic mode of thought, and which, if not continuously taken by the Mystic soul itself as an inevitable, but most demonstrable, inadequacy, will react upon the substance of this soul’s thought in a truly Pantheistic sense. This peculiarity results from the Mystic’s ever-present double tendency of absorbing himself, away from the Successive and Temporal, in the Simultaneity and Eternity of God, conceiving thus all reality as partaking, in proportion to its depth and greater likeness to Him, in this Totum Simul character of its ultimate Author and End; and of clinging to such vivid picturings of this reality as are within his, this Mystic’s reach. Now such a Simultaneity can be pictorially represented to the mind only by the Spacial imagery of co-existent Extensions,—say of air, water, light, or fire: and these representations, if dwelt on as at all adequate, will necessarily suggest a Determinism of a Mathematico-Physical, Extensional type, i.e. one, and the dominant, side of Spinozistic Pantheism.—It is here, I think, that we get the double cause for the Pantheistic-seeming trend of almost all the Mystical imagery. For even the marked Emanationism of much in Plotinus, and of still more in Proclus,—the latter still showing through many a phrase in Dionysius,—appears in their images as operating upon a fixed Extensional foundation: and indeed these very overflowings, owing to the self-centredness and emptiness of content of their Source, the One, and to their accidental yet automatic character, help still further to give to the whole outlook a strikingly materialistic, mechanical, in so far Pantheistic, character.