4. Christianity excludes complete and final Pantheism.
And yet, as we have repeatedly found, Christianity has, in its fundamental Revelation and Experience, ever implied and affirmed such a conception of Unity, of Self-Surrender, and of the Divine Action, as to render any Pantheistic interpretation of these things ever incomplete and transitional.
(1) The Unity here is nowhere, even ultimately, the sheer Oneness of a simply identical Substance, but a Unity deriving its very close-knitness from its perfect organization of not simply identical elements or relations.
The Self-Surrender here is not a simply final resolution, of laboriously constituted centres of human spiritual consciousness and personality, back into a morally indifferent All, but a means and passage, for the soul, from a spiritually worthless self-entrenchment within a merely psycho-physical apartness and lust to live, on to a spiritual devotedness, an incorporation, as one necessary subject, into the Kingdom of souls,—the abiding, living expression of the abiding, living God.
And, above all, God’s Action is not a mechanico-physical, determinist, simultaneous Extension, nor even an automatic, accidental, unconscious Emanation, but, as already Plato divined,—an intuition lost again by Aristotle, and, in his logic, denied by Plotinus,—a voluntary outgoing and self-communication of the supreme self-conscious Spirit, God. For Plato tells us that “the reason why Nature and this Universe of things was framed by Him Who framed it, is that God is good … and desired that all things should be as like Himself as it was possible for them to be.”[423] Yet this pregnant apprehension never attains here to its full significance, because the Divine Intelligence is conceived only as manifesting itself in relation to something given from without,—the pre-existing, chaotic Matter. And for Aristotle God does not love this Givenness; for “the first Mover moves” (all things) only “as desired” by them: He Himself desires, loves, wills nothing whatsoever, and thinks and knows nothing but His own self alone.[424] And in Plotinus this same transcendence is still further emphasized, for the Absolute One here transcends even all thought and self-consciousness.
(2) It is in Christianity, after noble preludings in Judaism, that we get the full deliberate proclamation, in the great Life and Teaching, of the profound fact,—the Self-Manifestation of the Loving God, the Spirit-God moving out to the spirit-man, and spirit-man only thus capable of a return movement to the Spirit-God. As Schelling said, “God can only give Himself to His creatures as He gives a self to them,” and, with it, the capacity of participating in His life. We thus get a relation begun and rendered possible by God’s utterly prevenient, pure, ecstatic love of Man, a relation which, in its essence spiritual, personal and libertarian, leaves behind it, as but vain travesties of such ultimate Realities, all Emanational or Parallelistic Pantheism, useful though these latter systems are as symbols of the Mathematico-Physical level and kind of reality and apprehension. Yet this spiritual relation is here, unlike Plotinus’s more or less Emanational conception of it, not indeed simply invertible, as Spinoza would have it, (for Man is ontologically dependent upon God, whereas God is not thus dependent upon Man), but nevertheless largely one of true mutuality. And this mutuality of the relation is not simply a positive enactment of God, but is expressive, in its degree and mode, of God’s intrinsic moral nature. For God is here the Source as well as the Object of all love; hence He Himself possesses the supreme equivalent for this our noblest emotion, and is moved to free acts of outgoing, in the creation and preservation, the revelation to, and the redemption of finite spirits, as so many successive, mutually supplementary, and increasingly fuller expressions and objects of this His nature. “God is Love”; “God so loved the world, as to give His only-begotten Son”; “Let us love God, for God hath first loved us”; “if any man will do the will of God, he shall know of the doctrine if it be from God”: God’s Infinity is here, not the negation of the relatively independent life of His creatures, but the very reason and source of their freedom.[425]
In the concluding chapter I hope to give a sketch of the actual operation of the true correctives to any excessive, Plotinian or Spinozistic, tendencies in the Mystical trend, especially when utilizing Mathematico-Physical Science at the soul’s middle level; and of History at the ultimate reaches of the soul’s life.
IV. The Divine Immanence; Spiritual Personality.
1. Panentheism.
As to our fourth question, the Divine Immanence and Personality, our last quotations from St. Teresa give us, I think, our true starting-point. For it is evident that, between affirming the simple Divinity of the innermost centre of the soul, and declaring that the soul ever experiences only the Grace of God, i.e. certain created effects, sent by Him from the far-away seat of His own full presence, there is room for a middle position which, whilst ever holding the definite creatureliness of the soul, in all its reaches, puts God Himself into the soul and the soul into God, in degrees and with results which vary indeed indefinitely according to its good-will and its call, yet which all involve and constitute a presence ever profoundly real, ever operative before and beyond all the soul’s own operations. These latter operations are, indeed, even possible only through all this Divine anticipation, origination, preservation, stimulation, and, at bottom,—in so far as man is enabled and required by God to reach a certain real self-constitution,—through a mysterious Self-Limitation of God’s own Action,—a Divine Self-Restraint.