There can be little doubt that such a Panentheism is all that many a daring, in strictness Pantheistic, saying of the Christian, perhaps also of the Jewish and Mohammedan, Mystics aimed at. Only the soul’s ineradicable capacity, need and desire for its Divine Lodger and Sustainer would constitute, in this conception, the intrinsic characteristic of human nature; and it is rather the too close identification, in feeling and emotional expression, of the desire and the Desired, of the hunger and the Food, and the too exclusive realization of the deep truth that this desire and hunger do not cause, but are themselves preceded and caused by, their Object,—it is the over-vivid perception of this real dynamism, rather than any a priori theory of static substances and identities—which, certainly in many cases, has produced the appearance of Pantheism.
And again it is certain that we have to beware of taking the apparent irruption or ingrafting,—in the case of the operations of Grace,—of an entirely heterogeneous Force and Reality into what seems the already completely closed circle of our natural functions and aspirations, as the complete and ultimate truth of the situation. However utterly different that Force may feel to all else that we are aware of within ourselves, however entirely unmeditated may seem its manifestations: it is clear that we should be unable to recognize even this Its difference, to welcome or resist It, above all to find It a response to our deepest cravings, unless we had some natural true affinity to It, and some dim but most real experience of It from the first. Only with such a general religiosity and vague sense, from a certain contact, of the Infinite, is the recognition of definite, historical Religious Facts and Figures as true, significant, binding upon my will and conscience, explicable at all.
2. Aquinas on our direct semi-consciousness of God’s indwelling.
St. Thomas, along one line of doctrine, has some excellent teachings about all this group of questions. For though he tells us that “the names which we give to God and creatures, are predicated of God” only “according to a certain relation of the creature to God, as its Principle and Cause, in which latter the perfections of all things pre-exist in an excellent manner”: yet he explicitly admits, in one place, that we necessarily have some real, immediate experience of the Nature of God, for that “it is impossible, with regard to anything, to know whether it exists,”—and he has admitted that natural reason can attain to a knowledge of God’s bare existence,—“unless we somehow know what is its nature,” at least “with a confused knowledge”; whence “also with regard to God, we could not know whether He exists, unless we somehow knew, even though confusedly, what He is.”[426]—God, though transcendent, is also truly immanent in the human soul: “God is in all things, as the agent is present in that wherein it acts. Created Being is as true an effect of God’s Being, as to burn is the true effect of fire. God is above all things,—by the excellence of His nature, and yet He is intimately present within all things, as the cause of the Being of all.”—And man has a natural exigency of the face-to-face Vision of God, hence of the Order of Grace, however entirely its attainment may be beyond his natural powers: “There is in man a natural longing to know the cause, when he sees an effect: whence if the intellect of the rational creature could not attain to the First Cause of things,”—here in the highest form, that of the Beatific vision of God—“the longing of its nature would remain void and vain.”[427]
But it is the great Mystical Saints and writers who continuously have, in the very forefront of their consciousness and assumptions, not a simply moral and aspirational, but an Ontological and Pre-established relation between the soul and God; and not a simply discursive apprehension, but a direct though dim Experience of the Infinite and of God. And these positions really underlie even their most complete-seeming negations, as we have already seen in the case of the Areopagite.
3. Gradual recognition of the function of subconsciousness.
Indeed, we can safely affirm that the last four centuries, and even the last four decades, have more and more confirmed the reality and indirect demonstrableness of such a presence and sense of the Infinite; ever more or less obscurely, but none the less profoundly, operative in the innermost normal consciousness of mankind: a presence and sense which, though they can be starved and verbally denied, cannot be completely suppressed; and which, though they do not, if unendorsed, constitute even the most elementary faith, far less a developed Historical or Mystical Religion, are simply necessary prerequisites to all these latter stimulations and consolidations.
(1) As we have already found, it is only since Leibniz that we know, systematically, how great is the range of every man’s Obscure Presentations, his dim Experience as against his Clear or distinct Presentations, his explicit Knowledge; and how the Clear depends even more upon the Dim, than the Dim upon the Clear. And further discoveries and proofs in this direction are no older than 1888.[428]
(2) Again, it is the growing experience of the difficulties and complexities of Psychology, History, Epistemology, and of the apparent unescapableness and yet pain of man’s mere anthropomorphisms, that makes the persistence of his search for, and sense of, Objective Truth and Reality, and the keenness of his suffering when he appears to himself as imprisoned in mere subjectivity, deeply impressive. For the more man feels, and suffers from feeling himself purely subjective, the more is it clear that he is not merely subjective: he could never be conscious of the fact, if he were. “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized … would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” John Stuart Mill asked himself; and “an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered ‘No.’”[429] Whether in bad health just then or not, Mill was here touching the very depths of the characteristically human sense. In all such cases only a certain profound apprehension of Abiding Reality, the Infinite, adequately explains the keen, operative sense of contrast and disappointment.
(3) And further, we have before us, with a fulness and delicate discrimination undreamed of in other ages, the immense variety, within a certain general psychological unity, of the great and small Historical Religions, past and present, of the world. Facing all this mass of evidence, Prof. Troeltsch can ask, more confidently than ever: “Are not our religious requirements, requirements of Something that one must have somehow first experienced in order to require It? Are they not founded upon some kind of Experience as to the Object, Which Itself first awakens the thought of an ultimate infinite meaning attaching to existence, and Which, in the conflict with selfishness, sensuality and self-will, draws the nobler part of the human will, with ever new force, to Itself?” “All deep and energetic religion is in a certain state of tension towards Culture, for the simple reason that it is seeking something else and something higher.”[430] And Prof. C. P. Tiele, so massively learned in all the great religions, concludes: “‘Religion,’ says Feuerbach, ‘proceeds from man’s wishes’ …; according to others, it is the outcome of man’s dissatisfaction with the external world.… But why should man torment himself with wishes which he never sees fulfilled around him, and which the rationalistic philosopher declares to be illusions? Why? surely, because he cannot help it.… The Infinite, very Being as opposed to continual becoming and perishing,—or call It what you will,—that is the Principle which gives him constant unrest, because It dwells within him.” And against Prof. Max Müller,—who had, however, on this point, arrived at a position very like Tiele’s own,—he impressively insists that “the origin of religion consists,” not in a “perception of the Infinite,” but “in the fact that Man has the Infinite within him.”—I would only contend further that the instinct of the Infinite awakens simultaneously with our sense-perceptions and categories of thinking, and passes, together with them and with the deeper, more volitional experiences, through every degree and stage of obscurity and relative clearness. “Whatever name we give it,—instinct; innate, original, or unconscious form of thought; or form of conception,—it is the specifically human element in man.”[431] But if all this be true, then the Mystics are amongst the great benefactors of our race: for it is especially this presence of the Infinite in Man, and man’s universal subjection to an operative consciousness of it, which are the deepest cause and the constant object of the adoring awe of all truly spiritual Mystics, in all times and places.