We twain are quits, I ween.[[188]]
On the other hand, there are many terse and happy couplets and quatrains in the Wanderer, which express the better spirit of mysticism. Angelus insists constantly on the vanity of mere externals,—the necessity of a Christ formed within, as opposed to a dead, unsanctifying faith,—the death of self-will, as the seat of all sin,—the reality of the hell or heaven already wrought in time by sin or holiness. These were the maxims and ejaculations which religious minds, mystically inclined, found so edifying. The arrogant egotheism of some passages they took in another sense, or deemed the sense beyond them. Moreover, the high-flown devotion affected by Rome has always familiarized her children with expressions which (as Thomas Fuller has it) ‘do knock at the door of blasphemy, though not always with intent to enter in thereat.’
The second representative of the West, who must assist towards our comparative estimate of pantheistic mysticism in its poetical form, is Mr. Emerson, the American essayist. Whether in prose or verse he is chief singer of his time at the high court of Mysticism. He belongs more to the East than to the West—true brother of those Sufis with whose doctrine he has so much in common. Luxuriant in fancy, impulsive, dogmatic, darkly oracular, he does not reason. His majestic monologue may not be interrupted by a question. His inspiration disdains argument. He delights to lavish his varied and brilliant resources upon some defiant paradox—and never more than when that paradox is engaged in behalf of an optimism extreme enough to provoke another Voltaire to write another Candide. He displays in its perfection the fantastic incoherence of the ‘God-intoxicated’ man.
In comparing Emerson with the Sufis, it may be as well to state that he does not believe in Mohammed and receive the Koran in a manner which would satisfy an orthodox Mussulman. Yet he does so (if words have meaning) much after the same fashion in which he believes in Christ and receives the Bible. Mohammed and Jesus are both, to him, extraordinary religious geniuses—the Bible and the Koran both antiquated books. He looks with serene indifference on all the forms of positive religion. He would agree perfectly with those Sufis who proclaimed the difference between the Church and the Mosque of little moment. The distance between the Crescent and the Cross is, with him, one of degree—their dispute rather a question of individual or national taste than a controversy between a religion with evidence and a religion without.
In the nineteenth century, and in America, the doctrine of emanation and the ascetic practice of the East can find no place. But the pantheism of Germany is less elevated than that of Persia, in proportion as it is more developed. The tendency of the latter is to assign reality only to God; the tendency of the former is to assign reality only to the mind of man. The Sufi strove to lose humanity in Deity; Emerson dissolves Deity in humanity. The orientals are nearer to theism, and the moderns farther from it, than they sometimes seem. That primal Unity which the Sufi, like the Neo-Platonist, posits at the summit of all things, to ray forth the world of Appearance, may possibly retain some vestige of personality. But the Over-Soul of Emerson, whose organs of respiration are men of genius, can acquire personality only in the individual man. The Persian aspired to reach a divinity above him by self-conquest; the American seeks to realize a divinity within him by self-will. Self-annihilation is the watchword of the one; self-assertion that of the other.
CHAPTER II.
Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses: Stirb und werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunkeln Erde.[[189]]