[7]. Dionysius thus describes the mystical adept who has reached the summit of union:—‘Then is he delivered from all seeing and being seen, and passes into the truly mystical darkness of ignorance, where he excludes all intellectual apprehensions (τὰς γνωστικὰς ἀντιλήηψεις), and abides in the utterly Impalpable and Invisible; being wholly His who is above all, with no other dependence, either on himself or any other; and is made one, as to his nobler part, with the utterly Unknown, by the cessation of all knowing; and at the same time, in that very knowing nothing, he knows what transcends the mind of man.’—De Mysticâ Theologiâ, cap. i. p. 710. S. Dion. Areop. Opp. Paris, 1644.
So again he exhorts Timothy ‘by assiduous practice in mystical contemplations to abandon the senses and all operations of the intellect; all objects of sense and all objects of thought, all things non-existent and existent (αἰσθητὰ = οὐκ ὄντα, νοητὰ = ὄντα), and ignorantly to strive upwards towards Union as close as possible with Him who is above all essence and knowledge:—inasmuch as by a pure, free, and absolute separation (ἐκστάσει) of himself from all things, he will be exalted (stripped and freed from everything) to the superessential radiance of the divine darkness.’—p. 708.
About the words rendered ‘intellectual apprehensions’ commentators differ. The context, the antithesis, and the parallel passage in the earlier part of the chapter, justify us in understanding them in their strict sense, as conveying the idea of cessation from all mental action whatsoever.
[9]. See Wilkins’ Bagvat-Gita, pp. 63-65. Ward, ii. 180. Also, Asiatic Researches, vol. xvii. pp. 169-313, containing an account of these Yogis, by Horace Hayman Wilson. One sect, we are told, have a way of contemplating Vishnu in miniature, by imagining the god in their heart, about the size of an open hand, and so adoring him from top to toe. In this gross conception of an indwelling deity these Hindoos do indeed exceed St. Theresa, who after swallowing the wafer conceives of Christ as prisoner in her inwards, and, making her heart a doll’s-house, calls it a temple. But beyond her, and beyond the Indians, too, in sensuousness, are the Romanist stories of those saints in whom it is declared that a post-mortem examination has disclosed the figure of Christ, or the insignia of his passion, miraculously modelled in the chambers of the heart.
[10]. Asiatic Researches, loc. cit. The worshipped principle of Hindooism is not love, but power. Certain objects are adored as containing divine energy. The Guru is a representative and vehicle of divine power—a Godful man, and accordingly the most imperious of task-masters. The prodigies of asceticism, so abundant in Indian fable, had commonly for their object the attainment of superhuman powers. Thus Taraki, according to the Siva Puran, stood a hundred years on tip-toe, lived a hundred years on air, a hundred on fire, &c. for this purpose.—Notes to Curse of Kehama, p. 237.
The following passage, cited by Ward, exhibits the subjective idealism of these Hindoos in its most daring absurdity. ‘Let every one meditate upon himself; let him be the worshipper and the worship. Whatever you see is but yourself, and father and mother are nonentities; you are the infant and the old man, the wise man and the fool, the male and the female; it is you who are drowned in the stream—you who pass over; you are the sensualist and the ascetic, the sick man and the strong; in short, whatsoever you see, that is you, as bubbles, surf, and billows are all but water.’
Now, there is an obvious resemblance between this idealism and that of Fichte. The Indian and the German both ignore the notions formed from mere sensible experience; both dwell apart from experience, in a world fashioned for themselves out of ‘pure thought;’ both identify thought and being, subject and object. But here the likeness ends. The points of contrast are obvious. The Hindoo accepts as profoundest wisdom what would be an unfair caricature of the system of Fichte. The idealism of the Oriental is dreamy and passive; it dissolves his individuality; it makes him a particle, wrought now into this, now into that, in the ever-shifting phantasmagoria of the universe; he has been, he may be, he, therefore, in a sense is, anything and everything. Fichte’s philosophy, on the contrary, rests altogether on the intense activity—on the autocracy of the Ego, which posits, or creates, the Non-Ego. He says, ‘The activity and passivity of the Ego are one and the same. For in as far as it does not posit a something in itself, it posits that something in the Non-Ego. Again, the activity and passivity of the Non-Ego are one and the same. In as far as the Non-Ego works upon the Ego, and will absorb a something in it, the Ego posits that very thing in the Non-Ego.’ (Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, § 3. Sämmtliche Werke, v. i. p. 177.) Action is all in all with him. God he calls ‘a pure Action’ (reines Handeln), the life and principle of a supersensuous order of the world—just as I am a pure Action, as a link in that order. (Gerichtliche Verantwortung gegen die Anklage des Atheismus, Werke, v. p. 261.) Charged with denying personality to God, Fichte replies that he only denied him that conditioned personality which belongs to ourselves—a denial, I suppose, in which we should all agree. The only God in his system which is not an uninfluential abstraction is manifestly the Ego—that is dilated to a colossal height, and deified. Pre-eminently anti-mystical as was the natural temperament of Fichte, here he opens a door to the characteristic misconception of mysticism—the investiture of our own notions and our own will with a divine authority or glory. He would say, ‘The man of genius does think divine thoughts. But the man who is unintelligible, who, in the very same province of pure thought as that occupied by the true philosopher, thinks only at random and incoherently; he is mistaken, I grant, in arrogating inspiration—him I call a mystic.’ But of unintelligibility or incoherence what is to be the test,—who is to be the judge? In this anarchy of gods, numerous as thinkers, one deity must have as much divine right as another. There can be no appeal to experience, which all confessedly abandon; no appeal to facts, which each Ego creates after its own fashion for itself.
[11]. Philo gives an account of the Therapeutæ referred to in the letter, in his treatise De Vitâ Contemplativâ.
Passages corresponding with those contained in the letter contributed by Atherton, concerning the enmity of the flesh and the divine nature of the soul, are to be found in the works of Philo, Sacr. Leg. Alleg. lib. iii. p. 101 (ed. Mangey); lib. ii. p. 64; De eo quod det. potiori insid. soleat, pp. 192, 208.