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Christian Mysticism

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Title: Christian Mysticism

Author: William Ralph Inge


        
Release date: January 4, 2005 [eBook #14596]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM ***

CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM

The Bampton Lectures, 1899

Considered in Eight Lectures Delivered before the University of Oxford

by

WILLIAM RALPH INGE, D.D.
Dean Of S. Paul's

Methuen & Co. Ltd.
36 Essex Street W.c.
London







Extract
From The Last Will And Testament
Of The Late
Rev. John Bampton
Canon Of Salisbury


----"I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to the Chancellor,
Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford for ever, to have
and to hold all and singular the said Lands and Estates upon trust,
and to the intents and purposes hereinafter mentioned; that is to say,
I will and appoint that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of
Oxford for the time being shall take and receive all the rents,
issues, and profits thereof, and (after all taxes, reparations, and
necessary deductions made) that he pay all the remainder to the
endowment of eight Divinity Lecture Sermons, to be established for
ever in the said University, and to be performed in the manner
following:

"I direct and appoint that upon the first Tuesday in Easter Term, a
Lecturer be yearly chosen by the Heads of Colleges only, and by no
others, in the room adjoining to the Printing-House, between the hours
of ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, to preach eight
Divinity Lecture Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary's in Oxford,
between the commencement of the last month in Lent Term, and the end
of the third week in Act Term.

"Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity Lecture Sermons
shall be preached upon either of the following Subjects--to confirm
and establish the Christian Faith, and to confute all heretics and
schismatics--upon the Divine authority of the Holy Scriptures--upon
the authority of the writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the
faith and practice of the primitive Church--upon the Divinity of our
Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ--upon the Divinity of the Holy
Ghost--upon the Articles of the Christian Faith, as comprehended in
the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds.

"Also I direct that thirty copies of the eight Divinity Lecture
Sermons shall be always printed within two months after they are
preached; and one copy shall be given to the Chancellor of the
University, and one copy to the head of every College, and one copy to
the Mayor of the City of Oxford, and one copy to be put into the
Bodleian Library; and the expense of printing them shall be paid out
of the revenue of the Land or Estates given for establishing the
Divinity Lecture Sermons; and the Preacher shall not be paid, nor
entitled to the revenue, before they are printed.

"Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be qualified to
preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless he hath taken the degree
of Master of Arts at least, in one of the two Universities of Oxford
or Cambridge; and that the same person shall never preach the Divinity
Lecture Sermons twice."




PREFACE


The first of the subjects which, according to the will of Canon
Bampton, are prescribed for the Lecturers upon his foundation, is the
confirmation and establishment of the Christian faith. This is the aim
which I have kept in view in preparing this volume; and I should wish
my book to be judged as a contribution to apologetics, rather than as
a historical sketch of Christian Mysticism. I say this because I
decided, after some hesitation, to adopt a historical framework for
the Lectures, and this arrangement may cause my object to be
misunderstood. It seemed to me that the instructiveness of tracing the
development and operation of mystical ideas, in the forms which they
have assumed as active forces in history, outweighed the disadvantage
of appearing to waver between apology and narrative. A series of
historical essays would, of course, have been quite unsuitable in the
University pulpit, and, moreover, I did not approach the subject from
that side. Until I began to prepare the Lectures, about a year and a
half before they were delivered, my study of the mystical writers had
been directed solely by my own intellectual and spiritual needs. I was
attracted to them in the hope of finding in their writings a
philosophy and a rule of life which would satisfy my mind and
conscience. In this I was not disappointed; and thinking that others
might perhaps profit by following the same path, I wished to put
together and publish the results of my thought and reading. In such a
scheme historical details are either out of place or of secondary
value; and I hope this will be remembered by any historians who may
take the trouble to read my book.

The philosophical side of the subject is from my point of view of much
greater importance. I have done my best to acquire an adequate
knowledge of those philosophies, both ancient and modern, which are
most akin to speculative Mysticism, and also to think out my own
position. I hope that I have succeeded in indicating my general
standpoint, and that what I have written may prove fairly consistent
and intelligible; but I have felt keenly the disadvantage of having
missed the systematic training in metaphysics given by the Oxford
school of _Literæ Humaniores_, and also the difficulty (perhaps I
should say the presumption) of addressing metaphysical arguments to an
audience which included several eminent philosophers. I wish also that
I had had time for a more thorough study of Fechner's works; for his
system, so far as I understand it, seems to me to have a great
interest and value as a scheme of philosophical Mysticism which does
not clash with modern science.

I have spoken with a plainness which will probably give offence of the
debased supernaturalism which usurps the name of Mysticism in Roman
Catholic countries. I desire to insult no man's convictions; and it
is for this reason that I have decided not to print my analysis of
Ribet's work (_La Mystique Divine, distinguée des Contrefaçons
diaboliques_. Nouvelle Edition, Paris, 1895, 3 vols.), which I
intended to form an Appendix. It would have opened the eyes of some of
my readers to the irreconcilable antagonism between the Roman Church
and science; but though I translated and summarised my author
faithfully, the result had all the appearance of a malicious travesty.
I have therefore suppressed this Appendix; but with regard to Roman
Catholic "Mysticism" there is no use in mincing matters. Those who
find edification in signs and wonders of this kind, and think that
such "supernatural phenomena," even if they were well authenticated
instead of being ridiculous fables, could possibly establish spiritual
truths, will find little or nothing to please or interest them in
these pages. But those who reverence Nature and Reason, and have no
wish to hear of either of them being "overruled" or "suspended," will,
I hope, agree with me in valuing highly the later developments of
mystical thought in Northern Europe.

There is another class of "mystics" with whom I have but little
sympathy--the dabblers in occultism. "Psychical research" is, no
doubt, a perfectly legitimate science; but when its professors invite
us to watch the breaking down of the middle wall of partition between
matter and spirit, they have, in my opinion, ceased to be scientific,
and are in reality hankering after the beggarly elements of the later
Neoplatonism.

The charge of "pantheistic tendency" will not, I hope, be brought
against me without due consideration. I have tried to show how the
Johannine Logos-doctrine, which is the basis of Christian Mysticism,
differs from Asiatic Pantheism, from Acosmism, and from (one kind of)
evolutionary Idealism. Of course, speculative Mysticism is nearer to
Pantheism than to Deism; but I think it is possible heartily to eschew
Deism without falling into the opposite error.

I have received much help from many kind friends; and though some of
them would not wish to be associated with all of my opinions, I cannot
deny myself the pleasure of thanking them by name. From my mother and
other members of my family, and relations, especially Mr. W.W. How,
Fellow of Merton, I have received many useful suggestions. Three past
or present colleagues have read and criticised parts of my work--the
Rev. H. Rashdall, now Fellow of New College; Mr. H.A. Prichard, now
Fellow of Trinity; and Mr. H.H. Williams, Fellow of Hertford. Mr. G.L.
Dickinson, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, lent me an unpublished
dissertation on Plotinus. The Rev. C. Bigg, D.D., whose Bampton
Lectures on the Christian Platonists are known all over Europe, did me
the kindness to read the whole of the eight Lectures, and so added to
the great debt which I owe to him for his books. The Rev. J.M. Heald,
formerly Scholar of Trinity, Cambridge, lent me many books from his
fine library, and by inquiring for me at Louvain enabled me to procure
the books on Mysticism which are now studied in Roman Catholic
Universities. The Rev. Dr. Lindsay, who has made a special study of
the German mystics, read my Lectures on that period, and wrote me a
very useful letter upon them. Miss G.H. Warrack of Edinburgh kindly
allowed me to use her modernised version of Julian of Norwich.

I have ventured to say in my last Lecture--and it is my earnest
conviction--that a more general acquaintance with mystical theology
and philosophy is very desirable in the interests of the English
Church at the present time. I am not one of those who think that the
points at issue between Anglo-Catholics and Anglo-Protestants are
trivial: history has always confirmed Aristotle's famous dictum about
parties--[Greek: gignontai ai staseis ou peri mikrôn all' ek mikrôn,
stasiazousi de peri megalôn]--but I do not so far despair of our
Church, or of Christianity, as to doubt that a reconciling principle
must and will be found. Those who do me the honour to read these
Lectures will see to what quarter I look for a mediator. A very short
study would be sufficient to dispel some of the prejudices which still
hang round the name of Mysticism--e.g., that its professors are
unpractical dreamers, and that this type of religion is antagonistic
to the English mind. As a matter of fact, all the great mystics have
been energetic and influential, and their business capacity is
specially noted in a curiously large number of cases. For instance,
Plotinus was often in request as a guardian and trustee; St. Bernard
showed great gifts as an organiser; St. Teresa, as a founder of
convents and administrator, gave evidence of extraordinary practical
ability; even St. Juan of the Cross displayed the same qualities; John
Smith was an excellent bursar of his college; Fénelon ruled his
diocese extremely well; and Madame Guyon surprised those who had
dealings with her by her great aptitude for affairs. Henry More was
offered posts of high responsibility and dignity, but declined them.
The mystic is not as a rule ambitious, but I do not think he often
shows incapacity for practical life, if he consents to mingle in it.
And so far is it from being true that Great Britain has produced but
few mystics, that I am inclined to think the subject might be
adequately studied from English writers alone. On the more
intellectual side we have (without going back to Scotus Erigena) the
Cambridge Platonists, Law and Coleridge; of devotional mystics we have
attractive examples in Hilton and Julian of Norwich; while in verse
the lofty idealism[1] and strong religious bent of our race have
produced a series of poet-mystics such as no other country can rival.
It has not been possible in these Lectures to do justice to George
Herbert, Vaughan "the Silurist," Quarles, Crashaw, and others, who
have all drunk of the same well. Let it suffice to say that the
student who desires to master the history of Mysticism in Britain will
find plenty to occupy his time. But for the religious public in
general the most useful thing would be a judicious selection from the
mystical writers of different times and countries. Those who are more
interested in the practical and devotional than the speculative side
may study with great profit some parts of St. Augustine, the sermons
of Tauler, the _Theologia Germanica_, Hilton's _Scale of Perfection_,
the Life of Henry Suso, St. Francis de Sales and Fénelon, the Sermons
of John Smith and Whichcote's _Aphorisms_, and the later works of
William Law, not forgetting the poets who have been mentioned. I can
think of no course of study more fitting for those who wish to revive
in themselves and others the practical idealism of the primitive
Church, which gained for it its greatest triumphs.

I conclude this Preface with a quotation from William Law on the value
of the mystical writers. "Writers like those I have mentioned," he
says in a letter to Dr. Trapp, "there have been in all ages of the
Church, but as they served not the ends of popular learning, as they
helped no people to figure or preferment in the world, and were
useless to scholastic controversial writers, so they dropt out of
public uses, and were only known, or rather unknown, under the name of
mystical writers, till at last some people have hardly heard of that
very name: though, if a man were to be told what is meant by a
mystical divine, he must be told of something as heavenly, as great,
as desirable, as if he was told what is meant by a real, regenerate,
living member of the mystical body of Christ; for they were thus
called for no other reason than as Moses and the prophets, and the
saints of the Old Testament, may be called the spiritual Israel, or
the true mystical Jews. These writers began their office of teaching
as John the Baptist did, after they had passed through every kind of
mortification and self-denial, every kind of trial and purification,
both inward and outward. They were deeply learned in the mysteries of
the kingdom of God, not through the use of lexicons, or meditating
upon critics, but because they had passed from death unto life. They
highly reverence and excellently direct the true use of everything
that is outward in religion; but, like the Psalmist's king's daughter,
they are all glorious within. They are truly sons of thunder, and sons
of consolation; they break open the whited sepulchres; they awaken the
heart, and show it its filth and rottenness of death: but they leave
it not till the kingdom of heaven is raised up within it. If a man has
no desire but to be of the spirit of the gospel, to obtain all that
renovation of life and spirit which alone can make him to be in Christ
a new creature, it is a great unhappiness to him to be unacquainted
with these writers, or to pass a day without reading something of what
they wrote."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: It is really time that we took to burning that travesty
of the British character--the John Bull whom our comic papers
represent "guarding his pudding"--instead of Guy Fawkes. Even in the
nineteenth century, amid all the sordid materialism bred of commercial
ascendancy, this country has produced a richer crop of imaginative
literature than any other; and it is significant that, while in
Germany philosophy is falling more and more into the hands of the
empirical school, our own thinkers are nearly all staunch idealists.]




CONTENTS

LECTURE

     I. General Characteristics of Mysticism

    II. The Mystical Element in the Bible

   III. Christian Platonism and Speculative Mysticism--(1) In the East

    IV. Christian Platonism and Speculative Mysticism--(2) In the West

     V. Practical and Devotional Mysticism

    VI. Practical and Devotional Mysticism--_continued_

   VII. Nature-Mysticism and Symbolism

  VIII. Nature-Mysticism--_continued_

        APPENDIX A. Definitions of "Mysticism" and "Mystical Theology"

        APPENDIX B. The Greek Mysteries and Christian Mysticism

        APPENDIX C. The Doctrine of Deification

        APPENDIX D. The Mystical Interpretation of the Song of Solomon

        INDEX




LECTURE I


[Greek: "Hêmin de apodeikteon hôs ep' eutuchia tê megistê para Theôn
hê toiautê mania didotai hê de dê apodeixis estai deinois men
apistos, sophois de pistê"]

PLATO, _Phædrus_, p. 245.


  "_Thoas_. Es spricht kein Gott; es spricht dein eignes Herz.
  _Iphigenia_. Sie reden nur durch unser Herz zu uns."

GOETHE, _Iphigenie_.


  "Si notre vie est moins qu'une journée
   En l'éternel; si l'an qui fait le tour
   Chasse nos jours sans espoir de retour;
   Si périssable est toute chose née;
   Que songes-tu, mon âme emprisonnée?
   Pourquoi te plaît l'obscur de notre jour,
   Si, pour voler en un plus clair séjour,
   Tu as au dos l'aile bien empennée!
   Là est le bien que tout esprit désire,
   Là, le repos ou tout le monde aspire,
   Là est l'amour, là le plaisir encore!
   Là, ô mon âme, au plus haut ciel guidée,
   Tu y pourras reconnaître l'idée
   De la beauté qu'en ce monde j'adore!"

OLD POET.



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MYSTICISM

"Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest
what we shall be. We know that, if He shall be manifested, we shall be
like Him; for we shall see Him even as He is."--I JOHN iii. 2, 3.


No word in our language--not even "Socialism"--has been employed more
loosely than "Mysticism." Sometimes it is used as an equivalent for
symbolism or allegorism, sometimes for theosophy or occult science;
and sometimes it merely suggests the mental state of a dreamer, or
vague and fantastic opinions about God and the world. In Roman
Catholic writers, "mystical phenomena" mean supernatural suspensions
of physical law. Even those writers who have made a special study of
the subject, show by their definitions of the word how uncertain is
its connotation.[2] It is therefore necessary that I should make clear
at the outset what I understand by the term, and what aspects of
religious life and thought I intend to deal with in these Lectures.

The history of the _word_ begins in close connexion with the Greek
mysteries.[3] A mystic [Greek: mystês] is one who has been, or is
being, initiated into some esoteric knowledge of Divine things, about
which he must keep his mouth shut ([Greek: myein]); or, possibly, he is
one whose _eyes_ are still shut, one who is not yet an [Greek:
epoptês].[4] The word was taken over, with other technical terms of
the mysteries, by the Neoplatonists, who found in the existing
mysteriosophy a discipline, worship, and rule of life congenial to
their speculative views. But as the tendency towards quietism and
introspection increased among them, another derivation for "Mysticism"
was found--it was explained to mean deliberately shutting the eyes to
all external things.[5] We shall see in the sequel how this later
Neoplatonism passed almost entire into Christianity, and, while
forming the basis of mediæval Mysticism, caused a false association to
cling to the word even down to the Reformation.[6]

The phase of thought or feeling which we call Mysticism has its
origin in that which is the raw material of all religion, and perhaps
of all philosophy and art as well, namely, that dim consciousness of
the _beyond_, which is part of our nature as human beings. Men have
given different names to these "obstinate questionings of sense and
outward things." We may call them, if we will, a sort of higher
instinct, perhaps an anticipation of the evolutionary process; or an
extension of the frontier of consciousness; or, in religious language,
the voice of God speaking to us. Mysticism arises when we try to bring
this higher consciousness into relation with the other contents of our
minds. Religious Mysticism may be defined as the attempt to realise
the presence of the living God in the soul and in nature, or, more
generally, as _the attempt to realise, in thought and feeling, the
immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the
temporal_. Our consciousness of the beyond is, I say, the raw material
of all religion. But, being itself formless, it cannot be brought
directly into relation with the forms of our thought. Accordingly, it
has to express itself by symbols, which are as it were the flesh and
bones of ideas. It is the tendency of all symbols to petrify or
evaporate, and either process is fatal to them. They soon repudiate
their mystical origin, and forthwith lose their religious content.
Then comes a return to the fresh springs of the inner life--a revival
of spirituality in the midst of formalism or unbelief. This is the
historical function of Mysticism--it appears as an independent active
principle, the spirit of reformations and revivals. But since every
active principle must find for itself appropriate instruments,
Mysticism has developed a speculative and practical system of its
own. As Goethe says, it is "the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic
of the feelings." In this way it becomes possible to consider it as a
type of religion, though it must always be remembered that in becoming
such it has incorporated elements which do not belong to its inmost
being.[7] As a type of religion, then, Mysticism seems to rest on the
following propositions or articles of faith:--

First, _the soul_ (as well as the body) _can see and
perceive_--[Greek: esti de psychês aisthêsis tis], as Proclus says.
We have an organ or faculty for the discernment of spiritual truth,
which, in its proper sphere, is as much to be trusted as the organs of
sensation in theirs.

The second proposition is that, since we can only know what is akin to
ourselves,[8] _man, in order to know God, must be a partaker of the
Divine nature_. "What we are, that we behold; and what we behold,
that we are," says Ruysbroek. The curious doctrine which we find in
the mystics of the Middle Ages, that there is at "the apex of the
mind" a spark which is consubstantial with the uncreated ground of the
Deity, is thus accounted for. We could not even begin to work out our
own salvation if God were not already working in us. It is always "in
His light" that "we see light." The doctrine has been felt to be a
necessary postulate by most philosophers who hold that knowledge of
God is possible to man. For instance, Krause says, "From finite reason
as finite we might possibly explain the thought of itself, but not the
thought of something that is outside finite reasonable beings, far
less the absolute idea, in its contents infinite, of God. To become
aware of God in knowledge we require certainly to make a freer use of
our finite power of thought, but the thought of God itself is
primarily and essentially an eternal operation of the eternal
revelation of God to the finite mind." But though we are made in the
image of God, our _likeness_ to Him only exists potentially.[9] The
Divine spark already shines within us, but it has to be searched for
in the innermost depths of our personality, and its light diffused
over our whole being.

This brings us to the third proposition--"_Without holiness no man may
see the Lord_"; or, as it is expressed positively in the Sermon on the
Mount, "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God."
Sensuality and selfishness are absolute disqualifications for knowing
"the things of the Spirit of God." These fundamental doctrines are
very clearly laid down in the passage from St. John which I read as
the text of this Lecture. The filial relation to God is already
claimed, but the vision is inseparable from _likeness_ to Him, which
is a hope, not a possession, and is only to be won by "purifying
ourselves, even as He is pure."

There is one more fundamental doctrine which we must not omit.
Purification removes the obstacles to our union with God, but our
guide on the upward path, _the true hierophant of the mysteries of
God, is love_[10]. Love has been defined as "interest in its highest
power";[11] while others have said that "it is of the essence of love
to be disinterested." The contradiction is merely a verbal one. The
two definitions mark different starting-points, but the two "ways of
love" should bring us to the same goal. The possibility of
disinterested love, in the ordinary sense, ought never to have been
called in question. "Love is not love" when it asks for a reward. Nor
is the love of man to God any exception. He who tries to be holy in
order to be happy will assuredly be neither. In the words of the
_Theologia Germanica_, "So long as a man seeketh his own highest good
_because_ it is his, he will never find it." The mystics here are
unanimous, though some, like St. Bernard, doubt whether perfect love
of God can ever be attained, pure and without alloy, while we are in
this life.[12] The controversy between Fénelon and Bossuet on this
subject is well known, and few will deny that Fénelon was mainly in
the right. Certainly he had an easy task in justifying his statements
from the writings of the saints. But we need not trouble ourselves
with the "mystic paradox," that it would be better to be with Christ
in hell than without Him in heaven--a statement which Thomas à Kempis
once wrote and then erased in his manuscript. For wherever Christ is,
there is heaven: nor should we regard eternal happiness as anything
distinct from "a true conjunction of the mind with God.[13]" "God is
not without or above law: He _could_ not make men either sinful or
miserable.[14]" To believe otherwise is to suppose an irrational
universe, the one thing which a rational man cannot believe in.

The mystic, as we have seen, makes it his life's aim to be transformed
into the likeness of Him in whose image he was created.[15] He loves
to figure his path as a ladder reaching from earth to heaven, which
must be climbed step by step. This _scala perfectionis_ is generally
divided into three stages. The first is called the purgative life,
the second the illuminative, while the third, which is really the goal
rather than a part of the journey, is called the unitive life, or
state of perfect contemplation.[16] We find, as we should expect, some
differences in the classification, but this tripartite scheme is
generally accepted.

The steps of the upward path constitute the ethical system, the rule
of life, of the mystics. The first stage, the purgative life, we read
in the _Theologia Germanica_, is brought about by contrition, by
confession, by hearty amendment; and this is the usual language in
treatises intended for monks. But it is really intended to include the
civic and social virtues in this stage.[17] They occupy the lowest
place, it is true; but this only means that they must be acquired by
all, though all are not called to the higher flights of contemplation.
Their chief value, according to Plotinus, is to teach us the meaning
of _order_ and _limitation_ ([Greek: taxis] and [Greek: peras]), which
are qualities belonging to the Divine nature. This is a very valuable
thought, for it contradicts that aberration of Mysticism which calls
God the Infinite, and thinks of Him as the Indefinite, dissolving all
distinctions in the abyss of bare indetermination. When Ewald says,
"the true mystic never withdraws himself wilfully from the business
of life, no, not even from the smallest business," he is, at any rate,
saying nothing which conflicts with the principles of Mysticism.[18]

The purgative life necessarily includes self-discipline: does it
necessarily include what is commonly known as asceticism? It would be
easy to answer that asceticism means nothing but _training_, as men
train for a race, or more broadly still, that it means simply "the
acquisition of some greater power by practice.[19]" But when people
speak of "asceticism," they have in their minds such severe
"buffeting" of the body as was practised by many ancient hermits and
mediæval monks. Is this an integral part of the mystic's "upward
path"? We shall find reason to conclude that, while a certain degree
of austere simplicity characterises the outward life of nearly all the
mystics, and while an almost morbid desire to suffer is found in many
of them, there is nothing in the system itself to encourage men to
maltreat their bodies. Mysticism enjoins a dying life, not a living
death. Moreover, asceticism, when regarded as a virtue or duty in
itself, tends to isolate us, and concentrates our attention on our
separate individuality. This is contrary to the spirit of Mysticism,
which aims at realising unity and solidarity everywhere. Monkish
asceticism (so far as it goes beyond the struggle to live unstained
under unnatural conditions) rests on a dualistic view of the world
which does not belong to the essence of Mysticism. It infected all the
religious life of the Middle Ages, not Mysticism only.[20]

The second stage, the illuminative life, is the concentration of all
the faculties, will, intellect, and feeling, upon God. It differs from
the purgative life, not in having discarded good works, but in having
come to perform them, as Fénelon says, "no longer as virtues," that is
to say, willingly and almost spontaneously. The struggle is now
transferred to the inner life.

The last stage of the journey, in which the soul presses towards the
mark, and gains the prize of its high calling, is the unitive or
contemplative life, in which man beholds God face to face, and is
joined to Him. Complete union with God is the ideal limit of religion,
the attainment of which would be at once its consummation and
annihilation. It is in the continual but unending approximation to it
that the life of religion subsists.[21] We must therefore beware of
regarding the union as anything more than an infinite process, though,
as its end is part of the eternal counsel of God, there is a sense in
which it is already a fact, and not merely a thing desired. But the
word deification holds a very large place in the writings of the
Fathers, and not only among those who have been called mystics. We
find it in Irenæus as well as in Clement, in Athanasius as well as in
Gregory of Nyssa. St. Augustine is no more afraid of "deificari" in
Latin than Origen of [Greek: theopoieisthai] in Greek. The subject is
one of primary importance to anyone who wishes to understand mystical
theology; but it is difficult for us to enter into the minds of the
ancients who used these expressions, both because [Greek: theos] was a
very fluid concept in the early centuries, and because our notions of
_personality_ are very different from those which were prevalent in
antiquity. On this latter point I shall have more to say presently;
but the evidence for the belief in "deification," and its continuance
through the Middle Ages, is too voluminous to be given in the body of
these Lectures.[22] Let it suffice to say here that though such bold
phrases as "God became man, that we might become God," were
commonplaces of doctrinal theology at least till after Augustine, even
Clement and Origen protest strongly against the "very impious" heresy
that man is "a part of God," or "consubstantial with God.[23]" The
attribute of Divinity which was chiefly in the minds of the Greek
Fathers when they made these statements, was that of _imperishableness_.

As to the means by which this union is manifested to the
consciousness, there is no doubt that very many mystics believed in,
and looked for, ecstatic revelations, trances, or visions. This,
again, is one of the crucial questions of Mysticism.

Ecstasy or vision begins when thought ceases, _to our consciousness_,
to proceed from ourselves. It differs from dreaming, because the
subject is awake. It differs from hallucination, because there is no
organic disturbance: it is, or claims to be, a temporary enhancement,
not a partial disintegration, of the mental faculties. Lastly, it
differs from poetical inspiration, because the imagination is passive.

That perfectly sane people often experience such visions there is no
manner of doubt. St. Paul fell into a trance at his conversion, and
again at a later period, when he seemed to be caught up into the third
heaven. The most sober and practical of the mediæval mystics speak of
them as common phenomena. And in modern times two of the sanest of our
poets have recorded their experiences in words which may be worth
quoting.

Wordsworth, in his well-known "Lines composed above Tintern Abbey,"
speaks of--


                "That serene and blessed mood,
  In which ... the breath of this corporeal frame,
  And even the motion of our human blood,
  Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
  In body, and become a living soul:
  While with an eye made quiet by the power
  Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
  We see into the life of things."


And Tennyson says,[24] "A kind of waking trance I have often had,
quite from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally
come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to
myself silently, till all at once, out of the intensity of the
consciousness of individuality, the individual itself seemed to
dissolve and fade away into boundless being: and this not a confused
state, but the clearest of the clearest, and the surest of the surest,
the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an
almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it
were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life."

Admitting, then, that these psychical phenomena actually occur, we
have to consider whether ecstasy and kindred states are an integral
part of Mysticism. In attempting to answer this question, we shall
find it convenient to distinguish between the Neoplatonic vision of
the super-essential One, the Absolute, which Plotinus enjoyed several
times, and Porphyry only once, and the visions and "locutions" which
are reported in all times and places, especially where people have not
been trained in scientific habits of thought and observation. The
former was held to be an exceedingly rare privilege, the culminating
point of the contemplative life. I shall speak of it in my third
Lecture; and shall there show that it belongs, not to the essence of
Mysticism, and still less to Christianity, but to the Asiatic leaven
which was mixed with Alexandrian thought, and thence passed into
Catholicism. As regards visions in general, they were no invention of
the mystics. They played a much more important part in the life of the
early Church than many ecclesiastical historians are willing to admit.
Tertullian, for instance, says calmly, "The majority, almost, of men
learn God from visions.[25]" Such implicit reliance was placed on the
Divine authority of visions, that on one occasion an ignorant peasant
and a married man was made Patriarch of Alexandria against his will,
because his dying predecessor had a vision that the man who should
bring him a present of grapes on the next day should be his successor!
In course of time visions became rarer among the laity, but continued
frequent among the monks and clergy. And so the class which furnished
most of the shining lights of Mysticism was that in which these
experiences were most common.

But we do not find that the masters of the spiritual life attached
very much importance to them, or often appealed to them as aids to
faith.[26] As a rule, visions were regarded as special rewards
bestowed by the goodness of God on the struggling saint, and
especially on the beginner, to refresh him and strengthen him in the
hour of need. Very earnest cautions were issued that no efforts must
be made to induce them artificially, and aspirants were exhorted
neither to desire them, nor to feel pride in having seen them. The
spiritual guides of the Middle Ages were well aware that such
experiences often come of disordered nerves and weakened digestion;
they believed also that they are sometimes delusions of Satan. Richard
of St. Victor says, "As Christ attested His transfiguration by the
presence of Moses and Elias, so visions should not be believed unless
they have the authority of Scripture." Albertus Magnus tries to
classify them, and says that those which contain a sensuous element
are always dangerous. Eckhart is still more cautious, and Tauler
attaches little value to them. Avila, the Spanish mystic, says that
only those visions which minister to our spiritual necessities, and
make us _more humble_, are genuine. Self-induced visions inflate us
with pride, and do irreparable injury to health of mind and body.[27]

It hardly falls within my task to attempt to determine what these
visions really are. The subject is one upon which psychological and
medical science may some day throw more light. But this much I must
say, to make my own position clear: I regard these experiences as
neither more nor less "supernatural" than other mental phenomena. Many
of them are certainly pathological;[28] about others we may feel
doubts; but some have every right to be considered as real
irradiations of the soul from the light that "for ever shines," real
notes of the harmony that "is in immortal souls." In illustration of
this, we may appeal to three places in the Bible where revelations of
the profoundest truths concerning the nature and counsels of God are
recorded to have been made during ecstatic visions. Moses at Mount
Horeb heard, during the vision of the burning bush, a proclamation of
God as the "I am"--the Eternal who is exalted above time. Isaiah, in
the words "Holy, Holy, Holy," perceived dimly the mystery of the
Trinity. And St. Peter, in the vision of the sheet, learned that God
is no respecter of persons or of nationalities. In such cases the
highest intuitions or revelations, which the soul can in its best
moments just receive, but cannot yet grasp or account for, make a
language for themselves, as it were, and claim the sanction of
external authority, until the mind is elevated so far as to feel the
authority not less Divine, but no longer external. We may find fairly
close analogies in other forms of that "Divine madness," which Plato
says is "the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men"--such as
the rapture of the poet, or (as Plato adds) of the lover.[29] And
even the philosopher or man of science may be surprised into some such
state by a sudden realisation of the sublimity of his subject. So at
least Lacordaire believed when he wrote, "All at once, as if by
chance, the hair stands up, the breath is caught, the skin contracts,
and a cold sword pierces to the very soul. It is the sublime which has
manifested itself![30]" Even in cases where there is evident
hallucination, e.g. when the visionary sees an angel or devil sitting
on his book, or feels an arrow thrust into his heart, there need be no
insanity. In periods when it is commonly believed that such things may
and do happen, the imagination, instead of being corrected by
experience, is misled by it. Those who honestly expect to see miracles
will generally see them, without detriment either to their
truthfulness or sanity in other matters.

The mystic, then, is not, as such, a visionary; nor has he any interest
in appealing to a faculty "above reason," if reason is used in its
proper sense, as the logic of the whole personality. The desire to find
for our highest intuitions an authority wholly external to reason and
independent of it,--a "purely supernatural" revelation,--has, as
Récéjac says, "been the cause of the longest and the most dangerous of
the aberrations from which Mysticism has suffered." This kind of
supernaturalism is destructive of _unity_ in our ideas of God, the
world, and ourselves; and it casts a slur on the faculties which are the
appointed organs of communication between God and man. A revelation
absolutely transcending reason is an absurdity: no such revelation could
ever be made. In the striking phrase of Macarius, "the human mind is the
throne of the Godhead." The supremacy of the reason is the favourite
theme of the Cambridge Platonists, two of whom, Whichcote and Culverwel,
are never tired of quoting the text, "The spirit of man is the candle of
the Lord." "Sir, I oppose not rational to spiritual," writes Whichcote
to Tuckney, "for spiritual is most rational." And again, "Reason is the
Divine governor of man's life: it is the very voice of God.[31]" What we
can and must transcend, if we would make any progress in Divine
knowledge, is not reason, but that shallow rationalism which regards the
data on which we can reason as a fixed quantity, known to all, and which
bases itself on a formal logic, utterly unsuited to a spiritual view of
things. Language can only furnish us with poor, misleading, and wholly
inadequate images of spiritual facts; it supplies us with abstractions
and metaphors, which do not really represent what we know or believe
about God and human personality. St. Paul calls attention to this
inadequacy by a series of formal contradictions: "I live, yet not I";
"dying, and behold we live"; "when I am weak, then I am strong," and so
forth; and we find exactly the same expedient in Plotinus, who is very
fond of thus showing his contempt for the logic of identity. When,
therefore, Harnack says that "Mysticism is nothing else than rationalism
applied to a sphere above reason," he would have done better to say that
it is "reason applied to a sphere above rationalism.[32]"

For Reason is still "king.[33]" Religion must not be a matter of
_feeling_ only. St. John's command to "try every spirit" condemns all
attempts to make emotion or inspiration independent of reason. Those
who thus blindly follow the inner light find it no "candle of the
Lord," but an _ignis fatuus_; and the great mystics are well aware of
this. The fact is that the tendency to separate and half personify the
different faculties--intellect, will, feeling--is a mischievous one.
Our object should be so to _unify_ our personality, that our eye may
be single, and our whole body full of light.

We have considered briefly the three stages of the mystic's upward
path. The scheme of life therein set forth was no doubt determined
empirically, and there is nothing to prevent the simplest and most
unlettered saint from framing his conduct on these principles. Many of
the mediæval mystics had no taste for speculation or philosophy;[34]
they accepted on authority the entire body of Church dogma, and
devoted their whole attention to the perfecting of the spiritual life
in the knowledge and love of God. But this cannot be said of the
leaders. Christian Mysticism appears in history largely as an
intellectual movement, the foster-child of Platonic idealism; and if
ever, for a time, it forgot its early history, men were soon found to
bring it back to "its old loving nurse the Platonic philosophy." It
will be my task, in the third and fourth Lectures of this course, to
show how speculative Christian Mysticism grew out of Neoplatonism; but
we shall not be allowed to forget the Platonists even in the later
Lectures. "The fire still burns on the altars of Plotinus," as
Eunapius said.

Mysticism is not itself a philosophy, any more than it is itself a
religion. On its intellectual side it has been called "formless
speculation.[35]" But until speculations or intuitions have entered
into the forms of our thought, they are not current coin even for the
thinker. The part played by Mysticism in philosophy is parallel to the
part played by it in religion. As in religion it appears in revolt
against dry formalism and cold rationalism, so in philosophy it takes
the field against materialism and scepticism.[36] It is thus possible
to speak of speculative Mysticism, and even to indicate certain
idealistic lines of thought, which may without entire falsity be
called the philosophy of Mysticism. In this introductory Lecture I
can, of course, only hint at these in the barest and most summary
manner. And it must be remembered that I have undertaken to-day to
delineate the general characteristics of Mysticism, not of Christian
Mysticism. I am trying, moreover, in this Lecture to confine myself to
those developments which I consider normal and genuine, excluding the
numerous aberrant types which we shall encounter in the course of our
survey.

The real world, according to thinkers of this school, is created by
the thought and will of God, and exists in His mind. It is therefore
spiritual, and above space and time, which are only the forms under
which reality is set out as a process.

When we try to represent to our minds the highest reality, the
spiritual world, as distinguished from the world of appearance, we are
obliged to form images; and we can hardly avoid choosing one of the
following three images. We may regard the spiritual world as endless
duration opposed to transitoriness, as infinite extension opposed to
limitation in space, or as substance opposed to shadow. All these are,
strictly speaking, symbols or metaphors,[37] for we cannot regard any
of them as literally true statements about the nature of reality; but
they are as near the truth as we can get in words. But when we think
of time as a piece cut off from the beginning of eternity, so that
eternity is only in the future and not in the present; when we think
of heaven as a place somewhere else, and therefore not here; when we
think of an upper ideal world which has sucked all the life out of
this, so that we now walk in a vain shadow,--then we are paying the
penalty for our symbolical representative methods of thought, and must
go to philosophy to help us out of the doubts and difficulties in
which our error has involved us. One test is infallible. Whatever view
of reality deepens our sense of the tremendous issues of life in the
world wherein we move, is _for us_ nearer the truth than any view
which diminishes that sense. The truth is revealed to us that we may
have _life_, and have it more abundantly.

The world as it is, is the world as God sees it, not as we see it. Our
vision is distorted, not so much by the limitations of finitude, as by
sin and ignorance. The more we can raise ourselves in the scale of
being, the more will our ideas about God and the world correspond to
the reality. "Such as men themselves are, such will God Himself seem
to them to be," says John Smith, the English Platonist. Origen, too,
says that those whom Judas led to seize Jesus did not know who He was,
for the darkness of their own souls was projected on His features.[38]
And Dante, in a very beautiful passage, says that he felt that he was
rising into a higher circle, because he saw Beatrice's face becoming
more beautiful.[39]

This view of reality, as a vista which is opened gradually to the
eyes of the climber up the holy mount, is very near to the heart of
Mysticism. It rests on the faith that the ideal not only ought to be,
but _is_ the real. It has been applied by some, notably by that
earnest but fantastic thinker, James Hinton, as offering a solution of
the problem of evil. We shall encounter attempts to deal with this
great difficulty in several of the Christian mystics. The problem
among the speculative writers was how to reconcile the Absolute of
philosophy, who is above all distinctions,[40] with the God of
religion, who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. They could not
allow that evil has a substantial existence apart from God, for fear
of being entangled in an insoluble Dualism. But if evil is derived
from God, how can God be good? We shall find that the prevailing view
was that "Evil has no substance." "There is nothing," says Gregory of
Nyssa, "which falls outside of the Divine nature, except moral evil
alone. And this, we may say paradoxically, has its being in not-being.
For the genesis of moral evil is simply the privation of being.[41]
That which, properly speaking, exists, is the nature of the good." The
Divine nature, in other words, is that which excludes nothing, and
contradicts nothing, except those attributes which are contrary to the
nature of reality; it is that which harmonises everything except
discord, which loves everything except hatred, verifies everything
except falsehood, and beautifies everything except ugliness. Thus that
which falls outside the notion of God, proves on examination to be
not merely unreal, but unreality as such. But the relation of evil to
the Absolute is not a religious problem. To our experience, evil
exists as a positive force not subject to the law of God, though
constantly overruled and made an instrument of good. On this subject
we must say more later. Here I need only add that a sunny confidence
in the ultimate triumph of good shines from the writings of most of
the mystics, especially, I think, in our own countrymen. The Cambridge
Platonists are all optimistic; and in the beautiful but little known
_Revelations_ of Juliana of Norwich, we find in page after page the
refrain of "All shall be well." "Sin is behovable,[42] but all shall
be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

Since the universe is the thought and will of God expressed under the
forms of time and space, everything in it reflects the nature of its
Creator, though in different degrees. Erigena says finely, "Every
visible and invisible creature is a theophany or appearance of God."
The purest mirror in the world is the highest of created things--the
human soul unclouded by sin. And this brings us to a point at which
Mysticism falls asunder into two classes.

The question which divides them is this--In the higher stages of the
spiritual life, shall we learn most of the nature of God by close,
sympathetic, reverent observation of the world around us, including
our fellow-men, or by sinking into the depths of our inner
consciousness, and aspiring after direct and constant communion with
God? Each method may claim the support of weighty names. The former,
which will form the subject of my seventh and eighth Lectures, is very
happily described by Charles Kingsley in an early letter.[43] "The
great Mysticism," he says, "is the belief which is becoming every day
stronger with me, that all symmetrical natural objects ... are types
of some spiritual truth or existence.... Everything seems to be full
of God's reflex if we could but see it.... Oh, to see, if but for a
moment, the whole harmony of the great system! to hear once the music
which the whole universe makes as it performs His bidding! When I feel
that sense of the mystery that is around me, I feel a gush of
enthusiasm towards God, which seems its inseparable effect."

On the other side stand the majority of the earlier mystics. Believing
that God is "closer to us than breathing, and nearer than hands and
feet," they are impatient of any intermediaries. "We need not search
for His footprints in Nature, when we can behold His face in
ourselves,[44]" is their answer to St. Augustine's fine expression
that all things bright and beautiful in the world are "footprints of
the uncreated Wisdom.[45]" Coleridge has expressed their feeling in
his "Ode to Dejection"--


        "It were a vain endeavour,
         Though I should gaze for ever
      On that green light that lingers in the West;
      I may not hope from outward forms to win
  The passion and the life whose fountains are within."


"Grace works from within outwards," says Ruysbroek, "for God is nearer
to us than our own faculties. Hence it cannot come from images and
sensible forms." "If thou wishest to search out the deep things of
God," says Richard of St. Victor, "search out the depths of thine own
spirit."

The truth is that there are two movements,--a _systole_ and _diastole_
of the spiritual life,--an expansion and a concentration. The tendency
has generally been to emphasise one at the expense of the other; but
they must work together, for each is helpless without the other. As
Shakespeare says[46]--


              "Nor doth the eye itself,
  That most pure spirit of sense, behold itself,
  Not going from itself, but eye to eye opposed,
  Salutes each other with each other's form:
  For speculation turns not to itself
  Till it hath travelled, and is mirrored there,
  Where it may see itself."


Nature is dumb, and our own hearts are dumb, until they are allowed to
speak to each other. Then both will speak to us of God.

Speculative Mysticism has occupied itself largely with these two great
subjects--the immanence of God in nature, and the relation of human
personality to Divine. A few words must be said, before I conclude, on
both these matters.

The Unity of all existence is a fundamental doctrine of Mysticism. God
is in all, and all is in God. "His centre is everywhere, and His
circumference nowhere," as St. Bonaventura puts it. It is often argued
that this doctrine leads direct to Pantheism, and that speculative
Mysticism is always and necessarily pantheistic. This is, of course,
a question of primary importance. It is in the hope of dealing with it
adequately that I have selected three writers who have been frequently
called pantheists, for discussion in these Lectures. I mean Dionysius
the Areopagite, Scotus Erigena, and Eckhart. But it would be
impossible even to indicate my line of argument in the few minutes
left me this morning.

The mystics are much inclined to adopt, in a modified form, the old
notion of an _anima mundi_. When Erigena says, "Be well assured that
the Word--the second Person of the Trinity--is the Nature of all
things," he means that the Logos is a cosmic principle, the
Personality of which the universe is the external expression or
appearance.[47]

We are not now concerned with cosmological speculations, but the
bearing of this theory on human personality is obvious. If the Son of
God is regarded as an all-embracing and all-pervading cosmic
principle, the "mystic union" of the believer with Christ becomes
something much closer than an ethical harmony of two mutually
exclusive wills. The question which exercises the mystics is not
whether such a thing as fusion of personalities is possible, but
whether, when the soul has attained union with its Lord, it is any
longer conscious of a life distinct from that of the Word. We shall
find that some of the best mystics went astray on this point. They
teach a real _substitution_ of the Divine for human nature, thus
depersonalising man, and running into great danger of a perilous
arrogance. The mistake is a fatal one even from the speculative side,
for it is only on the analogy of human personality that we can
conceive of the perfect personality of God; and without personality
the universe falls to pieces. Personality is not only the strictest
unity of which we have any experience; it is the fact which creates
the postulate of unity on which all philosophy is based.

But it is possible to save personality without regarding the human
spirit as a monad, independent and sharply separated from other
spirits. Distinction, not separation, is the mark of personality; but
it is separation, not distinction, that forbids union. The error,
according to the mystic's psychology, is in regarding consciousness of
self as the measure of personality. The depths of personality are
unfathomable, as Heraclitus already knew;[48] the light of
consciousness only plays on the surface of the waters. Jean Paul
Richter is a true exponent of this characteristic doctrine when he
says, "We attribute far too small dimensions to the rich empire of
ourself, if we omit from it the unconscious region which resembles a
great dark continent. The world which our memory peoples only
reveals, in its revolution, a few luminous points at a time, while its
immense and teeming mass remains in shade.... We daily see the
conscious passing into unconsciousness; and take no notice of the bass
accompaniment which our fingers continue to play, while our attention
is directed to fresh musical effects.[49]" So far is it from being
true that the self of our immediate consciousness is our true
personality, that we can only attain personality, as spiritual and
rational beings, by passing beyond the limits which mark us off as
separate individuals. Separate individuality, we may say, is the bar
which prevents us from realising our true privileges as persons.[50]
And so the mystic interprets very literally that maxim of our Lord, in
which many have found the fundamental secret of Christianity: "He that
will save his life--his soul, his personality--shall lose it; and he
that will lose his life for My sake shall find it." The false self
must die--nay, must "die daily," for the process is gradual, and there
is no limit to it. It is a process of infinite _expansion_--of
realising new correspondences, new sympathies and affinities with the
not-ourselves, which affinities condition, and in conditioning
constitute, our true life as persons. The paradox is offensive only
to formal logic. As a matter of experience, no one, I imagine, would
maintain that the man who has practically realised, to the fullest
possible extent, the common life which he draws from his Creator, and
shares with all other created beings,--so realised it, I mean, as to
draw from that consciousness all the influences which can play upon
him from outside,--has thereby dissipated and lost his personality,
and become less of a person than another who has built a wall round
his individuality, and lived, as Plato says, the life of a
shell-fish.[51]

We may arrive at the same conclusion by analysing that unconditioned
sense of duty which we call _conscience_. This moral sense cannot be a
fixed code implanted in our consciousness, for then we could not
explain either the variations of moral opinion, or the feeling of
_obligation_ (as distinguished from necessity) which impels us to obey
it. It cannot be the product of the existing moral code of society,
for then we could not explain either the genesis of that public
opinion or the persistent revolt against its limitations which we
find in the greatest minds. The only hypothesis which explains the
facts is that in conscience we feel the motions of the universal
Reason which strives to convert the human organism into an organ of
itself, a belief which is expressed in religious language by saying
that it is God who worketh in us both to will and to do of His good
pleasure.

If it be further asked, Which is our personality, the shifting _moi_
(as Fénelon calls it), or the ideal self, the end or the developing
states? we must answer that it is both and neither, and that the root
of mystical religion is in the conviction that it is at once both and
neither.[52] The _moi_ strives to realise its end, but the end being
an infinite one, no process can reach it. Those who have "counted
themselves to have apprehended" have thereby left the mystical faith;
and those who from the notion of a _progressus ad infinitum_ come to
the pessimistic conclusion, are equally false to the mystical creed,
which teaches us that we are already potentially what God intends us
to become. The command, "Be ye perfect," is, like all Divine commands,
at the same time a promise.

It is stating the same paradox in another form to say that we can only
achieve inner _unity_ by transcending mere individuality. The
independent, impervious self shows its unreality by being inwardly
discordant. It is of no use to enlarge the circumference of our life,
if the fixed centre is always the _ego_. There are, if I may press the
metaphor, other circles with other centres, in which we are vitally
involved. And thus sympathy, or love, which is sympathy in its
highest power, is the great _atoner_, within as well as without. The
old Pythagorean maxim, that "a man must be _one_,[53]" is echoed by
all the mystics. He must be one as God is one, and the world is one;
for man is a microcosm, a living mirror of the universe. Here, once
more, we have a characteristic mystical doctrine, which is perhaps
worked out most fully in the "_Fons Vitæ_" of Avicebron (Ibn Gebirol),
a work which had great influence in the Middle Ages. The doctrine
justifies the use of _analogy_ in matters of religion, and is of great
importance. One might almost dare to say that all conclusions about
the world above us which are _not_ based on the analogy of our own
mental experiences, are either false or meaningless.

The idea of man as a microcosm was developed in two ways. Plotinus
said that "every man is double," meaning that one side of his soul is
in contact with the intelligible, the other with the sensible world.
He is careful to explain that the doctrine of Divine Immanence does
not mean that God _divides_ Himself among the many individuals, but
that they partake of Him according to their degrees of receptivity, so
that each one is potentially in possession of all the fulness of God.
Proclus tries to explain how this can be. "There are three sorts of
_Wholes_--the first, anterior to the parts; the second, composed of
the parts; the third, knitting into one stuff the parts and the
whole.[54]" In this third sense the whole resides in the parts, as
well as the parts in the whole. St. Augustine states the same doctrine
in clearer language.[55] It will be seen at once how this doctrine
encourages that class of Mysticism which bids us "sink into the depths
of our own souls" in order to find God.

The other development of the theory that man is a microcosm is not
less important and interesting. It is a favourite doctrine of the
mystics that man, in his individual life, recapitulates the spiritual
history of the race, in much the same way in which embryologists tell
us that the unborn infant recapitulates the whole process of physical
evolution. It follows that the Incarnation, the central fact of human
history, must have its analogue in the experience of the individual.
We shall find that this doctrine of the birth of an infant Christ in
the soul is one of immense importance in the systems of Eckhart,
Tauler, and our Cambridge Platonists. It is a somewhat perilous
doctrine, as we shall see; but it is one which, I venture to think,
has a future as well as a past, for the progress of modern science has
greatly strengthened the analogies on which it rests. I shall show in
my next Lecture how strongly St. Paul felt its value.

This brief introduction will, I hope, have indicated the main
characteristics of mystical theology and religion. It is a type which
is as repulsive to some minds as it is attractive to others.
Coleridge has said that everyone is born a Platonist or an
Aristotelian, and one might perhaps adapt the epigram by saying that
everyone is naturally either a mystic or a legalist. The
classification does, indeed, seem to correspond to a deep difference
in human characters; it is doubtful whether a man could be found
anywhere whom one could trust to hold the scales evenly between--let
us say--Fénelon and Bossuet. The cleavage is much the same as that
which causes the eternal strife between tradition and illumination,
between priest and prophet, which has produced the deepest tragedies
in human history, and will probably continue to do so while the world
lasts. The legalist--with his conception of God as the righteous Judge
dispensing rewards and punishments, the "Great Taskmaster" in whose
vineyard we are ordered to labour; of the Gospel as "the new law," and
of the sanction of duty as a "categorical imperative"--will never find
it easy to sympathise with those whose favourite words are St. John's
triad--light, life, and love, and who find these the most suitable
names to express what they know of the nature of God. But those to
whom the Fourth Gospel is the brightest jewel in the Bible, and who
can enter into the real spirit of St. Paul's teaching, will, I hope,
be able to take some interest in the historical development of ideas
which in their Christian form are certainly built upon those parts of
the New Testament.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: See Appendix A for definitions of Mysticism and Mystical
Theology.]

[Footnote 3: See Appendix B for a discussion of the influence of the
Greek mysteries upon Christian Mysticism.]

[Footnote 4: Tholuck accepts the former derivation (cf. Suidas,
[Greek: mystêria eklêthêsan para to tous akouontas myein to stoma
kai mêdeni tauta exêgeisthai]); Petersen, the latter. There is no
doubt that [Greek: myêsis] was opposed to [Greek: epopteia], and in
this sense denoted _incomplete_ initiation; but it was also made to
include the whole process. The prevailing use of the adjective [Greek:
mystikos] is of something seen "through a glass darkly," some
knowledge purposely wrapped up in symbols.]

[Footnote 5: So Hesychius says, [Greek: Mystai, apo myô, myontes gar
tas aisthêseis kai exô tôn sarkikôn phrontidôn genomenoi, outô tas
theias analampseis edechonto.] Plotinus and Proclus both use [Greek:
myô] of the "closed eye" of rapt contemplation.]

[Footnote 6: I cannot agree with Lasson (in his book on Meister
Eckhart) that "the connexion with the Greek mysteries throws no light
on the subject." No writer had more influence upon the growth of
Mysticism in the Church than Dionysius the Areopagite, whose main
object is to present Christianity in the light of a Platonic
mysteriosophy. The same purpose is evident in Clement, and in other
Christian Platonists between Clement and Dionysius. See Appendix B.]

[Footnote 7: It should also be borne in mind that every historical
example of a mystical movement may be expected to exhibit
characteristics which are determined by the particular forms of
religious deadness in opposition to which it arises. I think that it
is generally easy to separate these secondary, accidental
characteristics from those which are primary and integral, and that we
shall then find that the underlying substance, which may be regarded
as the essence of Mysticism as a type of religion, is strikingly
uniform.]

[Footnote 8: The analogy used by Plotinus (_Ennead_ i. 6. 9) was often
quoted and imitated: "Even as the eye could not behold the sun unless
it were itself sunlike, so neither could the soul behold God if it
were not Godlike." Lotze (_Microcosmus_, and cf. _Metaphysics_, 1st
ed., p. 109) falls foul of Plotinus for this argument. "The reality of
the external world is utterly severed from our senses. It is vain to
call the eye sunlike, as if it needed a special occult power to copy
what it has itself produced: fruitless are all mystic efforts to
restore to the intuitions of sense, by means of a secret identity of
mind with things, a reality outside ourselves." Whether the subjective
idealism of this sentence is consistent with the subsequent dogmatic
assertion that "nature is animated throughout," it is not my province
to determine. The latter doctrine is held by a large school of
mystics: the acosmistic tendency of the former has had only too much
attraction for mystics of another school.]

[Footnote 9: This distinction is drawn by Origen, and accepted by all
the mystical writers.]

[Footnote 10: Faith goes so closely hand in hand with love that the
mystics seldom try to separate them, and indeed they need not be
separated. William Law's account of their operation is characteristic.
"When the seed of the new birth, called the inward man, has faith
awakened in it, its faith is not a notion, but a real strong essential
hunger, an attracting or magnetic desire of Christ, which as it
proceeds from a seed of the Divine nature in us, so it attracts and
unites with its like: it lays hold on Christ, puts on the Divine
nature, and in a living and real manner grows powerful over all our
sins, and effectually works out our salvation" (_Grounds and Reasons
of Christian Regeneration_).]

[Footnote 11: R.L. Nettleship, _Remains_.]

[Footnote 12: "Nescio si a quoquam homine quartus (gradus) in hac vita
perfecte apprehenditur, ut se scilicet diligat homo tantum propter
Deum. Asserant hoc si qui experti sunt: mihi (fateor) impossibile
videtur" (_De diligendo Deo_, xv.; _Epist_. xi. 8).]

[Footnote 13: From a sermon by Smith, the Cambridge Platonist.
Plotinus, too, says well, [Greek: ei tis allo eidos êdonês peri ton
spoudaion bion zêtei, ou ton spoudaion bion zêtei] (_Ennead_ i. 4.
12).]

[Footnote 14: From Smith's sermons.]

[Footnote 15: Pindar's [Greek: genoio oios essi mathôn] is a fine
mystical maxim. (_Pyth._ 2. 131.)]

[Footnote 16: Strictly, the unitive road (_via_) leads to the
contemplative life (_vita_). Cf. Benedict, xiv., _De Servorum Dei
beatific_., iii. 26, "Perfecta hæc mystica unio reperitur regulariter
in perfecto contemplativo qui in vita purgativa et illuminativa, id
est meditativa, et contemplativa diu versatus, ex speciali Dei favore
ad infusam contemplativam evectus est." On the three ways, Suarez
says, "Distinguere solent mystici tres vias, purgativam,
illuminativam, et unitivam." Molinos was quite a heterodox mystic in
teaching that there is but a "unica via, scilicet interna," and this
proposition was condemned by a Bull of Innocent XI.]

[Footnote 17: In Plotinus the civic virtues _precede_ the cathartic;
but they are not, as with some perverse mystics, considered to lie
_outside_ the path of ascent.]

[Footnote 18: Tauler is careful to put social service on its true
basis. "One can spin," he says, "another can make shoes; and all these
are gifts of the Holy Ghost. I tell you, if I were not a priest, I
should esteem it a great gift that I was able to make shoes, and would
try to make them so well as to be a pattern to all." In a later
Lecture I shall revert to the charge of indolent neglect of duties, so
often preferred against the mystics.]

[Footnote 19: R.L. Nettleship, _Remains_.]

[Footnote 20: In a Roman Catholic manual I find: "Non raro sub nomine
theologiæ mysticæ intelligitur etiam ascesis, sed immerito. Nam
ascesis consuetas tantum et tritas perfectionis semitas ostendit,
mystica autem adhuc excellentiorem viam demonstrat." This is to
identify "mystical theology" with the higher rungs of the ladder. It
has been used in this curious manner from the Middle Ages. Ribet says,
"La mystique, comme science spéciale, fait partie de la théologie
ascétique"; that part, namely, "dans lequel l'homme est réduit à la
passivité par l'action souveraine de Dieu." "L'ascèse" is defined as
"l'ascension de l'âme vers Dieu."]

[Footnote 21: Cf. Professor W. Wallace's collected _Lectures and
Essays_, p. 276.]

[Footnote 22: See Appendix C on the Doctrine of Deification.]

[Footnote 23: So Fénelon, after asserting the truth of mystical
"transformation," adds: "It is false to say that transformation is a
deification of the real and natural soul, or a hypostatic union, or an
unalterable conformity with God."]

[Footnote 24: _Life of Tennyson_, vol. i. p. 320. The curious
experience, that the repetition of his own name induced a kind of
trance, is used by the poet in his beautiful mystical poem, "The
Ancient Sage." It would, indeed, have been equally easy to illustrate
this topic from Wordsworth's prose and Tennyson's poetry.]

[Footnote 25: See the very interesting note in Harnack, _History of
Dogma_, vol. i. p. 53.]

[Footnote 26: The Abbé Migne says truly, "Ceux qui traitent les
mystiques de visionnaires seraient fort étonnés de voir quel peu de
cas ils font des visions en elles-mémes." And St. Bonaventura says of
visions, "Nec faciunt sanctum nec ostendunt: alioquin Balaam sanctus
esset, _et asina_, quæ vidit Angelum."]

[Footnote 27: The following passage from St. Francis de Sales is much
to the same effect as those referred to in the text: "Les philosophes
mesmes ont recogneu certaines espèces d'extases naturelles faictes par
la véhémente application de l'esprit à la considération des choses
relevées. Une marque de la bonne et sainete extase est qu'elle ne se
prend ny attache jamais tant à l'entendement qu'à la volonté, laquelle
elle esmeut, eschauffe, et remplit d'une puissante affection envers
Dieu; de manière que si l'extase est plus belle que bonne, plus
lumineuse qu'affective, elle est grandement douteuse et digne de
soupçon."]

[Footnote 28: Some of my readers may find satisfaction in the
following passage of Jeremy Taylor: "Indeed, when persons have long
been softened with the continual droppings of religion, and their
spirits made timorous and apt for impression by the assiduity of
prayer, and the continual dyings of mortification--the fancy, which is
a very great instrument of devotion, is kept continually warm, and in
a disposition and aptitude to take fire, and to flame out in great
ascents; and when they suffer transportations beyond the burdens and
support of reason, they suffer they know not what, and call it what
they please." Henry More, too, says that those who would "make their
whole nature desolate of all animal figurations whatever," find only
"a waste, silent solitude, and one uniform parchedness and vacuity.
And yet, while a man fancies himself thus wholly Divine, he is not
aware how he is even then held down by his animal nature; and that it
is nothing but the stillness and fixedness of melancholy that thus
abuses him, instead of the true Divine principle."]

[Footnote 29: Plato, _Phædrus_, 244, 245; Ion, 534.]

[Footnote 30: Lacordaire, _Conférences_, xxxvii.]

[Footnote 31: Compare, too, the vigorous words of Henry More, the most
mystical of the group: "He that misbelieves and lays aside clear and
cautious reason in things that fall under the discussion of reason,
upon the pretence of hankering after some higher principle (which, a
thousand to one, proves but the infatuation of melancholy, and a
superstitious hallucination), is as ridiculous as if he would not use
his natural eyes about their proper object till the presence of some
supernatural light, or till he had got a pair of spectacles made of
the crystalline heaven, or of the _cælum empyreum_, to hang upon his
nose for him to look through."]

[Footnote 32: There is, of course, a sense in which any strong feeling
lifts us "above reason." But this is using "reason" in a loose
manner.]

[Footnote 33: [Greek: ho nous basileus], says Plotinus.]

[Footnote 34: Roman Catholic writers can assert that "la plupart des
contemplatifs étaient dépourvus de toute culture littéraire." But
their notion of "contemplation" is the passive reception of
"supernatural favours,"--on which subject more will be said in
Lectures IV. and VII.]

[Footnote 35: "Die Mystik ist formlose Speculation," Noack,
_Christliche Mystik_, p. 18.]

[Footnote 36: The Atomists, from Epicurus downwards, have been
especially odious to the mystics.]

[Footnote 37: The theory that time is real, but not space, leads us
into grave difficulties. It is the root of the least satisfactory kind
of evolutionary optimism, which forgets, in the first place, that the
idea of perpetual progress in time is hopelessly at variance with what
we know of the destiny of the world; and, in the second place, that a
mere _progressus_ is meaningless. Every created thing has its fixed
goal in the realisation of the idea which was immanent in it from the
first.]

[Footnote 38: Origen in _Matth._, Com. Series, 100; _Contra Celsum_,
ii. 64. Referred to by Bigg, _Christian Platonists of Alexandria_, p.
191.]

[Footnote 39: _Paradiso_ viii. 13--

  "Io non m'accorsi del salire in ella;
   Ma d'esserv' entro mi fece assai fede
   La donna mia ch'io vidi far più bella." ]

[Footnote 40: "Deo nihil opponitur," says Erigena.]

[Footnote 41: Compare Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, where it is
shown that the essential attributes of Reality are _harmony_ and
_inclusiveness_.]

[Footnote 42: I.e. "necessary" or "expedient."]

[Footnote 43: _Life_, vol. i. p. 55.]

[Footnote 44: J. Smith, _Select Discourses_, v. So Bernard says (_De
Consid._ v. I), "quid opus est scalis tenenti iam solium?"]

[Footnote 45: Aug. _De Libero Arbitrio_, ii. 16, 17.]

[Footnote 46: _Troilus and Cressida_, Act III. Scene 3.]

[Footnote 47: This idea of the world as a living being is found in
Plotinus: and Origen definitely teaches that "as our body, while
consisting of many members, is yet an organism which is held together
by one soul, so the universe is to be thought of as an immense living
being which is upheld by the power and the Word of God." He also holds
that the sun and stars are spiritual beings. St. Augustine, too (_De
Civitate Dei_, iv. 12, vii. 5), regards the universe as a living
organism; and the doctrine reappears much later in Giordano Bruno.
According to this theory, we are subsidiary members of an
all-embracing organism, and there may be intermediate will-centres
between our own and that of the universal Ego. Among modern systems,
that of Fechner is the one which seems to be most in accordance with
these speculations. He views life under the figure of a number of
concentric circles of consciousness, within an all-embracing circle
which represents the consciousness of God.]

[Footnote 48: [Greek: psuchês peirata ouk an exeuroio pasan
epiporeuomenos hodon outô bathyn logon echei], Frag. 71.]

[Footnote 49: J.P. Richter, _Selina_. Compare, too, Lotze,
_Microcosmus_: "Within us lurks a world whose form we imperfectly
apprehend, and whose working, when in particular phases it comes under
our notice, surprises us with foreshadowings of unknown depths in our
being."]

[Footnote 50: As Lotze says, "The finite being does not contain in
itself the conditions of its own existence." It must struggle to
attain to complete personality; or rather, since personality belongs
unconditionally only to God, to such a measure of personality as is
allotted to us. Eternal life is nothing than the attainment of full
personality, a conscious existence in God.]

[Footnote 51: J.A. Picton (_The Mystery of Matter_, p. 356) puts the
matter well: "Mysticism consists in the spiritual realisation of a
grander and a boundless unity, that humbles all self-assertion by
dissolving it in a wider glory. It does not follow that the sense of
individuality is necessarily weakened. But habitual contemplation of
the Divine unity impresses men with the feeling that individuality is
phenomenal only. Hence the paradox of Mysticism. For apart from this
phenomenal individuality, we should not know our own nothingness, and
personal life is good only through the bliss of being lost in God.
[Rather, I should say, through the bliss of finding our true life,
which is hid with Christ in God.] True religious worship doth not
consist in the acknowledgment of a greatness which is estimated by
comparison, but rather in the sense of a Being who surpasses all
comparison, because He gives to phenomenal existences the only reality
they can know. Hence the deepest religious feeling necessarily shrinks
from thinking of God as a kind of gigantic Self amidst a host of minor
selves. The very thought of such a thing is a mockery of the
profoundest devotion."]

[Footnote 52: See, further, Appendix C, pp. 366-7.]

[Footnote 53: [Greek: hena genesthai ton anthrôpon dei]: Pythagoras
quoted by Clement. Cf. Plotinus, _Enn._ vi. 9. I, [Greek: kai hugieia
de, hotan eis hen syntachthê to sôma, kai kallos hotan hê tou henos ta
moria kataschê physis, kai aretê de psychês hotan eis hen kai eis mian
homologian henôthê].]

[Footnote 54: Proclus, _in Tim._ 83. 265.]

[Footnote 55: Aug. _Ep._ 187. 19: "Deus totus adesse rebus omnibus
potest, _et singulis totus_, quamvis in quibus habitat habeant eum pro
suæ capacitatis diversitate, alii amplius, alii minus." More clearly
still, Bonaventura, _Itin. ment. ad Deum_, 5: "Totum intra omnia, et
totum extra: ac per hoc est sphæra intelligibilis, cuius centrum est
ubique, et circumferentia nusquam."]




LECTURE II


[Greek: "To eu zên edidaxen epiphaneis ôs didaskalos, hina to aei
zên husteron ôs theos chorêgêsê."]

CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA.


   "But souls that of His own good life partake
    He loves as His own self: dear as His eye
    They are to Him; He'll never them forsake:
    When they shall die, then God Himself shall die:
    They live, they live in blest eternity."

HENRY MORE.


   "Amor Patris Filiique,
    Par amborum, et utrique
      Compar et consimilis:
    Cuncta reples, cuncta foves,
    Astra regis, coelum moves,
      Permanens immobilis.

    "Te docente nil obscurum,
    Te præsente nil impurum;
      Sub tua præsentia
    Gloriatur mens iucunda;
    Per te læta, per te munda
      Gaudet conscientia.

    "Consolator et fundator,
    Habitator et amator
      Cordium humilium;
    Pelle mala, terge sordes,
    Et discordes fac concordes,
      Et affer præsidium."

ADAM OF ST. VICTOR



THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT IN THE BIBLE

"That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; to the end that ye,
being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all
the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to
know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled
with all the fulness of God."--EPH. iii. 17-19.


The task which now lies before me is to consider how far that type of
religion and religious philosophy, which I tried in my last Lecture to
depict in outline, is represented in and sanctioned by Holy Scripture.
I shall devote most of my time to the New Testament, for we shall not
find very much to help us in the Old. The Jewish mind and character,
in spite of its deeply religious bent, was alien to Mysticism. In the
first place, the religion of Israel, passing from what has been called
Henotheism--the worship of a national God--to true Monotheism, always
maintained a rigid notion of individuality, both human and Divine.
Even prophecy, which is mystical in its essence, was in the early
period conceived as unmystically as possible, Balaam is merely a
mouthpiece of God; his message is external to his personality, which
remains antagonistic to it. And, secondly, the Jewish doctrine of
ideas was different from the Platonic. The Jew believed that the
world, and the whole course of history, existed from all eternity in
the mind of God, but as an unrealised purpose, which was actualised by
degrees as the scroll of events was unfurled. There was no notion that
the visible was in any way inferior to the invisible, or lacking in
reality. Even in its later phases, after it had been partially
Hellenised, Jewish idealism tended to crystallise as Chiliasm, or in
"Apocalypses," and not, like Platonism, in the dream of a perfect
world existing "yonder." In fact, the Jewish view of the external
world was mainly that of naïve realism, but strongly pervaded by
belief in an Almighty King and Judge. Moreover, the Jew had little
sense of the Divine _in_ nature: it was the power of God _over_ nature
which he was jealous to maintain. The majesty of the elemental forces
was extolled in order to magnify the greater power of Him who made and
could unmake them, and whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain. The
weakness and insignificance of man, as contrasted with the tremendous
power of God, is the reflection which the contemplation of nature
generally produced in his mind. "How can a man be just with God?" asks
Job; "which removeth the mountains, and they know it not; when He
overturneth them in His anger; which shaketh the earth out of her
place, and the pillars thereof tremble; which commandeth the sun, and
it riseth not, and sealeth up the stars.... He is not a man, as I am,
that I should answer Him, that we should come together in judgment.
There is no daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both."
Nor does the answer that came to Job out of the whirlwind give any
hint of a "daysman" betwixt man and God, but only enlarges on the
presumption of man's wishing to understand the counsels of the
Almighty. Absolute submission to a law which is entirely outside of us
and beyond our comprehension, is the final lesson of the book.[56] The
nation exhibited the merits and defects of this type. On the one hand,
it showed a deep sense of the supremacy of the moral law, and of
personal responsibility; a stubborn independence and faith in its
mission; and a strong national spirit, combined with vigorous
individuality; but with these virtues went a tendency to externalise
both religion and the ideal of well-being: the former became a matter
of forms and ceremonies; the latter, of worldly possessions. It was
only after the collapse of the national polity that these ideals
became transmuted and spiritualised. Those disasters, which at first
seemed to indicate a hopeless estrangement between God and His people,
were the means of a deeper reconciliation. We can trace the process,
from the old proverb that "to see God is death," down to that
remarkable passage in Jeremiah where the approaching advent, or rather
restoration, of spiritual religion, is announced with all the
solemnity due to so glorious a message. "Behold, the days come, saith
the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel,
and with the house of Judah.... After those days, saith the Lord, I
will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts;
and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. And they shall
teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother,
saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know Me, from the least of
them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord.[57]" That this
knowledge of God, and the assurance of blessedness which it brings, is
the reward of righteousness and purity, is the chief message of the
great prophets and psalmists. "Who among us shall dwell with the
devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings? He
that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth
the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of
bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his
eyes from seeing evil, he shall dwell on high; his place of defence
shall be the munitions of rocks: bread shall be given unto him; his
waters shall be sure. Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty;
they shall behold the land that is very far off.[58]"

This passage of Isaiah bears a very close resemblance to the 15th and
24th Psalms; and there are many other psalms which have been dear to
Christian mystics. In some of them we find the "_amoris
desiderium_"--the thirst of the soul for God--which is the
characteristic note of mystical devotion; in others, that longing for
a safe refuge from the provoking of all men and the strife of tongues,
which drove so many saints into the cloister. Many a solitary ascetic
has prayed in the words of the 73rd Psalm: "Whom have I in heaven but
Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My flesh
and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my
portion for ever." And verses like, "I will hearken what the Lord God
will say concerning me," have been only too attractive to quietists.
Other familiar verses will occur to most of us. I will only add that
the warm faith and love which inspired these psalms is made more
precious by the reverence for _law_ which is part of the older
inheritance of the Israelites.

There are many, I fear, to whom "the mystical element in the Old
Testament" will suggest only the Cabbalistic lore of types and
allegories which has been applied to all the canonical books, and with
especial persistency and boldness to the Song of Solomon. I shall give
my opinion upon this class of allegorism in the seventh Lecture of
this course, which will deal with symbolism as a branch of Mysticism.
It would be impossible to treat of it here without anticipating my
discussion of a principle which has a much wider bearing than as a
method of biblical exegesis. As to the Song of Solomon, its influence
upon Christian Mysticism has been simply deplorable. A graceful
romance in honour of true love was distorted into a precedent and
sanction for giving way to hysterical emotions, in which sexual
imagery was freely used to symbolise the relation between the soul and
its Lord. Such aberrations are as alien to sane Mysticism as they are
to sane exegesis.[59]

In Jewish writings of a later period, composed under Greek influence,
we find plenty of Platonism ready to pass into Mysticism. But the
Wisdom of Solomon does not fall within our subject, and what is
necessary to be said about Philo and Alexandria will be said in the
next Lecture. In the New Testament, it will be convenient to say a
very few words on the Synoptic Gospels first, and afterwards to
consider St. John and St. Paul, where we shall find most of our
material.

The first three Gospels are not written in the religious dialect of
Mysticism. It is all the more important to notice that the fundamental
doctrines on which the system (if we may call it a system) rests, are
all found in them. The vision of God is promised in the Sermon on the
Mount, and promised only to those who are pure in heart. The
indwelling presence of Christ, or of the Holy Spirit, is taught in
several places; for instance--"The kingdom of God is within you";
"Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in
the midst of them"; "Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the
world." The unity of Christ and His members is implied by the words,
"Inasmuch as ye have done it to one of the least of these My brethren,
ye have done it unto Me." Lastly, the great law of the moral
world,--the law of gain through loss, of life through death,--which is
the corner-stone of mystical (and, many have said, of Christian)
ethics, is found in the Synoptists as well as in St. John. "Whosoever
shall seek to gain his life (or soul) shall lose it; but whosoever
shall lose his life (or soul) shall preserve it."

The Gospel of St. John--the "spiritual Gospel," as Clement already
calls it--is the charter of Christian Mysticism. Indeed, Christian
Mysticism, as I understand it, might almost be called Johannine
Christianity; if it were not better to say that a Johannine
Christianity is the ideal which the Christian mystic sets before
himself. For we cannot but feel that there are deeper truths in this
wonderful Gospel than have yet become part of the religious
consciousness of mankind. Perhaps, as Origen says, no one can fully
understand it who has not, like its author, lain upon the breast of
Jesus. We are on holy ground when we are dealing with St. John's
Gospel, and must step in fear and reverence. But though the breadth
and depth and height of those sublime discourses are for those only
who can mount up with wings as eagles to the summits of the spiritual
life, so simple is the language and so large its scope, that even the
wayfaring men, though fools, can hardly altogether err therein.

Let us consider briefly, first, what we learn from this Gospel about
the nature of God, and then its teaching upon human salvation.

There are three notable expressions about God the Father in the Gospel
and First Epistle of St. John: "God is Love"; "God is Light"; and "God
is Spirit." The form of the sentences teaches us that these three
qualities belong so intimately to the nature of God that they usher us
into His immediate presence. We need not try to get behind them, or to
rise above them into some more nebulous region in our search for the
Absolute. Love, Light, and Spirit are for us names of God Himself. And
observe that St. John does not, in applying these semi-abstract words
to God, attenuate in the slightest degree His personality. God _is_
Love, but He also exercises love. "God so loved the world." And He is
not only the "white radiance" that "for ever shines"; He can "draw" us
to Himself, and "send" His Son to bring us back to Him.

The word "Logos" does not occur in any of the discourses. The
identification of Christ with the "Word" or "Reason" of the
philosophers is St. John's own. But the statements in the prologue are
all confirmed by our Lord's own words as reported by the evangelist.
These fall under two heads, those which deal with the relation of
Christ to the Father, and those which deal with His relation to the
world. The pre-existence of Christ in glory at the right hand of God
is proved by several declarations: "What if ye shall see the Son of
Man ascending where He was before?" "And now, O Father, glorify Me
with Thine own self, with the glory which I had with Thee before the
world was." His exaltation above time is shown by the solemn
statement, "Before Abraham was, I am." And with regard to the world,
we find in St. John the very important doctrine, which has never made
its way into popular theology, that the Word is not merely the
Instrument in the original creation,--"by (or through) Him all things
were made,"--but the central Life, the Being in whom life existed and
exists as an indestructible attribute, an underived prerogative,[60]
the Mind or Wisdom who upholds and animates the universe without being
lost in it. This doctrine, which is implied in other parts of St.
John, seems to be stated explicitly in the prologue, though the words
have been otherwise interpreted. "That which has come into existence,"
says St. John, "was in Him life" ([Greek: ho gegonen, en autô zôê
ên.]) That is to say, the Word is the timeless Life, of which the
temporal world is a manifestation. This doctrine was taught by many of
the Greek Fathers, as well as by Scotus Erigena and other speculative
mystics. Even if, with the school of Antioch and most of the later
commentators, we transfer the words [Greek: ho gegonen] to the
preceding sentence, the doctrine that Christ is the life as well as
the light of the world can be proved from St. John.[61] The world is
the poem of the Word to the glory of the Father: in it, and by means
of it, He displays in time all the riches which God has eternally put
within Him.

In St. John, as in mystical theology generally, the Incarnation,
rather than the Cross, is the central fact of Christianity. "The Word
was made flesh, and tabernacled among us," is for him the supreme
dogma. And it follows necessarily from the Logos doctrine, that the
Incarnation, and all that followed it, is regarded primarily as a
_revelation_ of life and light and truth. "That eternal life, which
was with the Father, has been _manifested_ unto us," is part of the
opening sentence of the first Epistle.[62] "This is the message which
we have heard of Him and announce unto you, that God is Light, and in
Him is no darkness at all." In coming into the world, Christ "came
unto His own." He had, in a sense, only to show to them what was there
already: Esaias, long before, had "seen His glory, and spoken of Him."
The mysterious estrangement, which had laid the world under the
dominion of the Prince of darkness, had obscured but not quenched the
light which lighteth _every_ man--the inalienable prerogative of all
who derive their being from the Sun of Righteousness. This central
Light is Christ, and Christ only. He alone is the Way, the Truth, the
Life, the Door, the Living Bread, and the True Vine. He is at once the
Revealer and the Revealed, the Guide and the Way, the Enlightener and
the Light. No man cometh unto the Father but by Him.

The teaching of this Gospel on the office of the Holy Spirit claims
special attention in our present inquiry. The revelation of God in
Christ was complete: there can be no question that St. John claims for
Christianity the position of the one eternally true revelation. But
without the gradual illumination of the Spirit it is partly
unintelligible and partly unobserved.[63] The purpose of the
Incarnation was to reveal God _the Father_: "He that hath seen Me hath
seen the Father." In these momentous words (it has been said) "the
idea of God receives an abiding embodiment, and the Father is brought
for ever within the reach of intelligent devotion.[64]" The purpose of
the mission of the Comforter is to reveal _the Son_. He takes the
place of the ascended Christ on earth as a living and active principle
in the hearts of Christians. His office it is to bring to remembrance
the teachings of Christ, and to help mankind gradually to understand
them. There were also many things, our Lord said, which could not be
said at the time to His disciples, who were unable to bear them. These
were left to be communicated to future generations by the Holy Spirit.
The doctrine of development had never before received so clear an
expression; and few could venture to record it so clearly as St. John,
who could not be suspected of contemplating a time when the teachings
of the human Christ might be superseded.

Let us now turn to the human side of salvation, and trace the upward
path of the Christian life as presented to us in this Gospel. First,
then, we have the doctrine of the new birth: "Except a man be born
anew (or, from above), he cannot see the kingdom of God." This is
further explained as a being born "of water and of the Spirit"--words
which are probably meant to remind us of the birth of the world-order
out of chaos as described in Genesis, and also to suggest the two
ideas of purification and life. (Baptism, as a symbol of purification,
was, of course, already familiar to those who first heard the words.)
Then we have a doctrine of _faith_ which is deeper than that of the
Synoptists. The very expression [Greek: pisteuein eis], "to believe
_on_," common in St. John and rare elsewhere, shows that the word is
taking a new meaning. Faith, in St. John, is no longer regarded
chiefly as a condition of supernatural favours; or, rather, the
mountains which it can remove are no material obstructions. It is an
act of the whole personality, a self-dedication to Christ. It must
precede knowledge: "If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know
of the teaching," is the promise. It is the "_credo ut intelligam_" of
later theology. The objection has been raised that St. John's teaching
about faith moves in a vicious circle. His appeal is to the inward
witness; and those who cannot hear this inward witness are informed
that they must first believe, which is just what they can find no
reason for doing. But this criticism misses altogether the drift of
St. John's teaching. Faith, for him, is not the acceptance of a
proposition upon evidence; still less is it the acceptance of a
proposition in the teeth of evidence. It is, in the first instance,
the resolution "to stand or fall by the noblest hypothesis"; that is
(may we not say?), to follow Christ wherever He may lead us. Faith
begins with an experiment, and ends with an experience.[65] "He that
believeth in Him hath the witness in himself"; that is the
verification which follows the venture. That even the power to make
the experiment is given from above; and that the experience is not
merely subjective, but an universal law which has had its supreme
vindication in history,--these are two facts which we learn
afterwards. The converse process, which begins with a critical
examination of documents, cannot establish what we really want to
know, however strong the evidence may be. In this sense, and in this
only, are Tennyson's words true, that "nothing worthy proving can be
proven, nor yet disproven."

Faith, thus defined, is hardly distinguishable from that mixture of
admiration, hope, and love by which Wordsworth says that we live. Love
especially is intimately connected with faith. And as the Christian
life is to be considered as, above all things, a state of union with
Christ, and of His members with one another, love of the brethren is
inseparable from love of God. So intimate is this union, that hatred
towards any human being cannot exist in the same heart as love to God.
The mystical union is indeed rather a bond between Christ and the
Church, and between man and man as members of Christ, than between
Christ and individual souls. Our Lord's prayer is "that they all may
be one, even as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also
may be one in us." The personal relation between the soul and Christ
is not to be denied; but it can only be enjoyed when the person has
"come to himself" as a member of a body. This involves an inward
transit from the false isolated self to the larger life of sympathy
and love which alone makes us persons. Those who are thus living
according to their true nature are rewarded with an intense
unshakeable conviction which makes them independent of external
evidences. Like the blind man who was healed, they can say, "One thing
I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see." The words "we know" are
repeated again and again in the first Epistle, with an emphasis which
leaves no room for doubt that the evangelist was willing to throw the
main weight of his belief on this inner assurance, and to attribute it
without hesitation to the promised presence of the Comforter. We must
observe, however, that this knowledge or illumination is
_progressive_. This is proved by the passages already quoted about the
work of the Holy Spirit. It is also implied by the words, "This is
life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus
Christ whom Thou hast sent." Eternal life is not [Greek: gnôsis],
knowledge as a possession, but the state of acquiring knowledge
([Greek: hina gignôskôsin]). It is significant, I think, that St. John,
who is so fond of the verb "to know," never uses the substantive
[Greek: gnôsis].

The state of progressive unification, in which we receive "grace upon
grace," as we learn more and more of the "fulness" of Christ, is
called by the evangelist, in the verse just quoted and elsewhere,
_eternal life_. This life is generally spoken of as a present
possession rather than a future hope. "He that believeth on the Son
_hath_ everlasting life"; "he _is passed_ from death unto life"; "we
_are_ in Him that is true, even Jesus Christ. This _is_ the true God,
and eternal life." The evangelist is constantly trying to transport us
into that timeless region in which one day is as a thousand years, and
a thousand years as one day.

St. John's Mysticism is thus patent to all; it is stamped upon his
very style, and pervades all his teaching. Commentators who are in
sympathy with this mode of thought have, as we might expect, made the
most of this element in the Fourth Gospel. Indeed, some of them, I
cannot but think, have interpreted it so completely in the terms of
their own idealism, that they have disregarded or explained away the
very important qualifications which distinguish the Johannine theology
from some later mystical systems. Fichte, for example, claims St. John
as a supporter of his system of subjective idealism (if that is a
correct description of it), and is driven to some curious bits of
exegesis in his attempt to justify this claim. And Reuss (to give one
example of his method) says that St. John cannot have used "the last
day" in the ordinary sense, "because mystical theology has nothing to
do with such a notion.[66]" He means, I suppose, that the mystic, who
likes to speak of heaven as a state, and of eternal life as a present
possession, has no business to talk about future judgment. I cannot
help thinking that this is a very grave mistake. There is no doubt
that those who believe space and time to be only forms of our thought,
must regard the traditional eschatology as symbolical. We are not
concerned to maintain that there will be, literally, a great assize,
holden at a date and place which could be announced if we knew it. If
that is all that Reuss means, perhaps he is right in saying that
"mystical theology has nothing to do with such a notion." But if he
means that such expressions as those referred to in St. John, about
eternal life as something here and now, imply that judgment is now,
_and therefore not in the future_, he is attributing to the
evangelist, and to the whole array of religious thinkers who have used
similar expressions, a view which is easy enough to understand, but
which is destitute of any value, for it entirely fails to satisfy the
religious consciousness. The feeling of the contrast between what
ought to be and what is, is one of the deepest springs of faith in the
unseen. It can only be ignored by shutting our eyes to half the facts
of life. It is easy to say with Browning, "God's in His heaven: all's
right with the world," or with Emerson, that justice is not deferred,
and that everyone gets exactly his deserts in this life; but it would
require a robust confidence or a hard heart to maintain these
propositions while standing among the ruins of an Armenian village, or
by the deathbed of innocence betrayed. There is no doubt a sense in
which it may be said that the ideal is the actual; but only when we
have risen in thought to a region above the antitheses of past,
present, and future, where "_is_" denotes, not the moment which passes
as we speak, but the everlasting Now in the mind of God. This is not a
region in which human thought can live; and the symbolical eschatology
of religion supplies us with forms in which it is possible to think.
The basis of the belief in future judgment is that deep conviction of
the rationality of the world-order, or, in religious language, of the
wisdom and justice of God, which we cannot and will not surrender. It
is authenticated by an instinctive assurance which is strongest in
the strongest minds, and which has nothing to do with any desire for
spurious "consolations";[67] it is a conviction, not merely a hope,
and we have every reason to believe that it is part of the Divine
element in our nature. This conviction, like other mystical
intuitions, is formless: the forms or symbols under which we represent
it are the best that we can get. They are, as Plato says, "a raft" on
which we may navigate strange seas of thought far out of our depth. We
may use them freely, as if they were literally true, only remembering
their symbolical character when they bring us into conflict with
natural science, or when they tempt us to regard the world of
experience as something undivine or unreal.

It is important to insist on this point, because the extreme
difficulty (or rather impossibility) of determining the true relations
of becoming and being, of time and eternity, is constantly tempting us
to adopt some facile solution which really destroys one of the two
terms. The danger which besets us if we follow the line of thought
natural to speculative Mysticism, is that we may think we have solved
the problem in one of two ways, neither of which is a solution at all.
Either we may sublimate our notion of spirit to such an extent that
our idealism becomes merely a sentimental way of looking at the
actual; or, by paring down the other term in the relation, we may fall
into that spurious idealism which reduces this world to a vain shadow
having no relation to reality. We shall come across a good deal of
"acosmistic" philosophy in our survey of Christian Platonism; and the
sentimental rationalist is with us in the nineteenth century; but
neither of the two has any right to appeal to St. John. Fond as he is
of the present tense, he will not allow us to blot from the page
either "unborn to-morrow or dead yesterday." We have seen that he
records the use by our Lord of the traditional language about future
judgment. What is even more important, he asserts in the strongest
possible manner, at the outset both of his Gospel and Epistle, the
necessity of remembering that the Christian revelation was conveyed by
certain historical events. "The Word was made flesh, and tabernacled
among us, and we have seen His glory." "That which was from the
beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our
eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word
of Life ... that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you."
And again in striking words he lays it down as the test whereby we may
distinguish the spirit of truth from Antichrist or the spirit of
error, that the latter "confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in
the flesh." The later history of Mysticism shows that this warning was
very much needed. The tendency of the mystic is to regard the Gospel
history as only one striking manifestation of an universal law. He
believes that every Christian who is in the way of salvation
recapitulates "the whole process of Christ" (as William Law calls
it)--that he has his miraculous birth, inward death, and
resurrection; and so the Gospel history becomes for the Gnostic (as
Clement calls the Christian philosopher) little more than a
dramatisation of the normal psychological experience.[68] "Christ
crucified is teaching for babes," says Origen, with startling
audacity; and heretical mystics have often fancied that they can rise
above the Son to the Father. The Gospel and Epistle of St. John stand
like a rock against this fatal error, and in this feature some German
critics have rightly discerned their supreme value to mystical
theology.[69] "In all life," says Grau, "there is not an abstract
unity, but an unity in plurality, an outward and inward, a bodily and
spiritual; and life, like love, unites what science and philosophy
separate." This co-operation of the sensible and spiritual, of the
material and ideal, of the historical and eternal, is maintained
throughout by St. John. "His view is mystical," says Grau, "because
all life is mystical." It is true that the historical facts hold, for
St. John, a subordinate place as _evidences_. His main _proof_ is, as
I have said, experimental. But a spiritual revelation of God without
its physical counterpart, an Incarnation, is for him an impossibility,
and a Christianity which has cut itself adrift from the Galilean
ministry is in his eyes an imposture. In no other writer, I think, do
we find so firm a grasp of the "psychophysical" view of life which we
all feel to be the true one, if only we could put it in an
intelligible form.[70]

There is another feature in St. John's Gospel which shows his affinity
to Mysticism, though of a different kind from that which we have been
considering. I mean his fondness for using visible things and events
as symbols. This objective kind of Mysticism will form the subject of
my last two Lectures, and I will here only anticipate so far as to say
that the belief which underlies it is that "everything, in being what
it is, is symbolic of something more." The Fourth Gospel is steeped in
symbolism of this kind. The eight miracles which St. John selects are
obviously chosen for their symbolic value; indeed, he seems to regard
them mainly as acted parables. His favourite word for miracles is
[Greek: sêmeia], "signs" or "symbols." It is true that he also calls
them "works," but this is not to distinguish them as supernatural. All
Christ's actions are "works," as parts of His one "work." As evidences
of His Divinity, such "works" are inferior to His "words," being
symbolic and external. Only those who cannot believe on the evidence
of the words and their echo in the heart, may strengthen their weak
faith by the miracles. But "blessed are they who have not seen, and
yet have believed." And besides these "signs," we have, in place of
the Synoptic parables, a wealth of allegories, in which Christ is
symbolised as the Bread of Life, the Light of the World, the Door of
the Sheep, the good Shepherd, the Way, and the true Vine. Wind and
water are also made to play their part. Moreover, there is much
unobtrusive symbolism in descriptive phrases, as when he says that
Nicodemus came by night, that Judas went out into the night, and that
blood and water flowed from our Lord's side; and the washing of the
disciples' feet was a symbolic act which the disciples were to
understand hereafter. Thus all things in the world may remind us of
Him who made them, and who is their sustaining life.

In treating of St. John, it was necessary to protest against the
tendency of some commentators to interpret him simply as a speculative
mystic of the Alexandrian type. But when we turn to St. Paul, we find
reason to think that this side of his theology has been very much
underestimated, and that the distinctive features of Mysticism are
even more marked in him than in St. John. This is not surprising, for
our blessed Lord's discourses, in which nearly all the doctrinal
teaching of St. John is contained, are for all Christians; they rise
above the oppositions which must always divide human thought and human
thinkers. In St. Paul, large-minded as he was, and inspired as we
believe him to be, we may be allowed to see an example of that
particular type which we are considering.

St. Paul states in the clearest manner that Christ _appeared_ to him,
and that this revelation was the foundation of his Christianity and
apostolic commission. "Neither did I receive the Gospel from man,[71]"
he says, "nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of
Jesus Christ." It appears that he did not at first[72] think it
necessary to "confer with flesh and blood"--to collect evidence about
our Lord's ministry, His death and resurrection; he had "seen" and
felt Him, and that was enough. "It was the good pleasure of God to
reveal His Son in me,[73]" he says simply, using the favourite
mystical phraseology. The study of "evidences," in the usual sense of
the term in apologetics, he rejects with distrust and contempt.[74]
External revelation cannot make a man religious. It can put nothing
new into him. If there is nothing answering to it in his mind, it will
profit him nothing. Nor can philosophy make a man religious. "Man's
wisdom," "the wisdom of the world," is of no avail to find spiritual
truth. "God chose the foolish things of the world, to put to shame
them that are wise." "The word of the Cross is, to them that are
perishing, foolishness." By this language he, of course, does not mean
that Christianity is irrational, and therefore to be believed on
authority. That would be to lay its foundation upon external
evidences, and nothing could be further from the whole bent of his
teaching. What he does mean, and say very clearly, is that the carnal
mind is disqualified from understanding Divine truths; "it cannot know
them, because they are spiritually discerned." He who has not raised
himself above "the world," that is, the interests and ideals of human
society as it organises itself apart from God, and above "the flesh,"
that is, the things which seem desirable to the "average sensual man,"
does not possess in himself that element which can be assimilated by
Divine grace. The "mystery" of the wisdom of God is necessarily hidden
from him. St. Paul uses the word "mystery" in very much the same sense
which St. Chrysostom[75] gives to it in the following careful
definition: "A mystery is that which is everywhere proclaimed, but
which is not understood by those who have not right judgment. It is
revealed, not by cleverness, but by the Holy Ghost, as we are able to
receive it. And so we may call a mystery a secret ([Greek:
aporrêton]), for even to the faithful it is not committed in all its
fulness and clearness." In St. Paul the word is nearly always found in
connexion with words denoting revelation or publication[76]. The
preacher of the Gospel is a hierophant, but the Christian mysteries
are freely communicated to all who can receive them. For many ages
these truths were "hid in God,[77]" but now all men may be
"illuminated,[78]" if they will fulfil the necessary conditions of
initiation. These are to "cleanse ourselves from all defilement of
flesh and spirit,[79]" and to have love, without which all else will
be unavailing. But there are degrees of initiation. "We speak wisdom
among the perfect," he says (the [Greek: teleioi] are the fully
initiated); but the carnal must still be fed with milk. Growth in
knowledge, growth in grace, and growth in love, are so frequently
mentioned together, that we must understand the apostle to mean that
they are almost inseparable. But this knowledge, grace, and love is
itself the work of the indwelling God, who is thus in a sense the
organ as well as the object of the spiritual life. "The Spirit
searcheth all things," he says, "yea, the deep things of God." The man
who has the Spirit dwelling in him "has the mind of Christ." "He that
is spiritual judgeth all things," and is himself "judged of no man."
It is, we must admit frankly, a dangerous claim, and one which may
easily be subversive of all discipline. "Where the Spirit of the Lord
is, there is liberty"; but such liberty may become a cloak of
maliciousness. The fact is that St. Paul had himself trusted in "the
Law," and it had led him into grievous error. As usually happens in
such cases, his recoil from it was almost violent. He exalts the inner
light into an absolute criterion of right and wrong, that no corner of
the moral life may remain in bondage to Pharisaism. The crucifixion of
the Lord Jesus and the stoning of Stephen were a crushing condemnation
of legal and ceremonial righteousness; the law written in the heart of
man, or rather spoken there by the living voice of the Holy Spirit,
could never so mislead men as to make them think that they were doing
God service by condemning and killing the just. Such memories might
well lead St. Paul to use language capable of giving encouragement
even to fanatical Anabaptists. But it is significant that the boldest
claims on behalf of liberty all occur in the _earlier_ Epistles.

The subject of St. Paul's visions and revelations is one of great
difficulty. In the Acts we have full accounts of the appearance in the
sky which caused, or immediately preceded, his conversion. It is quite
clear that St. Paul himself regarded this as an appearance of the same
kind as the other Christophanies granted to apostles and "brethren,"
and of a different kind from such visions as might be seen by any
Christian. It was an unique favour, conferring upon him the apostolic
prerogatives of an eye-witness. Other passages in the Acts show that
during his missionary journeys St. Paul saw visions and heard voices,
and that he believed himself to be guided by the "Spirit of Jesus."
Lastly, in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians he records that "more
than fourteen years ago" he was in an ecstasy, in which he was "caught
up into the third heaven," and saw things unutterable. The form in
which this experience is narrated suggests a recollection of
Rabbinical pseudo-science; the substance of the vision St. Paul will
not reveal, nor will he claim its authority for any of his
teaching.[80] These recorded experiences are of great psychological
interest; but, as I said in my last Lecture, they do not seem to me
to belong to the essence of Mysticism.

Another mystical idea, which is never absent from the mind of St.
Paul, is that the individual Christian must live through, and
experience personally, the redemptive process of Christ. The life,
death, and resurrection of Christ were for him the revelation of a
law, the law of redemption through suffering. The victory over sin and
death was won _for_ us; but it must also be won _in_ us. The process
is an universal law, not a mere event in the past.[81] It has been
exemplified in history, which is a progressive unfurling or revelation
of a great mystery, the meaning of which is now at last made plain in
Christ.[82] And it must also appear in each human life. "We were
buried with Him," says St. Paul to the Romans,[83] "through baptism
into death," "that like as Christ was raised from the dead through the
glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life." And
again,[84] "If the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead
dwell in you, He that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall
quicken also your mortal bodies through His Spirit that dwelleth in
you." And, "If ye were raised together with Christ, seek the things
that are above.[85]"

The law of redemption, which St. Paul considers to have been
triumphantly summed up by the death and resurrection of Christ,[86]
would hardly be proved to be an universal law if the Pauline Christ
were only the "heavenly man," as some critics have asserted. St.
Paul's teaching about the Person of Christ was really almost identical
with the Logos doctrine as we find it in St. John's prologue, and as
it was developed by the mystical philosophy of a later period. Not
only is His pre-existence "in the form of God" clearly taught,[87] but
He is the agent in the creation of the universe, the vital principle
upholding and pervading all that exists. "The Son," we read in the
Epistle to the Colossians,[88] "is the image of the invisible God, the
firstborn of all creation; for in Him were all things created, in the
heavens and upon the earth; all things have been created through Him,
and unto Him; and He is before all things, and in Him all things
consist" (that is, "hold together," as the margin of the Revised
Version explains it). "All things are summed up in Christ," he says to
the Ephesians.[89] "Christ is _all_ and in all," we read again in the
Colossians.[90] And in that bold and difficult passage of the 15th
chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians he speaks of the
"reign" of Christ as coextensive with the world's history. When time
shall end, and all evil shall be subdued to good, Christ "will deliver
up the kingdom to God, even the Father," "that God may be all in
all.[91]" Very important, too, is the verse in which he says that the
Israelites in the wilderness "drank of that spiritual rock which
followed them, and that rock was Christ.[92]" It reminds us of
Clement's language about the Son as the Light which broods over all
history.

The passage from the Colossians, which I quoted just now, contains
another mystical idea besides that of Christ as the universal source
and centre of life. He is, we are told, "the Image of the invisible
God," and all created beings are, in their several capacities, images
of Him. Man is essentially "the image and glory of God";[93] the
"perfect man" is he who has come "to the measure of the stature of the
fulness of Christ.[94]" This is our _nature_, in the Aristotelian
sense of completed normal development; but to reach it we have to slay
the false self, the old man, which is informed by an actively
maleficent agency, "flesh" which is hostile to "spirit." This latter
conception does not at present concern us; what we have to notice is
the description of the upward path as an inner transit from the false
isolation of the natural man into a state in which it is possible to
say, "I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.[95]" In the Epistle
to the Galatians he uses the favourite mystical phrase, "until Christ
be formed in you";[96] and in the Second Epistle to the
Corinthians[97] he employs a most beautiful expression in describing
the process, reverting to the figure of the "mirror," dear to
Mysticism, which he had already used in the First Epistle: "We all
with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are
transformed into the same image from glory to glory." Other passages,
which refer primarily to the future state, are valuable as showing
that St. Paul lends no countenance to that abstract idea of eternal
life as freedom from all earthly conditions, which has misled so many
mystics. Our hope, when the earthly house of our tabernacle is
dissolved, is not that we may be unclothed, but that we may be
_clothed upon_ with our heavenly habitation. The body of our
humiliation is to be changed and glorified, according to the mighty
working whereby God is able to subdue all things unto Himself. And
therefore our whole spirit and soul _and body_ must be preserved
blameless; for the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, not the
prison-house of a soul which will one day escape out of its cage and
fly away.

St. Paul's conception of Christ as the Life as well as the Light of
the world has two consequences besides those which have been already
mentioned. In the first place, it is fatal to religious individualism.
The close unity which joins us to Christ is not so much a unity of the
individual soul with the heavenly Christ, as an organic unity of all
men, or, since many refuse their privileges, of all Christians, with
their Lord. "We, being many, are one body in Christ, and severally
members one of another.[98]" There must be "no schism in the
body,[99]" but each member must perform its allotted function. St.
Augustine is thoroughly in agreement with St. Paul when he speaks of
Christ and the Church as "unus Christus." Not that Christ is
"divided," so that He cannot be fully present to any individual--that
is an error which St. Paul, St. Augustine, and the later mystics all
condemn; but as the individual cannot reach his real personality as an
isolated unit, he cannot, as an isolated unit, attain to full
communion with Christ.

The second point is one which may seem to be of subordinate
importance, but it will, I think, awaken more interest in the future
than it has done in the past. In the 8th chapter of the Epistle to the
Romans, St. Paul clearly teaches that the victory of Christ over sin
and death is of import, not only to humanity, but to the whole of
creation, which now groans and travails in pain together, but which
shall one day be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the
glorious liberty of the sons of God. This recognition of the
spirituality of matter, and of the unity of all nature in Christ, is
one which we ought to be thankful to find in the New Testament. It
will be my pleasant task, in the last two Lectures of this course, to
show how the later school of mystics prized it.

The foregoing analysis of St. Paul's teaching has, I hope, justified
the statement that all the essentials of Mysticism are to be found in
his Epistles. But there are also two points in which his authority has
been claimed for false and mischievous developments of Mysticism.
These two points it will be well to consider before leaving the
subject.

The first is a contempt for the historical framework of Christianity.
We have already seen how strongly St. John warns us against this
perversion of spiritual religion. But those numerous sects and
individual thinkers who have disregarded this warning, have often
appealed to the authority of St. Paul, who in the Second Epistle to
the Corinthians says, "Even though we have known Christ after the
flesh, yet now we know Him so no more." Here, they say, is a distinct
admission that the worship of the historical Christ, "the man Christ
Jesus," is a stage to be passed through and then left behind. There is
just this substratum of truth in a very mischievous error, that St.
Paul _does_ tell us[100] that he _began_ to teach the Corinthians by
giving them in the simplest possible form the story of "Jesus Christ
and Him crucified." The "mysteries" of the faith, the "wisdom" which
only the "perfect" can understand, were deferred till the converts had
learned their first lessons. But if we look at the passage in
question, which has shocked and perplexed many good Christians, we
shall find that St. Paul is not drawing a contrast between the
earthly and the heavenly Christ, bidding us worship the Second Person
of the Trinity, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, and to cease
to contemplate the Cross on Calvary. He is distinguishing rather
between the sensuous presentation of the facts of Christ's life, and a
deeper realisation of their import. It should be our aim to "know no
man after the flesh"; that is to say, we should try to think of human
beings as what they are, immortal spirits, sharers with us of a common
life and a common hope, not as what they appear to our eyes. And the
same principle applies to our thoughts about Christ. To know Christ
after the flesh is to know Him, not as man, but as _a_ man. St. Paul
in this verse condemns all religious materialism, whether it take the
form of hysterical meditation upon the physical details of the
passion, or of an over-curious interest in the manner of the
resurrection. There is no trace whatever in St. Paul of any aspiration
to rise above Christ to the contemplation of the Absolute--to treat
Him as only a step in the ladder. This is an error of false Mysticism;
the true mystic follows St. Paul in choosing as his ultimate goal the
fulness of Christ, and not the emptiness of the undifferentiated
Godhead.

The second point in which St. Paul has been supposed to sanction an
exaggerated form of Mysticism, is his extreme disparagement of
external religion--of forms and ceremonies and holy days and the like.
"One man hath faith to eat all things; but he that is weak eateth
herbs.[101]" "One man esteemeth one day above another, another
esteemeth every day alike." "He that eateth, eateth unto the Lord, and
giveth God thanks; and he that eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not,
and giveth God thanks." "Why turn ye back to the weak and beggarly
rudiments, whereunto ye desire to be in bondage again? Ye observe
days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I
have bestowed labour upon you in vain.[102]" "Why do ye subject
yourselves to ordinances, handle not, nor taste, nor touch, after the
precepts and doctrines of men?[103]" These are strongly-worded
passages, and I have no wish to attenuate their significance. Any
Christian priest who puts the observance of human ordinances--
fast-days, for example--at all on the same level as such duties as
charity, generosity, or purity, is teaching, not Christianity, but that
debased Judaism against which St. Paul waged an unceasing polemic, and
which is one of those dead religions which has to be killed again in
almost every generation.[104] But we must not forget that these vigorous
denunciations _do_ occur in a polemic against Judaism. They bear the
stamp of the time at which they were written perhaps more than any other
part of St. Paul's Epistles, except those thoughts which were connected
with his belief in the approaching end of the world. St. Paul certainly
did not intend his Christian converts to be anarchists in religious
matters. There is evidence, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians,
that his spiritual presentation of Christianity had already been made an
excuse for disorderly licence. The usual symptoms of degenerate
Mysticism had appeared at Corinth. There were men there who called
themselves "spiritual persons[105]" or prophets, and showed an arrogant
independence; there were others who wished to start sects of their own;
others who carried antinomianism into the sphere of morals; others who
prided themselves on various "spiritual gifts." As regards the last
class, we are rather surprised at the half-sanction which the apostle
gives to what reads like primitive Irvingism;[106] but he was evidently
prepared to enforce discipline with a strong hand. Still, it may be
fairly said that he trusts mainly to his personal ascendancy, and to his
teaching about the organic unity of the Christian body, to preserve or
restore due discipline and cohesion. There have been hardly any
religious leaders, if we except George Fox, the founder of Quakerism,
who have valued ceremonies so little. In this, again, he is a genuine
mystic.

Of the other books of the New Testament it is not necessary to say
much. The Epistle to the Hebrews cannot be the work of St. Paul. It
shows strong traces of Jewish Alexandrianism; indeed, the writer
seems to have been well acquainted with the Book of Wisdom and with
Philo. Alexandrian idealism is always ready to pass into speculative
Mysticism, but the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews can hardly be
called mystical in the sense in which St. Paul was a mystic. The most
interesting side of his theology, from our present point of view, is
the way in which he combines his view of religious ordinances as types
and adumbrations of higher spiritual truths, with a comprehensive view
of history as a progressive realisation of a Divine scheme. The
keynote of the book is that mankind has been educated partly by
ceremonial laws and partly by "promises." Systems of laws and
ordinances, of which the Jewish Law is the chief example, have their
place in history. They rightly claim obedience until the practical
lessons which they can teach have been learned, and until the higher
truths which they conceal under the protecting husk of symbolism can
be apprehended without disguise. Then their task is done, and mankind
is no longer bound by them. In the same way, the "promises" which were
made under the old dispensation proved to be only symbols of deeper
and more spiritual blessings, which in the moral childhood of humanity
would not have appeared desirable; they were (not delusions, but)
_illusions_, "God having prepared some better thing" to take their
place. The doctrine is one of profound and far-reaching importance. In
this Epistle it is certainly connected with the idealistic thought
that all visible things are symbols, and that every truth apprehended
by finite intelligences must be only the husk of a deeper truth. We
may therefore claim the Epistle to the Hebrews as containing in
outline a Christian philosophy of history, based upon a doctrine of
symbols which has much in common with some later developments of
Mysticism.

In the Apocalypse, whoever the author may be, we find little or
nothing of the characteristic Johannine Mysticism, and the influence
of its vivid allegorical pictures has been less potent in this branch
of theology than might perhaps have been expected.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 56: In referring thus to the Book of Job, I rest nothing on
any theory as to its date. Whenever it was written, it illustrates
that view of the relation of man to God with which Mysticism can never
be content. But, of course, the antagonism between our personal claims
and the laws of the universe must be done justice to before it can be
surmounted.]

[Footnote 57: Jer. xxxi. 31-34.]

[Footnote 58: Isa. xxxiii. 14-17.]

[Footnote 59: See Appendix D, on the devotional use of the Song of
Solomon.]

[Footnote 60: Leathes, _The Witness of St. John to Christ_, p. 244.]

[Footnote 61: The punctuation now generally adopted was invented
(probably) by the Antiochenes, who were afraid that the words "without
Him was not anything made" might, if unqualified, be taken to include
the Holy Spirit. Cyril of Alexandria comments on the older
punctuation, but explains the verse wrongly. "The Word, as Life by
nature, was in the things which have become, mingling Himself by
participation in the things that are." Bp. Westcott objects to this,
that "the one life is regarded as dispersed." Cyril, however, guards
against this misconception ([Greek: ou kata merismon tina kai
alloiôsin]). He says that created things share in "the one life as they
are able." But some of his expressions are objectionable, as they seem
to assume a material substratum, animated _ab extra_ by an infusion of
the Logos. Augustine's commentary on the verse is based on the
well-known passage of Plato's _Republic_ about the "ideal bed." "Arca
in opere non est vita; arca in arte vita est. Sic Sapientia Dei, per
quam facta sunt omnia, secundum artem continet omnia antequam fabricat
omnia. Quæ fiunt ... foris corpora sunt, in arte vita sunt." Those who
accept the common authorship of the Gospel and the Apocalypse will
find a confirmation of the view that [Greek: ên] refers to ideal,
extra-temporal existence, in Rev. iv. 11: "Thou hast created all
things, and for Thy pleasure they _were_ ([Greek: êsan] is the true
reading) and were created." There is also a very interesting passage
in Eusebius (_Proep. Ev._ xi. 19): [Greek: kai outos ara ên ho logos
kath' hon aei onta ta gignomena egeneto, hôsper Hêrakleitos an
axiôseie.] This is so near to the words of St. John's prologue as to
suggest that the apostle, writing at Ephesus, is here referring
deliberately to the lofty doctrine of the great Ephesian idealist,
whom Justin claims as a Christian before Christ, and whom Clement
quotes several times with respect.]

[Footnote 62: It will be seen that I assume that the first Epistle is
the work of the evangelist.]

[Footnote 63: Westcott on John xiv. 26.]

[Footnote 64: Westcott.]

[Footnote 65: Cf. _Theologia Germanica_, chap. 48: "He who would know
before he believeth cometh never to true knowledge.... I speak of a
certain truth which it is possible to know by experience, but which ye
must believe in before ye know it by experience, else ye will never
come to know it truly."]

[Footnote 66: On the second coming of Christ, cf. John v. 25, xxi. 23;
I John ii. 28, iii. 2. Scholten goes so far as to expunge v. 25 and
28, 29 as spurious.]

[Footnote 67: The allegation that the Christian persuades himself of a
future life because it is the most comfortable belief to hold, seems
to me utterly contemptible. Certain views about heaven and hell are no
doubt traceable to shallow optimism; but the belief in immortality is
in itself rather awful than consoling. Besides, what sane man would
wish to be deceived in such a matter?]

[Footnote 68: Henry More brings this charge against the Quakers. There
are, he says, many good and wholesome things in their teaching, but
they mingle with them a "slighting of the history of Christ, and
making a mere allegory of it--tending to the utter overthrow of that
warrantable, though more external frame of Christianity, which
Scripture itself points out to us" (_Mastix, his letter to a Friend_,
p. 306).]

[Footnote 69: E.g. Strauss and Grau, quoted in Lilienfeld's _Thoughts
on the Social Science of the Future_.]

[Footnote 70: The intense moral dualism of St. John has been felt by
many as a discordant note; and though it is not closely connected with
his Mysticism, a few words should perhaps be added about it. It has
been thought strange that the Logos, who is the life of all things
that are, should have to invade His own kingdom to rescue it from its
_de facto_ ruler, the Prince of darkness; and stranger yet, that the
bulk of mankind should seemingly be "children of the devil," born of
the flesh, and incapable of salvation. The difficulty exists, but it
has been exaggerated. St. John does not touch either the metaphysical
problem of the origin of evil, or predestination in the Calvinistic
sense. The vivid contrasts of light and shade in his picture express
his judgment on the tragic fate of the Jewish people, The Gospel is
not a polemical treatise, but it bears traces of recent conflicts. St.
John wishes to show that the rejection of Christ by the Jews was
morally inevitable; that their blindness and their ruin followed
naturally from their characters and principles. Looking back on the
memories of a long life, he desires to trace the operation of uniform
laws in dividing the wheat of humanity from the chaff. He is content
to observe how [Greek: êthos anthrôpô daimôn], without speculating on
the reason why characters differ. In offering these remarks, I am
assuming, what seems to me quite certain, that St. John selected from
our Lord's discourses those which suited his particular object, and
that in the setting and arrangement he allowed himself a certain
amount of liberty.]

[Footnote 71: Gal. i. 12.]

[Footnote 72: 1 Cor. xv. shows that he subsequently satisfied himself
of the truth of the other Christophanies.]

[Footnote 73: Gal, i. 15, 16.]

[Footnote 74: 1 Cor. i. and ii.]

[Footnote 75: Chrysostom _in_ I _Cor_., Hom. vii. 2.]

[Footnote 76: See Lightfoot on Col. i. 26.]

[Footnote 77: Eph. iii. 9.]

[Footnote 78: 2 Tim. i. 10 ([Greek: phôtizein]); cf. Eph. i. 9.]

[Footnote 79: 2 Cor. vii. 1.]

[Footnote 80: In spite of this, he is attacked for this passage in the
_Pseudo-Clementine Homilies_ (xvii. 19), where "Simon Magus" is asked,
"Can anyone be made wise to teach through a vision?"]

[Footnote 81: Compare a beautiful passage in R.L. Nettleship's
_Remains_: "To live is to die into something more perfect.... God can
only make His work to be truly _His_ work, by eternally dying,
sacrificing what is dearest to Him."]

[Footnote 82: Col. i. 26, ii. 2, iv. 3; Eph. iii. 2-9. I have allowed
myself to quote from these Epistles because I am myself a believer in
their genuineness. The Mysticism of St. Paul might be proved from the
undisputed Epistles only, but we should then lose some of the most
striking illustrations of it.]

[Footnote 83: Rom. vi. 4.]

[Footnote 84: Rom. viii. 11.]

[Footnote 85: St. Paul's mystical language about death and
resurrection has given rise to much controversy. On the one hand, we
have writers like Matthew Arnold, who tell us that St. Paul
unconsciously substitutes an ethical for a physical resurrection--an
eternal life here and now for a future reward. On the other, we have
writers like Kabisch (_Eschatologie des Paulus_), who argue that the
apostle's whole conception was materialistic, his idea of a "spiritual
body" being that of a body composed of very fine atoms (like those of
Lucretius' "_anima_"), which inhabits the earthly body of the
Christian like a kernel within its husk, and will one day (at the
resurrection) slough off its muddy vesture of decay, and thenceforth
exist in a form which can defy the ravages of time. Of the two views,
Matthew Arnold's is much the truer, even though it should be proved
that St. Paul sometimes pictures the "spiritual body" in the way
described. But the key to the problem, in St. Paul as in St. John, is
that pyscho-physical theory which demands that the laws of the
spiritual world shall have their analogous manifestations in the world
of phenomena. Death must, somehow or other, be conquered in the
visible as well as in the invisible sphere. The law of life through
death must be deemed to pervade every phase of existence. And as a
mere prolongation of physical life under the same conditions is
impossible, and, moreover, would not fulfil the law in question, we
are bound to have recourse to some such symbol as "spiritual body." It
will hardly be disputed that the Christian doctrine of the
resurrection of the whole man has taken a far stronger hold of the
religious consciousness of mankind than the Greek doctrine of the
immortality of the soul, or that this doctrine is plainly taught by
St. Paul. All attempts to turn his eschatology into a rationalistic
(Arnold) or a materialistic (Kabisch) theory must therefore be
decisively rejected.]

[Footnote 86: Col. iii. 1.]

[Footnote 87: Phil. ii. 6.]

[Footnote 88: Col. i. 15-17.]

[Footnote 89: Eph. i. 10.]

[Footnote 90: Col. iii. 11.]

[Footnote 91: 1 Cor. xv. 24-28.]

[Footnote 92: 1 Cor. x. 4.]

[Footnote 93: 1 Cor. xi. 7.]

[Footnote 94: Eph. iv. 13.]

[Footnote 95: Gal. ii. 20.]

[Footnote 96: Gal. iv. 19.]

[Footnote 97: 2 Cor. iii. 18.]

[Footnote 98: Rom. xii. 5.]

[Footnote 99: 1 Cor. xii. 25.]

[Footnote 100: 1 Cor. ii. 1, 2.]

[Footnote 101: Rom. xiv.]

[Footnote 102: Gal. iv. 9-11.]

[Footnote 103: Col. ii. 20-22.]

[Footnote 104: I have been reminded that great tenderness is due to
the "sancta simplicitas" of the "anicula Christiana," whose religion
is generally of this type. I should agree, if the "anicula" were not
always so ready with her faggot when a John Huss is to be burnt.]

[Footnote 105: 1 Cor. xiv. 37.]

[Footnote 106: There seem to have been two conceptions of the
operations of the Spirit in St. Paul's time: (a) He comes fitfully,
with visible signs, and puts men beside themselves; (b) He is an
abiding presence, enlightening, guiding, and strengthening. St. Paul
lays weight on the latter view, without repudiating the former. See H.
Gunkel, _Die Wirkungen des H. Geistes nach der popul. Anschauung d.
apostol. Zeit und d. Lehre der Paulus._]




LECTURE III


[Greek: "Dio dê dikaiôs monê pteroutai hê tou philosophou dianoia
pros gar ekeinois aei esti mnêmê kata dunamin, pros oisper theos ôn
theios esti. tois de dê toioutois anêr hupomnêmasin orthôs
chrômenos, teleous aei teletas teloumenos, teleos ontôs monos
gignetai."]

PLATO, _Phædrus_, p. 249.


  LICHT UND FARBE

   "Wohne, du ewiglich Eines, dort bei dem ewiglich Einen!
     Farbe, du wechselnde, komm' freundlich zum Menschen herab!"

SCHILLER.


   "Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,
      Legato con amore in un volume,
      Ciò che per l'universo si squaderna;
    Sustanzia ed accidente, e lor costume,
      Tutti conflati insieme par tal modo,
      Che ciò ch'io dico è un semplice lume."

DANTE, _Paradiso_, c. 33.



CHRISTIAN PLATONISM AND SPECULATIVE MYSTICISM

I. IN THE EAST

"That was the true Light, which lighteth every man coming into the
world."--JOHN i. 9.

"He made darkness His hiding place, His pavilion round about Him;
darkness of waters, thick clouds of the skies."--Ps. xviii. 11.


I have called this Lecture "Christian Platonism and Speculative
Mysticism." Admirers of Plato are likely to protest that Plato himself
can hardly be called a mystic, and that in any case there is very
little resemblance between the philosophy of his dialogues and the
semi-Oriental Mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. I do not
dispute either of these statements; and yet I wish to keep the name of
Plato in the title of this Lecture. The affinity between Christianity
and Platonism was very strongly felt throughout the period which we
are now to consider. Justin Martyr claims Plato (with Heraclitus[107]
and Socrates) as a Christian before Christ; Athenagoras calls him the
best of the forerunners of Christianity, and Clement regards the
Gospel as perfected Platonism.[108] The Pagans repeated so
persistently the charge that Christ borrowed from Plato what was true
in His teaching, that Ambrose wrote a treatise to confute them. As a
rule, the Christians did not deny the resemblance, but explained it by
saying that Plato had plagiarised from Moses--a curious notion which
we find first in Philo. In the Middle Ages the mystics almost
canonised Plato: Eckhart speaks of him, quaintly enough, as "the great
priest" (_der grosse Pfaffe_); and even in Spain, Louis of Granada
calls him "divine," and finds in him "the most excellent parts of
Christian wisdom." Lastly, in the seventeenth century the English
Platonists avowed their intention of bringing back the Church to "her
old loving nurse the Platonic philosophy." These English Platonists
knew what they were talking of; but for the mediæval mystics Platonism
meant the philosophy of Plotinus adapted by Augustine, or that of
Proclus adapted by Dionysius, or the curious blend of Platonic,
Aristotelian, and Jewish philosophy which filtered through into the
Church by means of the Arabs. Still, there was justice underlying this
superficial ignorance. Plato is, after all, the father of European
Mysticism.[109] Both the great types of mystics may appeal to
him--those who try to rise through the visible to the invisible,
through Nature to God, who find in earthly beauty the truest symbol of
the heavenly, and in the imagination--the image-making faculty--a raft
whereon we may navigate the shoreless ocean of the Infinite; and
those who distrust all sensuous representations as tending "to nourish
appetites which we ought to starve," who look upon this earth as a
place of banishment, upon material things as a veil which hides God's
face from us, and who bid us "flee away from hence as quickly as may
be," to seek "yonder," in the realm of the ideas, the heart's true
home. Both may find in the real Plato much congenial teaching--that
the highest good is the greatest likeness to God--that the greatest
happiness is the vision of God--that we should seek holiness not for
the sake of external reward, but because it is the health of the soul,
while vice is its disease--that goodness is unity and harmony, while
evil is discord and disintegration--that it is our duty and happiness
to rise above the visible and transitory to the invisible and
permanent. It may also be a pleasure to some to trace the fortunes of
the positive and negative elements in Plato's teaching--of the
humanist and the ascetic who dwelt together in that large mind; to
observe how the world-renouncing element had to grow at the expense of
the other, until full justice had been done to its claims; and then
how the brighter, more truly Hellenic side was able to assert itself
under due safeguards, as a precious thing dearly purchased, a treasure
reserved for the pure and humble, and still only to be tasted
carefully, with reverence and godly fear. There is, of course, no
necessity for connecting this development with the name of Plato. The
way towards a reconciliation of this and other differences is more
clearly indicated in the New Testament; indeed, nothing can
strengthen our belief in inspiration so much as to observe how the
whole history of thought only helps us to _understand_ St. Paul and
St. John better, never to pass beyond their teaching. Still, the
traditional connexion between Plato and Mysticism is so close that we
may, I think, be pardoned for keeping, like Ficinus, a lamp burning in
his honour throughout our present task.

It is not my purpose in these Lectures to attempt a historical survey
of Christian Mysticism. To attempt this, within the narrow limits of
eight Lectures, would oblige me to give a mere skeleton of the
subject, which would be of no value, and of very little interest. The
aim which I have set before myself is to give a clear presentation of
an important type of Christian life and thought, in the hope that it
may suggest to us a way towards the solution of some difficulties
which at present agitate and divide us. The path is beset with
pitfalls on either side, as will be abundantly clear when we consider
the startling expressions which Mysticism has often found for itself.
But though I have not attempted to give even an outline of the history
of Mysticism, I feel that the best and safest way of studying this or
any type of religion is to consider it in the light of its historical
development, and of the forms which it has actually assumed. And so I
have tried to set these Lectures in a historical framework, and, in
choosing prominent figures as representatives of the chief kinds of
Mysticism, to observe, so far as possible, the chronological order.
The present Lecture will carry us down to the Pseudo-Dionysius, the
influence of whose writings during the next thousand years can hardly
be overestimated. But if we are to understand how a system of
speculative Mysticism, of an Asiatic rather than European type, came
to be accepted as the work of a convert of St. Paul, and invested with
semi-apostolic authority, we must pause for a few minutes to let our
eyes rest on the phenomenon called Alexandrianism, which fills a large
place in the history of the early Church.

We have seen how St. Paul speaks of a _Gnosis_ or higher knowledge,
which can be taught with safety only to the "perfect" or "fully
initiated";[110] and he by no means rejects such expressions as the
_Pleroma_ (the totality of the Divine attributes), which were
technical terms of speculative theism. St. John, too, in his prologue
and other places, brings the Gospel into relation with current
speculation, and interprets it in philosophical language. The movement
known as Gnosticism, both within and without the Church, was an
attempt to complete this reconciliation between speculative and
revealed religion, by systematising the symbols of transcendental
mystical theosophy.[111] The movement can only be understood as a
premature and unsuccessful attempt to achieve what the school of
Alexandria afterwards partially succeeded in doing. The anticipations
of Neoplatonism among the Gnostics would probably be found to be very
numerous, if the victorious party had thought their writings worth
preserving. But Gnosticism was rotten before it was ripe. Dogma was
still in such a fluid state, that there was nothing to keep
speculation within bounds; and the Oriental element, with its
insoluble dualism, its fantastic mythology and spiritualism, was too
strong for the Hellenic. Gnosticism presents all the features which we
shall find to be characteristic of degenerate Mysticism. Not to speak
of its oscillations between fanatical austerities and scandalous
licence, and its belief in magic and other absurdities, we seem, when
we read Irenæus' description of a Valentinian heretic, to hear the
voice of Luther venting his contempt upon some "_Geisterer_" of the
sixteenth century, such as Carlstadt or Sebastian Frank. "The fellow
is so puffed up," says Irenæus, "that he believes himself to be
neither in heaven nor on earth, but to have entered within the Divine
Pleroma, and to have embraced his guardian angel. On the strength of
which he struts about as proud as a cock. These are the self-styled
'spiritual persons,' who say they have already reached perfection."
The later Platonism could not even graft itself upon any of these
Gnostic systems, and Plotinus rejects them as decisively as Origen.

Still closer is the approximation to later speculation which we find
in Philo, who was a contemporary of St. Paul. Philo and his Therapeutæ
were genuine mystics of the monastic type. Many of them, however, had
not been monks all their life, but were retired men of business, who
wished to spend their old age in contemplation, as many still do in
India. They were, of course, not Christians, but Hellenised Jews,
though Eusebius, Jerome, and the Middle Ages generally thought that
they were Christians, and were well pleased to find monks in the first
century.[112]

Philo's object is to reconcile religion and philosophy--in other
words, Moses and Plato.[113] His method[114] is to make Platonism a
development of Mosaism, and Mosaism an implicit Platonism. The claims
of orthodoxy are satisfied by saying, rather audaciously, "All this is
Moses' doctrine, not mine." His chief instrument in this difficult
task is allegorism, which in his hands is a bad specimen of that
pseudo-science which has done so much to darken counsel in biblical
exegesis. His speculative system, however, is exceedingly interesting.

God, according to Philo, is unqualified and pure Being, but _not_
superessential. He is emphatically [Greek: ho ôn], the "I am," and the
most _general_ ([Greek: to genikôtaton]) of existences. At the same
time He is without qualities ([Greek: apoios]), and ineffable
([Greek: arrêtos]). In His inmost nature He is inaccessible; as it
was said to Moses, "Thou shalt see what is behind Me, but My face
shall not be seen." It is best to contemplate God in silence, since we
can compare Him to nothing that we know. All our knowledge of God is
really God dwelling in us. He has breathed into us something of His
nature, and is thus the archetype of what is highest in ourselves. He
who is truly inspired "may with good reason be called God." This
blessed state may, however, be prepared for by such mediating agencies
as the study of God's laws in nature; and it is only the highest class
of saints--the souls "born of God"--that are exalted above the need of
symbols. It would be easy to show how Philo wavers between two
conceptions of the Divine nature--God as simply transcendent, and God
as immanent. But this is one of the things that make him most
interesting. His Judaism will not allow him really to believe in a God
"without qualities."

The Logos dwells with God as His Wisdom (or sometimes he calls Wisdom,
figuratively, the mother of the Logos). He is the "second God," the
"Idea of Ideas"; the other Ideas or Powers are the forces which he
controls--"the Angels," as he adds, suddenly remembering his Judaism.
The Logos is also the mind of God expressing itself in act: the Ideas,
therefore, are the content of the mind of God. Here he anticipates
Plotinus; but he does not reduce God to a logical point. His God is
self-conscious, and reasons. By the agency of the Logos the worlds
were made: the intelligible world, the [Greek: kosmos noêtos], is
the Logos acting as Creator. Indeed, Philo calls the intelligible
universe "the only and beloved Son of God"; just as Erigena says, "Be
assured that the Word is the Nature of all things." The Son represents
the world before God as High Priest, Intercessor, and Paraclete. He is
the "divine Angel" that guides us; He is the "bread of God," the "dew
of the soul," the "convincer of sin": no evil can touch the soul in
which He dwells: He is the eternal image of the Father, and we, who
are not yet fit to be called sons of God, may call ourselves His
sons.

Philo's ethical system is that of the later contemplative Mysticism.
Knowledge and virtue can be obtained only by renunciation of self.
Contemplation is a higher state than activity. "The soul should cut
off its right hand." "It should shun the whirlpool of life, and not
even touch it with the tip of a finger." The highest stage is when a
man leaves behind his finite self-consciousness, and sees God face to
face, standing in Him from henceforward, and knowing Him not by
reason, but by clear certainty. Philo makes no attempt to identify the
Logos with the Jewish Messiah, and leaves no room for an Incarnation.

This remarkable system anticipates the greater part of Christian and
Pagan Neoplatonism. The astonishing thing is that Philo's work
exercised so little influence on the philosophy of the second century.
It was probably regarded as an attempt to evolve Platonism out of the
Pentateuch, and, as such, interesting only to the Jews, who were at
this period becoming more and more unpopular.[115] The same prejudice
may possibly have impaired the influence of Numenius, another
semi-mystical thinker, who in the age of the Antonines evolved a kind
of Trinity, consisting of God, whom he also calls Mind; the Son, the
maker of the world, whom he does _not_ call the Logos; and the world,
the "grandson," as he calls it. His Jewish affinities are shown by his
calling Plato "an Atticising Moses."

It was about one hundred and fifty years after Philo that St. Clement
of Alexandria tried to do for Christianity what Philo had tried to do
for Judaism. His aim is nothing less than to construct a philosophy of
religion--a Gnosis, "knowledge," he calls it--which shall "initiate"
the educated Christian into the higher "mysteries" of his creed. The
Logos doctrine, according to which Christ is the universal
Reason,[116] the Light that lighteth every man, here asserts its full
rights. Reasoned belief is the superstructure of which faith[117] is
the foundation.

"Knowledge," says Clement, "is more than faith." "Faith is a summary
knowledge of urgent truths, suitable for people who are in a hurry;
but knowledge is scientific faith." "If the Gnostic (the philosophical
Christian) had to choose between the knowledge of God and eternal
salvation, and it were possible to separate two things so inseparably
connected, he would choose without the slightest hesitation the
knowledge of God." On the wings of this "knowledge" the soul rises
above all earthly passions and desires, filled with a calm
disinterested love of God. In this state a man can distinguish truth
from falsehood, pure gold from base metal, in matters of belief; he
can see the connexion of the various dogmas, and their harmony with
reason; and in reading Scripture he can penetrate beneath the literal
to the spiritual meaning. But when Clement speaks of reason or
knowledge, he does not mean merely intellectual training. "He who
would enter the shrine must be pure," he says, "and purity is to
think holy things." And again, "The more a man loves, the more deeply
does he penetrate into God." Purity and love, to which he adds
diligent study of the Scriptures, are all that is _necessary_ to the
highest life, though mental cultivation may be and ought to be a great
help.[118]

History exhibits a progressive training of mankind by the Logos.
"There is one river of truth," he says, "which receives tributaries
from every side."

All moral evil is caused either by ignorance or by weakness of will.
The cure for the one is knowledge, the cure for the other is
discipline.[119]

In his doctrine of God we find that he has fallen a victim to the
unfortunate negative method, which he calls "analysis." It is the
method which starts with the assertion that since God is exalted above
Being, we cannot say what He is, but only what He is not. Clement
apparently objects to saying that God is above Being, but he strips
Him of all attributes and qualities till nothing is left but a
nameless point; and this, too, he would eliminate, for a point is a
numerical unit, and God is above the idea of the Monad. We shall
encounter this argument far too often in our survey of Mysticism, and
in writers more logical than Clement, who allowed it to dominate their
whole theology and ethics.

The Son is the Consciousness of God. The Father only sees the world as
reflected in the Son. This bold and perhaps dangerous doctrine seems
to be Clement's own.

Clement was not a deep or consistent thinker, and the task which he
has set himself is clearly beyond his strength. But he gathers up most
of the religious and philosophical ideas of his time, and weaves them
together into a system which is permeated by his cultivated, humane,
and genial personality.

Especially interesting from the point of view of our present task is
the use of mystery-language which we find everywhere in Clement. The
Christian revelation is "the Divine (or holy) mysteries," "the Divine
secrets," "the secret Word," "the mysteries of the Word"; Jesus Christ
is "the Teacher of the Divine mysteries"; the ordinary teaching of the
Church is "the lesser mysteries"; the higher knowledge of the Gnostic,
leading to full initiation ([Greek: epopteia]) "the great mysteries."
He borrows _verbatim_ from a Neopythagorean document a whole sentence,
to the effect that "it is not lawful to reveal to profane persons the
mysteries of the Word"--the "Logos" taking the place of "the
Eleusinian goddesses." This evident wish to claim the Greek
mystery-worship, with its technical language, for Christianity, is
very interesting, and the attempt was by no means unfruitful. Among
other ideas which seem to come direct from the mysteries is the notion
of _deification by the gift of immortality_. Clement[120] says
categorically, [Greek: to mê phtheiresthai theiotêtos metechein
esti]. This is, historically, the way in which the doctrine of
"deification" found its way into the scheme of Christian Mysticism.
The idea of immortality as the attribute constituting Godhead was, of
course, as familiar to the Greeks as it was strange to the Jews.[121]

Origen supplies some valuable links in the history of speculative
Mysticism, but his mind was less inclined to mystical modes of thought
than was Clement's. I can here only touch upon a few points which bear
directly upon our subject.

Origen follows Clement in his division of the religious life into two
classes or stages, those of faith and knowledge. He draws too hard a
line between them, and speaks with a professorial arrogance of the
"popular, irrational faith" which leads to "somatic Christianity," as
opposed to the "spiritual Christianity" conferred by Gnosis or
Wisdom.[122] He makes it only too clear that by "somatic Christianity"
he means that faith which is based on the gospel history. Of teaching
founded upon the historical narrative, he says, "What better method
could be devised to assist the masses?" The Gnostic or Sage no longer
needs the crucified Christ. The "eternal" or "spiritual" Gospel, which
is his possession, "shows clearly all things concerning the Son of God
Himself, both the mysteries shown by His words, and the things of
which His acts were the symbols.[123]" It is not that he denies or
doubts the truth of the Gospel history, but he feels that events which
only happened once can be of no importance, and regards the life,
death, and resurrection of Christ as only one manifestation of an
universal law, which was really enacted, not in this fleeting world
of shadows, but in the eternal counsels of the Most High. He
considers that those who are thoroughly convinced of the universal
truths revealed by the Incarnation and Atonement, need trouble
themselves no more about their particular manifestations in time.

Origen, like the Neoplatonists, says that God is above or beyond
Being; but he is sounder than Clement on this point, for he attributes
self-consciousness[124] and reason to God, who therefore does not
require the Second Person in order to come to Himself. Also, since God
is not wholly above reason, He can be approached by reason, and not
only by ecstatic vision.

The Second Person of the Trinity is called by Origen, as by Clement,
"the Idea of Ideas." He is the spiritual activity of God, the
World-Principle, the One who is the basis of the manifold. Human souls
have fallen through sin from their union with the Logos, who became
incarnate in order to restore them to the state which they have lost.

Everything spiritual is indestructible; and therefore every spirit
must at last return to the Good. For the Good alone exists; evil has
no existence, no substance. This is a doctrine which we shall meet
with again. Man, he expressly asserts, cannot be consubstantial with
God, for man can change, while God is immutable. He does not see,
apparently, that, from the point of view of the Platonist, his
universalism makes man's freedom to change an illusion, as belonging
to time only and not to eternity.

While Origen was working out his great system of ecclesiastical
dogmatic, his younger contemporary Plotinus, outside the Christian
pale, was laying the coping-stone on the edifice of Greek philosophy
by a scheme of idealism which must always remain one of the greatest
achievements of the human mind.[125] In the history of Mysticism he
holds a more undisputed place than Plato; for some of the most
characteristic doctrines of Mysticism, which in Plato are only thrown
out tentatively, are in Plotinus welded into a compact whole. Among
the doctrines which first receive a clear exposition in his writings
are, his theory of the Absolute, whom he calls the One, or the Good;
and his theory of the Ideas, which differs from Plato's; for Plato
represents the mind of the World-Artist as immanent in the Idea of the
Good, while Plotinus makes the Ideas immanent in the universal mind;
in other words, the real world (which he calls the "intelligible
world," the sphere of the Ideas) is in the mind of God. He also, in
his doctrine of Vision, attaches an importance to _revelation_ which
was new in Greek philosophy. But his psychology is really the centre
of his system, and it is here that the Christian Church and Christian
Mysticism, in particular, is most indebted to him.

The _soul_ is with him the meeting-point of the intelligible and the
phenomenal. It is diffused everywhere.[126] Animals and vegetables
participate in it;[127] and the earth has a soul which sees and
hears.[128] The soul is immaterial and immortal, for it belongs to the
world of real existence, and nothing that _is_ can cease to be.[129]
The body is in the soul, rather than the soul in the body. The soul
creates the body by imposing form on matter, which in itself is
No-thing, pure indetermination, and next door to absolute
non-existence.[130] Space and time are only forms of our thought. The
concepts formed by the soul, by classifying the things of sense, are
said to be "Ideas unrolled and separate," that is, they are conceived
as separate in space and time, instead of existing all together in
eternity. The nature of the soul is triple; it is presented under
three forms, which are at the same time the three stages of perfection
which it can reach.[131] There is first and lowest the animal and
sensual soul, which is closely bound up with the body; then there is
the logical, reasoning soul, the distinctively _human_ part; and,
lastly, there is the superhuman stage or part, in which a man "thinks
himself according to the higher intelligence, with which he has become
identified, knowing himself no longer as a man, but as one who has
become altogether changed, and has transferred himself into the higher
region." The soul is thus "made one with Intelligence without losing
herself; so that they two are both one and two." This is exactly
Eckhart's doctrine of the _funkelein_, if we identify Plotinus'
[Greek: Nous] with Eckhart's "God," as we may fairly do. The soul is
not altogether incarnate in the body; part of it remains above, in the
intelligible world, whither it desires to return in its entirety.

The world is an image of the Divine Mind, which is itself a reflection
of the One. It is therefore not bad or evil. "What more beautiful
image of the Divine could there be," he asks, "than this world, except
the world yonder?" And so it is a great mistake to shut our eyes to
the world around us, "and all beautiful things.[132]" The love of
beauty will lead us up a long way--up to the point when the love of
the Good is ready to receive us. Only we must not let ourselves be
entangled by sensuous beauty. Those who do not quickly rise beyond
this first stage, to contemplate "ideal form, the universal mould,"
share the fate of Hylas; they are engulfed in a swamp, from which they
never emerge.

The universe resembles a vast chain, of which every being is a link.
It may also be compared to rays of light shed abroad from one centre.
Everything flowed from this centre, and everything desires to flow
back towards it. God draws all men and all things towards Himself as
a magnet draws iron, with a constant unvarying attraction. This theory
of emanation is often sharply contrasted with that of evolution, and
is supposed to be discredited by modern science; but that is only true
if the emanation is regarded as a process in time, which for the
Neoplatonist it is not.[133] In fact, Plotinus uses the word
"evolution" to explain the process of nature.[134]

The whole universe is one vast organism,[135] and if one member
suffer, all the members suffer with it.[136] This is why a "faint
movement of sympathy[137]" stirs within us at the sight of any living
creature. So Origen says, "As our body, while consisting of many
members, is yet held together by one soul, so the universe is to be
thought of as an immense living being, which is held together by one
soul--the power and the Logos of God." All existence is drawn upwards
towards God by a kind of centripetal attraction, which is unconscious
in the lower, half conscious in the higher organisms.

Christian Neoplatonism tended to identify the Logos, as the Second
Person of the Trinity, with the [Greek: Nous], "Mind" or
"Intelligence," of Plotinus, and rightly; but in Plotinus the word
Logos has a less exalted position, being practically what we call
"law," regarded as a vital force.[138]

Plotinus' Trinity are the One or the Good, who is above existence,
God as the Absolute; the Intelligence, who occupies the sphere of real
existence, organic unity comprehending multiplicity--the One-Many, as
he calls it, or, as we might call it, God as thought, God existing in
and for Himself; and the Soul, the One and Many, occupying the sphere
of appearance or imperfect reality--God as action. Soulless matter,
which only exists as a logical abstraction, is arrived at by looking
at things "in disconnexion, dull and spiritless." It is the sphere of
the "merely many," and is zero, as "the One who is not" is Infinity.

The Intelligible World is timeless and spaceless, and contains the
archetypes of the Sensible World. The Sensible World is _our_ view of
the Intelligible World. When we say it does not exist, we mean that we
shall not always see it in this form. The "Ideas" are the ultimate
form in which things are regarded by Intelligence, or by God. [Greek:
Nous] is described as at once [Greek: stasis] and [Greek:
kinêsis], that is, it is unchanging itself, but the whole cosmic
process, which is ever in flux, is eternally present to it as a
process.

Evil is disintegration.[139] In its essence it is not merely unreal,
but unreality as such. It can only _appear_ in conjunction with some
low degree of goodness which suggests to Plotinus the fine saying that
"vice at its worst is still human, being mixed with something
opposite to itself.[140]"

The "lower virtues," as he calls the duties of the average
citizen,[141] are not only purgative, but teach us the principles of
_measure_ and _rule_, which are Divine characteristics. This is
immensely important, for it is the point where Platonism and Asiatic
Mysticism finally part company.[142]

But in Plotinus, as in his Christian imitators, they do _not_ part
company. The "marching orders" of the true mystic are those given by
God to Moses on Sinai, "See that thou make all things according to the
pattern showed thee in the mount.[143]" But Plotinus teaches that, as
the sensible world is a shadow of the intelligible, so is action a
shadow of contemplation, suited to weak-minded persons.[144] This is
turning the tables on the "man of action" in good earnest; but it is
false Platonism and false Mysticism. It leads to the heartless
doctrine, quite unworthy of the man, that public calamities are to the
wise man only stage tragedies--or even stage comedies.[145] The moral
results of this self-centred individualism are exemplified by the
mediæval saint and visionary, Angela of Foligno, who congratulates
herself on the deaths of her mother, husband, and children, "who were
great obstacles in the way of God."

A few words must be said about the doctrine of ecstasy in Plotinus. He
describes the conditions under which the vision is granted in exactly
the same manner as some of the Christian mystics, e.g. St. Juan of the
Cross. "The soul when possessed by intense love of Him divests herself
of all form which she has, even of that which is derived from
Intelligence; for it is impossible, when in conscious possession of
any other attribute, either to behold or to be harmonised with Him.
Thus the soul must be neither good nor bad nor aught else, that she
may receive Him only, Him alone, she alone.[146]" While she is in this
state, the One suddenly appears, "with nothing between," "and they are
no more two but one; and the soul is no more conscious of the body or
of the mind, but knows that she has what she desired, that she is
where no deception can come, and that she would not exchange her bliss
for all the heaven of heavens."

What is the source of this strange aspiration to rise above Reason and
Intelligence, which is for Plotinus the highest category of Being, and
to come out "on the other side of Being" [Greek: epekeina tês
ousias]? Plotinus says himself elsewhere that "he who would rise above
Reason, falls outside it"; and yet he regards it as the highest
reward of the philosopher-saint to converse with the hypostatised
Abstraction who transcends all distinctions. The vision of the One is
no part of his philosophy, but is a mischievous accretion. For though
the "superessential Absolute" may be a logical necessity, we cannot
make it, even in the most transcendental manner, an object of sense,
without depriving it of its Absoluteness. What is really apprehended
is not the Absolute, but a kind of "form of formlessness," an idea not
of the Infinite, but of the Indefinite.[147] It is then impossible to
distinguish "the One," who is said to be above all distinctions, from
undifferentiated matter, the formless No-thing, which Plotinus puts at
the lowest end of the scale.

I believe that the Neoplatonic "vision" owes its place in the system
to two very different causes. First, there was the direct influence of
Oriental philosophy of the Indian type, which tries to reach the
universal by wiping out all the boundary-lines of the particular, and
to gain infinity by reducing self and the world to zero. Of this we
shall say more when we come to Dionysius. And, secondly, the blank
trance was a real psychical experience, quite different from the
"visions" which we have already mentioned. Evidence is abundant; but I
will content myself with one quotation.[148] In Amiel's _Journal_[149]
we have the following record of such a trance: "Like a dream which
trembles and dies at the first glimmer of dawn, all my past, all my
present, dissolve in me, and fall away from my consciousness at the
moment when it returns upon myself. I feel myself then stripped and
empty, like a convalescent who remembers nothing. My travels, my
reading, my studies, my projects, my hopes, have faded from my mind.
All my faculties drop away from me like a cloak that one takes off,
like the chrysalis case of a larva. I feel myself returning into a
more elementary form." But Amiel, instead of expecting the advent of
"the One" while in this state, feels that "the pleasure of it is
deadly, inferior in all respects to the joys of action, to the
sweetness of love, to the beauty of enthusiasm, or to the sacred
savour of accomplished duty.[149]"

We may now return to the Christian Platonists. We find in Methodius
the interesting doctrine that the indwelling Christ constantly repeats
His passion in remembrance, "for not otherwise could the Church
continually conceive believers, and bear them anew through the bath of
regeneration, unless Christ were repeatedly to die, emptying Himself
for the sake of each individual." "Christ must be born mentally
([Greek: moêtôs]) in every individual," and each individual saint,
by participating in Christ, "is born as a Christ." This is exactly the
language of Eckhart and Tauler, and it is first clearly heard in the
mouth of Methodius.[150] The new features are the great prominence
given to _immanence_--the mystical union as an _opus operatum_, and
the individualistic conception of the relation of Christ to the soul.

Of the Greek Fathers who followed Athanasius, I have only room to
mention Gregory of Nyssa, who defends the historical incarnation in
true mystical fashion by an appeal to spiritual experience. "We all
believe that the Divine is in everything, pervading and embracing it,
and dwelling in it. Why then do men take offence at the dispensation
of the mystery taught by the Incarnation of God, who is not, even now,
outside of mankind?... If the _form_ of the Divine presence is not now
the same, we are as much agreed that God is among us to-day, as that
He was in the world then." He argues in another place that all other
species of spiritual beings must have had their Incarnations of
Christ; a doctrine which was afterwards condemned, but which seems to
follow necessarily from the Logos doctrine. These arguments show very
clearly that for the Greek theologians Christ is a cosmic principle,
immanent in the world, though not confined by it; and that the scheme
of salvation is regarded as part of the constitution of the universe,
which is animated and sustained by the same Power who was fully
manifested in the Incarnation.

The question has been much debated, whether the influence of Persian
and Indian thought can be traced in Neoplatonism, or whether that
system was purely Greek.[151] It is a quite hopeless task to try to
disentangle the various strands of thought which make up the web of
Alexandrianism. But there is no doubt that the philosophers of Asia
were held in reverence at this period. Origen, in justifying an
esoteric mystery-religion for the educated, and a mythical religion
for the vulgar, appeals to the example of the "Persians and Indians."
And Philostratus, in his life of Apollonius of Tyana, says, or makes
his hero say, that while all wish to live in the presence of God, "the
Indians alone succeed in doing so." And certainly there are parts of
Plotinus, and still more of his successors, which strongly suggest
Asiatic influences.[152] When we turn from Alexandria to Syria, we
find Orientalism more rampant. Speculation among the Syrian monks of
the third, fourth, and fifth centuries was perhaps more unfettered
and more audacious than in any other branch of Christendom at any
period. Our knowledge of their theories is very limited, but one
strange specimen has survived in the book of Hierotheus,[153] which
the canonised Dionysius praises in glowing terms as an inspired
oracle--indeed, he professes that his own object in writing was merely
to popularise the teaching of his master. The book purports to be the
work of Hierotheus, a holy man converted by St. Paul, and an
instructor of the real Dionysius the Areopagite. A strong case has
been made out for believing the real author to be a Syrian mystic,
named Stephen bar Sudaili, who lived late in the fifth century. If
this theory is correct, the date of Dionysius will have to be moved
somewhat later than it has been the custom to fix it. The book of the
holy Hierotheus on "the hidden mysteries of the Divinity" has been but
recently discovered, and only a summary of it has as yet been made
public. But it is of great interest and importance for our subject,
because the author has no fear of being accused of Pantheism or any
other heresy, but develops his particular form of Mysticism to its
logical conclusions with unexampled boldness. He will show us better
even than his pupil Dionysius whither the method of "analysis" really
leads us.

The system of Hierotheus is not exactly Pantheism, but Pan-Nihilism.
Everything is an emanation from the Chaos of bare indetermination
which he calls God, and everything will return thither. There are
three periods of existence--(1) the present world, which is evil, and
is characterised by motion; (2) the progressive union with Christ, who
is all and in all--this is the period of rest; (3) the period of
fusion of all things in the Absolute. The three Persons of the
Trinity, he dares to say, will then be swallowed up, and even the
devils are thrown into the same melting-pot. Consistently with
mystical principles, these three world-periods are also phases in the
development of individual souls. In the first stage the mind aspires
towards its first principles; in the second it becomes Christ, the
universal Mind; in the third its personality is wholly merged. The
greater part of the book is taken up with the adventures of the Mind
in climbing the ladder of perfection; it is a kind of theosophical
romance, much more elaborate and fantastic than the "revelations" of
mediæval mystics. The author professes to have himself enjoyed the
ecstatic union more than once, and his method of preparing for it is
that of the Quietists: "To me it seems right to speak without words,
and understand without knowledge, that which is above words and
knowledge; this I apprehend to be nothing but the mysterious silence
and mystical quiet which destroys consciousness and dissolves forms.
Seek, therefore, silently and mystically, that perfect and primitive
union with the Arch-Good."

We cannot follow the "ascent of the Mind" through its various
transmutations. At one stage it is crucified, "with the soul on the
right and the body on the left"; it is buried for three days; it
descends into Hades;[154] then it ascends again, till it reaches
Paradise, and is united to the tree of life: then it descends below
all essences, and sees a formless luminous essence, and marvels that
it is _the same essence_ that it has seen on high. Now it comprehends
the truth, that God is consubstantial with the Universe, and that
there are no real distinctions anywhere. So it ceases to wander. "All
these doctrines," concludes the seer, "which are unknown even to
angels, have I disclosed to thee, my son" (Dionysius, probably).
"Know, then, that all nature will be confused with the Father--that
nothing will perish or be destroyed, but all will return, be
sanctified, united, and confused. Thus God will be all in all.[155]"

There can be no difficulty in classifying this Syrian philosophy of
religion. It is the ancient religion of the Brahmins, masquerading in
clothes borrowed from Jewish allegorists, half-Christian Gnostics,
Manicheans, Platonising Christians, and pagan Neoplatonists. We will
now see what St. Dionysius makes of this system, which he accepts as
from the hand of one who has "not only learned, but felt the things of
God.[156]"

The date and nationality of Dionysius are still matters of
dispute.[157] Mysticism changes so little that it is impossible to
determine the question by internal evidence, and for our purposes it
is not of great importance. The author was a monk, perhaps a Syrian
monk: he probably perpetrated a deliberate fraud--a pious fraud, in
his own opinion--by suppressing his own individuality, and fathering
his books on St. Paul's Athenian convert. The success of the imposture
is amazing, even in that uncritical age, and gives much food for
reflection. The sixth century saw nothing impossible in a book
full of the later Neoplatonic theories--those of Proclus rather
than Plotinus[158]--having been written in the first century.
And the mediæval Church was ready to believe that this strange
semi-pantheistic Mysticism dropped from the lips of St. Paul.[159]

Dionysius is a theologian, not a visionary like his master Hierotheus.
His main object is to present Christianity in the guise of a Platonic
mysteriosophy, and he uses the technical terms of the mysteries
whenever he can.[160] His philosophy is that of his day--the later
Neoplatonism, with its strong Oriental affinities.

Beginning with the Trinity, he identifies God the Father with the
Neoplatonic Monad, and describes Him as "superessential
Indetermination," "super-rational Unity," "the Unity which unifies
every unity," "superessential Essence," "irrational Mind," "unspoken
Word," "the absolute No-thing which is above all existence.[161]"
Even now he is not satisfied with the tortures to which he has
subjected the Greek language. "No monad or triad," he says, "can
express the all-transcending hiddenness of the all-transcending
super-essentially super-existing super-Deity.[162]" But even in the
midst of this barbarous jargon he does not quite forget his Plato.
"The Good and Beautiful," he says, "are the cause of all things that
are; and all things love and aspire to the Good and Beautiful, which
are, indeed, the sole objects of their desire." "Since, then, the
Absolute Good and Beautiful is honoured by eliminating all qualities
from it, the non-existent also ([Greek: to mê on]) must
participate in the Good and Beautiful." This pathetic absurdity shows
what we are driven to if we try to graft Indian nihilism upon the
Platonic doctrine of ideas. Plotinus tried hard to show that his First
Person was very different from his lowest category--non-existent
"matter"; but if we once allow ourselves to define the Infinite as the
Indefinite, the conclusion which he deprecated cannot long be averted.

"God is the Being of all that is." Since, then, Being is identical
with God or Goodness, evil, as such, does not exist; it only exists by
its participation in good. Evil, he says, is not in things which
exist; a good tree cannot bear evil fruit; it must, therefore, have
another origin. But this is dualism, and must be rejected.[163] Nor
is evil in God, nor of God; nor in the angels; nor in the human soul;
nor in the brutes; nor in inanimate nature; nor in matter. Having thus
hunted evil out of every corner of the universe, he asks--Is evil,
then, simply privation of good? But privation is not evil in itself.
No; evil must arise from "disorderly and inharmonious motion." As dirt
has been defined as matter in the wrong place, so evil is good in the
wrong place. It arises by a kind of accident; "all evil is done with
the object of gaining some good; no one does evil as evil." Evil in
itself is that which is "nohow, nowhere, and no thing"; "God sees evil
as good." Students of modern philosophy will recognise a theory which
has found influential advocates in our own day: that evil needs only
to be supplemented, rearranged, and transmuted, in order to take its
place in the universal harmony.[164]

All things flow out from God, and all will ultimately return to Him. The
first emanation is the Thing in itself ([Greek: auto to einai]), which
corresponds to the Plotinian [Greek: Nous], and to the Johannine Logos.
He also calls it "Life in itself" and "Wisdom in itself" ([Greek:
autozôê, autosophia]). Of this he says, "So then the Divine Wisdom in
knowing itself will know all things. It will know the material
immaterially, and the divided inseparably, and the many as one ([Greek:
heniaiôs]), knowing all things by the standard of absolute unity." These
important speculations are left undeveloped by Dionysius, who merely
states them dogmatically. The universe is evolved from the Son, whom he
identifies with the "Thing in itself," "Wisdom," or "Life in itself." In
creation "the One is said to become multiform." The world is a necessary
process of God's being. He created it "as the sun shines," "without
premeditation or purpose." The Father is simply One; the Son has also
plurality, namely, the words (or reasons) which make existence ([Greek:
tous ousiopoious logous]), which theology calls fore-ordinations
([Greek: proorismous]). But he does not teach that all separate
existences will ultimately be merged in the One. The highest Unity gives
to all the power of striving, on the one hand, to share in the One; on
the other, to persist in their own individuality. And in more than one
passage he speaks of God as a Unity comprehending, not abolishing
differences.[165] "God is before all things"; "Being is in Him, and He
is not in Being." Thus Dionysius tries to safeguard the transcendence of
God, and to escape Pantheism. The outflowing process is appropriated by
the mind by the _positive_ method--the downward path through finite
existences: its conclusion is, "God is All." The return journey is by
the _negative_ road, that of ascent to God by abstraction and analysis:
its conclusion is, "All is not God.[166]" The negative path is the high
road of a large school of mystics; I will say more about it presently.
The mystic, says Dionysius, "must leave behind all things both in the
sensible and in the intelligible worlds, till he enters into the
darkness of nescience that is truly mystical." This "Divine darkness,"
he says elsewhere, "is the light unapproachable" mentioned by St. Paul,
"a deep but dazzling darkness," as Henry Vaughan calls it. It is dark
through excess of light[167]. This doctrine really renders nugatory what
he has said about the persistence of distinctions after the restitution
of all things; for as "all colours agree in the dark," so, for us, in
proportion as we attain to true knowledge, all distinctions are lost in
the absolute.

The soul is bipartite. The higher portion sees the "Divine images"
directly, the lower by means of symbols. The latter are not to be
despised, for they are "true impressions of the Divine characters,"
and necessary steps, which enable us to "mount to the one undivided
truth by analogy." This is the way in which we should use the
Scriptures. They have a symbolic truth and beauty, which is
intelligible only to those who can free themselves from the "puerile
myths[168]" (the language is startling in a saint of the Church!) in
which they are sometimes embedded.

Dionysius has much to say about love[169], but he uses the word
[Greek: erôs], which is carefully avoided in the New Testament. He
admits that the Scriptures "often use" [Greek: agapê], but justifies
his preference for the other word by quoting St. Ignatius, who says of
Christ, "My Love [Greek: erôs] is crucified.[170]" Divine Love, he
finely says, is "an eternal circle, from goodness, through goodness,
and to goodness."

The mediæval mystics were steeped in Dionysius, though his system
received from them certain modifications under the influence of
Aristotelianism. He is therefore, for us, a very important figure; and
there are two parts of his scheme which, I think, require fuller
consideration than has been given them in this very slight sketch. I
mean the "negative road" to God, and the pantheistic tendency.

The theory that we can approach God only by analysis or abstraction has
already been briefly commented on. It is no invention of Dionysius.
Plotinus uses similar language, though his view of God as the fulness of
all _life_ prevented him from following the negative path with
thoroughness. But in Proclus we find the phrases, afterwards so common,
about "sinking into the Divine Ground," "forsaking the manifold for the
One," and so forth. Basilides, long before, evidently carried the
doctrine to its extremity: "We must not even call God ineffable," he
says, "since this is to make an assertion about Him; He is above every
name that is named.[171]" It was a commonplace of Christian instruction
to say that "in Divine matters there is great wisdom in confessing our
ignorance"--this phrase occurs in Cyril's catechism.[172] But confessing
our ignorance is a very different thing from refusing to make any
positive statements about God. It is true that all our language about
God must be inadequate and symbolic; but that is no reason for
discarding all symbols, as if we could in that way know God as He knows
Himself. At the bottom, the doctrine that God can be described only by
negatives is neither Christian nor Greek, but belongs to the old
religion of India. Let me try to state the argument and its consequence
in a clear form. Since God is the Infinite, and the Infinite is the
antithesis of the finite, every attribute which can be affirmed of a
finite being may be safely denied of God. Hence God can only be
_described_ by negatives; He can only be _discovered_ by stripping off
all the qualities and attributes which veil Him; He can only be
_reached_ by divesting ourselves of all the distinctions of personality,
and sinking or rising into our "uncreated nothingness"; and He can only
be _imitated_ by aiming at an abstract spirituality, the passionless
"apathy" of an universal which is nothing in particular. Thus we see
that the whole of those developments of Mysticism which despise symbols,
and hope to see God by shutting the eye of sense, hang together. They
all follow from the false notion of God as the abstract Unity
transcending, or rather excluding, all distinctions. Of course, it is
not intended to _exclude_ distinctions, but to rise above them; but the
process of abstraction, or subtraction, as it really is, can never lead
us to "the One.[173]" The only possible unification with such an
Infinite is the [Greek: atermôn nêgretos hupnos] of Nirvana.[174] Nearly
all that repels us in mediæval religious life--its "other-worldliness"
and passive hostility to civilisation--the emptiness of its ideal
life--its maltreatment of the body--its disparagement of family
life--the respect which it paid to indolent contemplation--springs from
this one root. But since no one who remains a Christian can exhibit the
results of this theory in their purest form, I shall take the liberty of
quoting a few sentences from a pamphlet written by a native Indian judge
who I believe is still living. His object is to explain and commend to
Western readers the mystical philosophy of his own country:[175]--"He
who in perfect rest rises from the body and attains the highest light,
comes forth in his own proper form. This is the immortal soul. The
ascent is by the ladder of one's thoughts. To know God, one must first
know one's own spirit in its purity, unspotted by thought. The soul is
hidden behind the veil of thought, and only when thought is worn off,
becomes visible to itself. This stage is called knowledge of the soul.
Next is realised knowledge of God, who rises from the bosom of the soul.
This is the end of progress; differentiation between self and others has
ceased. All the world of thought and senses is melted into an ocean
without waves or current. This dissolution of the world is also known as
the death of the sinful or worldly 'I,' which veils the true Ego. Then
the formless Being of the Deity is seen in the regions of pure
consciousness beyond the veil of thought. Consciousness is wholly
distinct from thought and senses; it knows them; they do not know it.
The only proof is an appeal to spiritual experience." In the highest
stage one is absolutely inert, "knowing nothing in particular.[176]"

Most of this would have been accepted as precious truth by the
mediæval Church mystics.[177] The words nakedness, darkness,
nothingness, passivity, apathy, and the like, fill their pages. We
shall find that this time-honoured phraseology was adhered to long
after the grave moral dangers which beset this type of Mysticism had
been recognised. Tauler, for instance, who lays the axe to the root of
the tree by saying, "Christ never arrived at the emptiness of which
these men talk," repeats the old jargon for pages together. German
Mysticism really rested on another basis, and when Luther had the
courage to break with ecclesiastical tradition, the _via negativa_
rapidly disappeared within the sphere of his influence.

But it held sway for a long time--so long that we cannot complain if
many have said, "This is the essence of Mysticism." Mysticism is such
a vague word, that one must not quarrel with any "private
interpretation" of it; but we must point out that this limitation
excludes the whole army of symbolists, a school which, in Europe at
least, has shown more vitality than introspective Mysticism. I regard
the _via negativa_ in metaphysics, religion, and ethics as the great
accident of Christian Mysticism. The break-up of the ancient
civilisation, with the losses and miseries which it brought upon
humanity, and the chaos of brutal barbarism in which Europe weltered
for some centuries, caused a widespread pessimism and world-weariness
which is foreign to the temper of Europe, and which gave way to
energetic and full-blooded activity in the Renaissance and
Reformation. Asiatic Mysticism is the natural refuge of men who have
lost faith in civilisation, but will not give up faith in God. "Let us
fly hence to our dear country!" We hear the words already in
Plotinus--nay, even in Plato. The sun still shone in heaven, but on
earth he was eclipsed. Mysticism cuts too deep to allow us to live
comfortably on the surface of life; and so all "the heavy and the
weary weight of all this unintelligible world" pressed upon men and
women till they were fain to throw it off, and seek peace in an
invisible world of which they could not see even a shadow round about
them.

But I do not think that the negative road is a pure error. There is a
negative side in religion, both in thought and practice. We are first
impelled to seek the Infinite by the limitations of the finite, which
appear to the soul as bonds and prison walls. It is natural first to
think of the Infinite as that in which these barriers are done away.
And in practice we must die daily, if our inward man is to be daily
renewed. We must die to our lower self, not once only but continually,
so that we may rise on stepping stones of many dead selves to higher
things.[178] We must die to our first superficial views of the world
around us, nay, even to our first views of God and religion, unless
the childlike in our faith is by arrest of growth to become the
childish. All the good things of life have first to be renounced, and
then given back to us, before they can be really ours. It was
necessary that these truths should be not only taught, but lived
through. The individual has generally to pass through the quagmire of
the "everlasting No," before he can set his feet on firm ground; and
the Christian races, it seems, were obliged to go through the same
experience. Moreover, there is a sense in which all moral effort aims
at destroying the conditions of its own existence, and so ends
logically in self-negation. Our

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