II. Mysticism and the Limits of Human Knowledge and Experience

But have not even the most sober-minded of the Partial Mystics greatly exceeded the limits of human knowledge, more or less continuously, throughout their conclusions? Is Kant completely in the wrong? And are not the Positivists right in restricting all certain cognition to the experiences of the senses and to the Mathematico-Physical Sciences built upon those experiences? And, again, is there such a thing at all as specifically Mystical Experience or Knowledge? And, if so, what is its worth?—I must keep the elaboration of the (ultimately connected) question, as to the nature of the realities experienced or known—as to the human spirit and the Divine Spirit, and their inter-relations, hence as to Pantheism and Personality—for the next chapter, and can here but prepare the ground for it, by the elucidation of certain important points in general Epistemology, and of the more obvious characteristics of Mystical apprehension.

1. Positivist Epistemology an error.

As regards general Epistemology, we may well take up the following positions.

(1) We cannot but reject, with Prof. Volkelt, as a mere vulgar error, the Positivist limitation of trans-subjectively valid knowledge to direct sense-perception and to the laws of the so-called Empirical Sciences. For, as he shows conclusively, the only fact which is absolutely indubitable, is that of the bare occurrence of our (possibly utterly misleading) sensations and impressions. Some of these are, it is true, accompanied by a certain pressure upon our minds to credit them with trans-subjective validity; and the fact of this (possibly quite misleading) pressure is itself part of our undeniable experience. Yet we can, if we will, treat this pressure also as no more than a meaningless occurrence, and not as evidencing the trans-subjective reality which it seems to indicate. No man, it is true, has ever succeeded in consistently carrying out such a refusal of assent,—since no scepticism is so thorough but that it derives its very power, against the trans-subjective validity of some of the impressions furnished with trans-subjective pressure, from an utterly inconsistent acceptance, as trans-subjectively valid, of other impressions furnished with a precisely similar trans-subjective intimation. Yet the fact remains that, in all such cases of trans-subjective pressure, the mind has “an immediate experience of which the content is precisely this, that we are justified in proceeding with these concepts into what is absolutely beyond the possibility of being experienced by us.” “Positivistic Cognition,” to which no man, Positivist included, can systematically restrict himself, “abides absolutely within the immediately experienced. Logical Cognition,” which every man practises surreptitiously if not avowedly, “exceeds experience at every step, and conceptually determines what is absolutely incapable of being experienced, yet the justification for this kind of cognition is, here also, an immediately experienced certitude.”

We have, “then, immediately experienced presentations which of themselves already constitute a knowledge,—our first knowledge, and the only one possessed of absolute indubitableness.” And some of these presentations “are accompanied by a kind of immediate certainty or revelation that, in some way, they reach right into the Thing-in-Itself, that they directly express something objectively valid, present in that Thing-in-Itself”; and “this pressure ever involves, should the contradictory of what it enunciates be admitted as objectively existent, the self-destruction of objective reality.”—“And this pressure can, in any one case, be resisted by the mind; an act of endorsement, of a kind of faith, is necessary on the part of the mind: for these presentations, furnished with such pressure, do not transform themselves into the Things-in-Themselves directly,—we do not come to see objective reality simply face to face.” And we find thus that “in principle the entire range of reality, right down to its last depths, lies open to cognition, proceeding according to the principle of the necessities of thought. For he who recognizes this principle, thereby admits that the necessities of thought have trans-subjective significance, so that, if any affirmation concerning the ultimate reasons and depths of Reality can be shown to be necessary in thought, this affirmation possesses as rightful a claim to trans-subjective validity, as any determination, necessary in thought, which concern only such parts of the Thing-in-Itself as are the nearest neighbours to our sense-impressions concerning it. Everywhere our principle leaves us only the question whether thought, as a matter of fact, does or does not react, under the given problems, with the said logical constraint and pressure.”

(2) We can next insist upon how we have thus already found that the acquisition of even so rudimentary an outline of Reality, as to be ever in part presupposed in the attacks of the most radical sceptics, necessarily involves a certain emotive disposition and volitional action. And, over and above this partially withholdable assent, such quite elementary thinking will also ever require the concomitant energizing of the picturing faculty. And again, the more interior and spiritual are this thinking’s subject-matters, the more will it be permeated by, and be inseparable from, deep feeling. It is then all man’s faculties conjoined, it is the whole man, who normally thus gives, without reflecting on it, his all, to gain even this elementary nucleus of certainty as to Reality. “Even receptivity,” as Prof. Ward well says, “is activity”; for even where non-voluntary, it is never indifferent. “Not mere receptivity, but conative or selective activity, is the essence of subjective reality.” Or, with Prof. Volkelt: “Purely isolated thought,”—which, in actual life ever more or less of a fiction, is not rarely set up by individuals as an ideal,—“is, however intensified and interiorized, something ever only formal, something, in the final resort, insignificant and shadowy.”—And, concurrently with the recognition of this fact, man will come to find that “the ultimate Substance or Power of and in the world,”—that objective reality which is the essential counterpart to his own subjective reality,—“is something possessed of a true, deep content and of a positive aim, and alive according to the analogy of a willing individual. The world would thus be a Logical Process only in the sense that this concrete fundamental Power is bound by the ideal necessity of its own nature.”

(3) And again, I would note with Volkelt how Kant, owing to his notoriously intense natural tendency to universal Dualism, never admits, even as a point for preliminary settlement, the possibility that our subjective conceptions of Objective Reality may have some true relation to that Reality. His professed ignorance as to the nature of that Reality changes instantaneously, quite unbeknown to himself, into an absolutely unvarying, negative knowledge concerning that Reality,—he simply knows that it is utterly heterogeneous to our conception of it. Thus he finds the view that “God has implanted into the human mind certain categories and concepts of a kind spontaneously to harmonize with things,” to be “the most preposterous solution that we could possibly choose.” Thus the epistemological difference between Presentation and Thing-in-Itself becomes a metaphysical exclusion of each by the other. And yet we know of no fact, whether of experience or of thought, to prevent something which is my presentation existing also, in so far as it is the content of that presentation, outside of this presentment. Indeed Psychology and Epistemology have, driven by every reason and stopped by none, more and more denied and refuted this excessive, indeed gratuitous, Dualism.

As Prof. Henry Jones well puts it: “The hypothesis that knowledge consists of two elements which are so radically different as to be capable of description only by defining each negatively in terms of the other, the pure manifold or differences of sense, and a purely universal or relative thought,” breaks down under the fact that “pure thought and the manifold of sense pass into each other, the one proving meaningless and the other helpless in its isolation.” These elements “are only aspects of one fact, co-relates mutually penetrating each other, distinguishable in thought, but not separable as existences.” Hence we must not “make logical remnants do the work of an intelligence which is never purely formal, upon a material which is nowhere a pure manifold”: for “the difference between the primary data of thought on the one hand, and the highest kinds of systematized knowledge on the other, is no difference … between a mere particular and a mere universal, or a mere content and a mere form; but it is a difference in comprehensiveness of articulation.” However primary may be the distinction of subjective and objective, “we are not entitled to forget the unity of the reality in which the distinction takes place.” If we begin with the purely subjective, we must doubtless end there; but then, in spite of certain, never self-consistent, philosophical hypotheses, “the purely subjective is as completely beyond our reach as the purely objective.”

Prof. Ward indeed pushes the matter, I think rightly, even a step further. He points out how readily, owing to the ambiguous term “consciousness,” “we confound experience with knowledge”; but holds that experience is the wider term. “Knowledge must fall within experience, and experience extend beyond knowledge. Thus I am not left to infer my own being from my knowing.… Objective reality is immediately ‘given,’ or immediately ‘there,’ not inferred.” But the subjective reality is not immediately given, immediately there. “There is no such parallelism between the two.… The subjective factor in experience is not datum but recipiens: it is not ‘there’ but ‘here’; a ‘here’ relative to that ‘there.’” Nothing of this, I think, really conflicts with the positions we have adopted from Volkelt, since “experience” is evidently used here in a sense inclusive of the presentations, the trans-subjective pressure and the endorsement of the latter’s estimations,—the three elements which, according also to Volkelt, form an organism which even the most daring subjectivism can never consistently reject. At most, the term “experience” is more extended in Prof. Ward, since it includes all three elements, than in Prof. Volkelt, who restricts it to the two first.

(4) And further, we must take care to find room for the only unforced explanation of the wondrous fact that “although,” as Dr. Volkelt strikingly says, “the various schools of philosophy “—this is largely true of those of theology also,—are “in part essentially determined by historical currents, forces which follow other standards than those of logical necessity”: yet “these points of view and modes of thought, thus determined by” apparently non-logical “history, subserve nevertheless logical necessity, indeed represent its” slow, intermittent, yet real “progressive realization.” The explanation is that “the forces of history are, unbeknown to themselves, planned, in their depths, for agreement with the necessities and ends of thought and of truth.” “And thus the different spheres” and levels “of spiritual life and endeavour appear as originally intended for each other, so that each sphere, whilst consciously striving only after its own particular laws and standards, in reality furthers the objects of the rest.” For “only the operative presence of such an original, teleological inter-relation can explain how historic forces, by their influence upon, and determination of, philosophical thinking, can, instead of staining and spoiling it by the introduction of religious, artistic, political, and other motives, actually advance it most essentially.”—Here then we get a still further enlargement of the already wide range of interaction, within the human mind, between forces which, at first sight, appear simply external to, indeed destructive of, each other; and a corresponding increase in the indications of the immense breadth, depth, and closeness of inter-penetration characterizing the operative ground-plan, the pre-existing Harmony and Teleology of the fundamental forces of Reality. Thus once more man’s spirit appears as possessed of a large interiority; and as met, supported and penetrated, by a Spirit stupendously rich in spiritual energy.

(5) And finally, let us never forget that “the only experience immediately accessible to us” men, “is our own; this, in spite of its complexity, is the first we know.” And this means that we have direct experience and anything like adequate knowledge, (because knowledge from within,) not of things, but of mind and will, of spiritual life struggling within an animal life; and that in face, say, of plant-life, and still more of a pebble or of a star, we have a difficulty as to an at all appropriate and penetrative apprehension, which, if opposite to, is also in a sense greater than, the difficulty inherent to our apprehension of God Himself. For towards this latter apprehension we have got the convergent testimony of certain great, never quite obliterable facts without us and within ourselves.

There is the upward trend, the ever-increased complexity of organization, the growing depth and interiority in the animate world,—Plant-Life itself being already, very probably, possessed of a vague consciousness, and Man, at the other end of the scale, summing up the tendency of the whole series in a deep self-consciousness which, at the same time, makes him alone keenly aware of the great difference, in the midst of the true kinship, between himself and the humbler members of that one world. For Natural Selection can but describe the results and explain part of the method of this upward trend, but cannot penetrate to its ultimate cause and end.

There is, again, the great, deep fact of the mutually necessary, mutually stimulating presence and interaction, within our own mental and spiritual life, of sense-impressions, imaginative picturings, rational categories, emotional activities, and volitional acts; and, again, of subject and object; and, once more, of general, philosophic Thought and the contingencies of History. For the immanental inter-adaptation and Teleology, that mysteriously link together all these, profoundly disparate-seeming, realms and forces is far too deep-down, it too much surprises, and exacts too much of us, it too much reveals itself, precisely at the end of much labour of our own and in our truest and most balanced moods, as the mostly unarticulated presupposition and explanation of both the great cost and the rich fruitfulness of every approximately complete actuation of all our faculties, each with and in the others, and in and with their appropriate objects, to be permanently ruled out of court as mere sentimentalism or baseless apologetic.

And there is the deepest fact of all, the one which precisely constitutes the specific characteristic of all true humanity, the sense of mental oppression, of intolerable imprisonment inflicted by the very idea of the merely contingent, the simply phenomenal and Finite, and the accompanying noble restlessness and ready dwarfing of all man’s best achievements by the agent’s own Ideal of Perfection. For this latter sense is, precisely in the greater souls, so spontaneous and so keen, so immensely operative in never leaving our, otherwise indolent and readily self-delusive, self-complacent race fully and long satisfied with anything that passes entirely away, or that is admittedly merely a subjective fancy, even though this fancy be shared by every member of the human race; and this sense operates so explosively within Sceptics as well as Dogmatists, within would-be Agnostic Scientists as well as in the most Intellectualist Theologians; it so humbles, startles, and alone so braces, sweetens, widens, indeed constitutes our humanity: as to be unforcedly explicable only by admitting that man’s spirit’s experience is not shut up within man’s own clear analysis or picturing of it; that it is indefinitely wider, and somehow, in its deepest reaches, is directly touched, affected, in part determined, by the Infinite Spirit Itself. “Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is,” says Goethe. Yes, but it was a man, Goethe, it is at bottom all men, in proportion as they are fully, sensitively such, who have somehow discovered this truth; who suffer from its continuous evidences, as spontaneously as from the toothache or from insomnia; and whose deepest moments give them a vivid sense of how immensely the Spirit, thus directly experienced by their spirit, transcends, and yet also is required by and is immanent in, their keen sense of the Finitude and Contingency present throughout the world of sense-perception and of clear intellectual formulation.

(6) With Plato and Plotinus, Clement of Alexandria and St. Augustine, St. Bernard, Cardinal Nicolas of Coes and Leibniz in the past; with Cardinal Newman, Professors Maurice Blondel and Henri Bergson, Siegwart, Eucken, Troeltsch and Tiele, Igino Petrone and Edward Caird, in the present; with the explicit assent of practically all the great Mystics of all ages and countries, and the implicit instinct, and at least partial, practical admission, of all sane and developed human souls; we will then have to postulate here, not merely an intellectual reasoning upon finite data, which would somehow result in so operative a sense of the Infinite; nor even simply a mental category of Infinitude which, evoked in man by and together with the apprehension of things finite, would, somehow, have so massive, so explosive an effect against our finding satisfaction in the other categories, categories which, after all, would not be more subjective, than itself: but the ontological presence of, and the operative penetration by the Infinite Spirit, within the human spirit. This Spirit’s presence would produce, on occasion of man’s apprehension or volition of things contingent and finite, the keen sense of disappointment, of contrast with the Simultaneous, Abiding, and Infinite.—And let the reader note that this is not Ontologism, for we here neither deduce our other ideas from the idea of God, nor do we argue from ideas and their clarity, but from living forces and their operativeness.

We thus get man’s spirit placed within a world of varying degrees of depth and interiority, the different levels and kinds of which are necessary, as so many materials, stimulants, obstacles, and objects, for the development of that spirit’s various capacities, which themselves again interact the one upon the other, and react upon and within that world. For if man’s experience of God is not a mere discursively reasoned conclusion from the data of sense, yet man’s spirit experiences the Divine Spirit and the spirits of his fellow-men on occasion of, and as a kind of contrast, background, and support to, the actuation of his senses, imagination, reason, feeling, and volition, and, at least at first and in the long run, not otherwise.

2. No distinct faculty of Mystical apprehension.

Is there, then, strictly speaking, such a thing as a specifically distinct, self-sufficing, purely Mystical mode of apprehending Reality? I take it, distinctly not; and that all the errors of the Exclusive Mystic proceed precisely from the contention that Mysticism does constitute such an entirely separate, completely self-supported kind of human experience.—This denial does not, of course, mean that soul does not differ quite indefinitely from soul, in the amount and kind of the recollective, intuitive, deeply emotive element possessed and exercised by it concurrently or alternately with other elements,—the sense of the Infinite within and without the Finite springing up in the soul on occasion of its contact with the Contingent; nor, again, that these more or less congenital differences and vocations amongst souls cannot and are not still further developed by grace and heroism into types of religious apprehension and life, so strikingly divergent, as, at first sight, to seem hardly even supplementary the one to the other. But it means that, in even the most purely contingent-seeming soul, and in its apparently but Institutional and Historical assents and acts, there ever is, there never can fail to be, some, however implicit, however slight, however intermittent, sense and experience of the Infinite, evidenced by at least some dissatisfaction with the Finite, except as this Finitude is an occasion for growth in, and a part-expression of, that Infinite, our true home. And, again, it means, that even the most exclusively mystical-seeming soul ever depends, for the fulness and healthiness of even the most purely mystical of its acts and states, as really upon its past and present contacts with the Contingent, Temporal, and Spacial, and with social facts and elements, as upon its movement of concentration, and the sense and experience, evoked on occasion of those contacts or of their memories, of the Infinite within and around those finitudes and itself.

Only thus does Mysticism attain to its true, full dignity, which consists precisely in being, not everything in any one soul, but something in every soul of man; and in presenting, at its fullest, the amplest development, among certain special natures with the help of certain special graces and heroisms, of what, in some degree and form, is present in every truly human soul, and in such a soul’s every, at all genuine and complete, grace-stimulated religious act and state. And only thus does it, as Partial Mysticism, retain all the strength and escape the weaknesses and dangers of would-be Pure Mysticism, as regards the mode and character of Religious Experience, Knowledge, and Life.

3. The first four pairs of weaknesses and strengths special to the Mystics.

I take the Mystic’s weaknesses and strengths to go together in pairs, and that there are seven such pairs. Only the first four shall be considered here; the fifth and the last two couples are reserved respectively for the following, and for the last section, of this chapter.

(1) The Mystic finds his joy in the recollective movement and moments of the soul; and hence ever tends, qua Mystic, to ignore and neglect, or to over-minimize, the absolutely necessary contact of the mind and will with the things of sense. He will often write as though, could he but completely shut off his mind from all sense-perceptions,—even of grand scenery, or noble works of art, or scenes of human devotedness, suffering, and peace,—it would be proportionately fuller of God.—Yet this drift is ever more or less contradicted by his practice, often at the very moment of such argument: for no religious writers are more prolific in vivid imagery derived from noble sensible objects and scenes than are the Mystics,—whose characteristic mood is an intuition, a resting in a kind of vision of things invisible.—And this contradiction is satisfactory, since it is quite certain that if the mind, heart, and will could be completely absorbed, (from the first or for any length of time), in the flight from the sensible, it would become as dangerously empty and languid concerning things invisible themselves as, with nothing but an outgoing occupation with the sensible, it would become distracted and feverish. It is this aversion from Outgoing and from the world of sense, of the contemporaneous contingencies environing the soul, that gives to Mysticism, as such, its shadowy character, its floating above, rather than penetrating into, reality,—in contradiction, where this tendency becomes too exclusive, to the Incarnational philosophy and practice of Christianity, and indeed of every complete and sound psychology.

And yet the Incoming, what the deep religious thinker Kierkegaard has so profoundly analyzed in his doctrine of “Repetition,”—recollection and peaceful browsing among the materials brought in by the soul’s Outgoing,—is most essential. Indeed it is the more difficult, and, though never alone sufficient, yet ever the more centrally religious, of the two movements necessary for the acquisition of spiritual experience and life.

(2) Again, the Mystic finds his full delight in all that approximates most nearly to Simultaneity, and Eternity; and consequently turns away, qua Mystic, from the Successive and Temporal presented by History.—Yet here also there are two movements, both necessary for man. He will, by the one, once more in fullest sympathy with the grand Christian love of lowliness, strive hard to get into close, and ever closer, touch with the successivenesses of History, especially those of Our Lord’s earthly life and of His closest followers. Without this touch he will become empty, inflated, as St. Teresa found to be the case with herself, when following the false principle of deliberate and systematic abstraction from Christ’s temporal words and acts: for man’s soul, though it does not energize in mere Clock-Time, cannot grow if we attempt to eliminate Duration, that interpenetrative, overlapping kind of Succession, which is already, as it were, halfway to the Simultaneity of God. It is this aversion from Clock-Time Succession and even from Duration which gives to Mysticism, as such, its remarkable preference for Spacial images, and its strong bent towards concepts of a Static and Determinist type, profoundly antagonistic though these are to the Dynamic and Libertarian character which ever marks the occasions and conditions for the acquiring of religious experience.

And yet, here again, the Mystic is clinging, even one-sidedly, to the more central, more specifically religious, of the two movements. For it is certain that God is indeed Simultaneous and Eternal; that it is right thus to try and apprehend, what appears to us stretched out successively in time, as simultaneously present in the one great Now of God; and that our deepest experiences testify to History itself being ever more than mere process, and to have within it a certain contribution from, a certain approximation to and expression of, Eternity.

(3) And again, the Mystic finds his joy in the sense of a Pure Reception of the Purely Objective; that God should do all and should receive the credit of all, is here a primary requirement.—And yet all penetrating Psychology, Epistemology, and Ethics find this very receptivity, however seemingly only such, to be, where healthy and fruitful, ever an action, a conation of the soul,—an energizing and volition which, as we have seen, are present in its very cognition of anything affirmed by it as trans-subjective, from a grain of sand up to the great God Himself. This antipathy to even a relative, God-willed independence and power of self-excitation, gives Mysticism, as such, its constant bent towards Quietism; and hence, with regard to the means and nature of knowledge, its tendency to speak of such a purely spiritual effect as Grace, and such purely spiritual beings as the Soul and God, as though they were literally sensible objects sensibly impressing themselves upon the Mystic’s purely passive senses. This tendency reinforces the Mystic’s thirst for pictorial, simultaneous presentation and intuition of the verities apprehended by him, but is in curious contradiction to his even excessive conceptions concerning the utter separateness and difference from all things material of all such spiritual realities.—And yet, here too, it is doubtless deeply important ever to remember, and to act in accordance with, the great truth that God Himself is apprehended by us only if there be action of our own, and that, from elementary moral dispositions right up to consummate sanctity, the whole man has ever to act and will more and more manysidedly, fully, and persistently.

But the corresponding, indeed the anterior and more centrally religious, truth here is, that all this range of our activity could never begin, and, if it could, would lose itself in vacuo, unless there already were Reality around it and within it, as the stimulus and object for all this energizing,—a Reality which, as Prof. Ward has told us with respect to Epistemology, must, for a certain dim but most true experience of ours, be simply given, not sought and found. And indeed the operations of Grace are ever more or less penetrating and soliciting, though nowhere forcing, the free assent of the natural soul: we should be unable to seek God unless He had already found us and had thus, deep down within ourselves, caused us to seek and find Him. And hence thus again the most indispensable, the truest form of experience underlies reasoning, and is a kind of not directly analyzable, but indirectly most operative, intuition or instinct of the soul.

(4) And yet the Mystic, in one of his moods (the corresponding, contradictory mood of a Pantheistic identification of his true self with God shall be considered in our next chapter), finds his joy in so exalting the difference of nature between himself and God, and the incomprehensibility of God for every finite intelligence, as,—were we to press his words,—to cut away all ground for any experience or knowledge sufficient to justify him in even a guess as to what God is like or is not like, and for any attempt at intercourse with, and at becoming like unto, One who is so utterly unlike himself.

4. Criticism of the fourth pair, mystical “Agnosticism.”

Now this acutely paradoxical position, of an entire certainty as to God’s complete difference from ourselves, has been maintained and articulated, with a consistency and vividness beyond that of any Mystic known to me, by that most stimulating, profound, tragically non-mystical, religious ascetic and thinker, the Lutheran Dane, Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855). His early friend, but philosophical opponent, Prof. Höffding, describes him as insisting that “the suffering incident to the religious life is necessarily involved in the very nature of the religious relation. For the relation of the soul to God is a relation to a Being utterly different from man, a Being which cannot confront man as his Superlative and Ideal, and which nevertheless is to rule within him.” “What, wonder, then,” as Kierkegaard says, “if the Jew held that the vision of God meant death, and if the Heathen believed that to enter upon relations with God was the beginning of insanity?” For the man who lives for God “is a fish out of water.”—We have here what, if an error, is yet possible only to profoundly religious souls; indeed it would be easy to point out very similar passages in St. Catherine and St. John of the Cross. Yet Höffding is clearly in the right in maintaining that “Qualitative or Absolute difference abolishes all possibility of any positive relation.… If religious zeal, in its eagerness to push the Object of religion to the highest height, establishes a yawning abyss between this Object and the life whose ideal It is still to remain,—such zeal contradicts itself. For a God who is not Ideal and Exemplar, is no God.”

Berkeley raised similar objections against analogous positions of the Pseudo-Dionysius, in his Alciphron in 1732. Indeed the Belgian Jesuit, Balthazar Corderius, has a very satisfactory note on this matter in his edition, in 1634, of the Areopagite, in which he shows how all the negative propositions of Mystical Theology, e.g. “God is not Being, not Life,” presuppose a certain affirmative position, e.g. “God is Being and Life, in a manner infinitely more sublime and perfect than we are able to comprehend”; and gives reasons and authorities, from St. Jerome to St. Thomas inclusive, for holding that some kind and degree of direct confused knowledge (I should prefer, with modern writers, to call it experience) of God’s existence and nature is possessed by the human soul, independently of its reasoning from the data of sense.

St. Thomas’s admissions are especially striking, as he usually elaborates a position which ignores, and would logically exclude, such “confused knowledge.” In his Exposition and Questions on the Book of Boetius on the Trinity, after arguments to show that we know indeed that God is, but not what He is,—at most only what He is not, he says: “We should recognize, however, that it is impossible, with regard to anything, to know whether it exists, unless, in some way or other, we know what it is, either with a perfect or with a confused knowledge.… Hence also with regard to God,—we could not know whether He exists, unless we somehow knew what He is, even though in a confused manner.” And this knowledge of what He is, is interestingly, because unconsciously, admitted in one of the passages directed to proving that we can but know that He is. “In our earthly state we cannot attain to a knowledge of Himself beyond the fact that He exists. And yet, among those who know that He is, the one knows this more perfectly than the other.” For it is plain that, even if the knowledge of the existence of something were possible without any knowledge of that thing’s nature, no difference or increase in such knowledge of the thing’s bare existence would be possible. The different degrees in the knowledge, which is here declared to be one concerning the bare existence of God, can, as a matter of fact, exist only in knowledge concerning His nature. I shall have to return to this great question further on.

Here I would only point out how well Battista Vernazza has, in her Dialogo, realized the importance of a modification in such acutely dualistic statements as those occasionally met with in the Vita. For, in the Dialogo, the utter qualitative difference between God and the Soul, and the Soul and the Body, which find so striking an utterance in one of Catherine’s moods, is ever carefully limited to the soul’s sinful acts and habits, and to the body’s unspiritualized condition; so that the soul, when generous and faithful to God’s grace, can and does grow less and less unlike God, and the body can, in its turn, become more and more an instrument and expression of the soul. A pity only that Battista has continued Catherine’s occasional over-emphasis in the parallel matter of the knowledge of God: since, even in the Dialogo, we get statements which, if pressed, would imply that even the crudest, indeed the most immoral conception of God is, objectively, no farther removed from the reality than is the most spiritual idea that man can attain of Him.

It would indeed be well if the Christian Mystics who, since about 500 A.D., are more and more dependent for their formulations upon the Areopagite, had followed, in this matter, not his more usual and more paradoxical, but his exceptional, thoroughly sober vein of teaching,—that contained in the third chapter of his Mystical Theology, where he finds degrees of worth and approximation among the affirmative attributions, and degrees of unfitness and distance among the negative ones. “Are not life and goodness more cognate to Him than air and stone? And is He not further removed from debauchery and wrath, than from ineffableness and incomprehensibility”? But such a scale of approximations would be utterly impossible did we not somehow, at least dimly, experience or know what He is.

We shall then have to amend the Mystic’s apparent Agnosticism on three points. We shall have to drop any hard and fast distinction between knowledge of God’s Existence and knowledge of His Nature, since both necessarily more or less stand and fall together. We shall have to replace the terms as to our utter ignorance as to what He is, by terms expressive of an experience which, if not directly and independently clear and analyzable to the reflex, critical reason, can yet be shown to be profoundly real and indefinitely potent in the life of man’s whole rational and volitional being. It is this dim, deep experience which ever causes our reflex knowledge of God to appear no knowledge at all. And we shall reject any absolute qualitative difference between the soul’s deepest possibilities and ideals, and God; and shall, in its stead, maintain an absolute difference between God and all our downward inclinations, acts, and habits, and an indefinite difference, in worth and dignity, between God and the very best that, with His help, we can aim at and become. With regard to every truly existent subject-matter, we can trace the indefinitely wider range and the more delicate penetration possessed by our dim yet true direct contact and experience, as contrasted with our reflex analysis concerning all such contacts and experiences; and this surplusage is at its highest in connection with God, Who is not simply a Thing alongside of other things, but the Spirit, our spirit’s Origin, Sustainer, and End, “in whom we live and move and have our being.”