II. Relations between God and the Human Soul

In taking next the question as to the relations between God and the Human Soul, we shall find our difficulties increased, because, here especially, the Philosophers and even the Biblical Writers have, with regard to religious experience, used expressions and furnished stimulations of a generally complex and unclarified, intermittent, and unharmonized kind; and especially because certain specifically religious experiences and requirements have operated here with a unique intensity, at one time in a Pantheistic, at another in a more or less Deistic direction. The reader will specially note the points in the following doctrines which helped on the conception that a certain centre or highest part of the soul is God, or a part of God, Himself.

1. Plato and Aristotle. “The Noûs.”

(1) Plato teaches the pre-existence and the post-existence (immortality) of the soul, as two interdependent truths. In his earlier stage, e.g. the Phaedrus, he so little discriminates, in his argument for immortality, between the individual soul and the World-Soul, as to argue that “the Self-Moving” Soul generally “is the beginning of motion, and this motion,” (specially here in connection with the human soul), “can neither be destroyed nor begotten, since, in that case, the heavens and all generation would collapse.” Yet individual souls are not, according to him, emanations of the World-Soul; but, as the particular ideas stand beside the Supreme Idea, so do the particular souls stand beside the Soul of the Whole, in a distinct peculiarity of their own.—And again, since the soul has lapsed from a purer, its appropriate, life into the body, and has thus no original, intrinsic relation to this body, the activity of the senses, indeed in strictness even that of the emotions, cannot form part of its essential nature. Only the highest part of the soul, the Reason, Noûs, which, as “sun-like, God-like,” can apprehend the sun, God, is one and simple, as are all the ideas, immortal; whereas the soul’s lower part consists of two elements,—the nobler, the irascible, and the ignobler, the concupiscible passions. But how the unity of the soul’s life can co-exist with this psychical tritomy, is a question no doubt never formulated even to himself by Plato: we certainly have only three beings bound together, not one being active in different directions.

(2) Aristotle, if more sober in his general doctrine, brings some special obscurities and contradictions. For whilst the pre-existence of the soul, taken as a whole, is formally denied, and indeed its very origin is linked to that of the body, its rational part, the Noûs, comes into the physical organism from outside of the matter altogether, and an impersonal pre-existence is distinctly predicated of it,—in strict conformity with his doctrine that the Supreme Noûs does not directly act upon, or produce things in, the world.

2. St. Paul. The “Spirit.”

But it is St. Paul who, in his Mystical outbursts and in the systematic parts of his doctrine, as against the simply hortatory level of his teaching, gives us the earliest, one of the deepest, and to this hour by far the most influential, among the at all detailed experiences and schemes, accepted by and operative among Christians, as to the relations of the human soul to God. And here again, and with characteristic intensity, certain overlapping double meanings and conceptions, and some vivid descriptions of experiences readily suggestive of the divinity of the soul’s highest part, repeatedly appear.

(1) In the systematic passages we not only find the terms Psyche, “Soul,” for the vital force of the body; and Noûs, (“Mind,”) “Heart,” and “Conscience,” for various aspects and functions of man’s rational and volitional nature: but a special insistence upon Pneuma, “Spirit,” mostly in a quite special sense of the word. Thus in 1 Cor. ii, 14, 15, we get an absolute contrast between the psychic or sarkic, the simply natural man, and the Pneumatic, the Spiritual one, all capacity for understanding the Spirit of God being denied to the former. The Spiritual thus appears as itself already the Divine, and the Spirit as the exclusive, characteristic property of God, something which is foreign to man, apart from his Christian renovation and elevation to a higher form of existence. Only with the entrance of faith and its consequences into the mind and will of man, does this transcendent Spirit become an immanent principle: “through His Spirit dwelling in you.”—Hence, in the more systematic Pauline Anthropology, Pneuma cannot be taken as belonging to man’s original endowment. Certainly in 1 Cor. ii, 11, the term “the spirit of a man” appears simply because the whole passage is dominated by a comparison between the Divine and the human consciousness, which allows simultaneously of the use of the conversely incorrect term, “the mind of God,”—here, v. 16, and in Rom. xi, 34. And the term “the spirit of the world,” 1 Cor. ii, 12, is used in contrast with “the Spirit of God,” and as loosely as the term “the God of this world,” is applied, in 2 Cor. iv, 4, to Satan.—Only some four passages are difficult to interpret thus: e.g. “Every defilement of flesh and of spirit” (2 Cor. vii, 1); for how can God, Spirit, be defiled? Yet we can “forget that our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit,” 1 Cor. vi, 19; and its defilement can “grieve the Holy Spirit” (Eph. iv, 30).

And note how parallel to his conception of this immanence of the transcendent Spirit is St. Paul’s conception, based upon his personal, mystical experience, of the indwelling of Christ in the regenerate human soul. Saul had indeed been won to Jesus Christ, not by the history of Jesus’ earthly life, but by the direct manifestation of the heavenly Spirit-Christ, on the way to Damascus: whence he teaches that only those who know Him as Spirit, can truly “be in Christ,”—an expression formed on the model of “to be in the Spirit,” as in Mark xii, 36, and Apoc. 1, 10.

(2) And then these terms take on, in specifically Pauline Mystical passages, a suggestion of a local extension and environment, and express, like the corresponding formulae “in God,” “in the Spirit,” the conception of an abiding within as it were an element,—that of the exalted Christ and His Divine glory. Or Christ is within us, as the Spirit also is said to be, so that the regenerate personality, by its closeness of intercourse with the personality of Christ, can become one single Spirit with Him, 1 Cor. vi, 17. “As the air is the element in which man moves, and yet again the element of life which is present within the man: so the Pneuma-Christ is for St. Paul both the Ocean of the Divine Being, into which the Christian, since his reception of the Spirit, is plunged,” and in which he disports himself, “and a stream which, derived from that Ocean, is specially introduced within his individual life.” Catherine’s profound indebtedness to this Mystical Pauline doctrine has already been studied; here we are but considering this doctrine in so far as suggestive, to the Mystics, of the identity between the true self and God,—an identity readily reached, if we press such passages as “Christ, our life”; “to live is Christ”; “I live, not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

3. Plotinus.

Some two centuries later, Plotinus brings his profound influence to bear in the direction of such identification. For as the First, the One, which, as we saw, possesses, for him, no Self-consciousness, Life, or Being, produces the Second, the Noûs, which, possessed of all these attributes, exercises them directly in self-contemplation alone; and yet this Second is so closely like that First as to be “light from light”: so does the Second produce the Third, the Human Psyche, which, though “a thing by itself,” is a “godlike (divine) thing,” since it possesses “a more divine part, the part which is neighbour to what is above, the Noûs, with which and from which Noûs the Psyche exists.”—The Psyche is “an image of the Noûs”: “as outward speech expresses inward thought, so is the Psyche a concept of the Noûs,—a certain energy of the Noûs, as the Noûs itself is an energy of the First Cause.” “As with fire, where we distinguish the heat that abides within the fire and the heat that is emitted by it … so must we conceive the Psyche not as wholly flowing forth from, but as in part abiding in, in part proceeding from the Noûs.”

And towards the end of the great Ninth Book of the Sixth Ennead, he tells how in Ecstasy “the soul sees the Source of Life … the Ground of Goodness, the Root of the Soul.… For we are not cut off from or outside of It … but we breathe and consist in It: since It does not give and then retire, but ever lifts and bears us, so long as It is what It is.” “We must stand alone in It and must become It alone, after stripping off all the rest that hangs about us.… There we can behold both Him and our own selves,—ourselves, full of intellectual light, or rather as Pure Light Itself, having become God, or rather as being simply He … abiding altogether unmoved, having become as it were Stability Itself.” “When man has moved out of himself away to God, like the image to its Prototype, he has reached his journey’s end.” “And this is the life of the Gods and of divine and blessed men … a flight of the alone to the Alone.”

4. Eckhart’s position. Ruysbroek.

(1) Eckhart gives us both Plotinian positions—the God-likeness and the downright Divinity of the soul. “The Spark (das Fünkelein) of the Soul … is a light impressed upon its uppermost part, and an image of the Divine Nature, which is ever at war with all that is not divine. It is not one of the several powers of the soul.… Its name is Synteresis,”—i.e. conscience. “The nine powers of the soul are all servants of that man of the soul, and help him on to the soul’s Source.”—But in one of the condemned propositions he says: “There is something in the soul which is Increate and Uncreatable; if the whole soul were such, it would be (entirely) Increate and Uncreatable. And this is the Intellect,”—standing here exactly for Plotinus’s Noûs.

(2) Ruysbroek (who died in 1381) combines a considerable fundamental sobriety with much of St. Paul’s daring and many echoes of Plotinus. “The unity of our spirit with God is of two kinds,—essential and actual. According to its essence, our spirit receives, in its innermost highest part, the visit of Christ, without means and without intermission; for the life which we are in God, in our Eternal Image, and that which we have and are in ourselves, according to the essence of our being … are without distinction.—But this essential unity of our spirit with God has no consistency in itself, but abides in God and flows out from and depends on Him.” The actual unity of our spirit with God, caused by Grace, confers upon us not His Image, but His Likeness, “and though we cannot lose the Image of God, nor our natural unity with Him,—if we lose His Likeness, His Grace, Christ, who, in this case, comes to us with mediations and intermissions, we shall be damned.”

5. St. Teresa’s mediating view.

St. Teresa’s teachings contain interesting faint echoes of the old perplexities and daring doctrines concerning the nature of the Spirit; but articulate a strikingly persistent conviction that the soul holds God Himself as distinct from His graces, possessing thus some direct experience of this His presence. “I cannot understand what the mind is, nor how it differs from the soul or the spirit either: all three seem to me to be but one, though the soul sometimes leaps forth out of itself, like a fire which has become a flame: the flame ascends high above the fire, but it is still the same flame of the same fire.” “Something subtle and swift seems to issue from the soul, to ascend to its highest part and to go whither Our Lord will … it seems a flight. This little bird of the spirit seems to have escaped out of the prison of the body.” Indeed “the soul is then not in itself … it seems to me to have its dwelling higher than even the highest part of itself.”—“In the beginning I did not know that God is present in all things.… Unlearned men used to tell me that He was present only by His grace. I could not believe that.… A most learned Dominican told me He was present Himself … this was a great comfort to me.” “To look upon Our Lord as being in the innermost parts of the soul … is a much more profitable method, than that of looking upon Him as external to us.” “The living God was in my soul.” And even, “hitherto” up to 1555, “my life was my own; my life, since then, is the life which God lived in me.”

6. Immanence, not Pantheism.

St. Teresa’s teaching as to God’s own presence in the soul points plainly, I think, to the truth insisted on by the Catholic theologian Schwab, in his admirable monograph on Gerson. “Neither speculation nor feeling are satisfied with a Pure Transcendence of God; and hence the whole effort of true Mysticism is directed, whilst not abolishing His Transcendence, to embrace and experience God, His living presence, in the innermost soul,—that is, to insist, in some way or other, upon the Immanence of God. Reject all such endeavours as Pantheistic, insist sharply upon the specific eternal difference between God and the Creature: and the Speculative, Mystical depths fade away, with all their fascination.” Not in finding Pantheism already here, with the imminent risk of falling into a cold Deism, but in a rigorous insistence, with all the great Inclusive Mystics, upon the spiritual and moral effects, as the tests of the reality and worth of such experiences, and, with the Ascetical and Historical souls, upon also the other movement—an outgoing in some kind of contact with, and labour at, the contingencies and particularities of life and mind—will the true safeguard for this element of the soul’s life be found.