III. Mysticism and Pantheism: their Differences and Points of Likeness

But does not Mysticism, not only find God in the soul, but the soul to be God? Is it not, as such, already Pantheism? Or, if not, what is their difference?

1. Plotinus and Spinoza compared.

Now Dr. Edward Caird, in his fine book, The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, 1904, tells us that “Mysticism is religion in its most concentrated and exclusive form; it is that attitude of mind in which all other relations are swallowed up in the relation of the soul to God”; and that “Plotinus is the Mystic par excellence.” And he then proceeds to contrast Plotinus, the typical Mystic, with Spinoza, the true Pantheist.

“Whether” or not “Spinoza, in his negation of the limits of the finite, still leaves it open to himself to admit a reality in finite things which is not negated,” and “to conceive of the absolute substance as manifesting itself in attributes and modes”: “it is very clear that he does so conceive it, and that, for all those finite things which he treats as negative and illusory in themselves, he finds in God a ground of reality
… which can be as little destroyed as the divine substance
itself.” “God, Deus sive Natura, is conceived as the immanent principle of the universe, or perhaps rather the universe is conceived as immanent in God.”—Thus to him “the movement by which he dissolves the finite in the infinite, and the movement by which he finds the finite again in the infinite, are equally essential. If for him the world is nothing apart from God, God is nothing apart from His realization in the world.” This is true Pantheism.

But in Plotinus the via negativa involves a negation of the finite and determinate in all its forms; hence here it is impossible to find the finite again in the infinite. The Absolute One is here not immanent but transcendent. “While the lower always has need of the higher, the higher is regarded as having no need” for any purpose “of the lower”; and “the Highest has no need of anything but Itself.” “Such a process cannot be reversed”: “in ascending, Plotinus has drawn the ladder after him, and left himself no possibility of descending again. The movement, in which he is guided by definite and explicit thought, is always upwards; while, in describing the movement downwards, he has to take refuge in metaphors and analogies,” for the purpose of indicating a purely self-occupied activity which only accidentally produces an external effect, e.g., “the One as it were overflows, and produces another than itself.” “Thus we have the strange paradox that the Being who is absolute, is yet conceived as in a sense external to the relative and finite, and that He leaves the relative and finite in a kind of unreal independence.” “On the one side, we have a life which is nothing apart from God, and which, nevertheless, can never be united to him, except as it loses itself altogether; and, on the other side, an Absolute, which yet is not immanent in the life it originates, but abides in transcendent isolation from it.… It is this contradiction which … makes the writings of Plotinus the supreme expression of Mysticism.”

Now I think, with this admirable critic, that we cannot but take Spinoza as the classical representative of that parallelistic Pantheism to which most of our contemporary systems of psycho-physical parallelism belong. As Prof. Troeltsch well puts it, “we have here a complete parallelism between every single event in the physical world, which event is already entirely explicable from its own antecedents within that physical world, and every event of a psychical kind, which, nevertheless, is itself also entirely explicable from its own psychical antecedents alone.” And “this parallelism again is but two sides of the one World-Substance, Which is neither Nature nor Spirit, and Whose law is neither natural nor spiritual law, but Which is Being in general and Law in general.” In this one World-Substance, with its parallel self-manifestations as extension and as thought, Spinoza finds the ultimate truth of Religion, as against the Indeterminist, Anthropomorphic elements of all the popular religions,—errors which have sprung, the Anthropomorphic from man’s natural inclination to interpret Ultimate Reality, with its complete neutrality towards the distinctions of Psychical and Physical, by the Psychic side, as the one nearest to our own selves; and the Indeterminist from the attribution of that indetermination to the World-Substance which, even in Psychology, is already a simple illusion and analytical blunder.

“It is in the combination,” concludes Professor Troeltsch, “of such a recognition of the strict determination of all natural causation, and of such a rejection of materialism (with its denial of the independence of the psychic world), that rests the immense power of Pantheism at the present time.” On the other hand, the supposed Pantheistic positions of the later Lessing, of Herder, Goethe and many another predominantly aesthetic thinker, must, although far richer and more nearly adequate conceptions of full reality, be assigned, qua Pantheism, a secondary place, as inconsistent, because already largely Teleological, indeed Theistic Philosophies.

2. Complete Pantheism non-religious; why approached by Mysticism.

Now the former, the full Pantheism, must, I think, be declared, with Rauwenhoff, to be only in name a religious position at all. “In its essence it is simply a complete Monism, a recognition of the Pan in its unity and indivisibility, and hence a simple view of the world, not a religious conception.”—Yet deeply religious souls can be more or less, indeed profoundly, influenced by such a Monism, so that we can get Mystics with an outlook considerably more Spinozist than Plotinian. There can, e.g., be no doubt as to both the deeply religious temper and the strongly Pantheistic conceptions of Eckhart in the Middle Ages, and of Schleiermacher in modern times; and indeed Spinoza himself is, apart from all questions as to the logical implications and results of his intellectual system, and as to the justice of his attacks upon the historical religions, a soul of massive religious intuition and aspiration.

But further: Mystically tempered souls,—and the typical and complete religious soul will ever possess a mystical element in its composition,—have three special attraits which necessarily bring them into an at least apparent proximity to Pantheism.

(1) For one thing Mysticism, like Pantheism, has a great, indeed (if left unchecked by the out-going-movement) an excessive, thirst for Unity, for a Unity less and less possessed of Multiplicity; and the transition from holding the Pure Transcendence of this Unity to a conviction of its Exclusive Immanence becomes easy and insignificant, in proportion to the emptiness of content increasingly characterizing this Oneness.

(2) Then again, like Pantheists, Mystics dwell much upon the strict call to abandon all self-centredness, upon the death to self, the loss of self; and in proportion as they dwell upon this self to be thus rejected, and as they enlarge the range of this petty self, do they approach each other more and more.

(3) And lastly, there is a peculiarity about the Mystical habit of mind, which inevitably approximates it to the Pantheistic mode of thought, and which, if not continuously taken by the Mystic soul itself as an inevitable, but most demonstrable, inadequacy, will react upon the substance of this soul’s thought in a truly Pantheistic sense. This peculiarity results from the Mystic’s ever-present double tendency of absorbing himself, away from the Successive and Temporal, in the Simultaneity and Eternity of God, conceiving thus all reality as partaking, in proportion to its depth and greater likeness to Him, in this Totum Simul character of its ultimate Author and End; and of clinging to such vivid picturings of this reality as are within his, this Mystic’s reach. Now such a Simultaneity can be pictorially represented to the mind only by the Spacial imagery of co-existent Extensions,—say of air, water, light, or fire: and these representations, if dwelt on as at all adequate, will necessarily suggest a Determinism of a Mathematico-Physical, Extensional type, i.e. one, and the dominant, side of Spinozistic Pantheism.—It is here, I think, that we get the double cause for the Pantheistic-seeming trend of almost all the Mystical imagery. For even the marked Emanationism of much in Plotinus, and of still more in Proclus,—the latter still showing through many a phrase in Dionysius,—appears in their images as operating upon a fixed Extensional foundation: and indeed these very overflowings, owing to the self-centredness and emptiness of content of their Source, the One, and to their accidental yet automatic character, help still further to give to the whole outlook a strikingly materialistic, mechanical, in so far Pantheistic, character.

3. Points on which Mysticism has usefully approximated to Pantheism.

And yet we must not overlook the profound, irreplaceable services that are rendered by Mysticism,—provided always it remains but one of two great movements of the living soul,—even on the points in which it thus approximates to Pantheism. These services, I think, are three.

(1) The first of these services has been interestingly illustrated by Prof. A. S. Pringle Pattison, from the case of Dr. James Martineau’s writings, and the largely unmediated co-existence there of two different modes of conceiving God. “The first mode represents God simply as another, higher Person; the second represents Him as the soul of souls. The former, Deistic and Hebraic, rests upon an inferential knowledge of God, derived either from the experience of His resistance to our will through the forces of Nature, or from that of His restraint upon us in the voice of Conscience,—God, in both cases, being regarded as completely separated from the human soul, and His existence and character apprehended and demonstrated by a process of reasoning.—The second mode is distinctly and intensely Christian, and consists in the apprehension of God as the Infinite including all finite existences, as the immanent Absolute who progressively manifests His character in the Ideals of Truth, Beauty, Righteousness, and Love.” And Professor Pattison points out, with Professor Upton, that it was Dr. Martineau’s almost morbid dread of Pantheism which was responsible for the inadequate expression given to this Mystical, or “Speculative” element in his religious philosophy. For only if we do not resist such Mysticism, do we gain and retain a vivid experience of how “Consciousness of imperfection and the pursuit of perfection are alike possible to man only through the universal life of thought and goodness in which he shares, and which, at once an indwelling presence and an unattainable ideal, draws him on and always on.” “Personality is” thus “not ‘unitary’ in Martineau’s sense, as occupying one side of a relation, and unable to be also on the other. The very capacity of knowledge and morality implies that the person … is capable of regarding himself and all other beings from what Martineau well names ‘the station of the Father of Spirits.’”

I would, however, guard here against any exclusion of a seeking or finding of God in Nature and in Conscience: only the contrary exclusion of the finding of God within the soul, and the insistence upon a complete separation of Him from that soul, are inacceptable in the “Hebraic” mood. For a coming and a going, a movement inwards and outwards, checks and counter-checks, friction, contrast, battle and storm, are necessary conditions and ingredients of the soul’s growth in its sense of appurtenance to Spirit and to Peace.

(2) A further service rendered by this Pantheistic-seeming Mysticism,—though always only so long as it remains not the only or last word of Religion,—is that it alone discovers the truly spiritual function and fruitfulness of Deterministic Science. For only if Man deeply requires a profound desubjectivizing, a great shifting of the centre of his interest, away from the petty, claimful, animal self, with its “I against all the world,” to a great kingdom of souls, in which Man gains his larger, spiritual, unique personality, with its “I as part of, and for all the world,” by accepting to be but one amongst thousands of similar constituents in a system expressive of the thoughts of God; and only if Mathematico-Physical Science is specially fitted to provide such a bath, and hence is so taken, with all its apparently ruinous Determinism and seeming Godlessness: is such Science really safe from apologetic emasculation; or from running, a mere unrelated dilettantism, alongside of the deepest interests of the soul; or from, in its turn, crushing or at least hampering the deepest, the spiritual life of man. Hence all the greater Partial Mystics have got a something about them which indicates that they have indeed passed through fire and water, that their poor selfishness has been purified in a bath of painfully-bracing spiritual air and light, through which they have emerged into a larger, fuller life. And Nicolas of Coes, Pascal, Malebranche are but three men out of many whose Mysticism and whose Mathematico-Physical Science thus interstimulated each other and jointly deepened their souls.

We shall find, further on, that this purificatory power of such Science has been distinctly heightened for us now. Yet, both then and now, there could and can be such purification only for those who realize and practise religion as sufficiently ultimate and wide and deep to englobe, (as one of religion’s necessary stimulants), an unweakened, utterly alien-seeming Determinism in the middle regions of the soul’s experience and outlook. Such an englobement can most justly be declared to be Christianity driven fully home. For thus is Man purified and saved,—if he already possesses the dominant religious motive and conviction,—by a close contact with Matter; and the Cross is plunged into the very centre of his soul’s life, operating there a sure division between the perishing animal Individual and the abiding spiritual Personality: the deathless Incarnational and Redemptive religion becomes thus truly operative there.

(3) And the last service, rendered by such Mysticism, is to keep alive in the soul the profoundly important consciousness of the prerequisites, elements and affinities of a Universally Human kind, which are necessary to, and present in, all Religion, however definitely Concrete, Historical and Institutional it may have become. Such special, characteristic Revelations, Doctrines and Institutions, as we find them in all the great Historical Religions, and in their full normative substance and form in Christianity and Catholicism, can indeed alone completely develop, preserve and spread Religion in its depth and truth; yet they ever presuppose a general, usually dim but most real, religious sense and experience, indeed a real presence and operation of the Infinite and of God in all men.

It is, then, not an indifferentist blindness to the profound differences, in their degree of truth, between the religions of the world, nor an insufficient realization of man’s strict need of historical and institutional lights and aids for the development and direction of that general religious sense and experience, which make the mind revolt from sayings such as those we have already quoted from the strongly Protestant Prof. Wilhelm Hermann, and to which we can add the following. “Everywhere, outside of Christianity, Mysticism will arise, as the very flower of the religious development. But the Christian must declare such Mystical experience of God to be a delusion.” For “what is truly Christian is ipso facto not Mystical.” “We are Christians because, in the Humanity of Jesus, we have struck upon a fact which is of incomparably richer content, than are the feelings that arise within our own selves.” Indeed, “I should have failed to recognize the hand of God even in what my own dead father did for me, had not, by means of my Christian education, God appeared to me, in the Historic Christ.”—As if it were possible to consider Plato and Plotinus, in those religious intuitions and feelings of theirs which helped to win an Augustine from crass Manichaeism to a deep Spiritualism, and which continue to breathe and burn as part-elements in countless sayings of Christian philosophers and saints, to have been simply deluded, or mere idle subjectivists! As if we could apprehend even Christ, without some most real, however dim and general, sense of religion and presence of God within us to which He could appeal! And as if Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Maccabaean Martyrs, and many a devoted soul within Mohammedanism or in Brahmanic India, could not and did not apprehend something of God’s providence in their earthly father’s love towards them!

No wonder that, after all this, Hermann can,—as against Richard Rothe who, in spite of more than one fantastic if not fanatical aberration, had, on some of the deepest religious matters, a rarely penetrating perception,—write in a thoroughly patronizing manner concerning Catholic Mysticism. For this Mysticism necessarily appears to him not as, at its best, the most massive and profound development of one type of the ultimate religion,—a type in which one necessary element of all balanced religious life is at the fullest expansion compatible with a still sufficient amount and healthiness of the other necessary elements of such a life,—but only as “a form of religion which has brought out and rendered visible such a content of interior life as is capable of being produced within the limits of Catholic piety.” The true, pure Protestant possesses, according to Hermann, apparently much less, in reality much more,—the Categorical Imperative of Conscience and the Jesus of History, as the double one-and-all of his, the only spiritual religion.—Yet if Christianity is indeed the religion of the Divine Founder, Who declared that he that is not against Him is for Him; or of Paul, who could appeal to the heathen Athenians and to all men for the truth and experience that in God “we live and move and have our being”; or of the great Fourth Gospel, which tells us that Christ, the True Light, enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world, a light which to this hour cannot, for the great majority, be through historic knowledge of the Historic Christ at all; or of Clement of Alexandria and of Justin Martyr, who loved to find deep apprehensions and operations of God scattered about among the Heathen; or of Aquinas, who, in the wake of the Areopagite and others, so warmly dwells upon how Grace does not destroy, but presupposes and perfects Nature: then such an exclusive amalgam of Moralism and History, though doubtless a most honest and intelligible reaction against opposite excesses, is a sad impoverishment of Christianity, in its essential, world-wide, Catholic character.

Indeed, to be fair, there have never been wanting richer and more balanced Protestant thinkers strongly to emphasize this profound many-sidedness and universality of Christianity: so, at present, in Germany, Profs. Eucken, Troeltsch, Class, Siebeck and others; and, in England, Prof. A. S. P. Pattison and Mr. J. R. Illingworth. In all these cases there is ever a strong sympathy with Mysticism properly understood, as the surest safeguard against such distressing contractions as is this of Hermann, and that of Albrecht Ritschl before him.

4. Christianity excludes complete and final Pantheism.

And yet, as we have repeatedly found, Christianity has, in its fundamental Revelation and Experience, ever implied and affirmed such a conception of Unity, of Self-Surrender, and of the Divine Action, as to render any Pantheistic interpretation of these things ever incomplete and transitional.

(1) The Unity here is nowhere, even ultimately, the sheer Oneness of a simply identical Substance, but a Unity deriving its very close-knitness from its perfect organization of not simply identical elements or relations.

The Self-Surrender here is not a simply final resolution, of laboriously constituted centres of human spiritual consciousness and personality, back into a morally indifferent All, but a means and passage, for the soul, from a spiritually worthless self-entrenchment within a merely psycho-physical apartness and lust to live, on to a spiritual devotedness, an incorporation, as one necessary subject, into the Kingdom of souls,—the abiding, living expression of the abiding, living God.

And, above all, God’s Action is not a mechanico-physical, determinist, simultaneous Extension, nor even an automatic, accidental, unconscious Emanation, but, as already Plato divined,—an intuition lost again by Aristotle, and, in his logic, denied by Plotinus,—a voluntary outgoing and self-communication of the supreme self-conscious Spirit, God. For Plato tells us that “the reason why Nature and this Universe of things was framed by Him Who framed it, is that God is good … and desired that all things should be as like Himself as it was possible for them to be.” Yet this pregnant apprehension never attains here to its full significance, because the Divine Intelligence is conceived only as manifesting itself in relation to something given from without,—the pre-existing, chaotic Matter. And for Aristotle God does not love this Givenness; for “the first Mover moves” (all things) only “as desired” by them: He Himself desires, loves, wills nothing whatsoever, and thinks and knows nothing but His own self alone. And in Plotinus this same transcendence is still further emphasized, for the Absolute One here transcends even all thought and self-consciousness.

(2) It is in Christianity, after noble preludings in Judaism, that we get the full deliberate proclamation, in the great Life and Teaching, of the profound fact,—the Self-Manifestation of the Loving God, the Spirit-God moving out to the spirit-man, and spirit-man only thus capable of a return movement to the Spirit-God. As Schelling said, “God can only give Himself to His creatures as He gives a self to them,” and, with it, the capacity of participating in His life. We thus get a relation begun and rendered possible by God’s utterly prevenient, pure, ecstatic love of Man, a relation which, in its essence spiritual, personal and libertarian, leaves behind it, as but vain travesties of such ultimate Realities, all Emanational or Parallelistic Pantheism, useful though these latter systems are as symbols of the Mathematico-Physical level and kind of reality and apprehension. Yet this spiritual relation is here, unlike Plotinus’s more or less Emanational conception of it, not indeed simply invertible, as Spinoza would have it, (for Man is ontologically dependent upon God, whereas God is not thus dependent upon Man), but nevertheless largely one of true mutuality. And this mutuality of the relation is not simply a positive enactment of God, but is expressive, in its degree and mode, of God’s intrinsic moral nature. For God is here the Source as well as the Object of all love; hence He Himself possesses the supreme equivalent for this our noblest emotion, and is moved to free acts of outgoing, in the creation and preservation, the revelation to, and the redemption of finite spirits, as so many successive, mutually supplementary, and increasingly fuller expressions and objects of this His nature. “God is Love”; “God so loved the world, as to give His only-begotten Son”; “Let us love God, for God hath first loved us”; “if any man will do the will of God, he shall know of the doctrine if it be from God”: God’s Infinity is here, not the negation of the relatively independent life of His creatures, but the very reason and source of their freedom.

In the concluding chapter I hope to give a sketch of the actual operation of the true correctives to any excessive, Plotinian or Spinozistic, tendencies in the Mystical trend, especially when utilizing Mathematico-Physical Science at the soul’s middle level; and of History at the ultimate reaches of the soul’s life.