Rational Mysticism and New Testament Christianity/II

by Henry William Clark

Undoubtedly mysticism has been right in declaring that religion is ultimately and essentially a losing of self in God — that the significance of religion is not exhausted in any grasp which the mind may fling round facts about God, nor in any adjustment of an external kind which a man may make in his attitude towards God, nor in any change in man's judicial standing before the sight of God, but is a far deeper thing. That recognition, already referred to, of a valuable and desirable element in mystical experience — that recognition which practically all men, though they may sheer off from and think extravagant much of the language in which mysticism expresses or expounds itself, are ready to make — is itself strong testimony to mysticism's nearness to the heart of the whole thing. Indeed, all really religious men would, if brought to the point, make two admissions. They would admit, on the one hand, that if religion calls for anything at all, it calls for much more than a merely external relationship between man and God, however many faculties of human nature that relationship may cover, and however carefully that relationship may be maintained and cultivated once it is made. And they would admit, on the other hand, that if those instincts of our nature which seem to cry for something outside of ourselves on which they may take hold and in whose answering clasp they may find their complement — those aspirations and variously named (or unnamed) movements which so often go forth from the busy harbor of our inner life as if outward bound upon an unknown sea — that if all these may be legitimately interpreted in a religious sense at all, it is to something like real and intimate union with God that they point. Mysticism, in speaking of losing self in God, is true to our ultimate interpretation of religion and true to our ultimate interpretation of ourselves.

But, under the taunt which cold reason so frequently levels against it, mysticism has permitted itself to be caught in a false antithesis, and has mistakenly accepted as inevitable that hostility between itself and reason which reason has sought to force. "This intimate relation between man and God of which you speak" — so reason's complaint has run — "and this knowledge of God which, as you claim, results from that intimate relation, are not facts discoverable or provable by any instruments at my command. The existence of such a relation and of such knowledge cannot be inferred from any premises that lie before my eyes. In asserting it, therefore, you declare yourself more powerful than I am in my own particular field, come in as a sort of confident but unauthorized amateur where the regular practitioner confesses himself baffled, and set up a preposterous claim which I cannot for a moment allow." Mysticism's mistake has been that it has so frequently answered taunt with taunt, and in its indignation has missed the right reply. "Yes," it has answered, "I do take your place in this department, and perform what you cannot accomplish. They who would penetrate the secrets behind the veil must substitute my guidance for yours." In reply to reason's attempt to rule mysticism out, mysticism has attempted to rule reason out in its turn: it has willingly occupied the false position into which reason has been eager to thrust it, and, as previously suggested, has given a wrong account of itself and of its rdle. What the true answer of mysticism to the taunt flung at it by reason would have been — the answer by the making of which mysticism would have robbed reason of its arms — we shall presently come to understand. For the moment it may suffice to say that mysticism, rightly interpreted, does not take the place of reason at all; and it is on some such line as this that mysticism should have replied when reason complained or sneered, so repudiating the alternative — as between mysticism or reason — which reason has assiduously pushed to the front. By failing to take this line — by foolishly lifting the gage which reason throws down and by entering into the conflict on reason's own ground — by letting itself be drawn into a wholly unnecessary battle — mysticism loses its opportunity, and becomes discredited in a court where a verdict might easily be won.

For mysticism is not, except incidentally, a matter of knowledge. It is a matter of something else and of something more. What mysticism really aims at, and what mysticism has really reached more or less perfectly in the experience of those who are entitled to the mystic's name, is the acceptance of God by man as the actual, energizing, dynamic source of all that man is — man setting himself in such a God-ward relation that henceforth he is, in regard to all that proceeds from him in the way of activity, emotion, and the rest, mediate instead of immediate, a channel instead of a spring. Mysticism aims at the substitution of God's initiative for man's within man's own personality — except, of course, that the initiative of surrender, the initiative in giving up initiative, must on man's part be ceaselessly maintained. Mysticism aims at using the separateness of man's personality only to secure a unity of man's personality with God's — a unity in which man, so far as he is conscious of his own personality at all, is conscious of it only as a thing that has abrogated all its powers save the power of self-abandonment, and that sleeps. It is more than a relation between man and God: it is a relation wherein there is no more between: ay, it is more than a relation — it is a mingling, a threading together, a lying down of the man upon God, a folding of God round every part of the man. All this is only to say in other words what has been said of themselves by the mystics of every age; and this is the experience (let their theoretical account of it be what it may) which the mystics of every age have possessed. But from the point of view of our present theme this involves a good deal. The mystical experience, read thus, is at once perceived to be not a matter of knowledge, nor a substitute for knowledge; and the effort to attain it is in no wise an effort that aims at taking reason's place. Of course, if that close fellowship between God and man, after which mysticism strives, be once established, man will necessarily know more of the God with whom he is made one; and thus, incidentally, mysticism may come, over and above being what in its own essence it is, to be a feeder and enricher of the mind. But primarily, the mystical experience is not a matter of the mind. It is not an attitude of the intellect, nor an attitude substituted for an attitude of the intellect, but an attitude of the whole nature, an attitude — or, more accurately, a movement, a development — of life. It is not a knowing God, but a climbing into God on the part of man, a descent into man on the part of God. That is to say (and this is the crucial point) the mystical experience is the emergence of a new fact, not on the stage of the mind, but on the stage of the world-process itself: its establishment indicates, not that something has been learned or recognized or understood, but that a new event has taken place, that the next step of the evolutionary process has been passed. In the establishment of the mystical experience life, as man has known it, moves on through the next stage, which is also the last; something happens in the cosmic order and on the cosmic scale. In the nature of the case, the new cosmic event takes place by degrees, in instalments, as it were, since the individual members of the race, in whom life as it is is embodied, ascend only separately and at too rare intervals into the mystical experience which is life as it is destined to be. But this must not blind our eyes to the fact that every single instance of a genuine mystical experience is another instalment of the one movement which life in its evolution is next called upon to make. And if we could imagine all men entering upon the mystical experience at once, and could realize what this would imply in the way of the substitution of God's initiative for man's, we should immediately see how the establishment of any mystical experience is really an event upon the cosmic scale, the actual making of what did not exist before.

And so, once again, mysticism is not a reading of the world-process, but a contribution to it, the carrying of it on to a further stage: it is not a new apprehension of the order of the world and its relation to God; it is itself an event in that order and that relation. It is the actual making of something that did not previously exist: it is not an adjustment of relations, but the bringing to being of a new reality: it is a veritable becoming on the part of man, and, one may dare to say, a veritable becoming on the part of God, since, this union once set up, God sends himself through, beats himself out through, man, as previously he did not do. The mystical experience is a creative one, not an inferential one, or a substitute for an inferential one, at all. It is an anticipatory experience, on the part of the mystic's individual life, of that condition of things which is to be the goal of the world-process; it is, in fact, that condition of things beginning to be realized. In the mystical experience, life, and all that led up to it, gives itself up once more to the God from whom it came; and God takes into himself once more the life, with all that led up to it, to which he gave birth. It is the process of things which has been brought up, may one say, to its semi-final stage in the personality of man, now seeking and finding its goal, accomplishing the last stage of all, linking itself up with the personality of God, whence it originally set out, and so making itself rounded and complete. And the answer of mysticism, when reason taunts it with an endeavor to supplant reason in reason's own particular sphere, should run something like this: "I do not take your place nor claim to do your work. You search out what is. I make something that hitherto has not been. My part is not to know, but to create. I bring into the system of things a new fact, on which, once I have brought it in, you may work, if you can and will, in perfect consistency with the method on which you have worked before. I, at any rate, shall not seek to prevent you. There need be no quarrel between us. You expound the order of things. I supply a new element to the order of things. You say that you have no previous knowledge of all these things whereof I speak. Of course not. Until I call them into being, they are not there for you to know. But that is precisely what I do. In this mingling of God with man which I aim at and in part bring about, I conduct the order of things a step nearer to its goal."