Rational Mysticism and New Testament Christianity/IV

by Henry William Clark

But, now, what of New Testament Christianity? If mysticism, rightly understanding itself, finds that it has become truly rational because it creates the ultimate fact which somewhere or other reason needs to come upon in order to make its own system complete, does it also find itself in line with the religion expounded and prescribed on the New Testament page? We are proceeding throughout this paper, let it be remembered, upon the idea that if we begin from a revised apprehension of what mysticism in its essence really is, we may find ourselves started upon the road to that ultimate reconciliation of seeming incompatibles which we desire. In other words, the suggestion is that the moment mysticism gives a legitimate account of itself, mysticism moves toward reason and reason toward mysticism, mysticism toward New Testament Christianity and New Testament Christianity toward mysticism. The mutual movement of reason and mysticism, we have seen, is made. But does the other mutual movement begin? Do we find that our idea of New Testament Christianity makes anything like an automatic approach to clasp hands with our clarified and rectified idea of what the mystical experience really is?

An affirmative reply is surely the only one that can be given. If we set the mystical experience, as read above, side by side with the conception of the Christian experience given in the New Testament, it becomes immediately evident that these two are one. So soon as we obtain a right idea of mysticism, our idea of New Testament Christianity — if we come to the New Testament with receptive minds — tones itself up to meet it. When mysticism quits its mistaken self-interpretation and moves on to surer ground New Testament Christianity, in our conception of it, hoists an answering signal, and moves in its turn to meet mysticism there.

For let the phrases wherein the mystical experience was described be recalled. Mysticism is a climbing into God on the part of man, a descent into man on the part of God — that is the sum of them all. But if this be a right description of the mystical experience, it is also a right description of the experience declared in the New Testament to be religion's goal. It is true that the New Testament is largely concerned with the means whereby man may find his way from the lower stages of life up to this highest stage of all — with a self-revelation which God has given — with a work which God has wrought — with the manner in which that divine life wherewith man, moving upward, is to unite himself, has in Christ, moving downward, made offer to unite itself with man — with a faith through which man is to render all these works and arrangements of God, so to call them, effective for his own self-union with God. But, all through, the ideal of a veritable union between man's life and God's (or between man's life and Christ's, which for the New Testament is the same thing, since the divine life, according to the New Testament, mediates itself to man in and through Christ, and moves down, as was just now said, to meet man's upward striving, so that oneness with Christ is oneness with God) — all through, that ideal of a veritable union between man's life and God's life or Christ's life is kept in view. And it is a union in the strictest sense — not a mere harmony, not an accommodation of attitude on the part of one to what the attitude of the other requires, but an actual organic oneness, a true linking of personality to personality and of soul to soul. That, and nothing less, is the New Testament ideal.

To show this in any detail would involve a catena of quotations that is impossible here. But for any one who goes open-mindedly to the reading of the New Testament (after all due allowance for the results of reasonable criticism has been made) its mystical call rings clear. It rings in the ministry of Jesus — in the indisputable fact that, according to the presentation of the four gospels, Synoptic and Johannine alike, it was always his whole personality he sought to impress upon the personality of his hearers, and the whole personality of his hearers, as distinct from their assenting minds, he sought to draw into his own. One may venture to speak of the mysticism of Jesus, not in the sense that he was himself climbing into the divine life, for he was the divine life, but in the sense that he set himself before men as the One into whom they were to climb. That Christ was in a manner egoistic — may one put it so? — indicates how mystical he meant men to be; for to that egoism of his only mysticism on the part of men could adequately or appropriately respond. In Paul, again, the mystical call rings clear — in Paul, to whom those who fear the language of mysticism so often fly for refuge and for arms. It is not to be denied that Paul spoke frequently of the means whereby the mystical experience was to be won — of the machinery, so to term it, which the wisdom and power of God had set at work in order to make the mystical experience possible for mankind. But always it was "Christ in you," "you in Christ," and similar phrases that Paul employed to denote religion's goal; and for himself the aim was that it should be not he that lived, but Christ that lived in him; and he saw all the fulness of God in Christ, and, correlatively, in Christ saw also man made full. And this (unless we water down the words to a quite illegitimate extent) is mysticism undefiled. Indeed, the mystical experience of human life united to the life of God through union with Christ was for Paul so much the very essence of Christianity that he assumed it as such rather than argued it, and spoke of it, as it were, without any note of exclamation at the end of his phrase, — for which reason, it may be, we sometimes fail to be arrested as we ought. And so all through. A reading of the New Testament that is unprejudiced and open-eyed finds it the most mystical book in all the world. Theology may have missed the fact not seldom — and may have missed it, partly, because mysticism's wrong account of itself has failed to waken New Testament echoes as mysticism's right account of itself cannot fail to waken them. With a mysticism which understands itself mistakenly the New Testament has nothing to do; a mysticism which is merely a substitute for knowledge, and which repays reason's scorn with scorn, has no kinship with New Testament religion; it is at least on a different plane, since it is not with intellectual knowledge, or with substitutes for intellectual knowledge, that New Testament religion is concerned. But when mysticism begins to talk of a veritable movement of life into God's, the New Testament and mysticism find that they are speaking the same tongue. It is precisely of such a movement that the New Testament speaks. Mysticism makes the final fact — it is with the making of that same final fact that the New Testament deals throughout. Mysticism, in the sense of a real union between man's life and God's, is the atmosphere which pervades the New Testament from cover to cover; and when once, having heard mysticism expounding itself aright, we pass on to listen to New Testament Christianity expounding itself in its turn, we find that both come forth from the secret place with the same light upon their faces, and that the hearts of both beat as one.

But the matter must be pushed a little further before our task is ended. "You have not yet done" (it might be said) "what at the outset you were going to do. You have not yet made any connection between the mystical experience and those great terms, with the ideas they connote, which recur most frequently in the New Testament account — between the mystical experience and the ideas of sin, salvation, faith, and the rest — between the mystical experience and evangelicalism, in short. Can this also be done? Is it possible for the religious man to feel that 'immersion of his entire being in the eternal tides ' which was spoken of earlier, and at the same time to keep a hold upon all the apparatus of truth which gathers round the evangelical idea of reconciliation with God?"

On the true conception of mysticism, the connection is not only possible, but necessary. Mysticism not only permits the New Testament evangelicalism, but demands it. Interpreting itself truly, mysticism, we have seen, tenders itself not as a method of knowledge, but as a movement of life. But having thus corrected one mistake in the statement of its programme, mysticism is forced on inevitably to the correction of another; and the stress which it has often laid upon "contemplation" as the means of union with God must yield to something else. A "movement of life" means a real activity, and implies either something actually done by man's life for itself, or something actually done upon man's life from beyond itself, in order that the necessary movement may be made: if man is to climb into God, the problem at once becomes one which no method of "contemplation" can solve; and we have now to look for forces, whether acting from within the man or from without the man, whereby the "climbing" shall be pushed successfully through. And, taking the mere facts of the situation, a force acting from without the man — a reinforcement of man's power from beyond himself — is at the very least a thing to be desired. For, aiming at the mystical experience as described, we find ourselves with a retarding and depressing weight in our own nature to lift, with the divine life into which we want to climb so far away, and with a movement away from, rather than toward, the divine life always incipient, and often accentuated, within. These are mere matters of easily ascertainable fact, however exaggerated or distorted some readings of them may have been. How, in face of facts like these, is the true mystical experience to be attained?

It is here that the evangelical side of New Testament Christianity comes in. It is this question that is answered when the New Testament speaks of all those "means" — as we called them — whereof the New Testament does speak in tones so persistent and so loud. When the New Testament talks of sin, it is talking of that movement away from the divine life which is going on within me. When it talks of salvation in Christ, it recognizes that there must be a force, either within me or without me, under whose impulsive power I am to climb into the life of God, and, because the force within me is baffled, points me to a force without. When it speaks of God reconciling me to himself by Christ's Cross, it is mindful of the distance between me the climber and God the goal — mindful, too, of my helplessness — and tells how the far-off God has in Christ stooped out of his distance, taking upon himself the pain of sacrifice involved in the stooping, to meet arid touch me, to fetch me, to take me back again with him in Christ to his height. When it talks of faith, of believing and being saved, it talks of my response to that stooping down on God's part, calls me to identify myself with God in Christ in answer to that identification of himself with me which in Christ he has offered and (so far as from one side is possible) has actually made. That is, all the great terms which evangelical religion finds blazoned on the pages of the New Testament are concerned with the means whereby the mystical experience is to be won: they solve the problem which he who aspires to the mystical experience sets himself; and just in proportion to my understanding of the mystical experience, and to my desire for it, will be, not only my willingness to accept, but my passionate cry for, the New Testament presentation of the Christian faith. There is no fear that if I take the mystical experience for my goal, I shall sever myself from those things which students of the New Testament have held as cardinal through the ages. I shall, it is true, have a central conception (itself, however, a New Testament conception) round which all the New Testament ideas are to be grouped in order to receive their interpretation and in whose light they are to be read. Every doctrine which is given as a part of the "machinery" for producing the movement of my life into God's must justify itself as a means to that end; and in my conception of religion's goal I shall have a test to which every conception of faith, atonement, and all else must submit. But I shall want faith, atonement, and all else — all the great old words and the realities they stand for — not less, but more. And this, not in any pale, eviscerated significance — not in any significance which implies juggling with the old words but not really putting them to fair use, but in a significance which leaves them with the full value rendered to them still. When I set myself to achieve a veritable union with God, — a union wherein the only initiative I keep is the initiative of surrender — a union wherein God becomes the actual dynamic source of all I am — a union wherein the separateness of my personality is used only to secure its unity with God's, — then I shall prize the more warmly all those ringing words and ideas of the New Testament which tell me how God himself, knowing all the obstacles and gloriously conquering them in his wisdom, love, and power, has made it possible for that union to be achieved. New Testament Christianity need have no fear that for him who understands the mystical experience aright one jot or tittle of the religious programme it inculcates will pass away. It is just in that programme that the needed secret will be found. And the religious man, longing for the warmth of the mystic's experience, yet wondering whether in seeking it he may not be divorcing himself from the primary essentials of a true Christian life, may set his misgivings at rest. For if he understand the mystical experience truly, he will through his pursuit of it come to see all the vaster significance in the great New Testament truths of sin, and faith, and incarnation, and Christ, and Cross.

So, in the end, under a right understanding of the mystical experience, we see mysticism moving toward reason and reason toward mysticism; and we see mysticism and New Testament Christianity at one. And, with mysticism thus linked with reason on the one hand and with New Testament Christianity on the other, our conception of New Testament Christianity (which through its link with mysticism becomes endowed with fresh depth) becomes, through mysticism's link with reason, linked with reason in its turn, and endowed with fresh reasonableness, too. And so, to speak of "rational mysticism and New Testament Christianity" is to venture upon no union of incompatibles after all: it is to bring together three things whose voices blend, and on whose blended voices there comes the sound of a call we ought to hear. For the whole thing has a practical issue — which is this. Only in driving our religious life up to the mystical heights do we render it at the same time most reasonable and most in accord with the New Testament scheme; because only so do we make the "final fact" for which reason calls, and only so do we use the New Testament "means" for the realization of the New Testament ideal.