By the Rev. W. K. Fleming, M.A., B.D. London: Robert Scott; New York and Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Company. 1913.
Mysticism and Modern Life. By John Wright Buckham. New York and Cincinnati: The Abingdon Press. [1915.]1
These two books illustrate a movement of recent thought which both of them are eager that we should recognize as in progress. This is a movement towards a reawakened interest in Mysticism, and even toward a reversion to it as a satisfying religious point of view. Such a movement was for religious men inevitable in the prevalent decay of confidence in the Christian revelation. For Mysticism is religion, and supplies a refuge for men of religious mind who find it no longer possible for them to rest on “external authority”—as George Tyrrell both expounded and illustrated for us. Once turn away from revelation and little choice remains to you but the choice between Mysticism and Rationalism. There is not so much choice between these things, it is true, as enthusiasts on either side are apt to imagine. The difference between them is very much a matter of temperament, or perhaps we may even say of temperature. The Mystic blows hot, the Rationalist cold. Warm up a Rationalist and you inevitably get a Mystic; chill down a Mystic and you find yourself with a Rationalist on your hands. The history of thought illustrates repeatedly the easy passage from one to the other. Each centers himself in himself, and the human self is not so big that it makes any large difference where within yourself you take your center. Nevertheless just because Mysticism blows hot, its “eccentricity” is the more attractive to men of lively religious feeling. But it is just as scornful as Rationalism of the supernatural, of “external revelation,” of historical foundations for religion. Face to face with the supernatural revelations recorded in the Christian Scriptures, it reduces them to “mystical phenomena,” and assimilates them to the experiences of a Plotinus, or of a Sadi. Face to face with the historical foundations of Christianity, it treats them as symbols of transactions which take place within the souls of men. It is of the very essence of Mysticism to find God within the circle of the individual’s experience. So soon as any other “way” of coming into “contact” with God is proposed than by sinking into ourselves, Mysticism is radically deserted. And because not the perception of God but God Himself is found in the human soul, and by implication in every human soul, God is ultimately confounded with the human soul: at his deepest depths man is God. No doubt, being a religion and not merely a philosophy, “unification” is presented by Mysticism as an achievement rather than as a postulate. And no doubt we may learnedly distinguish between Pantheism and Panentheism, between Pantheism and Negativism. All such efforts to escape from the coils of the serpent, however, are futile. Mysticism, in its fundamental basis of underlying conception, is just Pantheizing Anti-supernaturalism. And such it has shown itself—in greater or less purity of manifestation—in its entire historical development.
This is what Mysticism, with a capital M, is. Spell it with a lower-case m, and we may possibly broaden it out into only another name for natural religion. As it is religion, it is of course when so understood admirable. As it remains natural religion, it is equally of course, for fallen men, inadequate. Its relation to Christianity is that of natural religion to the religion of revelation. It goes without saying that it finds “for itself in Christianity a field of the richest and most fruitful soil.” This is saying too little. We must say that only in Christianity can it attain its true development and complement. For Christianity is not an unnatural religion disputing the field of religion with natural religion. It is natural religion reinforced by supernatural republication and sanctions, and completed by the addition of what is needed for a religion for men in the unnatural condition induced by sin. It takes up natural religion into itself and gives it the power to come to its rights while it enlarges it by adding to it the supernatural religion needed for sinful man. But it goes equally without saying that mysticism, understood as natural religion, is not, in some of its less complete developments, confined to the soil of Christianity. Just because it is natural religion it is present wherever human nature is present and functions religiously; and we do not need Schleiermacher to teach us that there is no human self-consciousness which is destitute of the God-consciousness. Of course, then, “it has been at the root of any and every religion worthy of the name, in its original and indefectible ‘feeling after God, if haply it may find Him.’ ” Wherever man exists he is “in contact” with God: and wherever men are “in contact” with God they may “know” Him if only they will attend to Him “in contact” with whom they are. We may even use the word “know” in its full sense. We see no reason to dispute Plotinus’ dictum that God to be known must be “seen” or “felt.” If God be a mere hypothesis, however fully that hypothesis is verified, He can scarcely be said to be “known.” That He is we may be sure; but to know that God is, is not yet to “know” God. We may acquire after a while good reason to believe that Mars, say, is inhabited: that would not warrant us in saying that we “know” the beings whose bare existence we have found reason to believe in. God is known only by those who being “in contact” with Him have looked upon Him with that eye of the soul to which He is visible. If this be mysticism, we are all mystics: not merely Augustine with his doctrine of the intelligible world and the sensus internus by which it is perceived, but Calvin also with his doctrine of the sensus deitatis which is the semen religionis. But it certainly is not Mysticism in any historical sense of that term.