The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 1 (of 2)

The external, historical side is represented by the careful description and chronological arrangement observable in the account of six successive apparitions of the Risen Christ; and by the reference back to the acts and words used in the Eucharistic act at the Last Supper.[16]

Yet throughout the writings of St. Paul and of his school, it is the mystical, interior, experimental element that permeates the argumentative-speculative and the historical constituents. The chief manifestations of this mystical spirit and conviction, which really penetrates and knits together the whole of the Pauline teaching, can perhaps best be taken in a logical order.

First then it is St. Paul who, himself or through writers more or less dependent on him, gives us by far the most definite and detailed presentation of by far the most extraordinary experiences and events to be found in the New Testament outside of the Gospels themselves. For the author of the Acts of the Apostles gives us the lengthy description of the Pentecostal Visitation, and, three times over, that most vivid account of Our Lord’s apparition to Saul on the way to Damascus. And St. Paul himself describes for us, at the closest first hand, the ecstatic states of the Christian communities in their earliest charismatic stage; he treats the apparition on the way to Damascus as truly objective and as on a complete par with the earlier apparitions accorded to the chosen Apostles in the first days after the Resurrection; and he gives us the solemn reference to his own experience of rapture to the third Heaven.[17] We should, however, note, in the next place, as the vital complement, indeed as the necessary pre-requisite, to this conviction and to the effectiveness of these facts,—facts conceived and recorded as external, as temporal and local,—St. Paul’s profound belief that all external evidences, whether of human reasoning and philosophy or of visible miracle, fail to carry conviction without the presence of certain corresponding moral and spiritual dispositions in those to whom they are addressed. “The word of the Cross,” the very same preaching, “is to those that are perishing foolishness, but to us that are being saved the power of God.” And the external, taken alone, can so little convince, that even the seeking after the external, without requisite dispositions, will but get us further away from its hidden function and meaning. “The Jews ask for signs (miracles), and the Greeks seek wisdom (philosophy); but we preach Christ crucified, who is to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Gentiles foolishness; but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” And the cause of this difference of interpretation is shown to lie in the various interior dispositions of the hearers: “The animal man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he is incapable of understanding them, because they are spiritually discerned; but the spiritual man discerneth all things.”[18]

And yet this mystery of religion has to be externally offered, to be preached to us, and is preached to all men; it is intended by God to be known by all, and hence it is He who stimulates men to external preaching and external hearing, as to one of the pre-requisites of its acceptance: “The mystery which was hidden from the ages has now been made manifest”; he desires the Colossians to be strengthened in “the knowledge of the mystery of God and Christ”; and has to “speak the mystery of the Christ,” to “make it manifest.”[19]

And since this preaching, to be effective, absolutely requires, as we have seen, interior dispositions and interior illumination of the hearers, and since these things are different in different men, the degrees of initiation into this identical mystery are to be carefully adapted to the interior state of those addressed. “We preach wisdom amongst the perfect τέλειοι,” the technical term in the heathen Greek Mysteries for those who had received the higher grades of initiation. “I was not able to speak unto you as unto spiritual men, but (only) as unto fleshly ones, as unto infants in Christ. I have fed you with milk, not strong food, for you were not yet able.”[20]

And since all good, hence also the external preaching, comes from God, still more must this all-important interior apprehension of it come from Him. In a certain real sense the Spirit is thus organ as well as object of this interior light. “God has revealed unto us the wisdom of God through the Spirit; for the Spirit searcheth all things, even the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, unless the spirit of man that is in him? even so no man knoweth the things of God, except the Spirit of God.”[21]

But further, the mystery revealed in a unique degree and form in Christ’s life, is really a universal spiritual-human law; the law of suffering and sacrifice, as the one way to joy and possession, which has existed, though veiled till now, since the foundation of the world. “The mystery of Christ, which in former generations was not made manifest unto the sons of men, but has now been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets in the spirit.” And this law, which is Christ’s life, must reappear in the life of each one of us. “We have been buried together with Him through Baptism unto death, in order that, as Christ rose again from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in the newness of life”; “We know that our old man has been crucified together with Him. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall live with Him”; “If the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, He who raised Jesus from the dead will quicken your mortal bodies through His Spirit dwelling within you.”[22]

Christ’s life can be thus the very law of all life, because “He is the first-born of all creation, for in Him all things were created in heaven and on earth,” “all things were created through Him”; “and He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together”; “all things are summed up in Christ”; “Christ is all in all.” So that in the past, before His visible coming, the Jews in the desert “drank from the spiritual rock which followed them, and the rock was Christ.” And as He Himself is the perfect image of God, so all things are, in varying degrees, created in the image of Christ: “(Christ) who is the image of the living God”; “all things were created unto Him.” And since man is, in his original and potential essence, in a very special sense “the image and glory of God,” his perfecting will consist in a painful reconquest and development of this obscured and but potential essence, by becoming, as far as may be, another Christ, and living through the successive stages of Christ’s earthly life. We are bidden “all attain unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ,” so that, in the end, we may be able to say with the Apostle himself: “I live no more in myself, but Christ lives in me”; a consummation which appears so possible to St. Paul’s mind, that he eagerly, painfully longs for it: “My children, with whom I am again in travail, until Christ be formed in you.” And indeed “we all, with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord, the Spirit.”[23]

We have then in St. Paul not only a deeply mystical element, but mysticism of the noblest, indeed the most daringly speculative, world-embracing type.

5. The “Joannine” group: its characteristic truths.

And finally the Joannine group furnishes us with an instance, as strong as is conceivable within the wide pale of a healthy Christian spirit, of the predominance of an interior and intuitive, mystical, universalistic, spiritual and symbolic apprehension and interpretation both of external fact and of explicit reasoning.

The Visible and Historical is indeed emphasized, with a full consciousness of the contrasting Gnostic error, in the culminating sentence of the solemn Prologue of the Gospel, “And the Word was made Flesh and tabernacled amongst us, and we saw His glory,” and in the equally emphatic opening sentence of the First Epistle: “That which was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have beholden, and our hands have handled, … we announce unto you.” Hence too the Historical, Temporal Last Judgment, with its corporal resurrection, remains as certainly retained in this Gospel as in St. Matthew: “The hour cometh in which all those that are in the monuments shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and those that have done good shall come forth unto the resurrection of life, but those that have worked evil, unto the resurrection of judgment.”[24]

And Reasoning of a peculiarly continuous, rhythmically recurrent pattern, is as present and influential everywhere, as it is difficult to describe or even to trace. For it is here but the instrument and reflex of certain Mystical conceptions and doctrines, of a tendency to see, in everything particular and temporal, the Universal and Eternal; to apprehend Unity, a changeless Here and Now, in all multiplicity and succession, and hence to suppress explicit reasoning and clear distinctions, movement, growth, and change, as much as may be, both in the method of presentation and in the facts presented. If the Synoptists give us the successive, and write, unconsciously but specially, under the category of Time: the Fourth Gospel consciously presents us with simultaneity, and works specially under the category of Space.

The Successive is here conceived as but the appearance of the Simultaneous, of the Eternal and Abiding. Hence the historical development in the earthly experiences, teachings, and successes of Christ is ignored: His Godhead, that which is, stands revealed from the first in the appearances of His earthly life. Hence too the various souls of other men are presented to us as far as possible under one eternal and changeless aspect; they are types of various abiding virtues and iniquities, rather than concrete, composite mortals.

God appears here specially as Light, as Love, and as Spirit. Yet these largely thing-like attributions co-exist with personal qualities, and with real, ethical relations between God and the world: “God so loved the world, as that He gave His only begotten Son, in order that anyone who believeth in Him may not perish, but may have everlasting life.” The Father “draws” men, and “sends” His Son into the world.[25]

And this Son has eternally pre-existed with the Father; is the very instrument and principle of the world’s creation; and “is the true Light that enlightened every man that cometh into the world.” And this Word which, from the first, was already the Light of all men, became Flesh specially to manifest fully this its Life and Light. Indeed He is the only Light, and Way, and Truth, and Life; the only Door; the Living Bread; the true Vine.[26]

This Revelation and Salvation is indeed assimilated by individual souls and is received by them at a given moment, by a birth both new and from above, and is followed by a new knowledge. But this knowledge is not absolute nor unprogressive. Everywhere the Evangelist has indeed the verb γιγνώσκω, but nowhere the noun Gnosis; and the full meaning of the Revelation of the Father by the Son is to be only gradually revealed by the Holy Spirit. And this special new knowledge is not the cause but the effect of an ethical act on the part of the human soul,—an act of full trust in the persons of God and of His Christ, and in the intimations of the moral conscience as reflections of the divine will and nature. “If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be from God, or whether I speak from myself”; “He who doeth the truth, cometh to the light.”[27]

And this trust, and the experimental knowledge which flows from it, lead to an interior conviction so strong as to make us practically independent of external evidences. Hence in the First Epistle, this “we know” is repeatedly emphasized: “We know, that, if He shall be manifested, we shall be like Him”; “You know, that He was made manifest, that He might take away sins.” And this knowledge is communicated by the Spirit of God to man’s soul; the spirit bearing witness, there within, to the truth of Christ’s words, communicated from without. “The Spirit it is that beareth witness, for the Spirit is the Truth.”[28]

External signs (miracles), and a certain un-ethical assent given to them and their implications, these things are, even at their best, but preliminary, and, of themselves, insufficient. Hence Our Lord can find “many who believed in His name, seeing His signs (miracles) which He did”; and yet could “not trust Himself to them.” Nicodemus indeed can come to Our Lord, moved by the argument that “thou hast come a teacher from God, for no man can do the signs (miracles) that thou doest, unless God be with him.” But then Our Lord’s whole conversation with him renders clear how imperfect and ignorant Nicodemus is so far,—he had come by night, his soul was still in darkness. So also “many Samaritans believed in Him, because of His sign,”—His miraculous knowledge of her past history, shown to the Woman at the Well; but more of them believed because of His own words to them: “We ourselves have (now) heard, and we know that this man is of a truth the Saviour of the world.” Hence He can Himself bid the Apostles, in intimation of their full and final privilege and duty, “believe in Me” (that is, My words and the Spirit testifying within you to their Truth), “that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me”; and, only secondarily and failing that fulness, “but if not, then believe, because of the very works.” And the whole Joannine doctrine as to the object and method of Faith is dramatically presented and summed up in the great culminating scene and saying of the Fourth Gospel: “Thomas” (the Apostle who would see a visible sign first, and would then build his Faith upon that sight) “saith to Him: ‘My Lord and my God.’ Jesus saith to him: ‘Because thou hast seen Me, Thomas, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed.’”[29]

And this Faith and Knowledge arising thus, in its fulness, at most only on occasion, and never because, of spacial and temporal signs, are conceived as a timeless, Eternal Life, and as one which is already, here and now, an actual present possession. “He who believeth in the Son, hath eternal life”; “He who heareth and believeth My word, hath eternal life”; “We know that we have passed from death unto life”; “We know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.”[30] There is then a profound immanence of Christ in the believing soul, and of such a soul in Christ; and this mutual immanence bears some likeness to the Immanence of the Father in Christ, and of Christ in the Father. “In that day” (when “the Father shall give you the Spirit of Truth”) “ye shall know that I am in My Father, and you are in Me, and I in you.”[31]

III. Science: the Apprehension and Conception Of Brute Fact and Iron Law.

But now, athwart both the Hellenic and the Christian factors of our lives, the first apparently so clear and complete and beautiful, the latter, if largely dark and fragmentary, so deep and operative, comes and cuts a third and last factor, that of Science, apparently more peremptory and irresistible than either of its predecessors.[32] For both the former factors would appear to melt into mid-air before this last one. They evidently cannot ignore it; it apparently can ignore them. If Metaphysics and Religion seem involved in a perpetual round of interminable questions, solved, at most and at best, for but this man and for that, and with an evidence for their truth which can be and is gainsaid by many, but cannot be demonstrated with a peremptory clearness to any one: Science, on the other hand, would appear to give us just this terra firma of an easy, immediate, undeniable, continually growing, patently fruitful body of evidence and of fact.

And not only can Metaphysics and Religion not ignore Science, in the sense of denying or even overlooking its existence; they cannot apparently, either of them, even begin or proceed or end without constant reference, here frank and open, there tacit but none the less potent, to the enterprises, the methods, the conclusions of the Sciences one and all, and this even in view of establishing their own contentions. And more and more of the territory formerly assigned to Metaphysics or Religion seems in process of being conquered by Science: in Metaphysics, by experimental psychology, and by the simple history of the various philosophical systems, ideas, and technical terms, and of the local and temporal, racial and cultural antecedents and environments which gave rise to them; in Religion, by an analogous observation and study of man in the past and present, of man studied from within and from without.

1. Three characteristics of this scientific spirit.

Now this scientific spirit has hitherto, since its birth at the Renaissance, ever tended to the ever-increasing development of three main characteristics, which are indeed but several aspects of one single aim and end. There was and is, for one thing, the passion for Clearness, which finds its expression in the application of Mathematics and of the Quantitative view and standard to all and every subject-matter, in so far as the latter is conceived as being truly knowable at all. There was and is, for another, the great concept of Law, of an iron Necessity running through and expressing itself in all things, one great Determinism, before which all emotion and volition, all concepts of Spontaneity and Liberty, of Personality and Spirit, either Human or Divine, melt away, as so many petty subjective wilfulnesses of selfish, childish, “provincial” man, bent on fantastically humanizing this great, cold thing, the Universe, into something responsive to his own profoundly unimportant and objectively uninteresting sensations and demands. There was and is, for a third thing, a vigorous Monism, both in the means and in the end of this view. Our sources of information are but one,—the reasoning, reckoning Intellect, backed up by readily repeatable, directly verifiable Experiment. The resultant information is but one,—the Universe within and without, a strict unbroken Mechanism.

If we look at the most characteristically modern elements of Descartes, and, above all, of Spinoza, we cannot fail to find throughout, as the reaction of this Scientific spirit upon Philosophy, the passion for those three things: for Clearness and ready Transferableness of ideas; for one universal, undeniable Common Element and Measure for all knowledge of every degree and kind; and for Law, omnipresent and inexorable. That is, we have here a passion for Thing as over against, as above, Person; for the elimination of all wilfulness, even at the cost of will itself, of all indetermination, obscurity and chance, even at the cost of starving and drying up whole regions of our complex nature, whole sources of information, and of violently simplifying and impoverishing the outlook on to reality both within us and without.

2. Fundamental motive of entire quest, deeply legitimate, indeed religious: Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant.

And yet how unjust would he be who failed to recognize, in the case of Spinoza especially, the noble, and at bottom deeply religious, motives and aspirations underlying such excesses; or the new problems and necessities, the permanent growth and gain, which this long process of human thought has brought to Religion itself, especially in indirect and unintentional ways!

For as to the motives, it ought not to be difficult to any one who knows human history and human nature, to see how the all but complete estrangement from Nature and Physical Fact which, from Socrates onwards, with the but very partial exception of Aristotle, had, for well-nigh two thousand years, preceded this reaction; how the treatment of Matter and the Visible as more or less synonymous with Non-Being and Irrationality, as a veil or even a wall, as a mere accident or even a positive snare, lying everywhere between us and Reality, could not fail to require and produce a swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction. And the feeling and the perception of how superficial and unreal, how oppressively confined, how intolerably fixed and ultimate, how arrogant and cold and fruitless, such persistent neglect of the Data of Sense had somehow, at last, rendered philosophy, gave now polemical edge to men’s zealous study and discovery of this world. This study was perceived, even by the shallower thinkers, to be fair and rational and fruitful in itself; and it was found, by some few deep spirits, to be a strangely potent means of purifying, enlarging, “deprovincializing” man himself. The severe discipline of a rigorous study of man’s lowly, physical conditions and environment, things hitherto so despised by him, was now at last to purify him of his own childish immediacy of claim. The pettily selfish, shouting Individual was to pass through the broad, still, purgatorial waters of a temporary submergence under the conceptions, as vivid as though they were direct experiences, of ruthless Law, of Mechanism, of the Thing; so as to pass out, purified and enlarged, a Person, expressive of the Universal and Objective, of Order and of Law.

It is especially in Spinoza that this deeper, universally human and ethical, indeed we can say religious, implication and ideal of the rigorously scientific spirit is present in all its noble intuition and aspiration, and that at the same time, alas, this deep truth is forced into a ruinously inappropriate method and formulation. For the original end of the entire quest, an end which is still emotionally dominant and which furnishes the hidden dialectic of the whole,—Man, his nobility and interior purification and beatitude,—has here, intellectually, become but a means; Man, in the real logic of this system, is, hopelessly and finally, but a wheel in the huge mechanism of that natura naturata which Spinoza’s own richness and nobility of character transcends with potent inconsistency. And this very system, which is so nobly human and Christian in its ethical tone and in its demand of a Conversion of the whole man, in its requiring man to lose and sacrifice his petty self that he may gain his true self and become a genuine constituent of the Universe and Thought of God, is also the very one which, by its ruthless Naturalism and Determinism of Doctrine and its universally Mathematical and Quantitative form and method, logically eliminates all such qualitative differentiation and conversion as impossible and futile.

The prima facie view of life as it presents itself to the clarifying, Scientific Intellect, namely the omnipresence of the determinist mechanism, has never been more impressively felt and pictured than by Spinoza; the dispositions and happiness of the purified, disinterested soul have rarely been experienced and described with more touching elevation and power. But there is no real transition, indeed no possibility of such, in his system, from that first aspect to this latter state; for that first aspect, that apparent determinism, is for his logic not merely apparent or secondary, but the very truth of truths, the very core and end of things.

And this bondage of mind to matter, this enslavement of the master to the servant, this narrow, doctrinaire intellectualism and determinism, is more hidden than cured in Leibniz, who, if he brings the immense improvement because enrichment of a keen sense and love of the Historical, loses, on the other hand, Spinoza’s grandly Conversional tone and temper. A cheerful, easy, eminently sane but quite inadequate bustle of manifold interests; a ready, pleasant optimism; an endless laboriousness of the reasoning faculty; all this, even though carried out on a scale unique since the days of Aristotle, is necessarily unequal to face and bear “the burthen of all this unintelligible world.”

And yet here, in him who may not unfitly be called the last of the Dogmatic Rationalists and Optimists, we have already those great perceptions which were destined more and more to burst the bonds of this cold, clear, complete, confining outlook. For one thing, as already stated, there is, alongside the love of the Material and Mathematical, an almost equal love of the Historical and Human. There is, for another thing, the deep consciousness of the Individuality and Interiority of all real existences,—all that is at all, has an inside to it. And, finally, in further enforcement of this latter doctrine, there is the fruitful conception of Subconscious States of feeling and of mind in all living things.

Yet it is only in Kant that,—with all his obscurities and numberless demonstrable inconsistencies, with all his saddening impoverishment of the outlook in many ways,—we get, little conscious as he himself is of such a service, the deep modern explanation of the ancient pre-scientific neglect and suspicion of natural research. Here we are led to see that the strictly Scientific view of Nature is necessarily quantitative, but that the strictly Ethical, Spiritual view of man is as necessarily qualitative; that the analysis of all natural phenomena but leads to judgments as to what is, whereas the requirements of human action lead to judgments of what ought to be. Here the weak point lies in the contrast, established by him and pushed to the degree of mutual exclusion, between Reason and Will. For the contrast which we find in actual life is really between the deeper reason, ever closely accompanied by deep emotion, this reason and emotion occasioning, and strengthened by, the action of the whole man,—and all this is not directly transferable; and the more superficial reasoning, having with it little or no emotion,—the action of but one human faculty,—and this action is readily transferable.

3. Place and function of such science in the totality of man’s life.

The mistake in the past would thus lie, not in the doctrine that the Visible cannot suffice for man and is not his mind’s true home; nor in the implication that the Visible cannot directly and of itself reveal to him the Spiritual world. The error would lie entirely in the double implication or doctrine, that there is really nothing to be known about Nature, or that what can be known of it can be attained by Metaphysical or Mystical methods; and again that strictly quantitative, severe scientific method and investigation can, even in the long run, be safely neglected by the human soul, as far as its own spiritual health is concerned.

We take it then that mankind has, after endless testings and experiences, reached the following conclusions. We encounter everywhere, both within us and without, both in the physical and mental world, in the first instance, a whole network of phenomena; and these phenomena are everywhere found to fall under certain laws, and to be penetrable by certain methods of research, these laws and methods varying indeed in character and definiteness according to the subject-matter to which they apply, but in each case affording to man simply indefinite scope for discovery without, and for self-discipline within.

And all this preliminary work and knowledge does not directly require religion nor does it directly lead to it; indeed we shall spoil both the knowledge itself, and its effect upon our souls and upon religion, if religion is here directly introduced. The phenomena of Astronomy and Geology, of Botany and Zoology, of human Physiology and Psychology, of Philology and History are and ought to be, in the first instance, the same for all men, whether the said men do or do not eventually give them a raison d’être and formal rational interest by discovering the metaphysical and religious convictions and conclusions which underlie and alone give true unity to them and furnish a living link between the mind observing and the things observed. Various as are these phenomena, according to the department of human knowledge to which they severally belong, yet they each and all have to be, in the first instance, discovered and treated according to principles and methods immanent and special to that department.

And the more rigorously this is accomplished, both by carrying out these principles and methods to their fullest extent, and by conscientiously respecting their limits of applicability and their precise degree of truth and of range in the larger scheme of human activity and conviction, the more will such science achieve three deeply ethical, spiritually helpful results.

Such science will help to discipline, humble, purify the natural eagerness and wilfulness, the cruder forms of anthropomorphism, of the human mind and heart. This turning to the visible will thus largely take the place of that former turning away from it; for only since the Visible has been taken to represent laws, and, provisionally at least, rigorously mechanical laws characteristic of itself, can it be thus looked upon as a means of spiritual purification.

Such science again will help to stimulate those other, deeper activities of human nature, which have made possible, and have all along preceded and accompanied, these more superficial ones; and this, although such science will doubtless tend to do the very opposite, if the whole nature be allowed to become exclusively engrossed in this one phenomenal direction. Still it remains true that perhaps never has man turned to the living God more happily and humbly, than when coming straight away from such rigorous, disinterested phenomenal analysis, as long as such analysis is felt to be both other than, and preliminary and secondary to, the deepest depths of the soul’s life and of all ultimate Reality.

And finally, such science will correspondingly help to give depth and mystery, drama and pathos, a rich spirituality, to the whole experience and conception of the soul and of life, of the world and of God. Instead of a more or less abstract picture, where all is much on the same plane, where all is either fixed and frozen, or all is in a state of feverish flux, we get an outlook, with foreground, middle distances, and background, each contrasting with, each partially obscuring, partially revealing, the other; but each doing so, with any freshness and fulness, only in and through the strongly willing, the fully active and gladly suffering, the praying, aspiring, and energizing spiritual Personality, which thus both gives and gets its own true self ever more entirely and more deeply.

4. Science to be taken, throughout our life, in a double sense and way.

In such a conception of the place of Science, we have permanently to take Science, throughout life, in a double sense and way. In the first instance, Science is self-sufficing, its own end and its own law. In the second instance, which alone is ever final, Science is but a part of a whole, but a function, a necessary yet preliminary function, of the whole of man; and it is but part, a necessary yet preliminary part, of his outlook. Crush out, or in any way mutilate or deautonomize, this part, and all the rest will suffer. Sacrifice the rest to this part, either by starvation or attempted suppression, or by an impatient assimilation of this immense remainder to that smaller and more superficial part, and the whole man suffers again, and much more seriously.

And the danger, in both directions,—let us have the frankness to admit the fact,—is constant and profound: even to see it continuously is difficult; to guard against it with effect, most difficult indeed. For to starve or to suspect, to cramp or to crush this phenomenal apprehension and investigation, in the supposed interest of the ulterior truths, must ever be a besetting temptation and weakness for the religious instinct, wherever this instinct is strong and fixed, and has not yet itself been put in the way of purification.

For Religion is ever, qua religion, authoritative and absolute. What constitutes religion is not simply to hold a view and to try and live a life, with respect to the Unseen and the Deity, as possibly or even certainly beautiful or true or good: but precisely that which is over and above this,—the holding this view and this life to proceed somehow from God Himself, so as to bind my innermost mind and conscience to unhesitating assent. Not simply that I think it, but that, in addition, I feel bound to think it, transforms a thought about God into a religious act.

Now this at once brings with it a double and most difficult problem. For Religion thus becomes, by its very genius and in exact proportion to its reality, something so entirely sui generis, so claimful and supreme, that it at once exacts a two-fold submission, the one simultaneous, the other successive; the first as it were in space, the second in time. The first regards the relations of religion to things non-religious. It might be parodied by saying: “Since religion is true and supreme, religion is all we require: all things else must be bent or broken to her sway.” She has at the very least the right to a primacy not of honour only, but of direct jurisdiction, over and within all activities and things. The second regards the form and concept of religion itself. Since religion always appears both in a particular form at a particular time and place, and as divine and hence authoritative and eternal; and since the very strength and passion of religion depend upon the vigorous presence and close union of these two elements: religion will ever tend either really to oppose all change within itself, or else to explain away its existence. Religion would thus appear doomed to be either vague and inoperative, or obscurantist and insincere.

And it is equally clear that the other parts of man’s nature and of his outlook cannot simply accept such a claim, nor could religion itself flourish at all if they could and did accept it. They cannot accept the claim of religion to be immediately and simply all, for they are fully aware of being themselves something also. They cannot accept her claim to dictate to them their own domestic laws, for they are fully aware that they each, to live truly at all, require their own laws and their own, at least relative, autonomy. However much man may be supremely and finally a religious animal, he is not only that; but he is a physical and sexual, a fighting and artistic, a domestic and social, a political and philosophical animal as well.

Nor can man, even simply qua religious man, consent to a simple finality in the experience and explication, in the apprehension and application of religion, either in looking back into the past; or in believing and loving, suffering and acting in the present; or in forecasting the future, either of the race or of himself alone. For the here and now, the concrete “immediacy,” the unique individuality of the religious experience for me, in this room, on this very day, its freshness, is as true and necessary a quality of living religion as any other whatsoever. And if all life sustains itself only by constant, costing renovation and adaptation of itself to its environment, the religious life, as the most intense and extensive of all lives, must somehow be richest in such newness in oldness, such renovative, adaptive, assimilative power.

5. All this seen at work in man’s actual history.

Now it is deeply instructive to observe all this at work historically. For here we find every variety of attitude towards this very point. There are men of Religion who attempt to do without Science, and men of Science who attempt to do without Religion. Or again, men of Religion attempt to level up,—to assimilate the principles and results of the various sciences directly to religion, or at least to rule those scientific principles and results directly by religion. Or men of Science attempt to level down, to make religion into a mere philosophy or even a natural history. Yet we find also,—with so persistent a recurrence in all manner of places and times, as itself to suggest the inherent, essential, indestructible truth of the view,—another, a far more costing attitude. This attitude refuses all mutilation either of normal human nature or of its outlook, all oppression of one part by the other; for it discovers that these various levels of life have been actually practised in conjunction by many an individual in the past and in the present; and that, where they have been practised within a large organization of faith and love, they have ever led to a fuller reality and helpfulness both of the science and of the religion concerned. Hence the mind thus informed cannot doubt the truth of this solution, however difficult at all times may be its practice, and however little final at any time can be its detailed intellectual analysis.

IV. Summing up: Hellenism or Harmonization, Christianity or Spiritual Experience, and Science or Acceptance of a Preliminary Mechanism, all three necessary to Man.

To sum up all this first chapter, we have got so far as this. We have seen that humanity has, so far, found and worked out three forces and conceptions of life, forces which are still variously operative in each of us, but which find their harmonious interaction in but few men, their full theoretical systematization in none.[33]

There is the ancient, Greek contribution, chiefly intellectual and aesthetic, mostly cold and clear, quick and conclusive, with, upon the whole, but a slight apprehension of personality and freedom, of conscience and of sin, and little or no sense of the difference and antagonism between these realities and simply Mathematical, Mechanical laws and concepts. It is a view profoundly abstract, and, at bottom, determinist: the will follows the intellect necessarily, in exact proportion to the clearness of information of the former. And the strength of this view, which was possible even to that gifted race just because of the restrictedness of its knowledge concerning the length and breadth of nature and of history, and still more with regard to the depths of the human character and conscience, consists in its freshness, completeness, and unity. And this ideal of an ultimate harmonization of our entire life and of its theory we must never lose, more and more difficult though its even approximate realization has of necessity become.

There is next the middle, Christian contribution, directly moral and religious, deep and dim and tender, slow and far-reaching, immensely costly, infinitely strong; with its discovery and exemplification of the mysterious depth and range and complexity of human personality and freedom, of conscience and of sin; a view profoundly concrete and at bottom libertarian. The goodwill here first precedes, and then outstrips, and determines the information supplied by the intellect: “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.” And the strength of this position consists in its being primarily not a view, but a life, a spiritual, religious life, requiring, implying, indeed proclaiming, definite doctrines concerning God and man, and their relations to each other, but never exhausted by these doctrines even in their collectivity, inexhaustible though these in their turn are by their union with the life of the spirit, their origin and end.

There is finally the modern, Scientific contribution, intensely impersonal and determinist, directly neither metaphysical nor religious, but more abstract even than the Greek view, in the mathematical constituent of its method, and more concrete in a sense than Christianity itself, in the other, the sensible-experiment constituent of its method. The most undeniable of abstractions, those of mathematics, (undeniable just because of their enunciation of nothing but certain simplest relations between objects, supposing those objects to exist,) are here applied to the most undeniable of concretions, the direct experiences of the senses. And this mysterious union which, on the surface, is so utterly heterogeneous, is itself at all explicable only on mental, metaphysical assumptions and on the admission of the reality and priority of Mind. It is a union that has turned out as unassailable in its own province, as it is incapable of suppressing or replacing the wider and deeper truths and lives discovered for us respectively by Hellenism and Christianity.

Only in the case that man could but reckon mathematically and observe with his senses, or in the case that man were indeed provided with other faculties, but that he found Reality outside him and within him to be properly apprehensible by the mathematico-experimental process alone, could there be any serious question of such a final suppression of by far the greater and deeper portion of himself. Instead of any such deadlock the facts of these last four centuries bear out the contention that neither can the religious life suppress or do without the philosophical and the scientific, nor can either of these other two lives suppress or permanently do without its fellow or without religion.

But all this and its detailed practical application will, I trust, become much clearer as we proceed.

CHAPTER II
THE THREE ELEMENTS OF RELIGION

Now if we will but look back upon our own religious life, we shall find that, in degrees and in part in an order of succession varying indefinitely with each individual, three modalities, three modes of apprehension and forms of appeal and of outlook, have been and are at work within us and around.[34]

1. Sense and Memory, the Child’s means of apprehending Religion.

In the doubtless overwhelming majority of cases, there came first, as far as we can reconstruct the history of our consciousness, the appeal to our infant senses of some external religious symbol or place, some picture or statue, some cross or book, some movement of some attendant’s hands and eyes. And this appeal would generally have been externally interpreted to us by some particular men or women, a Mother, Nurse, Father, Teacher, Cleric, who themselves would generally have belonged to some more or less well-defined traditional, institutional religion. And their appeal would be through my senses to my imaginative faculty first, and then to my memory of that first appeal, and would represent the principle of authority in its simplest form.

All here as yet works quasi-automatically. The little child gets these impressions long before itself can choose between, or even is distinctly conscious of them; it believes whatever it sees and is told, equally, as so much fact, as something to build on. If you will, it believes these things to be true, but not in the sense of contrasting them with error; the very possibility of the latter has not yet come into sight. And at this stage the External, Authoritative, Historical, Traditional, Institutional side and function of Religion are everywhere evident. Cases like that of John Stuart Mill, of being left outside of all religious tradition, we may safely say, will ever remain exceptions to help prove the rule. The five senses then, perhaps that of touch first, and certainly that of sight most; the picturing and associative powers of the imagination; and the retentiveness of the memory, are the side of human nature specially called forth. And the external, sensible, readily picturable facts and the picturing functions of religion correspond to and feed this side, as readily as does the mother’s milk correspond to and feed that same mother’s infant. Religion is here, above all, a Fact and Thing.

2. Question and Argument, the Youth’s mode of approaching Religion.

But soon there wakes up another activity and requirement of human nature, and another side of religion comes forth to meet it. Direct experience, for one thing, brings home to the child that these sense-informations are not always trustworthy, or identical in its own case and in that of others. And, again, the very impressiveness of this external religion stimulates indeed the sense of awe and of wonder, but it awakens curiosity as well. The time of trustful questioning, but still of questioning, first others, then oneself, has come. The old impressions get now more and more consciously sought out, and selected from among other conflicting ones; the facts seem to clamour for reasons to back them, against the other hostile facts and appearances, or at least against those men in books, if not in life, who dare to question or reject them. Affirmation is beginning to be consciously exclusive of its contrary: I begin to feel that I hold this, and that you hold that; and that I cannot do both; and that I do the former, and exclude and refuse the latter.

Here it is the reasoning, argumentative, abstractive side of human nature that begins to come into play. Facts have now in my mind to be related, to be bound to other facts, and men to men; the facts themselves begin to stand for ideas or to have the latter in them or behind them. The measuring-rod seems to be over all things. And religion answers this demand by clear and systematic arguments and concatenations: this and this is now connected with that and that; this is true or this need not be false, because of that and that. Religion here becomes Thought, System, a Philosophy.

3. Intuition, Feeling, and Volitional requirements and evidences, the Mature Man’s special approaches to Faith.

But yet a final activity of human nature has to come to its fullest, and to meet its response in a third side of Religion. For if in Physiology and Psychology all action whatsoever is found to begin with a sense-impression, to move through the central process of reflection, and to end in the final discharge of will and of action, the same final stage can be found in the religious life. Certain interior experiences, certain deep-seated spiritual pleasures and pains, weaknesses and powers, helps and hindrances, are increasingly known and felt in and through interior and exterior action, and interior suffering, effort, and growth. For man is necessarily a creature of action, even more than of sensation and of reflection; and in this action of part of himself against other parts, of himself with or against other men, with or against this or that external fact or condition, he grows and gradually comes to his real self, and gains certain experiences as to the existence and nature and growth of this his own deeper personality.

Man’s emotional and volitional, his ethical and spiritual powers, are now in ever fuller motion, and they are met and fed by the third side of religion, the Experimental and Mystical. Here religion is rather felt than seen or reasoned about, is loved and lived rather than analyzed, is action and power, rather than either external fact or intellectual verification.

II. Each Element ever accompanied by some amount of the other two. Difficulty of the Transitions from one stage to the other.

Now these three sides of the human character, and corresponding three elements of Religion, are never, any one of them, without a trace or rudiment of the other two; and this joint presence of three such disparate elements ever involves tension, of a fruitful or dangerous kind.[35]

1. Utility of this joint presence.

In the living human being indeed there never exists a mere apprehension of something external and sensible, without any interior elaboration, any interpretation by the head and heart. We can hardly allow, we can certainly in nowise picture to ourselves, even an infant of a few hours old, as working, and being worked upon, by nothing beyond these sense-perceptions alone. Already some mental, abstractive, emotional-volitional reaction and interpretation is presumably at work; and not many weeks or months pass before this is quite obviously the case. And although, on the other hand, the impressions of the senses, of the imagination and the memory are, normally, more numerous, fresh, and lasting in early than in later years, yet up to the end they continue to take in some new impressions, and keep up their most necessary functions of supplying materials, stimulants, and tests to the other powers of the soul.

Thus, too, Religion is at all times more or less both traditional and individual; both external and internal; both institutional, rational, and volitional. It always answers more or less to the needs of authority and society; of reason and proof; of interior sustenance and purification. I believe because I am told, because it is true, because it answers to my deepest interior experiences and needs. And, everything else being equal, my faith will be at its richest and deepest and strongest, in so far as all these three motives are most fully and characteristically operative within me, at one and the same time, and towards one and the same ultimate result and end.

2. The two crises of the soul, when it adds Speculation to Institutionalism, and Mysticism to both.

Now all this is no fancy scheme, no petty or pretty artificial arrangement: the danger and yet necessity of the presence of these three forces, the conflicts and crises within and between them all, in each human soul, and between various men and races that typify or espouse one or the other force to the more or less complete exclusion of the other, help to form the deepest history, the truest tragedy or triumph of the secret life of every one of us.

The transition from the child’s religion, so simply naïve and unselfconscious, so tied to time and place and particular persons and things, so predominantly traditional and historical, institutional and external, to the right and normal type of a young man’s religion, is as necessary as it is perilous. The transition is necessary. For all the rest of him is growing,—body and soul are growing in clamorous complexity in every direction: how then can the deepest part of his nature, his religion, not require to grow and develop also? And how can it permeate and purify all the rest, how can it remain and increasingly become “the secret source of all his seeing,” of his productiveness and courage and unification, unless it continually equals and exceeds all other interests within the living man, by its own persistent vitality, its rich and infinite variety, its subtle, ever-fresh attraction and inexhaustible resourcefulness and power? But the crisis is perilous. For he will be greatly tempted either to cling exclusively to his existing, all but simply institutional, external position, and to fight or elude all approaches to its reasoned, intellectual apprehension and systematization; and in this case his religion will tend to contract and shrivel up, and to become a something simply alongside of other things in his life. Or he will feel strongly pressed to let the individually intellectual simply supplant the institutional, in which case his religion will grow hard and shallow, and will tend to disappear altogether. In the former case he will, at best, assimilate his religion to external law and order, to Economics and Politics; in the latter case he will, at best, assimilate it to Science and Philosophy. In the first case, he will tend to superstition; in the second, to rationalism and indifference.

But even if he passes well through this first crisis, and has thus achieved the collaboration of these two religious forces, the external and the intellectual, his religion will still be incomplete and semi-operative, because still not reaching to what is deepest and nearest to his will. A final transition, the addition of the third force, that of the emotional-experimental life, must yet be safely achieved. And this again is perilous: for the two other forces will, even if single, still more if combined, tend to resist this third force’s full share of influence to the uttermost. To the external force this emotional power will tend to appear as akin to revolution; to the intellectual side it will readily seem mere subjectivity and sentimentality ever verging on delusion. And the emotional-experimental force will, in its turn, be tempted to sweep aside both the external, as so much oppressive ballast; and the intellectual, as so much hair-splitting or rationalism. And if it succeeds, a shifting subjectivity, and all but incurable tyranny of mood and fancy, will result,—fanaticism is in full sight.

III. Parallels to this Triad of Religious Elements.

If we would find, applied to other matters, the actual operation and co-operation, at the earliest stage of man’s life, of the identical powers under discussion, we can find them, by a careful analysis of our means and processes of knowledge, or of the stages of all reflex action.

1. The three constituents of Knowledge.

Even the most elementary acquisition, indeed the very possibility, of any and all certitude and knowledge, is dependent for us upon the due collaboration of the three elements or forces of our nature, the sensational, the rational, the ethico-mystical.[36]

There is, first, in the order of our consciousness and in the degree of its undeniableness, the element of our actual impressions, the flux of our consciousness as it apprehends particular sights and sounds, smells and tastes and touches; particular sensations of rest and movement, pleasure and pain, memory, judgment, and volition, a flux, “changeless in its ceaseless change.” We have so far found neither a true object for thought, nor a subject which can think. And yet this element, and this alone, is the simply, passively received, the absolutely undeniable part of our experience,—we cannot deny it if we would. And again, it is the absolutely necessary pre-requisite for our exercise or acquisition, indeed for our very consciousness, of the other two means or elements, without which there can be no real knowledge.

For there is, next in the logical order of the analysis of our consciousness and in the degree of its undeniableness, the element of the various forms of necessary thought, in as much as these are experienced by us as necessary. We can, with Aristotle, simply call them the ten categories; or we can, with greater precision and extension, group them, so far with Kant, under the two main heads of the two pure “aesthetic” Perceptions of time and space, on the one hand; and of the various “analytic” Forms of judgment and of the Categories of Unity, Reality, Substance, Possibility, etc., on the other hand. Now it can be shown that it is only by means of this whole second element, only through the co-operation of these “perceptions” and forms of thought, that any kind even of dim feeling of ordered succession or of system, of unity or meaning, is found by our mind in that first element. Only these two elements, found and taken together, present us, in their interaction, with even the impression and possibility of something to reason about, and something wherewith to reason.

The second element then differs from the first in this, that whereas the first presents its contents simply as actual and undeniable, yet without so far any necessity or significance: the second presents its contents as both actual and necessary. By means of the first element I see a red rose, but without any feeling of more than the fact that a rose, or at least this one, is red; it might quite as well be yellow or blue. By means of the second element, I think of a body of any kind, not only as actually occupying some particular space and time, but as necessarily doing so; I feel that I must so think of it.

And yet there is a third and last element necessary to give real value to the two previous ones. For only on the condition that I am willing to trust these intimations of necessity, to believe that these necessities of my subjective thought are objective as well, and correspond to the necessities of Being, can I reach the trans-subjective, can I have any real knowledge and experience of anything whatsoever, either within me or without. The most elementary experience, the humblest something to be granted as really existing and as to be reasoned from, is thus invariably and inevitably composed for me of three elements, of which only the first two are directly experienced by me at all. And the third element, the ethico-mystical, has to be there, I have to trust and endorse the intimations of necessity furnished by the second element, if anything is to come of the whole movement.

Thus, here also, at the very source of all our certainty, of the worth attributable to the least or greatest of our thoughts and feelings and acts, we already find the three elements: indubitable sensation, clear thought, warm faith in and through action. And thus life here already consists of multiplicity in unity; and what in it is absolutely indubitable, is of value only because it constitutes the indispensable starting-point and stimulation for the apprehension and affirmation of realities not directly experienced, not absolutely undeniable, but which alone bear with them all the meaning, all the richness, all the reality and worth of life.

2. The three links in the chain of Reflex Action.

We can also find this same triad, perhaps more simply, if we look to Psychology, and that most assured and most far-reaching of all its results, the fact and analysis of Reflex Action. For we find here that all the activities of specifically human life begin with a sense-impression, as the first, the one simply given element; that they move into and through a central process of mental abstraction and reflection, as the second element, contributed by the mind itself; and that they end, as the third element, in the discharge of will and of action, in an act of free affirmation, expansion, and love.

In this endless chain composed of these groups of three links each, the first link and the last link are obscure and mysterious: the first, as coming from without us, and as still below our own thought; the third, as going out from us, and seen by us only in its external results, never in its actual operation, nor in its effect upon our own central selves. Only the middle link is clear to us. And yet the most mysterious part of the whole process, the effect of it all upon the central self, is also the most certain and the most important result of the whole movement, a movement which ever culminates in a modification of the personality and which prepares this personality for the next round of sense-perception, intellectual abstraction, ethical affirmation and volitional self-determination,—acts in which light and love, fixed and free, hard and cold and warm, are so mysteriously, so universally, and yet so variously linked.

IV. Distribution of the Three Elements amongst Mankind and throughout Human History.

Let us now watch and see where and how the three elements of Religion appear among the periods of man’s life, the human professions, and the races of mankind; then how they succeed each other in history generally; and finally how they exist among the chief types and phases of the Oriental, Classical Graeco-Roman, and Judaeo-Christian religions.

1. The Elements: their distribution among man’s various ages, sexes, professions, and races.

We have already noticed how children incline to the memory-side, to the external, social type; and it is well they should do so, and they should be wisely helped therein. Those passing through the storm-and-stress period insist more upon the reason, the internal, intellectual type; and mature souls lay stress upon the feelings and the will, the internal, ethical type. So again, women generally tend either to an excess of the external, to superstition; or of the emotional, to fanaticism. Men, on the contrary, appear generally to incline to an excess of the intellectual, to rationalism and indifference.

Professions, too, both by the temperaments which they presuppose, and the habits of mind which they foster, have various affinities. The fighting, administrative, legal and political sciences and services, readily incline to the external and institutional; the medical, mathematical, natural science studies, to the internal-intellectual; the poetical, artistic, humanitarian activities, to the internal-emotional.

And whole races have tended and will tend, upon the whole, to one or other of these three excesses: e.g. the Latin races, to Externalism and Superstition; the Teutonic races, to the two Interiorisms, Rationalism and Fanaticism.

2. Co-existence and succession of the Three Elements in history generally.

The human race at large has evidently been passing, upon the whole, from the exterior to the interior, but with a constant tendency to drop one function for another, instead of supplementing, stimulating, purifying each by means of the other two.

If we go back as far as any analyzable records will carry us, we find that, in proportion as religion emerges from pure fetichism, it has ever combined with the apprehension of a Power conceived, at last and at best, as of a Father in heaven, that of a Bond with its brethren upon earth. Never has the sacrifice, the so-to-speak vertical relation between the individual man and God, between the worshipper and the object of his worship, been without the sacrificial meal, the communion, the so-to-speak lateral, horizontal relations between man and his fellow-man, between the worshippers one and all. Never has religion been purely and entirely individual; always has it been, as truly and necessarily, social and institutional, traditional and historical. And this traditional element, not all the religious genius in the world can ever escape or replace: it was there, surrounding and moulding the very pre-natal existence of each one of us; it will be there, long after we have left the scene. We live and die its wise servants and stewards, or its blind slaves, or in futile, impoverishing revolt against it: we never, for good or for evil, really get beyond its reach.

And yet all this stream and environment of the traditional and social could make no impression upon me whatsoever unless it were met by certain secret sympathies, by certain imperious wants and energies within myself. If the contribution of tradition is quantitatively by far the most important, and might be compared to the contribution furnished by the Vocabulary to the constitution of a definite, particular language,—the contribution of the individual is, qualitatively and for that individual, more important still, and might be compared to the contribution of the Grammar to the constitution of that same language: for it is the Grammar which, though incomparably less in amount than the Vocabulary, yet definitely constitutes any and every language.

And there is here no necessary conflict with the claim of Tradition. It is true that all real, actual Religion is ever an act of submission to some fact or truth conceived as not only true but as obligatory, as coming from God, and hence as beyond and above our purely subjective fancies, opinings, and wishes. But it is also true that, if I could not mentally hear or see, I should be incapable of hearing or seeing anything of this kind or of any other; and that without some already existing interior affinity with and mysterious capacity for discriminating between such intimations—as either corresponding to or as traversing my existing imperious needs and instincts—I could not apprehend the former as coming from God. Without, then, such non-fanciful, non-wilful, subjective capacities and dispositions, there is for us not even the apprehension of the existence of such objective realities: such capacities and dispositions are as necessary pre-requisites to every act of faith, as sight is the absolute pre-requisite for my discrimination between black and white. Hence as far back as we can go, the traditional and social, the institutional side of religion was accompanied, in varying, and at first small or less perceptible degrees and forms, by intellectual and experimental interpretation and response.

3. The Three Elements in the great Religions.

Even the Greek religion, so largely naturalistic up to the very end, appears, in the centuries of its relative interiorization, as a triad composed of a most ancient traditional cultus, a philosophy of religion, and an experimental-ethical life; the latter element being readily exemplified by the Demon of Socrates, and by the Eleusinian and Orphic Mysteries.

In India and Tibet, again, Brahmanism and Buddhism may be said to have divided these three elements between them, the former representing as great an excess of the external as Buddhism does of abstruse reasoning and pessimistic emotion. Mahometanism, while combining, in very imperfect proportions, all three elements within itself, lays special stress upon the first, the external element; and though harbouring, for centuries now and more or less everywhere, the third, the mystical element, looks, in its strictly orthodox representatives, with suspicion upon this mysticism.

Judaism was slow in developing the second, the intellectual element; and the third, the mystical, is all but wholly absent till the Exilic period, and does not become a marked feature till still later on, and in writers under Hellenistic influence. It is in the Book of Wisdom, still more in Philo, that we find all three sides almost equally developed. And from the Hasmonean period onwards till the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, we find a severe and ardent external, traditional, authoritative school in the Pharisees; an accommodating and rationalizing school in the Sadducees; and, apart from both, more a sect than a school, the experimental, ascetical, and mystical body of the Essenes.

But it is in Christianity, and throughout its various vicissitudes and schools, that we can most fully observe the presence, characteristics, and interaction of these three modalities. We have already seen how the New Testament writings can be grouped, with little or no violence, according to the predominance of one of these three moods, under the heads of the traditional, historic, external, the “Petrine” school; the reasoning, speculative-internal, the Pauline; and the experimental, mystical-internal, the Joannine school. And in the East, up to Clement of Alexandria, in the West up to St. Augustine, we find the prevalence of the first type. And next, in the East, in Clement and Origen, in St. Gregory of Nyssa, in the Alexandrian and the Antiochene school generally, and in the West, in St. Augustine, we find predominantly a combination of the second and third types. The Areopagitic writings of the end of the fifth century still further emphasize and systematize this Neo-Platonic form of mystical speculation, and become indeed the great treasure-house from which above all the Mystics, but also largely the Scholastics, throughout the Middle Ages, drew much of their literary material.

And those six or seven centuries of the Middle Ages are full of the contrasts and conflicts between varying forms of Institutionalism, Intellectualism, and Mysticism. Especially clearly marked is the parallelism, interaction, and apparent indestructibleness of the Scholastic and Mystical currents. Abelard and St. Bernard, St. Thomas of Aquin and the great Franciscan Doctors, above all the often largely latent, yet really ceaseless conflict between Realism and Nominalism, all can be rightly taken as caused by various combinations and degrees, insufficiencies or abnormalities in the action of the three great powers of the human soul, and of the three corresponding root-forms and functions of religion. And whereas, during the prevalence of Realism, affective, mystical religion is the concomitant and double of intellectual religion; during the later prevalence of Nominalism, Mysticism becomes the ever-increasing supplement, and at last, ever more largely, the substitute, for the methods of reasoning. “Do penance and believe in the Gospel” becomes now the favourite text, even in the mouth of Gerson (who died in 1429), the great Nominalist Doctor, the Chancellor of the then greatest intellectual centre upon earth, the University of Paris. A constant depreciation of all dialectics, indeed largely of human knowledge generally, appears even more markedly in the pages of the gentle and otherwise moderate Thomas of Kempen (who died in 1471).