CHAPTER VI

_THE EMPHASIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS UPON THE PERSONAL RELATION IN RELIGION, AND SO UPON THE TRULY MYSTICAL_

I. THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS TENDS POSITIVELY TO EMPHASIZE THE PERSONAL RELATION IN RELIGION

1. _Emphasizes Everywhere the Personal._--The social consciousness sees man as preëminently the social animal, made for personal relations, irrevocably and essentially knit up with other persons. It deepens everywhere our sense of persons and of personal relations. It may be itself almost defined as the sense of the fully personal.

Religion, then, if it is to be most real to men of the social consciousness, must be personally conceived, that is, must be distinctly seen to be a personal relation of man to God. And this conception, as the highest we can reach, is to be followed fearlessly to the end; only guarding it against wrong inferences from the simple transference to God of finite conditions, and recognizing exactly in what respects the personal relation to God is unique.[35]

The social consciousness, moreover, as we have seen, must have a conception of religion that can really justify the social consciousness, and, therefore, must do justice to the fully personal in God and man; and this need also leads the social consciousness naturally to the conception of religion as a personal relation.

2. _Requires the Laws of a Deepening Friendship in Religion._--When this conception is carried out, it is found that growth in the religious life, in communion with God, follows the laws of a deepening friendship.[36] These laws can, therefore, be known and studied and formulated; and religion, at the same time, ceases to be unintelligible and ceases to be isolated--cut off from the rest of life, and becomes rather that one great fundamental relation which gives being and meaning and value to all the rest. In absolute harmony, then, with the genesis of the social consciousness, religion, in this conception, is bound up with the whole of life; and we catch a glimpse of the real and final unity of life in true love, the relation to God and the relation to man each helping everywhere the other. If religion is truly a personal relation, and its laws are those of a deepening friendship, then every human relation, heartily and truly fulfilled, becomes a new outlook on God, a revelation of new possibilities in the religious life. And, on the other hand, in that mutual self-revelation and answering trust upon which every growing personal relation is built, every fresh revelation of God is an enlarging of our ideal for our relations to others. Even biblical literature, perhaps, furnishes no more perfect example of the interplay of the human and divine relations than Hosea's account of his own providential leading through the human relation into the divine, and back again from the divine to a still better human.

3. _Requires the Ideal Conditions of the Richest Life in Religion._--And if religion is to be justified in its supreme claims by the social consciousness, it must be felt to offer, besides, the ideal conditions of the richest life. As a personal relation to God, religion need not shrink from this test. Our great needs are character and happiness. Psychology seems to me to point to two great means and to two accompanying conditions of both character and happiness. The means are association and work; the corresponding conditions are reverence for personality, and objectivity--the mood of both love and work. The great essentials, therefore, to the richest life are (1) association in which personality is respected, and (2) work in which one can lose himself. Now, when would these conditions become ideal? On the one hand, as to association, when the association is with him who is of the highest character and of the infinitely richest life, and relation to whom is fundamental to every other personal relation; when, secondly, God is made concrete and real to us in an adequate personal revelation of his character, and of his love toward us; and when, third, the association is individualized for each one, who throws himself open to God, in God's spiritual presence in us, constantly and intimately, and yet _unobtrusively_, coöperating with us. And, on the other hand, as to work, when the work is God-given work, to which one is set apart, and in which he may lose himself with joy. These are the ideal conditions of the richest life. Just these ideal conditions Jesus declared actualities. For the fulfilment of just these, in the case of his disciples, he prayed in his double petition,--"Keep them," "Sanctify them," "Keep them in thy name," that is, through the divine association. "Sanctify them"--set them apart unto their God-given work. "As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world." Such a conception of religion can fairly claim to meet, broadly and deeply, the most exacting demands of the social consciousness for emphasis upon the personal relation in religion.

II. THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS THUS KEEPS THE TRULY MYSTICAL

I have no predilection for the term mystical, and would gladly confine it to what I have termed the neo-platonic or falsely mystical, were it not that, in spite of the dictionaries and the histories of philosophy and the histories of doctrine, the term is used in two quite different senses. Many, it seems to me, are defending what they call the mystical in religion, who have no idea of defending what Herrmann and Nash call mystical. And many, on the other hand, are defending and teaching the falsely mystical through an undefined fear that else they will lose the truly mystical. Theology and religion both greatly need a clear discrimination of terms here. Many are involved, in both living and thinking, in a self-contradiction, which they feel but cannot state; and are urging with themselves and with others a means of religious life and a corresponding method of conception, which really contradict their highest convictions in other lines of life and thought. Can we find our way out of this confusion?

If one studies carefully the historical representatives of mysticism, and especially such a strong type as Jacob Böhme, whom Erdmann calls the "culmination of mysticism," and still keeps his head, certain dangers in mysticism, it would seem, must become apparent. And it may be worth while to attempt a brief, but definite, analysis of the justifiable and unjustifiable elements in these mystical movements.

1. _The Justifiable and Unjustifiable Elements in Mysticism._--(1) The first danger in mysticism seems to me to be the tendency to make simple emotion the supreme test of the religious state. Whether this emotion is thought of as ecstatic--such as some of the old mystics called "being drunk with God," or, as quietistic--in which imperturbability, passionlessness, become the highest good--is comparatively indifferent. The justifiable element here is the insistence that religion is real and is life; for feeling is perhaps the most powerful element in the sense of reality. So James says: "Speaking generally, the more a conceived object excites us, the more reality it has."[37] The unjustifiable element is the perilous subjection of the rational and ethical. Such a view must always lack any positive and adequate conception of our active life and vocation in the world.

(2) A second closely connected danger in mysticism is the tendency toward mere subjectivism. There is here a justifiable element in the emphasis on one's own personal conviction and faith; an unjustifiable element in the tendency to underrate anything but the purely subjective, to ignore all correcting influences from others, from the church, and from the Scriptures.

(3) A third danger follows from this: the marked tendency to underestimate the historical. The justifiable element here is, again, the emphasis on personal conviction and faith; the unjustifiable element is the tendency toward the greatest one-sidedness, and toward emptiness, especially of ethical content. Advising our young people simply to "listen to God," without the strongest insistence upon the historical revelation of God at the same time, is exposing them to the great danger of mistaking for an indubitable, divine revelation the veriest vagary that may chance in their empty-mindedness next to come into their thought. With the reason in supposed abeyance, the door is thus thrown open to the grossest superstitions. Honest attempts to deepen the religious life may thus become dangerous assaults upon true religion.

(4) A fourth danger in mysticism is so strong a tendency toward vagueness, that the common mind is not without warrant in identifying mysticism and mistiness. The justifiable element here is in the real difficulty of expressing the full content of the entire religious experience; the unjustifiable element is, once more, the slighting of the historical, the ethical, and the rational, especially in talking much of the contradictions of reason, and of what is above reason. Mysticism naturally lacks positive content.

(5) Another danger--the tendency toward pantheism--comes in partly, as Herrmann has suggested, as a meeting of this lack of content, and partly as the logical outcome of such an insistence upon losing oneself in God as amounts to a being swept out of one's self--a loss of clear and rational self-consciousness, which is next interpreted speculatively as a real absorption in God, and is then made the goal. This is the familiar road of Indian and neo-platonic mysticism, and its phenomena are real enough, but probably of only the slightest religious significance. Tennyson tells somewhere of the immense sense of illumination that came to him once from simply repeating monotonously his own name--"Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson." This may be as effective as looking at the end of one's nose and ceaselessly reiterating "Om," as does the Hindu ascetic. A still shorter and more certain method is through nitrous-oxide-gas intoxication, of which Professor James says: "With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the key-note of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity, to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases as one stares at a cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand." "The immense emotional sense of reconciliation," he felt to be the characteristic mood. "It is impossible to convey," he says, "an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience."[38]

Now it is not safe to ignore such facts, when we are seriously trying to estimate the religious significance of intense emotional experiences, the reality of which we need not at all question. The vital question is, not that of the reality of the experiences, but that of the real cause of the experiences; and the only possible test of this is rational and ethical. But from this test, mysticism tends from the start to shut itself off, and so, assuming the experience to be truly religious, ends often in virtual pantheism.

The justifiable element in this insistence upon absorption in God is the necessary moral relation of complete surrender to God. The unjustifiable element is in belittling the personal in both God and man, and in making essentially religious an experience that has almost nothing of the rational and ethical in it, and that, on that very account, fosters the irreverent familiarity with Christ so deplored by more than one careful student of mysticism. A natural and common and most dangerous accompaniment of such an intense emotional experience is the tendency afterward, to excuse sin in oneself. In the case of the most conscientious, it is worth noting, such an emphasis upon intense experiences tends to lead them to distrust the reality of the normal Christian experience if they have not had these intense emotions, or if they have had them, tends to bring them into despair when they find these marked experiences actually proving less powerful in effects upon life than they had expected.

(6) The last danger in mysticism, to which reference will be made, is the tendency to extravagant symbolism. This is closely connected with "the immense emotional sense of reconciliation," and is much stronger by nature in some than in others. The born mystic finds his own subjective views symbolized everywhere, and is in grave danger of being led into an ingenious, practically unconscious intellectual dishonesty. The justifiable element here is that sense of the unity and worth of things which is the most fundamental conviction of our minds. The unjustifiable element has been sufficiently indicated.

The justifiable elements in mysticism, then, may be said to include: the insistence on the legitimate place of feeling in religion as a real and vital experience; the emphasis on one's own conviction and faith; the real difficulty of expressing the full meaning of the religious experience; the demand for a complete ethical surrender to God; and the faith in the real unity and worth of the world in God. Now if one tries to bring together these justifiable elements in mysticism, the truly mystical may all be summed up as simply a protest in favor of the whole man--the entire personality. It says that men can experience and live and feel and do much more than they can logically formulate, define, explain, or even fully express. Living is more than thinking.

2. _The Protest in Favor of the Whole Man._--The element to which mysticism has tried most to do justice is feeling, and so it has been liable to a new and dangerous one-sidedness. But the truly mystical must be a protest alike against a narrow juiceless intellectualism, against a narrow moralistic rigorism, and against a blind and spineless sentimentalism. It is a protest particularly against making the mathematico-mechanical view of the world the only view; against making logical consistency the sole test of truth or reality; against ignoring all data, except those which come through the intellect alone; that is, against trying to make a part, not the whole, of man the standard; in other words, against ignoring the data which come through feeling and will--emotional, æsthetic, ethical, and religious data, as well as those judgments of worth which underlie reason's theoretical determinations.

Man stands, in fact, everywhere face to face with an actual world of great complexity, that seems to him at first what James says the baby's world is, "one big blooming buzzing confusion;" "and the universe of all of us is still to a great extent such a confusion, potentially resolvable, and demanding to be resolved, but not yet actually resolved, into parts."[39] In one sense, man's whole task is to think unity and order into this confusion. The problem really becomes that of thinking the universe through in several kinds of terms, and then finally bringing all together into one comprehensive view. All these are alike ideals which the mind sets before itself. The easiest of these problems is the attempt to think the world through, in mathematico-mechanical terms. But the attempt to think the world through in æsthetic or ethical or religious terms is equally legitimate, though it is more difficult. Not only, then, is the mathematico-mechanical view not the sole justifiable view, but it really has its justification in an ideal, and success in this attempt affords just encouragement for the hope of success in the other more difficult problems.[40]

The truly mystical holds, then, that the narrow intellectualism is unwarranted, because natural science, the mechanical view of the world, is itself an ideal--the "child of duties," as Münsterberg calls it--and so cannot legitimately rule out other ideals; because we have just as immediate a conviction concerning the worth, as concerning the logical consistency of the world; because a narrow intellectualism would make conscious life but a "barren rehearsal" of the outer world, without significance; because if we can trust the indications of our intellect, we ought to be able to trust the indications of the rest of our nature; and because, thus, the only possible key and standard of truth and reality are in ourselves--the whole self, and "necessities of thought" become necessities of a reason which means loyally to take account of all the data of the entire man.

And the same point may be thus stated. We use the word rational in two quite distinct senses: in the narrow sense, as meaning simply the intellectual; in the broad sense, as indicating the demands of the entire man. The true mysticism stands for the broadly rational.

So, too, we speak of the necessary fundamental assumption of the honesty or sincerity of the world; but this includes two quite distinct propositions: one, that the world must be thinkable, conceivable, construable, a logically consistent whole, a sphere for rational thinking,--where the test is consistency; the other, that the world must be worth while, must not mock our highest ideals and aspirations, must in some true and genuine sense satisfy the whole man, be a sphere for rational living,--where the test is worth. All our arguments go forward upon these two assumptions. Now, a true mysticism contends that the second principle is as rational as the first, though it must be freely granted that it is not as easy to employ it for detailed conclusions, and it is consequently much more liable to abuse. The true mysticism wishes to be not less, but more, rational. It knows no shorthand substitute for the hard and steady thinking of the philosopher, or for the historical experience of the prophet; it needs and uses both.

In all this, it is plain that the truly mystical is a legitimate outgrowth of the emphasis of the social consciousness upon recognition of the entire personality. Phillips Brooks finds just this in the intellectual life of Jesus. "The great fact concerning it is this," he says, "that in him the intellect never works alone. You never can separate its workings from the complete operation of the entire nature. He never simply knows, but always loves and resolves at the same time."[41]

3. _The Self-Controlled Recognition of Emotion._--Moreover, it probably may be fairly claimed that all of the mystical recognition of the emotional which is valuable or even legitimate, is preserved, and far more safely and sanely conceived, in a strictly personal conception of religion. It may well be doubted, if it is possible in any other way, both to do justice to feeling in religion, and at the same time to keep feeling in its proper place. Is it possible briefly to indicate both the recognition of emotion and the control of emotion in religion?

The true mysticism recognizes that the supreme joy is "joy in personal life"--joy in entering into the revelation of a person; and it believes with reason that a growing acquaintance with God must have such heights and depths of meaning as no other personal relation can have. It is not, therefore, afraid or distrustful of true emotion--of joy or peace, of intense longing or of keen satisfaction--in the religious life.

But the true mysticism knows at the same time that deep revelation of a person is made only to the reverent, that the conditions are in the highest degree ethical, and above all must be recognized to be so in religion. It does view, then, with deep distrust an emotional emphasis in religion that ignores the ethical. It cannot forget that Christ thought that everything must be tested by its fruits in life. Paul, too, insisted on applying the test of an active ministering love to the highly valued emotional experiences of the Corinthians; and writes to the Galatians that there is but one infallible proof of the working of the Spirit in them--a righteous life: "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance."

And a true mysticism knows that the spirit, reverent of personality, leads to a self-restraint that does not seek the emotional experience simply as such on _any_ conditions; but, knowing the supreme psychological conditions of happiness and character and influence, it loses itself in an unselfish love and in absorbing work, and understands that it must simply let the experiences come. It will have nothing, therefore, to do with strained emotion, or with the working up of feeling for its own sake. It seeks health, not merely the signs of health. It prizes, therefore, the joy that simply proclaims itself as the sign of the normal life and so positively strengthens and cheers, but it will have nothing of the strain of emotion which is drain.

It is interesting to notice that it is exactly this true psychological attitude concerning the emotional life that Phillips Brooks believed that he found perfectly reflected in Jesus. "The sensitiveness of Jesus to pain and joy," he says, "never leads him for a moment to try to be sad or happy with direct endeavor; nor, is there any sign that he ever judges the real character of himself or any other man by the sadness or the happiness that for the moment covers his life. He simply lives, and joy and sorrow issue from his living, and cast their brightness and their gloominess back upon his life; but there is no sorrow and no joy that he ever sought for itself, and he always kept a self-knowledge underneath the joy or sorrow, undisturbed by the moment's happiness or unhappiness."[42]

How far from this objectivity and this healthful emotional life is the atmosphere of most of our devotional books, and, one might say, of all the manuals of ordinary mysticism! That this difficulty should confront us in devotional literature is very natural; for such writing commonly aims to give the emotional sense of reality in religion; and is, therefore, particularly under the temptation to show and to produce a straining after the emotion, as for its own sake. Moreover, the very introspection, almost inevitably involved in the reading and writing of devotional books, tends to bring about an artificial change in the religious experience, and so to introduce into it the abnormal.

But the social consciousness, so far as it affects religion, not only tends to draw away from the falsely mystical, and to emphasize the personal, and so to keep the truly mystical, but it is even more plain that it must tend to insist upon the ethical in religion.

[35] Cf. King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, p. 201 ff.

[36] _Op. cit._, pp. 210 ff.

[37] James, _Psychology_, Vol. II, p. 307.

[38] James, _The Will to Believe_, pp. 294, 295.

[39] _Psychology_, Briefer Course, p. 16.

[40] Cf. James, _Psychology_, Vol. II, 633-677; especially 633, 634, 667, 671, 677; Münsterberg, _Psychology and Life_, pp. 23-28.

[41] Brooks, _The Influence of Jesus_, p. 219.

[42] _The Influence of Jesus_, p. 156.