The Mystical Element of Religion. Friedrich von Hügel

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ worked out, intuition that it is love, (some energizing analogous to our thinking, loving and willing the existence, the self-realization and the happiness of other self-conscious beings,) which moves the Good, as it were, to go out from Itself, and to communicate Itself to others. Here, in Plotinus’s scheme, Man begins indeed with sense-impressions and imaginative picturings, with discursive reasoning and intuitive reason, with feelings, volitions, and energizings of every kind. But the more he moves up, the more of all this he leaves utterly behind; till, in ecstasy, all will, love, thought, consciousness, cease altogether. For man has thus been getting nearer and nearer, and more and more like, the One; and this One is just nothing besides sheer, pure Oneness,—it is neither Will, nor Love, nor Thought, nor Self-consciousness, in any degree or sense of these words.

      Plotinus’s scheme is thus indeed prompted by some of the deepest Mystical aspirations. But whilst in its one deliberate movement—that of man up to God—it starts from convictions and requirements that are deeply ethical, libertarian, spiritual, theistic: it will be shown, in its conception of the nature of the One and of this One’s relations down into the world, to be curiously naturalistic and determinist, and subtly materialistic. Thus does Greek Philosophy end in an impressively all-devouring Abstraction, in an intense Realism destructive, step by step, of precisely all that concrete, individual, personal Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, of all the spiritual, hence organic, interior, self-conscious reality, which had given occasion to this system. We have now but so many hypostatized abstractions, each more pale and empty than the other, each ever more simply a mere category of the human mind, indeed, but a category appropriate to Things and to Mathematico-Physical Laws, not to Spirit and to Ethico-Personal Organisms. The system, in its ultimate upshot and trend, is thus profoundly anti-Immanental, anti-Incarnational: a succession of increasingly exalted and increasingly empty Transcendences, each of which is, as it were, open upwards but closed downwards, takes the place of all deliberate operations and self-expressions of the Higher in and through the Lower, hence of all preveniences and condescensions of God.

      And in Proclus, practically the last non-Christian Greek Philosopher, all these intensely abstractive, naturalistic features get finally and fully systematized, whilst but intermittent traces remain of Plato’s richly manifold, organized activities and his at times strikingly incarnational conceptions; and only skeleton-schemes persist of those rapt recollective experiences of Plotinus which, derived in his case from direct experience, constitute him, among all Philosophers, as Dr. Edward Caird most aptly calls him, the “Mystic par excellence.”

      II. The Second of the Three Forces: Christianity, the Revelation of Personality and Depth.

      Now the whole of this clear, conceptual, abstractive Greek method, in as far as it identified abstractions with realities, and names with things, and reasoning with doing, suffering, and experience; and sought for Unity outside of Multiplicity, for Rest outside of Energizing, for the Highest outside of Personality and Character as these are developed and manifested in the permeation and elevation of the lower; has in so far been succeeded and superseded by two other great world-moving experiences of the human race, experiences apparently even more antagonistic to each other than either appears to be to the Greek view: Christianity and Scientific Method.

      1. The unique fulness and closeness of unity in multiplicity of our Lord’s life.

      As to Christianity, it is really impossible to compare it directly with Hellenism, without at once under-stating its originality. For its originality consists not so much in its single doctrines, or even in its teaching as a whole, and in the particular place each doctrine occupies in this teaching, as in its revelation, through the person and example of its Founder, of the altogether unsuspected depth and inexhaustibleness of human Personality, and of this Personality’s source and analogue in God, of the simplicity and yet difficulty and never-endingness of the access of man to God, and of the ever-preceding condescension of God to man. Hence if Christianity is thus throughout the Revelation of Personality; and if Personality is ever a One in Many, (and more deeply One and more richly Many, in proportion to the greatness of that spiritual reality): then we need not wonder at the difficulty we find in pointing out any one particular doctrine as constitutive of the unique originality of Christianity.

      For a Person came, and lived and loved, and did and taught, and died and rose again, and lives on by His Power and His Spirit for ever within us and amongst us, so unspeakably rich and yet so simple, so sublime and yet so homely, so divinely above us precisely in being so divinely near,—that His character and teaching require, for an ever fuller yet never complete understanding, the varying study, and different experiments and applications, embodiments and unrollings of all the races and civilizations, of all the individual and corporate, the simultaneous and successive experiences of the human race to the end of time. If there is nothing shifting or fitful or simply changing about Him, there is everywhere energy and expansion, thought and emotion, effort and experience, joy and sorrow, loneliness and conflict, interior trial and triumph, exterior defeat and supplantation: particular affections, particular humiliations, homely labour, a homely heroism, greatness throughout in littleness. And in Him, for the first and last time, we find an insight so unique, a Personality so strong and supreme, as to teach us, once for all, the true attitude towards suffering.

      Not one of the philosophers or systems before Him had effectually escaped falling either into Pessimism, seeing the end of life as trouble and weariness, and seeking to escape from it into some aloofness or some Nirvana; or into Optimism, ignoring or explaining away that suffering and trial which, as our first experience and as our last, surround us on every side. But with Him, and alone with Him and those who still learn and live from and by Him, there is the union of the clearest, keenest sense of all the mysterious depth and breadth and length and height of human sadness, suffering, and sin, and, in spite of this and through this and at the end of this, a note of conquest and of triumphant joy.

      And here, as elsewhere in Christianity, this is achieved not by some artificial, facile juxtaposition: but the soul is allowed to sob itself out; and all this its pain gets fully faced and willed, gets taken up into the conscious life. Suffering thus becomes the highest form of action, a divinely potent means of satisfaction, recovery, and enlargement for the soul,—the soul with its mysteriously great consciousness of pettiness and sin, and its immense capacity for joy in self-donation.

      And again, His moral and spiritual idealism, whilst indefinitely higher than that of any of the philosophers or prophets before Him, has nothing strained or restless, nothing rootless or quietistic, nothing querulous or disdainful, or of caste or sect about it: the humblest manual labour, the simplest of the human relations, the universal elemental faculties of man as man, are all entered into and developed, are all hallowed in smallest detail, and step by step.

      And finally His teaching, His life, are all positive, all constructive, and come into conflict only with worldly indifference and bad faith. No teacher before Him or since, but requires, if we would not be led astray by him, that we should make some allowances, in his character and doctrine, for certain inevitable reactions, and consequent narrownesses and contrarinesses. Especially is this true of religious teachers and reformers, and generally in exact proportion to the intensity of their fervour. But in Him there is no reaction, no negation, no fierceness, of a kind to deflect His teaching from its immanent, self-consistent trend. His very Apostles can ask Him to call down fire from heaven upon the unbelieving Samaritans; they can use the sword against one of those come out to apprehend Him; and they can attempt to keep the little ones from Him. But He rebukes them; He orders Peter to put back the sword in its scabbard; and He bids the little ones to come unto Him, since of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. Indeed St. Mark’s Gospel tells us how the disciples begged Him to forbid a man who did not follow them from casting out devils in His name; and how He refused to do so, and laid down the great universal rule of all-embracing generosity: “He that is not against us, is with us.”[7]

      2. This rich unity of life occasions three СКАЧАТЬ