Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/744

 Luther's Article of a Standing or Failing Church, Justification by Faith alone, is the positive side of the idea which is negatively expressed as the bondage of the will; and the idea in both its positive and negative forms implies a philosophy of existence which may be stated as a question thus: How is God, as the source of all good, related to man as the seat and servant of evil? God and man, good as identical with God and evil as inseparable from man, are recognised, and the problem is: how is the good to overcome the evil? The man who frames the problem is a mystic; God is the supreme desire and delight of his soul; and he conceives sin as a sort of inverted capacity for God, the dust which has stifled a thirst and turned it into an infinite misery. Now, Luther has two forms under which he conceives God's relation to man, a juristic denoted by the term "justification," and a vital denoted by the term "faith." "Justification " is the acquittal of the guilty: "faith is nothing else than the true life realised in God." The one term thus describes the universe as ethically governed, while the other describes man as capable of participating in the eternal life; and the two together mean that he can realise his happiness or his end only as he shares the life of God and lives in harmony with His law. The philosophy here implied is large and sublime, though its intrinsic worth may be hidden by the crudity of its earliest forms. The Lutheran doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum attempts, for example, to establish a kind of equation between the ideas of God and man. The person of Christ is a symbol of humanity; in it man can so participate as to share its perfections and dignity. Christ's humanity is capable of deity; God lives in Him now openly, now cryptically, but ever really; and His humanity so penetrates the Deity as to touch Him with a feeling of our infirmities and make Him participant in our lot as we are in His life.

This is the very root and essence of German mysticism, which gives to the German hymns their beauty and their pathos, which inspired the speculations of Brenz and Chemnitz, and which later determined Schelling's doctrine of "indifference" or the "identity of subject and object," and Hegel's "absolute idealism." If we read Boehme from this point of view, how splendid his dreams and how reasonable his very extravagances become! We are not surprised to hear him speak of the necessity of antitheses to all being, and especially to the life and thought of God, of evil being as necessary as good, or wrath as essential as love in God, who is the fundament of hell as well as of heaven, both the everlasting No, and the eternal Yes. He dwells in nature as the soul dwells in the body; there is no point in the body where the soul is not, no spot in space and no atom in nature where we can say, "God is not here." The man who is His image, who is holy as He is holy, good as He is good, is of no other matter than God. This may be Pantheism, but it is not rational and reasoned like Bruno's; it is emotional and felt, a thing of imagination all compact. It is born of the love that