Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/143

Rh MYSTICISM 131 itself estrangement from God. (Porphyry tells us that Plotinus was unwilling to name his parents or his birth place, and seemed ashamed of being in the body.) Be yond the /&amp;lt;a#a/jo-eis, or virtues which purify from sin, lies the further stage of complete identification with God (OVK e w apapTias efvcu, dXXa Oeov elvat). To reach the ulti mate goal, thought itself must be left behind ; for thought is a form of motion, and the desire of the soul is for the motionless rest which belongs to the One. The union with transcendent deity is not so much knowledge or vision as ecstasy, coalescence, contact (eWracrts, cnrAtoo-ts, u(f)ij, Ennead.j vi. 9. 8-9). But in our present state of exist ence the moments of this ecstatic union must be few and short ; &quot; I myself,&quot; says Plotinus simply, &quot; have realized it but three times as yet, and Porphyry hitherto not once.&quot; It will be seen from the above that Neo-Platonism is not mystical as regards the faculty by which it claims to apprehend philosophic truth. It is first of all a system of complete rationalism ; it is assumed, in other words, that reason is capable of mapping out the whole system of things. But, inasmuch as a God is affirmed beyond reason, the mysticism becomes in a sense the necessary complement of the would-be all-embracing rationalism. The system culminates in a mystical act, and in the sequel, especially with lamblichus and the Syrian Neo- Platonists, mystical practice tended more and more to overshadow the theoretical groundwork. It was probably about the end of the 5th century, just as ancient philosophy was dying out in the schools of Athens, that the speculative mysticism of Neo-Platonism made a definite lodgment in Christian thought through the literary forgeries of the Pseudo-Dionysius. The doctrines of Christianity were by that time so firmly established that the church could look upon a symbolical or mystical inter pretation of them without anxiety. The author of the Theo- logia Mystica and the other works ascribed to the Areopa- gite proceeds, therefore, to develop the doctrines of Proclus with very little modification into a system of esoteric Chris tianity. God is the nameless and supra-essential One, ele vated above goodness itself. Hence &quot;negative theology,&quot; which ascends from the creature to God by dropping one after another every determinate predicate, leads us nearest to the truth. The return to God (ei/oxris, $eoxris) is the consummation of all things and the goal indicated by Christian teaching. The same doctrines were preached with more of churchly fervour by Maximus the Confessor (580-622). Maximus represents almost the last speculative activity of the Greek Church, but the influence of the Pseudo-Dionysian writings was transmitted to the West in the 9th century by Erigena, in whose speculative spirit both the scholasticism and the mysticism of the Middle Ages Erigena have their rise. Erigena translated Dionysius into Latin along with the commentaries of Maximus, and His system is essentially based upon theirs. The negative theology is adopted, and God is stated to be predicateless Being, above all categories, and therefore not improperly called Nothing. Out of this Nothing or incomprehensible essence the world of ideas or primordial causes is eternally created. This is the Word or Son of God, in whom all things exist, so far as they have substantial existence. All existence is a theophany, and as God is the beginning of all things, so also is He the end. Erigena teaches the restitution of all things under the form of the Dionysian adunatio or deificatio. These are the permanent outlines of what may be called the philosophy of mysticism in Christian times, and it is remarkable with how little variation they are repeated from age to age. In Erigena mysticism has not yet separated itself in any way from the dogma of the church. There is no revulsion, as later, from dogma as such, nor is more stress laid upon one dogma than upon another ; all are treated upon the same footing, and the whole dogmatic system is held, as it were, in solution by the philosophic medium in which it is presented. No distinction is drawn, indeed, between what is reached by reason and what is given by authority ; the two are immediately identical for Erigena. In this he agrees with the speculative mystics everywhere, and differentiates himself from the scholastics who followed him. The distinguishing characteristic of scholasticism is the acceptance by reason of a given matter, the truth of which is independent of rational grounds, and which re mains a presupposition even when it cannot be understood. Scholasticism aims, it is true, in its chief representatives, at demonstrating that the content of revelation and the teaching of reason are identical. But what was matter of immanent assumption with Erigena is in them an equat ing of two things which have been dealt with on the hypothesis that they are separate, and which, therefore, still retain that external relation to one another. This externality of religious truth to the mind is fundamental in scholasticism, while the opposite view is equally funda mental in mysticism. Mysticism is not the voluntary demission of reason and its subjection to an external authority. In that case, all who accept a revelation with out professing to understand its content would require to be ranked as mystics ; the fierce sincerity of Tertullian s credo quiet, absurdum, Pascal s reconciliation of contra dictions in Jesus Christ, and Bayle s half-sneering sub ordination of reason to faith would all be marks of this standpoint. But such a temper of mind is much more akin to scepticism than to mysticism ; it is characteristic of those who either do not feel the need of philosophizing their beliefs, or who have failed in doing so and take refuge in sheer acceptance. Mysticism, on the other hand, is marked on its speculative side by even an overweening confidence in human reason. Nor need this be wondered at if we consider that the unity of the human mind with the divine is its underlying presupposition. Hence where reason is discarded by the mystic it is merely reason overleaping itself ; it occurs at the end and not at the beginning of his speculations. Even then there is no appeal to authority ; nothing is accepted from without. The appeal is still to the individual, who, if not by reason then by some higher faculty, claims to realize absolute truth and to taste absolute blessedness. Mysticism first appears in the mediaeval church as the protest of practical religion against the predominance of the dialectical spirit. It is so with Bernard of Clair- Bernard vaux (1091-1153), who condemns Abelard s distinctions of clair and reasonings as externalizing and degrading the faith. va Bernard s mysticism is of a practical cast, dealing mainly with the means by which man may attain to the know ledge and enjoyment of God. B,eason has three stages, in the highest of which the mind is able, by abstraction from earthly things, to rise to contemplatio or the vision of the divine. More exalted still, however, is the sudden ecstatic vision, such as was granted, for example, to Paul. This is the reward of those who are dead to the body and the world. Asceticism is thus the counterpart of mediaeval mysticism ; and, by his example as well as by his teaching in such passages, Bernard unhappily encouraged practices which necessarily resulted in self-delusion. Love grows with the knowledge of its object, Bernard proceeds, and at the highest stage self-love is so merged in love to God that we love ourselves only for God s sake or because God has loved us. &quot; Te enim quodammodo perdere tanquam qui non sis, et omnino non sentire te ipsum et a te ipso exinaniri et pene annullari, ccelestis est conversationis. . . . Sic affici deificari est.&quot; &quot;As the little water-drop poured into a large measure of wine seems to lose its own