Rational Mysticism and New Testament Christianity

To the very title of this paper, or at any rate to the idea implied in it, the average religious thinker might conceivably make more objections than one. He might in the first place inquire whether any meaning can be found in the term "rational mysticism"; and, examining it either from the standpoint of reason or from that of mysticism, might complain that it attempts to bring together two quite incompatible things. Reason has usually held mysticism in scorn, looking upon it as a sort of quack method, if the word may pass, of accomplishing, or of pretending to accomplish, what reason accomplishes in the professional and only legitimate way. Mysticism, from the other side, has been ready enough to repay scorn with scorn: it has claimed to find its way to the secret places of truth by a subtle process far more efficacious than that laborious following of the trail which reason practises; and its independence of reason, its irreconcilability with reason, it has always taken as its glory rather than its shame. What — the average religious man might say — what can "rational mysticism" mean? How, indeed, can such a thing exist at all? And in the next place, even supposing you could manufacture the curious compound that "rational mysticism" would be, and could link the two seeming incompatibles together, how are you going to make any connection between your newly created rational mysticism and New Testament Christianity? Rational, indeed, New Testament Christianity is, or claims to be; and to show its harmony with reason (provided that the thing be not pushed too far) is one of the chief objects that Christian apologetics may well keep in view. But the line of mysticism has commonly been held as being to a considerable extent divorced from the New Testament line. Mysticism has not run, for instance (so it has been said), upon the most prominent lines of Pauline experience and Pauline teaching; its language has not, as a rule, echoed the language in which most students have embodied the results of their investigation into the New Testament system; the processes and programmes of the soul, so to call them, which it has advocated have scarcely run parallel with those on which the New Testament appears to lay the principal stress; nor do the great ideas of sin and salvation and faith, which are the fixed and shining ideas of New Testament Christianity, occupy in the mystical system the central place. What connection can there be between mysticism, rational or otherwise, and the Christianity which, according to the consensus of testimony through the Christian ages, the pages of the New Testament enshrine? The average religious thinker might well suppose that in attempting to bring together "rational mysticism" and "New Testament Christianity" one is attempting to make a series of reconciliations among things that can only look at one another askance, and beating oneself vainly against an impossible task.

And yet that the linking of the three things — mysticism, reason, and the New Testament conception of Christianity — that the linking of the three would, if we could but accomplish it, be most welcome, probably no one would deny. The religious man, though he may think himself to have perceived certain possible ways of reconciliation between reason and the Christian religion as he finds it in the New Testament, and on that point may be satisfied, is conscious that something is lacking still. "Wanting is what?" Mysticism assuredly has a not quite negligible answer to give. That warmth — that sense of immediate contact with a higher world and a higher life — that immersion of the whole personality in the eternal tides — that lifting of the entire inner experience away from the level of problem and solution, of seeking and finding, of painful self-adjustment to spiritual facts and forces which seem, when all is said, to be half-hidden as behind a veil — that sublime ecstasy in which the soul no longer possesses its religion, its Christ, its God, but is possessed by them, enveloped in them, conscious not so much of any relation between itself and them as of a penetration of itself by them through and through, — these things, which are the things for which mysticism stands and whereof it speaks, would be for the ordinary religious man his religion's perfecting and crown. That he knows. Mysticism may have given up some of the things he has; but it has seized upon a great many things he has not. It may appear to have shifted, as to its standing-ground, away from the fundamentals; but somehow or other it contrives to stretch itself into a sun-bathed atmosphere into which he, with his feet never so firmly planted, cannot lift his head. It may not be an altogether safe guide, and in the programmes it issues may slur over some of the first essential steps of the sacred way; but it speaks as from a fair land whose entrance-gate all would rejoice to find. If, now, the average religious man could but keep what he has, his own grip upon the primary factors of the religious life, his own seriousness in face of the tremendous import of the fundamental facts concerning God and man and sin and redemption, and yet add on to that the glow and color and thrill of the mystical experience, what great gain it would be! His customary religion, partly through its emphasis, its right and proper emphasis, upon the relations between himself and God and upon the necessity for their adjustment, leaves him too conscious of his separateness, of the hard outlines of his own personality as distinct from the eternal life he wants to make his own; and even though he may sometimes, in hours of kindled emotion, become thrilled with joy about his religion and the benefits it brings, that, he knows, is not the ultimate joy. If he could, while not losing that sense of separateness of his, add on to it a sense of oneness — if he could be, not only reconciled to God, but one with God — if the realization of that seeming paradox were found to be possible — then the ultimate joy would be attained. To find some method of adhering to the fundamental conceptions of New Testament Christianity, and at the same time possessing the experience which the mystics of history claim for their own — this would be, for every man of earnest religious thought and serious religious purpose, a delight indeed.

Perhaps an endeavor to apprehend the true significance and secret of mysticism may at any rate start us toward the desired goal. For it may be that those who have entered into the mystical experience have not always given a quite accurate account of the experience they enjoy; and a revision of the account (which of course implies no questioning or suspicion of the experience itself) may enable us to see that mysticism has no quarrel with reason after all. And further, this same revision of mysticism's account of itself may bring mysticism into much closer relations with New Testament Christianity than those in which it usually seems to stand — partly by making clearer what mysticism in its essence really is, and partly by a sudden flashing of light upon our conceptions of New Testament Christianity, showing us how those conceptions need to be deepened and enlarged, and how in that deepening and enlarging they come nearer to mysticism's line. And obviously, if mysticism has already appeared to be reasonable, then to move New Testament Christianity nearer to mysticism is necessarily to move it nearer to reason too. Thus, by bringing mysticism into contact, first with reason and then with New Testament religion, and consequently bringing reason and New Testament religion into closer mutual contact in their turn, we may find that in speaking of "rational mysticism and New Testament Christianity" we are venturing upon no union of incompatibles after all.