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Renewing Philosophy of Religion
Renewing Philosophy
of Religion
Exploratory Essays

EDITED BY
Paul Draper
and J. L. Schellenberg

1
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/10/2017, SPi

3
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First Edition published in 2017
Impression: 1
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
In memory of
William L. Rowe
exemplar and friend
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/10/2017, SPi

Contents

List of Contributors ix

Introduction 1

Part I. Focus
1. Rescuing Religion from Faith 15
Sonia Sikka
2. Global Philosophy of Religion and its Challenges 33
Yujin Nagasawa
3. Against Ultimacy 48
Stephen Maitzen
4. Religion after Naturalism 63
Eric Steinhart
5. Renewing our Understanding of Religion: Philosophy
of Religion and the Goals of the Spiritual Life 79
Mark Wynn
6. On Facing Up to the Question of Religion as Such 94
John Bishop
7. The Future of Philosophy of Religion, the Future of
the Study of Religion, and (Even) the Future of Religion 112
Robert McKim

Part II. Standpoint

8. North American Philosophers of Religion: How They
See their Field 133
Wesley J. Wildman and David Rohr
9. Continental Philosophy of Religion in a Kenotic Tone 154
J. Aaron Simmons
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/10/2017, SPi

viii CONTENTS

10. Rationality and Worldview 174

Graham Oppy
11. On the Socratic Injunction to Follow the Argument
Where It Leads 187
Jason Marsh
12. Spinoza’s Philosophy of Religious Life 208
Clare Carlisle
13. Protest and Enlightenment in the Book of Job 223
Wes Morriston

Index 243
List of Contributors

JOHN BISHOP is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland.

CLARE CARLISLE is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Theology at King’s College

London.

PAUL DRAPER is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University.

STEPHEN MAITZEN is W. G. Clark Professor of Philosophy at Acadia University.

JASON MARSH is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at St. Olaf College.

ROBERT MCKIM is Professor of Religion and of Philosophy at the University of

Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

WES MORRISTON is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of

Colorado Boulder.

YUJIN NAGASAWA is Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the John Hick

Centre for the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Birmingham.

GRAHAM OPPY is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University and CEO of the

Australasian Association of Philosophy.

DAVID ROHR is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University’s Graduate Division of

Religious Studies.

J. L. SCHELLENBERG is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent University.

SONIA SIKKA is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa.

J. AARON SIMMONS is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Furman University.

ERIC STEINHART is Professor of Philosophy at William Paterson University.

WESLEY J. WILDMAN is Professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics at Boston

University.

MARK WYNN is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Leeds.

 Introduction

It was during a meeting of the Society for Philosophy of Religion in Hilton

Head, South Carolina, back in 2011, that we began batting around the idea
for a collection such as the one you hold in your hands. Both of us thought
that philosophy of religion was in need of renewal, and we wondered
whether others might agree and explore the idea with us. After writing
some emails, it became clear that we were not alone and that there was
indeed considerable enthusiasm for the project we had in mind.
Of course, not everyone agrees with us. Philosophy of religion, under-
stood as a subdiscipline of philosophy, has grown enormously in the past
fifty years, primarily by attracting committed Christians to the study of
philosophy. Some take this growth to be a sign of the health of the field
and a cause for celebration. We view it, however, as a mixed blessing.
One of our concerns is that philosophy of religion has become increas-
ingly theological in its methods, topics, and criteria of evaluation, and
strikingly narrow in its focus. Not all of these changes are obviously bad.
To the extent that it is appropriate for philosophers of religion to work
out and even defend the perspective of a particular religious tradition or
worldview, overlap with theology is to be expected. So long as such
perspectival work is done with intellectual humility and openness, and
in dialogue with other religious and non-religious perspectives, it may be
perfectly compatible with the spirit of philosophy. Unfortunately, much
work in contemporary philosophy of religion is not done in this way,
exhibiting instead symptoms of partisanship, insularity, and bias. Further,
even if those problems could be solved (or didn’t exist), the question would
still arise whether or not what we have now is all that philosophy of
religion can or should be.
The subject of renewal therefore seems ripe for exploration. What’s
needed is a variety of assessments of what it would be for philosophy of
 PAUL DRAPER AND J . L . SCHELLENBERG

religion to truly flourish and reach its potential. We hope that with this
volume of essays we are taking a first important step toward satisfying
this need. The essays explore a variety of answers to the question of why,
exactly, we should not be satisfied with the status quo in philosophy of
religion. They also explore a variety of alternatives to that status quo. The
goal is to create a crescendo of diverse voices, all calling for change of one
sort or another. While this first exploration will no doubt leave much
territory uncharted, the hope is that it will spark additional investigation
and ultimately lead to new models of inquiry about religion that are
philosophical instead of theological, and scientific (in the broadest sense)
instead of confessional.
The visions for renewal described in this book are diverse, but they
overlap in multiple and interesting ways. There is also disagreement,
though perhaps less than one might expect. Our aim in this introduction
is to identify the main themes, thus facilitating understanding of what is
to come. But to this we have added some remarks on how we think those
themes interact, on the unified contribution that we think can be
extracted from the book, and on areas of contention that seem to us to
remain after all is said and done. Thus, we hope to help motivate a
fruitful continuing discussion outside the covers of this book, one that
builds on or challenges its results, and clears up matters here left open.
Seven of the thirteen essays argue for renewal citing issues about focus,
maintaining either that philosophy of religion should expand the range
of issues it addresses or that it should shift attention from one set of
issues to another. Six essays are concerned with the standpoint from
which philosophers of religion address the issues they do, arguing pri-
marily for renewal in this domain.
Concerns about focus are not new. For decades there have been calls
from philosophers of religion such as William J. Wainwright to devote
more attention to non-Western religious traditions, at least by seriously
studying them if not by writing about them. Some have tried to respond
to these calls in a positive way, for example by including a smattering of
articles on Eastern religions in the philosophy of religion textbooks they
edit. There has, however, been little dialogue between philosophers of
(Western) theism and, say, philosophers of Buddhism or Hinduism.
Instead, a common approach among the former is to compare theism
or even Christian theism to naturalism, as if those two positions exhaust
the options worthy of serious consideration.
 INTRODUCTION 

Some of the chapters in Part 1 address this problem. None of their

authors, however, think that simply increasing the number of philo-
sophers willing to talk about non-Western religions can solve the prob-
lem all by itself. According to Sonia Sikka, the problem cannot be solved
this way because a narrowness of focus among Western philosophers of
religion causes most of them to conflate religion with faith in authority or
revelation. This makes them incapable of examining non-Western reli-
gions without distortion, since those religions are not “faiths” in the
relevant sense. Indeed, such distortion is even present in philosophy of
religion readers. In their efforts to be more inclusive or global, they
simply add selections on Eastern religions to categories that are inappro-
priate for non-faith traditions. Also of concern to Sikka is the fact that
the false assumption that religion must involve faith in authority or
revelation makes it impossible for contemporary philosophy of religion
to assist the increasing number of people exploring spiritual possibilities
outside of traditional religion. Such people, who are often unfairly
dismissed as narcissistic or arrogant because they dare to challenge the
authority of established forms of religion, might have expected to find
assistance from philosophy of religion in their spiritual searches; instead,
they find a discipline that is so narrow in its focus and in how it conceives
of its subject matter that it will not even recognize their explorations as
proper objects of study.
Yujin Nagasawa, for his part, has no problem with Christian philoso-
phy being a part of philosophy of religion, but he thinks, as do a number
of other authors in this volume, that those who claim to be philosophers
of religion must address more than just a specific form of religion. They
must in some way address religion in general. It is not obvious, however,
says Nagasawa, how philosophers of religion should go about doing what
he recommends. Should they evaluate worldviews as Ninian Smart
advocates? Or should they pursue some form of religious pluralism as
John Hick did? Nagasawa finds problems with both of these approaches.
Smart’s approach, for example, is unlikely to eliminate partisanship and
insularity, and Hick’s approach unreasonably requires all philosophers of
religion to adopt some form of religious pluralism. Nagasawa proposes
instead a “global philosophy of religion” that identifies philosophical
problems a variety of religions share and hence that all philosophers of
religion—no matter what tradition they “represent”—can work together
to clarify or solve. On the one hand, this appears to complement Sikka’s
 PAUL DRAPER AND J . L . SCHELLENBERG

moves because, if representatives each mine their own traditions—the

ones they understand best—for those clarifications and solutions, then
the distortions that concern Sikka might not undermine global philoso-
phy of religion. On the other hand, if those distortions are left in place,
then a common view even of the philosophical problems embedded in the
religious traditions of the world may prove elusive.
The next two chapters are more radical than the first two, with each
calling not just for an expanded focus that includes non-Western reli-
gions, but also for the focus on traditional religions to be replaced
altogether. According to Stephen Maitzen, the problem with traditional
religions and, by extension, with the philosophy of such religions is that
those religions appeal to ultimate entities, and such entities are not even
possibly real, let alone probably real. If he is right, then Sikka’s desire to
save traditional religion from faith is like the desire to save a terminal
patient from a hangnail, and the philosophical problems that traditional
religions share, and which Nagasawa proposes to have us solve, are
sidelined by a deeper problem that cannot be solved in their favor.
Maitzen seeks to support his claim by distinguishing and carefully
arguing against several different forms of ultimacy: ontological, axio-
logical, teleological, and explanatory. It remains to be seen whether Sikka
or Nagasawa or someone else could show that other ideas of ultimacy or
philosophically interesting non-ultimistic ideas are to be found in the
world’s religions. Maitzen, in his chapter, concludes that philosophy
itself enjoys three characteristics of religious realities—namely, meta-
physical, axiological, and soteriological transcendence—and that little
would be lost and much might be gained if both religion and philosophy
of religion were replaced by philosophy—that is, by “the attempt to answer
a limitless range of questions by means of our most careful reasoning.”
For Eric Steinhart, the problem with philosophy of religion’s current
focus on traditional religions is not that traditional religions involve
ultimate realities, but that they involve the supernatural. He implicitly
agrees with Sikka that philosophy of religion has the potential to be of
significant social value by helping those who identify as “spiritual but not
religious,” but he thinks this only because in his view spirituality is
compatible with naturalism. Steinhart is confident that some form of
naturalism is the most viable worldview, but he does not believe that this
means the end of philosophy of religion. What it means is that philosophy
of religion should shift its attention to new naturalistic forms of religion,
 INTRODUCTION 

which are best understood as technologies for attaining new and powerful
forms of self-expression, self-regulation, self-transcendence, and so on.
Such “energy” religions include religions of consciousness, exemplified by
Westernized Buddhism; religions of vision, which emphasize the ethical
use of entheogens; religions of dance, such as those employing raves; and
religions of beauty, such as Burning Man. Steinhart argues that these
forms of religiousness, which may loom larger in the future, raise plenty
of philosophical problems of their own and that these could replace the
present focus of philosophy of religion. Of course, even if replacement
were not necessary, it could be that philosophy of religion’s present focus
should be widened to include the forms of life Steinhart describes.
Further, since he sometimes uses the language of ultimacy in connection
with religion, there is a question as to whether Steinhart’s claims are
challenged successfully by Maitzen’s arguments against ultimacy, or
whether the language of transcendence, which Steinhart also uses,
would be sufficient for his purposes. At the same time, it seems to us
that Steinhart’s chapter challenges Maitzen’s conclusion about the reso-
lution of religion and philosophy of religion into philosophy, although in
order for this challenge to succeed Steinhart would need to be able to
show that the human goals achieved by his naturalistic religions exceed
any to which philosophizing alone offers widespread access.
Like Sikka, Mark Wynn believes that a faulty conception of religion—
or of how to evaluate it—is at the root of what is wrong with philosophy
of religion’s present focus. According to Wynn, however, the crucial
mistake is the assumption that beliefs are fundamental to religion. This
false assumption leads philosophers of religion to think that they can
evaluate a religion simply by evaluating its core doctrines. They ignore
practices on the faulty grounds that the justification of those practices
depends solely on the justification of the creedal commitments from
which those practices allegedly flow. For Wynn, this is no better than
the opposite scenario, that is to say, focusing solely on practices on the
faulty grounds that the justification of any creedal commitments
allegedly presupposed by those practices depends solely on whether or
not those practices are justified. Instead, religious commitment should be
treated as an amalgam of belief and practice designed to attain, if not
Steinhart’s elevated human ends, then at least certain goods that are
distinctively spiritual. Wynn argues that, because of its connection to the
“wider economy of human life,” this treatment of religion could aid in
 PAUL DRAPER AND J . L . SCHELLENBERG

the development of new forms of religious and spiritual practice. His

conclusions, it seems to us, complement those of Sikka and Steinhart and
offer a challenge, if not to Maitzen’s detailed arguments about various
forms of ultimacy, then to his idea that religion and philosophy of
religion are lost without ultimacy.
Much like Wynn, John Bishop focuses on axiological questions. But he
adds a philosophical rationale for making them central to the work of
philosophy of religion. Like Nagasawa and Sikka, Bishop thinks that, by
narrowly focusing on Western theism, philosophers of religion have to
their detriment shielded themselves from addressing more general ques-
tions about religion. Bishop, however, seems implicitly to suggest that one
way to pursue Nagasawa’s global philosophy of religion, or a slightly
expanded version thereof, is to ask not what philosophical questions
various religions happen to have in common, but instead what questions
philosophy appropriately has for all religions. Central among questions of
this sort, says Bishop, is the normative question of religion as such—that
is, the question of whether religion can somehow satisfy philosophy’s
need for an overall stance on reality that supports living well. Critiques of
specific religious forms of life (whether they are called religious or not)
will then flow from one’s answer to that ethical question, instead of being
based on the faulty assumption that the primary task of philosophy of
religion is to determine whether the truth of any religious belief is
probable relative to the evidence of those who hold it. Bishop’s suggestion
about how philosophy of religion’s focus ought to be renewed seems to us
relevant to Steinhart, as the former’s ethical criterion can presumably be
extended to naturalistic forms of religion. And it poses interesting ques-
tions about the range of issues philosophy raises for all religion, which, if
Maitzen is right, includes concerns about religious ideas of ultimacy.
Robert McKim’s chapter argues that the focus of philosophy of
religion ought to be expanded in three ways: by attending to more of
the world’s rich religious diversity (here he is at one with Sikka and
Nagasawa); by contributing more fully to the study of religion by
scholars not in philosophy departments (here his points complement
those made by others in Part 1); and by exploring how religion might
make progress in the future. Exploring avenues of progress in religion
receives the most attention. McKim argues that philosophy can help both
with progress of understanding and with practical progress. It can do
so both by identifying, clarifying, and developing options for future
 INTRODUCTION 

religious development and by integrating such abstract reflection with an

investigation of how well various forms of religion—including presently
existing forms and extensions thereof—fulfill the functions of religion.
On the latter matters, his work and that of Bishop and Wynn are, we
think, mutually complementary. Concerning what McKim thinks phil-
osophy of religion can offer the study of religion outside its bounds, it
seems to us he implicitly addresses the old dispute between academic
philosophers who specialize in philosophy of religion and those who
specialize in philosophy of religion but have their doctorates in religious
studies. The latter claim that work by the former evinces a lack of breadth
or depth in knowledge about religion, and the former claim that work by
the latter evinces a lack of breadth or depth in knowledge about phil-
osophy. McKim realizes that both sides of this dispute are correct. On the
one hand, he suggests that scholars of religion, including those who do
not specialize in philosophy of religion, can benefit greatly from training
in philosophy. Academic philosophers, on the other hand, need to be less
parochial, taking into account research by scholars of religion on the
variety of forms that religion can take. This will, among other things,
make it possible for them to play an important role in contributing to
religious progress.
The second half of this volume is concerned primarily with standpoint
rather than focus—that is, with how philosophers of religion are placed,
in terms of such things as commitments brought to inquiry and assump-
tions about proper aims and procedures, as they address whatever
particular issue becomes their focus. Clearly, there are potentially many
interesting points where issues about focus and issues about standpoint
will intersect as philosophy of religion is renewed, and indeed the former
are not entirely absent from Part 2, but a division nonetheless seems
warranted on the basis of primary concern.
Part 2 opens with a unique essay by Wesley Wildman and David
Rohr. They offer a qualitative analysis of what fifty-one mostly North
American philosophers of religion had to say when invited to respond
online to a broad question about the nature of their field. Through their
analysis and its data, we would like to think they provide an empirical
background for at least some of what other chapters in Part 2 discuss. In
the Wildman–Rohr study, several datasets were used to seek answers to
questions about trends spanning a great variety of issues, including how
philosophy of religion is related to each of the following: philosophical
 PAUL DRAPER AND J . L . SCHELLENBERG

theology, comparative philosophy or comparative religion, words for

ultimate reality, feminism, eco-justice, and many more. On the basis of
their results, Wildman and Rohr conclude that “a major fault line”
divides philosophers who work at institutions requiring the signing of
a statement of faith and belong to the Society for Christian Philosophers
or the American Philosophical Association from philosophers who are
employed by secular institutions (or religious institutions that do not
require the signing of a statement of faith) and are members of the
American Academy of Religion. This division, they think, has led to
misunderstandings outside the field as to what philosophy of religion is,
which might be removed by a sort of “truth in advertising” that makes
rather clearer when people are doing philosophical theology or analytical
theology, and when they are doing philosophy of religion.
Aaron Simmons examines another fault line, one whose challenges
would remain even if Wildman and Rohr are mistaken, or if they are right
and their advice were fully heeded. This time, the fault line is between
those whose home is continental philosophy of religion and those who
would place themselves within analytic philosophy of religion. Simmons
does not advocate bridging the divide in any sense that would involve
abandoning the identities that shape us, but rather explains a somewhat
different approach he calls “Mashup Philosophy of Religion.” However,
most of his attention is directed to the sort of renewal in continental
philosophy of religion—considered on its own—that he thinks philoso-
phy demands and would be required to make the “mashup” work. This
renewal, he argues, would involve a metaphorical “dying to oneself” and
is especially called for in relation to three things: confession, insularity,
and arrogance. The main focus is confession, with Simmons arguing that
continental philosophy of religion can be personal—in the sense of having
“existential traction” and being shaped by one’s religious (or anti-
religious) identities and commitments—without being confessional, that
is, without taking those commitments to be reliable sources of data for
the purpose of doing philosophy of religion.
Graham Oppy writes very much as an analytic philosopher, but he is
also much concerned about the biased standpoint that leads many
analytic philosophers of religion, whether Christians or naturalists, to
claim that their own worldviews are uniquely rational (in an internalist
sense) and uniquely supported by cogent arguments. He argues against
this view by developing several models for comparing the intellectual
 INTRODUCTION 

merits of competing worldviews. He then examines procedures for

collectively examining “best theories” on subjects that interest us, show-
ing the complexities and difficulties that attend even a scaled-back
version of such a project. He argues that, because of prejudice or bias,
contemporary philosophy of religion has not even come close to carrying
out such a project. In order to make effective pursuit of this project more
likely, he recommends that we should learn to highly prize the work of
those who are able to make “serious contributions to the advancement
of worldviews other than their own.” Oppy clearly has his own ideas—
which complement those proposed in Part 1—about how the focus of
philosophy of religion might properly be deepened and expanded. But he
emphasizes the problems involving standpoint that are preventing such
developments and the ways in which our standpoints might be sensitized
to these problems. If Simmons is right, then Oppy’s problem may be
even more widely exhibited than he supposes. Simmons, moreover,
suggests a solution that analytic as well as continental philosophers of
religion might consider.
Jason Marsh, in his essay, addresses a style of reasoning popular
among some analytic philosophers of religion on the narrower side of
Wildman and Rohr’s divide, which they might seek to use in response
to Oppy’s criticisms of their standpoint. This is religious Mooreanism.
Marsh points out how philosophers of religion like Alvin Plantinga expli-
citly or implicitly appeal to religious Mooreanism when they treat religious
claims, not just as starting points for inquiry, but as ending points even
when powerful skeptical challenges are not defeated by counter-argument.
Distinguishing several versions of religious Mooreanism, Marsh argues
that appealing to non-inferential evidence to deflect serious challenges to
religious beliefs violates at least the spirit of the Socratic injunction to follow
the evidence wherever it leads, especially when those beliefs (unlike, for
example, the belief that there is a past or that there is an external world) are
controversial and subject to personal doubts. Of course, it is consistent with
all of these points that the right way to resolve this tension between Moore
and Socrates is to abandon the Socratic injunction, but Marsh argues that to
do so would be premature because religious Mooreans have not yet
adequately supported their position. It seems to us that there are echoes
of Simmons in Marsh, and in particular that the relationships between
the Socratic injunction and Simmons’s application of the idea of kenosis
invite exploration.
Another random document with
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exaggeration, he would have been denounced as a mystic from a
hundred pulpits. Hence it has come to pass that some men, who
have figured largely as mystics in the history of the Church, have in
them but a comparatively small measure of that subjective excess
which we would call mysticism, in the strict sense. Tauler is one of
these.
But it may be said,—You talk of testing these men by Scripture; yet
you can only mean, by your interpretation of Scripture. How are you
sure that your interpretation is better than theirs? Such an objection
lies equally against every appeal to Scripture. For we all appeal to
what we suppose to be the meaning of the sacred writers,
ascertained according to the best exercise of our judgment. The
science of hermeneutics has established certain general principles of
interpretation which are acknowledged by scholars of every creed.
But if any one now-a-days resolves the New Testament into allegory,
and supposes, for example, that by the five husbands of the woman
of Samaria we are to understand the five Senses, I cannot of course
try my cause with him before a Court where he makes the verdict
what he pleases. I can only leave him with his riddles, and request
him to carry my compliments to the Sphinx.
There is, then, a twofold test by which Tauler and other mystics are
to be judged, if their teaching is to profit rather than to confuse and
mislead us. We may compare the purport of his discourses with the
general tenor and bearing of the New Testament, as far as we can
apprehend it as a whole. Are some unquestionable truths but rarely
touched, and others pushed to their utmost limits? If we think we see
a certain disproportionateness—that there is a joyousness, and
freedom, and warm humanity about the portraiture of Christian life in
St. John, which we lack in his very sincere disciple, the ascetic and
the mystic,—we trifle with truth if we do not say so. The other test is
the historical. Was a certain mystic on the side of the truth and
onwardness of his time, or against it? Did he rise above its worst
errors, or did he aggravate them? And here Tauler stands with a
glory round his head. Whatever exaggeration there may have been
of the inward as against the outward, it was scarcely more than was
inevitable in the case of a man who had to maintain the inmost
verities of Christian life amidst almost universal formality and death.
What then, it may be asked, is that exaggeration of which you
speak? For hitherto your account of mysticism proper is only
negative—it is a something which St. John does not teach.
I will give a few examples. If a man should imagine that his inward
light superseded outward testimony, so that the words of Christ and
his inspired disciples became superfluous to him; if he regarded
indifference to the facts and recorded truths of the New Testament
as a sign of eminent spirituality, such a man would, I think, abuse the
teaching of St. John concerning the unction from the Holy One. The
same Apostle who declares that he who hateth his brother abideth in
darkness, refuses to bid God speed to him who brings not the
doctrine of Christ, and inseparably associates the ‘anointing’ which
his children had received, with their abiding in the truth they had
heard from his lips. (1 John ii. 24.) If, again, any man were to pretend
that a special revelation exempted him from the ordinary obligations
of morality—that his union with God was such as to render sinless in
him what would have been sin in others, he would be condemned,
and not supported, by conscience and Scripture. Neither could that
mystic appeal to St. John who should teach, instead of the discipline
and consecration of our faculties, such an abandonment of their use,
in favour of supernatural gifts, as should be a premium on his
indolence, and a discouragement to all faithful endeavour to
ascertain the sense of Holy Writ. Nor, again, does any mystic who
disdains hope as a meanness abide by the teaching of St. John. For
the Apostle regards the hope of heaven as eminently conducive to
our fitness for it, and says—‘He that hath this hope purifieth himself.’
The mystical ascetic who refuses to pray for particular or temporal
bestowments is wrong in his practice, however elevated in his
motive. For St. John can write,—‘I pray (εὔχομαι) above all things
that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul
prospereth.’ (3 John 2.) Nowhere does that Apostle prescribe
absolute indifference, or absolute passivity. Lastly, John is not so
afraid of anthropomorphism as to discourage or refine away the
symbol and the figure. It is evident that he regards the fatherhoods
and the brotherhoods of this earthly life, not as fleshly ideas which
profane things spiritual, but as adumbrations, most fit (however
inadequate) to set forth the divine relationship to us,—yea, farther,
as facts which would never have had place in time, had not
something like their archetype from the first existed in that Eternal
Mind who has made man in his own image.
I remember hearing of an old lady, a member of the Society of
Friends, who interrupted a conversation in which the name of
Jerusalem had been mentioned, by the exclamation, ‘Jerusalem—
umph—Jerusalem—it has not yet been revealed to me that there is
such a place!’ Now I do not say that our friend the Quakeress might
not have been an excellent Christian; but I do venture to think her far
gone in mysticism. Her remark puts the idea of mysticism, in its
barest and most extreme form, as a tendency which issues in
refusing to acknowledge the external world as a source of religious
knowledge in any way, and will have every man’s Christianity
evolved de novo from the depths of his own consciousness, as
though no apostle had ever preached, or evangelist written, or any
Christian existed beside himself. It is not, therefore, the holding the
doctrine of an inward light that makes a mystic, but the holding it in
such a way as to ignore or to diminish the proper province of the
outer.

I should certainly like to see some one settle for us definitively the
questions which lie at the root of mysticism, such as these, for
example:—Is there an immediate influence exerted by the Spirit of
God on the spirit of man? And if so, under what conditions? What
are those limits which, once passed, land us in mysticism? But the
task, I fear, is beyond all hope of satisfactory execution. Every term
used would have to be defined, and the words of the definition
defined again, and every definition and subdefinition would be open
to some doubt or some objection. Marco Polo tells us that the people
of Kin-sai throw into the fire, at funerals, pieces of painted paper,
representing servants, horses, and furniture; believing that the
deceased will enjoy the use of realities corresponding to these in the
other world. But, alas, for our poor definition-cutter, with his logical
scissors! Where shall he find a faith like that of the Kin-sai people, to
believe that there actually exist, in the realm of spirit and the world of
ideas, realities answering to the terms he fashions? No; these
questions admit but of approximate solution. The varieties of spiritual
experience defy all but a few broad and simple rules. Hath not One
told us that the influence in which we believe is as the wind, which
bloweth as it listeth, and we cannot tell whence it cometh and
whither it goeth?
For my own part, I firmly believe that there is an immediate influence
exerted by the Divine Spirit. But is this immediate influence above
sense and consciousness, or not? Yes, answers many a mystic. But,
if it be above consciousness, how can any man be conscious of it?
And what then becomes of the doctrine—so vital with a large class of
mystics—of perceptible guidance, of inward impulses and
monitions? Speaking with due caution on a matter so mysterious, I
should say that, while the indwelling and guidance of the Spirit is
most real, such influence is not ordinarily perceptible. It would be
presumption to deny that in certain cases of especial need (as in
some times of persecution, sore distress, or desolation)
manifestations of a special (though not miraculous) nature may have
been vouchsafed.
With regard to the witness of the Spirit, I think that the language of
St. John warrants us in believing that the divine life within us is its
own evidence. Certain states of physical or mental distemper being
excepted, in so far as our life in Christ is vigorously and watchfully
maintained, in so far will the witness of the Spirit with our spirit give
us direct conviction of our sonship. How frequently, throughout his
first Epistle, does the Apostle repeat that favourite word, οἴδαμεν,
‘we know!’
Again, as to the presence of Christ in the soul. Says the Lutheran
Church, ‘We condemn those who say that the gifts of God only, and
not God himself, dwell in the believer.’ I have no wish to echo any
such condemnation, but I believe that the Lutheran affirmation is the
doctrine of Scripture. Both Christ himself and the Spirit of Christ are
said to dwell within the children of God. We may perhaps regard the
indwelling of Christ as the abiding source or principle of the new life,
and the indwelling of the Spirit as that progressive operation which
forms in us the likeness to Christ. The former is vitality itself; the
latter has its degrees, as we grow in holiness.
Once more, as to passivity. If we really believe in spiritual guidance,
we shall agree with those mystics who bid us abstain from any self-
willed guiding of ourselves. When a good man has laid self totally
aside that he may follow only the leading of the Spirit, is it not
essential to any practical belief in Divine direction that he should
consider what then appears to him as right or wrong to be really
such, in his case, according to the mind of the Spirit? Yet to say thus
much is not to admit that the influences of the Spirit are ordinarily
perceptible. The motion of a leaf may indicate the direction of a
current of air; it does not render the air visible. The mystic who has
gathered up his soul in a still expectancy, perceives at last a certain
dominant thought among his thoughts. He is determined, in one
direction or another. But what he has perceived is still one of his own
thoughts in motion, not the hand of the Divine Mover. Here, however,
some mystics would say, ‘You beg the question. What we perceive is
a something quite separate from ourselves—in fact, the impelling
Spirit.’ In this case the matter is beyond discussion. I can only say,
my consciousness is different. I shall be to him a rationalist, as he to
me a mystic; but let us not dispute.
Obviously, the great difficulty is to be quite sure that we have so
annihilated every passion, preference or foregone conclusion as to
make it certain that only powers from heaven can be working on the
waters of the soul. That ripple, which has just stirred the stillness!
Was it a breath of earthly air? Was it the leaping of a desire from
within us? Or was it indeed the first touch, as it were, of some
angelic hand, commissioned to trouble the pool with healing from on
high? If such questions are hard to answer, when judging ourselves,
how much more so when judging each other!
When we desire to determine difficult duty by aid of the illumination
promised, self must be abandoned. But what self? Assuredly,
selfishness and self-will. Not the exercise of those powers of
observation and judgment which God has given us for this very
purpose. A divine light is promised, not to supersede, but to
illuminate our understanding. Greatly would that man err who should
declare those things only to be his duty to which he had been
specially ‘drawn,’ or ‘moved,’ as the Friends would term it. What can
be conceived more snug and comfortable, in one sense, and more
despicable, in another, than the easy, selfish life which such a man
might lead, under pretence of eminent spirituality? Refusing to read
and meditate on the recorded example of Christ’s life—for that is a
mere externalism—he awaits inertly the development of an inward
Christ. As he takes care not to expose himself to inducements to
unpleasant duty—to any outward teachings calculated to awaken his
conscience and elevate his standard of obligation—that conscience
remains sluggish, that standard low. He is honest, respectable,
sober, we will say. His inward voice does not as yet urge him to
anything beyond this. Others, it is true, exhaust themselves in
endeavours to benefit the souls and bodies of men. They are right
(he says), for so their inward Christ teaches them. He is right (he
says), for so does not his inward Christ teach him. It is to be hoped
that a type of mysticism so ignoble as this can furnish but few
specimens. Yet such is the logical issue of some of the extravagant
language we occasionally hear concerning the bondage of the letter
and the freedom of the spirit. When the letter means what God
chooses, and the spirit what we choose, Self is sure to exclaim, ‘The
letter killeth.’ If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that
darkness!
Such, then, in imperfect outline, is what I hold to be true on this
question concerning the reality and extent of the Spirit’s influence.
As there are two worlds—the seen and the unseen—so have there
been ever two revelations—an inward and an outward—reciprocally
calling forth and supplementing each other. To undervalue the
outward manifestation of God, in nature, in providence, in revelation,
because it is outward—because it is vain without the inward
manifestation of God in the conscience and by the Spirit, is the great
error of mysticism. Hence it has often disdained means because
they are not—what they were never meant to be—the end. An ultra-
refinement of spirituality has rejected, as carnal and unclean, what
God has commended to men as wholesome and helpful. It is not
wise to refuse to employ our feet because they are not wings.
But it is not mysticism to believe in a world of higher realities, which
are, and ever will be, beyond sight and sense; for heaven itself will
not abrogate manifestation, but substitute a more adequate
manifestation for a less. What thoughtful Christian man supposes
that in any heaven of heavens, any number of millenniums hence,
the Wisdom, Power, or Goodness of God will become manifest to
him, as so many visible entities, with form, and hue, and motion? It is
not mysticism to believe that the uncreated underlies all created
good. Augustine will not be suspected of pantheism; and it is
Augustine who says—‘From a good man, or a good angel, take
away angel, take away man—and you find God.’ We may be realists
(as opposed to the nominalist) without being mystics. For the
surmise of Plato, that the world of Appearance subsisted in and by a
higher world of Divine Thoughts is confirmed (while it is transcended)
by Christianity, when it tells us of that Divine Subsistence, that
Eternal Word, by whom and in whom, all things consist, and without
whom was not anything made that is made. And herein lies that real,
though often exaggerated, affinity between Platonism and
Christianity, which a long succession of mystics have laboured so
lovingly to trace out and to develop. In the second and third
centuries, in the fourteenth, and in the seventeenth; in the Christian
school at Alexandria, in the pulpits of the Rhineland, at Bemerton,
and at Cambridge, Plato has been the ‘Attic Moses’ of the Clements
and the Taulers, the Norrises and the Mores.
But when mysticism, in the person of Plotinus, declares all thought
essentially one, and refuses to Ideas any existence external to our
own minds, it has become pantheistic. So, also, when the Oriental
mystic tells us that our consciousness of not being infinite is a
delusion (maya) to be escaped by relapsing ecstatically into the
universal Life. Still more dangerous does such mysticism become
when it goes a step farther and says—That sense of sin which
troubles you is a delusion also; it is the infirmity of your condition in
this phantom world to suppose that right is different from wrong.
Shake off that dream of personality, and you will see that good and
evil are identical in the Absolute.
In considering the German mysticism of the fourteenth century it is
natural to inquire, first of all, how far it manifests any advance
beyond that of preceding periods. An examination of its leading
principles will show that its appearance marks an epoch of no mean
moment in the history of philosophy. These monks of the Rhineland
were the first to break away from a long-cherished mode of thought,
and to substitute a new and profounder view of the relations
subsisting between God and the universe. Their memorable step of
progress is briefly indicated by saying that they substituted the idea
of the immanence of God in the world for the idea of the emanation
of the world from God. These two ideas have given rise to two
different forms of pantheism; but they are neither of them necessarily
pantheistic. To view rightly the relationship of God to the universe it
is requisite to regard Him as both above it and within it. So
Revelation taught the ancient Hebrews to view their great ‘I am.’ On
the one hand, He had His dwelling in the heavens, and humbled
Himself to behold the affairs of men; on the other, He was
represented as having beset man behind and before, as giving life to
all creatures by the sending forth of His breath, as giving to man
understanding by His inspiration, and as dwelling, in an especial
sense, with the humble and the contrite. But philosophy, and
mysticism, frequently its purest aspiration, have not always been
able to embrace fully and together these two conceptions of
transcendence and of immanence. We find, accordingly, that from
the days of Dionysius Areopagita down to the fourteenth century, the
emanation theory, in one form or another, is dominant. The daring
originality of John Scotus could not escape from its control. It is
elaborately depicted in Dante’s Paradiso. The doctrine of
immanence found first utterance with the Dominican Eckart; not in
timid hints, but intrepid, reckless, sounding blasphemous. What was
false in Eckart’s teaching died out after a while; what was true,
animated his brother mystics, transmigrated eventually into the mind
of Luther, and did not die.
To render more intelligible the position of the German mystics it will
be necessary to enter into some farther explanation of the two
theories in question. The theory of emanation supposes the universe
to descend in successive, widening circles of being, from the
Supreme—from some such ‘trinal, individual’ Light of lights, as Dante
seemed to see in his Vision. In the highest, narrowest, and most
rapid orbits, sing and shine the refulgent rows of Cherubim and
Seraphim and Thrones. Next these, in wider sweep, the
Dominations, Virtues, Powers. Below these, Princedoms,
Archangels, Angels, gaze adoring upwards. Of these hierarchies the
lowest occupy the largest circle. Beneath their lowest begins our
highest sphere—the empyrean, enfolding within its lesser and still
lesser spheres, till we reach the centre—‘that dim spot which men
call earth.’ Through the hierarchies of heaven, and the
corresponding hierarchies of the church, the grace of God is
transmitted, stage by stage, each order in its turn receiving from that
above, imparting to that below. This descent of divine influence from
the highest point to the lowest is designed to effect a similar ascent
of the soul from the lowest to the highest. Of such a theory John
Scotus Erigena is the most philosophical exponent. With him the
restitution of all things consists in their resolution into their ideal
sources (causæ primordiales). Man and nature are redeemed in
proportion as they pass from the actual up to the ideal; for in his
system, the actual is not so much the realization of the ideal as a fall
from it. So, in the spirit of this theory, the mounting soul, when it
anticipates in imagination the redemption of the travailing universe,
will extract from music the very essence of its sweetness, and refine
that again (far above all delight of sense) into the primal idea of an
Eternal Harmony. So likewise, all form and colour—the grace of
flowers, the majesty of mountains, the might of seas, the red of
evening or of morning clouds, the lustre of precious stones and gold
in the gleaming heart of mines—all will be concentrated and
subtilized into an abstract principle of Beauty, and a hueless original
of Light. All the affinities of things, and instincts of creatures, and
human speech and mirth, and household endearment, he will
sublimate into abstract Wisdom, Joy, or Love, and sink these
abstractions again into some crystal sea of the third heaven, that
they may have existence only in their fount and source—the
superessential One.
Very different is the doctrine of Immanence, as it appears in the
Theologia Germanica, in Eckart, in Jacob Behmen, and afterwards in
some forms of modern speculation. The emanation theory supposes
a radiation from above; the theory of immanence, a self-
development, or manifestation of God from within. A geometrician
would declare the pyramid the symbol of the one, the sphere the
symbol of the other. The former conception places a long scale of
degrees between the heavenly and the earthly: the latter tends to
abolish all gradation, and all distinction. The former is successive;
the latter, immediate, simultaneous. A chemist might call the former
the sublimate, the latter the diluent, of the Actual. The theory of
immanence declares God everywhere present with all His power—
will realize heaven or hell in the present moment—denies that God is
nearer on the other side the grave than this—equalizes all external
states—breaks down all steps, all partitions—will have man at once
escape from all that is not God, and so know and find only God
everywhere. What are all those contrasts that make warp and woof
in the web of time; what are riches and poverty, health and sickness;
all the harms and horrors of life, and all its joy and peace,—what
past and future, sacred and secular, far and near? Are they not the
mere raiment wherewith our narrow human thought clothes the Ever-
present, Ever-living One? Phantoms, and utter nothing—all of them!
The one sole reality is even this—that God through Christ does
assume flesh in every Christian man; abolishes inwardly his creature
self, and absorbs it into the eternal stillness of His own ‘all-moving
Immobility.’ So, though the storms of life may beat, or its suns may
shine upon his lower nature, his true (or uncreated) self is hidden in
God, and sits already in the heavenly places. Thus, while the Greek
Dionysius bids a man retire into himself, because there he will find
the foot of that ladder of hierarchies which stretches up to heaven;
the Germans bid man retire into himself because, in the depths of his
being, God speaks immediately to him, and will enter and fill his
nature if he makes Him room.
In spite of some startling expressions (not perhaps unnatural on the
first possession of men by so vast a truth), the advance of the
German mysticism on that of Dionysius or Erigena is conspicuous.
The Greek regards man as in need only of a certain illumination. The
Celt saves him by a transformation from the physical into the
metaphysical. But the Teuton, holding fast the great contrasts of life
and death, sin and grace, declares an entire revolution of will—a
totally new principle of life essential. It is true that the German
mystics dwell so much on the bringing forth of the Son in all
Christians now, that they seem to relegate to a distant and merely
preliminary position the historical incarnation of the Son of God. But
this great fact is always implied, though less frequently expressed.
And we must remember how far the Church of Rome had really
banished the Saviour from human sympathies, by absorbing to the
extent she did, his humanity in his divinity. Christ was by her brought
really near to men only in the magical transformation of the
Sacrament, and was no true Mediator. The want of human sympathy
in their ideal of Him, forced them to have recourse to the maternal
love of the Virgin, and the intercession of the saints. Unspeakable
was the gain, then, when the Saviour was brought from that awful
distance to become the guest of the soul, and vitally to animate, here
on earth, the members of his mystical body. Even Eckart, be it
remembered, does not say, with the Hegelian, that every man is
divine already, and the divinity of Christ not different in kind from our
own. He attributes a real divineness only to a certain class of men—
those who by grace are transformed from the created to the
uncreated nature. It is not easy to determine the true place of Christ
in his pantheistic system; but this much appears certain, that Christ
and not man—grace, and not nature, is the source of that
incomprehensible deification with which he invests the truly perfect
and poor in spirit.
On the moral character of Eckart, even the malice of persecution has
not left a stain. Yet that unknown God to which he desires to escape
when he says ‘I want to be rid of God,’ is a being without morality. He
is above goodness, and so those who have become identical with
Him ‘are indifferent to doing or not doing,’ says Eckart. I can no more
call him good, he exclaims, than I can call the sun black. In his
system, separate personality is a sin—a sort of robbery of God: it
resembles those spots on the moon, which the angel describes to
Adam as ‘unpurged vapours, not yet into her substance turned.’ I am
not less than God, he will say, there is no distinction: if I were not, He
would not be. ‘I hesitate to receive anything from God—for to be
indebted to Him would imply inferiority, and make a distinction
between Him and me; whereas, the righteous man is, without
distinction, in substance and in nature, what God is.’ Here we see
the doctrine of the immanence of God swallowing up the conception
of his transcendence. A pantheism, apparently apathetic and
arrogant as that of the Stoics, is the result. Yet, when we remember
that Eckart was the friend of Tauler and Suso, we cannot but
suppose that there may have lain some meaning in such language
less monstrous than that which the words themselves imply. Eckart
would probably apply such expressions, not to his actual self;—for
that he supposes non-existent, and reduced to its true nothing—but
to the divine nature which, as he thought, then superseded within
him the annihilated personality. Tauler (and with him Ruysbroek and
Suso) holds in due combination the correlative ideas of
transcendence and of immanence.

Such, then, is one of the most important characteristics of German

mysticism in the fourteenth century. I have next to ascertain in which
of the leading orders of mystics Tauler should be assigned a place.
‘Divination,’ saith Bacon, ‘is of two kinds—primitive, and by influxion.’
The former is founded on the belief that the soul, when by
abstinence and observances it has been purified and concentrated,
has ‘a certain extent and latitude of pre-notion.’ The latter is
grounded on the persuasion that the foreknowledge of God and of
spirits may be infused into the soul when rendered duly passive and
mirror-like. Of these two kinds of divining the former is characterized
by repose and quiet, the latter by a fervency and elevation such as
the ancients styled furor. Now our mystical divines have this in
common with the diviners, that they chiefly aim to withdraw the soul
within itself. They may be divided most appropriately after a like
manner. A cursory inspection will satisfy any one that theopathetic
mysticism branches into two distinct, and often contrasted, species.
There is the serene and contemplative mysticism; and over against
it, the tempestuous and the active. The former is comparatively self-
contained and intransitive; the latter, emphatically transitive. Its
subject conceives himself mastered by a divine seizure. Emotions
well-nigh past the strain of humanity, make the chest to heave, the
frame to tremble; cast the man down, convulsed, upon the earth. Or
visions that will not pass away, burn into his soul their glories and
their terrors. Or words that will not be kept down, force an
articulation, with quaking and with spasms, from organs no longer
under his control. The contemplative mystic has most commonly
loved best that side of Christian truth which is nearest to Platonism;
the enthusiastic or practical mystic, that which connects it with
Judaism. The former hopes to realize within himself the highest
ascents of faith and hope—nay, haply, to surpass them, even while
here below. The latter comes forth from his solitude, with warning,
apocalyptic voice, to shake a sleeping Church. He has a word from
the Lord that burns as a fire in his bones till it be spoken. He lifts up
his voice, and cries, exhorting, commanding, or foretelling, with the
authority of inspiration.
The Phrygian mountaineer, Montanus, furnishes the earliest
example, and a very striking one, of this enthusiastic or prophetic
kind of mysticism. He and his followers had been cradled in the
fiercest and most frantic superstitions of heathendom. Terrible was
Cybele, the mountain mother, throned among the misty fastnesses of
Ida. Maddest uproar echoed through the glens on her great days of
festival. There is beating of drum and timbrel, clashing of cymbals,
shrill crying of pipes; incessant the mournful sound of barbarous
horns; loud, above all, the groans and shrieks and yells from frenzied
votaries whom the goddess has possessed. They toss their heads;
they leap; they whirl; they wallow convulsed upon the rocks, cutting
themselves with knives; they brandish, they hurl their weapons; their
worship is a foaming, raving, rushing to-and-fro, till the driving deity
flings them down exhausted, senseless. Among these demoniacs—
sanguine fleti, Terrificas capitum quatientes numine cristas, as
Lucretius has described them—these Corybantes, or head-tossers,
Christianity made its way, exorcising a legion of evil spirits. But the
enthusiastic temperament was not expelled. These wild men,
become Christians, carried much of the old fervour into the new faith.
Violent excitement, ecstatic transport, oracular utterance, were to
them the dazzling signs of the divine victory—of the forcible
dislodgment of the power of Darkness by the power of Light. So
Montanus readily believes, and finds numbers to believe, that he is
the subject of a divine possession. Against the bloodthirsty mob in
the villages and towns—against a Marcus Aurelius, ordaining
massacre from the high places of the Cæsars—had not God armed
his own with gifts beyond the common measure—with rapture—with
vision—with prophecy? Yes! the promised Paraclete was indeed
among them, and it was not they, but He, who spake. So thought the
Montanists, as they announced new precepts to the Church; as they
foretold the gathering judgment of Antichrist and the dawning
triumph of the saints; as they hastened forth, defiant and sublime, to
provoke from their persecutors the martyr’s crown. Let us not
overlook the real heroism of these men, while touching on their
errors. But their conception of the Church of Christ, so analogous, in
many respects, to that of the early Quakers—was it the right one?
According to Montanus, the Church was to be maintained in the
world by a succession of miraculous interventions. From time to
time, fresh outpourings of the Spirit would inspire fresh companies of
prophets to ordain ritual, to confute heresy, to organize and modify
the Church according to the changing necessities of each period. He
denied that the Scripture was an adequate source, whence to draw
the refutation of error and the new supplies of truth demanded by the
exigencies of the future. As Romanism sets up an infallible Pope to
decide concerning truth, and in fact to supplement revelation, as the
organ of the Divine Spirit ever living in the Church; so these mystics
have their inspired teachers and prophets, raised up from time to
time, for the same purpose. But the contemplative mystics, and
indeed Christians generally, borne out, as we think, by Scripture and
by history, deny any such necessity, and declare this doctrine of
supplementary inspiration alien from the spirit of Christianity. While
Montanus and his prophetesses, Maximilla and Priscilla, were thus
speaking, in the name of the Lord, to the country-folk of Phrygia or to
the citizens of Pepuza, Clement at Alexandria was teaching, on the
contrary, that we have the organ requisite for finding in the Scriptures
all the truth we need—that they are a well of depth sufficient, nay
inexhaustible; and that the devout exercise of reason in their
interpretation and application is at once the discipline and
prerogative of the manhood proper to the Christian dispensation. We
are no longer Jews, he would say, no longer children. The presence
of the Spirit with us is a part of the ordinary law of the economy
under which we live. It is designed that the supernatural shall
gradually vindicate itself as the natural, in proportion as our nature is
restored to its allegiance to God. It is not necessary that we should
be inspired in the same way as the sacred writers were, before their
writings can be adequately serviceable to us.
Such was the opposition in the second century, and such has it been
in the main ever since, between these two kinds of mystical
tendency. The Montanist type of mysticism, as we see it in a
Hildegard, among the Quakers, among the Protestant peasantry of
the Cevennes, and among some of the ‘Friends of God,’ usually
takes its rise with the uneducated, is popular, sometimes
revolutionary. Animated by its spirit, Carlstadt filled Wittenberg with
scandal and confusion; and the Anabaptist mob reddened the sky
with the burning libraries of Osnaburg and Munster. The Alexandrian
mysticism, so far from despising scholarship and philosophy, as so
much carnal wisdom, desires to appropriate for Christianity every
science and every art. It is the mysticism of theologians, of
philosophers, and scholars. It exists as an important element in the
theology of Clement, of Origen, and of Augustine. It assumes still
greater prominence in a Hugo or a Richard of St. Victor. It obtained
its fullest proportions in these German mystics of the fourteenth
century. It refined and elevated the scholarship of Reuchlin, Ficinus,
and Mirandola. It is at once profound and expansive in our English
Platonists.
Yet let it not be supposed that the extravagance of the enthusiastic
mysticism has not its uses, or that the serenity of the contemplative
is always alike admirable. Both have, in their turn, done goodly
service. Each has had a work given it to do in which its rival would
have failed. The eccentric impetuosity of Montanism, ancient and
modern, has done good, directly and indirectly, by breaking through
traditional routine—by protesting against the abuses of human
authority—by stirring many a sleeping question, and daring many an
untried path of action. On the other hand, the contemplative
mysticism has been at times too timid, too fond of an elegant or
devout, but still unworthy, ease. The Nicodemuses of the sixteenth
century, the Briçonnets and the Gerard Roussels, were nearly all of
them Platonists. They were men whose mysticism raised them
above the wretched externalism of Rome, and at the same time
furnished them with an ingenious excuse for abiding safely in her
communion. ‘What,’ they would say, ‘are the various forms of the
letter, to the unity of the Spirit? Can we not use the signs of
Romanism in the spirit of Protestantism—since, to the spiritual and
the wise, this outward usage or that, is of small matter?’ The
enthusiastic mysticism tends to multiply, and the contemplative to
diminish, positive precept and ordinance. The former will sometimes
revolt against one kind of prescription only to devise a new one of its
own. So the followers of Fox exchanged surplice and ‘steeple-house’
for a singularity of hat, coat, and pronouns. The contemplative mystic
loves to inform his common life with the mysterious and the divine.
Certain especial sanctities he has, but nothing unsanctified; and he
covers his table with an altar-cloth, and curtains his bed with a
chasuble, and drinks out of a chalice every day of his life. A
Montanus commends celibacy; an Origen sees typified in marriage
the espousals of the Church. The zeal of the enthusiastic mysticism
is ever on the watch for signs—expects a kingdom coming with
observation—is almost always Millenarian. The contemplatist
regards the kingdom of heaven as internal, and sees in the history of
souls a continual day of judgment. The one courts the vision and
hungers after marvel: the other strives to ascend, above all form and
language, from the valley of phantasmata to the silent heights of
‘imageless contemplation.’ The one loves violent contrasts, and parts
off abruptly the religious world and the irreligious, the natural and the
supernatural. The other loves to harmonize these opposites, as far
as may be—would win rather than rebuke the world—would blend, in
the daily life of faith, the human with the divine working: and delights
to trace everywhere types, analogies, and hidden unity, rather than
diversity and strife. The Old Testament has been always the
favourite of the prophetic mysticism: the contemplative has drunk
most deeply into the spirit of the New.

Mysticism, as exhibited in Tauler’s sermons, is much more likely to

win appreciation at the hands of English readers than mysticism in
the Theologia Germanica. The principles which were there laid down
as bare abstractions are here warmed by sunshine and clothed with
verdure. To the theory of mysticism we find added many a
suggestive hint concerning its practice. There were general
statements in the Theologia Germanica so dim, so vast, so ultra-
human, that many readers would be at a loss to understand how
they could possibly become a practice or a joy in any soul alive. In
the sermons, a brother mystic supplies the requisite qualification,
and shows that the old Teutonic knight had, after all, a meaning not
so utterly remote from all the ways and wants of flesh and blood.
Brought out to view by Tauler’s fervour, his invisible ink becomes a
legible character. The exhortations of the pulpit thus interpret the
soliloquy of the cell; and when the preacher illuminates mysticism
with the many-coloured lights of metaphor and passion—when he
interrogates, counsels, entreats, rebukes, we seem to return from
the confines of the nameless, voiceless Void to a region within the
rule of the sun, and to beings a little lower than the angels. It will
reassure many readers to discover from these sermons that the
mystics whom Tauler represents are by no means so infatuated as to
disdain those external aids which God has provided, or which holy
men of old have handed down—that they do not call history a husk,
social worship a vain oblation, or decent order bondage to the letter
—that when they speak of transcending time and place, they pretend
to no new commandment, and do but repeat a truth old as all true
religion—that they are on their guard, beyond most men, against that
spiritual pride which some think inseparable from the mystical
aspiration—that so far from encouraging the morbid introspection
attributed to them, it is their first object to cure men of that malady—
that instead of formulating their own experience as a test and
regimen for others, they tell men to sit down in the lowest place till
God calls them to come up higher—and finally, that they are men
who have mourned for the sins, and comforted the sorrows of their
fellows, with a depth and compass of lowly love such as should have
disarmed every unfriendly judgment, had their errors been as
numerous as their excellence is extraordinary.
Any one who has attentively read Tauler’s discourses as now
accessible may consider himself familiar with the substance of
Tauler’s preaching. From whatever part of Scripture history,
prophecy, song, or precept, his text be taken, the sermons, we may
be sure, will contain similar exhortations to self-abandonment, the
same warnings against a barren externalism, the same directions to
prepare the way for the inward Advent of the Lord in the Ground of
the Soul. The allegorical interpretation, universal in those days,
rendered easy such an ever-varied presentation of a single theme.
Did the multitude go out into the wilderness to the preaching of
John? We are to go forth into the wilderness of the spiritual life. Did
Joseph and Mary seek their son in vain among their friends and
acquaintance, and find him in his Father’s house? We also must
retire to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, and be found no more in
the company of those hindering associates, our own Thoughts, Will,
and Understanding. Did Christ say to Mary Magdalen, ‘I have not yet
ascended to my Father?’ He meant, ‘I have not yet been spiritually
raised within thy soul;’ for he himself had never left the Father.
From the sermon on the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity I select a
passage which contains in two sentences the kernel of Tauler’s
doctrine—the principle which, under a thousand varieties of
illustration and application, makes the matter of all his sermons.
‘When, through all manner of exercises the outward man has been
converted into the inward, reasonable man, and thus the two, that is
to say, the powers of the senses and the powers of the reason, are
gathered up into the very centre of the man’s being—the unseen
depths of his spirit wherein lies the image of God,—and thus he
flings himself into the divine abyss, in which he dwelt eternally before
he was created; then when God finds the man thus simply and
nakedly turned towards Him, the Godhead bends down and
descends into the depths of the pure, waiting soul, and transforms
the created soul, drawing it up into the uncreated essence, so that
the spirit becomes one with Him. Could such a man behold himself,
he would see himself so noble that he would fancy himself God, and
see himself a thousand times nobler than he is in himself, and would
perceive all the thoughts and purposes, words and works, and have
all the knowledge of all men that ever were.’
An explanation of this extract will be a summary of Tauler’s theology.
First of all, it is obvious that he regards human nature as tripartite—it
is a temple in three compartments: there is the outer court of the
senses; there is the inner court of the intellectual nature, where the
powers of the soul, busy with the images of things, are ever active,
where Reason, Memory, Will, move to and fro, as a kind of mediating
priests; there is, lastly, and inmost, a Holy of Holies—the Ground of
the Soul, as the mystics term it.
‘Yes!’ exclaims some critic, ‘this Ground, of which we hear so much,
which the mystics so labour to describe, what is it, after all?’ Let
Tauler answer. He here calls it ‘the very centre of man’s being’—‘the
unseen depths of his spirit, wherein lies the image of God.’ I believe
that he means to indicate by these and other names that element in
our nature by virtue whereof we are moral agents, wherein lies that
idea of a right and a wrong which finds expression (though not
always adequate) in the verdicts of conscience—that Synderesis (to
use an Aristotelian word) of which the Syneidesis is the particular
action and voice—that part of our finite nature which borders on the
infinite—that gate through which God enters to dwell with man. Nor
is the belief in such a principle by any means peculiar to the mystics;
men at the farthest remove, by temperament and education, from
mysticism, are yet generally found ready to admit that we can only
approach a solution of our great difficulties concerning predestination
and free will, by supposing that there is a depth in our nature where
the divine and human are one. This is Tauler’s spark and potential
divinity of man—that face of man’s soul wherein God shineth always,
whether the man be aware thereof or not. This, to speak Platonically,
is the ideal part of man—that part of him whereby, as a creature, he
participates in the Word by whose thought and will all creatures
exist. It is the unlost and inalienable nobleness of man—that from
which, as Pascal says, his misery as well as his glory proceeds—
that which, according to Tauler, must exist even in hell, and be
converted into the sorrow there. The Christian Platonist expresses
his conception of the consummated redemption of man by saying
that he is restored to his original idea—becomes what he was
designed to be before sin marred him—puts off the actual sinful self,
and puts on the truer primal self which exists only in God. In this
sense Eckart says, ‘I shall be sorry if I am not younger to-morrow
than I am to-day—that is, a step nearer to the source whence I
came’—away from this Eckart to the Divine Idea of man.
Such, then, is this Ground. Next, how is the lapse, or transit into it,
effected? Tauler reminds us that many men live as though God were
not in this way nearer to them than they are to themselves. They
possess inevitably this image—this immediate receptivity of God, but
they never think of their prerogative, never seek Him in whom they
live and move. Such men live in the outside of themselves—in the
sensuous or intellectual nature; but never lift the curtain behind
which are the rays of the Shekinah. It will profit me nothing, says
Tauler, to be a king, if I know it not. So the soul must break away
from outward things, from passion and self, and in abandonment and
nothingness seek God immediately. When God is truly found, then
indeed the simplified, self-annihilated soul, is passive. But the way
thereto, what action it demands, what strong crying and tears, what
trampling out of subtle, seemly, darling sins!
First of all, the senses must be mastered by, and absorbed in, the
powers of the soul. Then must these very powers themselves—all
reasonings, willings, hopings, fearings, be absorbed in a simple
sense of the Divine presence—a sense so still, so blissful, as to
annihilate before and after, obliterate self, and sink the soul in a
Love, whose height and depth, and length and breadth, passing
knowledge, shall fill it with all the fulness of God.
‘What!’ it may be said, ‘and is this death—not of sin merely, but of
nature—the demand of your mysticism? Is all peace hollow which is
not an utter passivity—without knowledge, without will, without desire
—a total blank?’
Not altogether so, the mystic will reply. These powers of the soul
must cease to act, in as far as they belong to self; but they are not
destroyed: their absorption in the higher part of our nature is in one
sense a death; in another, their truest life. They die; but they live
anew, animated by a principle of life that comes directly from the
Father of lights, and from the Light who is the life of men. That in
them which is fit to live, survives. Still are they of use in this lower