30

THE FALLACY OF “ REUNION”

Protestant theology”?1 But even this description is hardly
adequate to the extraordinary display at Sheffield.
For practical conclusion, bearing in mind the history of
Ambrose Phillips de Lisle, devoted and fervent but for a time
misled, and the movement with which he was associated
(singularly resembling the present one), we may well adopt
the words of the late Father Clarke, S.J. :
Most Catholics have encountered from time to time Anglicans
who have sought to fraternise with us on the common ground of
dogmatic belief. They urge us to take part with them against
the common foe who is threatening to sweep away all religion
whatsoever. .... It seems a little hard to tell these well-inten­
tioned. well-meaning people, acting in good faith, that between
us and them there is a great gulf fixed, that they really belong
to the ranks of the enemy whom they desire th repel, that they
are, however unwillingly, his allies and friends, -promoting his
interest and furthering his cause. Yet it is no true kindness
to put this antagonism in the background, and, though we ought
to guard against any uncourteous or offensive rejection of their
advances, yet we should never forget the fundamental opposition
which exists between our religion and theirs; that we are as
Catholics the children of light, while they are as non-Catholics the
children of darkness ; that as regards principles they are our
enemies no less than the open unbeliever, and though we are glad
to recognize in them a happy inconsistency, which causes them
to profess a dogmatic belief where a dogmatic belief is logically
untenable, yet to ally ourselves with them would be no less a
treachery to our Faith, than a certain method of involving our­
selves in the destruction impending over them.8
These grave words are as true now as they were thirty­
seven years ago, although Anglicanism has been wonderfully
Catholicized in the meantime. For it has not crossed the
gulf which yawns between Authority and Private Judgment,
between a living infallible Teacher and doctrinal inde­
pendence.
h. e. g. rope.

‘ Dr. Aveling in Dublin Review, Oct. 1905, p. 339·
* The Month, Sept. 1885, p. 1.

MYSTICISM, FALSE AND TRUE
OR some years past mysticism has been in great
vogue. According to Miss Underhill this was to be
expected and is quite natural. The nineteenth cen­
tury was a period of great expansion and progress in science,
the arts, literature and politics ; and after such a period it
was to be expected that a period of renewed interest in
mysticism would succeed. For mysticism is humanity’s
finest flower, it is the product at which all the great creative
epochs of the race have aimed.
A Catholic holds that true mysticism is not a product of
nature but of grace. Nature may indeed furnish the occasion
for the manifestation of grace. And so he would prefer
to explain the modem interest in mysticism as a revolt of
the spiritual nature of man aided by grace against the secu­
larism and materialism of the age. He would consider that
the fact that mysticism also flourished in the sixteenth century
confirmed his contention. Undoubtedly the fifteenth and six­
teenth centuries were periods of great expansion, but they
were also periods of great religious and moral depravity.
But God did not leave Himself without witnesses then; it
may be that He does not wish to leave Himself without wit­
nesses now, and on this account has inspired the renewed
interest in mysticism.
However this may be, Catholics are always interested in
the spiritual life, a term which they prefer to mysticism'.
They are interested to see how St. Augustine, Dionysius the
Areopagite, Richard of St. Victor, St. Teresa, St. John of the
Cross, and innumerable other heroes of theirs, are studied
and quoted by modem non-Catholic writers on mysticism.
Many of these writers display abundant industry and learn­
ing. Although they generally give the pre-eminence to
great Catholic mystics like St. Teresa and St. John of the
Cross, yet they class with them, as belonging to the same
category, pagan philosophers such as Plato and Plotinus,
eastern sages of China and India, and men like Jacob Boehme
and XVilliam Blake. They usually show want of insight into
Catholic doctrine, and detect similarity of teaching where
little or none exists. I will quote one or two instances of
what I mean. Professor Rufus M. Jones writes :

F

32

MYSTICISM, EALSE AND TRUE

Mysticism in its narrow and exact historical significance is a
doctrine of union with the Absolute. It implies a certain meta­
physical conception of God and of the soul, and it implies further
a mystic way of obtaining union with the Absolute. The funda­
mental metaphysics in which the doctrine of Christian mysticism
is grounded is Greek rationalistic metaphysics formulated by
Socrates, and his great successors, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus.
God, according to this Greek interpretation, is Absolute Reality,
Pure Being, Perfect Form, with no admixture of matter, i.e.,
with no potentiality or possibility of change. God is That
which absolutely is, one, permanent, immutable, and free of every­
thing that implies process or becoming. He cannot therefore
be found in finite things, or in transitory happenings, or in passing
states of mind. He is utterly beyond the here and the none,
He is for ever above all that can be seen or felt or known or
named. There is, however, something in the human soul which
is unsundered from the Absolute, something which essentially is
that Reality. There are many names for this unsundered some­
thing in the soul, “ pure reason,*’ “ active reason,” “ creative
reason,” ■“ recollective faculty,” “ apex of mind,” “ abyss of
mind,” “ground of consciousness,” “synteresis,” “divine spark,"
“word of God,” “inward light,” “uncreated centre.” “However
it may be named, it is conceived as an original ground or junction
of soul with God, an unlost and inalienable soul-centre, the source
and basis of all real knowledge of absolute truth, of the idea of
the Good, and of all ideas of universal significance. The soul
can know super-empirical reality only because when it sinks to
its deepest centre, it is one with that reality, it is identical with
what it knows.1
Dean Inge writes:·
Greek Christianity remained predominantly Neoplatonic;
Gregory of Nyssa and Basil are full of echoes of Plotinus and
his school. With Augustine Latin theology follows the same
path. Plotinus, read in a Latin translation, was the school­
master who brought Augustine to Christ. There is therefore
nothing startling in the considered opinion of Rudolf Eucken,
that Plotinus has influenced Christian theology more than any
other thinker (since St. Paul, he should no doubt have added).
From the time of Augustine to the present day Neoplatonism
has always been at home in the Christian Church.2

These extracts give expression to the current view with
tolerable accuracy and fulness. That view maintains that
Catholic spiritual teaching is derived rather from Plato and
* Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ix. 84.
* The Philosophy of Plotinas, i. II.

MYSTICISM, FALSE AND TRUE

33

Neoplatonists than from Christ. The subject is a large one,
but I propose to treat here of only a small portion of it.
The aim of mysticism or of the spiritual life is to attain to
union with God, as Mr. Rufus M. Jones says. Let us see
what this union implied in the doctrine of Plotinus, and what
it implies in Catholic teaching. It will then be clear whether
Catholic teaching on the point is derived from Neoplatonism.
It may be admitted at once that some of the terminology
of the subject was borrowed by St. Augustine and by Diony­
sius the Areopagite from the Neoplatonists. They found
it ready made to their hands, and it was suitable for their
purpose. With great insight, Plato and the Neoplatonists
discerned the soul’s longing for the Source of its being, and
they expressed those natural desires of the soul in very beauti­
ful language. But their ideas of God, of the human soul, and
of their relations to each other, were quite different from
the teaching of the Catholic Church on the same subjects.
The terms used by Neoplatonist mystics received a quite
different meaning when they were used by St. Augustine
and others to describe the spiritual teaching of the Catholic
Church. In much the same way the term Logos is used by
the Alexandrian Jew Philo and by St. John, but with very
different meanings.
Making large use of the labours of Dean Inge, I will
first of all state briefly the views of Plotinus on the Absolute
Godhead, on human nature and on their relations to each
other.
The philosophy of Plotinus is often obscure, arbitrary,
and inconsistent with itself, but his opinions on the subjects
just mentioned may be summarized as follows.
The whole of Reality is spiritual, knowable and single.
There is a hierarchy of Being gradually sloping from the
lowest to ihe highest. In this hierarchy there are no gaps
and chasms, there is no absolute barrier between the human
and divine, between the natural and the supernatural. There
is one universal substance.
There are two fundamental trinities in the hierarchy of
Being, the Absolute (the One, the Good), Spirit and Soul;
and in man, Spirit, soul and body.
The One Absolute Being is Jbeyond existence, beyond
Spirit, and life, ineffable. He does not think, is not con­
scious, but He knows Himself by direct intuition, He abides
in a state of wakefulness beyond being. We must not attriVOL. CXLl.

n

34.

MYSTICISM, FJLSE ÂND TRUE

bute will to the One, but we may say that He is what He
willed to be, for He posited Himself. As the source and
goal of revelation He cannot be revealed, as the source and
goal of knowledge He cannot be known.
The One is the First Cause, but as the spiritual and
phenomenal worlds are coeternal with the One, causality
means little more than a hierarchy in Reality, leading up to
the all-embracing Absolute, in which everything is con­
tained. In fact, the Plotinian philosophy is a sort of spiri­
tualistic pantheism.
The One generates Spirit. The One turned towards Him­
self and looked, and this seeing is Spirit. Where Spirit
energizes in itself the objects of its activity are other spirits,
but where it energizes outside itself, soul. There is nothing
to prevent soul becoming spirit, nor is there any barrier be­
tween spirit and the One.
The ineffable Godhead is supra-personal. In Heaven the
Godhead is an atmosphere rather than a person.
Matter is a mere abstraction. It is immaterial, it is the
bare receptacle of forms, the subject of energy, that in­
tangible, impalpable, all but nothing, which remains when
we abstract from an object of thought all that makes it an
object of thought.
.
The universal soul casts upon matter a reflection of the
forms which it has received from above and the material
world springs into being.
Before our birth we existed as pure souls and spirits
attached to the universal soul. We neither come into being
nor perish. At death a soul that has sinned may be sent
for punishment into another body, even that of a beast.
Good souls return to the universal soul, but they retain their
separateness potentially. Soul by discipline may become
spirit, the highest part of man’s nature. Spirit is the self­
consciousness or the self-contemplation of the Absolute.
We can know God by the discursive reason, but we are
also capable of attaining a much more perfect knowledge
of Him and of intimate union with Him. We come
from the One, we are part of the One, we can return to and,
contemplating, be absorbed in the One. The beatific vision
is natural to man, all have the faculty, but few use it. The
soul must free itself from earthly desires, withdraw its atten­
tion from earthly objects, and becoming Spirit, concentrate
its gaze on the contemplation of the One. We will now let

MYSTICISM, FALSE AND TRUE

35

Plotinus speak for himself in Dean Inge’s translation : the
beauty of thought and language is manifest, but no less
evident is the essential Pantheism.

We always move round the One, but we do not always fix our
gaze on it; we are like a choir of singers who stand round the
conductor, but do not always sing in time because their attention
is diverted to some external object ; when they look at the con­
ductor they sing well and are really with him. So we always
move round the One, if we did not, we should be dissolved and
no longer exist ; but we do not always look towards the One.
When we do, we attain the end of our existence, and our repose,
and we no longer sing out of time, but form in very truth a
divine chorus round the One. In this choral dance the soul
sees the fountain of life and the source of Spirit, the source of
Being, the Cause of Good, the root of Soul. . . . . In it our soul
rests, out of reach of evil; it has ascended to a region which is
free from all evil; there it has spiritual vision, and is exempt
from passion and suffering ; there it truly lives. For bur present
life without God is a mere shadow and mimicry of the true
life. ....
We must then hasten to depart hence; to detach ourselves as
much as we can from the body to which we are unhappily bound,
to endeavour to embrace God with all our being, and to leave no
part of ourselves which is not in contact with Him. Then we
can see God and ourselves, as far as is permitted; we see our­
selves glorified, full of spiritual light, or rather we see ourselves
as pure, subtle, ethereal light ; we become divine, or rather we
know ourselves to be divine. Then indeed is the flame of life
kindled, that flame which when we sink back to earth, sinks with
us. ... .
,
Dean Inge has told us that with St. Augustine Latin
theology became predominantly Neoplatonic. St. Augustine
read Plotinus in a Latin translation, and hence from his time
to the present day Neoplatonism has always been at home
in the Christian Church.
We cannot do better than let St. Augustine speak for
himself. In his voluminous works he makes his attitude
towards Plato and the Neoplatonists quite clear.
He found much to admire in them. Before he read them
he was given to sensual pleasures and found it impossible
to form a clear concept of spirit. The Platonists furnished
him with a spiritual philosophy of great elevation and beauty.
It was the pedagogue that brought him to Christ, as Dean
Inge says. St. Augustine understood Plato to teach that the

36

MYSTICISM, FALSE AND TRUE

end of life is to live according to virtue, and that only he can
do this who knows and imitates God. The Platonists are
nearer than other philosophers to us Christians because they
teach that the supreme and true God is the author of all
created things, the light of all intellect, the good of all
action, the beginning of our nature, the truth of all learning,
and the felicity of life.1 Without doubt St. Augustine liked
the Platonists and showed a tendency to interpret them in
a Christian sense. Their philosophy contained much truth,
which he thought that Plato had learned from the Old Testa­
ment writers. But when he began to read the Christian Scrip­
tures, St. Augustine confesses that he found in them all the
truth that he had learned from the Platonists, together with
the grace of God by which human passion is subdued.2
This those writings contain not [he says]. Those pages
present not the image of this piety, the tears of confession, Thy
sacrifice, a troubled spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, the
salvation of the people, the bridal City, the earnest of the Holy
Ghost, the cup of our Redemption. No man sings there “ Shall
not my soul be submitted unto God? for of Him cometh my
salvation. For He is my God and my salvation, my guardian,
I shall no more be moved.” No one there hears Him call,
“ Come unto Me all ye that labour.” They scorn to learn of
Him because He is meek and humble of heart, for these things
hast Thou hid from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them
to little ones. For it is one thing from the mountain’s shaggy,
top to see the land of peace and to find no way thither, and
another to keep on the way that leads thither, guarded by the
host of the heavenly General.

So St. Augustine made use of the language of the Platon­
ists to expound Christian doctrine; he found in it the terms
that he needed to express the spiritual truths of Christianity.
He notes that St. Paul had a habit of appealing to pagan
writers and using their language as when he preached the
Gospel to the Athenians. St. Augustine did the same. Dur­
ing the first few years of his conversion, and, as he confesses,
before he knew Christian theology, he occasionally wrote
things which afterwards caused him displeasure. In the
Retractations, written at the end of his life, he laments that
he gave too much praise to the Platonists in his earlier writ­
ings, bad men, he says, against whom it is necessary to de* De Civ. Dei, viii. c. 9 ff.
1 Conference, VII. c. 31.

MYSTICISM, FALSE AND TRUE

37

fend Christian doctrine. He corrects several errors of
importance which he had unwarily imbibed from them.
St. Augustine recognized that the Platonic doctrine con­
cerning God and man’s true happiness was nearer to Chris­
tianity than that of other philosophers, but he also admitted
that there was a long distance between them. As a matter
of fact, there are profound differences between the two
systems.
Such fundamental terms as God and Creation have different meanings in Plotinus and in St. Augustine.
The supreme God of Plotinus, the One, Absolute God­
head, is beyond existence, beyond life, beyond Spirit, He is
ineffable. He is not conscious of Himself although he abides
in a state of wakefulness. We may not attribute Will to
Him. He cannot be revealed. He is beyond personality and
is impersonal. He may be called Creator and the First
Cause, but in a special sense. From all eternity He contem­
plates Himself, and His contemplations are the universe.
The spiritual and phenomenal worlds are coetemal with Him­
self, and everything is contained in the all-embracing
Absolute. Hence the creation is necessary. With St. Augus­
tine God is and exists in the fullest and truest sense. He is
Spirit, Life, Truth, Goodness, infinite Intellect and omni­
potent Will, in reality and in truth. Personality is predicated
of Him in the fullest and most proper sense. These and
similar terms are applied to creatures only in an analogous
sense. Their being is essentially dependent, potential, finite.
Thus there is the widest chasm between the.Creator and the
creature, the Divine and the human, the supernatural and
the natural. God can be known, though not comprehensively,
by reason, by revelation and faith, and by intuitive vision.
God has created all things out of nothing in the beginning
of time. Before anything was created God existed alone,
self-sufficient and supremely happy. He willed to create of
His own free Will and infinite Goodness.'
Plotinus’ doctrine concerning the nature of man is not
less in strong contrast with that of St. Augustine.
According to Plotinus, man is made up of three constitu­
ent parts, spirit, soul and body. Spirit is neither bom nor
dies, it has existed as a portion of the One from all eternity,
and at death it returns to him. It remains distinct from the
One and can be separated from him again, but in the mean­
time there is no difference between them, the whole spiri-

38

-

MYSTICISM, FALSE AND TRVE

tual world is one Absolute and single being. Plotinus held
not only the pre-existence of souls, but their transmigration
also. Spirit is sinless as becomes a portion of the Absolute.
.Why it should be imprisoned in earthly bodies is not clear
in the system of Plotinus.
St. Augustine teaches that man is composed of soul and
body, and that both have been created mediately or immedi­
ately in time out of nothing by God. In his earlier writings
he had said something which favoured the doctrine of
pre-existence, but he corrected this in his Retractations. In
the same work he also corrects another phrase which he had
let drop. He had said that the soul at death returns to God;
it would be better, he says, to say simply that it goes to God.
He has learnt, he says, from Scripture that sin separates from
God. He has no such illusion as the sinlessness of the soul,
nor did he dream of imagining that the soul or the spirit
were a portion of the Absolute.
. . Platonists placed man’s supreme happiness in the intuitive
vision of God. According to them the immediate and in­
tuitive vision of God is natural to man. All men have the
faculty but few use it. This is quite in keeping with the
main tenets of their philosophy. They held, as we have seen,
that man’s spirit is divine. His body, of course, cannot enter
into Heaven, but the spirit is at home there, and when re­
leased from the body it returns home and becomes one with
the One.. .
St. Augustine did not quarrel with the Platonists for plac­
ing man’s supreme happiness in the intuitive vision of God.
But the beatific vision had quite a different meaning for him·
It was not natural for man, it was the crowning reward of
thé supernatural order of grace, as a general rule, to be
enjoyed only in the fatherland, in Heaven after death. After
the resurrection the body will share in this supernatural privi­
lege. While on earth we can see God by the light of reason
and by the light of faith; the light of glory by which we
hope to see God face to face is reserved for the life to come.
This teaching St. Augustine drew from Holy Scripture.
John i. 18,1 John iv. 12,1 Tim. vi. 16, and numerous other
texts, declare that man in this life has not and cannot see
God. We see now through a glass darkly but then face to
face. Now I know in -part, but then I shall know even as 1
am known.1 In spite, however, of this general rule, St.
• 1 Cot. xiii. ia.

MYSTICISM, FALSE AND TRUE

39

Augustine was prepared to admit some exceptions to the
contrary. The express assertions of Holy Scripture seemed
to him to require that we should say that Moses and St.
Paul, during their lifetime, in ecstasy, had seen God face to
face, and he thought it probable that the same rare privi­
lege had been granted to other saints. In well-known pas­
sages in his early work, On the quantity of the Soul, in his
Confessions, and elsewhere, there are obvious reminiscences
of Plotinus and Neoplatonism, but they should be inter­
preted by the light of his dogmatic teaching, which they
certainly do not contradict. If we want instances of Neo­
platonism affecting the teaching of Christians we must go
to heretics like Arius and Eunomius. Eunomius asserted
that man knows God as clearly and fully as He knows Him­
self, and he was refuted by the great Cappadocian Fathers,
St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Gregory of Naziansus.
Enough has been said to show what truth there is in such
assertions as I have quoted from Professor Jones and Dean
Inge. The union of the soul with God in mystical con­
templation was believed to be physical, founded on identity
of nature, by the Neoplatonists, as by all Pantheists, ancient
and modern. This doctrine is quite untenable for Christians.
The creature can only enter into a moral union with the
Creator, founded on a harmony of mind, will and heart with
Him. In Heaven, indeed, we shall see Him face to face,
but even then there will be an infinite distance between the
seer and the seen. On earth we can only enjoy a mediate
vision of God either through reason or through faithï The
assurance and heightened conviction of the mystic that he
has seen God comes from himself, sometimes from the devil,
sometimes from an interpretation of the action of God, who
then works in the soul by the infused virtues of Faith and
Charity, helped by the gifts of the Holy Ghost.1
T. SLATER.

* Benedict XIV., On the Beatification and Canonization of Sainit, HI. c. a6.

tL