TkAJ' THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD SISTER AGNES TERESA McAULIFFE, M. A. of the Congregation of The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth Nazareth, Kentucky. A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES OF THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA WASHINGTON, D. C. 1934 211 THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD BY SISTER AGNES TERESA McAULIFFB, M. A. of the Congregation of The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth Nazareth, Kentucky. A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES OF THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOB THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA WASHINGTON, D. C. 19 34 Γ....... ■............................... î V TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Preface . · . · · * ■ · vii Introduction 1 Chapter I 4 The Historical Background of the Non-Intellectual Ap­ proach to God. Chapter II . ■ ■ · Modem Notions of Mysticism. . . ■ .10 Chapter III 16 Chapter IV 26 ........ Religious Experience. The Infra-Intellectual Mysticism of Wm. James. ........ Intuitionism. The Bergsonian Supra-Intellectual Approach. The Non-Rational Approach of Rudolph Otto. Chapter V . . . . . . . . The Supra-Scientific Approach of A. E. Eddington. .38 Chapter VI ........ Critical Appreciation. Religious Experience of William James. The Subconscious and Its Mystical Interpretation. Supra-Intellectual Mysticism of Henri Bergson. Non-Rational Approach of Rudolph Otto. Supra-Scientific Mysticism of Arthur Eddington. 44 Conclusion· ......... 89 Select Bibliography 91 ....... λ I r i PREFACE. In the field of Philosophy of Religion where nature, science and philosophy lead to the problem of the knowability of God, there have been marked changes in content and meaning. Through the discoveries of science, a new knowledge of God and of the ways of revealing Himself is reached. Knowledge by reason is replaced by consciousness; first principles, by descriptions; metaphysics, by physical sciences; static belief in the object of knowledge, by dynamic religious flux; cause is thought of as representing a func­ tional equation, a mere correlation between variables; the First Cause of the universe, is at best, in the nature of a cause that needs another cause to explain it; reason is distrusted for mere feeling; doctrines are tested by their working values, cosmic force is accepted as a deity ; figments of the imagination are born into every new theory that makes working approximation satisfy for truth. The purpose of this dissertation is to present and critically dis­ cuss three kinds of non-intellectual approaches to God which are in recent terminology “ mystical ” : first, the infra-intellectual mysti­ cism of religious experience, second, the supra-intellectual and nonrational mysticism of intuitionism, and third, the supra-scientific mysticism of recent science. By the development of religion into something more personal, more individualistic, there came into existence a e‘ new ” mysticism, spurious and quite unchristian. This mystical irrational approach to God has become popular. It has tried to outstrip, on the affective side, the traditional rationalism of cognitive good sense in the Christian order. Owing to the fact that psychology no longer offers itself as an auxiliary science to metaphysics but has become absolute in the study of mental processes, there is an attempt to explain mysticism on the basis that psychology offers. “ But psychology is a poor substitute for religion and metaphysics . . . and psychological experience is apt to prove the happy hunting ground of the faddist and the savage, and to culminate in utter pessimism.” 1 With the 1M. C. D’Arcy, S. J., The Nature of Belief, p. 34. vii viii PEEFACE volitional and sentient aspects of experience stressed to the detri­ ment of the cognitive, philosophy has been kept from supplying the truth about the nature of the Ultimate Reality and the relation­ ship established by such an experience. The mysticism, under consideration in this work, is not theo­ logical but philosophical mysticism, a distinction which Christianity does not recognize in the study of mysticism. Due to the recognized value and the importance it has for life, it is imperative that it be singled out for study. A philosopher who can point out lurking dangers in modern thought and stimulate his followers to take prevalent errors back to Thomistic thought for rectification, is a safe guide ; such is the Reverend Doctor Dulton J. Sheen. To him, the author gives acknowl­ edgment and sincere thanks for his direction and for the generous use of his personal library for sources of material for this disserta­ tion. The writer is also grateful to Doctor Ignatius Smith, 0. P. and to Doctor Charles Hart for most valuable suggestions. To Mother Mary Catharine Malone, and to the members of the Con­ gregation, she wishes to express her gratitude. The Catholic University of America. INTRODUCTION Modern thought outside the scholastic field is agnostic in regard to the supernatural. Arising from the system of Kant that God cannot be known by the intellect but by practical reason, agnosticism worked its way through principles that admit intellect to be limited and truth to be arrived at only by the empirical method. Kant made religion a matter of inward personal experience. Many of his followers are permeated with the same idea. “ They are anxious to be ‘ up-to-date ’ and in touch with modern thought, oblivious of < the fact that it stands on feet of miry clay which cannot support the weight which is laid upon them.”1 Anti-intellectualism, the outgrowth of intellectualism and ration­ alism, gave a subjective and relative value to the intellect and robbed ■ it of all dependence on objective being. It has found strange ways to lure the unwary, especially by imitations of mystic literature. Historical accounts of the great mystics with excerpts from their writings, popular expositions of the .subject in magazines, besides treatises by laymen whose chief interests lie outside the field of religion, keep the subject in the foreground. There is a current mysticism that is bad philosophy and poor religion. As a way of knowing God by Religious Experience, it is based on subjective feeling and emotion, not on any particular emotion, but on the whole of personality. It tries to get away from the supernatural help and belongs to natural or preternatural religion. It makes claim to a declaration of certitude of having seen God, of a deliberate undertaking to recover the principle of value without discursive reasoning. There is reason then, for the reader to discriminate be­ tween Christian mysticism founded on metaphysics with an accept­ ance of psychology to explain psychic states, and pseudo-mysticism based on emotional experiences and partial data left uninterpreted by the science of psychology. There is the mystic contemplation of the mind, a simplex intuitus, as contrasted with data of the senses ; a union with reality without identity, in opposition to deification, a unity all-absorbing; a mediate knowledge by a process of concepts1 1 A. Chandler, Church Quarterly Review, 104 (1927), 281. 1 Γ SOME MODERN N ON-INTELLECT UAL APPROACHES TO GOD 2 as against a knowledge by immediacy; an orthodox mysticism in which God enters into consciousness in the light of the principle of causality, as differentiated from that mysticism which is empirical. Taking only'a limited number of writers, we find mysticism has been studied and interpreted broadly or limitedly as men come to it by different approaches, under different impulses, in different tempers. Along the way of nature and under the impulse of science, the esoteric or psychic form has obtruded itself upon the world. The revelations of spiritism, the misnomered Christian Science, the paradoxically styled New Thought, the libido of the organism have all been termed mystic and the followers of these types have retired into their own imagination and there found God. With William James the religious man becomes conscious that the higher part of him is coterminous and continuous with the “ More,” a power beyond the subconscious mind. This type of religious experience is a sort of via media between Bergson’s intuitive idea and Eddington’s idealistic background in the scientific world. Its validity has been attacked for the lack of objective reference to any reality beyond the individual. It is not necessarily religion ; “ Many have ceased to believe in God as a personal being. They steep them­ selves in a semi-religious awe at the sight of mountains and seas or the starry heavens or the gorgeous pageantry of the setting or rising sun; they can best be described as quasi-religious or mystical, but they never face the dilemma, either God exists or He does not ” ;2 it expresses temperament rather than the more definite and self deter­ minative part we call character, and arouses interest in certain events which the psychologist himself evaluates. “If it does not furnish the knowledge that we are led to expect,” says Boutroux, “ it brings at least fresh arguments for maintaining against Ration­ alism, the original reality and power of religious emotion.” 3 Those who are intuitionists meet the problem of God by direct vision. Man by his natural powers anticipates the Beatific Vision reserved for the next life and claims to come to a complete knowl­ edge of the nature of God. The existence of life without cause, a transcendence of intuition over intellect allows the “ God of Becom­ 3 P. Richards, Belief in Man, p, 95. 8 E. Boutroux, Religion and Science, p. 318. INTRODUCTION 3 ing” to be an inspiration rather than a possession. Many of these evolutionary gods are creating a flair as a result of the interpretative analysis of their new organic universe. The conclusion that has been reached is, that intuitionism does not satisfy the need of religion, that Bergson’s philosophy can give no intuitive knowledge of God. Just how science has become locked up with mysticism some of the great scientists have already expressed. Though mysticism and science are seeking truth from opposite viewpoints, they have supple­ mented, each other. Scientists besides finding the invariants of the universe have exercised their mystical vision upon the invisible world, the “ beyond.” They have found the Reality that the scientific method had allowed to escape. This sort of mysticism, the supra-' scientific, has become a favorite resort of those who resent the authority of any tradition, and in their quest for truth of God leave reason for a seemingly higher guide. The new scientific world-view, in banning the active life of the intellect and taking the raw material of knowledge from the mind itself, is thus engaged in the contemplation of an ideal and transcendent universe, that is to say, in the contemplation of the abstract without the concrete. “ It is high time that the scientists and the religious folk took up a philosophy worth considering and built their natural beliefs on intellect and their religion on a faith which is intellectually watertight.” 4 M, C. D’Arcy, Nature of Belief, p, 25. CHAPTER I The Historical Background of the Non-Intellectual Approach to God To obtain an idea of what is meant by the term mysticism, which is often used vaguely and mysteriously, let us take the concept back to pagan times when men concentrated attention upon the develop­ ment of the sixth sense, by which they were able to find hidden meaning and revealed mysteries. Thus they come to describe as mystic, those sacred rites which took place not in the sight of all or in the full light of day and at public altars, but either in the night or within closed sanctuaries or in remote and solitary places.1 ■*"· The chief characteristics of the mysteries were secrecy, emotion, and edification; first, secret (μυστήριον)—what was known was com­ municated through certain words and ceremonies by those already in possession of the secrets ; second, emotion (οργιά)—the real'gain to the initiate being not to instruct or to impart knowledge, but to produce impressions and emotions; third, edification (reAerai)—the act which fitted the subject for admittance to the secret.2 After the advent of Christianity, mysiic had reference to the sacred mysteries in which those admitted had to be instructed be­ fore they received the Christian initiation of baptism. The relation between the pagan and the Christian mysteries has long been a sub­ ject of discussion. Some maintain that these early Christian cere­ monies are but a continuation of pagan thought; others suppose that the mysticism of the early church was made up of a medley of rites bearing a close resemblance to pagan forms.3 That they were 1 Lobeck, Aglaophamus. Quoted by S. Cheetham, The Ifysieries, Papon and Christian, p. 41. * Cf. S. Cheetham, The Hysterics, Pagan and Christian. ’There are the usual extremists, those who maintain that the oriental cults compare favorably with Christianity, and that Christianity borrowed lavishly from its competitors, and those who exalt Christianity by decrying 4 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 5 akin in meaning must be denied, that the spirit which animated the pagan ceremonies was comparable to Christian inspiration must also be rejected. Though young in the manifestation of external forms and although still in the atmosphere of the Zeitgeist, the church refused to absorb what was inconsistent with her teaching. The term mysticism was sometimes used in the Christian church to mean anything connected with the faith that was μυστικός or allegorical. A symbol having sensible and invisible elements could be applied to realities of the spiritual order ; for example, bread and wine were symbolic of the Eucharist, the lamb was symbolic of Christ Himself. What was really carried on into the times was the use of the word mysticism. According to the etymology of the word, mysticism is derived from the Greek verb, myein (μνειν) meaning to shut, to cover over, to close the eyes or the mouth ; the eyes so as not to see the secret, the mouth not to reveal it; or from the Greei: noun mysterion (μνστηρ<.ον), which signifies a hidden esoteric element that has associated with it some recondite meaning especially of a religious kind. It received a broader meaning when it became associated with philosophy. The old word contemplation held its own with the later Middle Ages. The study of mysticism has been found to be a world movement passing down through the ages, at one time destroying faith, again renewing it; at one period revealing itself as pantheistic in its tendencies or again justifying itself as a lofty means of Christian perfection. everything outside it. Many recognize that their unwholesome feature blended with much that exalted man above the limits of ordinary life. Cf. S. Angus, The Mystery Religions and Christianity. Scholars as E. Rohde, Psyche, 11, 293 ff.; R. M. Ramsay, D. B. Hastings, extra vol. 126a; L. R. Farnell, Higher Aspects of Greek Religion, 141 (London, 1912) ; Cults of the Greek States, 111 (Oxford 1899), 101, incline to a deprecatory opinion of the ancient mysteries. Others, like T. R. Glover, Progress in Religion (London 1922), 320, 323-330; K. Lake, Earlier Epistles of St. Paul (2nd ed.; London 1914), 39 f., seem to adopt a neutral or hesitating position, while the great majority hold to a favorable estimate, e. g. 0. Gruppe, Griechisehe Mythologie (Munich 1906), 11; F. Cumont, Religions Orientales (Paris 1909), 11, xxv; H.. A. Kennedy, St. Paul and the Mystery Religions (London 1913), 84; W. R. Inge, Christian Mysticism (London, 1899). 2 6 SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD Elle répond, dit J. Sinon, par le mysticisme aux théories des anciens sur la connaissance, et par le panthéisme a leurs spéculations sur la nature de l’Absolu.4 In the pre-christian era, Philo Judeus, who prepared the way for Plotinus in the third century, is regarded as a mystic. Although acquainted with Christianity he remained a pagan. His teachings that the soul retire into itself to receive the Divine Illumination and become truly spiritual were a part of a mystical system whose final goal was ecstacy.6 The soul is borne “ towards absolute Unity, the Good, God, whom the soul attains in the supreme Union. The, soul really lives the One in immortality and unconsciousness of itself.” 0 This conception, akin to the Christian mystics, raises the question as to whether Plotinus, who was not a Christian, was a real mystic. “ Does not Catholic Theology teach that supernatural grace, whatever be the names of its bestowal, is not refused to any soul of good will? Why deny it then, more directly, even outside Chris­ tianity, to some devout ascetic who seeks Him (God) haltingly, with humble and persevering energy, perhaps by means of proceed­ ings of a touching and exotic quaintness ? Let us hope, dear reader, that it may be so ; but as to this you are asking us much more than we can know.” 7 Not until the fifth century, when Dionysius developed Neo­ Platonic elements in his philosophy, did mysticism find itself a veritable source for later developments. The influence of Dionysius was evidenced in the works of Erigena and to him we attribute in * J. Sinon, Hist, de VEcole d’Alexandrie, 1, 2. Quoted by A. Augar, Étude sur les Mystiques des Pays-Bas au Moyen Age (Bruxelles 1892), p. 40. 6 Porphyry in the Life of Plotinus, p. 23, says that Plotinus experienced complete ecstacy four times to his knowledge. Cf. A. B. Sharpe, Mysticism, Its True Nature and Value, p. 154, also Dom C. Butler, Western Mysticism, p. 343. Dublin Review, vol. 190, p. 55. “ J. Maréchal, Studies in the Psychology of the Mystics, p. 178, tr. A. Thorold. 7 Ibid,, pp. 203-204. “ Accepting the principle,” says Sharpe, “ ‘ that he who is not against us is for us/ we may consider Plotinus as an involuntary witness of the truth of the Christian view of mysticism and the reality of the experience of Christian mystics.” A. B. Sharpe, Mysticism, Its True Nature and Value, p. 157. ,1 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 7 large part the spread of mysticism. A characteristic of Neo­ Platonism was a tendency of the mind toward the supernatural. As a type of religion, it appeared as a science in the twelfth century. Abelard, the Vir Bellator, with rationalizing dialectics encountered opposition from St. Bernard, whose mystical tendencies and ascetic teachings have placed him in the foremost rank of the great mystics of the West.8 Mysticism received a strong impetus from the Victorines,” Hugh, Richard, and Walter. Hugh declared that the way to ascend to God is to descend into one’s self; while Richard explained that the ascent is through self above self. In building a mystical theology, they brought renown to the abbey of Saint Victor of Marseilles. From a small priory dependent from the abbey, thg movement was spread through the teaching of William of Champeaux. At the close of the twelfth century, so remarkable for spiritual ideals, there was a drift towards pantheism due to Arabian speculation. Linking this period with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are the names of Bonaventure and Aquinas. The former, Cardinal and General of the Franciscan order, led a host of his followers into the way of mystical thought and mystical experience; the latter, both a mystic and a philosopher, conciliated mysticism with scholas­ tic thought in his writings and in his life. If Saint Thomas wrote a treatise, De Ente et Essentia and also hymns to the Blessed Sacrament, it is because there were really two men in him, as it were, obeying two distinct inspirations.910 In spite of its cold intellectual style, Scholasticism was a sister, not an opponent, of mysticism. The scholastic system synthesized the experiences of the mystics and, at the close of the fourteenth cen­ tury, cast overboard the extravagant elements and all sorts of hereti­ 9 Cf. Dorn C. Butler, Western Mysticism. • The Victorines go directly to the true, by meditation and contemplation without passing through the series of more or less complicated discursive acts of syllogism; for they looked upon created beings less as realities than as symbols of divine teaching. The sensible world hides invisible realities; what should be studied is not sensible beings in themselves hut the teaching which they contain. P. Pourrat, Christian Spirituality, Vol. II, p. 109. 10 De Wulf, Scholastic Philosophy, tr. Coffey, p. 69. 8 SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD cal opinions * The Béghards 11 or Fratieelli, the “ temperamental” theosophists consecrated themselves to the care of contagious dis­ eases and the burial of the dead; the Béguines, pious women, who assembled in beguinages, responded to the needs of the times, cared for the sick, in town and in private houses, lent themselves to the manual labor of women. The Council of Vienne in 1311,12 defended the notion of the supernatural against the followers of these sects by condemning the opinion that all intellectual nature has naturally its beatitude in itself, and has no need of the light of glory which elevates it to the Beatific Vision,13 and that j i SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD basis of mystical experience as envisaged in that which has immediacy beyond all interpretation, for there is an abstract and sterile mysticism that thrives on sentiment and releases itself from dogmas and works. At least Bergson’s philosophy seems to conduct us to a sort of natural mysticism because it pretends to make us com­ municate with the essence of things by means of sensibility. Chevalier in defending Bergson against this non-rational or even anti-rational charge of mysticism, says that it is because most people have taken the word intuition in its ordinary sense, by which philosophers define it ... a quality of instinctive divination, or vague presentiment, unattached to any precise object and, more particularly, based on no definite reason.20 Notwithstanding Berg­ son’s refusal to be mystic, the subject of mysticism has made strong appeal to him.21 To him, the mystics reveal themselves as great men of action whose inner fire of enthusiasm is to be con­ tagious, but never extinguished until it embraces all humanity. Love and action are to be the outlet of this vitality. Love on which each of them imprints the mark of his personality, love which is for each of them an emotion altogether new, capable of transposing human life into another tone; love which makes each one loved for his own sake and which by him and for him other men will let their souls open to the love of humanity.” As Christian mystics they must be the Adjutores Dei of creative evolution, the torch bearers to lead in the march of life, only then will religion whose essence ought to be the diffusion of mysticism and which is now only possible, become in the future an actual thing. From the enthusiastic boiling matter that was poured by individual mystics into the mold, new doctrines will crystallize. This is the distant vision of a new religion supported purely from the affective side of man’s nature. The Non-Rationdl Approach of Rudolph Otto Closely allied with the Bergsonian theory of intuition is that of Rudolph Otto. Both Bergson and Otto have presented a subjec- I J ‘ 80 J. Chevalier, Henri Bergson, p. 117. 11 I H. Bergson, cf. Les Deux Sources. 31 H. Bergson, Les Deux Sources, p. 101. INTUITIONISM 35 tively-felt reality—a philosophie attitude of suspended mysticism. Otto’s is an intuition which is not to be confounded with Cartesian evidence nor with Bergson’s insight, but with a Kantian form, a theological intuitionism. From the study of religion made by theologians of various schools, there have resulted many theories regarding its origin, its development and its distinctive elements. This theory of Rudolph Otto of the Marburg school as set forth in his principal work, Das Heilige,23 has in it a Stoic idea that religion rests ultimately on certain intuitively apprehended and self-evident truths of a distinctly religious character. These ele­ ments in experience are starting points of demonstration, common beliefs, that is, the religious consciousness is in possession of cer­ tain ultimate self-evident axioms peculiar to itself. These a priori forms are both rational and irrational. A specification of qualita­ tive differences between religious feeling and the feelings of various kinds, develops a new feature in the contribution he makes to religion. The a priori element analogous to Kant’s practical reason is the idea of the holy or of the sacred which refers to the non-rational element that is found in religion from its most elementary to its most highly developed forms. When we think of God, the Holy One, declares Otto, there are contained in our thought of Him certain rational predicates, for example, reason, spirit, almightiness and goodness. The rational element is that which can be " expressed in clear and definite con­ cepts and is accessible to thought, to intellectual analysis and to definition,”24 or "that in it which comes within the clear com­ prehension of our power of conceiving and belongs to the realm of familiar and definable conceptions.” 28 The non-rational element is the holy or sacred which is not ethical or aesthetic. It is the numinous.M IS The author defends the thesis that religion has sprung forth and is primarily developed in the zone of psychology of religion. His doctrine is, that in all men beginning with primitive man, there lives a religious im­ pulse which is an independent concern of mankind, and has directed itself at all times to an incomprehensible, which we experience emotionally and grasp intuitively. a‘E. Otto, Das Heilige (9th ed.), p. 1. es2biÆ, p. 75. a* Es gilt also, fiir dieses Moment in seiner Vereinzelung einen Namen zu 36 SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD This unique element in reality is a feeling or emotion. The emotion that it evokes in the human being is that of being in presence of something awe-inspiring or fascinating. But how translate “ ce frémissement de tout Fetre, cette horreur sacrée que Ton éprouve on que l’on devrait éprouver à la seule pensée et plus encore aux approches de Dieu.” 27 Oman calls it the “ holy dread of the Old Testament” or the Greek “panic fear.” 28 The Holy experienced as the Jfÿsieriwm Tremendum in all His awfulness, overpoweringness and energy is not wholly unknown, but is rather the “wholly apart ” before whom man recoils, before whom he is debased, in whose presence a Kreaturgefühl 29 possesses him, mak­ ing him conscious of bis profanity in the presence of the majesty of God; the other element is Mysterium Fascinans; no longer a dread, an annihilation of self, but an infinite yearning, an attrac­ tion and fascination for that same Divine Being. It appears as a strange and mighty propulsion towards an ideal good, known only to religion, and in its nature, fundamentally non-rational, which the mind knows in yearning and presentiment, recognizing it for what it is behind the obscure and inadequate symbols which are finden, der erstens es in seiner Besonderheit festhalt, und * der zweitens ermoglicht, die etwaigen Unterarten oder Entwicklungs-stufen deaselben mit zu befassen und mit zu bezeichnen. leh bilde hierffir zunâchst das Wort: das Numinose, und rede von einer eigentiimlichen numinosen Deutungs-und Bewertungs-Kategoria und einer numinosen Gemutsgestimmtheit, die allemal da eintritt, wo jene angewandt ist. R. Otto, Das Heilige, p. 7. From numen the most general Latin word for supernatural divine power, Professor Otto coins the word numinous. The reason is, that the word Holy is at once too lofty and too narrow. I do not mean that there is some rare specific quality in things which is the object of religious feeling as frost can be felt by our sense of cold. I should say that we have no organ which enables us to apprehend the numinous and that many persons do not have the religious feeling at all, or only, like myself, occasionally, just as some persons have no ear for music. S. Alexander, Symposium, Science and Religion, p. 133. 47 H. Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux, tome III, p. 37. 2a J. Oman, “ The Idea of the Holy,” Journal of Theol. Studies, 25 (192324), p. 277. ■· Ich suche nach einem Namen für die Sache und nenne es Kreaturgefühl, das Geftihl der Kreatur, die in ihrem eigenen Nichts versinkt und vergeht gegenuber dem, was fiber aller Kreatur ist. Das Heilige, p. 10. INTUITIONISM 37 its only expression.30 These two elements, the Demut finding God within and the Hochgefühl finding Him, das Ganz Andere, are in­ tended by Professor Otto to be the orthodox Christian ideas of transcendence and divine immanence. It is the part of religion everywhere to assume that the divine reveals itself without as truly as within. To this faculty, Otto gives the name of Divination. It is native to our being, he says, capable of being educated, but cannot be acquired in the sense of being evolved out of something else. The feeling, the mysterious something that Otto designates as numen, is continued in the his­ torical development of religion; it synthesizes the rational element of goodness and the non-rational of sanctity as the <( Sacred.” The new complex a priori category is realized only in a late period of religious development and “ it is immediately understood to be a matter of course of the plainest and most obvious kind.” 80 81 This “ Schématisation of the Category ” of holiness is quite unique, not chance “ association of ideas,” but “ necessary connections accord­ ing to principles of inward and rightful relationship and mutual affinity.” Nach Prinzipien innerer rechtuiassiger Verwandelschaft und Zugehorigkeit.82 The emotional response of the numinous is a mysticism, not however, an act of union, but predominantly the life lived in the knowledge of this wholly other, God. ... “ Mysticism enters into the religious experience in the measure that religious feeling sur­ passes its rational content, that is, to the extent to which its hidden non-rational numinous elements predominate and determine the emotional life.” 38 80 Ibid. 81 Es immer zugleich als einfachate, einleuch tends te Selbstverstandlichkeit verstanden wird. Ibid., p. 168. 88 Ibid., p. 59. 88 R. Otto, Mysticism, East and West, p. 141. 4 CHAPTER V The Supra-Scientific Approach of A. E. Eddington In the twentieth century, physics, using as its handmaid mathe­ matics, validated the claims of the mystics. The physicist began by taking “raw material for ether, electrons, quanta, potentials, Hamilton functions, etc. and he is now scrupulously careful to guard these from contamination by concepts borrowed from the other world.” 1 The mathematician with his ideal constructions finds his data outside sense experiences; he perceives relations directly and in this sense relativity is mysticism of the scientific type. Although mysticism is appearing in periodicals and in books which carry a reaction against the dominance of scientific ideas and dissatisfac­ tion with scientific method, Havelock Ellis says, When we look broadly at the matter not only is there no opposition between science and mysticism, but . . . they are essentially related. True, he says, if the natural impulses which normally work best together are separated and specialized in different persons, we may expect to find a concomitant state of atrophy and hypertrophy both alike morbid. The scientific person will be atrophied on the scientific side; the mystical will be atrophied on the mystical side. Each will become morbidly hypertrophied on his own side? Science is continuing to reduce everything to energy in motion; to dissolve substance into creations of mind. A scientific pragmatic vision is giving way to spiritual vision “ that apprehends in a new fashion and perceives with a strange intensity what had only been perceptible in silhouette on a cold clear background.” 3 When scientists say that Reality is beyond the scientific order, 1 A. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, xv. ’Havelock Ellis, “Science and Mysticism,” Atlantic Monthly, HI (1913) : 771. 8 Père de Grandmaison, Personal Religion, p. 106. 38 SUPBA-SCIENTIFIC APPROACH j j ■ 39 they are referring to reality not as “ all that there is,” but as a world in which they find higher values, a realm towards which they had taken an attitude as a “ place of adventure.” The basis of modern mysticism is the seeming disparity between scientific perception and common sense perception. While the plain man catches the colors in the evanescent clouds of a sinking sun, the scientist is measuring electro-magnetic wave lengths, he is giving significance to physical realities, making inferential statements in symbolic language. All scientists are reading the book of the universe; each one some portion of it written in a language in which he is an expert, and the whole body of science is simply the volume of thought they have transcribed from its pages. * * k It is with the volume transcribed by Professor Eddington, High Priest of a new cult, and with his attempt to set in order the facts of experience to reach the world of Reality, with which we are here principally concerned. His findings reveal the universe in two ways: there is the world of everyday experience, of common sense, real and objective, presupposed as the world from which other worlds are built, namely, the world of science, of pointer readings constructed by the mathematical physicist; and the world of Reality, the spiritual substratum which escapes sense perception but which is needed “to deal with those parts of our being unamenable to metrical specification.”8 This presupposition of a world of fact is made on the basis of code messages that come into the mind through a series of dots and dashes along nerve fibres. The world is sending us signals after the manner of a broad-casting station and our minds are receiving radios to interpret these signals. They are not like the things reported to us, they are their corresponding signs or symbols which we translate back into their corresponding ideas.8 What, it may be asked, are these sym­ bols, and for what do they stand.? Symbols are usually material forms that stand for some meaning, usually a spiritual reality. “ They are among the most powerful tools for digging into the * 3. H. Snowden, The World, a Spiritual System, p. 135. • A. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, p. 323. •A. Eddington, Science and the Unseen World, p. 35. Cf. J. Snowden, What Do the Present Day Christians Believe, p. 17. 40 SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD mine of the universe and exposing its merits.” 7 To understand the physical world it is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but not the nature of what is being symbolized. Professor Eddington, in The Nature of the Physical World, obtains common sense knowledge from the study of his table of sub­ stance, the table that lies before him supporting his books, papers and time-recorder. He distinguishes between this knowledge of table No. 1 and the scientific knowledge gained from his table of electric charges. This table is practically empty except for the scattered specks of electric charges that jump and collide, separate and vanish beyond the ken of science to discover. Everyone is familiar with table No. 1 no matter what its substance and acci­ dents, for its service is requisitioned for the savant of science who abstracts from it his scientific table No. 2. Although less familiar, “ it is the part of the world which in more devious ways has forced itself on his attention.”8 In this scientific world the “ whole sub­ ject matter consists of pointer-readings and similar indications.” 9 He discovers “ que les choses sont très differentes de ce qu’elles paraissant être,” but never does he come upon an irrational things, any piece that would refuse to fit into the general plan of the world, the jig-saw puzzle of scientific discovery. The entities of science, protons, electrons, and ether are subjective existences only, the result of certain abstracted features, capable of being measured on the scale and indicated by the pointer of a balance or some other instrument. As illustrative of this point of view of exact science, Professor Eddington considers an elephant sliding down a hill. The thing that really did descend the hill is a bundle of pointer­ readings, two tons. He speaks of the angle of 60 degrees of the hill as the reading of a plumb-line against the division of a pro­ tractor, of people as ridges in the four-dimensional world. So the whole subject matter turns to symbolical interpretation, to mathe­ matical treatment. “ Here the scientist,” says Levy, “ turns out to be a pure mathematician. It would not, then, be his function to tell us anything about a world more real or more extended than T J. Snowden, Discovery of God, p. 28. 8 Introd. x. 8 Ibid·., p. 252. 1 | SU PEA-SCIENTIFIC APPROACH I 41 the symbols on this sheet of paper, no matter how many of his symbols were called dimensions or space.” K) By mind the sub­ stantiality of things is dissolved into shadow; matter is absorbed and out of thinking are analyzed characteristics which the scientist himself has furnished. By working with abstractions he coneludes that nothing exists but his own ideas. Indeed by choosing the abstractions you work with, you can come to any conclusion you like, and all of them will be absurd and contradict ohe another.11 I ’ ■ I From the study of table No. 1 and table No. 2, the world of sense and the world of science, Professor Eddington carries his dual knowledge over to the world of value. He is concerned to know reality that underlies and forms the background of the mechanically measured part of the physical world. It is fundamentally mind-stuff, the raw material out of which worlds have been con­ structed. It is for him something below the level of consciousness and that here and there rises only in islands. It is likened to our own feelings, in fact, is continuous with our human nature, so that consciousness will be the avenue of approach to our knowledge of reality. From the watch-tower of consciousness the outlook for reality is taken. We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown ; we have devised profound theories one after another to account for its origin, at last, we have succeeded in constructing the creature that made the footprint and lo! it is our own,14 The scientist finds in consciousness besides sense perceptions, -the inner light of convictions, of value, of feeling of something that assures purpose. He derives this idea from the study of self. By a certain bending of the mind back upon itself, he is as clearly con­ scious of his spiritual nature as he is of his body, but as spirit belongs to an entirely different order of reality, so consciousness of spirit belongs to an entirely different order of consciousness. In other words, he finds two distinct kinds of consciousness, phe­ nomenal—awareness of physical and mental phenomena, and spirit10 H. Levy, The Universe of Science, p. 104. 11 L. P. Jacks, Symposium, Science and Religion, p. 167. 13 A. Eddington, Time, Space and Gravitation. I I f μ 42 SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD ual awareness of noumena. He insists that this self-consciousness is the key to the understanding of reality, that it is a fundamental bit of reality which he has a right to assume until the assumption is proved or disproved. It is representative of all reality; it is immediate experience. It has two outlets iii diametrically opposite directions, the stream of sensation with its cause outside, and the stream of thoughts, including feelings and purposes to be thought of as conscious life. The idea of continuity expressed “ as a stream ” is entirely figurative. What is meant is, that mental states exist in succession and “ stream ” expresses this fact with vividness. The idea of continuity is also used in relation of con­ sciousness to reality. To effect the relation, the mind first com stitutes reality as an object of meaning, and builds it according to its own plans and specifications. The inner convictions and feelings of purpose are not like sense data, appearances of physical reality; they are just what they seem. The self is these very states; they do not seem to undergo any transformed shape; they exist in consciousness in their own form. They are not something apart from consciousness which consciousness is viewing, but they are consciousness itself. They are not symbols or representations of something beyond them; they are the Ultimate Reality. The immediate object, then, is a state of mind, a pure mental object, a state that is called mystical. From the three-fold way of knowing one reality only this one, the mystical, engaged the mind of Eddington in the closing chap­ ter of The Nature of the Physical World. In inner convictions are “found the basis of experience from which the spiritual religion arises.” But it is obvious, the only avenue to the “ intimate ” knowledge of Reality is not to be trusted implicitly, it may be beset with “ pitfalls.” Through uncertainty, then, to the hinterland of science which is “no colorless domain,” but a world of projections from the brain, poetic additions to the real truth of things, he has gone forward only to find that he can­ not enter the Beyond, nor describe what is there, he can only say, “ It lies over there—where this trail and the others would lead if they did not break off.” 13 18 C. A. Bennett, Dilemma of Religious Knowledge, p. 14. 4 I • S' j 1 i I"' j SUPBA-SCIENTIFIC APPROACH 43 Just here Sir James Jeans, sensitive to peculiar feelings of an incalculable and tremendous something behind phenomena, assumes that sensitiveness is a response to a stimulus that is really there. He conceives the physical world as capable of being mathematically interpreted. People, he says, are trying to make concrete pictures of the world, of space and of time. But these must be thought of only as mathematical concepts. Mathematics can explain these admirably. He is not averse to making God a mathematician, a God to be verified by testing, analyzing, and measuring. A Thinker is behind the thought, and the Thinker is a mathematician capable of interpreting mathematical equations. The thought of the Thinker is the marvellous universe which fits into the fromework built by mathematicians, who accept the appellation “mystic/’ when it means that they are able to view the invisible, to handle the intangible, to perceive the relatione, to stand in awe before the profusion of eternal worlds with which they are acquainted.14 Up through a hierarchy of sciences to metaphysics we are carried by ah “irresistible compulsion” to find mathematical equa­ tions replacing first principles. The modern mystical approach of supra-“ scientism ” has led to a God, an abstraction devoid of Efe and energizing worth, designated by mathematical symbols. * i « The Monisl, 34 (19£4), 375-376. CHAPTER VI Critical Appreciation Religious Experience of William James It would not be a genuinely scientific approach to religious expe­ rience to condemn it outrightly and absolutely. There is a religious experience which is of a distinctly religious quality, an ultimate experience of a religious object, truth or value, which is among those spiritual intuitions which apprehend all ultimates not appre­ hended by the senses. To distinguish this form that does not exclude faith in God’s revelations from the form of experience that is pure subjectivism, there must be some understanding of its connotation. One of our recent writers1 has given religious experience two meanings: first, man creates the idea of God, otherwise non­ existent, by making Him to his own image; second, God as the Perfect Other exists in His own right, transcends our highest thought of Him and reveals Himself in a process by which men believe in Him. These two conceptions of God, as well as others, are involved in the modern idea of the universe. Thoughts of God are being adjusted to them because they cannot be adjusted to tra­ ditional conceptions. The God-idea is then growing with the expanding universe. He is a vast cosmic drift or trend toward harmony ;2 the sum of forces acting in the cosmos as perceived and grasped by the human mind ;3 that force or process which makes for the progressive development of values ;4 the super­ personal;4 the struggle and the mysterious pain at the heart of 1 E. Lewis, God and Ourselves, p, 258. 8 W. Horton, Theism and the Modern Mood, p. 117. 8 J. Huxley, Science and Religion, p. 202. * H. N. Wieman, Religious Experience and Scientific Method, p. 9. B Wishart, The Idea of God in the Light of Modern Science. 44 1 CRITICAL APPRECIATION 45 the universe; * the nisus directive of the course of events;7 the totality of the Universe;8 an oversoul;® the principle of concre­ tion ;10 the principle of the conservation of value within exist­ ence.11 These conceptions of God are substitutes for the traditional definition, Z am who am. The question is raised, Is God an idea or more than an idea? If He is just an idea, He is immanent in the Ego; if He is more than an idea He is reality. There are ideas to which are attached no factual reality, but there is no factual reality without an idea. Mental activity is the basis of all experience, and religious experi­ ence is no exception to the rule for arriving at a certitude of God. How else can God be known except man can be brought to think of Him? If God is only a thought, then if man did not exist to think about Him, there would be no God. But God is more than a revelation of something within man, He is also a revelation of something outside Him. He exists as a reality independent of mind. He would have existence whether man conceived Him or not. Religious experience establishes a relation with this external reality and becomes then, as Lewis says, not a monologue but a dialogue.12 From an examination of the visible world by the light of reason, man has convincing proof of the existence of God. By the ennobling faculty of the intellect which he possesses, he comes to know not only that God is, but also, in some manner to know who He is or to know His nature, though imperfectly and by analogy. It is not then experience only, but experience and reason also by which God is known. From the scholastic point of view, the first type of religious experience, namely that God is only an idea, is undoubtedly unjustified, because it makes religion purely subjective, and the idea of God a creation of the mind. The second sense is more legitimate, inasmuch as it implies the existence of God, independent of a mind. Its defect, however, lies in the fact that it already assumed the existence of God as an independent • E. S. Brightman, The Problem- of God, p. 137. ’ L. Morgan, Emergent Evolution, p. 34, 8 G. E. Harkness, Conflicts in Religious Thought, p. 168. • McKeehan, Interpretation of God, p. 327. 10 A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 250. 11 HOffding, Philosophy of Religion, p. 89. 18 E. Lewis, God and Ourselves, p. 259. 46 SOME MODERN NO N-IN TELLE CTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD fact, instead of a dialectical proof. This second definition corre­ sponds vaguely to the scholastic notion of the desire for God. Deep-rooted in man’s rational nature is the desire for happiness.13 Every man no matter who he be, wishes to be happy. There is no one who does not wish it, and who does not yearn after it in such a way as even to desire it above all else. Men are drawn by different attractions: one desires this, another that; among men there are many ways of living, and among them one prefers one way, another, another; but no matter what may be the kind of life one chooses, it is ever the same, a happy life is what all desire.1* This desire has its basis in the operations of the intellect which is infinite in its extension, boundless in its capacity for knowledge. Quantum est de se ad infinita individua se extendit. This implicit tendency toward beatitude at the very heart of being is as a ten­ dency toward God, the final end. He alone supplies happiness because He is, says St. Thomas.15 It is really the solution of the metaphysical problem of the return of being to its Source.10 When man realizes that the world about him has failed to satisfy the fullness of his being, where this tendency of nature remains unsat­ isfied,11 his desire for God is augmented. The universe as a par­ ticipated being has not within it the reason of its own existence nor the motif of its action, and since nothing finite can be the adequate object of happiness, and since man knows he is an imper­ fect being,13 he therefore, orientates his intelligence to the tran­ scendent,10 which carries him beyond the horizon of terrestrial 18 nomini inest appetitus naturalis ad illam veram beatitudinem quae in Dei visione consistit, non dico appetitum elicitum sed naturalem appetitum, hoc est, inclinationem naturalem et pondus naturae quo in illum finem propendit, sicut gravitas in lapide. Comm. F. D. Soto in IV Sententiarum (Venice, 1584), disp. XLIX, q. II, a. 1. 14 St. Augustine, Serm. CCCVI, seq, 3 opera ed. Migne V, p. 1400. 1B Cf. De Verit., q. 22, a. 2; ibid., q. 21, a. 2; De Pot., q. 5, a. 1; I q. 105, an 2, ad. 2. Cf. IV Sent., dist. 49, q. 1, a. 3; De Malo, q. 16, a, 8; I q. 57, a, 4; De Verit., q. 8, a. 13. ie J. E. O’Mahoney, The Desire of God, p. 94. O. G., lib. Ill, cap. XXV. 18 Omne imperfectum tendit in perfectum. Summa, I-II, q. 16, a. 4. 19 Intellectus noster in infinitum intelligendo aliquid extenditur, cujus signum est quod, qualibet quantitate finita data, intellectus noster majorem excogitare possit. Frustra autem esset haec ordinatio intellectus ad in- I CRITICAL APPRECIATION I ■ i * 4Î limitations to the ultimate and compelling object, God,20 the first desired of all creation.21 What is naturally desired is naturally known, for man naturally desires happiness and what is naturally desired by man is naturally known by him. The knowledge of God and the desire of the highest good are to all men, Nothing is desired except through likeness of first goodness; nothing is knowable except through likeness of first truth.22 Passing now to a strict presentation of the scholastic doctrine of religious experience, an important distinction must be made. The fundamental error of most modern philosophers who profess belief in religious experience, is their failure to take into account the first of the three stages by which this - state is reached, namely, confused intellectual knowledge. They start from the affective state thus giving no logical explanation for the initial attainment of this knowledge, for the affective state presupposes knowledge; it needs a cause, it is a reaction to a stimulus. Religious experience for them is made up of only two stages :— 1. Affective states 2. Intellectual knowledge I 1 , 1 I I finitum, nisi esset aliqua res intelligibilis infinita: Oportet igitur esse aliquam rem intelligibilem infinitam, quam oportet ease, esse maximam rerum; et hanc dicimus Deum. G. G., lib. I, cap. XLIII. Quaecumque sunt a Deo, ordinem habent ad invicem, et ad ipsum Deum. I, q, 47, a. 3. 30 Impossibile est beatitudinem hominis esse in aliquo creato, Beatitudo enim est bonum perfectum quod totaliter quietat appetitum; alioquin non esset ultimus finis si adhuc restaret aliquid appetendum, Simm®, I-II, q. II, a. 8. 21 Deus igitur, quum sit primum movens immobile, est primum desideratum G. G., lib. I, cap. 37. 23 . . . homo enim naturaliter desiderat beatitudinem, et quod naturaliter desideratur ab homine naturaliter cognoscitur ab eodem. Cognitio Dei naturaliter omnibus est inserta et similiter desiderium summi boni, . . . Homo naturaliter ordinatur ad Deum et per cognitionem et per affectum, in quantum est ejus particeps. Ill Sent., dist. 23, a. 4, q. 3. Omnia cognoscentia cognoscunt implicite Deum in quolibet cognito. Sicut enim nihil habet rationem appetibilis nisi per similitudinem primae boni­ tatis; ita nihil est cognoscibile nisi per similitudinem primae veritatis. De Verit., q. 22, a. 2, ad 1. 48 SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD whereas the scholastic doctrine has three stages : 1. Confused intellectual knowledge 2. Affective states 3. Keflex intellectual knowledge Professor James believed that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue. . . . When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in a world in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I doubt whether any philosophic theology could ever have been framed. I doubt if dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe, apart from inner unhappiness and need of deliverance on the one hand and mystical emotion on the other, would ever have resulted in religious philosophies such as we now possess/8 By this he means that religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied by feeling, that “ over-beliefs, buildings-out performed by the intellect ” 24 were originally directed by feeling. This position is quite contrary to the scholastic doctrine, that contends that there are not two elements in religious experience but three. First of all, confused intellectual knowledge of God; secondly, an affective reaction, and thirdly, distinct intellectual knowledge. A. A confused intellectual knowledge is that which the Fathers of the Alexandrine School declare is found and established in all men, that springs up spontaneously at the very sight of creation. This knowledge is incapable of being analyzed, as is distinct knowledge.25 In fact, it is not knowledge proper, that is, connected sa W. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 431, 84 Ibid., p. 431. as Cognitio, sive in sensu, sive in intellectu, alia est confusa, alia dis­ tincta. Cognitio confusa est qua attingitur aliquid non resolvendo nec discernendo ejus partes, seu praedicata, aut attributa. Distincta est e converso, qua cognoscitur aliquid resolvendo, seu discernendo partes ejus, aut praedicata. Et omnis confusio dicit ordinem ad plura; vel actualiter in se inclusa, quia ex illis actu constat, vel potentialiter subjecta, quia sub se continentur; unde oritur quod alia est cognitio confusa actualis, scilicet respectu eorum quae actu conveniunt rei, alia confusa potentialis, scilicet respectu eorum, quae sunt objecta, et quasi in ejus potentia continetur, et ; : '| ί \ ! ,i * f CRITICAL APPRECIATION ] i | ' I i t 49 and systematized; but only fragmentary pieces of information. Confused knowledge in its operations based on the inclination of nature in its search for goodness, is closely akin to the descriptive knowledge spoken of in modern religious experience, as having a very direct bearing upon the knowledge of God. Such knowledge does not define any object, “ it is simply the interlocking of a perfectly consistent system of concepts without regard to any experience whatever.” 28 By confused intellectual knowledge the scholastics mean the first impact of the first principles of thought on the sensible world. It will be recalled that there are certain immediate principles of thought, prima intelligibilium principia, such as identity, contra­ diction and' sufficient reason, known immediately upon the knowledge of the terms.2 T These first principles which preexist in man as certain seeds 28 of knowledge are not innate but the light by which they are known is innate.2* The soul does not possess this knowl­ edge as such, but they are the first intelligibles which the intellect reaches when it comes in contact with the sensible. Whether these principles be complex,30 such as a whole is greater than its parts, or simple, such as being, they are at the basis of all knowledge. In the first stage, the intellect spontaneously perceives in being these principles. On the notion of being and non-being is based the first indemonstrable principle, namely, that the same thing cannot be affirmed and denied at the same time. On this principle are based in turn all other principles.81 There is then according to St. similiter distingui potest e converso cognitio distincta. John of St. Thomas, Cursus Philosophicus, t, 2, p. 1, q. 1, a. 3 secunda distinctio. St. Thomas, 1 q. 14, a. 6; q. 85, a. 3, ad 3; q. 85, a. 4, ad 3; q. 85, a. 8; q. 86, a. 2. C. G., lib. III, cc. XXXVIII and XXXIX. 28 Η. N. Wieman, Reliffious Experience and Scientific Method, p. 27. 27 Primae conceptiones intellectus quae statim lumine intellectus agentis cognoscuntur per species a sensibilibus abstractas. De Verit., q. 11, a. 1, ad 1. 28 De Verit., q. 11, a,. 1, ad resp. 29 Cognitio principiorum accipitur a sensu, et tamen lumen quo principia cognoscuntur est innatum. In lib. Boeth, De Trinitate, q. 3, a. 1, ad 4. 80 Prima principia . . . sive sint complexa ut dignitates, sive incomplexa sicut ratio entis. De Verit., q. xi, a. 1, c. 81 Summa, I-II, q. 94, a. 2; cf. De Anima, a. 6, ad 8; In IV Meta., lect. 5, 6; I, q. 117, a. 1; I-II, q,, 51, a. 1. De Verit., q. 10, a. 6, 8, ad 1, q. 11, a. 3; a. 15, ad 1. 50 SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD Thomas need of a supreme principle, being, and a first judgment, being is, which imperfectly reflect back to a First Principle. But this First Principle is not clearly known. He is something about which many predicates are asserted; He may be the Being of all Being, the One or the Many, but in every case, these are attributes which are applicable to the First Principle which is God. All this has a bearing on religious experience. The confused intellectual approach to God means merely the immediate reaction of a mind upon seeing the universe. It is immediate knowledge, for in the act of knowing there is so rapid a relation between sub­ ject and predicate, that it seems to be accomplished without the aid of concept. In as much as it involves first principles, it is intel­ lectual. In its first apprehension, intelligence knows being for it cannot know itself the while it is still the intelligence of nothing.82* This immediate intellectual inference with reality which is still inchoate 48 has in common with modern religious experience, imme­ diacy but not intellectuality. An experience devoid of principles and dependent on mere feeling leads not to God but to Agnosticism, it tells nothing about the eternal ultimates, the everlasting verities. Confused intellectual knowledge} is therefore, not identical with modern religious experience, the first element of which is the affec­ tive state. B. The Affective State. A subjective state that is purely affective is the basis of modern religious experience. This is to distrust the intellect's ability to reach metaphysical truth and to resort to feeling, a simple yet vague state of mind. Our human personality is limited in its range. This limitation belongs to the very nature of personality, we recognize it in our relations with others. We have our own thoughts, feelings and emotion, these we can communicate to others through speech and the media of sense, but they cannot share our feelings, our emotions nor we theirs. We read the thoughts 82 Summa, I, q. 87, a. 1K 38 Est enim quaedam communis ex confusa Dei cognitio, quae quasi omnibus hominibus adest; . , . quia naturali ratione statim, homo in aliqualem Dei cognitionem pervenire potest. C. (}., Ill, cap. XXXVIII. CRITICAL APPRECIATION 51 of those whom we know, but their thoughts are not our thoughts. Sympathy enables us to share their feelings but it remains that the feelings are theirs, and ours are ours; feelings are incommuni­ cable, personal and limited to our organic nature. The simplest form of consciousness in the human personality is feeling. It varies from person to person, from experience to experience, thus allowing the God-idea to vary also. Take for example, the ideas of the deity according to A. N. Whitehead and E. S. Ames. The term, “ principle of concretion,” which Whitehead used to designate God is quite different from the popular identification of God as an ideal. God Himself is not concrete but He is the principle which constitutes the concretion of things. “In the place of Aristotle’s God as Prime Mover, we require God as the Principle of Concre­ tion. God is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actual­ ity. No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.” 84 According to Ames’ view, “ few patriots conceive their country as absolutely perfect. They idealize it, they love it and they labor for the ideals which are identified with its institutions and enterprises. Similarly, the reli­ gious man knows that justice is not complete, but he knows too that there are good and happiness and some fulfilment of righteous­ ness. These qualities he identifies with, the divine. God is not taken as the equivalent of all that is, but as the ideal being who seeks the realization of the good.”85 Experiences vary, those brought through fear, love, awe and religious joy are registered at different levels. The organic thrill of an Alpine ascent drops to a religious awe when man beholds the yawning chasm of a mountain gorge. But these temporary sentiments are generally too dissolv­ ing to give added strength to his religious convictions. If the affective state is placed in an intellectual background in relation to revelation and dogma, its object, God, will cease to be a capricious invention of an unregulated fancy and become a per­ sonal God, a God of value. A religion intellectualized and external­ ized and not entirely dependent on feeling and emotion can be 84 A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, pp. 250 and 257. 88 E. S. Ames, Religion, p. 146. 52 SOME MODERN" NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD the true religion, because it integrates harmoniously in one fuller and deeper vision of God, the different broken lights of the others, thus in­ corporating the truths of all, without the one-sidedness of any.88 A thing must be known to exist before it can be desired. This principle was observed by man when with dissatisfaction he passed beyond the finitu de of natural realization to the term of his final perfection. At the source of his incessant tendency was an intelligi­ bility that gave direction and adequate meaning to his actions. A tendency in itself toward an object is not knowledge of that object, but only an effect of something causative. Feelings emerge insensi­ bly from the knowledge which as a stimulus calls forth a reaction. An angry man knows who has insulted his honor; a man who experiences an emotional disturbance of fear knows the cause of his fear before he takes flight; and so with other experiences, there is emotion where there is cognition. The danger lies in allying our religious experience with feeling only. According to Schleiermacher’s theory, the " highest grade of feeling ” is associated with religion. Feeling is psychologically prior to the other elements of mental life. It is believed to be immediate, that is to say, unmedi­ ated by ideas of any kind ; so that it is through feeling alone that we become aware of our environment, knowledge and desire both alike secondary.37 Religion, it is true, has in it an element of feel­ ing, but it is not essentially feeling. Belief in God that was rooted in pure emotion would be lacking in that element necessary to be called belief. £i Genuine faith/’ as A. E. Taylor tells us, “ because it reposes on conviction, cannot be other than a fides quaerens intel­ lectum” While it is impossible to isolate completely the affective element from the element purely intellectual, just as it is impossible to isolate completely one chemical element from another, neverthe­ less, an approximate analysis can be attempted.88 To base the absolute conviction of God’s presence on feeling is to establish a religious experience of pure subjectivism, which is “ preoccupation with one’s inner attitude, the attempt of the mind to work upon / 88 A, E. Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, p. 96. 87 J. Baillie, The Interpretation of Religion, p. 208. 88 A. E. Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, p, 102. CRITICAL APPRECIATION 53 itself.”39 Fieurbach writing of Schleiermacher’s position, that religion fails to have any objectivity, says, God is renounced by the understanding; he has no longer the dignity of a real object, of a reality which imposes itself on the understanding; hence he is transferred to feeling; in feeling his existence is thought to be secure. And doubtless this is the safest refuge; for to make' feeling the essence of religion is nothing else than to make feeling the essence of God. And as certainly as I exist, so certainly does my feeling exist: and as certainly as my feeling exists, so certainly does my God exist.40 If religion is to be considered just a mental process, a fact of mind, then it may be brought to an idealist’s point of view. Christianity cannot allow religion to be merely a subjective creation of the mind, for it claims objective revelation and communion with God other than by thought of Him. Religion, to be worthy of its relation to God, must be based on conviction which has its birth in intelligence not feeling. Feeling besides being subjective is too indefinite to be made the basis of a faith in God. Λ pleasant or painful feeling is definite when associated with some person or thing, as when we say, the head is aching. Feeling dissociated from cognition is vague and indeterminate and will never issue in the knowledge of a personal God. To place feeling prior to intellect is not according to the doctrine of St. Thomas.41 For him it is the intellect and not the other faculties of the mind by which man is able to obtain a theological vision of God. He has not established the truth that man can see God fact# ad faciem by means of natural powers alone,42 for the 80 C. A. Bennett, Dilemma- of Religious Knowledge, pp. 113-114. 40 L. Fleurbach, Wesen des Christentums, Geo. Eliot’s tr., pp, 9, 277-278, Although this work was written as early as 1841, the author anticipates many tendencies in contemporary thought about religion. 41 Intellectus autem prior affectu,.. De Verit., q. 10, a. 5. 42, . . impossibile est quod aliquis creatus intellectus per sua naturalia essentiam Dei videat. Cognitio enim contingit secundum quod cognitum est in cogniscente. Cognitio autem est in cognoscente secundum modum cognoscentis. Summa, I, q. 12, a. 4, ad resp. Facultas autem videndi Deum non competit intellectui creato secundum suam naturam, sed per lumen gloriae. Idem., a. 6, ad resp. Omnis autem cognitio quae est secundum modum substantiae creatae 5 54 SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD natural ultimate end of the intellect is to see by the light of reason the glory of His works and thus also of Himself. It is the intellect that thinks, and it alone can give truth; it reaches down to the innermost essence of things, assimilates all being, and in some cer­ tain manner becomes all things,43 while feeling which belongs to the sensitive life is only superficially united to things. C. Reflex Intellectual Knowledge. After the confused intellectual knowledge or instinct for God, and the affective state, which is the effect of an idea but does not produce it, there follows a reflex intellectual act. It is to this realm that the scholastic arguments for God’s existence belong. These proofs are the result not of a confused or mediate but of a reflex knowledge which is essential for the development of religious ex­ perience. Theistic proofs of God’s existence, once the basis of dis­ cussions for philosophers and theologians, are not found to be necessary for modern experimentalists. They have been suspended for various and questionable reasons by those who say that there are no arguments to prove God real because experience of Him44 suffices. They claim these proofs are too abstract in their nature for any but philosophers and theologians to understand; too ex­ plicit and formal to make an appeal to the heart; too dependent upon Aristotelian principles that are now discarded; too insuffi­ ciently convincing to demonstrate the objective reality of God ; too traditional to prove anything about His nature. Even the * vast literature of proofs of God’s existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, today does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argues for.” 48 “ There is no more reason for rejecting the old arguments for the existence of a Supreme Being, that lost their deficit a visione divinae essentiae, quae in infinitum excedit omnem sub­ stantiam creatam. Unde nec homo, nee aliqua creatura potest consequi beatitudinem ultimam per sua naturalia. Idem., I-II, q. 5, a. 5, ad resp. Cf. II-II, q. 2, a. 3; G. G., lib. ΙΠ, cap. LUI. 48 C. G., lib. I, c. XLIV ; Summa, I, q. 26, a. 2. Ibid., II, cc, XLVII, XCVIII. 44 R. JÆ. Jones, Fundamental End of Life, p. 143. 48 W. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 74. I CRITICAL APPRECIATION 55 force largely because we have no longer that confidence in the faculty of discursive reasoning which our forefathers had/’40 than there is for rejecting the chemical combinations of the scientist, for example, water, because the chemist calls it H2O. These proofs formulated in the philosophic language of St. Thomas are not different in principle, from those of the man who as he observes the world about him expresses himself in common terms. Reproachful as modern religious experience may wish to make the Thomistic proofs, they cannot be despised. To discard proof is to discard reason ; to reject the sensible which is necessary as a preliminary of thought and as a stimulus to mind activity, is to depend upon personal experience, the testimony of inner light. The visible things of the. physical universe, illumined by the light of the intellect are signs wherefrom men infer the exist­ ence of God as First Cause and postulate Him as an unchangeable Mover. The knowledge of the perfections of creatures leads to a knowledge of the nature and perfections of the Creator. This reflex knowledge is the ultimate basis of all systems of truth. It differs from confused knowledge not in kind but in degree, whereas, God in the beginning was indistinguishable from other objects, of crea­ tion, He is by reason a distinct and certain Being, a Creator, “ the depths of whose wisdom are unfathomable and the ways of whose Providence are unsearchable.” 47 The intellectual approach to God by proof outweighs in value a religious experience that depends entirely on personality. Reflex knowledge brings determination and completeness48 to what was formerly only potential or undeveloped knowledge.48 This knowl­ edge is not accidental as some experimentalists 50 would have us believe, for the deciding factor must be the intellect,51 not an 10 F. L. Cross, Religion and the Reign of Science, p. 11. } 8* Does Professor Otto mean by irrational that element in religion that cannot be defined or described, or does he mean that the nonrational is a sensation ? If so, he fails to reconcile sensation which is a posteriori with the numinous which he says is a priori. From the Holy, he excludes ethical elements as not belonging to primitive religion. That the characteristic element in religion should be non-rational while morality should be characterized rational—that is a combination of views for which it seems impossible to conceive any justification. Surely, if the sense of the numinous is to be called non-rational, the sense of the moral obligation should be called non-rational too.’ From the facts ascertained by the anthropologist there is among primitive peoples a relationship between religion and morality, this relationship being either direct or indirect; there are duties to Deity or deities, and duties to fellow man. All, or practically all peoples, consider it a matter of obligation, or of custom closely akin to obligation, to manifest in some form or another— through prayer or sacrifice or ceremonial or taboo—their reverence, fear, regard, dependence or other feeling or attitude to the Deity or deities.1011 The advocates of early dissociation of morality and religion, as the evidence stands, have no warrant that there is any one people without some trace of either direct or indirect relationship.11 8 J. Baillie, The Interpretation of Religion, p. 254. * Ibid., p. 251. 10 J. Cooper, “ The Relations Between Religion and Morality/* Primitive Man, Vol. IV, No. 3, July 1931. There is no thorough study of the whole problem of religious-moral rela­ tions. A considerable number of pertinent facts have been assembled by E. Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 2 vols., 2nd ed., London, 1912, vol. 11, chap. 48-52; L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, 2 vols., 2nd ed., London, 1908, vol. II, chap. 2; E. C. Parsons, “Links Between Religion and Morality in Early Cultures,” American Anthropologist, 1915, n. s., XVII, 41-57. Cf. Primitive Man, vol. IV, No. 3, July, 1931. 11 Cf. W. Schmidt, Der Orsprung der Gottesidee. 74 SOME MODERN NON-IN TELLE CT UAL APPROACHES TO GOD From what reason does the Marburg Professor allow at a late period a rapprochement between religion and morality? When and why do two elements primitively separated become united? For no logical necessity but as a matter, of course, of the plainest and most obvious kind. The histories of religion are in the habit of reporting the gradual, mutual interpenetration of these elements, and the process of ethicising of the Divine as if these things were in some sort, a matter of course. And they are a matter of course for that feeling which is inwardly aware of its own necessity. Yet this very self-evidence which attaches to these processes is itself a problem, and one which we cannot possibly solve without the supposition of a dim a priori knowledge of the essential and necessary relationship of the two elements. This relationship is in no sense logically necessary.18 No wonder such want of logical necessity or logical reasoning is the “most surprising circumstance in the history of religion.” We cannot conclude that Professor Otto is either historically or philo­ sophically sound in his “religious a priori.’^ In the Marburg church where he attempts to carry out his religious convictions, Quaker quietism, the prayer of passive attention, and the dominant feature of external worship can never substitute for spiritual active contemplation that is essential for true mysticism, a union with God not by self-effort alone but by a gift from above, divine grace. i Supra-Scientific Mysticism of Arthur Eddington I. We have seen first, that the form of mysticism that science knows and is .concerned with is a natural mysticism, a mysticism that, as a philosophy, holds Reality to be One, ineffable and identical with self; second, that Professor Eddington’s monistic conceptions of reality imply different ways of knowing it and that the experi­ ence of consciousness as an avenue of approach is intuitive and vague. We are now to consider first, whether interpreting in abstractions develops a true mysticism, a mysticism that has always been associated with the Church and her great mystic members whether it is just a mood that is idealistic and mystical ; second, 18 Das Heilige, pp. 167-168. CRITICAL APPRECIATION I 11 / I 1 ç !| Γ i 75 whether a spiritual reality requires a unique way of knowing it, differentiated from sense, experience and scientific knowledge, and whether a new knowledge, that inverts the order between knower and known, is acceptable. First, we must admit a radical distinction been natural mysticism and supernatural mysticism, a distinction according as man lives in the natural or the supernatural order. For a clear explanation of the terms nature, natural and supernatural we refer to St. Thomas. When he says that it is the nature of fire to burn, he understands the term nature to signify what Aristotle meant by it, that is, “ Natura nihil aliud est, quam principium motus et quietis in eo in quo est, primo et per se, et non secundum accidens” 1II When he says nature is generation he takes it to signify a birth, in the same sense in which St. Paul says, “ we are by nature the sons of wrath.” Sumus natura filii irae. He interprets it also to mean principium hujus generationis, the intrinsic or vital principle in all living things; or again, he refers to it as the essense of a thing, principium radicale operationum et passionum quae ei per se con­ veniunt.3 That is natural which is proportionate or determined to its na­ ture, that is, all that which constitutes the being in its species, its essence, its faculties together with all that exercises their func­ tions, and' when it acts as a moral being, the just sanction of its acts. Man is so constituted in the natural order that he is able to seek God, his final end, by the light of reason, to use creatures to assist him to attain his end, to exercise his faculties, especially his intellect and will, and by obedience to the natural law ingrained in his heart to merit a reward for his works or a punishment for his faults. By correlation, all that exceeds the proportion of his nature in essence, passivities, powers, exigencies and reward, is in the super­ natural order. tf Id quod excedit proportionem ejus naturae eamque gratuito perfidere potest.” Supernatural then refers to those ad­ vantages which man cannot acquire by himself, but which the 1 In II Physicorum, lee. 1. a Natura dicta sicut generatio, id est nativitas est via in naturam. In II Physicorum, lec. II. · Cf. Garrigou-Lagrange, De Kevelatione. 76 If SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES IO GOD Creator bestows upon him by virtue of His wisdom and justice,; and not because of his act of Creation. Each nature has its own limits and its capacity to act, but as it is dependent upon the Creator for its being and actions, it is neces­ sary that it be elevated by the Creator to receive or to do that which it would be incapable of doing by itself. This obediential power has no other limits but the intrinsic possibility of things. A few examples will serve to illustrate. The potter perfects the clay in his hands when he molds it into a form which was potential to it, but which, of its nature, it was not able to attain without an artificer. In the order of nature, the fish swims and is guided to its end by its vegetative and sensitive powers. If God should elevate it by giving it reasoning powers fitted to perceive that which it could not naturally perceive, this would be to transcend the natural. To resuscitate .life is in the natural order of affairs, but to bring back life to a person already dead is supernatural. Such was Christ’s act in the raising to life of Lazarus. Following a known physical law, a stone cast into the sea falls to the bottom ; should we find it floating upon the water, we immediately ascribe this condition to a power which it does not possess. Again, God has provided for the very young child a mother to dispense the means of nourishing that child. There is nothing supernatural in the way the mother receives and gives to her child the milk upon which it lives ; should she or others fail to make the necessary pro­ vision, God would not be bound to supply the deficiency, but should He in His goodness sustain the child without any nourishment, this would be an act in the supernatural order, in the broad sense of the term. So, too, in speaking of the human mind as having capacity to act according to its nature, the Angelic Doctor states that when a higher power, as God, enables it to act above its natural capacity, this is an obediential power in the creature. In anima humana, sicut in qualibet creatura, consideratur duplex potentia passiva; una quidem per comparationem ad agens naturale: alia vero per comparationem ad agens primum quod potest quamlibet creaturam reducere in actum aliquem altiorem, in quem reducitur per agens naturale; et haec consuevit vocari potentia obedientiae in creatura.4 4 Summa, III, q. XI, a. 1. I ■i CRITICAL APPRECIATION . il Grace in the supernatural order presupposes nature; first there is the foundation namely, nature; then the structure built upon it which is grace. There must then be a relation between the natural and the supernatural as they both have their origin in God, the ■I I [ j * ! * ; ? 77 font of truth. They can easily be distinguished but not separated. There are truths, such as those of science, that belong to reason and nature, and truths supernatural that are of revelation and faith. A harmonious and helpful relation exists between faith and science. Newman expressed it when he said that all truth is of God, and therefore, from whatever source truths are derived they must be capable of harmonious adjustment. As for mutual assist­ ance, reason prepares for faith, explains and defends it; faith cor­ rects reason and is an enlightenment to its problems. Credo ut intelligam; intelligo ut credam. St. Thomas says, “ Faith presup­ poses natural knowledge, as grace presupposes nature, as perfection presupposes something perfectible.” Fides praesupponit cognitionem naturalem, sicut gratia naturam et ut perfectio perfectibile? To which the Council of the Vatican supplements recta ratio fidei fundamenta demonstrat. Those who oppose themselves to such harmony declare that philosophical reason is the supreme judge, the autonoma of the value of religious faith, and is able of itself to find what is true in faith. Rationem humanum ita independentem esse, ut fides ei a Deo imperari non potest? They also make a strong opposition be­ tween supernatural and contranatural, maintaining that super­ natural is contranatural.7 That to which man is not naturally in­ clined but to which he must do violence to overcome his natural propensities is truly contranatural. Is not this what the great mystics, well disciplined in mortification, are doing to overcome nature ? Between the natural and the supernatural is placed the inter- ■ I ! • Summa, I, q. 2, a. 2, ad 1. ® H. Denzinger, Enchiridion, n. 1810, p. 481, ed. 1908. 7 Sed vita supernaturalis non est contra nostram naturam ut natura est, eam gratuito perficit secundum mirabilem harmoniam quae praesertim apparet in vita illuminativa et unitiva Sanctorum et excellentissime in Christo. Garrigou-Lagrange, De Revelatione, p. 202. 78 SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD mediate concept preternatural signifying a privilege which per­ fects nature without going out beyond its own limits.8 The mystic states are called supernatural in a special sense, because nature is especially powerless to place them there. In mysticism man is in the supernatural order when the life to which God raises him exceeds the capacities, strength, and exigencies of his nature, when he lives and moves in virtue of an interior prin­ ciple, when another life, as it were, conspires with it in an ex­ quisite new unity, when without the destruction of his nature he is raised above his nature by grace. Grace makes him a participant of the Divine Nature "consortes divinae naturae” By this is meant that in this life his nature, elevated by sanctifying grace, “ gratia nihil aliud esi quam quaedam inchoatis gloriae in nobis" ° by infused virtues and by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, by the light of faith and by the exercise of supernatural virtues, comes by intuitive vision to a quasi-experimental perception of God, to love Him as a Being most worthy to be loved. "Par le coeur nous sommes a Dieu et U est a nous; il est notre et nous sommes siens; il nous appartient.”10 This action is a healthy, normal action of psychological and moral life, but in virtue of its own power cannot effect a supreme union with God. Grace, the help and gratuitous gift which God bestows on receptive souls, must be the intermediary, the link to bind the activity to a supernatural end. Grace makes him a participator in the Divine Life itself, makes him a “new creature, a member of the family of the Trinity/311 This trans­ formation does not change nature, thia communication of grace to the soul does not make a different sort of a person, but just himself living his own life, yet in vital union with an essentially higher One. It perfects nature, “cum gratia non tollat naturam • A contranaturali distinguitur etiam praeternaturale : praeternaturalia dicuntur miracula prout eorum supernaturalitas inferiori est supernatur alitate gratiae praesertim, miracula inferioris ordinis dicuntur "praeter naturam ” potius quam "supra naturam.” De Pot., q. 6, a. 2, ad 3. • Summa, I-IT, q. 24, a, 3, ad 2. 10 Noble, L'Amitie aveo Dieu, p. 133. 11 Dr. F. J. Sheen, The Life of All Living, p. 172. CRITICAL APPRECIATION 79 sed perficiat" 18 Just as a tree grafted produces fruits that it would not have without graft, but produces them by the movement of the sap and of all its natural energies; and as by graft the fruits are better, so too the soul through contemplation is enriched by God with new properties. The true mystic realizing that he has no right to God, comes by an ascesis of asceticism and prayer to the highest state of contemplation which St. Thomas defines “as a simple intellectual intuition of truth . . . ending in an affective movement of the heart” Contemplatio pertinget ad intu­ itum simplicis veritatis . . . in affectum terminatur.19 When the mystic emerges from the Land of Promise, still conscious of his experience, he has a stammering tongue. To those who have not been there, he can give no clear account of what he has seen. He breaks off exclaiming, “ Words are futile.” After the experience is passed, there is his great anxiety as to the meaning that should be given to it. “ A sort of immediate, indisputable, inevitable, evidential quality takes the place of dry banal knowledge.”14 Not all mystical states are of the same order. The ecstatic form, an accidental rather than an essential phenomenon, may sometimes need the application of a criterion to distinguish what is of divine origin. Mystics are in all walks of life, they are within the monastery, in convents as well as outside, among poets, artists and musicians as well as among those of low degree of learning. Beading the lives of the mystics one can admire the constancy of action and the enduring love and the joyfulness of heart with which they passed through the purgative and illuminative ways to dose union with God. Such mysticism is religion of the highest type. This mystic path, as we have followed it, is supernatural, reason­ able, simple and direct in its approach to God. The mysticism of our idealists is nothing more than a generali­ zation of past experiences, nothing more than ascribing objective 18 In natura animae vel cujus cumque creaturae rationalis est aptitude quaedam ad gratiae susceptionem et per gratiam susceptum fortificatur in' debitis actibus. . . . Gratia naturam perficit et quantum ad intellectum et quantum ad voluntatem et quantum ad inferiores animae partes obedibiles rationi. ** Summa, U-II, q. 180, a. 3, ad resp. 14 Père de Grandmaison, Personal Religion, p. 121. 80 SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECT UAL APPROACHES TO GOD existence to the subjective creations of their own faculty, to ideas or feelings of the mind, and believing that by watching and con­ templating these ideas of their own making, they can read into them what takes place in the world without.15 This naturalistic mysticism concerns the religious feelings as the " natural religious consciousness of men, as excited and influenced by the circum­ stances of the individual.”1® The theosophical mysticism which does not profess any dogma but is a potpourri of all Eastern exoteric forms of religion, is a mysticism of "pure human inven­ tion like so many wild trees the branches of which have not been grafted by divine grace; so many human efforts incurably vitiated and sterilized by naturalism.”17 Such mysticism is not religion nor is it a basis or a substitute for religion, for the mystic though he may be all faith, all love, all vision, is in vacuo without an objective. True mysticism recognizes this objective and directs to it by rendering to God the reverence which is His due. The con­ templation of the modern mystic is formless, lifeless, a part of ex­ perience that takes on the appearance of life, because stimulated by a temperament which some modern psychologists are trying by questionnaire method to associate as mystical. a Such an inquiry may lead to the classification of a type of character, but not to the understanding of an inward experience nor to the existence of any higher mystic experience, among those belonging to this type.” 18 The danger of such mysticism is that it weakens the rational and practical side of religion, and inclines to substitute pan-absorption for spiritual communion. Such an implication of absorption is found in the writings of Professor Eddington and thus rests upon a theory of knowledge that true philosophy cannot sustain. We pass then to a consideration of this epistemological prob­ lem, to find that a new faculty is employed for the purpose of knowing Reality, and that when known, the subject-object relation is transcended. · 16 Cf. J. S. Mill, Logic, Bk. 5, chap. 3, sec. 4. 1β B. B. Warfield, Studies in Theology, p. 654. 1T A. Farges, Mystical Phenomena, p. 583. ie Dom. A. Walsh, “ Mysticism Viewed by Some Philosophers/' The Pladdian, 5 (1928), 19. Cf. Sixth International Congress of Philosophy held at Harvard University, Sept. 1926. i i 1 1 ί 1 ! CBITICAL APPRECIATION 81 Quite apart from sense experience and scientific reasoning, mys­ tical consciousness is a unique way in which Professor Eddington has of knowing the spiritual. We treat it (consciousness), in what seems to be its obvious position as the avenue of approach to the reality and significance of the world, as it is the avenue of approach to all scientific knowledge of the world.1® This approach is intuitive and vague. An ambiguity as to the use of the term consciousness is, perhaps, responsible for this vagueness. By consciousness, he understands that part of the mind that has feelings of value, of purpose, of inner convictions that assure him of a spiritual world and even of a personality as the form of Reality of which he is convinced. In a yearning towards God the bou] grows upward and finds the fulfillment of something implanted in its nature. The sanction for this development is within ue, a striving born with our consciousness or an Inner Light proceeding from a greater power than our». * 0 Thia independent objective reality does not owe its being to con­ sciousness that knows it, it is simply an object of consciousness in the same way as trees, men, present facts, reasoning and discus­ sions, pains, pleasures and emotions. Just as objects in the light are not the light, so objects in consciousness are not the con­ sciousness. It is known, however, through immediate vision, through experience, for the necessary connection between subject and object is lacking. The second view that our Professor most frequently adopts is that Reality is part of and continuous with our own spirit. He takes point of departure in this with St. Thomas who sees Reality as objective and connected with the subject, Ego, under the influ­ ence of evidence and in the light of truth. This subjective attitude makes of Reality a mind-stuff, something fundamentally contin­ uous with our spiritual nature, a background that is of a piece with human consciousness. It makes Reality conscious and yet not conscious, for he says it αrises to the level of consciousness only in the form of those ‘ islands ’ which are human beings. Now according to a fundamental principle, a thing cannot be and 19 A. Eddington, Nature of the Physical World, p. 34810 Ibid., p. 327. 82 SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD not be, viewed under the same formal aspect, it cannot be above consciousness and yet below, if it is a piece and continuous with it, it is not independent, if it is mental, it cannot be the personality of which he is convinced. Reality is, as it were, imprisoned and incarcerated within the walls of self and such subjectivism is intolerable, both emotionally and practically, because it ‘ reduces life to a soliloquy *. 9i 21 The third attitude which consciousness takes of Reality is to make of it a product of creation. We have built the spiritual world out of symbols taken from our own personality . . . and in the mystical feeling the truth is apprehended from within and is as it should be, a part of ourselves?® Consciousness then being a creative faculty casts what it pleases into the background. Does the fact that a Reality is projected make of it a certainty, does it verify its existence? Is it not in truth existing anteriorly to anything that may be said about it, any place to which the mind may assign it? An attitude has been taken to something that was believed not to be there before, and the power which the mind has of putting it there eliminates the activity of the senses, through which St. Thomas says all knowl­ edge must come. Plato and Aristotle both admit that a philosopher by no means derives his knowledge of divine things solely from his divinely inspired inner consciousness, but he has at the same time to refer to tradition, to which religious sanction is attached?8 Once we admit that mind may contribute to the objects it knows, that its capacity is in part, constructive then I know of no method, says Joad, by which we can assign limits to the exercise of this capacity. It seems, in other words, to be impossible to assert of any object that is known or of any part of the object known, that it does not owe its existence as object or as part to the fact of our knowing it. If this impossibility be admitted, there is no longer any basis for maintaining a realist view of the universe. Hence, to admit that the mind can do anything to what it knows, is to open the floodgates to the waters of Idealism?481 *84 81 C. A. Bennett, The Dilemma of Religious Knowledge, p. 109. 88 A. Eddington, Nature of the Physical World, pp. 337 and 321. 88 Willman, Geschichte des Idealismus, I, 411 and 453. 84 C. Joad, Philosophical Aspects of Modern Science, p. 262. CRITICAL APPRECIATION 83 This mystical consciousness, whether it knows the spiritual world as an independent, continuous or projected object of existence, is an irrational approach. It sets itself up as a special faculty for knowing in a different way from sense data, and reasoning in the world of sense and science. By what means our scientist learned to transcend his thoughts so as to become a perfect copy of Reality we cannot say, except it be by a wish fulfillment which stands higher to him than the powers of pure reasoning. Do different appearances of the one object require different faculties for knowing it? It would seem this is the conclusion of our Professor. Even when we have not one reality and two appearances of it, but different realities, must we have different ways of knowing them ? By the light which St. Thomas throws upon the problem of knowledge there is seen one way and only one. The problem as set forth by him is to be understood provided a differentiation of office is placed upon the intellect and its object. The transforming power which the intel­ lect has of raising the sensible to a degree of likeness itself, must be accounted for through the intermediary and assisting factor, the phantasm. To enable the sensible species to become the intelli­ gible form of the intellect, it has to undergo a real transformation and the active intellect must be turned upon the phantasms in order to illuminate them. This illumination of the sensible species is the true sense of abstraction. The knowledge process, beginning in unlikes and ending in likes, makes man an endowed creature capable of knowing the world outside him, and in the spiritual world a Creator, but without knowing the fullness of His nature. This one way of knowing will account for the real, the scientific and the spiritual world and the experience arising from each of them. There are other kinds of knowledge, according to St. Thomas, that are more perfect. The supreme ideal of intelligence would be intuition, per intuitum simplicis veritatis, a single, im­ mobile, comprehensive act which grasps unity in itself but which we cannot reach except by componendo et dividendo. The intuitive knowledge is the most complete and better form. Our knowledge begins with the senses which give us the singular, the individual, but it is impossible for the intellect to apprehend this directly, “impossibile est singulare db intellectu apprehendi directe” but 84 SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPROACHES TO GOD we obtain by the abstractive process the direct intellectual knowl­ edge of the universe, also an intuitive and individual intellective knowledge of one ego which, “ it is true, is not a complete intuition because we grasp neither the nature of our being nor its entire history.”25 It is God alone with His Divine Intellect that knows intuitively the individual.29 His intelligence is Pure Intuition— “ Perfectius (res) cognoscitur per Verbum quam per seipsam etiam inquantum, est talisP 27 Man does not possess as a special power an intellect by which he attains simply and absolutely and without discursive steps to the knowledge of truth. “Deus cognoscit res alias a sc, non solum in universali, sed etiam in singulari.”28 According to his nature he sees dimly, as it were, in a glass, but in the Beatific Vision, his Creator face to face. We cannot by reflec­ tion find a region or define a region into which the intellect cannot come. Intuition and intelligence are not different, they are both the mind in action. Intuition contains first principles, intellect applies these principles in the sensible and the intellectual orders that come before it. They are inseparable, they constitute a work­ ing pair.28 Simple truths are known by mental habits of under­ standing, reorganization of more complex truths by the habit of science, mental dexterity in handling principles and conclusions according to the spirit of wisdom; but there is developed such spontaneous, natural and quick final judgments, that reasoning seems to be eliminated and the whole process to be intuitive al­ though it is strictly intellectual. St. Thomas expresses this idea by saying: The power of intellect first of all apprehends something and this act is ïG Olgiati-Zybura, The Key to the Study of St. Thnm-ns, p. 120. ae C. lib. I, C; 65. aT De Verity q. 8, a. 16, ad 2. ae C. a.> lib. I, C. 65. “ Il n’y a aucune ‘ saisie immediate ’ de Dieu d’ordre naturel ; une con­ templation mystique (authentique) d’ordre naturel est une contradiction dans les termes; une experience authentique des choses divines, un contact senti avec Dieu, un pati divina, ne peut avoir lieu que dans l’ordre de la grace sanctifiante.” J. Maritain, “ Experience Mystique et Philosophie,” Kevue de Philosophie, 33 (1926), 594. 3® Intelligere autem dicit nihil aliud quam simplicem intuitium intellectus in id qùod sibi est praesens intelligibile. I d, 3 q. a. 4, a. 5. CRITICAL APPRECIATION 85 called understanding ; secondly, however, it takes that which it apprehende and orders it toward knowing or doing something else, and this is called intention·, whilst, however, it is engaged in the inquiry of that which it Intends, it is called excogitation ; but when it examines that which. it has thought out with other certain truths, it is said to know or to be wise, and thia is the function of phronesis (Φρόνησα) or sapientia; for it is the function of wisdom, to judge.30 Corresponding to these habits are the gifts of understanding, intel­ lectus ; knowledge, scientia ; and wisdom, sapientia, which St. Thomas uses in his spiritual system.31 Intuition cannot exist as a separate faculty as a sufficient way of knowing. It has three defects, says Hocking. It cannot define what it perceives ; for a definition makes use of a concept. It cannot communicate what it perceives; for language is made of the common coin of concepts. It cannot defend its truth nor distinguish true from false interpretation without the aid and criticism of the intellect.’8 As it was distrust of intellect that led Eddington to appeal to mystical consciousness as a distinct faculty, so it is the same intellect that gives us certainty that it can take care of the spiritual. In placing the scientific world between the physical and the spirit­ ual, the Professor made it a pure mental construction, an abstract form. This ia wrong for two reasons, because abstract forms are incommunicable and immovable and never permit of true knowl­ edge ; and secondly, because it is ridiculous to have abstract realms when we can get knowledge from the concrete world around us. We maintain that both experience and reason will lead to the discovery of Reality, that they go hand in hand as we experience so Summa, I, q. 79, a. 10, ad 3. s* Sed differentia hujus doni intellectus ad alia tria, scilicet sapientiam, scientiam et consilium, quae etiam ad vim cognosci tivam pertinent, non est adeo manifesta. Videtur autem quibusdam quod donum intellectus distinguatur a dono scientiae et consilii per hoc quod illa duo pertinent ad practicam cognitionem, donum autem intellectus ad speculativam; a dono vero sapientiae, quod etiam ad speculativam cognitionem pertinet, distinguitur in hoc quod ad sapientiam pertinet judicium, ad intellectum vero capucelas intellectus eorum quae proponuntur, seu penetratio ad intima eorum. Et secundum hoc supra numerum donorum assignavimus. Summa·, II-ΓΙ, q. 8, a. 6, c. MW. Hocking, Types of Philosophy, p. 211. 7 86 SOME MODEEN N ON-INTELLECTUAL APPEOACHES TO GOD self and non-self, the inner and the outer worlds. By conscious­ ness we understand nothing else but the intellect apprehending present internal facts and phenomena, in as much as they are the modifications of the self. The ego is the subject which receives, remembers, compares, combines or separates the ideas, volitions and feelings which make up individual life. By one concrete act both the facts and the phenomena are apprehended. Although consciousness is a condition of knowledge, it is not a universal criterion of truth, for it makes known only present internal facts, and says nothing about the nature of these facts, nor is it a cause or motive of certitude. An attempt to draw knowledge from a vague inner experience that took birth in the mind is abortive. A feeling of value is always consequent to the perception and knowledge of an object’s existence and can never be the cause. Peelings of value pass into a religious conviction, that these values are the shadowings of a perfect Divine Reality which is beyond’ imagination, but is all the heart’s desire. Had our scientist chosen Conscience a word closely akin in etymological construction to consciousness, he might have discovered his goal much more easily, for in the depths of personality can be found traces of God. He has not left himself without a witness in conscious life. “ 0 man,” says St. Augustine, “ go not abroad, retire into thyself for truth dwells in the inner man.” 8S Cardinal Newman in the Apologia tells us that he would be an atheist, a pantheist or a polytheist were it not for God’s voice speaking to him through conscience. Eddington, too, could have heard that small voice had he listened. Even as he paused in his reasoning when he abstracted his scientific knowledge from table No. 1, he had already a notion of being, of something existing together with a knowledge of first principles, the germ of knowl­ edge. Intellectus naturaliter cognoscit ens. He who admits that intellect can safely assert that it reaches the absolute when it says something exists; he who grants the objective validity of the notion of being, cannot consistently stop half way, but is inevitably drawn within the domain of Thomistic Metaphysics.*84 88 St. Augustine, De Trinitate, 65, 7. 84 Olgiati-Zybura, The Keg to the Study of St. Thomas, p. 45. CRITICAL APPRECIATION 87 Men like Eddington and Jeans have acquired a sensitiveness of mental vision, an attitude toward the spiritual, and because of this have penetrated more deeply into the secrets of the universe. Should they, however, see ideality as the theologian, they would concern themselves not only with facts but with divine causation, that lies outside the experience of natural phenomena by natural causes, they would find the spiritual world with a Divine Per­ sonality. The tendency today is for the sensation of an object rather than the object itself and for the structure or relation of things in mathematical symbols. Those men who have “gone mystic” have heard no little grumbling from others in the rank and file of science about false appearances created by their championing this kind of thought. The return of science to some sort of modern mysticism, would be essentially a step in man’s hard-won progress away from one of his most ancient bad habits, that of ascribing to the supernatural whatever he did not understand.85 Intellectual men seek to reach the real by abstraction, argumenta­ tion, and analysis; emotional men by feeling without intellectual direction ; wise men by knowing all things in their ultimate causes. They are the philosophers who control common sense, the domain to which belong God’s existence. Now common sense declares God to be an objective reality. This deduction is made from primary data apprehended by observation, and first principles apprehended by the intellect. This certainty of common sense is as well founded as the certainty of science. According to Mr. Eddington’s science God is mental stuff, therefore, he looks within himself to find God there. God is immanent, but there is only poverty about such reasoned thought of God as “ to think that God exists.” We must postulate a Personal God choosing to create an ordered universe, and we have the one and only condition that can explain what we see and know. To make room for the supernatural Being in our lives, the “ Western mind,” says Adams, " must turn again from the surface of being, where the intellect plays its calculating game with the 88 Scientific American, Science and Mysticism, Oct. 1933. k 88 SOME MODERN NON-INTELLECTUAL· APPROACHES TO GOD things of the world, to its innermost being where the things of the world are silent and God speaks. Only in the depths of such a merciless return to itself, when the whole being is pressed back into one part, and the cold clear light of eternal things play upon it, will it be able to realize the enormity of its questionable, dis­ honest and godless things. Only hearts shaken to their depths can find the deeper nature; only the fully contrite man is on the right road to God.” Be 4 X I ·· K. Adams, Christ and thé Western Mind, p. 40. CONCLUSION We have, then, in the course of this dissertation, traced the his­ torical background of mysticism, and found that there were periods when spirituality was intensely practical as well as theoretical when false mysticism exposed Christian society to great danger; when spiritual teaching, which departed from a firm theological foundation, was looked upon with suspicion. Then we witnessed the rise of Phenomenology, a mystical trend which entered modern philosophy. We have shown that there is now a tendency to reject externality and transcendence ; to think in terms of what is called experience, and that this recent tendency has been to characterize the non-intellectual approach to God as mystical. The three types which we selected for a critical appreciation are first, the infra-intellectual approach of religious experience repre­ sented by William James; second, the supra-intellectual approach of intuitionism, the proponents, Henri Bergson and Rudolph Otto; third, the supra-scientific approach of scientific mysticism with Arthur Eddington as chief exponent. William James has first of all made religion purely subjective. Mental activity as the basis of religious experience leads only to a revelation of something within man, not to the revelation of a God outside him; secondly, his theory of the subconscious was found not to be consistent with the psychological analysis of religious facts nor with his metaphysical hypothesis that makes religion arise from the consciousness of an identity between the personal Ego and the Ego more vast. James attempts to explain religious life by taking from it the very essence of religion, namely, the real relation that exists between man and God, and the logical relation that exists between God and man. Pseudo-mysticism, as a form of religious experience, was found to have in it a preponderance of feeling, and a separation of this element from the rational and moral elements of the personality to have a deleterious effect on the stability of practical religion. For the affective approach to God represents to some the height of religious fervor; while in reality it suggests the dethronement of reason and the extravagant visions of a disordered imagination. 89 90 SOME MODEBN NON-INTELLECTUAL APPEOACSES TO GOD To discover and guarantee the divine existence, Bergson thinks the intellect perverts reality, and therefore he calls in a separate faculty, intuition. He believes that the way into the profounder levels of life is not to be found by means of a physical, psychological or intellectual insight. A view of his theory forces the conclusions, first, that his confusions of intellect and reason, or even his assignment of intellect to a subordinate position of cutting into distinct parts the continuity of the universe, is a rejection of truth. Mere thought without its relation to reality gives the idea of God but not his objective existence; second, Bergson’s intuition undervalues the logical elements of the work of knowl­ edge. He makes for the intuitive knowledge an identification of object and subject according to the mode of being of the object; hence a confusion of mind with reality. With Professor Otto, the real essence of religion is the irrational. He assumes that a vast process of development was gone through before the first element of rational belief in a personal deity emerged. This is idle speculation with no attempt at proof. The mystic approach which the scientist makes to Reality is as non-intellectual as that of the intuitionist. “ Inner conviction/’ says Joad, “ reached by non-rational ones, must carry its guarantee of authenticity within itself.” Mystical consciousness, the unique way in which Professor Eddington has of knowing the spiritual, results in a conclusion that Reality lies beyond, that it is dis­ coverable by a knowledge akin to our knowledge of self. But such a conclusion has been arrived at from premises that are nothing more than creations of his own mind. He believes that by contem­ plating these ideas he can read into them what takes place in the world without. This mysticism cannot be a trustworthy ap­ proach to God. 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