Part 13 (1/2)
After thus indicating in general outline the essential features of this culminating teaching of ethical religion, it may be well to trace its historical development. It will be found to be, not an original speculation of our own teacher, but a precious belief held by elect souls in all ages to embody the truth of the relations between what is _called_ the Divine and the human. I say ”called” because this doctrine annihilates the distinction. As the electricity in the atmosphere may annihilate s.p.a.ce by enabling us to flash a thought instantaneously even to a world whose distance is measured in millions of miles, so does this sublime conception of the great Oneness shatter the foundations on which all _outside_ redemptions, priests, sacrifices, formalisms, rituals, sacraments, devilry, h.e.l.l fire, and the rest repose, by showing every man that he is his own priest and sacrificer. No anointing or ordering can make him more than he is in himself (not through Christ or any man), the true-born son of G.o.d, one in nature with whatsoever is Highest in existence. Boldly does Emerson fling out his challenge--
Draw it thou canst the mystic line, Rightly severing his from thine, Which is human, which Divine.
We cannot. In our innermost selves we are Divine. We may say with Emerson, on the heights of the holy mount, when we have by long thought realised the truth, and by living the life which is alone worthy of such a conception, ”I the imperfect adore my own Perfect”. We seek to pray, we would fain wors.h.i.+p. Then look no more into the skies; there is nought but vapour there and the silent worlds that s.h.i.+ne eternally.
Look not in the churches and the temples, for they are made by men's hands, empty of the Divine Presence as a mausoleum is of life. Let us look into ourselves for the true Shekinah, the true manifestation of the Divine, nay, the truly Divine is there. The Good in man, that is G.o.d; that alone is worthy of our adoration and our love.
I do not think it can be questioned that this is a n.o.ble conception of man and G.o.d and their mutual relations, and as far as one can judge of the trend of modern thought, it would appear that only on some such grounds is the intelligence of the age prepared to recognise theism as a possible belief. The conception of the Deity as a Being anterior to creation in existence, eternally dissevered from it in being, an external object, so to speak, of admiration, reverence and fear, seems incomprehensible to the modern mind. It certainly did to the whole idealist school of Germany, to such thinkers as Hegel, Sch.e.l.ling and Fichte, to deeply religious spirits like Coleridge and Wordsworth, to Emerson in America, and Carlyle in England. The ”immeasurable clergyman” [2] view of the Deity, seated somewhere in the skies, and listening all day and night to the Hallelujah Chorus, is now wholly and absolutely impossible outside little Bethel and Bibliolatry.
But the truth must be confessed that in refusing to acknowledge what one may call an outside deity, an ”absentee G.o.d,” who pays periodical visits to his creation and acts only at the instant request of prayer, we are reverting to religious ideals that had their home in the land of the Indus and the Ganges, a thousand years before Christianity was heard of. It is the knowledge of this fact that fills one with stupefaction when we think of Exeter Hall and the type of Christian missioner who goes out to a.s.sail the venerable beliefs of Hindooism, when our cultivated men, our Emersons, Coleridges, Carlyles and Wordsworths, are positively reverting to the ideals of ancient India.
The doctrine of the Over-soul, essentially shared in by all men; the belief that man is not in name, but in reality, not through the vicarious intercessions of another, but by his own nature, a Divine son, is in essence a form of Hindoo thought, and the recent translations of their sacred books enable us to read that truth there.
The Jewish conception of the Deity was utterly opposed to this. In that theology the Supreme Being was ever transcendent, and probably Jesus, a son of Israel, was not greatly removed from this belief.
”Salvation is of the Jews,” he proclaimed. Certainly there are no indications in the three earlier gospels of any such teaching as that of Emerson, though it is found, in suggestion at least, in the fourth gospel. Christ is made to say in one of those lengthy speeches at the close of the book, ”If any man will keep my words, I will come to him and my Father will come to him, and we will take up our abode with him;” and again, ”I and the Father are one”. Here is a suggestion, faint enough, of the teaching that the Divine is present in the hearts of the just, of the ethically good, but there is a world of difference between that and the essential Divinity of every human soul, because part of the Over-soul, which is one in all men. No; Jesus was a son of Israel, and his ideals were those of his race. The few words quoted from the fourth gospel are in the spirit of the larger belief, but they are Neo-Platonic in their origin, as is the whole Johannine gospel, and cannot be taken as fairly representing the mind of the greatest of the Jewish seers. If we would see the Eastern teaching in the West, we must search, not the Old or New Testament, but the pages of the Alexandrian School, of Philo, and above all, of Plotinus, who believed that the supreme truths were learnt, not by study, nor by revelation from without, but in an ecstasy of the soul, losing itself in the contemplation of the Divine--in the ”flight of the alone to the Alone”.
Now, that which Plotinus considered an extraordinary occurrence, an experience perhaps only possible to elect spirits, men at length began to look upon as the truth of the normal relations between their Maker and themselves. Of course, so stupendous a change took centuries in evolution, and, naturally, the Christian Church and its clergymen gave it no sort of encouragement. It would never do to preach abroad that every man was his own priest, and so we wade through the whole of mediaevalism without finding any recognition of the great teaching. It is only when we are in the comparatively modern epoch of the fourteenth century that we find it in Eckhart, the German mystic. ”There is,” he writes, ”something in the soul which is above the soul. . . . It is absolute and free from all names and forms, as G.o.d is free and absolute in himself. It is higher than knowledge, higher than love, for in these there is distinction. . . . I have called it a power, sometimes a light. . . . This light is satisfied only with the super-essential essence.” It is ever entering ”into that unity where no man dwelleth,”
where there are no distinctions, ”neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost”.
It is the plain of the Great Silence, the centre of the immovable peace, an Inner Sea whose still waters are nevertheless bounded by no sh.o.r.es. It is the sense, rather it is the reality, of the Infinite in man, that of which all seers have dreamed under many diverse forms. I take it to be the Nirvana of Buddha, the eternal silence that follows when the last of the avenues of sense has been pa.s.sed, and the soul enters at length into the possession of itself, that is, into the recognition of its infinitude. It is what Jesus means when he speaks of the faithful ones--they who have endured even to the end--entering ”into the joy of their Lord”. It is the apostle's unspeakable peace, ”the peace of G.o.d, which pa.s.seth all understanding”.
Another of the school of Eckhart, Tauler, gives his own experience, and it is not dissimilar. He finds his soul ”so grounded in G.o.d that it is dissolved in the inmost of the Divine nature”. No man, he says, can distinguish between the suns.h.i.+ne and the air. How much less the light of the created and the uncreated Spirit! We are lost in the abyss which is our source. ”From the place whence the rivers of waters go forth, thither do they return.” [3] Those words always haunt one with a sense of the mysterious. They seem to say that the beginning and the end of all are the same--the abyss of the Infinite. Emerson believes that man came forth thence, is there now, and abides there for ever.
And surely Tennyson's lines must occur to the memory of every one:--
When that which drew from out the boundless deep, Turns again home.
To begin to think at all, is to be brought, at length, to thoughts such as these--the thought of the Inner Sea, on whose still and boundless waters all is silence, peace, G.o.d.
After two centuries the teaching reappears, not in the pages of professional divines, or the denizens of the cloister, but in the philosophy of modern Germany. Sch.e.l.ling carries it still farther by p.r.o.nouncing that there is but one reason, one mind, the human and the Divine being identical. The lines of Paracelsus are inevitably suggested:--
O G.o.d, Thou art Mind!
Crush not my mind, O G.o.d!