Varieties of Religious Experience: a study in Human Nature, Centenary Edition
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MYSTICISM 329
force. If we acknowledge it, it is for “suggestive,” not for logical reasons: we follow the majority because to do so suits our life. But even this presumption from the unanimity of mystics is far from being strong. In characterizing mystic states as pantheistic, optimistic, etc., I am afraid I over-simplified the truth. I did so for expository reasons, and to keep the closer to the classic mystical tradition. The classic religious mysticism, it now must be confessed, is only a “privileged case.” It is an extract, kept true to type by the selection of the fittest specimens and their preservation in “schools.” It is carved out from a much larger mass; and if we take the larger mass as seriously as religious mysticism has historically taken itself, we find that the supposed unanimity largely disappears. To begin with, even religious mysticism itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and makes schools, is much less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both ascetic and antinomianly self-indulgent within the Christian church. 1 It is dualistic in Sankhya, and monistic in Vedanta philosophy. I called it pantheistic; but the great Spanish mystics axe anything but pantheists. They are with few exceptions non-metaphysical minds, for whom “the category of personality” is absolute. The “union” of man with God is for them much more like an occasional miracle than like an original identity. 2 How different again, apart from the happiness common to all, is the mysticism of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard Jefferies, and other naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively Christian sort. 3 The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, pro- vided only they can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood. We have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in favor of any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism, or in the absolute monistic identity, or in the absolute goodness, of the world. It is only relatively in favor of all these 1 R
, in the work which Maeterlinck has translated, has a chapter against the antinomianism of disciples. H. D ELACROIX ’ S book (Essai our le mysticisme spéculatif en Allemagne an XIVme Siècle, Paris, 1900) is full of antinomian material. Compare also A. J UNDT
: Les Amis de Dieu an XIVme, Siècle, Thèse de Strasbourg, 1879. 2 Compare P AUL R OUSSELOT : Les Mystiques Espagnols, Paris, 1869, ch. xii. 3 See C ARPENTER ’ S Towards Democracy, especially the latter parts, and J EFFERIES
’ S wonder- ful and splendid mystic rhapsody, The Story of my Heart. 330THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE things — it passes out of common human consciousness in the direction in which they lie. So much for religious mysticism proper. But more remains to be told, for religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half has no accumulated traditions except those which the text-books on insanity supply. Open any one of these, and you will find abundant cases in which “mystical ideas” are cited as character- istic symptoms of enfeebled or deluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they sometimes call it, we may have a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extra- neous powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. It is evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or transmarginal region of which science is begin- ning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known. That region contains every kind of matter: “seraph and snake” abide there side by side. To come from thence is no infallible credential. What comes must be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world of sense. Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods, so long as we are not mystics ourselves. Once more, then, I repeat that non-mystics are under no obliga- tion to acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred on them by their intrinsic nature. 1 1
AX N ORDAU ” seeks to undermine all mysticism by exposing the weakness of the lower kinds. Mysticism for him means any sudden perception of hidden significance in things. He explains such perception by the abundant uncompleted associations which experiences may arouse in a degenerate brain. These give to him who has the experience a vague and vast sense of its leading further, yet they awaken no definite or useful consequent in his thought. The explanation is a plausible one for certain sorts of feeling of significance; and other alienists (W ERNICKE
, for example, in his Grundriss der Psychiatric, Theil ii., Leipzig, 1896) have explained “paranoiac” conditions by a laming of the association-organ. But the higher mystical flights, with their positiveness and abruptness, are surely products of no such merely negative condition. It seems far more reasonable to ascribe them to inroads from the subconscious life, of the cerebral activity correlative to which we as yet know nothing. Yüklə 1,7 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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