The Idea of the Holy  

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Das Heilige - Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (The Holy - On the Irrational in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational), published first in 1917, is a text by Rudolf Otto. The title is usually abbreviated as Das Heilige, in English The Idea of the Holy. Mircea Eliade used the concepts from The Idea of the Holy as the starting point for his own 1957 book, The Sacred and the Profane.

It is one of the most successful German theological books of the 20th century, has never gone out of print, and is now available in about 20 languages. The book defines the concept of the holy as that which is numinous. Otto explained the numinous as a "non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self". He coined this new term based on the Latin numen (deity). This expression is etymologically unrelated to Immanuel Kant's noumenon, a Greek term referring to an unknowable reality underlying all things. The numinous is a mystery (Latin mysterium) that is both terrifying (tremendum) and fascinating (fascinans) at the same time. It also sets a paradigm for the study of religion that focuses on the need to realize the religious as a non-reducible, original category in its own right. This paradigm was under much attack between approximately 1950 and 1990 but has made a strong comeback since then, after its phenomenological aspects have become more apparent, and written about by Karl Rahner's presentation of man as a being of transcendence.

Full text[1]

THE

IDEA OF THE HOLY

AN INQUIRY

INTO THE NON-RATIONAL FACTOR IN THE IDEA

OF THE DIVINE AND ITS RELATION TO

THE RATIONAL

A

A

BY

RUDOLF OTTO

PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF SIARBl RO

TRANSLATED BY JOHN W. HARVEY

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT ARMSTRONG COLLEGE X EWCAST1.E-ON-TYN E

REVISED WITH ADDITIONS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD

3 / <- ^

First Impression

November 1923

Second

December 1924

Third

Revised October 1925

Fourth

November 1926

Fifth

Revised February 1929

Sixth

May 1931

Reprinted in The Oxford Bookshelf May 193G

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

DEDICATED TO THEODOB VON HAKING

Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil. Wie auch die Welt ihm das Gefiihl verteuere, Ergriffen fiihlt er tief das Ungeheuere.

CONTENTS

PAGE

FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR .... vii

TRANSLATOR S PREFACE ix

TRANSLATOR S NOTE TO THE THIRD IMPRESSION . xx

CHAP.

I. THE RATIONAL AND THE NON-RATIONAL . 1

II. NtJMEN AND THE NUMINOUS ... 5

III. THE ELEMENTS IN THE NUMINOUS

Creature-Feeling 8

IV. MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM :

THE ANALYSIS OF TREMENDUM . . . 12

1. The Element of Awefulness . . 13

2. The Element of Overpoweringness . 20

3. The Element of Energy or Urgency . 23 V. THE ANALYSIS OF MYSTERIUM :

4. The Wholly Other .... 25 VI. 5. THE ELEMENT OF FASCINATION . . 31

VII. ANALOGIES AND ASSOCIATED FEELINGS . . 42

The Law of the Association of Feelings 43

O

Schematization 46

VIII. THE HOLY AS A CATEGORY OF VALUE :

Sin and Atonement 52

IX. MEANS OF EXPRESSION OF THE NUMINOUS:

1. Direct Means 62

2. Indirect Means ..... 64

3. Means by which the Numinous is ex

pressed in Art 68

X. THE NUMINOUS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT . 74

XI. THE NUMINOUS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT . 85

XII. THE NUMINOUS IN LUTHER .... 97

XIII. THE Two PROCESSES OF DEVELOPMENT . . 113

XIV. THE HOLY AS AN A PHI OKI CATEGORY. PART I 116 XV. ITS EARLIEST MANIFESTATIONS . . . 121

XVI. THE CRUDER PHASES . 136

vi CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

XVII. THE HOLY AS AN A PRIORI CATEGORY. PART II 140 XVIII. THE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE HOLY AND

THE FACULTY OF DIVINATION . . 147

XIX. DIVINATION IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY . 159

XX. DIVINATION IN CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY . . 166 XXI. HISTORY AND THE A PRIORI IN BELIGION :

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION . . .179

APPENDIXES :

I. Chrysostom on the Inconceivable in God . 183

II. The Numinous in Poetry, Hymn, and Liturgy 191

III. Original Numinous Sounds .... 194

IV. Spirit and * Soul as Numinous Entities . 198 V. The Supra-Personal in the Numinous . . 201

VI. The Mystical Element in Luther s Conception

of Faith 209

VII. Signs Following 212

VIII. Silent Worship ... 216

IX. A Numinous Experience of John Ruskin . 221

X. The Expression of the Numinous in English 222 XI. The Mysterlum Tremendum in Robertson and

Watts 226

XII. The Resurrection as a Spiritual Experience . 228 XIII. Religious Essays, A Supplement to The Idea of

the Holy (O.U.P.) : table of contents . . 235

INDEX 237

FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR

IN this book I have ventured to write of that which may be called non-rational or supra-rational in the depths of the divine nature. I do not thereby want to promote in any way the tendency of our time towards an extravagant and fantastic irrationalism , but rather to join issue with it in its morbid form. The irrational is to-day a favourite theme of all who are too lazy to think or too ready to evade the arduous duty of clarifying their ideas and grounding their convictions on a basis of coherent thought. This book, recognizing the profound import of the non-rational for meta- physic, makes a serious attempt to analyse all the more exactly the feeling which remains where the concept fails, and to introduce a terminology which is not any the more loose or indeterminate for having necessarily to make use of symbols.

Before I ventured upon this field of inquiry I spent many years of study upon the rational aspect of that supreme Reality we call God , and the results of my work are contained in my books, Naturalietische und religiose Welt- antacid (Eng. Tr. Naturalism and Religion , London, 1907), and Die Kant-friesisclie Religions-Philosophic. And I feel that no one ought to concern himself with the Numen ineflabile who has not already devoted assiduous and serious study to the Ratio aeterna .

This foreword gives me a very welcome opportunity to express my thanks to the translator for his care, his remark able delicacy of interpretation, and for the valuable supple mentary pages he has added. An English critic has said that the translation is much better than the original ; and to this I have nothing to object.

RUDOLF OTTO.

MABBUBQ.

TEANSLATOR S PREFACE

THIS translation of Dr. Rudolf Otto s Das Heiliye has been made from the ninth German edition, but certain passages, mostly additions to the book in its first form, have been omitted with the concurrence of the author. The chief of these are certain of the appendixes, especially a long one upon Myth and Religion in Wundt s Volkerpsycltologie , and some citations in the text from German and other hymns and liturgies which, besides defying adequate translation, appeared to be of less interest to the English than to the German reader. On the other hand, I would refer the English reader

o

to the brief appendix (No. X) that I have ventured to add, in which I have noted some points relevant to the subject discussed in the book suggested by the usage of English words, and added one or two illustrative passages from English writers.

My warmest thanks are due to the author, not only for the many corrections he has made in the text of the translation, the whole of which he read in manuscript, but more for his generous and patient encouragement, without which it would have been neither undertaken nor completed. My best thanks are also due to the readers of the Oxford University Press for many helpful suggestions and corrections in my English text.

• * *

In the six years since its first publication in 1917, Das lleilifje has already passed through ten editions. At a time when circumstances are as adverse to writers and purchasers of serious books as they have been for the last few years in Germany, this fact would alone suggest that the author s work has met a genuine need in his own land ; and any one who has followed the movement of religious thought abroad during this period is aware that the success of his book is much more

x TRANSLATOR S PREFACE

than a mere vogue, and that it is exerting no little influence upon religious thought in Germany and North Europe at the present time. It may be of interest to consider briefly where its chief significance may be found from the point of view of the English reader.

One of the most unmistakable points of contrast between the thought of to-day and that of the later nineteenth century is the increased comprehensiveness and adequacy with which the study of religion is being pursued. Not only has the older, harder, more dogmatic tone on all sides given place to one more tolerant and sympathetic, but the study of religion has come to claim a much wider reference and to draw material from far more diverse sources than would at one time have been recognized ; and the frontiers of the subject have been enormously extended in consequence. Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, and the history and comparative study of religious forms and institutions, if they have at once modified and com plicated the problems of religious inquiry, have definitely increased the range of observations likely to throw light upon them.

If we consider only the English-speaking countries, a future generation may perhaps judge that no writer did more to introduce or render more effective this new spirit in the study of religion than William James in his famous Gifford lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience, published just over twenty years ago (1902). In any case the title of that book might be taken as giving the chief characteristics of that spirit, the preoccupation with religion in all its manifold forms as a specific experience, rather than as either the vehicle of a system of dogma or metaphysics on the one hand or as simply the emotional heightening of morality on the other. This latter view is well represented by Matthew Arnold, himself in many respects a very typical child of his age; and Arnold s well- known phrase that the true meaning of religion is " morality touched by emotion " is a fair expression of the limita-

TRANSLATOR S PREFACE xi

tions and bias of the nineteenth-century mind. It suggests the fundamentally rational temper ( rational even when attacking rationalism ) of an age interested almost wholly in practice and conduct, which, rightly reacting against views tending to identify religion with creed and dogma, was content to correct them by one that practically reduced it to an ethic. It has been justly noted l that such an account leaves un answered the question, which to-day so obviously needs asking and wliich is in part the theme of this book, what sort of feelings or emotions it is by which morality is enkindled into religion.

For to-day this almost purely rational and ethical approach to the study of religion has been abandoned. Modern in quiries into the nature of religious experience have indeed tended to overweight the opposite scale. Feeling has, perhaps, something more than come into its own. Instinct, emotion, intuition, the more obscure and the more subjective aspects of religious experience it is these that are to-day the main centre of interest. The vogue (perhaps now already declining) of M. Bergson s philosophy, in which instinct and intuition are put in fundamental contrast to, if not actually opposed to, rationality and the needs of practical life, has been one, but only one, of the influences making in this direction. Equally significant is the quite modern interest in Mysticism, which owes so much to the admirable works of such writers as Dean Inge, Miss Evelyn Underbill, and Baron von Hiigel in this country, and Professor Rufus M. Jones in America. In Germany, where the popular interest in Mysticism is even more recent than it is with us, the same tendency is marked by a special leaning towards the study of oriental, and especially of Indian, religions. There, as here, a constant stream of books indicates how widely held is the conviction that there are essential elements in religion which are not to be comprised in

1 C. C. J. Webb, Problems in the Delations of God and Man (1911),

p. 4.

xii TRANSLATOR S PREFACE

any systematically thought-out fabric of ideas, nor wholly exhausted in practice and conduct elements which, if they admit of expression at all, can find it only in symbolism and imagery.

If, as one suspects, there are already signs of a new reaction against the possible over-emphasis of what may be called, for want of a better single term, the elements of feeling in religion, such a movement of criticism need not be regretted. We may note at any rate two points in which it may prove salutary.

In the first place, it has been urged, not altogether unjustly, that some modern students of religion, and especially of religion in its mystical forms, have been misled by their interest in the experiences of exceptional men into a distorted account of religion as a whole. They do not see the wood for the trees ; or, more accurately, they fail to get a true view of the common nature of the trees in their structure and growth through an undue preoccupation with certain particularly striking examples. It is easy (so it may be urged) to pursue the varieties so far as to neglect the identities of religious expe rience, those fundamental elements which distinguish it as religious from experience of other kinds. Mystical experience is surely after all something exceptional. Religion is some thing wider than Mysticism. Yet sometimes one gets the impression that the non-mystic is only rather grudgingly and half-heartedly admitted to have any first-hand genuine religious experience at all. The abnormal is often the more interesting, the more fascinating study, but it ought not on that account to be allowed to usurp the place of the normal ; and this, it may be suggested, is one mistake to which the modern comprehensive, fertile, and far-casting study of religion is prone.

This is one possible point of criticism. A second would emphasize the danger of subjectivism. It is possible to devote our attention to religious experience in a sense which would

TRANSLATOR S PREFACE xiii

almost leave out of account the object of which it is an experience. We may so concentrate upon the feeling , that the objective cause of it may fall altogether out of sight. Is religious experience essentially just a state of mind, a feeling, whether of oppression or of exaltation, a sense of sin or an assurance of salvation ; or is it not rather our apprehension of the divine , meaning by that term at least something independent of the mental and emotional state of the moment of experience 1 In short, it is suggested that by a one-sided over-emphasis of the subjective aspect of it the matter of our study may cease to be religion and come to be merely 1 religiosity , to employ a word which, commoner in German than in English, might well be better acclimatized in our language.

The enlarged and emancipated study of religion character istic of to-day has sometimes given just ground for these two criticisms. It has not always avoided exaggerating the exceptional experience at the expense of the normal ; and it has perhaps not infrequently allowed itself to become so far absorbed in the subjective states of mind manifested in religious experience as to ignore or half ignore the objective significance of them.

It is not least in reference to these two points that the value of Dr. Otto s volume lies. He is concerned tg^gxamine the nature of those elements in the religious experience which lie outside and beyond the scope of reason which cannot be comprised in ethical or rational conceptions, but which none the less as feelings cannot be disregarded by any honest inquiry. And his argument shows in the first place that in all the forms which religious experience may assume and has as sumed, so far as these can be re-interpreted in polytheistic and monotheistic cults, non-mystical and mystical worship alike- certain basic moments of feeling (again a word of which our language might well make fuller use) are always found to recur. All genuine religion exhibits these characteristic

xiv TRANSLATOR S PREFACE

reactions in consciousness. They are seen emerging as religion itself emerges, and we are shown their antecedents in the crude and savage stages of pre-religion , in magic and in the world of primitive superstition. For this inquiry the author not only draws upon his long familiarity with the theories of the anthropologists and the literature of Naturalism, 1 but also lays under contribution his great erudition in the history of religious development in all its varieties. He has ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes . The remote Mosaic and pre- Mosaic religion of Israel, the Hebrew prophets, and modern Judaism; the religions of Greece and Rome and Islam, of China and of India; the New Testament, the Fathers, the medieval mystics, the reformers, and modern Protestantism: the author calls them all as witnesses. He makes particularly effective use of examples drawn from India through his familiarity with Sanskrit and the great classics of Hinduism. His argument, while laying due stress on the essential differences between religions, emphasizes and establishes their no less fundamental kinship on the side of feeling; and Mysticism, especially, falls into its proper place as neither a morbid freak nor the sole true fruit of religion, but as differ ing from other forms of religious experience not so much in its essential nature as in the degree in which it stresses and overstresses certain common elements shared with them.

But of still more significance is the author s argument in relation to the second of the two points already mentioned the question of subjectivism. Here we are shown that the religious feeling properly involves a unique kind of appre hension, sui generis, not to be reduced to ordinary intellectual or rational knowing with its terminology of notions and concepts, and yet and this is the paradox of the matter itself a genuine knowing , the growing awareness of an object,

1 His book, Natunilistische und religiose Weltansicht (The Naturalistic and the Religious View of the World), has been translated into English under the title Naturalism and Religion, 1907.

TRANSLATOR S PREFACE xv

deity. All the feelings and emotions that recur the same through all their diversities of manifestation in different religions are shown to be just the reflection in human feeling of this awareness, as it changes and grows richer and more unmistakable ; a response, so to speak, to the impact upon the human mind of the divine , as it reveals itself whether obscurely or clearly. The primary fact is the confronta tion of the human mind with a Something, whose character is only gradually learned, but which is from the first felt as a transcendent presence, the beyond , even where it is also felt as the within man. Hence the author shows that Schleiermacher, who did so much to emphasize the function of

• feeling in religion, is wrong in starting his account with the

sense of absolute dependence , for that is to start from what is after all secondary and derivative, the reflection in self- feeling of this felt presence of the divine.

The feeling element in religion involves, then, a genuine knowing or awareness, though, in contrast to that knowing which can express itself in concepts, it may be termed non- rational . The feeling of the * uncanny , the thrill of awe or reverence, the sense of dependence, of impotence, or of nothing ness, or again the feelings of religious rapture and exaltation, all these are attempted designations of the mental states which attend the awareness of certain aspects of the divine . In some religions one may be more prominent and in some another ; and different individuals will vary widely in their susceptibility to these feelings, or, in Dr. Otto s terminology, in the degree and character of their faculty of divination . But all of these feelings have a necessary and some a per manent place in the developing recognition of the divine nature. The particular aspect of it, glimpsed, as it were, in each of them, he tries to isolate the better by having recourse to a Latin terminology : but such terms as mysterium , maiestas , fascinans , are confessedly, like fear , awe , love , in their religious application, not so much precise and

xvi TRANSLATOR S PREFACE

definable concepts as what he calls ideograms , hinting at meanings which elude exact formulation.

A word of explanation and defence (for the English reader does not take kindly to fresh word-coinages) may be offered in respect to the chief new word introduced by the author. Dr. Otto is maintaining the autonomy and uniqueness of a particular sort of knowing . Just as the recognition and appreciation of beauty cannot be reduced to that of moral goodness, just as the beautiful and the good are, in the philosopher s phrase, categories in their own right, so, too, it is with religion. There, too, we have to deal with a peculiar and irreducible kind of apprehension we employ or apply a distinct category . The natural term for this would be that which stands in the title of this book : the holy , or else the sacred . But the meaning of these words is at once too lofty and too narrow. Holiness , sanctity , are words which are charged with ethical import. 1 A large part, perhaps the chief part, of their meaning is moral. This, as the author maintains, is necessarily the case, inasmuch as, the better the character of deity and the divine becomes known, the more intimately it absorbs within itself all the highest moral and rational attributes. But though, in our final experience of God s Holiness , perfect goodness has an absolutely essential and central place, yet there remains a something beyond. Holiness or sanctity has an element in it independent of the category of the good. And to this the author gives the name of the numinous element, from the Latin numen, the most general Latin word for supernatural divine power. Numinous feeling is, then, just this unique apprehension of a Something, whose character may at first seem to have little connexion with our ordinary moral terms, but which later becomes charged with the highest and deepest moral significance. And the holy will be, in Dr. Otto s language, a complex category of the numinous and the moral , or, in

1 See, further, Appendix X.

TRANSLATOR S PREFACE xvii

one of his favourite metaphors, a fabric in which we have the non-rational numinous experience as the woof and the rational and ethical as the warp.

• Numinous and Numen will, then, be words which bear

no moral import, but which stand for the specific non-rational religious apprehension and its object, at all its levels, from the first dim stirrings where religion can hardly yet be said to exist to the most exalted forms of spiritual experience. And then we can keep the words holy and sacred , holiness and 1 sanctity , to their more usual meaning.

Dr. Otto is concerned in this volume primarily to establish the autonomy and uniqueness of this numinous experience to show its essential place in religion and its significance in religious development. But so far from claiming that this is all, that, for example, mystic intuition* can dispense with the knowledge that comes through human reason and moral experience, he asserts emphatically the contrary. And in his later chapters he makes it clear that for him the supremacy of Christianity over all other religions lies in the unique degree in which (as he holds) in Christianity the numinous elements, such as the sense of awe and reverence before infinite mystery and infinite majesty, are yet combined and made one with the rational elements, assuring us that God is an all-righteous, all-provident, and all-loving Person, with whom a man may enter into the most intimate relationship.

What is maintained in this book is, in fact, that religion is something not only natural but also, in the strict sense of the word, paradoxical. It is a real knowledge of, and real per sonal communion with, a Being whose nature is yet above knowledge and transcends personality. This apparent con tradiction cannot be evaded by concentrating upon one aspect of it and ignoring the other, without doing a real injury to religion. It must be faced directly in the experience of worship, and there, and only there, it ceases to be a contra diction and becomes a harmony. And many who are grateful

xviii TRANSLATOR S PREFACE

to Dr. Otto for his clear exposition of the unity of Religion through all the diversity of religions, and for his emphasis upon the objective significance of religious feeling, will be per haps still more grateful to him for insisting that both elements in the harmony must be preserved.

For in this, too, the argument of this book has something to offer to the thought of to-day. It would hardly be denied that the dominant movement of thought in this nearly completed first quarter of the twentieth century has been what has been called humanistic , and what might better be termed

• anthropocentric . In religion, as in other domains, we have

learned to view things, in the phrase of a brilliant exponent of this way of thinking, 1 from the human end ; man, an ideal humanity, has come to be increasingly our measure. We see one example of this in such a popular religious philosophy as that of Mr. H. G. Wells, with its virtual apotheosis of the spirit of striving mankind and the sharp antagonism it introduces between the God in man and the Veiled Being, the mysterious Power in Nature. It is only the former who has any religious significance for Mr. Wells. In such cases a standard less merely ethical may be employed than that which the moralistic tendency of the nineteenth century demanded, but it is far more a purely human standard. We need not repeat the taunt of the later nineteenth-century agnosticism which finds nothing in the God of traditional orthodoxy but man s giant shadow, hailed divine . 2 To say that religious thought to-day is too anthropocentric does not mean that it is thus crudely anthropomorphic. But it does suggest that by undue preoccupation with the human and the personal we may blind ourselves to that transcendent and supra-personal character of the deity which cannot be surrendered without a real loss to religion.

Is it possible that once more in this too anthropocentric

1 Dr. L. P. Jacks.

3 Sir William Watson, The Unknown God.

TRANSLATOR S PREFACE xix

trend in religious thought the tide is on the turn, and that men are beginning to feel it insufficient to think of God in wellnigh exclusively human terms? One suspects that it may be so, and that at any rate a religion which sets God as Person and Friend of Man at scarcely disguised enmity with the inscrutable power and mysterious tremendousness of nature will not for long satisfy the demands of the soul. And those who think thus will value all the more an exposition which recalls us, as this volume does, to the unsearchable otherness as well as to the human likeness of deity.

• * *

In this book there are certain features that may be puzzling and unfamiliar to some readers. Those unaccustomed to such terms may find words like category , a priori , schematize , repellent to them. To the general reader the quasi-Kantian treatment of this matter or that may be a stumbling-block, and to the mystic perhaps foolishness. Again, some may find the argument too much of an analysis ; others, too much of an apologetic. To some it may seem too logical ; to others, too theological. But it is good that our incurable propensity to think in compartments, to keep, if we admit them at all, our philosophy and theology strangers, should receive a shock now and then. And, for the rest, it is surely good that a book upon religion should be written by a man who feels that religion stands at the very centre and basis of life that the divine in man is, in Plato s phrase, the head and the root of him and who can make no pretence of viewing his own religion from without, as though it meant no more to him than any other. For though in so many departments in life it is the detached and unprejudiced observer who can best pronounce judgement, in this one the paradox must hold that he who professes to stand outside religion and view all the religions of the world in impartial detachment will never wholly under stand any one of them.

J. W. 11.

March 1023.

TRANSLATOR S NOTE TO THE THIRD IMPRESSION

I HAVE been glad of the opportunity of revision afforded by the gratifying welcome which English readers have given to this book. The difficulty of stereotype has unfortunately prevented me from removing a great many minor typographical irregularities, but I have been able to correct a number of inaccuracies in the translation. Had it been possible I should have wished further to substitute submerged (submergence) for abased (abasement) on pp. 10, 18, 20, 36, 52, 92, and to give exuberant (exuberance) as an alternative for over- abound ing (over-aboundingness) on pp. 37, 39, 88, 107. The reader is requested to make these alterations for himself.

The appendixes of the later editions of Das Hcilige, the con tinual multiplication of which had threatened to overwhelm the original text, have now been published with additional matter in a separate volume entitled Aufsatze das Numinose betreffend (Essays concerning the Numinous), and a translation of the table of contents of this work has been inserted on p. 235, in order that the reader may at least have an inkling in what directions TJte Idea of the Holy has been supplemented by these later essays. One of these, TJie Eesurrection as a Spiritual Experience, has been added (slightly curtailed) to this edition as Appendix XII, so that about two-fifths of the Aufsiitze are now included in the present translation. I may add that the eleventh German edition of Das Heilige contains a good deal of additional matter, mostly citations from various authors, which as they illustrate rather than amplify the author s argument, it has not been judged worth while to include in this impression.

May 1925. J. W. H.

TRANSLATOR S NOTE TO THE FIFTH IMPRESSION

ADDITIONS have been made in this edition at the close of chapters VIII and IX (pp. 61 and 69) giving the substance of paragraphs added in the fourteenth German edition, from which the two English citations forming the new Appendix XI have also been taken.

September 1928. J. W. H.

CHAPTER I THE RATIONAL AND THE NON-RATIONAL

IT is essential to every theistic conception of God, and most of all to the Christian, that it designates and precisely characterizes Deity by the attributes Spirit, Reason, Purpose, Good Will, Supreme Power, Unity, Selfhood. The nature of God is thus thought of by analogy with our human nature of reason and personality ; only, whereas in ourselves we are aware of this as qualified by restriction and limitation, as applied to God the attributes we use are completed , i.e. thought as absolute and unqualified. Now all these attributes constitute clear and definite concepts: they can be grasped by the intellect; they can be analysed by thought; they even admit of definition. An object that can thus be thought con ceptually may be termed rational. The nature of deity described in the attributes above mentioned is, then, a rational nature ; and a religion which recognizes and maintains such a view of God is in so far a rational religion. Only on such terms is Belief possible in contrast to mere feeling. And of Christianity at least it is false that feeling is all, the name but sound and smoke ] ; where name stands for conception or thought. Rather we count this the very mark and criterion of a religion s high rank and superior value that it should have no lack of conceptions about God; that it should admit knowledge the knowledge that comes by faith of the transcendent in terms of conceptual thought, whether those already mentioned or others which continue and develop them. Christianity not only possesses such conceptions but possesses them in unique clarity and abundance, and this is, though not the sole or even the chief, yet a very real sign of its superiority over religions of other forms and at other levels. This must be asserted at the outset and with the most positive emphasis.

1 Goethe, Faust. B

2 THE RATIONAL AND THE NON-RATIONAL

But, when this is granted, we have to be on our guard against an error which would lead to a wrong and one-sided interpretation of religion. This is the view that the essence of deity can be given completely and exhaustively in sucli 1 rational attributions as have been referred to above and in others like them. It is not an unnatural misconception. We are prompted to it by the traditional language of edification, with its characteristic phraseology and ideas ; by the learned treatment of religious themes in sermon and theological instruction ; and further even by our Holy Scriptures them selves. In all these cases the rational element occupies the foreground, and often nothing else seems to be present at all. But this is after all to be expected. All language, in so far as it consists of words, purports to convey ideas or concepts ; that is what language means ; and the more clearly and unequivocally it does so, the better the language. And hence expositions of religious truth in language inevitably tend to stress the rational attributes of God.

But though the above mistake is thus a natural one enough, it is none the less seriously misleading. For so far are these 1 rational attributes from exhausting the idea of deity, that they in fact imply a non-rational or supra-rational Subject of which they are predicates. They are essential (and not merely accidental ) attributes of that subject, but they are also, it is important to notice, synthetic essential attributes. That is to say, we have to predicate them of a subject which they qualify, but which in its deeper essence is not, nor indeed can be, comprehended in them ; which rather requires com prehension of a quite different kind. Yet, though it eludes the conceptual way of understanding, it must be in some way or other within our grasp, else absolutely nothing could be asserted of it. And even Mysticism, in speaking of it as TO dpprjTov, the ineffable, does not really mean to imply that absolutely nothing can be asserted of the object of the religious consciousness ; otherwise, Mysticism could exist only in un broken silence, whereas what has generally been a character istic of the mystics is their copious eloquence.

Here for the first time we come up against the contrast

THE RATIONAL AND THE NON-RATIONAL 3

between Rationalism and profounder religion, and with this contrast and its signs we shall be repeatedly concerned in what follows. We have here in fact the first and most distinctive mark of Rationalism, with which all the rest are bound up. It is not that which is commonly asserted, that Rationalism is the denial, and its opposite the affirmation, of the miraculous. That is manifestly a wrong or at least a very superficial distinction. For the traditional theory of the miraculous as the occasional breach in the causal nexus in nature by a Being who himself instituted and must therefore be master of it this theory is itself as massively rational as it is possible to be. Rationalists have often enough acquiesced in the possi bility of the miraculous in this sense ; they have even them selves contributed to frame a theory of it ; whereas anti- Rationalists have been often indifferent to the whole controversy about miracles. The difference between Rationalism and its opposite is to be found elsewhere. It resolves itself rather into a peculiar difference of quality in the mental attitude and emotional content of the religious life itself. All depends upon this : in our idea of God is the non-rational overborne, even perhaps wholly excluded, by the rational ? Or conversely, docs the non-rational itself preponderate over the rational ? Looking at the matter thus, we see that the common dictum, that Orthodoxy itself has been the mother of Rationalism, is in some measure well founded. It is not simply that Ortho doxy was preoccupied with doctrine and the framing of dogma, for these have been no less a concern of the wildest mystics. It is rather that Orthodoxy found in the construction of dogma and doctrine no way to do justice to the non-rational aspect of its subject. So far from keeping the non-rational element in religion alive in the heart of the religious experi ence, orthodox Christianity manifestly failed to recognize its value, and by this failure gave to the idea of God a one-sidedly intellectualistic and rationalistic interpretation.

This bias to rationalization still prevails, not only in theology but in the science of comparative religion in general, and from top to bottom of it. The modern students of mythology, and those who pursue research into the religion of primitive man

B 2

4 THE RATIONAL AND THE NON-RATIONAL

and attempt to reconstruct the bases or * sources of religion, are all victims to it. Men do not, of course, in these cases employ those lofty rational concepts which we took as our point of departure ; but they tend to take these concepts and their gradual evolution as setting the main problem of their inquiry, and fashion ideas and notions of lower value, which they regard as paving the way for them. It is always in terms of concepts and ideas that the subject is pursued, natural ones, moreover, such as have a place in the general

L O

sphere of man s ideational life, and are not specifically reli gious . And then with a resolution and cunning which one can hardly help admiring, men shut their eyes to that which is quite unique in the religious experience, even in its most primitive manifestations. But it is rather a matter for astonishment than for admiration ! For if there be any single domain of human experience that presents us with something unmistakably specific and unique, peculiar to itself, assuredly it is that of the religious life. In truth the enemy has often a keener vision in this matter than either the champion of religion or the neutral and professedly impartial theorist. For the adversaries on their side know very well that the entire pother about mysticism has nothing to do with ( reason and rationality .

And so it is salutary that we should be incited to notice that Religion is not exclusively contained and exhaustively com prised in any series of rational assertions ; and it is well worth while to attempt to bring the relation of the different

• moments of religion to one another clearly before the mind,

so that its nature may become more manii est.

This attempt we are now to make with respect to the quite distinctive category of the holy or sacred.

CHAPTER II NUMEN AND THE NUMINOUS

HOLINESS* the holy is a category of interpretation and valuation peculiar to the sphere of religion. It is, indeed, applied by transference to another sphere that of Ethics but it is not itself derived from this. While it is complex, it contains a quite specific element or moment , which sets it apart from the Rational in the meaning we gave to that word above, and which remains inexpressible an apprjTov or iiieffabile in the sense that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts. The same thing is true (to take a quite different region of experience) of the category of the beautiful.

Now these statements would be untrue from the outset if the holy were merely what is meant by the word, not only in common parlance, but in philosophical, and generally even in theological usage. The fact is we have come to use the words holy, tarred (heilig) in an entirely derivative sense, quite different from that which they originally bore. We generally take holy as meaning completely good ; it is the absolute moral attribute, denoting the consummation of moral goodness. In this sense Kant calls the will which remains unwaveringly obedient to the moral law from the motive of duty a holy will ; here clearly we have simply the perfectly moral will. In the same way we may speak of the holiness or sanctity of Duty or Law, meaning merely that they are imperative upon conduct and universally obligatory.

But this common usage of the term is inaccurate. It is true that all this moral significance is contained in the word holy , but it includes in addition as even we cannot but feel a clear overplus of meaning, and this it is now our tusk to isolate. Nor is this merely a later or acquired meaning; rather, holy , or at least the equivalent words in Latin and

6 NUMEN AND THE < NUMINOUS

Greek, in Semitic and other ancient languages, denoted first and foremost only this overplus : if the ethical element was present at all, at any rate it was not original and never con stituted the whole meaning of the word. Any one who uses it to-day does undoubtedly always feel the morally good to be implied in holy ; and accordingly in our inquiry into that element which is separate and peculiar to the idea of the holy it will be useful, at least for the temporary purpose of the investigation, to invent a special term to stand for the holy minus its moral factor or moment , and, as we can now add, minus its t rational aspect altogether.

It will be our endeavour to suggest this unnamed Something to the reader as far as we may, so that he may himself feel it. There is no religion in which it does not live as the real inner most core, and without it no religion would be worthy of the name. It is pre-eminently a living force in the Semitic religions, and of these again in none has it such vigour as in that of the Bible. Here, too, it has a name of its own, viz. the Hebrew qddosh, to which the Greek ayios and the Latin sanctus, and, more accurately still, sacer, are the corresponding terms. It is not, of course, disputed, that these terms in all three languages connote, as part of their meaning, good, absolute goodness, when, that is, the notion has ripened and reached the highest stage in its development. And we then use the word holy to translate them. But this holy then represents the gradual shaping and filling in with ethical meaning, or what we shall call the schematization , of what was a unique original feeling-response, which can be in itself ethically neutral and claims consideration in its own right. And when this moment or element first emerges and begins its long development, all those expressions (qdddsh, ay* or, sacer, &c.) mean beyond all question something quite other than the good . This is universally agreed by contemporary criticism, which rightly explains the rendering of qddosh by good as a mistranslation and unwarranted * rationalization or moralization of the term.

Accordingly, it is worth while, as we have said, to find a word to stand for this element in isolation, this extra in

NUMEN AND THE NUMINOUS* 7

the meaning of holy above and beyond the meaning of goodness. By means of a special term we shall the better be able, first, to keep the meaning clearly apart and distinct, and second, to apprehend and classify connectedly whatever sub ordinate forms or stages of development it may show. For this purpose I adopt a word coined from the Latin numen. Omen has given us ominous, and there is no reason why from numen we should not similarly form a word numinous . I shall speak then of a unique numinous category of value and of a definitely numinous state of mind, which is always found wherever the category is applied. This mental state is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other; and there fore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined. There is only one way to help another to an understanding of it. He must be guided and led on by consideration and discussion of the matter through the ways of his own mind, until he reach the point at which the numinous in him perforce begins to stir, to start into life and into consciousness. We can co-operate in this process by bringing before his notice all that can be found in other regions of the mind, already known and familiar, to resemble, or again to afford some special contrast to, the particular experience we wish to elucidate. Then we must add : This X of ours is not precisely this experience, but akin to this one and the opposite of that other. Cannot you now realize for yourself what it is? In other words our X cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind ; as everything that comes of the spirit must be awakened.

CHAPTER III

THE ELEMENTS IN THE NUMINOUS

Creature-Feeling.

THE reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no further ; for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feelings. We do not blame such an one, when he tries for himself to advance as far as he can with the help of such principles of explanation as he knows, interpreting Aesthetics in terms of sensuous pleasure, and Religion as a function of the gre garious instinct and social standards, or as something more primitive still. But the artist, who for his part has an intimate personal knowledge of the distinctive element in the aesthetic experience, will decline his theories with thanks, and the religious man will reject them even more uncompromisingly.

Next, in the probing and analysis of such states of the soul as that of solemn worship, it will be well if regard be paid to what is unique in them rather than to what they have in common with other similar states. To be rapt in worship is one thing; to be morally uplifted by the contemplation of a good deed is another ; and it is not to their common features, but to those elements of emotional content peculiar to the first that we would have attention directed as precisely as possible. As Christians we undoubtedly here first meet with feelings familiar enough in a weaker form in other departments of experience, such as feelings of gratitude, trust, love, reliance, humble submission, and dedication. But this does not by any

THE ELEMENTS IN THE NUMINOUS 9

means exhaust the content of religious worship. Not in any of these have we got the special features of the quite unique and incomparable experience of solemn worship. In what does this consist 1

Schleiermacher has the credit of isolating a very important element in such an experience. This is the feeling of de- . pendence . But this important discovery of Schleiermacher is open to criticism in more than one respect.

In the first place, the feeling or emotion which he really has in mind in this phrase is in its specific quality not a * feel ing of dependence in the natural sense of the word. As such, other domains of life and other regions of experience than the religious occasion the feeling, as a sense of personal insufficiency and impotence, a consciousness of being determined by circumstances and environment. The feeling of which Schleiermacher wrote has an undeniable analogy with these states of mind : they serve as an indication to it, and its nature may be elucidated by them, so that, by following the direction in which they point, the feeling itself may be spontaneously felt. But the feeling is at the same time also qualitatively different from such analogous states of mind. Schleiermacher himself, in a way, recognizes this by distinguishing the feeling of pious or religious dependence from all other feelings of dependence. His mistake is in making the distinction merely that between * absolute and relative dependence, and there fore a difference of degree and not of intrinsic quality. What he overlooks is that, in giving the feeling the name feeling of dependence at all, we are really employing what is no more than a very close analogy. Any one who compares and con trasts the two states of mind irrespectively will find out, I think, what I mean. It cannot be expressed by means of any thing else, just because it is so primary and elementary a datum in our psychical life, and therefore only definable through itself. It may perhaps help him if I cite a well-known example, in which the precise moment or element of religious feeling of which we are speaking is most actively present. When Abraham ventures to plead with God for the men of Sodom, he says (Genesis xviii. 27) : Behold now, I have taken upon

10 THE ELEMENTS IN THE * NUMINOUS

me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes. There you have a self-confessed feeling of dependence , which is yet at the same time far more than, and something other than, merely a feeling of dependence. Desiring to give it a name of its own, I propose to call it creature-consciousness or creature- feeling. It is the emotion of a creature, abased and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.

It is easily seen that, once again, this phrase, whatever it is, is not a conceptual explanation of the matter. All that this new term, creature-feeling , can express, is the note of self- abasement into nothingness before an overpowering, absolute might of some kind ; whereas everything turns upon the character of this overpowering might, a character which cannot be expressed verbally, and can only be suggested indirectly through the tone and content of a man s feeling- response to it. And this response must be directly experienced in oneself to be understood.

We have now to note a second defect in the formulation of Schleiermacher s principle. The religious category discovered by him, by whose means he professes to determine the real content of the religious emotion, is merely a category of self- valuation, in the sense of self-depreciation. According to him the religious emotion would be directly and primarily a sort of se//-consciousness, a feeling concerning one s self in a special, determined relation, viz. one s dependence. Thus, according to Schleiermacher, I can only come upon the very fact of God as the result of an inference, that is, by reasoning to a cause beyond myself to account for my feeling of dependence . But this is entirely opposed to the psychological facts of the case. Rather, the creature-feeling is itself a first subjective concomitant and effect of another feeling-element, which casts it like a shadow, but which in itself indubitably has immediate and primary reference to an object outside the self. 1

1 This is so manifestly borne out by experience that it must be about the first thing to force itself upon the notice of psychologists analysing the facts of religion. There is a certain naivete in the following passage from William James s Varieties of Religious Experience (p. 58),

THE ELEMENTS IN THE NUMINOUS 11

Now this object is just what we have already spoken of as the numinous . For the creature-feeling and the sense of dependence to arise in the mind the numen must be experienced as present, a numen praesens , as in the case of Abraham. There must be felt a something numinous , something bearing the character of a numen , to which the

^ O

mind turns spontaneously ; or (which is the same thing in other words) these feelings can only arise in the mind as accompanying emotions when the category of the numinous is called into play.

The numinous is thus felt as objective and outside the self. We have now to inquire more closely into its nature and the modes of its manifestation.

where, alluding to the origin of the Grecian representations of the gods, he says : As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at pre sent seek an opinion. But the whole array of our instances leads to a conclusion something like this: It is as if there were in the human con sciousness a sense of reality, a feelimj of objective presence, a perception of what we may call " something there", more deep and more general than any of the special and particular " senses" by which the current psycho logy supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. (The italics are James s own.) James is debarred by his empiricist and pragmatist stand-point from coming to a recognition of faculties of knowledge and potentialities of thought in the spirit itself, and he is therefore obliged to have recourse to somewhat singular and mysterious hypotheses to explain this fact. - But he grasps the fact itself clearly enough and is sufficient of a realist not to explain it away. But this feeling of reality , the feeling of a numinous object objectively given, must be posited as a primary immediate datum of consciousness, and the feeling of depen dence is then a consequence, following very closely upon it, viz. a depreciation of the subject in his own eyes. The latter presupposes the former,

CHAPTER IV MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM

The Analysis of Tremendum .

WE said above that the nature of the numinous can only be suggested by means of the special way in which it is reflected in the mind in terms of feeling. Its nature is such that it grips or stirs the human mind with this and that deter minate affective state. We have now to attempt to give a further indication of these determinate states. We must once again endeavour, by adducing feelings akin to them for the purpose of analogy or contrast, and by the use of metaphor and symbolic expressions, to make the states of mind we are investigating ring out, as it were, of themselves.

Let us consider the deepest and most fundamental element in all strong and sincerely felt religious emotion. Faith unto Salvation, Trust, Love all these are there. But over and above these is an element which may also on occasion, quite apart from them, profoundly affect us and occupy the mind with a wellnigh bewildering strength. Let us follow it up with every effort of sympathy and imaginative intuition wherever it is to be found, in the lives of those around us, in sudden, strong ebullitions of personal piety and the frames of mind such ebullitions evince, in the fixed and ordered solemnities of rites and liturgies, and again in the atmosphere that clings to old religious monuments and buildings, to temples and to churches. If we do so we shall find we are dealing with something for which there is only one appropriate expression, mysterium tremendum. The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thril- lingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the

MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM 13

soul resumes its profane , non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speech less humility of the creature in the presence of whom or what ? In the presence of that which is a Myttery inexpressible and above all creatures.

It is again evident at once that here too our attempted formulation by means of a concept is once more a merely negative one. Conceptually mysterium denotes merely that which is hidden and esoteric, that which is beyond conception or understanding, extraordinary and unfamiliar. The term does not deh ne the object more positively in its qualitative character. But though what is enunciated in the word is negative, what is meant is something absolutely and intensely positive. This pure positive we can experience in feelings, feelings which our discussion can help to make clear to us, in so far as it arouses them actually in our hearts.

1 . Tit e Ele ment of A iveful ness.

To get light upon the positive quale of the object of these feelings, we must analyse more closely our phrase mysterium tremeiulum, and we will begin first with the adjective.

Tremor is in itself merely the perfectly familiar and natu ral emotion of fear. But here the term is taken, aptly enough but still only by analogy, to denote a quite specific kind of emotional response, wholly distinct from that of being afraid, though it so far resembles it that the analogy of fear may be used to throw light upon its nature. There are in some languages special expressions which denote, either exclusively or in the first instance, this fear that is more than fear proper. The Hebrew hiqdish (hallow) is an example. To

14 MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM

keep a thing holy in the heart means to mark it off by a feeling of peculiar dread, not to be mistaken for any ordinary dread, that is, to appraise it by the category of the numinous. But the Old Testament throughout is rich in parallel expres sions for this feeling. Specially noticeable is the emdt of Yahweh ( fear of God ), which Yahweh can pour forth, dispatching almost like a daemon, and which seizes upon a man with paralysing effect. It is closely related to the SeTfia iraviKov of the Greeks. Compare Exodus xxiii. 27 : I will send my fear before thee and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come . . . ; also Job ix. 34; xiii. 21 ( Let not his fear terrify me ; Let not thy dread make me afraid ). Here we have a terror fraught with an inward shuddering such as not even the most menacing and overpowering created thing can instil. It has something spectral in it.

In the Greek language we have a corresponding term in o-e/SaoToy. The early Christians could clearly feel that the title o-/3aaT09 (augustus) was one that could not fittingly be given to any creature, not even to the emperor. They felt that to call a man o-e/Sacrroy was to give a human being a name proper only to the numen, to rank him by the category proper only to the numen, and that it therefore amounted to a kind of idolatry. Of modern languages English has the words awe , awef ul , which in their deeper and most special sense approximate closely to our meaning. The phrase, he stood aghast , is also suggestive in this connexion. On the other hand, German has no native-grown expression of its own for the higher and riper form of the emotion we are considering, unless it be in a word like erschauern , which does suggest it fairly well. It is far otherwise with its cruder and more debased phases, where such terms as grausen and * Schauer , and the more popular and telling gruseln ( grue ), graven , and yrasdich ( grisly ), very clearly designate the numinous element. In my examination of Wundt s Animism I suggested the term Scheu (dread) ; but the special numinous quality (making it awe rather than dread in the ordinary sense) would then of course have to be denoted by inverted commas. Religious dread (or awe ) would perhaps be a better

MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM 15

designation. Its antecedent stage is daemonic dread (cf. the horror of Pan) with its queer perversion, a sort of abortive off-shoot, the dread of ghosts . It first begins to stir in the feeling of something uncanny , eerie , or weird . It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point for the entire religious development in history. Daemons and gods alike spring from this root, and all the products of mythological apperception or fantasy are nothing but different modes in which it has been objectified. And all ostensible explanations of the origin of religion in terms of animism or magic or folk psychology are doomed from the outset to wander astray and miss the real goal of their inquiry, unless they recognize this fact of our nature primary, unique, underivable from anything else to be the basic factor and the basic impulse underlying the entire process of religious evolution. 1

Not only is the saying of Luther, that the natural man cannot fear God perfectly, correct from the standpoint of psychology, but we ought to go further and add that the natural man is quite unable even to shudder (graueu) or feel horror in the real sense of the word. For shuddering is something more than natural , ordinary fear. It implies that the mysterious is already beginning to loom before the mind, to touch the feelings. It implies the first application of a category of valua tion which has no place in the everyday natural world of ordinary experience, and is only possible to a being in whom has been awakened a mental predisposition, unique in kind and

1 Cf. my papers in Thfotogische Riindscliau, 1910, vol. i, on Myth and Religion in Wundt s Volkerpsychologie , and in Deutsche Littratiuzeitung, 1910, No. 38. I find in more recent investigations, especially those of R. R. Marett and N. Soderblom, a very welcome confirmation of the positions I there maintained. It is true that neither of them calls attention quite as precisely as, in this matter, psychologists need to do, to the unique character of the religious awe and its qualitative distinction from all natural feelings. But Marett more particularly comes within a hair s breadth of what I take to be the truth about the matter. Cf. his Thres hold of Rel if/ion (London, 1909], and N. Sflderblom s Das Werden df8 Gottesglaubens (Leipzig, 1915), also my review of the latter in Throl. Literaturzeitung, Jan. 1915.

16 MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM

different in a definite way from any natural faculty. And this newly- revealed capacity, even in the crude and violent manifestations which are all it at first evinces, bears witness to a completely new function of experience and standard of valuation, only belonging to the spirit of man.

Before going on to consider the elements which unfold as the tremendum develops, let us give a little further consideration to the first crude, primitive forms in which this numinous dread or a^ve shows itself. It is the mark which really characterizes the so-called Religion of Primitive Man , and there it appears as daemonic dread . This crudely nai ve and primordial emotional disturbance, and the fantastic images to which it gives rise, are later overborne and ousted by more highly-developed forms of the numinous emotion, with all its mysteriously impelling power. But even when this has long attained its higher and purer mode of expression it is possible for the primitive types of excitation that were formerly a part of it to break out in the soul in all their original naivete and so to be experienced afresh. That this is so is shown by the potent attraction again and again exercised by the element of horror and shudder in ghost stories, even among persons of high all-round education. It is a remarkable fact that the physical reaction to which this unique dread of the uncanny gives rise is also unique, and is not found in the case of any natural fear or terror. We say : my blood ran icy cold , and my flesh crept . The cold blood feeling may be a symptom of ordinary, natural fear, but there is something non- natural or supernatural about the symptom of creeping flesh . And any one who is capable of more precise introspection must recognize that the distinction between such a dread and natural fear is not simply one of degree and intensity. The awe or dread may indeed be so overwhelmingly great that it seems to penetrate to the very marrow, making the man s hair bristle and his limbs quake. But it may also steal upon him almost unobserved as the gentlest of agitations, a mere fleeting shadow passing across his mood. It has therefore nothing to do with intensity, and no natural fear passes over into it merely by being intensified. I may be beyond all

MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM 17

measure afraid and terrified without there being even a trace of the feeling of uncanniness in ray emotion.

We should see the facts more clearly if psychology in general would make a more decisive endeavour to examine and classify the feelings and emotions according to their qualitative differ ences. But the far too rough division of elementary feelings in general into pleasures and pains is still an obstacle to this. In point of fact pleasures no more than other feelings are differentiated merely by degrees of intensity ; they show very definite and specific differences. It makes a specific difference to the condition of mind whether the soul is merely in a state of pleasure, or joy, or aesthetic rapture, or moral exaltation, or finally in the religious bliss that may come in worship. Such states certainly show resemblances one to another, and on that account can legitimately be brought under a common class-concept ( pleasure ), which serves to cut them off from other psychical functions, generically different. But this class-concept, so far from turning the various subordinate species into merely different degrees of the same thing, can do nothing at all to throw light upon the essence of each several state of mind which it includes.

^ Though the numinous emotion in its completest development shows a world of difference from the mere daemonic dread , yet not even at the highest level does it belie its pedigree or kindred. Even when the worship of daemons has long since reached the higher level of worship of gods , these gods still retain as numina something of the ghost in the impress they make on the feelings of the worshipper, viz. the peculiar quality of the uncanny and awful , which survives with the quality of exaltedness and sublimity or is symbolized by means of it. And this element, softened though it is, does not disappear even on the highest level of all, where the worship of God is at its purest. Its disappearance would be indeed an essential loss. The shudder reappears in a form ennobled beyond measure where the soul, held speechless, trembles inwardly to the furthest fibre of its being. It invades the mind mightily in Christian worship with the words : Holy, holy, holy ; it breaks forth from the hymn of Tersteegen :

c

18 MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM

God Himself is present: Heart, be stilled before Him : Prostrate inwardly adore Him.

The shudder has here lost its crazy and bewildering note, but not the ineffable something that holds the mind. It has become a mystical awe, and sets free as its accompaniment, reflected in self-consciousness, that creature-feeling that has already been described as the feeling of personal nothingness and abasement before the awe-inspiring object directly expe rienced.

The referring of this feeling of numinous tremor to its object in the numen brings into relief a property of the latter which plays an important part in our Holy Scriptures, and which has been the occasion of many difficulties, both to commentators and to theologians, from its puzzling and baffling nature. This is the opyrj (orge), the Wrath of Yahweh, which recurs in the New Testament as opy?) 6eov, and which is clearly analogous to the idea occurring in many religions of a mysterious ira deorum . To pass through the Indian Pantheon of Gods is to find deities who seem to be made up altogether out of such an opyrj ; and even the higher Indian gods of grace and pardon have frequently, beside their merciful, their wrath form. But as regards the Wrath of Yahweh , the strange features about it have for long been a matter for constant remark. In the first place, it is patent from many passages of the Old Testament that this Wrath has no concern what ever with moral qualities. There is something very baffling in the way in which it is kindled and manifested. It is, as has been well said, like a hidden force of nature , like stored- up electricity, discharging itself upon any one who comes too near. It is incalculable and arbitrary . Any one who is accustomed to think of deity only by its rational attributes must Bee in this * Wrath mere caprice and wilful passion. But such a view would have been emphatically rejected by the religious men of the Old Covenant, for to them the Wrath of God, so far from being a diminution of His Godhead, appears as a natural expression of it, an element of holiness itself, and a quite indispensable one. And in this they are entirely

MYSTEBIUM TREMENDUM 19

right. This opyr; is nothing but the tremendum itself, apprehended and expressed by the aid of a naive analogy from the domain of natural experience, in this case from the ordinary passional life of men. But naive as it may be, the analogy is most disconcertingly apt and striking; so much so that it will always retain its value, and for us no less than for the men of old be an inevitable way of expressing one element in the religious emotion. It cannot be doubted that, despite the protest of Schleiermacher and Ritschl, Christianity also has something to teach of the Wrath of God .

It will be again at once apparent that in the use of this word we are not concerned with a genuine intellectual c con cept , but only with a sort of illustrative substitute for a concept. Wrath here is the ideogram of a unique emotional moment in religious experience, a moment whose singularly daunting and awe-inspiring character must be gravely disturbing to those persons who will recognize nothing in the divine nature but goodness, gentleness, love, and a sort of confidential intimacy, in a word, only those aspects of God / which turn towards the world of men.

This opyrj is thus quite wrongly spoken of as natural wrath : rather it is an entirely non- or super-natural, i. e. numinous, quality. The rationalization process takes place when it begins to be filled in with elements derived from the moral reason: righteousness in requital, and punishment for moral transgression. But it should be noted that the idea of the Wrath of God in the Bible is always a synthesis, in which the original is combined with the later meaning that has come to fill it in. Something supra-rational throbs and gleams, palpable and visible, in the Wrath of God , prompting to a sense of terror that no natural an<rer can arouse.

O

Beside the Wrath or An r er of Yahweh stands the related

O

expression Jealousy of Yahweh . The state of mind denoted by the phrase being jealous for Yahweh is also a numinous state of mind, in which features of the tremendum pass over into the man who has experience of it.

c 2

20 MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM

2. The element of Overpower ingness ( majestas ).

We have been attempting to unfold the implications of that aspect of the mysterium tremendum indicated by the adjec tive, and the result so far may be summarized in two words, constituting, as before, what may be called an ideogram , rather than a concept proper, viz. absolute unapproachability .

It will be felt at once that there is yet a further element which must be added, that, namely, of might , power ,

• absolute overpoweringness . We will take to represent this

the term * majestas , majesty the more readily because any one with a feeling for language must detect a last faint trace of the numinous still clinging to the word. The tremendum may then be rendered more adequately ; tremenda majestas , or awef ul majesty . This second element of majesty may continue to be vividly preserved, where the first, that of unapproachability, recedes and dies away, as may be seen, for example, in Mysticism. It is especially in relation to this element of majesty or absolute overpoweringness that the creature-consciousness, of which we have already spoken, comes upon the scene, as a sort of shadow or subjective reflection of it. Thus, in contrast to the overpowering of which we are conscious as an object over against the self, there is the feeling of one s own abasement, of being but dust and ashes and nothingness. And this forms the numinous raw material for the feeling of religious humility. 1

Here we must revert once again to Schleiermacher s expres sion for what we call creature- feel ing , viz. the feeling of dependence . We found fault with this phrase before on the ground that Schleiermacher thereby takes as basis and point of departure what is merely a secondary effect ; that he sets out to teach a consciousness of the religious object only by way of an inference from the shadow it casts upon ^//-conscious ness. We have now a further criticism to bring against it, and it is this. By feeling of dependence Schleiermacher means consciousness of being conditioned (as effect by cause), and so he develops the implications of this logically enough

1 Cf. R. R. Marett, The Birth of Humility, in The Tlireshold of Religion, 2nd ed., 1914. [Tr.]

MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM 21

in his sections upon Creation and Preservation. On the side of the deity the correlate to dependence would thus be causality , i. e. God s character as all-causing and all- conditioning. But a sense of this does not enter at all into that immediate and first-hand religious emotion which we have in the moment of worship, and which we can recover in a measure for analysis ; it belongs on the contrary decidedly to the rational side of the idea of God ; its implications admit of precise conceptual determination ; and it springs from quite a distinct source. The difference between the feeling of dependence of Schleiermacher and that which finds typical utterance in the words of Abraham already cited might be expressed as that between the consciousness of createdness (Ge- Bchaffenheit) and the consciousness of creaturehood (Geschopf- lichkeit). In the one case you have the creature as the work o-f the divine creative act; in the other, impotence and general nothingness as against overpowering might, dust and ashes as against majesty . In the one case you have the fact of having been created ; in the other, the status of the creature. And as soon as speculative thought has come to concern itself with this latter type of consciousness as soon as it has come to analyse this majesty we are introduced to a set of ideas quite different from those of creation or preservation. We come upon the ideas, first, of the annihilation of self, and then, as its complement, of the transcendent as the sole and entire reality. These are the characteristic notes of Mysticism in all its forms, however otherwise various in content. For one of the chiefest and most general features of Mysticism is just this self -depreciation (so plainly parallel to the case of Abra ham) the estimation of the self, of the personal 1 , as some thing not perfectly or essentially real, or even as mere nullity, a self-depreciation which comes to demand its own fulfilment in practice in rejecting the delusion of selfhood, and so makes for the annihilation of the self. And on the other hand Mysti cism leads to a valuation of the transcendent object of its reference as that which through plenitude of being stands supreme and absolute, so that the finite self contrasted with it becomes conscious even in its nullity that I am nought, Thou

22 MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM

art all . There is no thought in this of any causal relation between God, the creator, and the self, the creature. The point from which speculation starts is not a consciousness of absolute dependence of myself as result and effect of a divine cause for that would in point of fact lead to insistence upon the reality of the self ; it starts from a consciousness of the absolute superiority or supremacy of a power other than myself, and it is only as it falls back upon ontological terms to achieve its end terms generally borrowed from natural science that that element of the tremendum , originally apprehended as plenitude of power , becomes transmuted into 1 plenitude of being .

This leads again to the mention of Mysticism. No mere inquiry into the genesis of a thing can throw any light upon its essential nature, and it is hence immaterial to us how Mysticism historically arose. But essentially Mysticism is the stressing to a very high degree, indeed the overstressing, of the non-rational or supra-rational elements in religion ; and it is only intelligible when so understood. The various phases and factors of the non-rational may receive varying emphasis, and the type of Mysticism will differ according as some or others fall into the background. What we have been analys ing, however, is a feature that recurs in all forms of Mysticism everywhere, and it is nothing but the creature-consciousness stressed to the utmost and to excess, the expression meaning, if we may repeat the contrast already made, not feeling of our createdness but feeling of our creaturehood , that is, the consciousness of the littleness of every creature in face of that which is above all creatures.

A characteristic common to all types of Mysticism is the Identification, in different degrees of completeness, of the personal self with the transcendent Reality. This identifi cation has a source of its own, with which we are not here concerned, and springs from moments of religious experience which would require separate treatment. Identification alone, however, is not enough for Mysticism ; it must be Iden tification with the Something that is at once absolutely supreme in power and reality and wholly non-rational. And it is among the mystics that we most encounter this element of

MYSTERIUM TEEMENDUM 23

religious consciousness. Rdcejac has noticed this in his Evaai sur les fondements de la coimausance mystique (Paris, 1897). He writes (p. 90) :

Le mysticisme commence par la crainte, par le sentiment d une domination universelle, invincible, et devient plus tard un de sir d union avec ce qui domine ainsi.

And some very clear examples of this taken from the religious experience of the present day are to be found in W.James (op. cit., p. G(J) :

The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more have doubted that lie was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two.

This example is particularly instructive as to the relation of Mysticism to the feelings of Identification , for the experience here recounted was on the point of passing into it. 1

3. The Element of Energy or Urgency.

There is, finally, a third element comprised in those of tre- mendum and uiajestas , awefulness and majesty, and this I venture to call the urgency or energy of the numinous object. It is particularly vividly perceptible in the opyrj or Wrath ; and it everywhere clothes itself in symbolical expressions vitality, passion, emotional temper, will, force, movement, 2 excitement, activity, impetus. These features are typical and recur again and again from the daemonic level up to the idea of the living God. We have here the factor that has every where more than any other prompted the fiercest opposition to the philosophic God of mere rational speculation, who can be put into a definition. And for their part the philosophers have condemned these expressions of the energy of the numen, whenever they are brought on to the scene, as sheer anthropo morphism. In so far as their opponents have for the most part themselves failed to recognize that the terms they have borrowed from the sphere of human coimtive and affective life have merely value as analogies, the philosophers are right to

1 Compare too the experience on p. 70 : . . . "What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity. 1 The mobilitaj* L)ei of Luctantiua.

24 MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM

condemn them. But they are wrong, in so far as, this error notwithstanding, these terms stood for a genuine aspect of the divine nature its non-rational aspect a due consciousness of which served to protect religion itself from being rationalized away.

For wherever men have been contending for the living God and for voluntarism, there, we may be sure, have been non-rationalists fighting rationalists and rationalism. It was so with Luther in his controversy with Erasmus ; and Luther s omnipotentia Dei in his De Servo Arbitrio is nothing but the union of majesty in the sense of absolute supremacy with this energy , in the sense of a force that knows not stint nor stay, which is urgent, active, compelling, and alive. In Mysticism, too, this element of energy is a very living and vigorous factor, at any rate in the voluntaristic Mysticism, the Mysticism of love, where it is very forcibly seen in that consuming fire of love whose burning strength the mystic can hardly bear, but begs that the heat that has scorched him may be mitigated, lest he be himself destroyed by it. And in this urgency and pressure the mystic s love claims a per ceptible kinship with the opy-q itself, the scorching and con suming wrath of God ; it is the same energy , only differently directed. Love , says one of the mystics, is nothing else than quenched Wrath .

The element of energy reappears in Fichte s speculations on the Absolute as the gigantic, never-resting, active world- stress, and in Schopenhauer s daemonic Will . At the same time both these writers are guilty of the same error that is already found in Myth ; they transfer natural attributes, which ought only to be used as ideograms for what is itself properly beyond utterance, to the non-rational as real qualifica tions of it, and they mistake symbolic expressions of feelings for adequate concepts upon which a scientific structure of knowledge may be based.

In Goethe, as we shall see later, the same element of energy is emphasized in a quite unique way in his strange descriptions of the experience he calls daemonic .

CHAPTER V THE ANALYSIS OF MYSTERIUM

Ein begriffener Gott ist kein Gott. A God comprehended is no God. (TERSTEEGEN.)

WE gave to the object to which the numinous consciousness is directed the name mysterium tremendum , and we then set ourselves first to determine the meaning of the adjective 1 tremendum which we found to be itself only justified by analogy because it is more easily analysed than the sub stantive idea mysterium . We have now to turn to this, and try, as best we may, by hint and suggestion, to get to a clearer apprehension of what it implies.

4. The Wholly Other .

It might be thought that the adjective itself gives an explanation of the substantive ; but this is not so. It is not merely analytical ; it is a synthetic attribute to it ; i.e. tremendum adds something not necessarily inherent in mysterium . It is true that the reactions in consciousness that correspond to the one readily and spontaneously over flow into those that correspond to the other ; in fact, any one sensitive to the use of words would commonly feel that the idea of mystery (mysterium) is so closely bound up with its synthetic qualifying attribute aweful (tremendum) that one can hardly say the former without catching an echo of the latter, mystery almost of itself becoming aweful mystery to us. But the passage from the one idea to the other need not by any means be always so easy. The elements of meaning implied in awefulness and rnysteriousnefis are in themselves definitely different. The latter may so far preponderate in the religious consciousness, may stand out so

26 THE ANALYSIS OF MYSTERIUM

vividly, that in comparison with it the former almost sinks out of sight ; a case which again could be clearly exemplified from some forms of Mysticism. Occasionally, on the other hand, the reverse happens, and the tremendurn may in turn occupy the mind without the mysterium .

This latter, then, needs special consideration on its own account. We need an expression for the mental reaction peculiar to it ; and here, too, only one word seems appropriate though, as it is strictly applicable only to a natural state of mind, it has here meaning only by analogy : it is the word stupor . Stupor is plainly a different thing from tremor ; it signifies blank wonder, an astonishment that strikes us dumb, amazement absolute. 1 Taken, indeed, in its purely natural sense, mysterium would first mean merely a secret or a mystery in the sense of that which is alien to us, uncom- prehended and unexplained ; and so far mysterium is itself merely an ideogram, an analogical notion taken from the natural sphere, illustrating, but incapable of exhaustively rendering, our real meaning. Taken in the religious sense, that which is mysterious is to give it perhaps the most striking expression the wholly other (Qdrepov, anyad, alie- num), that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the canny , and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment.

This is already to be observed on the lowest and earliest level of the religion of primitive man, where the numinous consciousness is but an inchoate stirring of the feelings. What is really characteristic of this stage is not as the theory of

Compare also olstupefacere . Still more exact equivalents are the

Greek&i/ijSos 1 and Qa^dv. The sound 6ap.^(thamb) excellently depicts this state of mind of blank, staring wonder. And the difference between the moments of stupor and tremor is very finely suggested by the pas sage, Mark x. 32 (cf. infra, p. 1C3). On the other hand, what was said above of the facility and rapidity with which the two moments merge and blend is also markedly true of 0a^/3o9, which then becomes a classical term for the (ennobled) awe of the numinous in general. So Mark xvi. 5 is rightly translated by Luther und sie entsetzten sich , and by the English Authorized Version and they were affrighted .

THE ANALYSIS OF MYSTERIUM 27

Animism would have us believe that men are here concerned with curious entities, called souls or spirits , which happen to be invisible. Representations of spirits and similar con ceptions are rather one and all early modes of rationalizing a precedent experience, to which they are subsidiary. They are attempts in some way or other, it little matters how, to guess the riddle it propounds, and their effect is at the same time always to weaken and deaden the experience itself. They are the source from which springs, not religion, but the rationaliza tion of religion, which often ends by constructing such a massive structure of theory and such a plausible fabric of interpretation, that the mystery is frankly excluded. 1 Both imaginative Myth , when developed into a system, and intel- lectualist Scholasticism, when worked out to its completion, are methods by which the fundamental fact of religious experience is, as it were, simply rolled out so thin and flat as to be finally eliminated altogether.

Even on the lowest level of religious development the essential characteristic is therefore to be sought elsewhere than in the appearance of spirit representations. It lies rather, we repeat, in a peculiar moment of consciousness, to wit, the stupor before something wholly other , whether such an other be named spirit or daemon or deva , or be left without any name. Nor does it make any difference in this respect whether, to interpret and preserve their apprehension of this other , men coin original imagery of their own or adapt imaginations drawn from the world of legend, the fabrications of fancy apart from and prior to any stirrings of daemonic dread.

O

In accordance with laws of which we shall have to speak again later, this feeling or consciousness of the wholly other will attach itself to, or sometimes be indirectly aroused by means of, objects which are already puzzling upon the natural plane, or are of a surprising or astounding character; such as extraordinary phenomena or astonishing occurrences or things

1 A Kpirit or fcoul that has been conceived and comprehended no longer prompts to shuddering , as is proved b) Spiritualism. But it thereby ceaaes to be of interest for the psychology of religion.

28 THE ANALYSIS OF MYSTERIUM

in inanimate nature, in the animal world, or among men. But

7 O

here once more we are dealing with a case of association between things specifically different the numinous and the natural moment of consciousness and not merely with the gradual enhancement of one of them the natural till it becomes the other. As in the case of natural fear and 1 daemonic dread already considered, so here the transition from natural to daemonic amazement is not a mere matter of degree. But it is only with the latter that the complementary expression mysterium perfectly harmonizes, as will be felt perhaps more clearly in the case of the adjectival form mysterious . No one says, strictly and in earnest, of a piece of clockwork that is beyond his grasp, or of a science that he cannot understand : That is " mysterious " to me.

It might be objected that the mysterious is something which is and remains absolutely and invariably beyond our understanding, whereas that which merely eludes our under standing for a time but is perfectly intelligible in principle should be called, not a mystery , but merely a problem . But this is by no means an adequate account of the matter. The truly mysterious object is beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon something inherently wholly other , whose kind and character are in commensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in a wonder that strikes us chill and numb. 1

This may be made still clearer by a consideration of that degraded offshoot and travesty of the genuine numinous dread or awe, the fear of ghosts. Let us try to analyse this experience. We have already specified the peculiar feeling-

1 In Confessions, ii. 9. 1, Augustine very vstrikingly suggests this stiffen ing, benumbing element of the wholly other and its contrast to the rational aspect of the numen ; the dissimile and the simile .

Quid est illud, quod interlucet mihi et percutit cor nieum sine laesione ? Et inhorresco et inardesco. Inhorresco, in quantum dissimilis ei sum. Inardesco, in quantum similis ei sum.

( VVhat is that which gleams through me and smites my heart without wounding it ? I am both a-shudder and a-glow. A-shudder, in so far as I am unlike it, a-glow in so far as I am like it. )

THE ANALYSIS OF MYSTERIUM 29

element of dren<l aroused by the ghost as that of grue , grisly horror (gruseln, graven). Now this grue obviously contributes something to the attraction which ghost-stories exercise, in so far, namely, as the relaxation of tension ensuing upon our release from it relieves the mind in a pleasant and agreeable way. So far, however, it is not really the ghost itself that gives us pleasure, but the fact that we are rid of it. But obviously this is quite insufficient to explain the ensnaring attraction of the ghost-story. The ghost s real attraction rather consists in this, that of itself and in an uncommon degree it entices the imagination, awakening strong interest and curiosity ; it is the weird thing itself that allures the fancy. But it does this, not because it is something long and white (as some one once defined a ghost), nor yet through any of the positive and conceptual attributes which fancies about ghosts have invented, but because it is a thing that doesn t really exist at all , the wholly other , something which has no place in our scheme of reality but belongs to an absolutely different one, and which at the same time arouses an irrepressible interest in the mind.

But that which is perceptibly true in the fear of ghosts, which is, after all, only a caricature of the genuine thing, is in a far stronger sense true of the daemonic experience itself, of which the fear of ghosts is a mere off-shoot. And while, following this main line of development, this element in the numinous consciousness, the feeling of the wholly other , is heightened and clarified, its higher modes of manifestation come into being, which set the numinous object in contrast not only to everything wonted and familiar (i.e., in the end, to nature in general), thereby turning it into the super natural , but finally to the world itself, and thereby exalt it to the supraraundane , that which is above the whole world-order.

In Mysticism we have in the Beyond (tTre/caya) again the strongest stressing and over-stressing of those non-rational elements which are already inherent in all religion. Mysticism continues to its extreme point this contrasting of the numinous object (the numen), as the wholly other , with ordinary experi ence. Not content with coutrastinr it with all that is of

30 THE ANALYSIS OF MYSTERIUM

nature or this world, Mysticism concludes by contrasting it with Being itself and all that is , and finally actually calls it that which is nothing . By this nothing is meant not only that of which nothing can be predicated, but that which is absolutely and intrinsically other than and opposite of everything that is and can be thought. But while exaggerat ing to the point of paradox this negation and contrast the only means open to conceptual thought to apprehend the mysterium Mysticism at the same time retains the positive quality of the wholly other as a very living factor in its over-brimming religious emotion.

But what is true of the strange nothingness of our mystics holds good equally of the sunyam and the sunyata , the void and emptiness of the Buddhist mystics. This aspira tion for the void and for becoming void, no less than the aspiration of our western mystics for nothing and for becom ing nothing, must seem a kind of lunacy to any one who has no inner sympathy for the esoteric language and ideograms of Mysticism, and lacks the matrix from which these come neces sarily to birth. To such an one Buddhism itself will be simply a morbid sort of pessimism. But in fact the void of the eastern, like the nothing of the western, mystic is a numinous ideogram of the wholly other .

These terms, supernatural and transcendent (literally, supramundane : uberweltlich), give the appearance of positive attributes, and, as applied to the mysterious, they appear to divest the mysterium of its originally negative meaning and to turn it into an affirmation. On the side of conceptual thought this is nothing more than appearance, for it is obvious that the two terms in question are merely negative and ex clusive attributes with reference to nature and the world or cosmos respectively. But on the side of the feeling-content it is otherwise ; that is in very truth positive in the highest degree, though here too, as before, it cannot be rendered explicit in conceptual terms. It is through this positive feeling-content that the concepts of the transcendent and supernatural become forthwith designations for a unique wholly other reality and quality, something of whose special character we can feel, without being able to give it clear conceptual expression.

CHAPTER VI 5. THE ELEMENT OF FASCINATION

THE qualitative content of the numinous experience, to which the mysterious stands as/c^-m, is in one of its aspects the element of daunting awefulness and majesty , which has already been dealt with in detail ; but it is clear that it has at the same time another aspect, in which it shows itself as something uniquely attractive and fascinating.

These two qualities, the daunting and the fascinating, now combine in a strange harmony of contrasts, and the resultant dual character of the numinous consciousness, to which the entire religious development bears witness, at any rate from the level of the daemonic dread onwards, is at once the strangest and most noteworthy phenomenon in the whole history of religion. The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own. The mystery is for him not merely something to be wondered at but some thing that entrances him ; and beside that in it which bewilders and confounds, lie feels a something that captivates and transports him with a strange ravishment, rising often enough to the pitch of dizzy intoxication ; it is the Dionysiac- element in the numen.

The ideas and concepts which are the parallels or schemata on the rational side of this non-rational element of fasci nation are Love, Mercy, Pity, Comfort; these are all natural elements of the common psychical life, only they are here thought as absolute and in completeness. But important as these are for the experience of religious bliss or

32 THE ELEMENT OF FASCINATION

felicity, they do not by any means exhaust it. It is just the same as with the opposite experience of religious infelicity the experience of the opyr) or Wrath of God : both alike contain fundamentally non-rational elements. Bliss or beati tude is more, far more, than the mere natural feeling of being comforted, of reliance, of the joy of love, however these may be heightened and enhanced. Just as Wrath , taken in a purely rational or a purely ethical sense, does not exhaust that profound element of awef illness which is locked in the mystery of deity, so neither does Graciousness exhaust the profound element of wond erf illness and rapture which lies in the mysterious beatific experience of deity. The term grace may indeed be taken as its aptest designation, but then only in the sense in which it is really applied in the language of the mystics, and in which not only the gracious intent but c something more is meant by the word. This * something more has its antecedent phases very far back in the history of religions.

It may well be possible, it is even probable, that in the first stage of its development the religious consciousness started with only one of its poles the daunting aspect of the numen and so at first took shape only as daemonic dread . But if this did not point to something beyond itself, if it were not but one moment of a completer experience, pressing up gradually into consciousness, then no transition would be possible to the feelings of positive self-surrender to the numen. The only type of worship that could result from this dread alone would be that of airaiTt ia-Qai and dirorptTreiv , taking the form of expiation and propitiation, the averting or the appeasement of the wrath of the numen. It can never explain how it is that c the numinous is the object of search and desire and yearning, and that too for its own sake and not only for the sake of the aid and backing that men expect from it in the natural sphere. It can never explain how this takes place, not only in the forms of rational religious worship, but in those queer sacramental observances and rituals and procedures of communion in which the human being seeks to get the numen into his possession.

THE ELEMENT OF FASCINATION 33

Religious practice may manifest itself in those normal and easily intelligible forms which occupy so prominent a place in the history of religion, such forms as Propitiation, Petition, Sacrifice, Thanksgiving, &c. But besides these there is a series of strange proceedings which are constantly attracting greater and greater attention, and in which it is claimed that we may recognize, besides mere religion in general, the particular roots of Mysticism. I refer to those numerous curious modes of behaviour and fantastic forms of mediation, by means of which the primitive religious man attempts to master the mysterious , and to fill himself and even to identify himself with it. These modes of behaviour fall apart into two classes. On the one hand the magical identification of the self with the numen proceeds by means of various transactions, at once magical and devotional in character by formula, ordi nation, adjuration, consecration, exorcism, &c. : on the other hand are the shamanistic ways of procedure, possession, indwelling, Belf-imbuement with the numen in exaltation and ecstasy. All these have, indeed, their starting-points simply in magic, and their intention at first was certainly simply to appropriate the prodigious force of the numen for the natural ends of man. But the process does not rest there. Possession of and by the numen becomes an end in itself ; it begins to be sought for its own sake ; and the wildest and most artificial methods of asceticism are put into practice to attain it. In a word, the vita religiosa begins; and to remain in these strange and bizarre states of numinous possession becomes a good in itself, even a way of salvation, wholly different from the profane goods pursued by means of magic. Here, too, commences the process of development by which the experience is matured and purified, till finally it reaches its consummation in the eublimest and purest states of the life within the Spirit and in the noblest Mysticism. Widely various as these states are in themselves, yet they have this element in common, that in them the mysterium is experienced in its essential, positive, and specific character, as something that bestows upon man a beatitude beyond compare, but one whoso real nature ho can neither proclaim in speech nor conceive in thought, but

D

34 THE ELEMENT OF FASCINATION

may know only by a direct and living experience. It is a bliss which embraces all those blessings that are indicated or suggested in positive fashion by any doctrine of Salvation , and it quickens all of them through and through ; but these do not exhaust it. Rather by its all-pervading, penetrating glow it makes of these very blessings more than the intellect can conceive in them or affirm of them. It gives the Peace that passes understanding, and of which the tongue can only stammer brokenly. Only from afar, by metaphors and analogies, do we come to apprehend what it is in itself, and even so our notion is but inadequate and confused.

c Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. Who does not feel the exalted sound of these words and the Dionysiac element of transport and fervour in them ? It is instructive that in such phrases as these, in which consciousness would fain put its highest consummation into words, all images fall away* and the mind turns from them to grasp expressions that are purely negative. And it is still more instructive that in reading and hearing such words their merely negative character simply is not noticed ; that we can let whole chains of such negations enrapture, even intoxi cate us, and that entire hymns and deeply impressive hymns have been composed, in which there is really nothing positive at all ! All this teaches us the independence of the positive content of this experience from the implications of its overt conceptual expression, and how it can be firmly grasped, thoroughly understood, and profoundly appreciated, purely in. with, and from the feeling itself.

Mere love, mere trust, for all the glory and happiness they bring, do not explain to us that moment of rapture that breathes in our tenderest and most heart-felt hymns of salva tion, as also in such eschatological hymns of longing as that Rhyme of St. Bernard in which the very verses seem to dance.

Urbs Sion unica, mansio mystica, condita caelo, Nunc tibi gaudeo, nunc tibi lugeo, tristor, anhelo, Te, quia corpore non queo, pectore saepe penetro ; Sed caro terrea, terraque carnea, mox cado retro.

THE ELEMENT OF FASCINATION 35

Nemo retexere, nemoque promcre sustinet ore, Quo tua moenia, quo capitolia plena nitore. Id queo dicere, quo modo tangere pollice coclum, Ut mare currere, sicut in acre figere teluni. Opprimit omne cor ille tuns decor, O Sion, O Pax. Urbs sine tempore, nulla potest fore laus tibi mendax. O nova mansio, te pia concio, gens pia munit, Provehit, excitat, auget, identitat, em cit, unit. 1

This is where the living something more of the fascinans , the element of fascination, is to be found. It lives no less in those tense extollings of the blessing of salvation, which recur in all religions of salvation, and stand in such remarkable contrast to the relatively meagre and frequently childish import of that which is revealed in them by concept or by image. Everywhere Salvation is something whose meaning is often very little apparent, is even wholly obscure, to the natural man ; on the contrary, so far as he understands it, he tends to find it highly tedious and uninteresting, sometimes downright distasteful and repugnant to his nature, as he would, for instance, find the beatific vision of God in our own doctrine of Salvation, or the Henosis of God all in all among the mystics. So far as he understands , be it noted ; but then he does not understand it in the least. Because he lacks the inward teaching of the Spirit, he must needs confound what is offered him as an expression for the experience of salvation a mere ideogram of what is felt, whose import it hints at by analogy with natural concepts, as though it were itself just such an one. And so he wanders ever further from the goal .

1 Zion, thou cityBole and single, mystic mansion hidden away in the heavens, now I rejoice in thee, now I moan for thee and moujn and yearn for thee ; Thee often I pass through in the heart, as I cannot in the body, but being but earthly flesh and fleshly earth soon I fall back. None can disclose or utter in speech what plenary radiance fills thy walls and thy citadels. I can as little tell of it as I can touch the skies with my finger, or run upon the sea or make a dart stand still in the air. This thy splendour overwhelms every heart, Sion, Peace ! time less City, no praise can belie thee. O new dwelling-place, thee the concourse and people of the faithful erects and exalts, inspires and in creases, joins to itself, and makes complete and one.

D ii

36 THE ELEMENT OF FASCINATION

It is not only in the religious feeling of longing that the moment of fascination is a living factor. It is already alive and present in the moment of solemnity , both in the gathered concentration and humble abasement of private devotion, when the mind is exalted to the holy, and in the common worship of the congregation, where this is practised with earnestness and deep sincerity, as, it is to be feared, is with us a thing rather desired than realized. It is this and nothing else that in the solemn moment can fill the soul so full and keep it so inexpressibly tranquil. Schleiermacher s assertion l is perhaps true of it, as of the numinous consciousness in general, viz. that it cannot really occur alone on its own account, or except combined and penetrated with rational elements. But, if this be admitted, it is upon other grounds than those adduced by Schleiermacher ; while, on the other hand, it may occupy a more or less predominant place and lead to states of calm (rivv^ta) as well as of transport, in which it almost of itself wholly fills the soul. But in all the manifold forms in which it is aroused in us, whether in eschatological promise of the coming kingdom of God and the transcendent bliss of Paradise, or in the guise of an entry into that beatific Reality that is above the world ; whether it come first in expectancy or preintimation or in a present experience ( When I but have Thee, I ask no question of heaven and earth ) ; in all these forms, outwardly diverse but inwardly akin, it appears as a strange and mighty propulsion toward an ideal good known only to religion and in its nature fundamentally non-rational, which the mind knows of in yearning and presentiment, recognizing it for what it is behind the obscure and inadequate symbols which are its only expression. And this shows that above and beyond our rational being lies hidden the ultimate and highest part of our nature, which can find no satisfaction in the mere allaying of the needs of our sensuous, psychical, or intellectual impulses and cravings. The mystics called it the basis or ground of the soul.

We saw that in the case of the element of the mysterious the 1 Glaubenslehre, 5.

THE ELEMENT OF FASCINATION 37

c wholly other led on to the supernatural and transcendent and that above these appeared the beyond (eVc/ccu/a) of Mysti cism, through the non-rational side of religion being raised to its highest power and stressed to excess. It is the same in the case of the element of * fascination ; here, too, is possible a transition into Mysticism. At its highest point of stress the fascinating becomes the * overabounding \ l the mystical moment which exactly corresponds upon this line to the 7reAceu a upon the other line of approach, and which is to be understood accordingly. But while this feeling of the over- abounding is specially characteristic of Mysticism, a trace of it survives in all truly felt states of religious beatitude, how ever restrained and kept within measure by other factors. This is seen most clearly from the psychology of those great experiences of grace, conversion, second birth in which the religious experience appears in its pure intrinsic nature and in heightened activity, so as to be more clearly grasped than in the less typical form of piety instilled by education. The hard core of such experiences in their Christian form consists of the redemption from guilt and bondage to sin, and we shall have presently to see that this also does not occur with out a participation of non-rational elements. But leaving this out of account, what we have here to point out is the unutter- ableness of what has been yet genuinely experienced, and how such an experience may pass into blissful excitement, rapture, and exaltation verging often on the bizarre and the abnor mal. 2 This is vouched for by the autobiographical testi mony of the converted from St. Paul onward. William James has collected a great number of these, without, however,

1 Das UberscJnnngliche.

2 This may be found fatal to the attempt to construct a Religion within the limits of pure reason or of humanity * ; but, none the less, the matter is aa we have described it, as far as concerns the psychologi cal inquiry into religion, which asks, not what it is within the afore mentioned limit*, but what it is in its own essential nature. And for that matter this proceeding of constructing a humanity prior to and apart from the most central and potent of human capacities is like nothing so much as the attempt to frame a standard idea of the human body after having previously cut off the head.

38 THE ELEMENT OF FASCINATION

himself noticing the non-rational element that thrills in them.

Thus, one writes

. . . For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exaltation remained. It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great orchestra, when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony, that leaves the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted upwards and almost bursting with its own emotion. ( Varieties, &c., p. 66.)

And another :

. . . The more I seek words to express this intimate inter course, the more I feel the impossibility of describing the thing by any of our usual images. (Ibid., p. 68.)

And almost with the precision of dogma, a third (Jonathan Edwards) indicates the qualitative difference of the experience of beatitude from other rational joy :

The conceptions which the saints have of the loveliness of God and that kind of delight which they experience in it are quite peculiar and entirely different from anything which a natural man can possess or of which he can form any proper notion/ (Ibid., p. 229.)

Cf. also pp. 192, 225; and the testimony of Jacob Boehme given on p. 417. Also this of Boehme :

But I can neither write nor tell of what sort of Exaltation the triumphing in the Spirit is. It can be compared with nought, but that when in the midst of death life is born, and it is like the resurrection of the dead.

With the mystics these experiences pass up wholly into the over-abounding . O that I could tell you what the heart feels, how it burns and is consumed inwardly ! Only, I find no words to express it. I can but say : Might but one little drop of what I feel fall into Hell, Hell would be transformed into a Paradise. So says St. Catherine of Genoa ; and all the multitude of her spiritual kindred testify to the same effect.

What we Christians know as the experiences of grace and the second birth have their parallels also in the religions of high spiritual rank beyond the borders of Christianity. Such are the breaking out of the saving Bodhi , the opening

THE ELEMENT OF FASCINATION 39

of the heavenly eye , the Jndna by ISvarae prasdda, which is victorious over the darkness of nescience and shines out in an experience with which no other can be measured. And in all these the entirely non-rational and specific element in the beatific experience is immediately noticeable. The quali tative character of it varies widely in all these cases, and is again in them all very different from its parallels in Chris tianity ; still in all it is very similar in intensity, and in all it is a salvation and an absolute fascination , which in contrast to all that admits of natural expression or comparison is deeply imbued with the over-abounding nature of the numen.

And this is also entirely true of the rapture of Nirvana, which is only in appearance a cold and negative state. It is only conceptually that Nirvana is a negation ; it is felt in con sciousness as in the strongest degree positive ; it exercises a fascination by which its votaries are as much carried away as are the Hindu or the Christian by the corresponding objects of their worship. I recall vividly a conversation I had with a Buddhist monk. He had been putting before me methodi cally and pertinaciously the arguments for the Buddhist 1 theology of negation , the doctrine of Anatman and entire emptiness . When he had made an end, I asked him, what then Nirvana itself is ; and after a long pause came at last the single answer, low and restrained : Bliss unspeakable . And the hushed restraint of that answer, the solemnity of his voice, demeanour, and gesture, made more clear what was meant than the words themselves.

And so we maintain, on the one hand, following the via eminentiae et causalitatis , that the divine is indeed the highest, strongest, best, loveliest, and dearest that man can think of; but we assert on the other, following the via negationis , that God is not merely the ground and superlative of all that can be thought; He is in Himself a subject on His own account and in Himself.

•  : *

In the adjective Stivos the Greek language possesses a word peculiarly difficult to translate, and standing for an idea peculiarly difficult to grasp in all its strange variations. And

40 THE ELEMENT OF FASCINATION

if we ask whence this difficulty arises, the answer is plain ; it is because 5ety6y is simply the numinous (mostly of course at a lower level, in an arrested form, attenuated by rhetorical or poetic usage). Consequently 5et*>6y is the equivalent of dirus and tremendus . It may mean evil or imposing, potent and strange, queer and marvellous, horrifying and fascinating, divine and daemonic, and a source of energy . Sophocles means to awaken the feeling of c numinous awe through the whole gamut of its phases at the contemplation of man, the creature of marvel, in the choric song of the Antigone :

TroXXa TO, Seiva, KovSzv avQp&Trov Stivorepov neXei.

This line defies translation, just because our language has no term that can isolate distinctly and gather into one word the total numinous impression a thing may make on the mind. The nearest that German can get to it is in the expression

• das Ungeheuere (monstrous), while in English weird is

perhaps the closest rendering possible. The mood and attitude represented in the foregoing verse might then be fairly well rendered by such a translation as :

Much there is that is weird ; but nought is weirder than man.

The German ungeheuer is not by derivation simply huge , in quantity or quality ; this, its common meaning, is in fact a rationalizing interpretation of the real idea ; it is that which is not geheuer , i. e., approximately, the uncanny in a word, the numinous. And it is just this element of the uncanny in man that Sophocles has in mind. If this, its fundamental meaning, be really and thoroughly felt in consciousness, then the word could be taken as a fairly exact expression for the numinous in its aspects of mystery, awefulness, majesty, augustness, and energy ; nay, even the aspect of fascination is dimly felt in it.

The variations of meaning in the German word ungeheuer can be well illustrated from Goethe. 1 He, too, uses the word

1 Cf. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Bk. I, ch. 10; Wahlveneandtschaf- ten, 2. 15 ; Dichtunq und Wahrheit, 2. 9 ; 4. 20.

THE ELEMENT OF FASCINATION 41

first to denote the huge in size what is too vast for our faculty of space-perception, such as the immeasurable vault of the night sky. In other passages the word retains its original non-rational colour more markedly; it comes to mean the uncanny, the fearful, the dauntingly other and incomprehen sible, that which arouses in us stupor and Od^pos ; and finally, in the wonderful words of Faust which I have put upon my title-page, it becomes an almost exact synonym for our numinous under all its aspects.

Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil. Wie auch die Welt ihm das Gefiihl verteuere, Ergritfen fiihlt er tief das Ungeheuere. 1

1 Awe is the best of man : howe er the world s Misprizing of the feeling would prevent us, Deeply we feel, once gripped, the weird Portentous.

(GOETHE, Faust, Second Part, Act I, Sc. v.)

CHAPTEE VII ANALOGIES AND ASSOCIATED FEELINGS

IN order to give an adequate account of this second aspect of the numinous, we were led to add to its original designation as mysterium tremendum that it at the same time exercises a supreme fascination . And this its dual character, as at once an object of boundless awe and boundless wonder, quelling and yet entrancing the soul, constitutes the proper positive content of the mysterium as it manifests itself in conscious feeling. No attempt of ours to describe this harmony of contrasts in the import of the mysterium can really succeed ; but it may perhaps be adumbrated, as it were from a distance, by taking an analogy from a region belonging not to religion but to aesthetics. In the category and feeling of the sullime we have a counterpart to it, though it is true it is but a pale reflexion, and moreover involves difficulties of analysis all its own. The analogies between the consciousness of the sublime and of the numinous may be easily grasped. 1 To begin with, the sublime , like the numinous , is in Kantian language an idea or concept that cannot be unfolded or explicated (unaus- wickelbar). Certainly we can tabulate some general rational signs that uniformly recur as soon as we call an object sublime ; as, for instance, that it must approach, or threaten to overpass, the bounds of our understanding by some dynamic or mathematic greatness, by potent manifestations of force

1 We are often prone to resort to this familiar feeling-content to fill out the negative concept transcendent , explaining frankly God s trans cendence by His sublimity . As a figurative analogical description this is perfectly allowable, but it would be an error if we meant it literally and in earnest. Religious feelings are not the same as aesthetic feelings, and the sublime is as definitely an aesthetic term as the beautiful \ however widely different may be the facts denoted by the words.

ANALOGIES AND ASSOCIATED FEELINGS 43

or magnitude in spatial extent. But these are obviously only conditions of, not the essence of, the impression of sub limity. A thing does not become sublime merely by being great. The concept itself remains unexplicated ; it has in it something mysterious, and in this it is like that of 1 the numinous . A second point of resemblance is that the sublime exhibits the same peculiar dual character as the numinous; it is at once daunting, and yet again singularly attracting, in its impress upon the mind. It humbles and at the same time exalts us, circumscribes and extends us beyond ourselves, on the one hand releasing in us a feeling analogous to fear, and on the other rejoicing us. So the idea of the sublime is closely similar to that of the numinous, and is well adapted to excite it and to be excited by it, while each tends to pass over into the other.

The Law of the Association of Feelings.

As these expressions excite and pass over will later assume importance, and as the latter in particular is hedged about with misconceptions which are prominent in the modern doctrines of Evolution and give rise to quite erroneous con clusions, we will enter at once upon a closer consideration of them.

It is a well-known and fundamental psychological law that ideas attract one another, and that one will excite another and call it into consciousness, if it resembles it. An entirely similar law holds good with regard to feelings. A feeling, no less than an idea, can arouse its like in the mind ; and the presence of the one in my consciousness may be the occasion for my entertaining the other at the same time. Further, just as in the case of ideas the law of reproduction by similarity leads to a mistaken substitution of ideas, so that I come to entertain an idea x, when y would have been the appropriate one, so we may be led to a corresponding substitution of feelings, and I may react with a feeling x to an impression to which the feeling y would normally correspond. Finally, /can pass from one feeling to another by an imperceptibly gradual transition, the one feeling x dying away little by

44 ANALOGIES AND ASSOCIATED FEELINGS

little, while the other, y, excited together with it, increases and strengthens in a corresponding degree. But it is important here to recognize the true account of the phenomenon. What passes over undergoes transition is not the feeling itself. It is not that the actual feeling gradually changes in quality or evolves , i. e. transmutes itself into a quite different one, but rather that / pass over or make the transition from one feeling to another as my circumstances change, by the gradual decrease of the one and increase of the other. A transition of the actual feeling into another would be a real transmutation , and would be a psychological counterpart to the alchemist s production of gold by the transmutation of metals.

And yet it is this transmutation that is assumed by the modern Evolutionism more properly to be called Transmu- tationism by the introduction of the equivocal phrase, gradually evolve (i. e. from a thing of a certain quality to something qualitatively different), or the no less equivocal words * Epigenesis , Heterogony , l and their like. In this way, they would have us believe, the feeling, e.g. of moral obligation, evolves or develops. At first, so it is said, all that exists is the simple constraint of uniform custom, as seen in the community of the clan. Then, out of that, it is said, arises the idea of a universally obligatory ought . How the idea can do so is not disclosed. Now such a theory misses the fact that in moral obligation we have something qualitatively quite different from constraint by custom. The finer and more pene trating psychological analysis that can apprehend differences in quality is rudely ignored and in consequence the whole problem is misconceived. Or, if something of the essential difference is felt, it is covered up and glozed over by the phrase gradually evolve , and the one thing is made to turn into the other par la dure e , much as milk grows sour from standing. But ought is a primary and unique meaning, as little derivable from another as blue from bitter, and there are not transmutations in the psychological any more than in the

1 Neither Heterogony nor Epigenesis is genuine Evolution. They are rather just what the biologists call generatio equivoca , and there fore mere formation of an aggregate by addition and accumulation.

ANALOGIES AND ASSOCIATED FEELINGS 45

physical world. The idea ought is only evolvable out of the spirit of man itself, and then in the sense of being arous- able , because it is already potentially implanted in him. Were it not so, no evolution could effect an introduction for it.

The evolutionists may be quite correct in reconstructing the kind of historical process that took place, viz. the gradual and successive entry upon the scene of different moments of feeling-consciousness in historical sequence, and the order of entry itself may have been correctly discovered. But the explanation of this process is quite different from that which they intend ; it Is, namely, the law of the excitation and arousin"- of feelings and ideas according to the measure of

O O "

their resemblance. There is in point of fact a very strong analogy between constraint by custom and constraint by moral obligation, as both are constraints upon conduct. Conse quently the former can arouse the latter in the mind if it the latter was already potentially planted there ; the feeling of ought may start into consciousness at the presence of the other feeling, and the man may gradually effect a transition to it from that other. But what we are concerned with is the replacement of the one by the other, and not the transmuta tion of the one into the other.

Now it is just the same with the feeling of the numinous as with that of moral obligation. It too is not to be derived from any other feeling, and is in this sense unevolvable . It is a content of feeling that is qualitatively svi generis, yet at the same time one that has numerous analogies with others, and therefore it and they may reciprocally excite or stimulate one another and cause one another to appear in the mind. Instead of framing epigenctic and other fabrications of the course the evolution of religion has taken, it is our task to inquire into these stimuli or excitations , these elements that cause the numinous feeling to appear in consciousness, to intimate by virtue of what analogies they came to be able to do so, and so to discover the series or chain of these stimuli by whose operation the numinous feeling was awakened in us.

Such a power of stimulation characterizes the feeling of the Bublime, in accordance with the law we found, and through

46 ANALOGIES AND ASSOCIATED FEELINGS

the analogies it bears to the numinous feeling. But this is indubitably a stimulus that only makes its appearance late in the excitation-series, and it is probable that the feeling of the sublime is itself first aroused and disengaged by the precedent religious feeling not from itself, but from the rational spirit of man and its a priori capacity.

Schematization.

The Association of Ideas does not simply cause the idea y to reappear in consciousness with the given idea x occasionally only, it also sets up under certain circumstances lasting com binations and connexions between the two. And this is no less true of the association of feelings. Accordingly, we see religious feeling in permanent connexion with other feelings which are conjoined to it in accordance with this principle of Association. It is, indeed, more accurate to say conjoined than really con nected , for such mere conjunctions or chance connexions according to laws of purely external analogy are to be distin guished from necessary connexions according to principles of true inward affinity and cohesion. An instance of a con nexion of this latter kind an example, indeed, of an inner a priori principle is (following the theory of Kant) the con nexion of the Category of Causality with its temporal

• schema , the temporal sequence of two successive events,

which by being brought into connexion with the Category of Causality is known and recognized as a causal relation of the two. In this case analogy between the two the category and the schema has also a place, but it is not chance external resemblance but essential correspondence, and the fact that the two belong together is here a necessity of our reason. On the basis of such a necessity the temporal sequence schema tizes the category.

Now the relation of the rational to the non-rational ele ment in the idea of the holy or sacred is just such a one of schematization , and the non-rational numinous fact, schema tized by the rational concepts we have suggested above, yields us the complex category of holy itself, richly charged and complete and in its fullest meaning. And that the schematism

ANALOGIES AND ASSOCIATED FEELINGS 47

is a genuine one, and not a mere combination of analogies, may be distinctly seen from the fact that it does not fall to pieces, and cannot be cut out as the development of the consciousness of religious truth proceeds onwards and up wards, but is only recognized with greater definiteness and certainty. And it is for the same reason inherently probable that there is more, too, in the combination of the holy with the sublime than a mere association of feelings ; and per haps we may say that, while as a matter of historical genesis such an association was the means whereby this combination was awakened in the mind and the occasion for it, yet the in ward and lasting character of the connexion in all the higher religions does prove that the sublime too is an authentic scheme of the holy .

The intimate interpenetration of the non-rational with the rational elements of the religious consciousness, like the inter weaving of warp and woof in a fabric, may be elucidated by taking another familiar case, in which a universal human

O

feeling, that of personal affection, is similarly interpene trated by a likewise thoroughly non-rational and separate element, namely, the sex instinct. It goes without saying that this latter lies just on the opposite side of reason to the numinous consciousness; for, while this is above all reason , the sex impulse is below it, an element in our instinctive life. 1 The numinous infuses the rational from above, the sexual presses up from beneath, quite wholesomely and normally out of the nature which the human being shares with the general animal world, into the higher realm of the specifically humane . But though the two things I am comparing are thus manifestly opposite extremes, they have a closely corre sponding relation to that which lies between them, viz. the reason. For the quite special domain of the erotic is only brought into existence as the reproductive instinct passes up out of the merely instinctive life, penetrates the higher humane life of mind and feeling, and infuses wishes, cravings, and longings in personal liking, friendship, and love, in song and poetry and imaginative creation in general. Whatever falls within the sphere of the erotic is therefore always a composite

48 ANALOGIES AND ASSOCIATED FEELINGS

product, made up of two factors : the one something that occurs also in the general sphere of human behaviour as such, as friendship and liking, the feeling of companionship, the mood of poetic inspiration or joyful exaltation, and the like ; and the other an infusion of a quite special kind, which is not to be classed with these, and of which no one can have any inkling, let alone understand it, who has not learnt from the actual inward experience of eros or love. Another point in which the erotic is analogous to the holy is in having in the main no means of linguistic expression but terms drawn from other fields of mental life, which only cease to be innocuous (i. e. only become genuinely erotic terms) when it is realized that the lover, like the orator, bard, or singer, expresses himself not so much by the actual words he uses as by the accent, tone, and imitative gesture which reinforce them.

The phrase he loves me is verbally identical, whether it is said by a child of its father or by a girl of her lover. But in the second case a c love is meant which is at the same time something more (viz. sexual love), and something more not only in quantity but in quality. So, too, the phrase We ought to fear, love, and trust him l is verbally identical, whether it refers to the relation of child to father or to that of man to God. But again in the second case these ideas are infused with a meaning of which none but the religious- minded man can have any comprehension or indeed any inkling, whose presence makes, e. g., the fear of God some thing more than any fear of a man, qualitatively, not merely quantitatively, though retaining the essence of the most genuine reverence felt by the child for its father. And Suso means in the same way to distinguish love and love of God , when he says :

There was never a string so dulcet-toned but ceased to sound if stretched to a withered frame ; a heart poor in love can no more understand speech rich in love than a German can an Italian. 2

1 Luther s amplification of the First Commandment. 1 Works, ed. Denifle, p. 309.

ANALOGIES AND ASSOCIATED FEELINGS 49

There is another kind of experience in which we may find an example of the way in which rational elements in our feeling-consciousness may be thus penetrated by quite non- rational ones, and an example even more proximate to the complex feeling of the holy than that just described erotic* experience ; in so far as the non-rational element is, like the numinous feeling but unlike the sexual impulse, at the same time tu/>ra-ration;il. I refer to the state of mind induced in us by a song set to music. The verbal text of the song expresses feelings that are natural , homesickness perhaps, or confidence in time of danger, hope for a future good, or joy in a present possession all concrete elements in our natural human lot, and capable of being described in conceptual terms. But it is otherwise with the music, purely as music. It releases a blissful rejoicing in us, and we are conscious of a glimmering, billowy agitation occupying our minds, without being able to express or explain in concepts what it really is that moves us so deeply. And to say that the music is mourn ful or exultant, that it incites or restrains, is merely to use signs by analogy, choosing them for their resemblance to the matter in hand out of other regions of our mental life ; and at any rate we cannot say what the object or ground of this mourning or exulting may be. Music, in short, arouses in us an experience and vibrations of mood that are quite specific in kind and must simply be called musical ; but the rise and fall and manifold variations of this experience exhibit though again only in part definite, if fugitive, analogies and correspondences with our ordinary non-musical emotional states, and so can call these into consciousness and blend with them. If this happens, the specific music-consciousness is thereby schematized and rationalized, and the resultant complex mood is, as it were, a fabric, in which the general human feelings and emotional states constitute the warp, and the non-rational music-feelings the woof. The song in its entirety is therefore music rationalized .

Now here is illustrated the contrast between the legitimate and the illegitimate processes of rationalization . For, if the Bongmay be called music rationalized in the legitimate sense,

E

50 ANALOGIES AND ASSOCIATED FEELINGS

in programme-music we have a musical rationalism in the bad sense. Programme-music, that is to say, misinterprets and perverts the idea of music by its implication that the inner content of music is not as in fact it is something unique and mysterious, but just the incidental experiences joy and grief, expansion and repression familiar to the human heart. And in its attempt to make of musical tones a language to recount the fortunes of men programme-music abolishes the autonomy of music, and is deceived by a mere resemblance into employ ing as a means what is an end and substantive content in its own right. It is just the same mistake as when the august aspect of the numinous is allowed to evaporate into the morally good , instead of merely being schematized by it, or as when we let the holy be identified with the perfectly good will. And not only programme-music is at fault here. The music-drama of Wagner, by attempting a thorough going unification of the musical and the dramatic, commits the same offence against both the non-rational spirit of the former and the autonomy of either. We can only succeed in very partial and fragmentary fashion in schematizing the non- rational factor in music by means of the familiar incidents of human experience. And the reason is just this, that the real content of music is not drawn from the ordinary human emotions at all, and that it is in no way merely a second lan guage, alongside the usual one, by which these emotions find expression. Musical feeling is rather (like numinous feeling) something wholly other , which, while it affords analogies and here and there will run parallel to the ordinary emotions of life, cannot be made to coincide with them by a detailed point- to-point correspondence. It is, of course, from those places where the correspondence holds that the spell of a composed song arises by a blending of verbal and musical expression. But the very fact that we attribute to it a spell, an enchant ment, points in itself to that woof in the fabric of music of which we spoke, the woof of the unconceived and non- rational. 1

1 This is the point of view from which to estimate both the excellent and the inadequate features of E. Hanslick s book, Vom Musicalisch-Schunen.

ANALOGIES AND ASSOCIATED FEELINGS 51

But we must beware of confounding in any way the non- rational of music and the non-rational of the numinous itself, as Schopenhauer, for example, does. Each is something in its own right, independently of the other. We shall discuss later whether, and how far, the former may become a means of expression for the latter.

E 2

CHAPTER VIII THE HOLY AS A CATEGORY OF VALUE

Sin and Atonement

WE have already met that strange and profound mental reaction to the numinous which we proposed to call creature- feeling or creature-consciousness, with its concomitant feelings of abasement and prostration and of the diminution of the self into nothingness ; bearing always in mind that these expres sions do not hit with precision, but merely hint at what is really meant, 1 inasmuch as this diminution of the self , &c., is something very different from the littleness, weakness, or dependence of which we may become aware under other conditions than that of numinous feeling. And we had to notice that this experience marks a definite depreciation or disvaluation of the self in respect, so to speak, of its reality and very existence. We have now to put alongside of this another sort of self-disvaluation, which has long been a matter of common observation, and only needs to be suggested in order to be recognized. I am a man of unclean lips and dwell among a people of unclean lips. Depart from me^ for I am a sinful man, O Lord. So say respectively Isaiah and Peter, when the numinous reality encounters them as a present fact of consciousness. In both cases this self- depreciating feeling-response is marked by an immediate, almost instinctive, spontaneity. It is not based on delibera tion, nor does it follow any rule, but breaks, as it were, palpitant from the soul like a direct reflex movement at the stimulation of the numinous. It does not spring from

1 Cf. Hugo of St. Victor s words : Sumpta sunt vocabula, ut intellegi aliquatenus posset quod comprehend! non poterat . ( These words were chosen, that that which could not be comprehended might yet in some measure be understood. )

THE HOLY AS A CATEGORY OF VALUE 53

the consciousness of some committed transgression, but rather is an immediate datum given with the feeling of the nutnen : it proceeds to disvalue together with the self the tribe to which the person belongs, and indeed, together with that, all existence in general. Now it is to-day pretty generally agreed that, all this being the case, these outbursts of feeling are not simply, and probably at first not at all, moral deprecia tions, but belong to a quite special category of valuation and appraisement. The feeling is beyond question not that of the transgression of the moral law, however evident it may be that such a transgression, where it has occurred, will involve it as a consequence : it is the feeling of absolute * profaueness .

But what is this 1 Again something which the natural man cannot, as such, know or even imagine. He, only, who is in the Spirit knows and feels what this profaneness is ; but to such an one it comes with piercing acuteness, and is accom panied by the most uncompromising judgement of self-deprecia tion, a judgement passed, not upon his character, because of individual profane actions of his, but upon his own very existence as creature before that which is supreme above all creatures. And at the same moment he passes upon the liumcn a judgement of appreciation of a unique kind by the ^Cfttegorv diametrically contrary to the profane , the category hoTpjwinch~is proper to the numen alone, but to it in an aUsoIute degree ; he says : Tu solus sanctus . This sanctus is not merely perfect or beautiful or sublime or good , though, being like these concepts also a value, objective and ultimate, it has a definite, perceptible analogy with them. It is the positive numinous value or worth, and to it corre sponds on the side of the creature a numinous disvalue or 1 unworth .

In every highly-developed religion the appreciation of moral obligation and duty, ranking as a claim of the deity upon man, has been developed side by side with the religious feeling itself. None the less a profoundly humble and heartfelt recognition of the holy may occur in particular experiences without being always or definitely charged or infused with the Hense of moral demands. The holy will then be recognized as

54 THE HOLY AS A CATEGORY OF VALUE

that which commands our respect, as that whose real value is to be acknowledged inwardly. It is not that the awe of holiness is itself simply fear in face of what is absolutely overpower ing, before which there is no alternative to blind, awe-struck obedience. Tu solus sanctus is rather a paean of praise, which, so far from being merely a faltering confession of the divine supremacy, recognizes and extols a value, precious beyond all conceiving. The object of such praise is not simply absolute Might, making its claims and compelling their fulfilment, but a might that has at the same time the supremest right to make the highest claim to service, and receives praise because it is in an absolute sense worthy to be praised. Thou art worthy to ^receive praise and honour and power (Rev. iv. 11).

When once it has been grasped that qdddsh or sanctus is not | originally a moral category at all, the most obvious rendering L of the words is transcendent ( supramundane , uberweltlich). The one-sided character of this rendering to which we had to take exception has been supplemented by the more detailed exposition of the numinous and its implications. But its most essential defect remains to be noted : transcendent is a purely ontological attribute and not an attribute of value ; it denotes a character that can, if need be, abash us, but cannot inspire us with respect. It might once again, therefore, be an advantage to introduce another term to underline this side of the numinous, and the words augustus and o-e/^oy suggest themselves for the purpose. Augustus , august , no less than o-e/zj/6?, is really appropriate only to numinous objects to rulers only as offspring or descendants of gods. Then, while <j/3ao-r6? indicates the being of the numen, creyui/o? or augustus would refer rather to its supreme worth or value, its illustriousness. There will, then, in fact be two values to dis tinguish in the numen ; its fascination (fascinans) will be that element in it whereby it is of subjective value ( = beatitude) to man; but it is august (augustum) in so far as it is recognized as possessing in itself objective value that claims our homage.

Mere unlawfulness only becomes sin , impiety , sacri lege , when the character of numinous unworthiness or disvalue goes on to be transferred to and centred in moral

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delinquency. And only when the mind feels it as sin does the trans<a*ession of law become a matter of such dreadful

O

gravity for the conscience, a catastrophe that leads it to despair of its own power. The meaning of * sin is not under stood by the natural , nor even by the merely moral, man ; and the theory of certain dogmatists, that the demand of morality as such urged man on to an inner collapse and then obliged him to look round for some deliverance, is palpably incorrect. There are serious-minded men of sincere moral endeavour who cannot understand what such a deliverance or redemption may be, and dismiss it with a shrug of the shoulders. They are aware that they are erring and imperfect- men, but they know and put into practice the methods of self- discipline, and so labour onward upon their way with sturdy resolution. The morally robust older Rationalism was lacking neither in a sincere and respectful recognition of the moral law nor in honest endeavour to conform to it. It knew well and sternly condemned what was wrong , and the aim of its exhortations and instruction was that men should realize better and take more in earnest the facts of moral ri<rht and wron<r.

o o

But no downfall or collapse and no need of redemption came within its scheme, because the objection brought against it by its opponents was in fact just ; Rationalism lacked under standing of what sin is. 1 Mere morality is not the soil from which grows either the need of redemption and deliverance or the need for that other unique good which is likewise

1 Cf. the testimony of Theodore Parker certainly a man of far from crude mental development -as to his own experience, given by W.James, Varieties, p. 81 :

They (HC. the heathen of classical antiquity) were conscious of wrath, of cruelty, avarice, drunkenness, lust, sloth, cowardice, and other actual vices, and struggled and got rid of the deformities; but they were not conscious of " enmity against God " and didn t sit down and whine and groun against non-exihtt-nt evil. I have done wrong things enough in my life, and do them now: I miss the mark, draw bow, and try again. Hut ... 1 know there IB much "health in me"; and in my body, even now, there dwelk-th many a good thing, spite of consumption aud Saint Paul.

If there is nothing crude about such a statement, it is at any rate ntpttjicial. The depths of the non-rational consciousness must be stirred to Cud with Anselm quanti ponderiu bit peccatum .

56 THE HOLY AS A CATEGORY OF VALUE

altogether and specifically numinous in character, covering , and atonement . There would perhaps be less disputing as to the warrant and value of these latter in Christian doctrine if dogmatic theology itself had not transferred them from their mystical sphere into that of rational ethics and attenuated them into moral concepts. They were thus taken from a sphere where they have an authentic and necessary place to one where their validity is most disputable.

We meet the moment of covering in specially clear form in the religion of Yahweh, in its rites and the emotion they excite ; but it is contained also, though more obscurely, in many other religions. It comprises, first, a manifestation of the numinous awe, viz. the feeling that the profane creature can not forthwith approach the numen, but has need of a covering or shield against the opyij of the numen. Such a covering is then a consecration , i.e. a procedure that renders the approacher himself numinous , frees him from his profane being and fits him for intercourse with the numen. The means of consecration , however means of grace in the proper sense are derived from, or conferred and appointed by, the numen itself, which bestows something of its own quality to make man capable of communion with it. And this act is something very different from the annulment of mistrust , the phrase in which Ritschl seeks to rationalize these relations between God and man.

c Atonement , following our view, is a sheltering or cover ing , but a profounder form of it. It springs directly from the idea of numinous value or worth and numinous disvalue or unworth as soon as these have been developed. Mere awe, mere need of shelter from the tremendum , has here been elevated to the feeling that man in his profaneness is not worthy to stand in the presence of the holy one, and that his own entire personal unworthiness might defile even holiness itself. This is obviously the case in the vision of the call of Isaiah ; and the same note recurs, less emphatically but quite unmistakably, in the story of the centurion of Capernaum (St. Luke vii. 1-10), and his words : I am not worthy that thou shouldest enter under my roof . Here we have both the light thrill of awe before the

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1 tremendum of the numen and also, and more especially, the feeling of this unique disvalue or unworth of the profane confronted by the numen, which suggests to the man that even holiness itself may be tainted and tarnished by his presence.

Here, then, comes in the felt necessity and longing for atonement , and all the more strongly when the close presence of the nuinen, intercourse with it, and enduring possession of it, becomes an object of craving, is even desired as the sumwum bonum. It amounts to a longing to transcend this sundering un worthiness, given with the self s existence as creature and profane natural being. It is an element in the religious con sciousness, which, so far from vanishing in the measure in which religion is deepened and heightened, grows on the contrary continually stronger and more marked. Belonging, as it does, wholly to the non-rational side of religion, it may remain latent while, in the course of religious evolution, the rational side at first unfolds and assumes vigorous and definite form ; it may retire for a time behind other elements and apparently die away, but only to return more powerfully and insistently than before. And again it may grow to be the sole, one-sided, exclusive interest, a cry that drowns all other notes, so that the religious consciousness is distorted and disfigured ; as may readily happen where through long periods of time the rational aspects of religion have been fostered unduly and at the cost of the non-rational.

The special character of this consciousness of need for atonement may perhaps be brought home more clearly by an analogy from our natural emotional life ; but at the same time it is important that the religious feeling we are con sidering should itself be kept distinct from its analogue, as the two are frequently confounded. The analogy is with the feeling arising from moral transgression. There, too, we practise a kind of self-depreciation which is clear and familiar and perfectly intelligible to us, when we esteem ourselves guilty of a bad action and the action itself as morally evil. The evil of the action weighs upon us and deprives us of our self-respect. We accuse ourselves and remome sets in. But alongside this self -depreciation stands a second one, which

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while it may have reference to the same action as the other yet avails itself of definitely different categories. The same perverse action that before weighed upon us now pollutes us ; we do not accuse ourselves, we are defiled in our own eyes. And the characteristic form of emotional reaction is no longer remorse but loathing. The man feels a need, to express which he has recourse to images of washing and cleansing. The two kinds of self-depreciation proceed on parallel lines and may relate to the same action ; but none the less it is obvious that they are, inwardly and in their essence, determinately different. Now the second of them has a plain analogy with the need for atonement , and so can fairly be drawn upon for its elucidation ; while at the same time it is yet nothing more than an analogy from another sphere, viz. that of morality.

No religion has brought the mystery of the need for atonement or expiation to so complete, so profound, or so powerful expression as Christianity. And in this, too, it shows its superiority over others. It is a more perfect religion and more perfectly religion than they, in so far as what is potential in religion in general becomes in Christianity a pure actuality. And the distrust and suspicion which so widely obtains with regard to this mystery is only to be explained from the general custom for which our theoretical cult of homiletics, liturgy, and catechism is largely responsible of taking into account only the rational side of religion. Yet this atonement mystery is a moment which no Christian teaching that purports to represent the religious experience of the Christian and biblical tradition can afford to surrender. The teacher will have to make explicit, by an analysis of the Christian religious experience, how the very numen , by imparting itself to the worshipper, becomes itself the means of atonement . And in this regard it does not matter so very much what the decisions of the commentators are as to what, if anything, Paul or Peter wrote on the sub ject of expiation and atonement, or whether, indeed, there is any scriptural authority for the thing at all. Were there in scripture no word written about it, it might still

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be written to-day from our own experience. But it would indeed be extraordinary if it had not long ago been written of. For the God of the New Testament is not less holy than the God of the Old Testament, but more holy. The interval between the creature and Him is not diminished but made absolute ; the unworthiness of the profane in contrast to Him is not extenuated but enhanced. That God none the less admits access to Himself and intimacy with Himself is not a mere matter of course ; it is a grace beyond our power to apprehend, a prodigious paradox. To take this paradox out of Christianity is to make it shallow and superficial beyond recognition. But if this is so, the intuitions concerning, and the need felt for, Covering and Atonement result imme-

o

diately. And the divinely appointed means of God s self- revelation, where experienced and appraised as such the Word , the Spirit , the Person of Christ , become that to which the man flees , in which he finds refuge, and in which he locks himself, in order that, consecrated and cleansed of his profaneness thereby, he may come into the presence of Holiness itself.

That these ideas are viewed with a certain distrust may be traced to two causes. One is, that what is a specifically religious element is distortingly moralized. If we start from mere morality and in relation to a God understood as being the personification of the moral order endowed with love, then all these things are wholly inapplicable and a source of genuine difficulty. But we are concerned with religious (not merely moral) intuitions, and it is impossible to dispute how right or wrong they are with a man whose interest is wholly in morality and not in religion, and who is therefore quite incapable of appreciating them. Whoever, on the other hand, penetrates to the unique centre of the religious experience, so that it starts awake in his own consciousness, finds that the truth of these intuitions is experienced directly, as soon as he penetrates into their depths.

The other ground of distrust is that usually in our theo logical systems an attempt is made to develop conceptual theories of these ideas, which are all pure intuitions, emotional

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rather than conceptual in character. They are thus made objects of speculation, and the final outcome is the quasi- mathematical Doctrine of Imputation and its drastic ascrip tion to the credit of the sinner of the merit of Christ, not to mention the learned inquiry whether this transaction involves an analytic or a { synthetic judgement of God.

1. * * *

Let us look back once more from the point we have reached over the course our inquiry has so far taken. As the sub title of this book suggests, we were to investigate the non- rational element in the idea of the divine. The words non- rational and irrational are to-day used almost at random. The non-rational is sought over the most widely different regions, and writers generally shirk the trouble of putting down precisely what they intend by the term, giving it often the most multifarious meanings or applying it with such vague generality that it admits of the most diverse interpretations. Pure fact in contrast to law, the empirical in contrast to reason, the contingent in contrast to the necessary, the psycho logical in contrast to transcendental fact, that which is known a posteriori in contrast to that which is determinable a priori ; power, will, and arbitrary choice in contrast to reason, know ledge, and determination by value ; impulse, instinct, and the obscure forces of the subconscious in contrast to insight, reflection, and intelligible plan ; mystical depths and stirrings in the soul, surmise, presentiment, intuition, prophecy, and finally the f occult powders also ; or, in general, the uneasy stress and universal fermentation of the time, with its groping after the thing never yet heard or seen in poetry or the plastic arts all these and more may claim the names non- rational , irrational , and according to circumstances are extolled or condemned as modern irrationalism . Whoever makes use of the word non-rational to-day ought to say what he actually means by it. This we did in our intro ductory chapter. We began with the rational in the idea of God and the divine, meaning by the term that in it which is clearly to be grasped by our power of conceiving, and enters the domain of familiar and definable conceptions. We went on to

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maintain that beneath this sphere of clarity and lucidity lies a hidden depth, inaccessible to our conceptual thought, which we in so far call the non-rational*.

The meaning of the two contrasted terms may be made plainer by an illustration. A deep joy may fill our minds without any clear realization upon our part of its source and the object to which it refers, though some such objective reference there must always be. But as attention is directed to it the obscure object becomes clearly identified in precise conceptual terms. Such an object cannot, then, be called, in our sense of the word, non-rational . But it is quite otherwise with religious bliss and its essentially numinous aspect, the fascinans . Not the most concentrated attention can elucidate the object to which this state of mind refers, bringing it out of the impenetrable obscurity of feeling into the domain of the conceptual understanding. It remains purely a felt experience, only to be indicated symbolically by ideo grams . That is what we mean by saying, it is non-rational.

And the same is true of all the moments of the numinous experience. The consciousness of a wholly other evades precise formulation in words, and we have to employ symbolic phrases which seem sometimes sheer paradox, that is, irrational not merely non-rational in import. So with religious awe and reverence. In ordinary fear and in moral reverence I can indicate in conceptual terms what it is that I fear or revere ; in jury, e. g. or ruin in the one case, heroism or strength of character in the other. But the object of religious awe or reverence the tremendum and augustum, cannot be fully determined conceptually : it is non-rational, as is the beauty of a musical composition, which no less eludes complete conceptual analysis.

Confronted by the fact of the non-rational thus interpreted we cannot be satisfied with a mere bare statement, which would open the door to all the vague and arbitrary phraseology of an emotionalist irrationalism. We are bound to try, by means of the most precise and unambiguous symbolic and figurative terms that we can find, to discriminate the different elements of the experience so far as we can in a way that can claim general validity.

CHAPTER IX MEANS OF EXPRESSION OF THE NUMINOUS

1. Direct Means

IT may serve to make the essential nature of the numinous consciousness clearer if we call to mind the manner in which it expresses itself outwardly, and how it spreads and is trans mitted from mind to mind. There is, of course, no trans mission of it in the proper sense of the word ; it cannot be taught , it must be awakened from the spirit. And this could not justly be asserted, as it often is, of religion as a whole and in general, for in religion there is very much that can be taught that is, handed down in concepts and passed on in school instruction. What is incapable of being sc handed down is this numinous basis and background to religion, which can only be induced, incited, and aroused. This is least of all possible by mere verbal phrase or external symbol ; rather we must have recourse to the way all other moods and feelings are transmitted, to a penetrative imagina tive sympathy with what passes in the other person s mind. More of the experience lives in reverent attitude and gesture, in tone and voice and demeanour, expressing its momentousness, and in the solemn devotional assembly of a congregation at prayer, than in all the phrases and negative nomenclature which we have found to designate it. Indeed, these never give a positive suggestion of the object to which the religious consciousness refers ; they are only of assistance in so far as they profess to indicate an object, which they at the same time contrast with another, at once distinct from and inferior to it, e. g. the invisible , the eternal (non- temporal), the supernatural , the transcendent . Or they

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are simply ideograms for the unique content of feeling, ideograms to understand which a man must already have had the experience himself. Far the best means are actual holy situations or their representation in description. If a man does not ft el what the numinous is, when he reads the sixth chapter of Isaiah, then no preaching, singing, telling , in Luther s phrase, can avail him. Little of it can usually be noticed in theory and dogma, or even in exhortation, unless it is actually heard. Indeed no element in religion needs so much as this the * viva vox .transmission by living fellowship and the inspiration of personal contact. 1

But the mere word, even when it comes as a living voice is powerless without the Spirit in the heart of the hearer to move him to apprehension. And this Spirit, this inborn capacity to receive and understand, is the essential thing. If that is there, very often only a very small incitement, a very remote stimulus, is needed to arouse the numinous conscious ness. It is indeed astonishing to see how small a stimulus Kiifliccs and that too coming sometimes only in clumsy and bewildered guise to raise the Spirit of itself to the strongest pitch of the most definitely religious excitement. But where the wind of the Spirit blows, there the mere rational terms themselves are indued with power to arouse the feeling of the non-rational , and become adequate to tune the mood at once to the right tone. Here schematization starts at once and needs no prompting. He who in the Spirit reads the written word lives in the numinous, though he may have neither notion of it nor name for it, nay, though he may be unable to analyse any feeling of his own and so make explicit

1 SUBO says of the transmission of the mystical experience : One thing there may be known ; unlike as it is, when a man heareth himself a dulcet instrument of strings sweetly sounding, compared to whoso but heareth tell thereof, even BO are the words which are received in the purity of grace and flow forth out of a living heart by a living mouth unlike to those name words if they are beheld upon the dead parchment. . . . For there they grow cold, I know not how, and wither away like roses that have been plucked. For the lovely melody that above all toucheth the heart is then quenched to silence ; and in the waste places of the withered heart are they then received.

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to himself the nature of that numinous strand running through the religious experience.

2. Indirect Means

For the rest, the methods by which the numinous feeling is presented and evoked are indirect ; i. e. they consist in those means by which we express kindred and similar feelings belonging to the natural sphere. We have already become acquainted with these feelings, and we shall recognize them at once if we consider what are the means of expression which religion has employed in all ages and in every land.

One of the most primitive of these which is later more and more felt to be inadequate, until it is finally altogether discarded as unworthy is quite naturally the fearful and horrible, and even at times the revolting and the loathsome. Inasmuch as the corresponding feelings are closely analogous to that of the tremendum , their outlets and means of expression may become indirect modes of expressing the specific numinous awe that cannot be expressed directly. And so it comes about that the horrible and dreadful character of primitive images and pictures of gods, which seems to us to-day frequently so repellent, has even yet among naive and primitive natures nay, occasionally even among ourselves the effect of arousing genuine feelings of authentic religious awe. And, vice versa, this awe operates as a supremely potent stimulus to express the element of terror in different forms of imaginative representation. The hard, stern, and somewhat grim pictures of the Madonna in ancient Byzantine art attract the worship of many Catholics more than the tender charm of the Madonnas of Raphael. This trait is most signally evident in the case of certain figures of gods in the Indian pantheon. Durga, the great Mother of Bengal, whose worship can appear steeped in an atmosphere of profoundest devotional awe, is represented in the orthodox tradition with the visage of a fiend. And this same blend ing of appalling frightfulness and most exalted holiness can perhaps be even more clearly studied in the eleventh book

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of the Bhagavad-Gita, 1 in which Vishnu who is yet to his votaries the very principle of goodness displays himself to Aryuna in the true height of his divinity. Here, too, the mind has recourse for mode of expression first to the fearful and dreadful, though this is at the same time permeated with that element of the grand to which we next turn.

This mode of expression, by way of grandeur or sub limity , is found on higher levels, where it replaces mere terror and dread . We meet it in an unsurpassable form in the sixth chapter of Isaiah, where there is sublimity alike in the lofty throne and the sovereign figure of God, the skirts of His raiment * filling the temple and the solemn majesty of the attendant angels about Him. While the element of dread is gradually overborne, the connexion of the sub lime and the holy becomes firmly established as a legi timate fichematization and is carried on into the highest forms of religious consciousness a proof that there exists a hidden kinship between the numinous and the sublime which is something more than a merely accidental analogy, and to which Kant s Critique of Judgement bears distant witness.

So far we have been concerned with that element or factor of the numinous which was the first our analysis noted and which we proposed to name symbolically * the aweful (tremeiidum). We pass now to consider the means by which the second the element of the mysterious (mysterium) is expressed. Here we light upon the analogical mode of manifestation that in every religion occupies a foremost and extraordinary place, and the theory of which we are now in a position to give. I refer to miracle. Miracle is the dearest child of Faith ; if the history of religions had not already taught us the truth of Schiller s saying, we might have reached it by anticipation a priori from the element of the mysterious , as already shown. Nothing can be found in all the world of natural feelings bearing so immediate an analogy mutatis mutandis to the religious consciousness of ineffable, unutterable mystery,

1 See Appendix II. Nowhere can the non-mtional element of opy, , be better studied than in this chapter, one of the perfectly classical passages for the theory of Religion.

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the absolute other , as the incomprehensible, unwonted, enigmatic thing, in whatever place or guise it may confront us. This will be all the more true if the uncomprehended thing is something at once mighty and fearful, for then there is a twofold analogy with the numinous that is to say, an analogy not only with the mysterium aspect of it, but with the tremendum aspect, and the latter again in the two directions already suggested of fearfulness proper and sub limity. This exemplifies the general truth already considered that any form of the numinous consciousness may be stirred by means of feelings analogous to it of a natural kind, and then itself pass over into these, or, more properly, be replaced by them. And in fact this is everywhere manifest in the experience of man. Whatever has loomed upon the world of his ordinary concerns as something terrifying and baffling to the intellect ; whatever among natural occurrences or events in the human, animal, or vegetable kingdoms has set him astare in wonder and astonishment such things have ever aroused in man, and become endued with, the daemonic dread and numinous feeling, so as to become portents , prodigies , and marvels . Thus and only thus is it that the miraculous rose. And, in the reverse direction, the feeling of the numen as the mysterious worked as a potent stimulus on the naive imagination, inciting it to expect miracles, to invent them, to experience them, to recount them, just as before the felt awefulness of the numen became a stimulus to select or fashion inventively, as a means of religious expres sion, images of fear and dread. The mysterious became an untiring impulse, prompting to inexhaustible invention in folk-tale and myth, saga and legend, permeating ritual and the forms of worship, and remaining till to-day to naive minds, whether in the form of narrative or sacrament, the most powerful factor that keeps the religious consciousness alive. But here too, as in the case of the fearful and terrible, progress to a higher stage of development shows the gradual elimination of this merely external analogue to the numinous, viz. the miraculous; and so we see how, on the more enlightened levels, miracle begins to fade away ; how Christ

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is at one with Mohammed and Buddha in declining the r61e of mere wonder-worker ; how Luther dismisses the out ward miracles disparagingly as jugglery or apples and nuts for children ; and finally how the supernaturalism of miracle is purged from religion as something that is only an imperfect analogue and no genuine schema of the numinous.

There are other manifestations of this tendency of the feeling of the mysterious to be attracted to objects and aspects of experience analogous to it in being uncompre- hended . It finds its most unqualified expression in the spell exercised by the only half intelligible or wholly unintelligible language of devotion, and in the unquestionably real enhance ment of the awe of the worshipper which this produces. Instances of this are the ancient traditional expressions, still retained despite their obscurity, in our Bible and hym nals ; the special emotional virtue attaching to words like Hallelujah, Kyrie eleison, Selah, just because they are wholly other and convey no clear meaning ; the Latin in the service of the Mass, felt by the Catholic to be, not a necessary evil, but something especially holy; the Sanskrit in the Buddhist Mass of China and Japan ; the language of the gods in the ritual of sacrifice in Homer ; and many similar cases. Especially noticeable in this connexion are the half-revealed, half-concealed elements in the Service of the Mass, in the Greek Church liturgy, and so many others ; wo can see here one factor that justifies and warrants them. And the same is true of the remaining portions of the old Mass which recur in the Lutheran ritual. Just because their design shows but little of regularity or conceptual arrangement, they preserve in themselves far more of the spirit of worship than the proposed recastings of the service put forward by the most recent practical reformers. In these we find carefully arranged schemes worked out with the balance and coherence of an essay, but nothing unaccountable, and for that very reason suggestive ; nothing accidental, and for that very reason pregnant in meaning ; nothing that rises from the deeps below consciousness to break the rounded unity of the wonted disposition, and thereby point to a unity of a higher order

r 2

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in a word, little that is really spiritual. All the cases cited, then, derive their power of suggestion from the same source ; they are all instances of the analogy to the mysterious afforded by that which is not wholly understood, unwonted and at the same time venerable through age ; and in the resemblance they present to the mysterious they arouse it in the mind by a sort of anamnesis or reminder, and at the same time constitute its outward analogical representation.

3. Means by which the Numinous is expressed in Art

In the arts nearly everywhere the most effective means of representing the numinous is * the sublime . This is especially true of architecture, in which it would appear to have first been realized. One can hardly escape the idea that this feeling for expression must have begun to awaken far back in the remote Megalithic Age. The motive underlying the erection of those gigantic blocks of rock, hewn or unworked, single monoliths or titanic rings of stone, as at Stonehenge, may have well been originally to localize and preserve and, as it were, to store up the numen in solid presence by magic ; but the change to the motive of expression must have been from the outset far too vividly stimulated not to occur at a very early date. In fact the bare feeling for solemn and imposing magnitude and for the pomp of sublime pose and gesture is a fairly elementary one, and we cannot doubt that this stage had been reached when the mastabas, obelisks and pyramids were built in Egypt. It is indeed beyond question that the builders of these Temples, and of the Sphinx of Gizeh, which set the feeling of the sublime, and together with and through it that of the numinous, throbbing in the soul almost like a mechanical reflex, must themselves have been conscious of this effect and have in tended it.

Further, we often say of a building, or indeed of a song, a formula, a succession of gestures or musical notes, and in particular of certain manifestations of ornamental and decora tive art, symbols, and emblems, that they make a downright magical impression, and we feel we can detect the special characteristic of this magical note in ,rt with fair assurance

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even under the most varying conditions and in the most diverse relationships. The art of China, Japan, and Tibet, whose specific character has been determined by Taoism and Buddhism, surpasses all others in the unusual richness and depth of such impressions of the magical , and even an in expert observer responds to them readily. The designation 4 magical is here correct even from the historical point of view, since the origin of this language of form was properly magical representations, emblems, formularies, and contrivances. But the actual impression of magic is quite independent of this historical bond of connexion with magical practices. It occurs even when nothing is known of the latter; nay, in that case it comes out most strongly and uribrokenly. Beyond dispute art has here a means of creating a unique impression that of the magical apart from and independent of reflection. Now the magical is nothing but a suppressed and dimmed form of the numinous, a crude form of it which great art purifies and ennobles. In great art the point is reached at which we may no longer speak of the magical , but rather are confronted with the numinous itself, with all its impelling motive power, transcending reason, expressed in sweeping lines and rhythm. 1 In no art, perhaps, is this more fully realized than in the great landscape painting and religious painting of China in the classical period of the T ang and Sung dynasties. It has been said of this great art :

These works are to be classed with the profoundest and Bublirnest of the creations of human art. The spectator who,

1 This numinous magical character in specially noticeable in the- atrangely impressive figures of the Buddha in early Chinese art ; and here too it atlects the observer independently of ideas , i.e. without his knowing anything about the speculative doctrines of Buddhism. ThuH Siien justly says of the great Buddha from the Lung-Men Caves (T ang Dynawty):

Anyone who approaches this figure will realize that it has ft religious Hignificance without knowing anything about its motif. ... It matters little whether we call it a prophet or a god, because it is a complete work of ait permeated by a spiritual will, which communicates itself to the beholder . . . The religious element of such a figure is immanent; it is "a presence" or an atmosphere rather than a formulated idea. ... It cannot be dencnbed in wordH, because it lies beyond intellectual definition. (Oswald Siren, Chinese Sculpture, London, 1925, vol, i, p. 20.)

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as it were, immerses himself in them feels behind these waters and clouds and mountains the mysterious breath of the primeval Tao, the pulse of innermost being. Many a mystery lies half- concealed and half-revealed in these pictures. They contain the knowledge of the " nothingness " and the " void ", of the " Tao " of heaven and earth, which is also the Tao of the human heart. And so, despite their perpetual agitation, they seem as remotely distant and as profoundly calm as though they drew secret breath at the bottom of a sea. l

To us of the West the Gothic appears as the most numinous of all types of art. This is due in the first place to its sublimity ; but Worringer in his work Probleme der Gothik has done a real service in showing that the peculiar impressive- ness of Gothic does not consist in its sublimity alone, but draws upon a strain inherited from primitive magic, of which he tries to show the historical derivation. To Worringer, then, the impression Gothic makes is one of magic ; and, what ever may be said of his historical account of the matter, it is certain that in this at least he is on the right track. Gothic does instil a spell that is more than the effect of sublimity. But magic is too low a word : the tower of the Cathedral of Ulm is emphatically not magical , it is numinous. And the difference between the numinous and the merely magical can nowhere be felt more clearly than in the splendid plate Worringer gives in his book of this marvellous work of archi tecture. But when this is said, we may still keep the word magic in use to denote the style and means of artistic expression by which the impression of the numinous comes into being.

But in neither the sublime nor the magical, effective as they are, has art more than an indirect means of representing the numinous. Of directer methods our Western art has only two, and they are in a noteworthy way negative, viz. darkness and silence. The darkness must be such as is enhanced and made all the more perceptible by contrast with some last

1 From an article by Otto Fischer on Chinese landscape painting in Das KunstMatt, Jan. 1920.

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vestige of brightness, which it is, as it were, on the point of extinguishing ; hence the mystical effect begins with semi- darkness. Its impression is rendered complete if the factor of the sublime comes to unite with and supplement it. The semi-darkness that glimmers in vaulted halls, or beneath the branches of a lofty forest glade, strangely quickened and stirred by the mysterious play of half-lights, has always spoken eloquently to the soul, and the builders of temples, mosques, and churches have made full use of it.

SUeiice is what corresponds to this in the language of musical sounds. Yahweh is in His holy Temple, let all the earth keep silence before Him. (Habakkuk, ii. 20.) Neither we nor (probably) the prophet any longer bear in mind that this keeping silence (as ^v^rj^lv in Greek), if regarded from the historical, genetic standpoint, springs from the fear of using words of evil omen, which therefore prefers to be altogether speechless. It is the same with Tersteegen in his God is present, let all in us be silent . With prophet and psalmist and poet we feel the necessity of silence from another and quite independent motive. It is a spontaneous reaction to the feeling of the actual numen praesens . Once again, what is found coming upon the scene at a higher level of evolution cannot be explained by merely interpolating links in a historico-genetic chain of development ; and the Psalmist and Terbteegen and even we ourselves are at least as interesting subjects for the analysis of the psychologist of religion as are the Primitives , with their habitual practice of (ixprjfjLia, the silence that merely avoids words of ill augury.

Besides Silence and Darkness oriental art knows a third direct means for producing a strongly numinous impression, to wit, emptiness and empty distances. Empty distance, remote vacancy, is, as it were, the sublime in the horizontal. The wide-stretching desert, the boundless uniformity of the steppe, have real sublimity, and even in us Westerners they set vibrating chords of the numinous along with the note of the sublime, according to the principle of the association of feelings. Chinese architecture, which is essentially an art in the laying out and grouping of buildings, makes a wise and

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very striking use of this fact. It does not achieve the impression of solemnity by lofty vaulted halls or imposing altitudes, but nothing could well be more solemn than the silent amplitude of the enclosed spaces, courtyards, and vesti bules which it employs. The imperial tombs of the Ming emperors at Nanking and Peking are, perhaps, the strongest example of this, including, as they do, in their plan the empty distances of an entire landscape. Still more interesting is the part played by the factor of void or emptiness in Chinese painting. There it has almost become a special art to paint empty space, to make it palpable, and to develop variations upon this singular theme. Not only are there pictures upon which almost nothing is painted, not only is it an essential feature of their style to make the strongest impression with the fewest strokes and the scantiest means, but there are very many pictures especially such as are connected with con templation which impress the observer with the feeling that the void itself is depicted as a subject, is indeed the main subject of the picture. We can only understand this by recalling what was said above on the nothingness and the void of the mystics and on the enchantment and spell exercised by the negative hymns . For Void is, like Dark ness and Silence, a negation, but a negation that does away with every this and here , in order that the wholly other may become actual.

Not even music, which else can give such manifold expression to all the feelings of the mind, has any positive way to express the holy . Even the most consummate Mass-music can only give utterance to the holiest, most numinous moment in the Mass the moment of transubstantiation by sinking into stillness : no mere momentary pause, but an absolute cessation of sound long enough for us to hear the Silence itself ; and no devotional moment in the whole Mass approximates in impressiveness to this keeping silence before the Lord . It is instructive to submit Bach s Mass in B minor to the test in this matter. Its most mystical portion is the Incarnatus in the Credo, and there the effect is due to the faint, whispering, lingering sequence in the fugue structure, dying away

MEANS OF EXPRESSION OF THE NUMINOUS 73

pianissimo. The held breath and hushed sound of the passage, its weird cadences, sinking away in lessened thirds, its pauses and syncopations, and its rise and fall in astonishing semi tones, which render so well the sense of awe-struck wonder all this serves to express the mysterium by way of intimation, rather than in forthright utterance. And by this means Ba<jh attains his aim here far better than in the Sanctus . This latter is indeed an incomparably successful expression of Him, whose is the power and the glory , an enraptured and triumphant choric hymn to perfect and absolute sovereignty. But it is very far distant from the mood of the text that accompanies the music, which is taken from Isaiah vi, and which the composer should have interpreted in accordance with that passage as a whole. No one would gather from this magnifi cent chorus that the Seraphim covered their faces with two of their wings. 1 In this point Mendelssohn shows very fine sensibility in his musical setting of Psalm ii at the words (v. 11) : Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. And here too the matter is expressed less in the music itself than in the way the music is restrained and repressed one might almost say, abashed as the Cathedral choir at Berlin so well knows how to render it. And, if a final example may be cited, the Popule meus of Thomas Luiz gets as near to the heart of the matter as any music can. In this the first chorus sings the first words of the Trisagion : Hagios, ho theos, hagios ischyros, hagios athanatos , and the second chorus sings in response the Latin rendering of the words : Sanctus deus, sanctus fortis, sanctus immortalis , each chorus thrillino- with a sort of muffled

O

tremor. But the Trisagion itself, sung pianissimo by singers kept out of sight far at the back, is like a whisper floating down through space, and is assuredly a consummate reproduc tion of the scene in the vision of Isaiah.

1 Tlie Jewish tradition has been, however, very well aware of the import of the matter. In the splendid New Year s day Hymn of Melek Elyon the words run: All the mighty ones on high whisper low : Yahwth is King.

CHAPTEE X THE NUMINOUS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

WHILE the feelings of the non-rational and numinous constitute a vital factor in every form religion may take, they are pre-eminently in evidence in Semitic religion and most of all in the religion of the Bible. Here Mystery lives and moves in all its potency. It is present in the ideas of the daemonic and angelic world, which, as a wholly other , surrounds, transcends, and permeates this world of ours ; it is potent in the Biblical eschatology and the ideal of a king dom of God contrasted with the natural order, now as being future in time, now as being eternal, but always as the down right marvellous and other ; and finally it impresses itself on the character of Yahweh and Elohim that God who is nevertheless the Heavenly Father of Jesus and as such fulfils , not loses, his character as Yahweh.

The lower stage of numinous consciousness, viz. daemonic dread, has already been long superseded by the time we reach the Prophets and Psalmists. But there are not wanting occasional echoes of it, found especially in the earlier narra tive literature. The story in Exodus iv. 24, of how Yahweh in his 0/3777 met Moses by the way and sought to kill him , still bears this daemonic character strongly, and the tale leaves us almost with the suggestion of a ghostly apparition. And from the standpoint of the more highly developed fear of God one might easily get from this and similar stories the impression that this is not yet religion at all, but a sort of pre-religious, vulgar fear of demons or the like. That would, however, be a misconception ; a c vulgar fear of demons would refer to a demon in the narrower sense of the word, in which it is a synonym for devil, fiend, or goblin, and is contrasted with the divine. But demon in this sense has

THE NUMINOUS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 75

not been, any more than ghost or spectre , a point in the transition, or, if it be preferred, a link in the chain of develop ment which religious consciousness has undergone. Both demon (= fiend) and spectre are, so to speak, offshoots from the true line of progress, spurious fabrications of the fancy accompanying the numinous feeling. We must carefully distinguish from such a demon the Saifiow or daemon in the more general sense of the word, which, if it is not yet itself a god , is still less an anti-god, but must be termed a l pre-god , the numen at a lower stage, in which it is still trammelled and suppressed, but out of which the god gradually grows to more and more lofty manifestations. This is the phase whose after-effects can be detected in these ancient stories.

It will be worth while to consider this matter further. Two things may help to an understanding of the real relation with which we are here concerned. First, we may refer back to what was said on an earlier page upon the capacity of the dreadful and terrible in general to attract and arouse, and also to express, the true numinous consciousness or emotion. In the second place, we may refer to the parallel case of music. A man with a pronounced musical faculty, so long as he is a mere raw tyro, may be enraptured by the sound of the bagpipes or the hurdy-gurdy, though perhaps both become intolerable to him when his musical education has been com pleted. But, if he then recalls the qualitative character of his earlier musical experience and compares it with his present one, he will have to admit that, in both, one and the same side of his mind is functioning, and that what has taken place in the rise of his feeling for music to a more elevated form is no transition to something different in kind, but a process which we may call development or growth to maturity , but can hardly further specify. Were we to hear to-day the music of Confucius, it would probably be to us merely a succession of queer noises. Yet already Confucius speaks of the power of music on the mind in a way we moderns cannot better, and touches upon just those elements which we also must recognize in the experience of music. But the most

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striking consideration in this regard is the way in which some savage tribes are endowed with a capacity for a ready appreciation of our music, which they grasp quickly, practise assiduously, and enjoy intensely, when it is brought before them. This endowment did not first enter their minds at the moment they heard the music by a heterogony , epigenesis , or other miracle ; it simply existed all the time as a natural predisposition or latent capacity. It was aroused and began to develop as soon as the proper incitement came to stimulate it, but to the end it was yet the selfsame disposi tion that had been formerly excited to such primitive and crude manifestations. This crude , primitive form of music is often almost or wholly unrecognizable as real music by our developed musical taste, although it was the manifestation of the same impulse and the same element of our psychical nature. Now it is exactly a parallel case when the God fearing man of to-day finds it hard to detect in the narrative of Exodus iv that which is akin to his own religious experience, or misjudges it altogether. All this involves a point of view which should be taken into consideration more generally with respect to the religion of primitive man , though naturally great caution should be used in applying it, seeing that very mistaken conclusions can be drawn from it and there is a real danger of confounding the lower with the higher levels of development and of making too little of the interval between them. However, it is still more dangerous to exclude this point of view altogether, as is unfortunately very com monly done. 1

Recent research has sought to discover a difference in char acter between Yahweh, the austere and stern, and Elohim, the familiar, patriarchal God, and there is something very illumi nating in the suggestion. Soderblom s supposition 2 is that the notion of Yahweh had its point of origin in earlier ani mistic ideas. I do not dispute the importance of such animistic ideas in the religious evolutionary process; in

1 In this regard Mr. Marett in particular has important and novel considerations to offer. 3 So derblom, Das Werden des Gottesglaubens, 1916, pp. 297 ff.

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fact, I should go even farther than Soderblom in that respect, for he would explain them as a sort of primitive philosophy , and therefore has to exclude them altogether from the domain of genuinely religious imagination. It would be perfectly compatible with my own view to hold that where ideas of an animistic character had been framed they could serve as an important link in the chain of stimulation by which true numinous consciousness is aroused (namely, in so far as they served to disengage and free the obscure feeling-element of existent being , latent in it). But what distinguishes Yahwehi from El-Shaddai-Elohim is not that the former is an anima ,! but (and the distinction may be applied to differentiate all god-types) that, whereas in Yahweh the numinous preponder ates over the familiar rational character, in Elohim the rational aspect outweighs the numinous. Outweighs is as much as we can say, for in Elohim too the numinous element is certainly present ; Elohim is, for instance, the subject of the genuinely numinous narrative of the theophany in the burning bush, with the characteristic verse (Exodus iii. 6) : And Moses hid his face ; for he was afraid to look upon God.

For the copious and diverse characteristics of the idea of God of the ancient Israelites which might be instanced here the reader is referred to works upon the history of religion. 1 The venerable religion of Moses marks the beginning of a process which from that point onward proceeds with ever increasing momentum, by which the numinous is throughout rational ized and moralized, i.e. charged with ethical import, until it becomes the holy in the fullest sense of the word. The culmination of the process is found in the Prophets and in the Gospels. And it is in this that the special nobility of the religion revealed to us by the Bible is to be found, which, when the stage represented by the deutero-Lsaiah is reached, justifies its claim to be a universal world-religion. Here is to be found its manifest superiority over, e. g., Islam, in which Allah is mere numen , and is in fact precisely Yahweh in his pre-Mosaic form and upon a larger scale. But this moralizing

1 They are given exhauntively in the Encyclopaedia Die Reliyion in Geschichte und Gegentcart, vol. ii, pp. 1530, 2036.

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and rationalizing process does not mean that the numinous itself has been overcome, but merely that its preponderance has been overcome. The numinous is at once the basis upon which and the setting within which the ethical and rational meaning is consummated.

The capital instance of the intimate mutual interpenetration of the numinous with the rational and moral is Isaiah. The note struck in the vision of his call is the keynote of his entire prophecy. And nothing is in this regard more signifi cant than the fact that it is in Isaiah that the expression the Holy One of Israel first becomes established as the expression, par excellence, for the deity, prevailing over all others by its mysterious potency. This remains so in the writings of the deutero-Isaiah , who follows the tradition of the earlier Isaiah. Assuredly in deutero-Isaiah, if in any writer, we have to do with a God whose attributes are clear to conceptual thought : omnipotence, goodness, wisdom, truth ; and yet all the time these are attributes of the Holy One , whose strange name deutero-Isaiah too repeats no less than fifteen times and always in passages where it has a special impressiveness.

Related expressions akin to the holiness of Yahweh are His fury , His jealousy , His wrath , the consuming fire , and the like. The import of them all is not only the all-requiting righteousness of God, not even merely His susceptibility to strong and living emotions, but all this ever enclosed in and permeated with the awefulness and the majesty , the mystery and the augustness , of His non-rational divine nature.

And this holds good, also, of the expression the living God . God s livingness is perceptibly akin to His jealousy and is manifested in and through this, as in His other passions generally. 1 It is by His life that this God is differ-

1 Cf. Deut. v. 26 : For who is there of all flesh, that hath heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as we have, and lived? Cf. also Josh. iii. 10 ; 1 Sam. xvii. 26, 36 ; 2 Kings xix. 4; Isa. xxxvii. 4, 17 ; Jer. x. 10 : He is the living God : ... at His wrath the earth shall tremble and the nations shall not be able to abide His indigna-

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entiated from all mere World Reason , and becomes this ultimately non-rational essence, that eludes all philosophic treatment. This is the God that lives in the consciousness of all prophets and apostles of the Old and the New Dispensa tion alike. And all those who later championed against the God of philosophy the living God and the God of anger and love and the emotions have unwittingly been defending the non-rational core of the Biblical conception of God from all excessive rationalization. And so far they were right. Where they were wrong and sank into anthropomorphism was in defending, not figurative anger and emotion , but literal anger and emotion, misconceiving the numinous character of the attributes in question and holding them simply to be natural attributes, taken absolutely, instead of realizing that they can only be admitted as figurative indications of some thing essentially non-rational by means of symbols drawn from feelings that have analogy to it.

We find the power of the numinous in its phase of the mysterious to excite and intensify the imagination displayed with particular vividness in Ezekiel. Here are to be classed Ezekiel s dreams and parables and fanciful delineation of God s being and sovereign state, which are, as it were, an example by anticipation of the later more spurious sort of excitement of the religious impulse to the mysterious, leading (in accordance with analogies already expounded) to the merely strange, the extraordinary, the marvellous, and the fantastic. When such an operation of the religious conscious ness works itself out in accordance with a wrong analogy, the way is prepared for miracle and legend and the whole dream-

tion ; Jer. xxiii. 36 ; 2 Mace. vii. 33 ; Matt. xxvi. 63 (the adjuration by the liriny God , the God of terror and dread); and Heb. x. 31 : It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. The Old Testa ment idea of the terrible living God reaches its completion in the ideas of the avenging God , of which the most ruthless expression is in the almo.st appalling image of the treader of the wine-press, ISA. Ixiii. 3 : I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury ; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments and I will Rtain all my raiment. The dreadful image recurs in the New Testament in Rev. xix. 15 : He treadeth the wine-press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.

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world of pseudo-mysticism ; and, though these are all truly enough emanations from the genuine religious experience, they are emanations broken by the opaque, dull medium through which they pass, a mere substitute for the genuine thing, and they end in a vulgar rankness of growth that overspreads the pure feeling of the mysterium as it really is and chokes its direct and forthright emotional expression.

But, if Ezekiel hardly shows the numinous moment apart from an admixture of excessive fantasy and imagination, the same is not true of the Book of Job. In the 38th chapter of Job we have the element of the mysterious displayed in rare purity and completeness, and this chapter may well rank among the most remarkable in the history of religion. Job has been reasoning with his friends against Elohim, and as far as concerns them he has been obviously in the right. They are compelled to be dumb before him. And then Elohim Himself appears to conduct His own defence in person. And He conducts it to such effect that Job avows himself to be overpowered, truly and rightly overpowered, not merely silenced by superior strength. Then he confesses : There fore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes. That is an admission of inward convincement and conviction, not of impotent collapse and submission to merely superior power. Nor is there here at all the frame of mind to which St. Paul now and then gives utterance ; e.g. Rom. ix. 20: Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus ? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour ? To interpret the passage in Job thus would be a misunderstanding of it. This chapter does not proclaim, as Paul does, the renunciation of, the realization of the impossibility of, a theodicy ; rather, it aims at putting forward a real theodicy of its own, and a better one than that of Job s friends ; a theodicy able to convict even a Job, and not only to convict him, but utterly to still every inward doubt that assailed his soul. For latent in the weird expe rience that Job underwent in the revelation of Elohim is at once an inward relaxing of his soul s anguish and an

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appeasement, an appeasement which would alone and in itself perfectly suffice as the solution of the problem of the Book of Job, even without Job s rehabilitation in chapter xlii, where recovered prosperity comes as an extra payment thrown in after quittance has been already rendered. But what is this strange moment of experience that here operates at once as a vindication of God to Job and a reconciliation of Job to God? In the words put into the mouth of Elohim nearly every note is sounded which the situation may prepare one to expect a priori: the summons to Job, and the demonstration of God s overwhelming power, His sublimity and greatness, and His surpassing wisdom. This last would yield forthwith a plausible and rational solution of the whole problem, if only the argu ment were here completed with some such sentences as : My ways are higher than your ways ; in my deeds and my actions I have ends that you understand not ; viz. the testing or puri fication of the godly man, or ends that concern the whole universe as such, into which the single man must fit himself with all his sufferings. If you start from rational ideas and concepts, you absolutely thirst for such a conclusion to the dis course. But nothing of the kind follows ; nor does the chapter intend at all to suggest such teleological reflections or solutions. In the last resort it relies on something quite different from anything that can be exhaustively rendered in rational con cepts, namely, on the sheer absolute wondrousness that transcends thought, on the mysterium, presented in its pure, non-rational form. All the glorious examples from nature speak very plainly in this sense. The eagle, that dwelleth and abideth on the rock, upon the crag of the rock, and the strong place , whose eyes behold afar off" her prey, and whose young ones also suck up blood, and where the slain are, there is she this eagle is in truth no evidence for the ideological wisdom that prepares all cunningly and well , but is rather the creature of strangeness and marvel, in whom the wondrousness of its creator becomes apparent. And the same is true of the ostrich (xxxix. 13-18) with its inexplicable instincts. The ostrich is indeed, as here depicted, and ration ally considered, a crucial difficulty rather than an evidence of

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wisdom, and it affords singularly little help if we are seeking purpose in nature: which leaveth her eggs in the earth, and warmeth them in the dust, and forgetteth that the foot may crush them or that the wild beast may break them. She is hardened against her young ones as though they were not hers: her labour is in vain without fear; because God hath deprived her of ivisdom, neither hath he imparted to her understanding.

It is the same with the wild ass (verse 5) and the unicorn (verse 9). These are beasts whose complete dysteleology or negation of purposiveness is truly magnificently depicted ; but, nevertheless, with their mysterious instincts and their inexplicable behaviour, this very negation of purpose becomes a thing of baffling significance, as in the case of the wild goat (verse 1) and the hind. The wisdom of the inward parts (xxxviii. 36), and the knowledge of dayspring, winds, and clouds, with the mysterious ways in which they come and go, arise and vanish, shift and veer and re-form ; and the wonderful Pleiades aloft in heaven, with Orion and Arcturus and his sons these serve but to emphasize the same lesson. It is conjectured that the descriptions of the hippopotamus (behemoth) and crocodile (leviathan) in xl. 15 ff. are a later interpolation. This may well be the fact ; but, if so, it must be admitted that the interpolator has felt the point of the entire section extraordinarily well. He only brings to its grossest expression the thought intended by all the other examples of animals ; they gave portents only, he gives us monsters but the monstrous is just the mysterious in a gross form. Assuredly these beasts would be the most unfortunate examples that one could hit upon if searching for evidences of the purposefulness of the divine wisdom . But they, no less than all the previous examples and the whole context, tenor, and sense of the entire passage, do express in masterly fashion the downright stupendousness, the wellnigh daemonic and wholly incomprehensible character of the eternal creative power ; how, incalculable and wholly other , it mocks at all conceiving but can yet stir the mind to its depths, fascinate and overbrim the heart. What is

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meant is the mysterium not as mysterious simply, but at the same time also as fascinating and august ; and here, too, these latter meanings live, not in any explicit con cepts, but in the tone, the enthusiasm, in the very rhythm of the entire exposition. And here is indeed the point of the whole passage, comprising alike the theodicy and the appeasement and calming of Job s soul. The mysterium, simply as such, would merely (as discussed above) be a part of the absolute inconceivability of the numen, and that, though it might strike Job utterly dumb, could not convict him inwardly. That of which we are conscious is rather an intrinsic value in the incomprehensible a value inexpressible, positive, and fascinating . This is incommensurable with thoughts of rational human teleology and is not assimilated to them : it remains in all its mystery. But it is as it becomes felt in consciousness that Elohim is justified and at the same time Job s soul brought to peace.

A very real parallel to this experience of Job is to be found in the work of a writer of our own day, which is not the less deeply impressive because it is found in the fictitious context of a novel. Max Eyth recounts in his story Berufs-Tragik (in the collection Hinter Pjlug und Schraubstock) the build ing of the mighty bridge over the estuary of the Ennobucht. The most profound and thorough labour of the intellect, the most assiduous and devoted professional toil, had gone to the construction of the great edifice, making it in all its signifi cance and purposefulness a marvel of human achievement. In spite of endless difficulties and gigantic obstacles, the bridge is at length finished, and stands defying wind and waves. Then there comes a raging cyclone, and building and builder are swept into the deep. Utter meaninglessness seems to triumph over richest significance, blind destiny seems to stride on its way over prostrate virtue and merit. The narrator tells how he visits the scene of the tragedy and returns again.

When we got to the end of the bridge, there was hardly

a 2

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a breath of wind ; high above, the sky showed blue-green, and with an eerie brightness. Behind us, like a great open grave, lay the Ennobucht. The Lord of life and death hovered over the waters in silent majesty. We felt His presence, as one feels one s own hand. And the old man and I knelt down before the open grave and before Him.

Why did they kneel ? Why did they feel constrained to do so ? One does not kneel before a cyclone or the blind forces of nature, nor even before Omnipotence merely as such. But one does kneel before the wholly uncomprehended Mystery, revealed yet unrevealed, and one s soul is stilled by feeling the way of its working, and therein its justification.

It would be possible to cite many other traces of numinous feeling in the Old Testament. But they have already been admirably put together by one who wrote sixteen hundred years ago in the same sense as we upon the non-rational . This was Chrysostom. We shall be considering him later on and will not anticipate further in this place. 1

1 See Appendix I.

CHAPTER XI THE NUMINOUS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

I.v the Gospel of Jesus we see the consummation of that process tending to rationalize, moralize, and humanize the idea of God, which began with the earliest period of the old Hebrew tradition and became specially prominent as a living factor in the Prophets and the Psalms, continually bringing the apprehension of the numinous to a richer fulfilment by recognizing in it attributes of clear and profound value for

r* o +

the reason. The result was the faith in the fatherhood of God in that unsurpassable form in which it is peculiar to Christianity.

But in this case, too, it would be a mistake to think that such a rationalization means that the numinous is excluded or superseded. That is a misunderstanding into which we are led by the all too plausible delineations of Jesus s faith in the fatherhood of God now prevalent, but it certainly mis represents the attitude of the first Christian congregations. The error is only possible if we disregard in the message of Christ that which it really purports to be, first, last, and all the time, viz. the Gospel of the Kingdom. As against all rationalizing attempts to tone it down into something less startling, the most recent research shows quite decisively that the kingdom is just greatness and marvel absolute, the wholly other heavenly thing, set in contrast to the world of here and now, the mysterious itself in its dual character as awe- compelling yet all-attracting, glimmering in an atmosphere of genuine religious awe . As such, it sheds a colour, a mood, a tone, upon whatever stands in relation to it, upon the men

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who proclaim it or prepare for it, upon the life and practice that are its precondition, upon the tidings of it, upon the congregation of those who await it and attain to it. All is made into a mystery all, that is, becomes numinous . This is shown most strikingly in the name by which the company of the disciples call themselves collectively and each other individually, the numinous technical term ot ayioi, the holy ones or the Saints . It is manifest at once that this does not mean the morally perfect people : it means the people who participate in the mystery of the final Day. Their title is the clear and unambiguous antithesis to the term the profane , which we have already met with. For this reason the early Christians are able later to call them selves also actually a priestly or sacerdotal people , that is, a group of consecrated persons. But the precondition of all this was given with the Gospel itself and its claim to be the preaching of the coming Kingdom.

What of the lord of this kingdom, the heavenly Father 1 As its lord He is not less, but far more holy , numinous , mysterious, qadosh , d y*oy, sacer , and sanctus than His kingdom. He is all these in an absolute decree, and in this

O O

aspect of His nature He represents the sublimation and the consummation of all that the old Covenant had grasped by way of creature-consciousness , holy awe , and the like. Not to realize this is to turn the Gospel of Jesus into a mere idyll. That these moments do not occur severally in Jesus s message in the form of special doctrines is due to the circumstances already mentioned more than once. But apart from the inherent impossibility of teaching them, how could He have had need of teaching what was simply the primary, self- evident fact to every Jew, and especially to every believer in the Kingdom , namely, that God was the Holy One in Israel ? Christ had rather to teach and to proclaim what was not self-evident to the Jews, but His own original discovery and revelation, that this very Holy One is a heavenly Father . This point of view necessarily occupied the whole of His teaching , and all the more so because it was the point of view thrust sharply into the foreground by the two opposed

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influences of His time, against both of which the Gospel came historically as a reaction. On the one hand was Pharisaism, with its servitude to Law ; on the other, John the Baptist, with his harsh, ascetic interpretation of God ; and, in con trast to both, the Gospel of the Sonhood of man and the Fatherhood of God came as the easy yoke, the light burden. But though it is necessarily this new message that the parables and discourses and pronouncements of Jesus complete and fill out, it is in such a way that it always remains an over whelming and daring paradox, claiming our utmost homage, that He who is in heaven is yet our Father . That that 1 heavenly Being of marvel and mystery and awe is Himself the eternal, benignant, gracious will : this is the resolved contrast that first brings out the deep-felt harmony in true Christian experience; and the harmony cannot be heard aright by the man whose ear does not detect always sounding in it this sublimated seventh .

It is significant, and yet again so natural, that the first petition in the prayer of the Christian fellowship is : Hallowed be Thy name. What I have already said should make the meaning of this clear in its connexion with the Biblical mean ing of the word. And we can sometimes detect, even in the teaching of Jesus, notes still vibrating which seem to suggest a trace of that weird awe and shuddering dread before the mysteries of the transcendent of which we have already spoken. Such a passage is Matthew x. 28 : But fear him which is able to (.kstroy both soul and lody in hell

The dark and awful ring of this saying cannot be missed, and it is a rationalization of it merely to refer it to the Judge and His judgement on the Last Day. The same note rings out again clearly in the saying in Hebrews x. 31 : It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God ; and in Hebrews xii. X"J : Our God is a consuming fire. (Here the adaptation of Deuteronomy iv. 24 : The Lord is a consuming fire into Our God is a consuming lire gives a contrast whose ettect enhances the horror of the saying.) And when occasion demands it the Old Testament God of vengeance recurs even in the teaching of Jesus Himself, unveiled and in His own authentic

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character ; as, for instance, in Matthew xxi. 41 : He will miserably destroy those wicked men.

Finally, it is in the light of, and with the background of, this numinous experience, with its mystery and its awe its mykterium tremendum that Christ s Agony in the night of Gethsemane must be viewed, if we are to comprehend or realize at all in our own experience what the import of that agony was. What is the cause of this * sore amazement and heaviness , this soul shaken to its depths, exceeding sorrow ful even unto death , and this sweat that falls to the ground like great drops of blood ? Can it be ordinary fear of death in the case of one who had had death before his eyes for weeks past and who had just celebrated with clear intent his death-feast with his disciples ? No, there is more here than the fear of death ; there is the awe of the creature before the mysterium tremendum , before the shuddering secret of the numen. And the old tales come back into our mind as strangely parallel and, as it were, prophetically significant, the tales of Yahweh who waylaid Moses by night, and of Jacob who wrestled with God until the breaking of the day . He had power with God . . . and prevailed , with the God of Wrath and Fury , with the numen, which yet is itself My Father . In truth even those who cannot recog nize the Holy One of Israel elsewhere in the God of the Gospel must at least discover Him here, if they have eyes to see at all.

I have no need to dwell upon the numinous atmosphere pervading the writings of St. Paul. God dwelleth in a light that none may come nigh. The over-aboundingness of the idea of God and the feeling of God leads with Paul to the special terminology and experiences of Mysticism. 1 But it is

1 As a provisional definition of Mysticism I would suggest that, while sharing the nature of religion, it shows a preponderance of its non-rational elements and an over-stressing of them in respect to the overabounding aspect of the numen . A type of religious experience acquires mystical colouring if it shows an inclination to Mysticism. In this sense Christianity since St. Paul and St. John is not Mysticism, but religion with a mystical colouring. And this is justified.

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not confined to these: it can be seen alive through all his utterances in the feelings of exalted enthusiasm and his

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spiritual terminology of the pneuma , which are alike far removed from the merely rational side of Christian piety. His dualistic depreciation of the Flesh , as of all that pertains to creaturehood, is that numinous self-disvaluation spoken of on pp. 52 ff. carried to its extreme. These catastrophes and sudden reversals that befall the religious conscious ness, the tragedy of sin and guilt, or again the glow of beatitic joy, are only possible and intelligible on the basis of numinous experience. And just as the opyr) Stov with St. Paul is more than the mere reaction of righteous retri bution, just as it is permeated by the awefulness of the numinous, so on the other side is the fascination of the experienced love of God, that bears the spirit beyond its boundaries into the third heaven, more than the mere con summation of the natural human feeling of a child for its parent. The opyr] &eov is potently and vividly present in the grand passage in Romans i. 18 ff., where we recognize directly the jealous, passionate Yahweh of the Old Testament, here grown to a God of the Universe of fearful power, who pours out the blazing vials of His wrath over the whole world. In this passage there is an intuition, genuinely non-rational in char acter, the sublimity of which has an almost horrible quality : that the commission of sin is the angry God s punishment for bin. St. Paul reiterates this thought so intolerable, if con sidered rationally in three separate verses. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves (Romans i. 24) ; For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections (i. 26) ; God gave them over to a repro bate mind, .. . being filled with all unrighteousness , &c. (i. 28, 29).

To feel the full weight and force of this intuition it is necessary to escape a far as possible from the mental atmosphere of our dogmatic interpretations and judiciously toned-down catechisms, and to try to recapture the awe that could be felt by the Jew toward the fury of Yahweh, by the

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Hellenistic Greek toward the horror of Heimarmene or Destiny, and by primitive man in general toward the ira deorum or anger of the gods.

There is one other point in the teaching of Paul that demands notice in this connexion his doctrine of predestina tion. It is perhaps precisely the * rationalist who feels most directly that with the idea of predestination we are standing on downright non-rational ground. Nothing remains so alien to the rationalist as this doctrine. And from his point of view he is quite right; from the standpoint of the rational this notion of predestination is a sheer absurdity, an absolute offence. Let him acquiesce in all the paradoxes of the Trinity and Christology, predestination will yet remain perpetually to confront him as a stumbling-block.

Not, as need hardly be said, in the form in which it has been put forward since the time of Schleiermacher, following the tradition of Leibniz and Spinoza. That is simply a capitulation to Natural Law and causae secundae , a sur render to the claim of modern Psychology that all human resolves and actions are subject to the compelling force of motives, so that a man is unfree and predetermined thereby. And so, this predetermination by nature, having been identified with the all-embracing efficacy of God, in the end the outcome of the profound and purely religious intuition of divine pre determination which has no concern at all with laws of nature is the comparatively trivial scientific notion of uni versal causal connexion. There can be no more spurious product of theological speculation, no more fundamental falsification of religious conceptions than this ; and it is certainly not against this that the Rationalist feels an antagonism, for it is itself a piece of solid rationalism, but at the same time a complete abandonment of the real religious idea of predestination .

This false scientific interpretation of predestination having been put aside, it may be shown that as a religious idea it springs from two sources and has two quite distinct aspects, which should be distinguished by separate names. The one is election , the other striking an essentially different note predestination proper.

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The idea of election i. e. of having been chosen out and pre-ordained by God unto salvation is an immediate and pure expression of the actual religious experience of grace. The recipient of divine grace feels and knows ever more and more surely, as he looks back on his past, that he has not grown into his present self through any achievement or effort of his own, and that, apart from his own will or power, grace was imparted to him, grasped him, impelled, and led him. And even the resolves and decisions that were most his own and most free become to him, without losinnr the element of free-

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dom, something that he experienced rather than did. Before every deed of his own he sees love the deliverer in action, seek ing and selecting, and acknowledges that an eternal gracious purpose is watching over his life. But this preordainment is purely a preordainment unto salvation and has in itself nothing to do with the praedestinatio ambigua , the predeter mination of all men either to be saved or to be damned. The rational and logical conclusion of course would be that, if he is elected of God but others are not, God, in appointing the elect to bliss, determines also the rejected for damnation. But this conclusion is not, and must not be, drawn, for what we are concerned with is a religious intuition which, as such, stands alone and is only warrant for itself, and which indeed is outraged by any attempt to weave it into a system or make it yield a series of inferences. In this respect Schleier- rnacher is quite right when he says in his Discourses upon Religion 1 : Every (sc. religious) intuition is a self-subsistent work . . . knowing nothing of derivation and point of connexion.

So much for election . From it must be distinguished predestination proper, as it appears in St. Paul, e. g. Romans ix. 18 : Therefore hath He mercy on whom He will, and whom He will He hardeneth.

It is true that the thought of election , prominent in St. Paul, can be detected here as well. But the reflection in v. iiO is obviously the utterance of quite a different frame of mind : Nay, but, O man, who art thou that repliest against

1 Schleierm&cher, IteJtn Hberdie Religion, ed. K. Otto, 4th ed., pp. 37-8.

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God ? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus ? That is a line of thought wholly out of keeping with the set of ideas centring about election . And yet even less can it be derived from any abstractly theoretic doctrine of the all-causing nature of God. Such a doctrine we find in Zwingli, and with him it does indeed give rise to a doctrine of predestination , but one that is rather the artificial product of philosophical speculation than the result of immediate religious experience. The true pre destination , springing directly from religious intuition, has its origin beyond question in St. Paul. But in him it is easily recognized as the numinous feeling in face of the mysterium tremendum ; and that unique phase of it that we met with above (pp. 9 ff.) in the narrative of Abraham recurs here in a signally intensified form. For the religious conception in the notion of predestination is nothing but that creature-consciousness , that self-abasement and the annulment of personal strength and claims and achievements in the presence of the trans cendent, as such. The numen, overpoweringly experienced, becomes the all in all. The creature, with his being and doing, his * willing and running (Rom. ix. 16), his schemes and resolves, becomes nothing. The conceptual expression to indicate such a felt submergence and annihilation over against the numen is then here impotence and there omnipotence- here the futility of one s own choice, there the will that ordains all and determines all.

It is next to be noted that predestination in this sense, as identical with the absolute supremacy of the numen, has nothing whatever to do with the unfree will of Determinism . Rather, it finds very frequently precisely in the free will of the creature the contrast which makes it stand out so pro minently. Will what thou wilt and how thou canst ; plan and choose ; yet must all come about as it shall and as is determined : that is the earliest and most genuine expression of the matter. In face of the eternal power man is reduced to nought, together with his free choice and action. And the eternal power waxes immeasurable just because it fulfils its decrees despite the freedom of human will. This is the aspect

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of the matter designedly thrust into the foreground in many typical Mohammedan narratives which profess to display the inflexibility of the decrees of Allah. In these, men are able to devise and decide and reject ; but, however they choose or act, Allah s eternal will is accomplished to the very day and hour that was ordained. The purport of this is precisely, not that God and God alone is an active cause, but rather that the activity of the creature, be it never so vigorous and free, is overborne and determined absolutely by the eternal operative purpose. 1 The thought of the deity as the absolutely sole and all-embracing active cause first occurs where the creature-

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feeling is intensified still further, and is at the same time combined with theoretic considerations. It then leads to Mystic-ism; and it is only again a further consequence if the speculations about Being, peculiar to and characteristic of Mysticism, become then attached to the thought of God as sole cause. To the creature then is denied, not merely efficacy as a cause, but true reality and complete being, and all existence and fullness of being is ascribed to the absolute entity, who alone really is, while all being of creatures is either a function of this absolute Being which brings them into existence or mere illusion. This sequence of ideas is found in particularly explicit form in the Mysticism of Geulincx and the Occa- sionalists. Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis. Sometimes we hear the same mystical chord in St. Paul also, as in his mysterious saying about the final issue of all things, where

1 The story told by Bcidhavi, an expositor of the Koran, illustrates this : Once when Asrael, the angel of Death, came before Solomon he directed his gaze upon one of the king s companions. Who is that? asked the man. The angel of Death, replied Solomon. He seems to be looking at me, continued the other, BO command the wind that it bear me hence and set me down in India. Solomon did so. Then said the Angel, I gazed upon him for BO long out of astonishment, seeing it had been commanded me to fetch his soul out of India, while he was yet with thee in Canaan. This is a predestination which presupposes free will just as its foil. However freely man makes his plans, Allah has always set his countermine.

[This Btoiy is told in verse by Leigh Hunt in his poem The Inevitable ; cf. Oxford ed. (1922), pp. 95-6. (Trans.)]

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God shall be all in all . But the passage in Romans is differ ent. It goes no farther than the thought of predestination itself; and predestination we have found to be nothing but the intensified creature-feeling in conceptual expression, and to be altogether rooted in the numinous consciousness.

A further consideration may make it plainer that this must be so. If it be really true that the consciousness of the numinous, as creature-feeling , is the root of the predestina tion idea, then we should expect that the form of religious faith marked by an undue and exaggerated insistence on the non-rational elements in the idea of God would also lean most markedly to predestination. And such is obviously the case. No religion has such a leaning to predestination as Islam ; and the special quality of Islam is just that in it, from its commence ment onwards, the rational and specifically moral aspect of the idea of God was unable to acquire the firm and clear impress that it won, e. g., in Christianity or Judaism. In Allah the numinous is absolutely preponderant over everything else. So that, when Islam is criticized for giving a merely fortuitous character to the claim of morality, as though the moral law were only valid through the chance caprice of the deity, the criticism is well justified, only chance and fortuitousness have nothing to do with the matter. The explanation is rather that the numinous in Allah, nay, even his uncanny and daemonic character, outweighs what is rational in him. And this will account for what is commonly called the fanatical character of this religion. Strongly excited feeling of the numen, that runs to frenzy, untempered by the more rational elements of religious experience that is everywhere the very essence of Fanaticism.

The above interpretation of the notion of predestination gives at the same time our estimate of it. It is an attempted statement, in conceptual terms and by analogy, of something that at bottom is incapable of explication by concepts. Fully justified in this sense as an analogical expression, it is wholly unjustified ( summum jus becoming summa injuria ) if its character as analogy is missed, so that it is taken as an adequate formulation of theological theory. In that case it is disastrous

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and intolerable to a rational religion like Christianity, in spite of the attempts that are made to render it innocuous by all the arts of evasion and mitigation.

There is another element in the thought of Paul besides his notion of predestination that is rooted in the numinous: I refer to his utter depreciation of the Flesh . The Flesh with Paul is simply the condition of the creature in general. And this is utterly disparaged and depreciated by the numinous consciousness (as we saw on pp. 9 ff., 52 ff.) in contrast to the transcendent, both in regard to its existence and its value ; in respect to the first as Dust and ashes , nothingness , in sufficient, weak, transient, and perishing, and in respect to the second as the profane , the impure, which is unable to assume the worth of holiness or to come into its presence. We find these two same sorts of depreciation among the ideas of Paul, and the specifically Pauline feature in them is only the vigour and completeness with which he expresses them. It is a quite separate question whence Paul derives this intensity in his denunciation and depreciation of the Flesh , whether it is original to him or stimulated by the dualistic environment of thought in which he moved. As has been already said, one can determine nothing about the essential nature or the value of a thing by tracing its genesis and continuous historic derivation from other sources. And at least we may main tain that Paul might well be stimulated to this emphatic expression by many genuine cases of the numinous experience recorded in the Old Testament. There too Basar, the flesh, is both the principle of being dust and ashes and the principle of the pollution of the creature in the presence of holiness.

In St. John, no less than in St. Paul, there is a strong strain of the numinous. The element of awefulness , it is true, dies away in him, as so commonly in mysticism, without ever quite vanishing, for, jxice Kitsch], even in John the wrath of God abideth (John iii. 36) ; but this only makes the elements of mystery and fascination the stronger, even in their mystical form. In John, Christianity absorbs 0o>y and far/, light 1 and life , into itself from the religions at rivalry with

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it ; l and justly so, for only in Christianity do they win home. But what is this light and this life"? Not to feel what they are is to be made of wood, but none can express it. They are a sheer abounding overplus of the non-rational element in religion.

And the same is true even of that saying of St. John to which the Rationalists are so specially fond of referring : God is a Spirit (John iv. 24). This was the text on account of which Hegel held Christianity to be the highest because the most truly spiritual (geistig) religion. But Hegel meant by spirit the * absolute reason . St. John when he speaks of 7n>e5/za is not thinking of absolute reason but of that which is in absolute contrast to everything of the world and the flesh , the utterly mysterious and miraculous heavenly Being who surpasses all the understanding and reason of the natural man. He is thinking of that Spirit which bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth the Spirit which just on that account is not confined to Zion or Gerizim, and whose worship is only for those who are themselves in spirit and in truth . So that this saying, apparently wholly rational in import, is itself the strongest and clearest indication of the non-rational element in the Biblical idea of God. 2

1 And thereby drains these religions of their life-blood, according to the right of the stronger . And henceforth these elements belong to Christianity indissolubly as ita very own. For

Wenn gtarke Geisteskraft

Die Elemente

An sich herangerafft :

Kein Engel trennte

Geeinte Zwienatur

Der innigen Beiden

and still less can the criticism of scholars! [ When the vigour of the spirit has gathered the elements into itself, then may no angel sunder the double nature now made single of the united twain. ]

2 Compare with this chapter my recently published book Reich Gottes und Menschensohn.

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IN Catholicism the feeling of the numinous is to be found as a living factor of singular power. It is seen in Catholic forms of worship and sacramental symbolism, in the less authentic forms assumed by legend and miracle, in the para doxes and mysteries of Catholic dogma, in the Platonic and neo- Platonic strands woven into the fabric of its religious conceptions, in the solemnity of churches and ceremonies, and especially in the intimate rapport of Catholic piety with Mysticism. For reasons already suggested, the mysterious is much less in evidence in the oflicial systems of doctrine, whether Catholic or Protestant. Particularly since the time when the great mediaeval scholastics (the theologi moderni , so called) replaced Plato by Aristotle and welded the latter and his method on to the doctrines of the Church, Catholic orthodoxy has been subjected to a strong rationalizing influ ence, to which, however, actual living religious practice and feeling never conformed or corresponded. The battle here joined between so-called Platonism and Aristotelian- ism , and in general the long persistent protest against the scholastics, is itself in lar^e part nothing but the stru^le

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between the rational and the non-rational elements in the Christian religion. And the same antithesis is clearly opera tive as a factor in Luther s protest against Aristotle and the 1 theologi moderni .

At that time Plato himself was known (very imperfectly) chiefly through the interpretations and misinterpretations of him by Augustine, Plotinus, and Dionysius the Areopagite. Yet it was a true feeling that led the contrasted attitudes of

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mind to choose the names of Plato and Aristotle as their battle-cries. Plato did indeed make a powerful contribution towards the rationalization of his religion, for according to his philosophy the deity had to become identical with the Idea of the Good , and consequently something wholly rational and conceivable. But the most remarkable characteristic of Plato s thought is just that he himself finds science and philosophy too narrow to comprise the whole of man s mental life. He has indeed properly no Philosophy of Religion ; he grasps the object of religion by quite different means than those of conceptual thinking, viz. by the ideograms of myth, by enthusiasm or inspiration, eros or love, * mania or the divine frenzy. He abandons the attempt to bring the object of religion into one system of knowledge with the objects of science (cTnori} //?;), i.e. reason, and it becomes something not less but greater thereby; while at the same time it is just this that allows the sheer non-rational aspect of it to be so vividly felt in Plato, and indeed vividly expressed as well as felt. No one has enunciated more definitively than this master-thinker that God transcends all reason, in the sense that He is beyond the powers of our conceiving, not merely beyond our powers of comprehension.

Therefore is it an impossible task both to discover the Creator and Father of this Whole Universe and to publish the discovery of him in words for all to understand. J

Aristotle s thought is much more theological than Plato s, but his temper is far less religious ; and at the same time his theology is absolutely rationalistic. And this contrast between the two is repeated among those who profess themselves Platonists or Aristotelians .

1 Timaeus, 28 C TOV /zeV ovv TTOITJT^ KOI Trartpa roCSf TOU iravrbs evpdv r( fpyov /cat (vpovra tls iravTas ativvarov \tyciv. For the non-rational and supra- rational strain in Plato the reader is referred to von Wilamowitz- Mollendorff, Plato, i. 418: and especially to the splendid passage from Plato s seventh letter : 341 C : Concerning these things (sc. ultimate truth) there is not, nor will there be, any treatise written by me. For they do not at all admit of being expounded in writing, as do objects of other (scientific) studies. . . . Only after long, arduous conversance with the matter itself ... a light suddenly breaks upon the soul as from a kindled

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Another influence which orthodox doctrine underwent, from the earliest patristic period onwards, and which tended to weaken the non-rational element in religion, came from the acceptance of the ancient theory of the divine dirdOfia or immunity from passiorf. The God of Greek, and especially of Stoic, theology was constructed after the ideal of the 4 Wise man , who achieves this apathy by the overcoming of his passions and affections ; and the attempt was now made to assimilate this God to the living God of Scripture. And, as intimated above, an effective if unconscious factor in this contest was the antithesis between the non-rational and the rational aspects of the deity. Lactantius, in his treati.se De Ira Del, illustrates particularly strikingly this fight against the God of the philosophers. He uses the same wholly rational terms, taken from man s emotional life, as do his opponents, but raises them to a higher power, so that he makes God, as it were, a gigantic mind, quick with an immense vitality. But whoever in this way contends for the living God is at the same time contending unwittingly for the divine in God, that which cannot be reduced to Idea world-order, moral order, principle of Being, or purposive will. And many of Lactantius s own expressions point of themselves to something beyond. Thus, quoting Plato, he says: Quid omnino sit Deus, non esse quaerendum : quia nee inveniri possit nee enarrari. 1 He is in general fond of emphasizing the incomprehensibilitas of God: Quern nee aestimare eensu valeat humana mens nee eloqui lingua morta- lis. Sublimior enim ac maior est, quam ut possit aut cogita- tione hominis aut sermone comprehendi. 2 He is fond of the expression maiestas Dei , and blames the philosophers for

flume, and once born keeps alive of itself. . . . Only to a few men is the exposition of those things of any profit, and they only need a slight indication of them for their discovery.

1 Kd. Fritsche, p. 227: We ought not to ask what God is altogether; for it can neither be discovered by any nor utated in words.

1 Ibid., p. 116: (God) whom the human mind has no power to appraise, nor tongue of mortals to utter. For he is too sublime and too great to be grasped in the thought or the speech of man.

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misjudging the unique majesty of God. And he feels the tremendum in the maiestas when he asserts that God is wroth , and demands awe as a fundamental characteristic of religion when he says: Ita fit, ut religio et maiestas et honor metu constet. Metus autem non est, ubi nullus irascitur. l He says that a God who cannot be angry cannot love either: and a God that knows neither love nor anger would be immobilis and not the Deus vivus , the living God of Scripture.

This ancient battle of Lactantius against the dens philo- sophorum comes to life again in the Middle Ages in Duns Scotus s battle for the God of Willing , as opposed to the God of Being , and for the validity of volition as an essential in religion, as opposed to cognition . And the non-rational elements which are still latent in Duns Scotus break out openly in Luther in a whole series of some of his most characteristic thoughts.

This aspect of Luther s religion was later tacitly expunged, and is to-day readily dismissed as not the authentic Luther , or as a residuum of the scholastic speculations of the nomi nalists . But, if that is so, it is strange that this residuum of Scholasticism exercised such a power in Luther s own mental life as it palpably did. In point of fact this is not a residuum at all, but beyond all question the mysterious background of his religious life, obscure and uncanny , and to estimate it in all its power and profundity we need to abstract the lucid bliss and joyfulness of Luther s faith in the divine grace, and to see this faith in relation to the back ground of that mysterious experience on which it rests. It matters not from what source, whether nominalism or the traditional teaching of his Order, his consciousness was first stirred; we have in any case in Luther the numinous con sciousness at first hand, stirred and agitated through its typical moments , as we have come to know them. It is a corroboration that these moments appear in Luther in

1 Thus it comes that religion and majesty and honour depend upon fear. But there is no fear where none is angry.

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their completed series, and so point back to the common basis that unites them all.

(1) We are not here concerned with the many strands, strong at the outset, weaker later, but never altogether dis appearing, that connect him with Mysticism. Nor are we concerned with the surviving effects of the numinous element of the Catholic worship in his doctrine of the Eucharist, which cannot be wholly derived either from his doctrine of the forgiveness of sins or from his deference to the written word of scripture. Let us rather consider Luther s mirae speculations upon the unrevealed in God in contrast to the facies Dei revelata (revealed face of God), upon the divina maiestas and the omnipotentia Dei in contrast to his gratia , as he treats of them in his work De Servo ArlUrio. The investigation as to how far Luther took over 1 doctrines from Scotus does not amount to much ; they stand in most intimate connexion with his own innermost religious life, of which they are a genuine first-hand utterance, and should be examined as such. Luther himself guarantees expressly that he does not teach such things merely as subjects of dispute in the schools or as philosophical deductions and corollaries, but because they are a central part of the religious experience of the Christian, who must know them in order to have faith and to have life. He rejects the cautious fore sight of Erasmus s view, that such things should at least be withheld from the common people, preaching them himself in public sermons (e.g. upon Exodus, in reference to the hardening of Pharaoh s heart) and writing them in his letter to the men of Antwerp. And again, just before his death, speaking of his book De Servo Arbitrio, in which these ideas stand clearly expressed, Luther acknowledges that nothing he wrote was so truly his own.

Is this borne out in his general teaching? His words in the Great Catechism, To have a God is nothing else than to trust Him from the heart , might seem to imply the negative. And certainly to Luther God is He who overbrims with pure goodness . Yet this same Luther knows depths and abysses in the Godhead that make his heart despond,

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from which he flees for refuge to the Word , like a hare to his cleft in the rocks , flees, it may be, to the Sacrament or to absolution, or to the comforting official pronouncements of Dr. Pommeranus, but in general no less to every word of comfort or promise in the Psalms and the Prophets. But that before which his soul quails again and again in awe is not merely the stern Judge, demanding righteousness for He is wholly a God of revelation but rather at the same time God in His unrevealedness , in the aweful majesty of His very Godhead ; He before whom trembles not simply the transgressor of the law, but the creature, as such, in his uncovered creaturehood. Luther even ventures to designate this awe-inspiring, non-rational character of deity as Deus ipse, ut est in sua natura et maiestate 1 (an assumption which would be in fact a dangerous and erroneous one; for no distinction of the non-rational and the rational aspects of God should imply that the latter is less essential than the former).

The passages relevant in this connexion from Luther s De Servo Arbitrio are cited often enough: but to understand the wellnigh daemonic character of this numinous feeling the reader should particularly note the effect of the following passage from Luther s sermon on Exodus xx. The preacher leaves no means untried to bring out effectively the element of numinous horror in his text :

Yea, for the world it seemeth as though God were a mere silly yawner, with mouth ever agape, or a cuckold, who lets another lie with his wife and feigneth that he sees it not/

But * He assaileth a man, and hath such a delight therein that He is of His Jealousy and Wrath impelled to consume the wicked .

Then shall we learn how that God is a consuming fire, . . . That is then the consuming, devouring fire. Wilt thou sin ? Then will He devour thee up. For God is a fire, that consumeth, devoureth, rageth ; verily He is your undoing, as fire consumeth a house and maketh it dust and ashes.

1 God Himself, as He is in his own very nature and majesty.

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And in another place :

Yea, He is more terrible and frightful than the Devil. For He dealeth with us and bringeth us to ruin with power, smiteth and hammereth us and payeth no heed to us. In His majesty He is a consuming lire. For therefrom can no man refrain : if he thinketh on God aright, his heart in his body is struck with terror . . . Yea, as soon as he heareth God named, he is filled with trepidation and fear. 1

It is the absolute numen , felt here partially in its aspect of maiestas and tremenduin . And the reason I introduced these terms above to denote the one side of the numinous experience was in fact just because I recalled Luther s own expressions, and borrowed them from his divina maiestas and metuenda voluntas , which have rung in my ears from the time of my earliest study of Luther. Indeed I grew to understand the numinous and its difference from the rational in Luther s De Servo Arbitrio long before I identified it in the qadosh of the Old Testament and in the elements of religious awe in the history of religion in general.

One must have beheld these gulfs and abysses in Luther to understand aright how significant it is that it is the same man who on the other hand endeavours to put the whole of Christianity into a confiding faith. The same contrast noted above in the religion of the Gospel and in the paradoxes of the faith in God the Father recurs in the religious experience of Luther, but in unexampled intensity. That it is the unc^proachalle which becomes approachable, the Holy One who is pure goodness, that it is Majesty which makes itself familiar and intimate there is the inwardness of the matter } and this finds only very dubious expression in the subsequent one-sided doctrine of the schools, where the mystical character of the Wrath , which is of the essence of holiness infused with that of goodness , is referred simply to the righteous ness of God, and taken thus as righteous anger or indig nation.

1 Vide the Erlangen edition of Luther s works, xxxvi, pp. 210 ff., 222, 231. J37 ; xxxv, p. 167 ; xlvii, p. 145 ; 1, p. 200.

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(2) Once the numinous consciousness has been aroused, it is to be expected, seeing that it is a unity, that one of its moments will be found to be bound up with the rest. In the case of Luther we find next after this element of Wrath the numinous manifesting itself in the set of ideas which we may fairly call those of Job. The Book of Job, as was seen above, is not so much concerned with the awefulness of the majesty of the numen as with its mysterious ness ; it is con cerned with the non-rational in the sense of the irrational, with sheer paradox baffling comprehension, with that which challenges the ( reasonable and what might be reasonably expected, which goes directly against the grain of reason. To this place belong Luther s violent onslaughts upon the whore Reason , which must seem grotesque to any one who has not rightly grasped the problem of the non-rational element in the idea of God. But certain set phrases, con stantly recurring in Luther and very typical of him, are specially significant in this connexion, as showing the strong feeling he had for the non-rational aspect of the divine nature in general. The most interesting passages are not those in which he gives this feeling currency in the small change of popular edification, that soothes itself with the thought that God s ways are too high for us men ; but those in which he lays hold of some startling paradox. He can indeed tell in quite a homely and popular way how strange a lord our God is , and refer this to the fact that God does not esteem or count as the world counts, and that He disciplines us by the strange ways of His guidance. Such expressions are of general currency ; but others and these the more character istic strike a loftier note. God is altogether mysteriis suis et iudiciis impervestigabilis ( beyond tracking out in His mysteries and His judgements ), displays as in Job His vera maiestas in metuendis mirabilibus et iudiciis suis incom- prehensibilibus ( in His fearful marvels and incomprehensible judgements ), is in His essence hidden away from all reason, knows no measure, law, or aim, and is verified in the paradox : ut ergo fidei locus sit, opus est, ut omnia, quae creduntur, abscondantur ( in order, therefore, that there may be a place

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for faith, all the things that are believed must be hidden away ). And his concern is not simply to note this as an inconceivable paradox, to acknowledge it and bow before it, but to recognize that such a paradox is essential to the nature of God and even its distinguishing characteristic.

Si enim talis esset eius iustitia, quae humano captu posset iudicari esse iusta, plane non esset divina et nihilo diflerret ab huinana iustitia. At cum sit Deus verus et unus, deinde totus incomprehensibilis et inaccessibilis humana ratione, par est, immo necessarium est, ut et iustitia sua sit incomprehensi bilis. *

Theology gives expression to its perplexed endeavour to find a name for the elements of the non-rational and the mysterious in the repulsive doctrine that God is * exlex (outside the law), that good is good because God wills it, instead of that God wills it because it is good, a doctrine that results in attributing to God an absolutely fortuitous will, which would in fact turn Him into a capricious despot . These doctrines are specially prominent in the theology of Islam, and this can be immediately understood if the two positions we maintain are sound, viz. that such doctrines are really perplexed expressions of the non-rational, numinous side of the divine nature, and that this is altogether the pre ponderant aspect in Islam. And we find them also in Luther in the same connexion. In this very fact, however, lies the excuse for doctrines in themselves so blasphemous and horrible: they are caricatures prompted by a deficient psychology and a mistaken choice of expressions, and not by any disregard of the absoluteness of moral values.

(3) From the point of view already considered in detail it will be seen that, with such feelings as a basis, it was in evitable that the doctrine of predestination would in due course make its appearance in Luther s religion. And in his

For were Ilia juhtice Buch as could be adjudged as just by the human understanding it were manifestly not divine, and would differ in nothing from human justice. But since God is true and single, yea in Ilia entirety incomprehensible and inaccessible to human reason, it is right, nay it follows necesiarily, that His justice also is incomprehensible.

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case we do not need, as we did in the case of Paul, to postulate the close inner connexion between this doctrine and the numinous temper, for in the De Servo Arbitrio it is palpably evident. The one explicitly depends upon the other, and the inward bond of union between the two is so unmistakable that this treatise of Luther s becomes a sort of psychological key to related phases of religious experience.

It is only occasionally that these purely numinous ele ments in Luther s religious consciousness are displayed so strongly and forcibly as in the treatise De Servo Arbitrio. But in his battles with desperatio and with Satan, in his constantly recurring religious catastrophes and fits of melan choly, in his wrestlings for grace, perpetually renewed, which bring him to the verge of mental disorder, in all these there are more than merely rational elements at work in his soul. Moreover, even when he is speaking solely in rational terms of Judgement, Punishment, and the Wrath of God, we must, if we are to recapture the real Luther in these expressions, hear sounding in them the profoundly non-rational strain of religious awe*. For this Wrath of God also has often, perhaps has always, something in it of that Fury of Yahweh, that opytj of the numen.

(4) This circumstance suggests a further point. The ex pressions unrevealed God and tremenda maiestas mani festly repeated only those moments of the numinous which we found first in our analysis of it (p. 13), especially the tremendum , the daunting aspect of the numinous. What of that of fascination in Luther ? Is it missing altogether, to be replaced merely by the rational attributes of trustworthiness and love and the corresponding element in the mind of the worshipper, viz. faith and trustfulness ? No, beyond all question it is not. Only, the element of fascination is in Luther wholly interwoven with these rational elements and comes to utterance with them and in them. This can be felt forcibly in the boisterous, almost Dionysiac, blissfulness of his experience of God.

Christians are a blissful people, who can rejoice at heart

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and sing praises, stamp and dance and leap for joy. That is well pleasing to God and doth our heart good, when we trust in God and find in Him our pride and our joyfulness. Such a gift should only kindle a fire and a light in our heart, so that we should never cease dancing and leaping for joy.

Who will extol this enough or utter it forth It is neither to be expressed nor conceived.

If thou feelest it truly in the heart, it will be such a great thing to thee that thou wilt rather be silent than speak aught of it. 1

Here should be borne in mind what was remarked earlier (p. 48) respecting the interweaving of the non-rational with the rational and the consequently deepened import of rational expressions. As the awe-inspiring character of the Tran scendent is comprised in the God of sternness and punishment and justice, so is its bliss-giving character included in the God who overbrims with pure goodness . Indeed it is involved in the overabounding and mystical tone of Luther s actual creed. Here, as elsewhere, there is no mistaking his connexion with Mysticism. 2 Though for Luther faith begins more and more to take the place of knowledge and Love of God (Gottes-Minne) which means a marked qualitative alteration of the whole religious temper, as compared with that of Mysticism yet, despite the change, it remains obvious that there are definite features in c Faith , as the term is used by Luther, which justify us in classing it with the mystical ways of response to which it is in apparent contrast, and clearly distinguish it from the fides taught by the Lutheran school with its determinate, well-ordered, unmystical temper. Faith for Luther plays the same essential part, mutatis mutandis, as knowledge and love for the earlier mystics : it is the unique power of the soul, the adhaesio Dei , which unites man with God : and unity is the very signature of the mystical. So that when Luther says that Faith makes man one cake (ein Kuche) with God or Christ, or holds him as a ring holds a jewel (sicut annulus gemvuim), he is not speaking any more figuratively than when Tauler says the same of Love. Faith for Luther, as Love for Tauler and the 1 Erlungen cd., xi. 194, 2 See Appendix VI.

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mystics generally, is a something that cannot be exhaustively comprised in rational concepts, and to designate which figures and images are a necessity. To him Faith is the centre of the Soul the fundus animae or basis of the soul of the mystics in which the union of man with God fulfils itself. It is at the same time an independent faculty of knowledge, a mystical a priori element in the spirit of man, by which he receives and recognizes supra- sensible truth, and in this respect identical with the Holy Spirit in the heart (Spiritus Sanctus in corde). Faith* is further the mighty creative thing in us and the strongest of affects, most closely akin to the Greek enthusiasm (tvQovcriafrcrOou). It even takes over all the functions which all enthusiasts from Paul onwards have ascribed to the Spirit ; for it is faith that transforms us inwardly and brings us forth anew . In this regard, different as it is in its inner attitude, Faith is very similar to the amor mysticus . And in the bliss of the assurance of salvation (certitudo salutis) that it arouses, and the intensity of Luther s childlike faith , we have in a subdued form a recurrence of the childhood feelings of Paul, which go beyond mere comfort of the soul, appeasement of conscience, or feeling of protectedness. All subsequent mystics from Johann Arndt to Spener and Arnold * have always felt these aspects of Luther s inner life to be congenial and akin to their own, and have carefully collected the relevant passages from his writings as a defence against the attacks of the rationalized doctrine of the Lutheran school.

For in opposition to the rationalizations of the schools the non-rational elements are maintained and fostered in the western Mysticism that came to its later flower both on Catholic and Protestant soil. In this, as in Christian Mys ticism as a whole from its first stirrings, the elements of the non-rational already detailed are easily recognizable, most prominently of all those of mystery , fascination , and majesty . The element of awe , on the other hand,

1 [Johann Arndt, 1555-1621; Gottfried Arnold, 1666-1697; Philipp Jacob Spener, 1635-1705: the last-named was one of the founders of Pietism in Germany. (Trans.)]

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recedes and is subdued ; there has never been in the West a Mysticism of Horror, such as we find in certain kinds of Indian Mysticism, both Buddhist and Hindu in Bhagavad- Ghita, ch. 11 l in some forms of the Shiva and Durga worship, and in the horrible form of Tantrism. Yet, though the tremendum clement in Christian mysticism is subdued, it is not entirely lacking. It remains a living factor in the Catigo and the altum tiilentium, in the Abyss , the Night , the Deserts of the divine nature, into which the soul must descend, in the agony , abandonment , barrenness , taedium, in which it must tarry, in the shuddering and shrink ing from the loss and deprivation of self-hood and the anni hilation of personal identity. Thus Suso writes:

In this inconceivable mountain of the supra-divine Where (the height of the divine Majesty transcending substance ) there is a precipitousnessof which all pure spirits are sensible. Here the Soul enters a secret namelessness, a marvellous alie nation. It is the bottomless abyss no creature can sound ... the spirit perishos there, to become all-living in the won ders of the Godhead. -

And lie can pray :

Ah, woe is me, Thy wrathful countenance is so full of fury. Thy turning away in anger is so unendurable. Woe is me ! And the words of Thy enmity are so tiery, they cleave through heart and soul. 3

This note is familiar also to the later mystics. Thus St. John of the Cross says :

As this clear sight of the divine comes like a violent assault upon the soul to subdue it, the soul feels such anguish in its weakness that all power and breath leave it together, while sense and spirit as though they stood burdened beneath a dark unmeasured load sutler such agony and are oppressed by Hiich deadly fear that the soul would choose death as a mitigation and refreshment. 4

And again :

1 The fourth kind of anguish is brought into being in the BOU! . . . from the Majesty and Glory of God. 6

1 Sec Appendix II.

1 SUBO, German writings, cd. Denifle, pp. 280 ff. Ibid., p. 353.

4 St. John of the Crow, The Ascent of Mount Carmtl. B Ibid.

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Once more :

Therefore He destroys, crushes and overwhelms (the soul) in such a deep darkness, that it feels as though melted and in its misery destroyed by a cruel death of the spirit. Even as though it were to feel it had been swallowed by some savage beast and buried in the darkness of his belly. l

But in our Western Mysticism the writer in whom the non-rationally dreadful and even the daemonic phase of the numinous remains a most living element is Jakob Bohme. For all his adoption of its motives, Bohme is in his specula tion and theosophy sharply distinguished from the earlier Mysticism. He is at one with this (as represented, for instance, by Eckhart) in aiming at a construction and an understanding of God, and from Him of the world: and, like Eckhart, he finds as a starting point for his speculation the primal bottom , the supra-comprehensible and inexpressible. But this stands to him, not for Being and Above-being, but for Stress and Will ; it is not good and above- good, but a supra-rational identification of good and evil in an Indifferent, in which is to be found the potentiality for evil as well as for good, and therewith the possibility of the dual nature of deity itself as at once goodness and love on the one hand and fury and wrath on the other. J If the

1 St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel.

2 The ferocity is the origin of Lucifer, in whom the mere potentiality of evil is actualized. It might be said that Lucifer is fury , the opyr], hypostatized, the mysterium tremendum cut loose from the other elements and intensified to mysterium liorrendum. The roots at least of this may be found in the Bible and the early Church. The ideas of propitiation and ransom are not without reference to Satan as well as to the divine Wrath. The rationalism of the myth of the fallen angel does not render satisfactorily the horror of Satan and of the depths of Satan (Rev. ii. 24) and the mystery of iniquity (2 Thess. ii. 7). It is a horror that is in some sort numinous, and we might designate the object of it as the negatively numinous. This also holds good of other religions than that of the Bible. In all religions the devilish plays its part and has its place as that which, opposed to the divine, has yet something in common with it. As such it should be the subject of a special inquiry, which must be an analysis of fundamental feelings, and something very different from a mere record of the evolution of the idea of the devil .

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inventions and comparisons, with whose aid Bb hme com poses a sort of chemico-physical romance of God, strike us as extremely qu2er and bizarre, the strange intuitions of the religious feeling underlying them are yet highly significant. They are intuitions of the numinous, and are akin to those of Luther. With Bb hme, as with Luther, the non-rational energy and majesty of God and his awcfulness appear con ceptualized and symbolized as Will . And with Bohme, as with Luther, this is conceived as fundamentally independent of mond elevation or righteousness, and as indifferent toward good or evil action. It is rather a ferocity , a fiery wrath about something unknown ; or, better still, not about anything at all, but Wrath on its own account and without reference to any object ; an aspect of character which would be quite meaningless if taken literally in the sense of a real con ceivable and apprehensible anger. Who is not directly con scious that it is simply the non-rational element of awefulness , the tremendwm, for which Wrath , Fire , Fury , are excellent ideograms? 1 If such an ideogram is taken as an adequate concept, the result is anthropomorphism, such as mythology illustrates, and the writings of Lactantius (v. p. 99). And if speculation follows, based upon such concepts, the result is the pseudo-science of theosophy. For the characteristic mark of all theosophy is just this: having confounded analogical and figurative ways of expressing feeling with rational con cepts, it then systematizes them, and out of them spins, like a monstrous web, a * Science of God , which is and remains something monstrous, whether it employs the doctrinal terms of scholasticism, as Eckhart did, or the alchemical substances and mixtures of Paracelsus, as Bohme did, or the cate gories of an animistic logic, as Hegel did, or the elaborate

1 Btfhme s disciple, Johann Pordage, has some feeling of this when he writes: So hope I then, that you will Dot be angered with mo, if you find that I impute to God acerbity and bitterness, dread, wrath, fire, . . . and the like. For even Jakob Bflhme found no other words in which to express his exalted sfnsation (Empfindung) of God. You must then take all those forms of ppeech in a high divine sense, far removed from all imperfection (Divine and True Hfetaphysic, i. 166).

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diction of Indian religion, as Mrs. Besant does. For the history of religion it is not on account of his theosophy that Bohme is interesting, but because in him behind the theosophy the consciousness of the numinous was astir and alive as an element of genuine value : so that herein Bohme was an heir of Luther, preserving what in Luther s own school came to be overlooked and disregarded.

For the Lutheran school has itself not done justice to the numinous side of the Christian idea of God. By the exclusively moral interpretation it gave to the terms, it distorted the meaning of holiness and the wrath of God , and already from the time of Johann Gerhardt and onwards Lutheranism was returning to the doctrine of divine aTrdQeia or passion- lessness. More and more it deprived the forms of worship of the genuinely contemplative and specifically devotional elements in them. The conceptual and doctrinal the ideal of orthodoxy began to preponderate over the inexpressible, whose only life is in the conscious mental attitude of the devout soul. The Church became a school, and her communi cations, in truth, found a more and more contracted access to the mind, as Tyrrell has put it somewhere, through the narrow clefts (?) of the understanding .

Schleiermacher was the first to attempt to overcome this rationalism, most boldly and uncompromisingly in the rhapsody of his Discourses, with less heat and more subdued tone in his Glaubenslehre and his theory of the feeling of absolute dependence , which in point of fact give a representation as has been pointed out already of the first stirring of the feeling of the numinous. It will be a task for contemporary Christian teaching to follow in his traces and again to deepen the rational meaning of the Christian conception of God by permeating it with its non-rational elements.

CHAPTER XIII THE TWO PROCESSES OF DEVELOPMENT <

THIS permeation of the rational with the non-rational is to lead, then, to the deepening of our rational conception of God ; it must not be the means of blurring or diminishing it. For if (as suggested at the close of the last chapter) the disregard of the numinous elements tends to impoverish religion, it is no less true that holiness , sanctity , as Chris tianity intends the words, cannot dispense with the rational, and especially the clear ethical elements of meaning which Pro testantism more particularly emphasizes in the idea of God. To get the full meaning of the word holy as we find it used in the New Testament (and religious usage has established it in the New Testament sense to the exclusion of others), we must no longer understand by the holy or sacred the merely numinous in general, nor even the numinous at its own highest development ; we must always understand by it the numinous completely permeated and saturated with elements signifying rationality, purpose, personality, morality. It is in this combined meaning that we retain and apply the term holy in our subsequent chapters. But that the course of the historical development may be clearly understood, we venture first to recapitulate our view upon this matter as explicitly as possible.

That which the primitive religious consciousness first apprehends in the form of daemonic dread , and which, as it further unfolds, becomes more elevated and ennobled, is in origin not something rational or moral, but something distinct, non-rational, an object to which the mind responds in a unique way with the special feeling-reflexes that have been described. And this element or moment passes in itself through a process of development of its own, quite apart

I

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from the other process which begins at an early stage by which it is rationalized and moralized , i. e. filled with rational and ethical meaning. Taking this non-rational pro cess of development first, we have seen how the daemonic dread , after itself passing through various gradations, rises to the level of fear of the gods , and thence to fear of God . The Saifioviov or daemonic power becomes the 6dov or divine power : * dread becomes worship ; out of a confusion of inchoate emotions and bewildered palpitations of feeling grows c religio , and out of shudder a holy awe. The feelings of dependence upon and beatitude in the numen, from being relative, become absolute. The false analogies and fortuitous associations are gradually dispelled or frankly rejected. The numen becomes God and Deity. It is then to God and Deity, as numen rendered absolute, that the attribute denoted by the terms qddosh, sanctus, ayioy, holy, pertains, in the first and directest sense of the words. It is the culmination of a development which works itself out purely in the sphere of the non- rational. This development constitutes the first central fact of religious study, and it is the task of religious history and psychology to trace its course.

Next, secondary and subsidiary to this, is the task of tracing the course of the process of rationalization and moralization on the basis of the numinous consciousness. It nearly, if not quite, synchronizes and keeps pace with the stages of the purely numinous development, and, like that, it can be traced in its different gradations in the most widely different regions of religious history. Almost everywhere we find the numinous attracting and appropriating meanings derived from social and individual ideals of obligation, justice, and goodness. These become the will of the numen, and the numen their guardian, ordainer, and author. More and more these ideas come to enter into the very essence of the numen and charge the term with ethical content. Holy becomes good , and good from that very fact in turn becomes holy , sacrosanct ; until there results a thenceforth indissoluble synthesis of the two elements, and the final outcome is thus the fuller, more com plex sense of holy , in which it is at once good and sacrosanct.

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The greatest distinction of the religion of ancient Israel, at least from Amos onwards, is precisely the intimate coalescence of both elements. No God is like the God of Israel : for He is the absolutely Holy One (= perfectly good). And, on the other hand, no law is like Yahweh s Law, for it is not merely good, but also at the same time holy (= sacrosanct).

And this process of rationalization and moralization of the numinous, as it grows ever more clear and more potent, is in fact the most essential part of what we call the History of Salvation and prize as the ever-growing self-revelation of the divine. But at the same time it should be clear to us that this process of the moralization of the idea of God , often enough represented to us as a principal problem, setting the main line for inquiry into the history of religion, is in no wise a suppression of the numinous or its supersession by something else which would result not in a God, but a God substitute but rather the completion and charging of it with a new content. That is to say, the moralization process assumes the numinous and is only completed upon this as basis.

CHAPTER XIV THE HOLY AS AN A PRIORI CATEGORY

PART I

IT follows from what has been said that the holy in the fullest sense of the word is a combined, complex category, the combining elements being its rational and non-rational components. But in both and the assertion must be strictly maintained against all Sensationalism and Naturalism it is a purely a priori category.

The rational ideas of Absoluteness, Completion, Necessity, and Substantiality, and no less so those of the good as an objective value, objectively binding and valid, are not to be evolved from any sort of sense-perception. And the notions of epigenesis , heterogony , or whatever other expression we may choose to denote our compromise and perplexity, only serve to conceal the problem, the tendency to take refuge in a Greek terminology being here, as so often, nothing but an avowal of one s own insufficiency. Rather, seeking to account for the ideas in question, we are referred away from all sense-experience back to an original and underivable capacity of the mind implanted in the pure reason independently of all perception.

But in the case of the non-rational elements of our category of the Holy we are referred back to something still deeper than the pure reason , at least as this is usually understood, namely to that which Mysticism has rightly named the fundus animae , the bottom or f ground of the soul (Seelengrund). The ideas of the numinous and the feelings that correspond to them are, quite as much as the rational ideas and feelings, absolutely pure , and the criteria which Kant suggests for the pure concept and the pure feeling of respect are most precisely applicable to them. In the famous opening words of the 1 Critique of Pure Reason he says :

That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cogni tion should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means

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of objects which affect our senses ? . . . But, though all our know ledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.

And, referring to empirical knowledge, he distinguishes that part which we receive through impressions and that which our own faculty of cognition supplies from itself, sense-impressions giving merely the occasion.

The numinous is of the latter kind. It issues from the deepest foundation of cognitive apprehension that the soul possesses, and, though it of course comes into being in and amid the sensory data and empirical material of the natural world and cannot anticipate or dispense with those, yet it does not arise out of them, but only by their means. They are the incitement, the stimulus, and the occasion for the numinous experience to become astir, and, in so doing, to begin at first with a naive immediacy of reaction to be interfused and interwoven with the present world of sensuous experience, until, becoming gradually purer, it disengages itself from this and takes its stand in absolute contrast to it. The proof that in the numinous we have to deal with purely a priori cogni tive elements is to be reached by introspection and a critical examination of reason such as Kant instituted. We find, that is, involved in the numinous experience, beliefs and feelings qualitatively different from anything that natural sense- perception is capable of giving us. They are themselves not perceptions at all, but peculiar interpretations and valuations, at first of perceptual data, and then at a higher level of posited objects and entities, which themselves no longer belong to the perceptual world, but are thought of as supplementing and transcending it. And as they are not themselves sense- perceptions, RO neither are they any sort of transmutation of Bense-perceptions. The only transmutation possible in respect to sense-perception is the transformation of the intuitively given concrete percept, of whatever sort, into the corresponding concept ; there is never any question of the transformation of o/t class of percepts into a class of entities qualitatively oilier. The facts of the numinous consciousness point therefore as likewise do alao the pure concepts of the understanding of

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Kant and the ideas and value-judgements of ethics or aesthetics to a hidden substantive source, from which the religious ideas and feelings are formed, which lies in the mind independently of sense-experience ; a pure reason in the profoundest sense, which, because of the surpassingness of its content, must be distinguished from both the pure theoretical and the pure practical reason of Kant, as something yet higher or deeper than they.

The justification of the evolutionist theory of to-day stands or falls with its claim to explain the phenomenon of religion. That is in truth the real task of the psychology of religion. But in order to explain we must have the data from which an explanation may be forthcoming ; out of nothing nothing can be explained. Nature can only be explained by an investigation into the ultimate fundamental forces of nature and their laws : it is meaningless to propose to go further and explain these laws themselves, for in terms of what are they to be explained ? But in the domain of spirit the corresponding principle from which an explanation is derived is just the spirit itself, the reasonable spirit of man, with its predispositions, capacities, and its own inherent laws. This has to be presupposed : it can not itself be explained. None can say how mind or spirit is made though this is in effect just what the theory of Epi- genesis is fain to attempt. The history of humanity begins with man, and we have to presuppose man, to take him for granted as he is, in order that from him we may understand his history. That is, we must presuppose man as a being analogous to ourselves in natural propensities and capacities. It is a hopeless business to seek to lower ourselves into the mental life of a pithecanthropus erectus-, and, even if it were not, we should still need to start from man as he is, since we can only interpret the psychical and emotional life of animals regressively by clumsy analogies drawn from the developed human mind. To try, on the other hand, to understand and deduce the human from the sub-human or brute mind is to try to fit the lock to the key instead of vice versa ; it is to seek to illuminate light by darkness. In the first appearance of conscious life on dead unconscious matter we have a simple,

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irreducible, inexplicable datum. But that which here appears is already a manifold of qualities, and we can only interpret it as a seed of potentiality, out of which issue continually maturer powers and capacities, as the organization of the body increases in stability and complexity. And the only way we can throw any light upon the whole region of sub-human psychical life is by interpreting it once again as a sort of pre disposition (Anlage) at a second remove, i.e. a predisposition to form the predispositions or faculties of the actual developed mind, and standing in relation to this as an embryo to the full-grown organism. But we are not completely in the dark as to the meaning of this word predisposition . For in our own awakening and growth to mental and spiritual maturity we trace in ourselves in some sort the evolution by which the seed develops into the tree the very opposite of transformation and epigenesis by successive addition. 1

We call the source of growth a hidden predisposition of the human spirit, which awakens when aroused by divers excitations. That there are predispositions of this sort in individuals no one can deny who has given serious study to the history of religion. They are seen as propensities, predestining the individual to religion, and they may grow spontaneously to quasi-instinctive presentiments, uneasy seek ing and groping, yearning and longing, and become a religious imjfuksioii, that only finds peace when it has become clear to itself and attained its goal. From them arise the states of

1 The physical analogue to these spiritual or mental relationships is the relation of potential to kinetic energy. The assumption of such a rela tion in the world of mind (i.e. a relation between potential and kinetic mind) is, of course, only to be expected from one who is prepared to accept as the final cause of all mind in the world as a whole the absolute mind as pure actuality whose ellampatio or effulgence (in Leibniz s phrase) all other mind is. For all that is potential presupposes an actual aa the ground of its possibility, a.s Aristotle long ago showed. But indeed how can we afford to reject such a pure actuality ? It is an inconsequent proceeding to postulate actuality, as is done, for a starting point for the pbynical world, a a system of stored-up energy, whose transference to kint-tic energy constitutes the rush of worlds and wheel of systems , and yet to reject the analogous aisumption in the world of niind and spirit.

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mind of prevenient grace , described in masterly fashion by Suso :

Loving, tender Lord ! My mind has from the days of my childhood sought something with an earnest thirst of longing, Lord, and what that is have I not yet perfectly apprehended. Lord, I have now for many a year been in hot pursuit of it, and never yet have I been able to succeed, for I know not aright what it is. And yet it is something that draws my heart and my soul after it, and without which I can never attain to full repose. Lord, I was fain in the earliest days of my childhood to seek it among created things, as I saw others before me do. And the more I sought, the less I found it ; and the nearer I went, the further I wandered from it. ... Now my heart rages for it, for fain would I possess it. ... Woe is me ! . . . What is this, or how is it fashioned, that plays within me in such hidden wise ? x

These are manifestations of a predisposition becoming a search and a driving impulsion. But here, if nowhere else, the * fundamental biogenetic law really does hold good, which uses the stages and phases in the growth of the individual to throw light upon the corresponding stages in the growth of his species. The predisposition which the human reason brought with it when the species Man entered history became long ago, not merely for individuals but for the species as a whole, a religious impulsion, to which incitements from without and pressure from within the mind both contributed. It begins in undirected, groping emotion, a seeking and shaping of representations, and goes on, by a continual onward striving, to generate ideas, till its nature is self-illumined and made clear by an explication of the obscure a priori foundation of thought itself, out of which it originated. 2 And this emotion, this searching, this generation and explication of ideas, gives the warp of the fabric of religious evolution, whose woof we are to discuss later. 3

1 Worts, ed. Denifle, p. 311.

2 The reader may compare what Kant says in his Lectures on Psychology (Leipsic ed., 1889, p. 11) of the treasure buried in the field of obscure ideas, constituting the deep abyss of human knowledge, which we cannot sound. This deep abyss is just the fundus animae that is aroused in Suso. s Of. pp. 180, 181.

CHAPTER XV ITS EARLIEST MANIFESTATIONS

ONLY upon the basis of the foregoing assumptions is it possible to understand the historical origin and further develop ment of religion. It must be admitted that when religious evolution first begins sundry curious phenomena confront us, preliminary to religion proper and deeply atfecting its subsequent course. Such are the notions of clean and unclean , belief in and worship of the dead, belief in and worship of souls or spirits , magic, fairy tale, and myth, homage to natural objects, whether frightful or extraordinary, noxious or advantageous, the strange idea of power (orenda or mana), fetishism and totemism, worship of animal and plant, daemonisin and polydaemonism. Different as these things are, they are all haunted by a common and that a numinous element, which is easily identifiable. They did not, perhaps, take their origin out of this common numinous element directly ; they may have all exhibited a preliminary stage at which they were merely * natural products of the na ive, rudimentary fancies of primitive times. 1 ut these things acquire a strand of a quite special kind, which alone gives them their character as forming the vestibule of religion, brings them first to clear and explicit form, and furnishes them with the prodigious power over the minds of men which history universally proves them to possess. Let us attempt to grasp this peculiar strand, common to all these modes of thought and practice which stand upon the threshold of religion.

1. We will begin with magic. There has been at all times, and there still is to-day, a natural magic, that is to nay, modes of behaviour exhibiting some simple analogy and carried out quite unreilectively and without any basis in theory, whose

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object is to influence and regulate an event in accordance with the wishes of the agent. It may be noticed on any skittle- alley or bowling-green. A bowler aims and plays his bowl, wishing it to roll straight and hit the jack. He watches eagerly as it rolls, nodding his head, his body bent sideways, stands balancing on one leg, jerks over violently to the other side as the critical point is reached, makes as though to push the ball on with hand or foot, gives a last jerk and the end is reached. Its hazards past, the ball rolls safely into position. What was the man doing in this case ? He was not simply imitating the course of the ball ; he meant to prescribe and determine it, but this obviously without any reflection on his queer behaviour, without the belief of primitive man in universal animism , i. e. in the animatedness of everything, in this instance of the ball, and without a belief in some sympathetic rapport between his own soul power and the soul of the ball. His action was merely naively analogical, for the attainment of a definite wish. The proceedings of rain-makers were often, perhaps at first were always, just the same sort of thing ; and so were the naive charms purporting to influence the course of sun and moon, clouds and winds. But clearly, so long as they are not more than this, these are not by any means magic in the proper sense. There must be in addition a new ingredient, unique in quality, the element that is usually called supernatural efficacy . But this expression is a misnomer : supernatural has nothing to do with the case ; it is much too imposing an expression, and ascribes far too much to the naive mind. The conception of Nature as a single connected system of events united by laws is the final and most difficult outcome of abstraction ; and this conception of nature, or at least some hint of it, must have been arrived at before there could be any place for its negation, the supernatural . Again, nothing is explained, as Wundt would have it, by spirit-power or * soul- power . For, first, it is to-day universally recognized that magic is independent of a belief in spirits or souls, and probably existed before it. And, second, the point at issue is not by means of what class of powers the magical effect was produced whether soul-powers or others but by means of what

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quality or character in the powers. And this quality can be indicated solely through the daemonic , a character ascribed to certain definite operations of force, be they strong or weak, extraordinary or quite trivial, the work of a soul or a non- soul . The quality can be only suggested through that unique element of feeling, the feeling of uncanniness , of which we have already spoken, whose positive content cannot be defined conceptually, and can only be indicated by that mental response to it which we called shuddering .

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2. The same is true of the worship of the dead. It does not arise out of any theory of animism, according to which the primitive man thinks of inanimate objects, and so also of the dead, as animate and operative. Even in itself this entire theory of an ostensible attribution of soul or the principle of animation to everything is a mere fabrication of the study, llow much more when it is clumsily spatchcocked and w r elded together with * belief in spirits or souls , which is something quite different ! The dead man, in point of fact, exercises a spell upon the mind only when, and only because, he is felt as a thing of horror and shudder . But alike to the naive mind of the savage and to the blase mind of modern civilized man

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this feeling comes about w r ith such an immediate compelling force that we usually accept it as something immediately self- evident, failing altogether to remark that even the estimating something as horrible or grisly shows the emergence of a qualitatively separate content of feeling which the mere fact of death does not explain. Feeling-reactions to the dead, if prompted naturally , are pretty obviously only of two kinds : on the one hand, the experient feels disgust at the corpse s putrefaction, stench, revoltingness : on the other, he feels his own will to life disturbed and checked, the fear of death and the startled fright that directly follows on the sight of a corpse, especially if it be that of a member of one s own species. Both these sorts of feeling-response, viz. disgust and startled fright, are already found manifested among animals. I observed this in a very pronounced degree on one occasion, when, upon a lonely ride, we suddenly came upon the body of a dead horse, and Diana, my excellent mount, on

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nizing her dead fellow, gave every indication of the most natural fright and disgust. But these two moments of feeling do not by any means afford in themselves the materials for the art of making shudder (in the words of the old folk tale). It is something new and demands to be learnt as the folk-tale rightly declares : that is, this is a feeling that is not simply present with the other natural and normal mental functions, disgust, or fright, and cannot be got from these by analysis. It is a dread (or awe), qualitatively sui generis ; and even with regard to this rudimentary stage represented by the primitive worship of the dead we cannot admit that we have to do merely with a universal feeling, that has simply to be presupposed at the outset as a regular factor of folk psycho logy, a collectively engendered feeling that explains itself. On the contrary, it cannot be disputed that here too there have been persons endowed with special propensities in this direction, who possessed such feelings actually, and then, by giving expression to them, aroused them in others. Even the awe of the dead and from it the worship of the dead have been, as it were, instituted and have had founders .

3. We consider next ideas of souls and spirits . It would be possible to show, did not the subject lead us too far afield, that these were not conceived by the fanciful processes of which the animists tell us, but had a far simpler origin. But again the important point is not the origin of spirits in their ideational aspect, but the qualitative element of feeling relative to them. And this does not consist in the fact that 1 spirits or souls are thinner or less easily visible than the body, or quite invisible, or fashioned like air : often all this is true of them ; no less often none of it is ; most frequently of all it is both true and false. The essence of the soul lies not in the imaginative or conceptual expression of it, but first and foremost in the fact that it is a spectre , that it arouses dread or awe , as described above. But again, a spectre is not to be explained from natural feelings, and these are equally unable to explain the further development by which these somethings (and this is the only core ot conceptual meaning that can really be given them), at first

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always very eagerly shunned, later on become beings honoured in a positive way and loved, capable of rising into heroes, pitris, daemons, holy or sacred ones, and gods.

4. We turn to the idea of power , the mana of the Pacific Islands and the orenda of the North American Indians. It can have its antecedents in very natural phenomena. To notice power in plants, stones, and natural objects in general and to appropriate it by gaining possession of them ; to eat the heart or liver of an animal or a man in order to make his power and strength one s own this is not religion but science. Our science of medicine follows a similar prescription. If the power of a calf s glands is good for goitre and imbecility, we do not know what virtue we may not hope to find in frogs brains or Jews livers. All depends here upon observation, and our science of medicine in this respect only differs from that of the medicine-man in being more exact and in possess ing experimental methods. Pow r er does not take its place in the ante-chamber of religion, is not appropriated by religion in communion rites and sacraments (as we call them), until it too has come to include the idea of spell and malc .

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5. Volcanoes, mountain peaks, moon, sun, and clouds are regarded by primitive man as being alive or animate, not in consequence of a naV ve theory of the omnipresence of spirit or soul Panthelism , so called but as a result of precisely the same criterion that we ourselves apply when we recognize anything to be alive or animate, apart from the one live thing we can observe directly, our self ; that is to say, both we and the primitive credit an object with life if, and in so far as, we think we remark in it living efficacy and agency; and whether we do so rightly or wrongly is again simply a matter of more or less exact observation. But while from this criterion the natural objects mentioned above, and of course others, may be invested with life by the naive observer, this does not in itself lead to myth or religion. Purely as animate or living beings, these entities are far from being yet divine or gods ; nay, they do not even become so when the man turns to them with desire and petition ; for petition is something less than prayer

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and trust need not have a religious character. The objects in question only become divine objects of worship when the category of the numinous is applied to them, and that does not come about until, first, an attempt is made to influence them by numinous means, viz. by magic ; and, second, their special efficacy or way of working is at the same time accepted as something numinous, viz. something magical.

6. As regards fairy -stories, these presuppose the natural impulse to fantasy, narrative, and entertainment, and its products. But the fairy-story proper only comes into being with the element of the wonderful , with miracle and miracu lous events and consequences, i. e. by means of an infusion of the numinous. And the same holds good in an increased degree of myth.

7. All the factors and elements named so far in this chapter are but, as it were, the vestibule at the threshold of the real religious feeling, an earliest stirring of the numinous conscious ness, which comes upon the scene blended with associated feel ings in conformity to principles of analogy which it would be easy to specify for each several case. Only with the rise of the daemon do we have a really separate beginning. The most authentic form of the daemon may be seen in those strange deities of ancient Arabia, which are properly nothing but wandering demonstrative pronouns, neither * given shape and feature by means of myth , for there is in the main no mytho logy attached to them at all, nor evolved out of nature- deities, nor grown out of souls or spirits , but none the less felt as deities of mighty efficacy, who are the objects of very living veneration. They are pure products of the religious consciousness itself. And in their case it is very evident that they do not arise as a collective product of crowd-imagination, and that they do not therefore have their origin in group- or folk- psychology, but were the intuitions of persons of innate prophetic powers. For there is always the Kahin (the primi tive form of the prophet ) belonging to these numina , and he alone experiences a numen or divine-daemonic power at first hand. Only where and when it has been revealed through such a one do the forms of worship and a common

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cult arise. To each nuraen is assigned a Seer and there is none without one.

8. The notions clean and unclean , pure and impure , are already found in a purely natural sense, prior to their religious application. The unclean is the loathsome, that which stirs strong feelings of natural disgust. And it is just during the more primitive stages of human development that the emotion of disgust exercises such special power. Probably these emotional reactions are a part of our natural self-protective endowment, instinctive safeguards for many important vital functions. The effect of civilization is to refine these emotions of disgust and loathing by diverting them to different objects, so that things which were loathsome to the savage cease to be so and things which were not become so. This refinement spells at the same time a weakening in the intensity of the emotion ; we do not now loathe and feel disgust with the unbridled violence and strength of the savage. In this respect we can notice even to-day a plain distinction between our more primitive rural and our more refined urban population : we townsmen feel disgust at much that is harmless to the country man, but where the latter does feel it he is affected by the emotion more radically than we are ; it is a pro founder reaction in him.

We have so far been concerned with the ordinary feeling of disgust. Bofcween this and the feeling of the horrible there is a very close analogy ; and from this it becomes apparent, in accordance with the law of reciprocal attraction between analogous feelings and emotions, how the natural unclean or impure is bound to pass over into, and develop in, the sphere of the numinous. Once, in fact, we have in our hand the key of the problem the analogy and the law just mentioned we can reconstruct a priori the actual genetic process involved, by which the one emotion prompts the other. We indeed have ourselves a direct experience of the same thing to-day in our emotional reaction to the sight of flowing blood, in which it would be hard to say whether the element of disgust or horror is the stronger.

Later, then, when the more maturely developed elements of

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awe came upon the scene and went to shape the more elevated ideas of the daemonic and the divine, sacer and sanctus, things could become unclean or impure in the numinous sense without any substratum of natural impurity to serve as point of departure. And we can learn something of the relation of feeling-analogy involved from the fact that in the reverse direction the feeling of the numinously impure calls up easily by association the natural emotion of disgust (i.e. the feeling of the naturally impure), so that things become disgustful or loathsome which intrinsically were not objects of disgust at all, but of numinous horror. In fact such secondary and derived feelings of disgust can maintain them selves independently long after the original numinous awe which they once evoked has died away. Certain social feelings of loathing, such as those of caste, can be explained in this way : they had once a purely daemonic root, but long after that has died out they still survive in their secondary, acquired character as feelings of disgust.

9. If the examples numbered 1 to 8 may be termed pre- religion , this is not in the sense that religion and the possi bility of religion are explicable by their means : rather, they are themselves only made possible and can only be explained from a religious basic element, viz. the feeling of the numinous. This is a primal element of our psychical nature that needs to be grasped purely in its uniqueness and cannot itself be explained from anything else. Like all other primal psychical elements, it emerges in due course in the developing life of human mind and spirit and is thenceforward simply present. Of course it can only emerge if and when certain conditions are fulfilled, conditions involving a proper development of the bodily organs and the other powers of mental and emotional life in general, a due growth in suggestibility and spontaneity and responsiveness to external impressions and internal ex periences. But such conditions are no more than conditions ; they are not its causes or constituent elements. To recognize this is not to relegate the whole matter to the domain of mystery and supernaturalism, but simply to maintain that the same thing holds good of this which holds good of all other primal ele-

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ments of our mental or spiritual life. Pleasure or pain, love or hate, all faculties of sense-perception, such as susceptibility to light and sound, consciousness of space and time, and sub sequently all higher capacities of the mind, all duly emerge, sooner or later, in the course of development. That they do BO in conformity to laws and under definite conditions is indisputable, but not the less is each a new, original, underiv- able fact, and they are only to be explained on the assumption of a rich potentiality of spirit or mind, which underlies the course of their development and realizes itself more and more abundantly in them in proportion as the conditions of organic and cerebral evolution are more fully realized. And what is true of all these other elements of our mental life is also true of the i eelinir o f the numinous.

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10. The purest case, however, of the spontaneous stirring of numinous emotion would seem to be that mentioned in No. 7 (the feeling of daemons), which is of quite special signifi cance for the evolution of religion. This is because here the 1 religious emotion does not from the first get diverted (follow ing the stimulation of emotional associations) to earthly things, wrongly taken as numinous : but either it remains a pure fueling, as in panic terror (in the literal sense of the word), or itself invents, or, better, discovers, the numinous object by rendering explicit the obscure germinal ideas latent in itself. Even this latter case is not altogether beyond the reach of introspective analysis, which, moreover, can throw some light upon the transition from mere feeling to its explication and to the positing of the numinous object. At least there is none of us who has any living capacity for emotion but must have known at some time or at some place what it is to feel really * uncanny , to have a feeling of eerieness . And more exact psychological analysis will notice the following points in such a state of mind. First, there is the point of which we have already spoken, its separate and underivable, irreducible, qualitative character. Second, there is the very curious circum stance that the external features occasioning this state of mind are often quite slight, indeed so scanty that hardly any account can be given of them, so disproportionate are they to

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the strength of the emotional impression itself. Indeed the clutching force and violence of the emotion so far exceeds any impressiveness contributed by the circumstances of time and place that one can often scarcely speak of an impression at all, but at most of an encounter, serving as cue or occasion for the felt experience. This experience of eerie shuddering and awe breaks out rather from depths of the soul which the circum stantial, external impression cannot sound, and the force with which it breaks out is so disproportionate to the mere external stimulation that the eruption may be termed, if not entirely, at least very nearly, spontaneous. And with this we are brought to the third point which psychological analysis of the uncanny experience brings to view ; meanings are aroused and awakened in it of a unique and special content, though altogether obscure, latent, and germinal, which are the real ground for the emotion of awe. For, if such meanings are not there at the start in some form or other, the mental and emotional disturbance could never take place. In the fourth place, the mental state we are discussing may, on the one hand, remain pure feeling , pursue its course and pass away with out its obscure thought-content being rendered explicit. If in this implicit form it is summed up in a phrase, this will be merely some such exclamation as : How uncanny ! or * How eerie this place is ! On the other hand, the implicit meaning may be rendered explicit. It is already a beginning of this explicative process though still in merely negative terms when a man says : It is not quite right here ; It is uncanny. The English This place is haunted* shows a transition to a positive form of expression. Here we have the obscure basis of meaning and idea rising into greater clarity and beginning to make itself explicit as the notion, however vague and fleeting, of a transcendent Something, a real opera tive entity of a numinous kind, which later, as the development proceeds, assumes concrete form as a c numen loci , a daemon, an El , a Baal, or the like.

In Genesis xxviii. 17 Jacob says : How dreadful is this place ! This is none other than the house of Elohim. This verse is very instructive for the psychology of religion ; it

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exemplifies the point that has just been made. The first sentence gives plainly the mental impression itself in all its immediacy, before reflection has permeated it, and before the meaning-content of the feeling itself has become clear or explicit. It connotes solely the primal numinous awe, which has been undoubtedly sufficient in itself in many cases to mark out holy or sacred places, and make of them .spots of aweful veneration, centres of a cult admitting a certain development. There is no need, that is, for the experient to pass on to resolve his mere impression of the eerie and aweful into the idea of a numen , a divine power, dwelling in the aweful place, still less need the numen become a nomen, a named power, or the nomen become something more than a mere pro noun. Worship is possible without this farther explicative process. But Jacob s second statement gives this process of explication and interpretation ; it is no longer simply an expression of the actual experience.

The German expression Es spukt hier (literally, it haunts here) is also instructive. It has properly no true subject, or at least it makes no assertion as to what the es, the it , is which haunts ; in itself it contains no suggestion of the concrete representations of ghost , phantom , spectre , or spirit common to our popular mythology. Rather is the statement simply the pure expression of the emotion of eerieness or uncanniness itself, when just on the point of detaching and disengaging from itself a first vaguely intimated idea of a numinous something, an entity from beyond the borders of natural experience. It is to be regretted that the German language possesses no general word less vulgar than spuken , no word which, instead of pointing us aside, as this word does, to the domain of superstition and the impure offshoots of the numinous consciousness, should retain its fundamental meaning in an unperverted form. 1 But even so we can feel by an effort of

1 The expression es geistet hier may perve, but it haa an artificial sound. The English to haunt is a nobler expression than the German 1 spuken . We might legitimately translate Huliakkuk ii. 20 : Yahweh haunts His holy Temple. Such a haunting is frequently the meaning of the Hebrew ihukan. And we get a fuller and truer rendering of

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imaginative introjection how akin the debased feeling of haunt ing, given by this word, is to those primary numinous experi ences by which long ago seers had experience of aweful , holy , numen-possessed places, discovering thereby the starting-points for local cults and the birth-places of the El worshipped there. The echo of such primaeval experiences lingers in Genesis xxviii. 17 (Jacob at Bethel) and Exodus iii (the burn ing bush). The places here set apart by Moses and Jacob are genuine haunted places , at which es spukt , places about which there is something eerie . Only, the feeling of being haunted has in these cases not the impoverished and debased sense of our modern eerie feeling of being haunted by ghosts and spectres ; it comprises all the rich potentialities and possibilities of development inherent in the true primal numinous emotion. Nor can we doubt that even to-day the finer awe that may steal over us in the stillness and half-gloom of our own present- day sanctuaries has ultimate kinship not only with that of which Schiller writes in his verses :

Und in Poseidons Fichtenhain

Tritt er mit frommem Schauder ein, 1

but also with genuine ghostly emotions. The faint shiver that may accompany such states of mind is not unrelated to the feeling of creeping flesh , whose numinous character we have already considered (p. 16). In its efforts to derive daemon and god forcibly from souls and spirits , animism is looking the wrong way. It would be, at any rate, on the right path if it maintained that they are haunting apparitions.

This is partially proved by certain ancient, still extant terms, which long ago had reference to the original awe of the haunting spirit (in the good sense), and later grew to become designations both of the lowest and the highest forms of awe . Such a term is the enigmatical word asura in Sanskrit.

Ps. xxvi. 8 : the place where Thine honour dwelleth by translating it : the places haunted by Thy majesty . The Sheklnah is properly the haunting presence of Yahweh in the Temple at Jerusalem. 1 Schiller, Die Kraniche des Ibykus (The Cranes of Ibykus) : And to Poseidon s grove of pine With awe devout he enters in.

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Asura is the aweful or dreadful in the sense in which Jacob used the word, the eerie or uncanny. Later, in Indian religion, it is used as the technical expression for the lower forms of the spectral, ghostly, and daemonic. But at the same time it is from primaeval times a title of the sublimest of all the gods of the Rig- Veda, the weirdly exalted Varuna. And in the Persian expression Ahura-rrutzda it becomes the name of the one and only eternal godhead itself. The same thing is true of the term adbhida . You experience an adbhuta when you are in an empty house , pays an old definition. 1 It is the experience of our shuddering . But, on the other hand, udUiuta is also the name for the supreme transcendent marvel and its attractive spell, the element of fascination , even for the eternal Brahman himself and his salvation, the Adt hutdm that passes beyond the reach of speech. 2

11. Finally, it is only upon our assumption of an a priori basis of ideas and feelings that an explanation is forthcoming for the interesting phenomena to which Andrew Lang 3 rightly drew attention. These do not, of course, support the hypo thesis of a primitive monotheism , that offspring of missionary apologetic, which, eager to save the second chapter of Genesis, yet feels the shame of a modern at the walking of Yahweh in the garden in the cool of the day . But they do point to facts which remain downright riddles, if we start from any natural istic foundation of religion whether animism, pantheism, or another and must in that case be got out of the way by the most violent hypotheses. The essence of the matter is this,

1 A-dbhuta means literally the inapprehensible, inexpressible. But in the Gist instance it is exactly our mysterium stupcndutn, whereas aswa is the tr> mendum.

1 Adbhuta (and focnrya) would be an accurate rendering in Sanskrit for our numinous , were it not that the word, like the German wunder- bar and the English awful , has long ago become trite and shallow from the profane non-religious uses to which it has been so per petually put.

s Myth, llitual, and Religion, 1899. Th> Mnkiny of Ileligion, 1902. Mayic and Iieli<jion, 1901. Cf. also P. W. Schmidt, Gruncllinien einer Vergleichung der Iteliyionen und Mytholoyien der austrontaischen Vulker> Vienna, 1910.

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that elements and strands are to be found in numerous mythologies and the stories of savage tribes, which reach altogether beyond the point they have otherwise attained in religious rites and usages. Notions of high gods are adumbrated, with whom the savage has often hardly any rela tions in practice, if any at all, and in whom he yet acknow ledges, almost in spite of himself, a value superior to that of all other mythological images, a value which may well accord with the divine in the highest sense.

Sometimes, but by no means always, we can discern that these anticipations of a higher religious experience are the outcome of a past growth of myth. What is characteristic and at the same time so puzzling is the elevation with which they stand out from the surrounding more primitive religious life amid which they are found. Indeed, in cases where missions have introduced the preaching of Christian theism, these appre hended, exalted divinities are readily and frequently identified with God and reinforce the preaching of the missionary. And converts often come to admit that, though they had not honoured God, they had had knowledge of Him. It is, of course, true that this sort of fact can sometimes be explained as due to traditional influences, protracted from an earlier time, when the tribe in question was in contact with a higher theistic religion : the very names given to these higher beings some times prove as much. But even in this form the phenomenon is a very singular one. Why should savages , set in other respects in an utterly alien milieu of barbaric superstition, accept and, what is more, retain these notions, unless their own savage minds were so predisposed to them that, so far from being able to let them go, they were obliged to take at least an interest in them as a tradition and very frequently to acknowledge their authority by the felt witness of their own consciences? But, though the theory of a surviving tradi tion is sometimes applicable, there are many of these cases in which it is impossible to apply it without doing violence to the facts. In these we have clearly to do with anticipations and presentiments rather than survivals. Assuming the continual pressure and operation of an inward reasonable

ITS EARLIEST MANIFESTATIONS 135

disposition to form certain ideas, these anticipations are not only no matter for surprise ; they are as naturally to be expected as are the achievements of gipsy musicians, who, set otherwise in a milieu of the most primitive culture, yet respond to the pressure of a strong, innate, musical disposition. With out such an assumption, the facts would remain as an insoluble puzzle.

Naturalistic psychologists, in this as in other cases, ignore a fact which might be thought at least to have a psychological interest, and which they could notice in themselves by careful introspection, namely, the self-attestation of religious ideas in one s own mind. This is, to be sure, more certain in the case of the naive than in that of the more blase* mind ; but many people would identify it in their own consciousness if they would only recall deliberately and impartially their hours of preparation for the ceremony of confirmation . But what tho mind attests it can also under favourable circumstances evince and elicit from itself in premonitory stirring and felt surmise. The upholders of the theory of Primitive Mono theism , on the other hand, show no less serious disregard of this central fact than the naturalistic psychologists. For if the phenomena w r e have been considering were based simply and solely on historical traditions and dim memories of a primeval revelation , as on such a theory they must be, this self-attestation from within would be just as much excluded as before. *

1 Compare with this chapter my recently published book Das Geftihl da Uiti-u-eltlichen, especially Chapter VI: Das Werden eines Gottea.

CHAPTER XVI

THE CRUDER PHASES

IT is not only the more developed forms of religious experi ence that must be counted underivable and a priori. The same holds good throughout and is no less true of the primitive, crude , and rudimentary emotions of daemonic dread which, as we have seen, stand at the threshold of religious evolution. Religion is itself present at its commencement : religion, nothing else, is at work in these early stages of mythic and daemonic experience. Let us consider the circumstances in which alone the primitive and crude character of these consists.

(a) First, it is due to the merely gradual emergence and successive awakening of the several moments of the numinous. The numinous only unfolds its full content by slow degrees, as one by one the series of requisite stimuli or incitements becomes operative. But where any whole is as yet incompletely pre sented its earlier and partial constituent moments or elements, aroused in isolation, have naturally something bizarre, unin telligible, and even grotesque about them. This is especially true of that religious moment which would appear to have been in every case the first to be aroused in the human mind, viz. daemonic dread. Considered alone and per se, it necessarily and naturally looks more like the opposite of religion than religion itself. If it is singled out from the elements which form its context, it appears rather to resemble a dreadful form of auto-suggestion, a sort of psychological nightmare of the tribal mind, than to have anything to do with religion ; and the supernatural beings with whom men at this early stage profess relations appear as phantoms, projected by a morbid, unde veloped imagination afflicted by a sort of persecution-phobia. One can understand how it is that not a few inquirers could seriously imagine that * religion began with devil-worship, and that at bottom the devil is more ancient than God.

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To this serial and gradual awakening of the different aspects and moments of the numinous is also to be ascribed the difficulty of classifying religions by genus and species. Every one who undertakes the task produces a different classification. For the facts to be classified are for the most part not at all related as the distinct species of one and the same genus ; they are not alternative, determinate forms into which the whole religion may be analysed, but constituent elements, out of which it is to be synthesized or built up. It is as though a whale should begin to show itself above the water part by part, and as though people should then attempt to classify the arched back, the end of the tail, and the head spouting water, by genus and species, instead of seeking for such a real understanding of these phenomena as would recognize each of them in its place and proper connexion with the rest as a part and member of one whole body, which must itself have been grasped in its entirety before its parts could be properly apprehended.

(b) In the second place, the primitiveness of the cruder phases is due to the abrupt, capricious, and desultory character which marks the earliest form of numinous emotion ; and, in consequence, to its indistinctness, which causes it to be merged and confounded with natural feelings.

(c) It is due, next, to the fact that the valuation prompted by the moment of numinous consciousness (e.g. the * daemonic dread phase) is attached in the first place, and very naturally, to objects, occurrences, and entities falling within the workaday world of primitive experience, which prompt or give occasion to the stirring of numinous emotion by analogy and then divert it to themselves. This circumstance is more than anything else the root of what has been called nature-worship and the deification of natural objects. Only gradually, under pressure from the numinous feeling itself, are such connexions subse quently spiritualized or ultimately altogether rejected, and not till then does the obscure content of the feeling, with its

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reference to absolute transcendent reality, come to light in all its integrity and self -subsistence.

(d) A fourth factor contributing to the crudity of primitive

138 THE CRUDER PHASES

religion is the uncontrolled, enthusiastic form, making for wild fanaticism, in which the numinous feeling storms the savage mind, appearing as religious mania, possession by the numen, intoxication, and frenzy.

(e) Again, a quite essential factor is the wrong schematiza- tions it undergoes, when interpreted in terms of some experi ence analogous, perhaps, but not really appertaining to it. Examples of this have already been given (e.g. p. 127).

(/) Finally, and most important, there is the deficient rationalization and moralization of the experience, for it is only gradually that the numinous feeling becomes charged with progressively rational, moral, and cultural significance.

These considerations account for the primitive and savage character of the numinous consciousness at its outset. But it must be repeated that in its content even the first stirring of 4 daemonic dread is a purely a priori element. In this respect it may be compared from first to last with the aesthetic judge ment and the category of the beautiful. Utterly different as my mental experiences are when I recognize an object as beautiful or as horrible , yet both cases agree in this, that I ascribe to the object an attribute that professes to interpret it, which I do not and cannot get from sense-experience, but which I rather ascribe to it by a spontaneous judgement of my own. Intuitively I apprehend in the object only its sensuous qualities and its spatial form, nothing more. That the mean ing I call beautiful fits the object, i. e. that these sense-data mean beautiful , or even that there is any such meaning at all these are facts which sensory elements can in no wise supply or tell me. I must have an obscure conception of the beautiful itself , and, in addition, a principle of subsumption, by which I attribute it to the object, else even the simplest experience of a beautiful thing is rendered impossible. And this analogy may be pursued further. Joy in the beautiful, however analogous to mere pleasure in the agreeable, is yet distinguishable from it by a plain difference in quality, and cannot be derived from anything other than itself ; and just such is the relation of the specific religious awe to mere natural fear.

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The crude stage is transcended as the numen reveals iteelf (i. e. becomes manifest to mind and feeling) ever more strongly and fully. An essential factor in this is the process by which it is tilled out and charged with rational elements, whereby it passes at the same time into the region of the con ceivable and comprehensible. Yet all the time all the elements of non-rational inconceivability are retained on the side of the numinous and intensified as the revelation proceeds. Revelation does not mean a mere passing over into the intelligible and comprehensible. Something may be profoundly and intimately known in feeling for the bliss it brings or the agitation it produces, and yet the understanding may find no concept for it. To know and to understand conceptually are two different things, are often even mutually exclusive and contrasted. The mysterious obscurity of the numen is by no means tantamount to unknowableness. Assuredly the deus alsconditus et incomprehensibUis was for Luther no deus ignotuts . And so, too, St. Paul knows the Peace, which yet passeth understanding .

CHAPTER XVII THE HOLY AS AN A PRIORI CATEGORY

PART II

WE conclude, then, that not only the rational but also the non-rational elements of the complex category of holiness are a priori elements and each in the same degree. Religion is not in vassalage either to morality or teleology, ethos or telos , and does not draw its life from postulates ; and its non-rational content has, no less than its rational, its own independent roots in the hidden depths of the spirit itself.

But the same a priori character belongs, in the third place, to the connexion of the rational and the non-rational elements in religion, their inward and necessary union. The histories of religion recount indeed, as though it were something axiomatic, the gradual interpretation of the two, the pro cess by which the divine is charged and filled out with ethical meaning. And this process is, in fact, felt as some thing axiomatic, something whose inner necessity we feel to be self-evident. But then this inward self-evidence is a problem in itself; we are forced to assume an obscure, a priori knowledge of the necessity of this synthesis, com bining rational and non-rational. For it is not by any means a logical necessity. How should it be logically inferred from the still crude , half-daemonic character of a moon-god or a sun-god or a numen attached to some locality, that he is a guardian and guarantor of the oath and of honourable dealing, of hospitality, of the sanctity of marriage, and of duties to tribe and clan ? How should it be inferred that he is a god who decrees happiness and misery, participates in the concerns of the tribe, provides for its well-being, and directs the course of destiny and history ? Whence comes this most surprising of all the facts in the history of religion, that

THE HOLY AS AN A PRIORI CATEGORY 141

beings, obviously born originally of horror and terror, become g ( d# beings to whom men pray, to whom they confide their Borrow or their happiness, in whom they behold the origin and the sanction of morality, law, and the whole canon of justice 1 And how does all this come about in such a way that, when once such ideas have been aroused, it is understood at once as the plainest and most evident of axioms, that so it must be ?

Socrates, in Plato s Jiejwllic, ii. 382 E, says: God then is single and true in deed and word, and neither changes himself nor deceives others . . . And Adeimantos answers him : So too is it apparent to me, now that you say it. The most interesting point in this passage is not the elevation and purity of the conception of God, nor yet the lofty rationalization and moralizatioD of it here enunciated, but, on the side of Socrates, the apparently dogmatic tone of his pronouncement for he does not spend the least pains in demonstrating it and, on the side of Adeimantos, the ingenuous surprise and, at the same time, the confident assurance with which he admits a truth novel to him. And his assent is such as implies convincement ; he does not simply believe Socrates ; he sees clearly for himself the truth of his words. Now this is the criterion of all a priori knowledge, namely, that, so soon as an assertion has been clearly expressed and understood, knowledge of its truth comes into the mind with the certitude of first-hand insight. And what passed here between Socrates and Adeimantos has been repeated a thousand times in the history of religions. Amos, also, says something new when he proclaims Yahweh as the God of inflexible, universal, and absolute righteousness, and yet this is a novelty that he neither proves nor justifies by an appeal to authorities. He appeals to a priori judgements, viz. to the religious conscience itself, and this in truth bears witness to his message.

Luther, again, recognizes and maintains such an a j/riori knowledge of the divine nature. His rage against the whore Reason leads him, to be sure, usually to utterances in the opposite sense, such as the following :

1 It is a knowledge a posteriori, in that we look at God from without, at His works and His government, as one looketh at

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a castle or house from without and thereby f eeleth (spuret) the lord or householder thereof. But a priori from within hath no wisdom of men yet availed to discover what and of what manner of being is God as He is in Himself or in His inmost essence, nor can any man know nor say aught thereof, but they to whom it has been revealed by the Holy Ghost.

Here Luther overlooks the fact that a man must feel or detect the householder a priori or not at all. But in other passages he himself allows the general human reason to possess many true cognitions of what God is in Himself or in His inmost essence . Compare the following :

Atque ipsamet ratio naturalis cogitur earn concedere proprio suo iudicio convicta, etiamsi nulla esset scriptura. Omnes enim homines inveniunt hanc sententiam in cordibus Buis scriptam et agnoscunt earn ac probatam, licet inviti, cum audiant earn tractari : primo, Deum esse omnipotentem . . . deinde, ipsum omnia nosse et praescire, neque errare neque falli posse . . . Istis duobus corde et sensu concessis . . . l

The interesting words of this statement are : proprio suo iudicio convicta, for they make the distinction between cogni tions and mere innate ideas or supernaturally instilled notions, both of which latter may produce thoughts , but not convictions ex proprio iudicio . Note also the words : cum audiant earn tractari , which exactly correspond to the experi ence of Plato s Adeimantos, already quoted. 2

1 Luther, Weimar ed., xviii. 719: And the natural reason itself is forced, even were there no holy scripture, to grant it (sc. this assertion), convinced by its own judgement. For all men, as soon as they hear it treated of, find this belief written in their hearts, and acknowledge it as proved, even unwillingly : first, that God is omnipotent, . . . then, that He has knowledge and foreknowledge of all things and can neither err nor be deceived . . . Since these two things are admitted by heart and feeling . . .

2 The most interesting features in Luther in this connexion, however^ are the passages upon Faith , in which Faith is described as a unique cognitive faculty for the apprehension of divine truth, and as such is con trasted with the natural capacities of the Understanding, as elsewhere the Spirit is contrasted. Faith is here like the Synteresis in the theory of knowledge of the mystics, the inward teacher (maciister in- ternus) of Augustine, and the inward light of the Quakers, which are all of them of course above reason , but yet an a priori element in ourselves.

THE HOLY AS AN A PRIOKI CATEGORY 143

It is the same experience which missionaries have so often undergone. Once enunciated and understood, the ideas of the unity and goodness of the divine nature often take a surpris ingly short time to become firmly fixed in the hearer s mind, if he show any susceptibility for religious feeling. Frequently, thereupon, the hearer adapts the religious tradition that has hitherto been his to the new meaning he has learned. Or,

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A particularly striking passage is the following from Luther s TaUe- Talk (Wei. v. 5820) :

Omnium hominum mentibus impressa est divinitus notitia Dei. Quod sit Dous, omnes homines sine ullaartium et disciplinarum cognitione sola natura duce sciunt,et omnium hominum mentibus hoc divinitus impressum est. Nulla umquam fuit tarn fera gens et immanis, quae non crediderit, esse divinitatem quandam, quae omnia creavit. Itaque Paulus inquit : Invisibilia Dei a creatura rnundi per ea f quae facta sunt, intellecta con- spiciuntur, sempiterna eius virtus et divinit-is. Quare omnes ethnici eciveiunt esse Deum, quanturavis fuerunt Epicurei, quantumvis con- tenderunt, non esse Deum. Non in eo, quod negant esse Deum, simul confessi sunt esse Deum ? Nemo enim negare id potest, quod nescit Quare, etsi quidam per omnem vitam in maximis versati sunt flagitiis et eceleribus et non aliter omnino vixerunt, ac si nullus esset Deus, tamen nunquam conscientiam animis potuerunt eicere testantem et affir- mantem, quod sit Deus. Et quamvis ilia conscientia pravis et perversis opinionibus ad tempus oppressa fuit, redit tamen et convincit eos iu extn-mae vitae spiritu.

The knowledge of God is impressed upon the mind of every man by God. Under the sole guidance of nature all men know that God is without any acquaintance with the arts or sciences ; and this is divinely imprinted upon all men s minds. There has never been a people so wild and cavage that it did not believe that there is some divine power that created all things. And thus it is that Paul says: "the invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead." Wherefore all the Gentiles knew that there is a God, however much they were Epicureans, however much they maintained that there is no God. Did they not confess God s being in that very denial of Him? For no one can deny that of which he has no knowledge. Wherefore, although men have all their lives long been occupied in the greatest sins and crimes and have lived just as though there were no God, yet they have never been able to cast forth from their minds the conscience that testifies and afiirms that God is. And although that conscience has been over borne for a time by evil and perverse opinions, yet it comes back to convict them in their life s final breath.

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where resistance is offered to the new teaching, it is yet often noticeably in the face of pressure the other way from the man s own conscience. Such experiences have been made known to me by missionaries among the Tibetans and among African negroes, and it would be interesting to make a collection of them, both in regard to the general question of the a priori factors in religion, and especially as throwing light upon the a priori knowledge of the essential interdependence of the rational and the non -rational elements in the idea of God. For this the history of religion is itself an almost unanimous witness. Incomplete and defective as the process of moralizing the numina may often have been throughout the wide regions of primitive religious life, everywhere there are traces of it to be found. And wherever religion, escaping from its first crudity of manifestation, has risen to a higher type, this process of synthesis has in all cases set in and continued more and more positively. And this is all the more remark able when one considers at what widely different dates the imaginative creation of the figures of gods had its rise in different cases, and under what diverse conditions of race, natural endowment, and social and political structure its evolution proceeded. All this points to the existence of a priori factors universally and necessarily latent in the human spirit : those, in fact, which we can find directly in our own religious consciousness, when we, too, like Adeimantos, naively and spontaneously concur with Socrates saying, as with an axiom whose truth we have seen for ourselves : God is single, and true in deed and word.

As the rational elements, following a priori principles, come together in the historical evolution of religions with the non- rational, they serve to schematize these. This is true, not only in general of the relation of the rational aspect of the holy , taken as a whole, to its non-rational, taken as a whole, but also in detail of the several constituent elements of the two aspects. The tremendum, the daunting and repelling moment of the numinous, is schematized by means of the rational ideas of justice, moral will, and the exclusion of what is opposed to morality ; and schematized thus, it becomes the

THE HOLY AS AN A PRIORI CATEGORY 145

holy Wrath of God , which Scripture and Christian preaching alike proclaim. The fascinans, the attracting and alluring moment of the numinous, is schematized by means of the ideas of goodness, mercy, love, and, so schematized, becomes all that we mean by Grace, that term so rich in import, which unites with the holy Wrath in a single harmony of contrasts , and like it is, from the numinous strain in it, tinged with Mys ticism. The moment mysteriosum is schematized by the abso luteness of all rational attributes applied to the Deity. Probably the correspondence here implied between the mysterious and the absoluteness of all rational attributes will not appear at first sight so immediately evident as in the two foregoing cases, Wrath and Grace. None the less it is a very exact correspondence. God s rational attributes can be distinguished from like attributes applied to the created spirit by being not relative, as tho^e are, but absolute. Human love is relative, admitting of degrees, and it is the same with human know ledge and human goodness. God s love and knowledge and goodness, on the other hand, and all else that can be asserted of Him in conceptual terms, are formally absolute. The content of the attributes is the same ; it is an element of form which marks them apart as attributes of God. But such an element of form is also the mysterious as such : it is, as we saw on p. 31, the formal aspect of the wholly other . But to this plain correspondence of the two things, the mysterious and the absoluteness of rational attributes, a further one must be added. Our understanding can only compass the relative. That which is in contrast absolute, though it may in a sense be thought, cannot be thought home, thought out ; it is within the reach of our conceiving, but it is beyond the grasp of our comprehension. Now, though this does not make what ia absolute itself genuinely mysterious , as this term was expounded on p. 28, it does make it a genuine schema of the mysterious . The absolute exceeds our power to comprehend ; the mysterious wholly eludes it. The absolute is that which surpasses the limits of our understanding, not through its actual qualitative character, for that is familiar to us, but through its formal character. The mysterious, on the other

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146 THE HOLY AS AN A PRIORI CATEGORY

hand, is that which lies altogether outside what can be thought, and is, alike in form, quality, and essence, the utterly and wholly other . We see, then, that in the case of the moment of mystery , as well as those of awef ulness and fascina tion , there is an exact correspondence between the non- rational element and its rational schema, and one that admits of development.

By the continual living activity of its non-rational elements a religion is guarded from passing into rationalism . By being steeped in and saturated with rational elements it is guarded from sinking into fanaticism or mere mysticality, or at least from persisting in these, and is qualified to become a religion for all civilized humanity. The degree in which both rational and non-rational elements are jointly present, united in healthy and lovely harmony, affords a criterion to measure the relative rank of religions and one, too, that is specifically religious. Applying this criterion, we find that Christianity, in this as in other respects, stands out in complete superiority over all its sister religions. The lucid edifice of its clear and pure conceptions, feelings, and experiences is built up on a foundation that goes far deeper than the rational. Yet the non-rational is only the basis, the setting, the woof in the fabric, ever preserving for Christianity its mystical depth, giving religion thereby the deep undertones and heavy shadows of Mysticism, without letting it develop into a mere rank growth of mysticality. And thus Christianity, in the healthily proportioned union of its elements, assumes an absolutely classical form and dignity, which is only the more vividly attested in consciousness as we proceed honestly and without prejudice to set it in its place in the comparative study of religions. Then we shall recognize that in Christianity an element of man s spiritual life, which yet has its analogies in other fields, has for the first time come to maturity in a supreme and unparalleled way.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE HOLY AND THE FACULTY OF DIVINATION .

IT is one thing merely to believe in a reality beyond the senses and another to have experience of it also ; it is one thing to have ideas of the holy and another to become consciously aware of it as an operative reality, intervening actively in the phenomenal world. Now it is a fundamental conviction of all religions, of religion as such, we may say, that this latter is possible as well as the former. Religion is convinced not only that the holy and sacred reality is attested by the inward voice of conscience and the religious conscious ness, the still, small voice of the Spirit in the heart, by feeling, presentiment, and longing, but also that it may be directly encountered in particular occurrences and events, self-revealed in persons and displayed in actions, in a word, that beside the inner revelation from the Spirit there is an outward revelation of the divine nature. Religious language gives the name of sign to such demonstrative actions and manifestations, in which holiness stands palpably self-revealed. From the time of the most primitive religions everything has counted as a sign that was able to arouse in man the sense of the holy, to excite the feeling of apprehended sanctity, and stimulate it into open activity. Of this kind were those factors and circum stances of which we have already spoken the thing terrible, sublime, overpowering, or astounding, and in an especial degree the uncomprehended, mysterious thing, which became the portent and miracle . But, as we saw, all these were not signs in the true sense, but opportunities, circumstances, prompting the religious feeling to awake of itself; and the

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148 THE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE < HOLY

factor promoting this result was found to lie in an element common to them all, but merely analogous with the holy . The interpretation of them as actual appearances of the holy itself in its own nature meant, we saw, a confounding of the category of holiness with something only outwardly resembling it : it was not a genuine anamnesis , a genuine recognition of the holy in its own authentic nature, made manifest in appear ance. And therefore we find that such false recognitions of the holy are later rejected and wholly or partly extruded as inadequate or simply unworthy, so soon as a higher level of development and a purer religious judgement have been reached. There is a precisely parallel process in another department of judgement, that of aesthetic taste. While the taste is still crude, a feeling or fore-feeling of the beautiful begins to stir, which must come from an obscure a priori conception of beauty already present, else it could not occur at all. The man of crude taste, not being capable of a clear recognition of authentic beauty, falls into confusion and misapplies this obscure, dim conception of the beautiful, judging things to be beautiful which are in fact not beautiful at all. Here, as in the case of the judgement of holiness, the principle underlying the erroneous judgement of beauty is one of faint analogy. Certain elements in the thing wrongly judged to be beautiful have a closer or remoter analogy to real beauty. And later here, too, when his taste has been educated, the man rejects with strong aversion the quasi-beautiful but not really beauti ful thing and becomes qualified to see and to judge rightly, i. e. to recognize as beautiful the outward object in which the beauty of which he has an inward notion and standard really appears .

Let us call the faculty, of whatever sort it may be, of genuinely cognizing and recognizing the holy in its appear ances, the faculty of divination. Does such a faculty exist, and, if so, what is its nature ?

To the supernaturalistic theory the matter is simple enough. Divination consists in the fact that a man encounters an occurrence that is not natural , in the sense of being inexplicable by the laws of nature. Since it has actually

AND THE FACULTY OF DIVINATION 149

occurred, it must have had a cause ; and, since it has no 1 natural cause, it must (so it is said) have a supernatural one. This theory of divination is a genuine, solidly rationalist theory, put together with rigid concepts in a strict demon strative form and intended as such. And it claims that the capacity or faculty of divination is the understanding, the faculty of reflection in concept and demonstration. The transcendent is here proved as strictly as anything can be proved, logically from given premisses.

It would be almost superfluous to adduce in detail in oppo sition to this view the argument that we have no possibility of establishing that an event did not arise from natural causes or was in conflict with the laws of nature. The religious con sciousness itself rises against this desiccation and materializa tion of what in all religion is surely the most tender and living moment, the actual discovery of and encounter with very deity. Here, if anywhere, coercion by proof and demonstra tion and the mistaken application of logical and juridical pro cesses should be excluded ; here, if anywhere, should be liberty, the unconstrained recognition and inward acknowledgement that comes from deep within the soul, stirred spontaneously, apart from all conceptual theory. If not natural science or metaphysics , at least the matured religious consciousness itself spurns such ponderously solid intellectualistic explana tions. They are born of rationalism and engender it again ; and, as for genuine divination , they not only impede it, but despise it as extravagant emotionalism, mysticality, and false romanticism. Genuine divination, in short, has nothing whatever to do with natural law and the relation or lack of relation to it of something experienced. It is not concerned at all with the way in which a phenomenon be it event, person, or thing came into existence, but with what it mean*, that is, with its significance as a sign of the holy.

The faculty or capacity of divination appears in the lan guage of dogma hidden beneath the fine name testimonium Spiritus Sancti internum , the inner witness of the Holy Spirit limited, in the case of dogma, to the recognition of Scripture as Holy . And this name is the only right one, and right in

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a more than figurative sense, when the capacity of divination is itself grasped and appraised by divination. This is not our task here. We therefore employ a psychological rather than a religious expression as being more appropriate to the nature of our discussion.

In this sense, then, divination is no new theological discovery. Schleiermacher, in his Discourses upon Religion (1799), Jacob Friedrich Fries, in his doctrine of Ahndung ( inkling , surmise, presage), and Schleiermacher s colleague and Fries s pupil, De Wette, have all in effect made use of it and given it a footing in theology, the last-named with special reference to the divination of the divine in history, under the name Surmise of the divine government of the world . I have discussed Schleiermacher s discovery at greater length in my edition of his Discourses, 1 and in my volume, Kantisch- Fries sche Religionsphilosophie und ihre Anwendung auf die Theologie, I have given a more precise statement of the Ahndung theory, as it is found in Fries and De Wette. To these two works the reader is referred for a more detailed exposition of the matter, and I shall here note only very briefly the more salient features of this doctrine.

What Schleiermacher is feeling after is really the faculty or capacity of deeply absorbed contemplation, when confronted by the vast, living totality and reality of things as it is in nature and history. Wherever a mind is exposed in a spirit of absorbed submission to impressions of the universe , it becomes capable so he lays it down of experiencing intui tions and feelings (Anschauungen and Gefuhle) of something that is, as it were, a sheer overplus, in addition to empirical reality. This overplus, while it cannot be apprehended by mere theoretic cognition of the world and the cosmic system in the form it assumes for science, can nevertheless be really and truly grasped and experienced in intuition, and is given form in single intuitions . And these, in turn, assume shape in definite statements and propositions, capable of a certain groping formulation, which are not without analogy

1 Schleierraacher s Vber die Religion. Vandenboeck & Ruprecht, Gottingen, pp. 17 ft .

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with theoretic propositions, but are to be clearly distin guished from them by their free and merely felt, not reasoned, character. In themselves they are groping intimations of meanings figuratively apprehended. They cannot be em ployed as statements of doctrine in the strict sense, and can neither bo built into a system nor used as premisses for theoretical conclusions. But, though these intuitions are limited and inadequate, they are none the less indisputably true, i. e. true as far as they go ; and for all Schleiermacher s aversion to the word in this connexion they must certainly be termed cognitions, modes of knowing, though, of course, not the product of reflection, but the intuitive outcome of feeling. Their import is the glimpse of an Eternal, in and beyond the temporal and penetrating it, the apprehension of a ground and meaning of things in and beyond the empirical and transcend ing it. They are surmises or inklings of a Reality fraught with mystery and momentousness. And it is to be noted that Schleiermacher himself sometimes avails himself of the term tahnden (divining, surmise) instead of his principal ones, intuition and feeling , and expressly connects together the divination of prophecy and the knowledge of miracle in the religious sense of a sign .

When Schleiermacher, in expounding the nature of the experience, tries to elucidate its object by giving examples, he is for the most part led to adduce impressions of a higher TAo9, an ultimate, mysterious, cosmic purposiveness, of which we have a prescient intimation. Here he is quite in agree ment with the exposition of Fries, who defines the faculty of 1 Ahnduiig as being just a faculty of divining the objective teleology of the world. And De Wette says the same thing even more unreservedly. But in Schleiermacher this rational element is none the less grounded in eternal mystery, that basis of the cosmos that goes beyond reason. This is shown in the groping, hesitant, tentative manner in which the mean ing of the experience always reveals itself. And it is emphasized especially forcibly when Schleiermacher shows where in his own case this experience is to be found in the world he confronts; that it is not so much in its universal

152 THE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE HOLY

conformity to law a rational quality, interpretable by the intellect in terms of purpose but rather by means of what appears to us as a baffling exception to law, thereby hinting at a meaning that eludes our understanding. 1

No intellectual, dialectical dissection or justification of such intuition is possible, nor indeed should any be attempted, for the essence most peculiar to it would only be destroyed thereby. Rather it is once again to aesthetic judgements we must look for the plainest analogy to it. And the faculty of judging (Urteilsvermogen), here presupposed by Schleiermacher, certainly belongs to that Judgement (Urteilskraft), which Kant analyses in his Third Critique, and which he himself sets as aesthetic judgement in antithesis to logical judgement. Only, we may not infer from this that the particular several judgements passed in this way need be judgements of taste in their content. Kant s distinction between the aesthetic and logical judgement did not mean to imply that the faculty of aesthetic judgement was a judgement upon aesthetic objects in the special narrow sense of the term aesthetic , as being concerned with the beautiful. His primary intention is simply and in general terms to separate the faculty of judge ment based upon feeling of whatever sort from that of the understanding, from discursive, conceptual thought and inference ; and his term aesthetic is simply meant to mark as the peculiarity of the former that, in contrast to logical judgement, it is not worked out in accordance with a clear intellectual scheme, but in conformity to obscure, dim princi ples which must be felt and cannot be stated explicitly as premisses. Kant employs sometimes another expression also to denote such obscure, dim principles of judgement, based on pure feeling, viz. the phrase not-unfolded or unexplicated concepts ( unausgewickelte Begriffe ); and his meaning is here exactly that of the poet, when he says:

Und wecket der dunklen Gefiihle Gewalt, Die im Herzen wunderbar schliefen. 2

1 Op. cit., p. 53.

1 It waketh the power of feelings obscure That in the heart wondrously slumbered/

(SCHILLER: Der Graf von Habsburg.)

AND THE FACULTY OF DIVINATION 153

Or again :

Was von Menschen nicht gewusst Oder nicht bedacht, Durch das Labyrinth der Brust Wandelt bei der Nacht. 1

On the other hand, those judgements that spring from pure contemplative feeling also resemble judgements of aesthetic taste in claiming, like them, objective validity, universality, and necessity. The apparently subjective and personal char acter of the judgement of taste, expressed in the maxim : De gustibus non disputandum , simply amounts to this, that tastes of different degrees of culture and maturity are first compared, then so opposed one to the other that agreement is impossible. But unanimity, even in judgements of taste, grows and strengthens in the measure in which the taste matures with exercise ; so that even here, despite the proverb, there is the possibility of taste being expounded and taught, the possibility of a continually improving appreciation, of con- vincement and conviction. And if this is true of the judgement arising from aesthetic feeling in the narrower sense, it is at least equally true of the judgement arising from contemplation . Where, on the basis of a real talent in this direction, contempla tion grows by careful exercise in depth and inwardness, there what one man feels can be expounded and brought to con sciousness in another : one man can both educate himself to a genuine and true manner of feeling and be the means of bringing others to the same point ; and that is what corre sponds in the domain of contemplation to the part played by argument and persuasion in that of logical conviction.

Schleiermacher s exposition of his great discovery suffers from two defects. We will consider one of them here, leaving the other to the next chapter. Schleiermacher, then, naively and unreflectingly assumes this faculty or capacity of divi nation to be a universal one. In point of fact it is not

1 What beyond our conscious knowing Or our thought*! extremist span Threads by nijjht the labyrinthine Pathways of the breast of man.

(GoETHE : An den Alond.)

154 THE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE HOLY

universal if this means that it could be presupposed necessarily in every man of religious conviction as an actual fact, though of course Schleiermacher is quite right in counting it among the general capacities of mind and spirit, and regarding it indeed as the deepest and most peculiar element in mind, and in that sense man being defined by his intelligent mind- calling it a universal human element. But what is a universal potentiality of man as such is by no means to be found in actuality the universal possession of every single man ; very frequently it is only disclosed as a special endow ment and equipment of particular gifted individuals. And Schleiermacher gives an excellent indication of how the matter rightly lies in his very interesting exposition of the nature and function of the M ittler (mediator) in his first Discourse . Not Man in general (as rationalism holds), but only special divinatory natures possess the faculty of divination in actuality ; and it is these that receive impressions of the transcendent, not the undifferentiated aggregate of homo geneous individuals in mutual interplay, as held by modern social psychology. 1

It is questionable whether Schleiermacher himself, in spite of his (re-)discovery of divination , was a really divinatory nature, although in his first Discourse he maintains that he is. One of his contemporaries, to wit, Goethe, was at any rate decidedly his superior in this respect. In Goethe s life the power of divination, not latent but finding vital exercise, plays an important part, and it finds singular expression in the meaning he gives to the term daemonic , put with such emphasis in Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book 20, and in his Talks with Eckermann. 2 Let us briefly examine these. The most characteristic feature in his notion of the daemonic is

1 And this is undoubtedly true as far back as the lowest levels of development, when the religious dread first begins to stir in primitive form and to manifest itself in ideas. To derive these from an original group- and mass-fantasy collectively operating is itself sheer fantasy, and the results this theory helps to produce are about as queer and grotesque as any of the ideas of which it treats.

2 Cf. Goethe s Samtliche Werke, ed. Gotta, vol. xxv, pp. 124 ff. ; Ecker mann, Gesprache mit Goethe, ed. A. v. d. Linden, Part II, pp. 140 ff.

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that it goes beyond all conceiving , surpasses understand ing and reason , and consequently is inapprehensible and cannot properly be put into a statement :

1 The Daemonic is that which cannot be accounted for by understanding and reason. It chooses for itself obscure times of darkness. ... In a plain, prosaic town like Berlin it would hardly n nd an opportunity to manifest itself. ... In Poetry there is from first to last something daemonic, and especially in its unconscious appeal, for which all intellect and reason is insufficient, and which, therefore, has an efficacy beyond all concepts. Such is the effect in Music in the highest degree, for Music stands too high for any understanding to reach, and an all-mustering eilicacy goes forth from it, of which how ever no man is able to give an account. Religious worship cannot therefore do without music. It is one of the foremost means to work upon men with an effect of marvel.

Does not the daemonic (asks Eckermann) also appear in event* 1 Pre-eminently so, said Goethe, and assuredly in all which we cannot explain by intellect or reason. And in general it is manifested throughout nature, visible and invisible, in the most diverse ways. Many creatures in the animal kingdom are of a wholly daemonic kind, and in many we see some aspect of the daemonic operative.

We notice here how the elements of the numinous we discovered plainly recur: the wholly non-rational, incom prehensible by concepts, the elements of mystery, fascination, awefulness, and energy. The note of the daemonic in the animal kingdom reminds us of Job and the leviathan . But in another respect Goethe s intuition falls far short of Job s intuition of the mysterium . By his ignoring of the warn ing of the book of Job and by applying to the mysterium the standards of the rational understanding and reason and conceptions of human purpose, the non-rational comes to involve for Goethe a contradiction between meaning and mean- inglessness, sense and nonsense, that which promotes and that which frustrates human ends. Sometimes, however, he approximates it to wisdom t as when he says :

So there was something daemonic governing the circum stances of my acquaintance with Schiller all through. We might have met earlier or later. But that we should have

156 THE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE HOLY

met just at the time when I had my Italian tour behind me and Schiller had begun to weary of his philosophical specula tions that was a fact of great significance and fraught with success for both of us.

It even comes near the divine :

Such occurrences have often befallen me throughout my life. And one comes in such cases to believe in a higher influence (Einwirkung), something daemonic, to which one pays adoration, without presuming to try to explain it lurther.

Invariably the daemonic has an import of energy and overpoweringness , and sets its stamp upon men of vehement and overpowering personality.

Napoleon , said I, seems to have been a daemonic sort of man.

• He was so absolutely and to such a degree , said Goethe,

that hardly any other man can be compared with him in this respect. The late Grand Duke also was a daemonic nature, full of limitless, active force and restlessness.

Has not Mephistopheles also " daemonic " traits?

No, he is much too negative a being. The daemonic manifests itself in a downright positive and active power.

In Dichtung und Wahrheit (p. 126) he delineates still better the impressions such numinous persons make, and in this passage especially sets in the foreground our tremendum as the element alike of dread and overpoweringness .

This daemonic character appears in its most dreadful form when it stands out dominatingly in some man. Such are not always the most remarkable men, either in spiritual quality or natural talents, and they seldom have any goodness of heart to recommend them. 1 But an incredible force goes forth from them and they exercise an incredible power over all creatures, nay, perhaps even over the elements. And who can say how far such an influence may not extend ?

But the efficacy and influence of such a daemonic man, even when it is beneficent, moves to amazement rather than to admiration ; it is more a tumultuous urgency than ordinary agency, and is at any rate absolutely non-rational. This is

1 i. e. they are merely numinous , not holy men.

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what Goethe tries to describe in the series of antitheses in Dichtung uiid Wahrheit (p. 124):

. . . Something that only manifested itself in contradictions and therefore could not be comprehended under any concept, still less under any one word. It was not divine, for it seemed unreasonable; not human, for it lacked understanding; not devilish, for it was beneficent ; not angelic, for it often dis played malicious joy. It was like chance, for it pointed to no consequence ; it resembled providence, for it indicated con nexion and unity. All that hems us in seemed penetrable to it ; it seemed to dispose at will of the inevitable elements of our being, contracting time and expanding space. Only in the impossible did it seem at home, and the possible it spurned from itself with contempt.

Although this daemonic thing can be manifested in every thing corporeal and incorporeal, finding indeed most notable expression among animals, still it is pre-eminently with men that it stands in closest and most wonderful connexion, and there fashions a power which, if not opposed to the moral world order, yet intersects it in such a way that the one might be taken for the warp and the other for the woof.

There can be no clearer expression than this of the pro digiously strong impression which divination of the numinous may make upon the mind, and that obviously not on a single occasion but repeatedly, till it has become almost a matter of habit. But at the same time this divina tion of Goethe is not one that apprehends the numinous as the prophet does. It does not rise to the elevation of the experience of Job, where the non-rational mystery is at the same time experienced and extolled as supra-rational, as of profoundest value, and as holiness in its own right. It is rather the fruit of a mind which, for all its depth, was not equal to such profundities as these, and to which, therefore, the non-rational counterpoint to the melody of life could only sound in confused consonance, not in its authentic harmony, indefinable but palpable. Therefore, though it is genuine divination, it is the divination of Goethe the pagan , as he sometimes used to call himself. Indeed, it is a divination that functions only at the level of the daemonic which, as we saw, precedes religion proper, not at the level of the divine

158 THE HOLY AND DIVINATION

and the holy in the truest sense ; and it shows very clearly how that sort of merely daemonic experience of the numinous may in a highly cultivated mind only stir emotional reactions of bewilderment and bedazzlement, without giving real light or warmth to the soul. Goethe did not understand how to adjust this divination of the daemonic to his own higher conception of the divine; and, when Eckermann turned the conversation to that, his answer was hesitating and evasive :

• The operative, efficacious force (said I tentatively), which

we call the daemonic", does not seem to fit in with the idea of the divine/ Dear boy, said Goethe, what do we know of the idea of the divine, and what can our narrow conceptions presume to tell of the Supreme Being ? If I called him by a hundred names, like a Turk, I should yet fall short and have said nothing in comparison to the boundlessness of his attri butes.

But, if we leave out of account the comparatively low level of Goethe s divination , we have yet in it a most exact example of what Schleiermacher had in mind. These are

• intuitions and feelings , if not of something divine, still of

something numinous in the natural world and in history, and intuitions brought to the higher vitality by an individual with an innate * divinatory gift. At the same time the principles on which this divination works cannot even be suggested, for all the examples Goethe may give. What does the daemonic really consist in ? How does he come to be conscious of it ? How does he identify it as one and the same through all the manifold and contradictory forms in which it manifests itself? These are the questions to which Goethe can suggest no answer. It is evident that in this experience he is being guided by mere feeling , that is, by an a priori principle that is not explicit and overt, but dim and obscure.

CHAPTER XIX DIVINATION IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY

IN the last chapter we spoke of two defects in Schleier- macher s doctrine of divination. The first of these his misleading assumption that this is a universal human faculty has already been considered, and we have now to turn to the second. This is that, though Schleiermacher s description of divination in relation to the world of nature and history has both warmth and insight, he gives no clear detailed account, but only the scantiest hints, of what is after all its worthiest object and the object most propitious to its develop ment, namely, the history of religion, especially that of the Bible and its culmination in the person of Christ himself. His concluding discourse makes emphatic and significant mention of Christianity and Christ, but Christ is here only introduced as the supreme divining subject, not as the object of divination par excellence. And it is the same in Schleiermacher s Glaubens- lehre . In this, too, the significance of Christ is, essentially, intended to be fully given in the fact that he admits us into the power and beatitude of his consciousness of God . Now this is a thought of hi^rh value, but it does not attain to that

o o

supreme value which Christianity imputes to Christ, of being in his own person holiness made manifest , that is, a person in whose being, life, and mode of living we realize of ourselves by intuition and feeling the self-revealing power and pre sence of the Godhead. For to the Christian it is a momentous question whether or no a real divination a direct, first-hand apprehension of holiness manifested, the intuition and * feel ing of it can be got from the person and life of Christ ; whether, in short, * the holy can be independently experienced in him, making him a real revelation of it.

160 DIVINATION IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY

In this matter we can obviously get no help from the pain ful and fundamentally impossible inquiries, so often started* into Jesus consciousness of himself . They are impossible, if for no other reason, because the evidence at our disposal is neither sufficient in quantity nor appropriate to such a purpose. Jesus puts as the content of his message and all his utterances, not himself, but the kingdom , its beatitude and righteous ness, and, in its first and most straightforward interpretation, the gospel is the good tidings of the kingdom of God. What statements about himself do occur are fragmentary and incidental But even were this not the case, even if we could find in the gospels a detailed theory of Jesus as to his own nature, what would this prove ? Religious enthusiasts have not infrequently had recourse to the most exalted modes of self -proclamation, and often enough no doubt their statements about themselves have been completely bona fide and sincere. And it is just such self-revealing statements of the prophets of all ages that are more than any others dependent for their form upon their temporal or local context, the equipment of myth or dogma with which his environment supplies the speaker. The fact that the prophet or seer or inspired teacher applies all this material to state something about himself merely demonstrates the intensity of his self-consciousness, his sense of mission, his conviction, and his claim to belief and obedi ence all of which are to be taken for granted where a man stands forward in response to an inner call. The immediate, intuitive divination of which we are speaking would indeed not come as a result of such statements by the prophet about himself, however complete ; they can arouse a belief in his authority, but cannot bring about the peculiar experience of spontaneous insight that here is something holy made manifest. * We have heard him ourselves and know that this is indeed the Christ (St. John iv. 42).

It cannot now be doubted that such an avowal was made to him as a result of a spontaneous, original divination. This must at any rate be true of Christ s own first disciples. Otherwise it would be unintelligible how the Church could have come into existence at all. Mere proclamation, mere authoritative

DIVINATION IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY 161

statement, cannot bring about these massive certainties and that impelling strength, that power to maintain and assert itself, which were necessary if the Christian community was to come into being and which can be recognized in it as its unmistakable characteristics.

Misapprehension of this is only possible if, attempting a one-sided approach to the phenomenon of the origin of the Christian Church, we try to reconstruct the facts solely by the methods of scholarship and out of the material afforded by the staled feelings and blunted sensibility of our present-day artificial civilization and complex mentality. It would be an advantage if, in addition to these methods, an attempt were made to frame a less abstract intuition of the genesis of original and genuine religious communities with the aid of living instances of the thing as it may still be found to-day. It would be necessary for this to seek places and moments at which even to-day religion shows itself alive as a naive

• / t5

emotional force, with all its primal quality of impulse and instinct. This can still be studied in remote corners of the Mohammedan and Indian world. Even to-day one may come upon scenes in the streets of Mogador or Marrakesh, which have the strangest outward resemblance to those recorded by the Synoptic Gospels : holy men (and very queer specimens they generally are !) now and then make their appearance, each the centre of a group of disciples, and about them the people come and go, listening to their sayings, looking at their miracles, observing how they live and what they do. Bands of adherents gather round them, more loosely or more closely united as the case may be. Logia , tales, and legends form and accumulate ; l new brotherhoods arise or, if already arisen, extend in widen-

1 It is astonishing that the main problem of Gospel criticism, viz. how the collection of* Logia arose, is not studied in this still living milieu. It is even more astonishing that the logia-series were not long ago elucidated from the closely corresponding milieu of the Sayings of the Fathers (airotyiypara TW irarfpw), from the Hadith of Muhammed, or from the Franciscan legends. And a particular striking case of the same thing is the collection of the Logia of Kama-Krishna, which has grown to completion in our own day and under our very eyes.

M

162 DIVINATION IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY

ing circles. But the centre of it all is always the man himself, a holy man in his lifetime, and what sustains the movement is always the peculiar power of his personality, the special impression he makes on the bystander. Those who should know assure us that ninety-eight per cent, of these * holy men are impostors ; but, even so, we are left with two per cent, who are not, a surprisingly high percentage in the case of a matter that invites and facilitates imposture as much as this does. The consideration of this remaining two per cent, should continue to throw much light on the actual fact of the genesis of a reli gious community. The point is that the holy man or the prophet is from the outset, as regards the experience of the circle of his devotees, something more than a mere man (^iXoy avQpto-rros). He is the being of wonder and mystery, who somehow or other is felt to belong to the higher order of things, to the side of the numen itself. It is not that he himself teaches that he is such, but that he is experienced as such. And it is only such experiences, which, while they may be crude enough and result often enough in self-deception, must at least be profoundly and strongly felt, that can give rise to religious communities.

Such cases of contemporary religious movements afford after all a very inadequate analogy, far removed from that which occurred long ago in Palestine. Yet, if even these move ments are only made possible by the fact that men actually experience, or presume that they experience, veritable holiness in the personalities of individuals, how far more true must this not be of the early Christian community ! That this was so is attested directly by the whole spirit and the universal conviction of the early communities as a whole, so far as we can discern it in their modest records. And certain of the slighter touches in the Synoptic portrait of Jesus confirm the fact expressly in particular cases. We may instance here the narratives already referred to of Peter s haul of fishes (Luke v. 8), and of the centurion of Capernaum (Matt. viii. 8 ; Luke vii. 6), which point to spontaneous responses of feeling when the holy is directly encountered in experience. Especially apt in this connexion is the passage in Mark x. 32 : KCU T)V

DIVINATION IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY 163

airrovs 6 Irjaovs KCLI tQanftovvTO, ot 5e a.Ko\ov6ovi>T? </>o- /SoOi ro ( and Jesus went before them: and they were amazed ; and as they followed, they were afraid ). This passage renders with supreme simplicity and force the immediate impression of the numinous that issued from the man Jesus, and no artistry of characterization could do it so powerfully as these few masterly and pregnant words. The later saying in John xx. 28 (the confession of Thomas, My Lord and my God ) may perhaps appear to us by contrast the utterance of a time too far-reaching in its formulations, and very far removed from the simplicity of the original experi ence of the disciples. And this passage in Mark may appeal to us all the more just because the living emotion here dis dains any precise formulation at all ; none the less does it contain the real roots of all later developments of Christology.

Such intimations of the numinous impression made by Jesus upon those who knew him occur in the Gospel narrative only, as it were, incidentally to the main purpose of the narrator, who is scarcely interested in them, but absorbed rather in miracle- or other records. In our eyes their interest is all the greater, and we can fancy how numerous similar experiences must have been of which no trace survives in the records, just because there was no miracle to be told of in connexion with them and they were simply taken for granted by the narrator as a matter of course.

To this place belong further the belief in Jesus supremacy over the demonic world and the tendency to legend that began to take effect from the start; the fact that his own relatives take him for a man possessed , an involuntary acknowledge ment of the numinous impression he made upon them ; and in an especial degree the conviction that breaks spontaneously upon the minds of his disciples as by a sudden impact, won not from his teaching but from the very experience of him, that he is the Messiah the bein^r who stood for the circle in

o

which he moved as the numinous being par excellence. The experiential character of this belief in his Messiahship stands out clearly in Peter s first confession and Jesus answer to it (Matt. xvi. 15-17), Flesh and blood have not revealed it

M 2

164 DIVINATION IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY

unto thee, but my Father, which is in heaven. Jesus himself is astonished at Peter s confession, which shows that this was not learnt on authority, but found out by Peter himself, a genuine discovery, arising from the impression Jesus made upon him and the testimony borne to it in the depth of the mind, where no teaching of flesh and blood, or even of the word , can avail, but only my Father in heaven himself and without any intermediary.

For this factor the mind s own witness to the impression is, it need hardly be said, an indispensable one. Without it all impression is without effect, or rather no impression could occur at all. Therefore, all doctrines of the c impression made by Christ are inadequate if they do not pay regard to this second element, which indeed is nothing but the mental pre disposition necessary for the experience of holiness, to wit, the category of the holy, potentially present in the spirit as a dim or obscure a priori cognition. Impress or impression , that is, presupposes something capable of receiving impres sions, and that is just what the mind is not, if in itself it is only a tabula rasa . In that richer sense in which we use the word here, we do not in fact mean by impression merely the impression which, in the theory of the Sensationalist school, is the psychical result of sense-perception and is left behind as a psychical trace or vestige of the percept. To be impressed by some one, in the sense we use the term here, means rather to cognize or recognize in him a peculiar significance and to humble oneself before it. And we maintain that this is only possible by an element of cognition, comprehension, and valua tion in one s own inner consciousness, that goes out to meet the outward presented fact, i. e. by the spirit within . In Schleiermacher s language the presentiment goes out to meet the revelation to which it belongs. Music can only be under stood by the musical person ; none but he receives an impres sion of it. And to every unique kind of real impression corresponds in the same way a unique and special sort of con geniality , if the word may be used in this special sense of a particular disposition or aptitude, akin to the object arousing the impression. Nemo audit verbum, nisi spiritu

DIVINATION IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY 165

intus docente. l Once again let us recall the example of the beautiful. A beautiful thing can only make an impression as such, i. e. as signifying beauty, if and in so far as a man possesses in himself a priori the potentiality of framing a special standard of valuation, viz. aesthetic valuation. Such a disposition can only be understood as an original, obscure awareness and appreciation of the value of beauty itself. Because a man has this in him, or better, because he is capable of realizing it by training, he is able to recognize beauty in the particular given beautiful object that he encounters, to feel the correspondence of this object with the hidden standard of value within him. And so, and only so, will he get an 1 impression .

1 Cf. Luther s remark that only he who is verbo conformis under stands the Word, and cf. Augustine, Confessions, x. 6, 20.

CHAPTER XX DIVINATION IN CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY

THE question whether the primitive Church did or could experience holiness in the person of Christ, which we can but answer in the affirmative, is not so important to us as the question whether we too to-day can still do so. Has the portrayal of Christ s life, his actions and achievement, as pre served and handed down by the Christian Church, the value and power of a revelation for us to-day, or do we in this matter but live upon the inheritance bequeathed us by the first community of Christians and base our faith on the authority and testimony of others ? There would be no hope of answering this question, were it not that in us too that inner divining power of appre hension and interpretation which has already been considered may find a place that witness of the spirit, only possible on the basis of a mental predisposition to recognize the holy * and to respond to it. If without this no understanding and no impres sion of Christ was possible even to the first disciples, of what avail should any tradition be that requires the mediation of generations of Christian men? But if we may make this assump tion of a predisposing inner witness of the Spirit as we must the matter is very different. In that case there is no harm even in the fact that the records of Christ s life are fragmentary, that they contain manifold uncertainties, that they are inter mingled with legendary and overlaid with Hellenistic elements. For the Spirit knows and recognizes what is of the Spirit.

As evidence of the way in which this inward principle this co-witnessing spirit within us works, prompting, inter preting, and sending out intimation and surmise, I have found the information of a keenly observant missionary from a remote field very instructive. He told me that he had found it a constant matter for fresh astonishment to see how a pre-

DIVINATION IN CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 167

sentment of the Word so inadequate which could only hint at its meaning in a difficult foreign tongue and had to work with alien conceptions could yet at times win so surprisingly deep and inward an acceptance. And he said that here too the best results always were due to the responsive apprehen sion that came out of the hearer s heart half-way to meet the presented truth. Certainly it is only in this fact that we have a clue to the understanding of the problem of St. Paul. Perse cutor of the Church as he was, the intimations he had of the being and meaning of Christ and his Gospel must have come to him piecemeal, in fragmentary hints and caricature. But the spirit from within forced upon him the acknowledgement to which he succumbed on the way to Damascus. It taught him that infinitely profound understanding of the Christ made manifest which has led a critic like Wellhausen to confess that, when all is said, no man has understood Christ himself so deeply and thoroughly as Paul.

If, no\v, the experience of holiness and the holy in Christ is still to be possible and so afford support to our faith, one thing is evidently to be presupposed at the outset, namely, that his own most immediate and primary achievement and intention can be directly understood and appraised in our experience, so that out of this may grow the impression of his holiness with a like directness. And here a difficulty seems to confront us, which has to be removed if the entire problem is not to be barred from the start. It is this : is that which we to-day think we find in the person of Christ and in Christianity at bottom at all the same as that which he really intended to achieve and that which the first community of his disciples found in him? In other words, has Christianity really a principle of its own, which, however capable of historical evolution, yet remains unchanged in essence, so that the Christianity of to-day may be measured against the faith of the first disciples and awarded a rank essentially the same ?

Is Christianity at all and in a strict sense Jesus religion ? That is, is the religion we know to-day as Christianity, with its peculiar and unique content of belief and feeling, standing

168 DIVINATION IN CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY

in all its historic greatness and supremacy when measured against other religions, with all its power to-day over the hearts and consciences of men to elevate or to excite, to launch accusation or confer benediction, to attract or to repel is this religion still in its essence and inner meaning the same thing as the simple, unpretentious religion and form of piety which Jesus himself had, which he himself aroused and founded in the circle of those little, heart-stirred bands of men in that out-of-the-way corner of the world, Galilee ? It must be generally agreed that it has at least changed its form and its colour very significantly since those days, and that it has been exposed to violent alterations and metamorphoses. But is there any abiding essence, any enduring principle at all behind all the sequence of its manifestations, susceptible of evolution and development, but remaining one and the same throughout 1 ? Is it a case of development and evolution, or rather merely of continual transmutation, the influx of some thing quite different, which one man laments as a perversion, a second admires as a welcome substitution, and a third merely records as a simple historical fact ?

Christianity, as it stands before us to-day in present actuality as a great world religion , is indubitably, so far as its claim and promise go, in the first and truest sense a reli gion of Redemption. Its characteristic ideas to-day are Salvation overabounding salvation, deliverance from and conquest of the world and from existence in bondage to the world, and even from creaturehood as such, the overcoming of the remoteness of and enmity to God, redemption from servi tude to sin and the guilt of sin, reconciliation and atonement, and, in consequence, grace and all the doctrine of grace, the Spirit and the bestowal of the Spirit, the new birth and the new creature. These conceptions are common to Christendom, despite the manifold cleavages that divide it into different confessions, churches, and sects, and they characterize it sharply and definitely as a religion of redemption par excel lence, setting it in this respect on a level with the great reli gions of the East, with their sharp, dualistic antithesis of the state of liberation and bondage, nay, justifying its claim not to

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fall short of these in regard to the necessity of redemption and the grant of salvation, but to surpass them, both in the importance it gives to these conceptions and in the richness of meaning it finds in them. It cannot be doubted that here, in these elements, is to be found the inner principle and essence of contemporary Christianity to-day, and what we have to ask is whether the wealth of mental and emotional content was in very truth the principle of that plain religion of Jesus long a^o, whose establishment must be termed the first and most

O

immediate achievement of Christ.

In answering this question in the affirmative, we would point to a parable which, intended to have reference to the kingdom of God, fits the principle of Christianity equally well: the parable of the grain of mustard seed and the tree that grew therefrom. This parable hints at a change and altera tion, for the grown tree is something different from the seed, but an alteration that is no transformation, no transmutation or epigenesis , but genuine evolution or development, the transition from potentiality to actuality.

The religion of Jesus does not change gradually into a religion of redemption ; it is in its whole design and ten dency a religion of redemption from its earliest commencement, and that in the most uncompromising sense. Though it lacks the theological terms which the Church later possessed, its redemptive character is manifest and unambiguous. If we try to determine as simply and concisely as possible what really characterized the message of Jesus, ignoring what was historically inessential, we are left with two central elements : (1) First, there is the proclamation of the kingdom of God, as no mere accessory, but the foundation of the whole Gospel. This is characteristic of His ministry from the beginning and throughout its course. (2) Second, there is the reaction against Phariseeism, and, in connexion with this, Jesus ideal of godli ness as the attitude and mind of a child when its fault has been forgiven. But both points comprise in principle every thing which later became separately formulated in the specifi cally redemptive doctrines of Christianity : Grace, Election, the Holy Ghost, and Renewal by the Spirit. These were

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possessed by and experienced by that first group of disciples as truly as by any later Christians, though in an implicit form. A closer consideration may make this more plain.

To speak of a religion of redemption is, one may say, to be guilty of a redundancy, at any rate if we are considering the more highly developed forms of religion. For every such religion, when once it has won its autonomy and freed itself from dependent reference to an ideal of merely worldly wel fare (f^Saifjiovia), whether private or public, develops in itself unique and overabounding ideals of beatitude which may be designated by the general term salvation . Such a salvation is the goal to which the evolution of Indian reli gions has tended ever more markedly and consciously, from their beginning with the notion of deification of theUpanishad- Pantheism on to the bliss-state of the Buddhist Nirvana, which, as we have seen (p. 39), is negative only in appearance. It is also the goal of the religions of redemption , specifically so called, which spread with such vigour over the civilized world from Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor about the beginning of our era. Further, it is obvious to an examination sharpened by the comparative study of religions that the same tendency to salvation is operative also in the vesture of eschatology that gives form to the religion of Persia. Islam, too, embodies the longing for and the experience of salvation. In this case salvation is not simply in the hope of the joys of Paradise : rather the most vital element in Islam is Islam itself, i. e. that surrender to Allah which is not merely the dedication of the will to him, but also at the same time the entering upon the Allah state of mind here and now, the object of longing and striving, a frame of mind which is already salvation , and which may possess and enrapture the man like an intoxication and can give rise to a mystic transport of bliss.

But if the idea of salvation thus lies at the base of all higher religion everywhere, it is manifested quite unmistakably and in supreme fashion, both in intensity and intrinsic purity, in the Kingdom of Heaven of Christianity, which is at once a tenet of faith, an object of desire, and a present experience.

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It is quite immaterial whether this thought in ancient Israel issued from purely political considerations, only gradually rising above the ground of mere fact, till it finally was exalted to a transcendent meaning, or whether there were from the first authentic religious motives at work to shape and develop it. All this is beside the point, inasmuch as the materials by which the religious impulse works are very frequently at first of an unspiritual, earthly nature. It is just the unresting activity and continual urgency of this impulsion, enabling it to attain to freedom and press onward and upward to ever higher levels of development, it is just this that manifests it most characteristically, and reveals best its inner essential being. And this is nothing else than the pure impulsion to redemption, and the pre-intimation and anticipation of a boded good , transcendent and wholly other , a salvation comparable to those salvations striven after in other reli gions, but supreme above them in the measure in which the Lord of the Kingdom found and possessed in the Christian experience is supreme above Brahma, Vishnu, Ormuzd, Allah, as also above the Absolute in the form of Nirvana, Kaivalyam, Tao, or whatever other name it may be given. So redemp tion is throughout the purport of the gospel even in its first and simplest form, a redemption which is both to be fulfilled by God hereafter and yet at the same time already experienced here and now. In the former aspect it comes as the assured promise of the Kingdom of God ; in the latter, by the present experience of His fatherhood, instilled by the Gospel into the soul of the disciple as his most intimate possession. That the early Christians were conscious of this as something entirely novel and unheard of and exceeding all measure (a good news), is seen in the saying of Jesus that the Law and the Prophets were until John: since that time the gospel of the kingdom of God is preached (Luke xvi. 16), in which John the Baptist, who also preached a Kingdom of God , is yet classed with 1 the Law and the Prophets .

But to describe this novelty most truly and concisely it would be necessary to invent the saying of Paul (Romans viii. 15), did it not already stand written :

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• For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to

fear ; but ye have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father/

Here Paul has penetrated to the heart of the matter, breaking definitely with the older religion and seizing un erringly upon the very principle and essence of the new. And this principle and essence was the same for the first fisher men by the Lake of Galilee and has remained one and the same throughout the whole history of Christianity. With it is given the new attitude to Sin and Guilt, to Law and to Freedom, and, in principle, Justification , Second Birth , Renewal , the bestowal of the Spirit, new creation, and the blissful freedom of God s children. It was inevitable that these or similar expressions and doctrines and the profound speculation to which they would give rise should make their appearance when the Word called to the Spirit responsive to it. 1

And so Christ s first and direct work and achievement, as we can clearly understand it to-day, is the effectual bestowal of salvation as future hope and present possession by arousing a faith in his God and in the Kingdom of God.

And now how can Divination, in respect to such work of Christ, awake in us also, in us who stand so remote in time from him 1 ? How can we, too, come to experience in him holiness made manifest ?

Obviously not through demonstration and proof, by apply ing some conceptual rule. We cannot suggest any conceptual criterion in the form : When the elements x and y are brought together, a revelation results. It is just this impossibility which makes us speak of divination , intuitive apprehen sion . The experience must come, not by demonstration, but by pure contemplation, through the mind submitting itself unreservedly to a pure impression of the object. For this purpose all that was given and contained in the message and work of Jesus must be combined with the picture of his person and life and viewed as a whole and in its context with the

1 We can even comprehend thereby the later influx of dualistic or gnostic currents, or at least see how they became possible. A man like Marcion is an extreme Jesu-ist as well as an extreme Paul-ist .

DIVINATION IN CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 173

long and wonderful advance in the religious history of Israel and Judah that was the preparation for it, and with the inter play of diverse tributary lines of development which, even where apparently divergent, ultimately converged upon this as their single culmination. Account must be taken of the elements

t>

of fulfilment which the Gospel contains, and due heed given to the attraction and impelling force which it owed to its contrast with its Judaic environment or to parallels which it bore to this. And all the while, for the full impression to be received, regard is to bo paid to the non-rational, the woof of the web, the strange setting of the whole experience, which can nowhere be felt so palpably as in the case of Jesus Christ ; how his effect upon the men of his own day rises and ebbs, revealing his spiritual content, on which the salvation of the world depends, ever more and more manifestly, and revealing at the same time that mysteriously growing opposition of powers in which the problem of Job recurs a thousandfold more urgently where we have the suffering and the defeat not merely of a righteous person, but of all that is most vitally important for the highest interests of humanity. In fine there is that burden of non-rational, mystical significance, which hangs like a cloud over Golgotha. Whoever can thus immerse himself in contemplation and open his whole mind resolutely to a pure impression of all this combined will surely find growing in him, obedient to an inward standard that defies expression, the pure feeling of recognition of holiness , the intuition of the eternal in the temporal . If something eternal, something holy, ever results from the blending and interpenetration of rational and non-rational, purposive and indefinable elements in the way we tried to describe, in the person of Jesus this stands as nowhere else potently and palpably apparent.

And in a very real sense we of the later day are not worse but more fortunately placed for grasping it than Jesus own contemporaries. Realization of him through surmise (Ahn- duny) of the divine government of the world l depends essen tially upon two factors. On the one hand there is the gene ral view of the marvellous spiritual history of Israel as a

1 An expression of De Wette. (v. p. 150.)

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connected whole, with its prophetic and religious development, and with Christ appearing as its culmination. And on the other hand there is the complete life-work and achievement of Christ himself in its entirety. Now in both cases a general comprehensive view is more perfectly to be attained by us to-day than in the time of Christ ; for, not only is our histori cal insight more keen, but we can also see the whole in better perspective at our greater distance. Whoever sinks in con templation of that great connected development of the Judaic religion which we speak of as the old covenant up to Christ must feel the stirrings of an intimation that something Eternal is there, directing and sustaining it and urging it to its consummation. The impression is simply irresistible. And whoever then goes on to consider how greatly the scene is set for the completion of the whole story and the mighty stature of the personality that is its fulfilment, his firm, unfaltering hold upon God, his unwavering, unfailing righteousness, his certitude of conviction and assurance in action so mysterious and profound, his spiritual fervour and beatitude, the struggles and trustfulness, self-surrender and suffering, and finally the conqueror s death that were his whoever goes on to consider all this must inevitably conclude : * That is god-like and divine ; that is verily Holiness. If there is a God and if He chose to reveal himself, He could do it no otherwise than thus.

Such a conclusion is not the result of logical compulsion ; it does not follow from clearly conceived premisses ; it is an immediate, underivable judgement of pure recognition, and it follows a premiss that defies exposition and springs directly from an irreducible feeling of the truth. But that, as we have seen, is just the manner in which genuine divination, in the sense of an intuition of religious significance, takes place.

Such an intuition, once granted, issues, for us no less than for the first disciples, necessarily and independently of exege sis or the authority of the early Church, in a series of further intuitions respecting the Person, the Work, and the Words of Christ, and it is the task of theology to render these explicit. Such are the intuitions gained of sacred history in general, of its preparation in prophecy, and of its fulfilment in Jesus

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Messiahship the Being in whom all the religious potentiali ties of prophet and psalmist and all the anticipatory move ments and currents in the old covenant became actualized, in whom all previous development found its culmination, and the evolution of a people at once its real significance and its goal, the completion of its course and the consummation of its allotted historical task. And there are further intuitions which have the same origin : the intuition by which we recog nize in Christ the portrayal and presentment of God, divining in his agony and victory, his redemptive search and love, the very stamp and signature of God ; the intuition of his Son- ship , by which we recognize Christ as the only Begotten , the called, the fully empowered with deity, as one whose being, only made possible and intelligible of God, repeats and reveals the divine nature in human fashion ; or the intuition of the new covenant , of adoption and reconciliation through Christ, of his life-work and self-surrender to God as sacrih ce and as a warrant of divine grace. And last, not least, the intuition of the covering and propitiating Mediator. For the abyss between creature and Creator, profanum and 1 sanctum , sin and holiness, is not diminished but increased by that deeper knowledge that comes from the Gospel of Christ : and, as a result of the emotion spontaneously stirred in the recognition of it, that in which the holy stands self-revealed is taken here, as in other cases, both as the refuge from, and the means by which to approach, Holiness. And this impul sion of the mind to see in Christ mediator and propitiator may be roused to seek expression spontaneously, even in cases where it is not, as in Hebrew and primitive religion, pre pared for and sustained by a traditional cult and mysticism of 4 sacrifice . That is, it is a natural religious instinct, due to the pressure of the numinous experience and to nothing else.

We are not, then, to deplore the fact that intuitions of this kind find a place in the doctrines of the Christian faith : they do so of necessity. What we must deplore is, that their free character, as springing from divination , is so generally mis interpreted ; that too commonly we dogmatize and theorize about them, deducing them from * necessary truths of exegesis

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or dogma (which are in fact always dubious), and so failing to recognize them for what they are, free-floating utterances and trial nights at expression of the numinous feeling ; and that too often we give them an emphasis which puts them unwarrantably at the centre of our religious interest, a place which nothing but the experience itself of God ought to occupy.

In this connexion we may draw attention to what are com monly called the miracles of Christ, but which we may per haps more aptly call, in the words of Mark xvi. 20, signs following (tiraKoXovOovvra 0-rjfj.eLa). It is not upon them primarily that the experience of holiness made manifest is based ; but, where there has been real divination , there cer tain traits in the portrait of Christ come to acquire a fresh significance, as confirmation of the divination rather than its ground. I refer to the signs of exalted spiritual power over nature to be detected in the portrait of Jesus. These have their parallels elsewhere in the history of religion: in the great prophets of Israel, for instance, they are shown in the form of that visionary intuition and boding foreknowledge with which the prophet was endowed for his calling. In the life of Christ they recur unmistakably as gifts of the Spirit , raised to a supreme power. These things are not miracles , for they are powers of the spirit, and so are as natural as our will itself is, with its control over our body. But they clearly only come upon the scene where the spirit is itself exalted to its fullest stature and in its fullest vitality, and are most of all to be expected where the spirit is in closest and most intimate union with its eternal cause and foundation, and is thereby set free to the highest it can itself achieve. 1

It is, in the last place, clear that it is in the Passion and death of Christ that the objects of the strongest religious intui tion must be sought. If his Incarnation, his mission, and the manner of his Hie come to be considered as a piece of self- revelation, in which an eternal Will of Love is mirrored, before all else is this Love and Faith seen accomplished in the Passion. The Cross becomes in an absolute sense the mirror of the 1 See further Appendix VII.

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eternal Father (speculum aeterni Patris); and not of the 1 Father alone the highest rational interpretation of the holy but of Holiness as such. For what makes Christ in a special sense the summary and climax of the course of antecedent religious evolution is pre-eminently this that in his life, suffering, and death is repeated in classic and abso lute form that most mystical of all the problems of the Old Covenant, the problem of the guiltless suffering of the righteous, which re-echoes again and again so mysteriously from Jere miah and deutero-Isaiah on through Job and the Psalms. The 38lh chapter of Job is a prophecy of Golgotha. And on Gol gotha the solution of the problem, already adumbrated in Job, is repeated and surpassed. It lay, as we saw, entirely in the non-rational aspect of deity, and yet was none the less a solution. In Job the suffering of the righteous found its significance as the classic and crucial case of the revelation, more immediately actual and in more palpable proximity than any other, of the transcendent mysteriousness and beyond- ness of God. The Cross of Christ, that monogram of the eternal mystery, is its completion. Here rational are enfolded with non-rational elements, the revealed commingled with the unrevealed, the most exalted love with the most awe-inspiring wrath of the numen, and therefore, in applying to the Cross of Christ the category holy , Christian religious feeling has given birth to a religious intuition profounder and more vital than any to be found in the whole history of religion.

This is what must be borne in mind in the comparison of religions, when we seek to decide which of them is the most perfect. The criterion of the value of a religion as religion cannot ultimately be found in what it has done for culture, nor in its relation to the limits of the reason or the limits of humanity (which, forsooth, are presumed capable of being drawn in advance apart from reference to religion itself !), nor in any of its external features. It can only be found in what is the innermost essence of religion, the idea of holiness as such, and in the degree of perfection with which any given religion realizes this.

There can naturally be no defence of the worth and validity

N

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of such religious intuitions of pure feeling that will convince a person who is not prepared to take the religious conscious ness itself for granted. Mere general argument, even moral demonstrations, are in this case useless, are indeed for obvious reasons impossible from the outset. On the other hand the criticisms and confutations attempted by such a person are un sound from the start. His weapons are far too short to touch his adversary, for the assailant is always standing right out side the arena ! But if these intuitions, these separate responses to the impress upon the spirit of the Gospel story and the central Person of it if these intuitions are immune from rational criticism, they are equally unaffected by the fluctuat ing results of biblical exegesis and the laboured justifications of historical apologetics. For they are possible without these, springing, as they do, from first-hand personal divination. *

1 Compare with this chapter my recently published book Reich Gottes tind Menschensohn.

CHAPTER XXI

HISTORY AND THE A PRIORI IN RELIGION: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

WE have considered the holy on the one hand as an a priori category of mind, and on the other as manifesting itself in outward appearance. The contrast here intended is exactly the same as the common contrast of inner and outer, general and special revelation. And if we take reason* (ratio) as an inclusive term for all cognition which arises in the mind from principles native to it, in contrast to those based upon facts of history, then we may say that the distinc tion between holiness as an a priori category and holiness as revealed in outward appearance is much the same as that between * reason (in this wide sense) and history.

Every religion which, so far from being a mere faith in traditional authority, springs from personal assurance and inward convincement (i. e. from an inward first-hand cognition of its truth) as Christianity does in a unique degree must presuppose principles in the mind enabling it to be indepen dently recognized as true. 1 But these principles must be a priori ones, not to be derived from experience or history . It has little meaning, however edifying it may sound, to say that they are inscribed upon the heart by the pencil of the Holy Spirit in history . For whence comes the assurance that it was the pencil of the Holy Spirit that wrote, and not that of a deceiving spirit of imposture, or of the tribal fantasy of anthropology? Such an assertion is itself a

1 The attestation of such principles is the testimoniura Spiritus Sancti internum of which we have already spoken. And this must clearly be itsr-lf immediate and self-warranted, else there would be need of another witness of the Holy Spirit to attest the truth of the first, and BO on ad infinitum.

N 2

180 HISTORY AND THE A PRIORI IN RELIGION :

presumption that it is possible to distinguish the signature of the Spirit from others, and thus that we have an a priori notion of what is of the Spirit independently of history.

And there is a further consideration. There is something presupposed by history as such not only the history of mind or spirit, with which we are here concerned which alone makes it history, and that is the existence of a quale, some thing with a potentiality of its own, capable of becoming, in the special sense of coming to be that to which it was predis posed and predetermined. An oak-tree can become, and thus have a sort of history ; whereas a heap of stones cannot. The random addition and subtraction, displacement and rearrangement, of elements in a mere aggregation can certainly be followed in narrative form, but this is not in the deeper sense a historical narrative. We only have the history of a people in proportion as it enters upon its course equipped with an endowment of talents and tendencies ; it must already be something if it is really to become anything. And biography is a lamentable and unreal business in the case of a man who has no real unique potentiality of his own, no special idiosyn crasy, and is therefore a mere point of intersection for various fortuitous causal series, acted upon, as it were, from without. Biography is only a real narration of a real life where, by the interplay of stimulus and experience on the one side and pre disposition and natural endowment on the other, something individual and unique comes into being, which is therefore neither the result of a mere self-unfolding nor yet the sum of mere traces and impressions, written from without from moment to moment upon a tabula rasa . In short, to pro pose a history of mind is to presuppose a mind or spirit determinately qualified ; to profess to give a history of reli gion is to presuppose a spirit specifically qualified for religion. There are, then, three factors in the process by which reli gion comes into being in history. First, the interplay of pre disposition and stimulus, which in the historical development of man s mind actualizes the potentiality in the former, and at the same time helps to determine its form. Second, the groping re cognition, by virtue of this very disposition, of specific portions

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of history as the manifestation of the holy , with consequent modification of the religious experience already attained both in its quality and degree. And third, on the basis of the other two, the achieved fellowship with the holy in knowing, feeling, and willing. Plainly, then, Religion is only the off spring of history in so far as history on the one hand develops our disposition for knowing the holy, and on the other is itself repeatedly the manifestation of the holy. * Natural religion, in contrast to historical, does not exist, and still less does * innate religion. 1

A priori cognitions are not such as every one does have such would be innate cognitions but such as every one is capable of having. The loftier a priori cognitions are such as while every one is indeed capable of having them do not, as experience teaches us, occur spontaneously, but rather are awakened through the instrumentality of other more highly endowed natures. In relation to these the universal predisposition is merely a faculty of receptivity and a principle of judgement and acknowledgement, not a capacity to pro duce the cognitions in question for oneself independently. This latter capacity is confined to those specially endowed . And this endowment is the universal disposition on a higher level and at a higher power, differing from it in quality as well as in degree. The same thing is very evident in the sphere of art : what appears in the multitude as mere recep- tiveness, the capacity of response and judgement by trained aesthetic taste, reappears at the level of the artist as invention, creation, composition, the original production of genius. This difference of level and power, e.g. in musical composition, seen in the contrast between what is a mere capacity for musical experience and the actual production and revelation of music, is obviously something more than a difference of degree. It is very similar in the domain of the religious consciousness, reli gious production and revelation. Here, too, most men have only the predisposition , in the sense of a receptiveness and susceptibility to religion and a capacity for freely recognizing

1 For the distinction between innate and a priori, cf. R. Otto, Religionsphilosophie, p. 42.

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and judging religious truth at first hand. The Spirit is only universal in the form of the * testimoniumSpiritus internum (and this again only * ubi ipsi visumfuit ). The higher stage, not to be derived from the first stage of mere receptivity, is in the sphere of religion the prophet. The prophet corresponds in the religious sphere to the creative artist in that of art : he is the man in whom the Spirit shows itself alike as the power to hear the voice within and the power of divination, and in each case appears as a creative force. Yet the prophet does not represent the highest stage. We can think of a third, yet higher, beyond him, a stage of revelation as underivable from that of the prophet as was his from that of common men. We can look, beyond the prophet, to one in whom is found the Spirit in all its plenitude, and who at the same time in his person and in his performance is become most completely the object of divination, in whom Holiness is recognized apparent. Such a one is more than Prophet. He is the Son.

APPENDIX I

CHRYSOSTOM ON THE INCONCEIVABLE IN GOD

BUT that is an impertinence to say that He who is beyond the apprehension of even the higher Powers can be comprehended by us earthworms, or compassed and comprised by the weak forces of our understanding !

This protest of Chrysostom occurs at the beginning of the third of his five discourses -rrepi aKaraXiJTrTov (Dc Incomprchensibili}, which were directed against the avo /uoioi who were perverting the Christian community of Antioch, and more especially against disciples of the Arian Aetios, with their doctrine Otov oTSa is auros 6 #cos tavrov olB( ( I know God as He is known to Himself). Our histories of Dogma do not generally say much, if anything, upon these sermons of Chrysostom, and their contribution to dogmatics is not indeed very important. But their interest for the psycho logy of religion is all the greater ; and this would still remain, even if they had not contained the passages bearing upon Christo- logy , which begin at the conclusion of the fourth sermon. For we have in them the primary promptings of genuine religious feeling in its specifically numinous character, excited to a passionate intensity and directed with all the charm and eloquence of the Golden-mouthed against the theoretical Aristotelian God of the schools. All that is non-rational in the feeling of God is here in conflict with what is rational and capable of rationalization and threatens to break loose from it altogether.

A strange spectacle! Fordoes not the distinguishing character of Christianity consist in just this that God is near us, that we can possess and apprehend Him, and that man himself is His image and likeness ? And yet we find this Father of the Church battling passionately, as for something that concerned the very essence of Christianity, for the view that God is the Inconceiv able, the Inexpressible, that which gives denial to every notion. And this he does not do on speculative grounds, with the aid of the terms and phrases of any school of theology ; it is rather a

184 CHRYSOSTOM ON THE

sort of instinct in him that guides him with astonishing assurance and accuracy to track out and collect the most wonderful texts of Scripture, so that their full weight becomes felt, as his profoundly penetrating interpretation explains and applies them.

First and chiefly he takes his stand against Conceiving and Comprehension in general, against the idea of TO KaraXrjTTTov, and against the oucetoi Aoyioyxoi (i. e. constructions of the understanding) which seek to delimit and circumscribe God (-n-tpiypafaLv, TreptAa/x- ySdvciv). For his opponents had maintained that a conceptual know ledge of God is possible, definitive and exhaustive, by means of notions, in fact by a single notion (viz. of dyew^o-t a, unbegottenness), in a word, that it is possible to know God exactly (/ACT d/cpi/3ei as eioYvcu). * But we, says Chrysostom, * in opposition to this view, call Him TOV dveK<pacrTOV, TOV aTTfpivorjTOV 6eov, TOV dopaTOV, TOV aKO.ro.- AT/TTTOV, TOV vt/cuWa yX(t)TTr)<; BvvafUV avOp<aTrivr)<s, TOV virepfiaivovra Siavoi as KaTaAi^tv, TOV avf^t^VLao TOV dyyeAois, TOV d$earov ToZs TOV a.Ka.Tav6r)Tov TOIS XcpovfiLfj,, TOV doparov ap^cus covo-t cus Suva/xecriv, KCU aTrAoijs Traarf) rrj KTUTCI. l (Migne, p. 721.) He insults God who seeks to apprehend His essential being (v/Jpi 8e 6 TT;V ova-Lav avTov Trepiepya^o /xevo?, 714 e), he says, and goes on to urge that God is incomprehensible even in His works how much more in His own essential nature ; even in His demeanings (o-vy*aTa/?ao-eis) how much more in His own transcendent majesty ; even to the Cherubim and Seraphim how much more to mere humanity

The dfcaTaA^TTTov in this sense is for Chrysostom primarily the

• exceeding greatness of God, which escapes our mental grasp and

compass because of the dorfcVcta TOJV Aoyur/xaiv, the over-short reach of our faculty of conception. We call it incomprehensibility , and distinguish from it the inapprehensibility which springs, not from the exceeding greatness , but from the wholly other ness of God (Odrcpov TOV Ociov), from what is alien and remote in Him, from what we have called the * mysterium stupendum . And it is instructive to see how for Chrysostom too this latter sense of dKaTaA^TTTov passes into the former, sometimes blending with it, sometimes plainly distinguished as something beyond and

1 We call Him the inexpressible, the unthinkable God, the invisible, the inapprehensible ; who quells the power of human speech and tran scends the grasp of mortal thought ; inaccessible to the angels, unbeheld of the Seraphim, unimagined of the Cherubim, invisible to rules and authorities and powers, and, in a word, to all creation.

INCONCEIVABLE IN GOD 185

higher than it. We have said already that we have the experi ence of the wholly other , where we come upon something which not merely overtops our every concept, but astounds us by its absolute and utter difference from our whole nature. Chrysostom similarly contrasts the avOp^irirq <vo-is with the 6tla <vW as being incommensurable with it, and therefore incapable of understanding it, and his words refer not only to the narrow ness and meagreness of our understanding, but just to this sheer difference in quality of the * wholly other .

This sort of apostrophe is common with him : "AvflpuTros &v 6tov

Tro\vTrpa.yfjiovtiS j Apxct yap TO. oi o/iara \ptXa TTJS dyota? $(la.L TIJV VTrepfioXi jv avOpwrros yjj KOL OTTToSos VTrdp^djv, a-up Kol cu/xa, ^d/yros /ecu avOos \6prov, <TKIO. Kal /caTrvos Kai /laTcudrr/s (712). 1 And the same

note sounds even more clearly in an exposition of Komans ix. 20, 21 (715). As little as the clay can master or comprehend the potter because of its essential difference from him, even so little can man comprehend God. * Or rather, far less, for man the potter is in the end himself but clay. But the difference between the being of God and the being of man is of such a kind that no word can express it and no thought appraise it. His position is put more unmistakably still in the following passage :

He dwells, says St. Paul, in an unapproachable light. 2 Observe here the exactitude of St. Paul s expression. . . . For he says not merely in an incomprehensible, but (what conveys far more) in an altogether " unapproachable " light. We say "inconceivable " and "incomprehensible" of something which, though it eludes con ception, does not elude all inquiry and questioning. " Unap proachable ", on the other hand, means something which in principle excludes the very possibility of inquiry, which is quite inaccessible by conceptual investigation. A sea into which divers may plunge, but which they cannot fathom, would represent the merely " incomprehensible " (aKaroA^Trrov). It would only repre sent the " unapproachable " (a.7rp6cnTov) if it remained in principle beyond search and beyond discovery. (p. 721.) And so too in the fourth discourse (upon Eph. iii. 8) (p. 729) : Ti CO-TIV av^t^yiatrrov ;

firj 8iW/zevov ^rjTr}Orjvai f ov JJLOVOV 8e /IT/ Svi dfjLfvov tvptOrjva.t, dAA* ov&k

1 Dost thon, a man, presume to busy thyself with God ? Nay, the bare names (of man) suffice to show the extent of this fully ; man that ig earth and dust,Jlesh and blood, grass and the Jloicer of grass, shadowed smoke and raniti/.

1 1 Tim. vi. 16 $d>c olnvv an^AtuTov. R.V. unapproachable .

186 CHRYSOSTOM ON THE

i.. ( l What is " unsearchable " ? To be beyond searching, that is, to be such as excludes not discovery only but also tracing/)

And this line of thought draws him imperceptibly farther. The bounds of the incomprehensible are extended, and the whole numinous consciousness is set astir in it, one element in the feel ing prompting to the others. The mysterium stupcndum passes directly over into mysterium tremendum and maicstas, so that we might entitle the Discourses, instead of De Incomprehensibili , 1 De Numine ac Numinoso .

Specially noticeable in this connexion is the passage in which Chrysostom brings clearly out the psychological distinction between numinous and merely rational wonder. He cites that truly significant text from Ps. cxxxix. 14, which runs in the Septuagint : * I praise Thee : for that Thou madest Thyself fearfully wondrous V and then gives a subtle analysis of the feelings there expressed.

• What does " fearfully " mean here ? Many things move us to

wonder in which there is nothing "fearful" the beauty of a colonnade, for example ; the beauty of pictures, or bodily loveli ness. Again, we wonder at the greatness of the sea and its measureless expanse, but terror and "fear" only seize upon us when we gaze down into its depths. So, too, here the Psalmist. When he gazes down into the immeasurable, yawning (agave s) Depth 2 of the divine Wisdom, dizziness comes upon him and he recoils in terrified wonder and cries : . . . "Thy knowledge is too wonderful for me ; it is high, above my power (I am too weak for it: LXX)." The dizziness and the unique feeling of the uncanny, which we have called stupor and tremor, are here clearly noted by Chrysostom. And he rightly cites also the profoundly numinous exclamation of St. Paul (Rom. xi. 33) : Dizzy before the unfathomable main and gazing down into its yawning depths, he recoils precipitately and cries aloud : " O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. . . . " (Migne, p. 705).

The passage on page 733 should be read in close connexion with this. Nowhere has the awe and even the eerie shuddering and amazement at the supernatural been more vividly and truly recaptured in feeling, and nowhere has it been portrayed with

(rot on ()ofpa>s f

5 Reading puOos for the undoubtedly erroneous Trt

INCONCEIVABLE IN GOD 187

a more gripping and constraining power. Expertus loquitur! This is the voice not of the Platonist or Neo-Platonist ; it is the voice of antiquity itself, typified in one who had found in Pagan ism and Judaism and Christianity alike those primal and ele mental experiences out of which all religion has arisen and without which no religion is worthy of the name, and who had made them his very own in all the force of growth sometimes rank and violent enough which originally characterized them. Chrysostom describes thus the experience of Dan. x. 5-8, and the state of ecstasy into which Daniel falls in his encounter with the Unseen : For just as happens when the charioteer looses hold of the reins in terror, so that the horses bolt and the chariot over turns, ... so it befell the Prophet. His affrighted soul could not bear the sight of the Angel made manifest, could not endure the supernatural light, and was overwhelmed. It strove to break free from the bonds of the flesh as from a harness . . . and he lay there in a swoon. Very similar is the comment on the vision of Ezekiel. Chrysostom realizes that the aw T e in these experiences does not find its origin in any self-depreciation of an ethical or rational sort (e. g. from an uneasy conscience or the like), but that they are the natural reactions of the creature, of the acr$eveia <vVca;s face to face with transcendent, unearthly reality, as such. I cite to you the case of the holy Daniel, the friend of God, who, because of his wisdom and righteousness, might well have been justly con fident, just in order that no one may suppose, if I show even him to you weakening, collapsing, powerless, and overwhelmed before the presence of the Angel, that this befalls him because of his sins and his evil conscience, but that this example may throw a clear light on the impotence of our nature.

Naturally the passage in Genesis xviii. 27 has not escaped him ; still less the scene in Isa. vi. But let us now leave St. Paul and the prophets and ascend into Heaven to see if haply any one there knows what God s essential being is. ... What do we hear from the Angels ? Do they inquire and reason meticulously among themselves about God s nature ? By no means. What do they do? They praise Him. They fall down and worship Him with a great trembling (p-f.ro. TroXArjs TT)V tfrpiicrfi, p. 707). They turn their eyes away, and can themselves not endure the vouch safed revelation of God. Again: Tell me, wherefore do they cover their faces and hide them with their wings? Why, but

188 CHRYSOSTOM ON THE

that they cannot endure the dazzling radiance and its rays that pour from the Throne ? Nor does he ignore the loci classici of the tremenda maiestas, viz. Ps. civ. 32 and Job ix. 6 sqq. : He looketh on the earth and it trembleth : he toucheth the hills and they smoke.* Ps. cxiv. 3 : * The sea saw and fled : Jordan was driven back. * iraa-a fj KTICTIS craAeucrcu, Se Soi/ce, rpe/xti. And he concludes his commentary upon all this with the remark: (I will conclude, for) thought grows weary, not from the extent of what I have spoken but from the trembling it brings. For the soul that concerns itself in these contemplations trembles and is

appalled (iKa/xei TJ/JLLV rj Stavota, ou T<5 TrAry^ct aAAa TTJ (^ptKrj TOJV i/D77/Avoov. TpffJ.fi. yap Kal e/cTreTrX^KTat rj ij/v^r) CTTI TTO\V rats avo> IvSiarpifiovcra. $coptais) (p. 725).

Chrysostom, then, is combating the arrogance and overweening presumptuousness of the human understanding and of the creature in general in imagining that any escape is possible from the incomprehensible, supreme, transcendent, and wholly other nature of God. And it is because he wishes to shatter this human complacency, to overawe and overwhelm, that he portrays these aspects of the numinous. But he does not leave out the others or fail to note the paradox, that this * incomprehensible is at the same time a fascinans and an intimate and essential possession of the human soul. Blank amazement is to him at the same time enraptured adoration ; speechlessness in the presence of the inap prehensible passes over and only an understanding of the 1 harmony of contrasts can show how into a humble gratitude that it is so, that it is * fearfully wonderful . He cites again Ps. cxxxix. 14, and interprets it thus : See here the nobility of this servant of God (David). " I thank Thee " (evxapurroi crot), he says in effect, "for that I have a Lord who is beyond comprehen sion." Tersteegen means the same when he uses the words A comprehended God is no God to express praise ; as does Goethe, in the words of the archangels hymn in Faust :

Ihr Anblick gibt den Engeln Starke, Weil keiner sie ergriinden mag. 1

And SO with Chrysostom : this u.KaTa\r]7rTov is e/ceiVy; /xaKapta ovcrta a favourite and recurring expression of his. And we feel that

1 Its (sc. the Sun s) aspect gives the angels strength because none may fathom it. [The usual reading is wenn, though , for well, because . Trans.]

INCONCEIVABLE IN GOD 189

this Being is incomprehensible because it is blessed , and blessed because it is incomprehensible . In the very passion with which he battles for the unimaginable God, who makes His worshipper weak and dizzy with awe, there yet glows un- uttered and unexpressed an enthusiastic sense of the soul having been carried away in rapture and taken up into the being of God.

The aKaTdXrjTTTov involves a denial of conceptual designations, and hence come the negative attributes of deity, which Chryso- stom frequently employs, singly or in series a negativa thco- logia in little. But this negative theology does not mean that faith and feeling are dissipated and reduced to nothing ; on the contrary, it contains within it the loftiest spirit of devotion, and it is out of such negative attributes that Chrysostom fashions the most solemn confessions and prayers. He thereby shows once more that feeling and experience reach far beyond conceiv ing, and that a conception negative in form may often become the symbol (what we have called an * ideogram ) for a content of meaning which, if absolutely unutterable, is none the less in the highest degree positive. And the example of Chrysostom at the same time shows that a negative theology can and indeed must arise, not only from the infusion of Hellenistic speculation and nature mysticism , but from purely and genuinely religious roots, namely, the experience of the numinous.

The insistence upon the inconceivable and incomprehensible in God did not cease to be a point of honour in Christian theology with Chrysostom. The forms this protest took did indeed vary : it appears as the assertion at one time that God stands above the reach of all possible predication whatever, and so is Nothing ness and the * Silent desert ; at another, that He is dvoWu/xos, TravoWyxo?, o/zaw/xos ; at another, that He can indeed be made the subject of predication, but only in so far as all attributes are mere 1 nomina ex partc intcllectus nostri ; or again, the sternest form of all, it reproduces the line of thought of Job, as can be seen now and then in Luther in his notion of the deus absconditus the thought, namely, that God Himself is not only above every human grasp, but in antagonism to it. 1

1 Compare also Luther s Short Form of the Ten Commandments, the Cited, and the. Lord s 1 raytr (1520) : 1 venture to put my trust in the one God alone, the invisible and incomprehensible, who hath created Heaven and Earth and is alone above all creatures.

190 CHRYSOSTOM ON THE

All these doctrines are preserving a heritage passionately won against the opposition of ancient errors. They do so, certainly, at the cost of a one-sided emphasis, for the meaning Christians attach to the word * God is indubitably also a profoundly rational one, the basis indeed of all reason. Yet this is bound up with a still profounder meaning, which, as we have seen, is beyond and above all conception.

With the discourse of Chrysostom we may compare Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium (Migne, S. Gr. 45). What stirs Chryso stom passionately as a matter of the first moment is indeed only of secondary importance in Gregory, incidental to his dogmatic inquiries. But even so he, too, can write (p. 601) : t Se TIS

airaiTOLr) rrjs Octets oucrias tp/xr/veiav nva Kal inroypa^v Kal c^rj-yrjcriv, d/A<z0as ctvat rrj<s TOKIVTT?? cro^t as OUK apvrycro/xe^a . . . on OVK CCTTI TO aopLcrrov Kara rr]v tfrvanv eTrivoia Ttvi prjfj.dr(t)v Bia\r)<f>67Jvau tTrei ovv KpeiTTOv eaTi /cat vij/rjXorfpov rrj<s 6vofJ.acmKrjs o-^jaao-i as TO eiov says the Latin translator] auoTrrj Ti/mv ra vrrep Xoyov re Kal fjiefjiaOijKafjLfv. ( But if one asks for an interpretation or description or explanation of the divine nature we shall not deny that in such a science as this we are unlearned. . . . For there is no way of comprehending the indefinable as it is by a scheme of words. For the Divine is too noble and too lofty to be indicated by a name : and we have learned to honour by silence that which transcends reason and thought. )

But another, long before Chrysostom the heretic Marcion writing in a different situation, not within but on the fringe of the Church, had experienced the inconceivable aspect of the numinous and extolled it in words of an almost intoxicated fervour: O it is a marvel beyond marvels, enravishment, power, and wonder, that one can say nought about the Gospel, and think nought about it and compare it to nothing.

It is remarkable to see how the several moments of the numinous in experience are constantly compounded and blended afresh so as to produce quite special and peculiar types of religion. In Marcion the original moment tremendum is silenced before the consoling power of the Gospel, in fulfilment of the word Perfect love casts out feai . But there remains strongly and profoundly felt the

• wholly other , the ineffable and inconceivable, in his strange

God , and in the first words of his treatise, whose * violent fer ment (in Harnack s phrase) reveals the element of fascination .

INCONCEIVABLE IN GOD 191

The sense of the august lives in the feeling of distance in face of the strange God , and in that too we detect a light thrill that is the awe of the tremcndum reawakened and returning in a nobler form. 1

APPENDIX II

THE NUMINOUS IN POETRY, HYMN, AND LITURGY

Example of numinous poetry.

From Bhagavad-Glta, Chapter XI (Barnett s translation slightly

altered).

IN the Bhagavad-Gitft, Krishna, the embodiment of Vishnu Vishnu himself in human form instructs Aryuna in the deepest mysteries of his religion. Aryuna then desires to behold God himself in his own form, and his petition is granted. And now in Chapter XI there follows a theophany of terrific grandeur, which seeks to give a feeling of the unapproachable essence of the Divine before which the creature trembles and falls, by embodying the human and natural means of terror, majesty, and sublimity. Aryuna stands in his war-chariot, about to enter the carnage of the battle against his brother Yudhishthira s enemies. Krishna is his charioteer. Aryuna tells him his request. Show to me thy changeless Self, Sovran of the Rule. Krishna-Vishnu answers him :

7. Behold now, O Wearer of the Hair-Knot, the whole universe,

moving and unmoving, solely lodged in this my body, and all else that thou art lain to see.

8. But for that thou canst not see Me with this thine own eye,

I give thee a divine eye ; behold my sovran Rule.

9. Thus speaking, Hari (i. e. Vishnu), the great Lord of the Rulo,

then showed to Pritha s son his sovran form supreme,

10. of many mouths and eyes, of many divine ornaments, with

uplifted weapons many and divine ;

11. wearing divine flower-chaplets and robes, with anointment of

divine perfumes, compound of all marvels, tha boundless god facing all ways.

1 See Harnack, Marcion, 1921, p. 138.

192 THE NUMINOUS IN POETRY,

12. If the light of a thousand suns should of a sudden rise in the heavens, it would be like to the light of that mighty being. . . .

14. Thereupon the Wealth- Winner (i.e. Aryuna), smitten with amazement, with hair standing on end, bowed his head, and with clasped hands spake to the God. . . .

17. I behold Thee bearing diadem, mace, and disc, massed in radiance, on all sides glistening, hardly discernible, shining round about as gleaming fire and sun, immeasurable. . . .

20. For this mid-space between heaven and earth and all the

quarters of the sky are filled with Thee alone. Seeing this Thy fearful and wonderful form, O great-hearted one, the threefold world quakes.

21. These hosts of Suras come unto Thee; some, affrighted, praise

with clasped hands. With cries of " Hail ! " the hosts of Great Saints and Adepts sing to Thee hymns of abounding praise.

22. All the Spirits and Divine Powers that live in heaven and

earth, in clouds and winds, in air and water, Daemons, Manes, Asuras, Saints, and Adepts, all gaze on Thee in amazement.

23. Looking upon Thy mighty form of many mouths and eyes,

of many arms and thighs and feet, of many bellies, and grim with many teeth, O mighty-armed one, the worlds and I quake.

24. For as I behold Thee touching the heavens, glittering, many-

hued, with yawning mouths, with wide eyes agleam, my inward soul trembles, and I find not constancy nor peace, O Vishnu.

25. Seeing Thy mouths grim with teeth, like to the fire of the

last day, I recognize not the quarters of the heavens, and take no joy ; Lord of Gods, home of the universe, be gracious !

26. These sons of Dhritarashtra all, with the hosts of kings,

Bhishma, Drona, and the Charioteer s son yonder, and likewise the chief of our warriors,

27. hasting enter into Thy mouths grim with fangs and terrible ;

some, caught between the teeth, appear with crushed heads.

28. As many currents of rivers flow to meet the sea, so these

warriors of the world of mankind pass into Thy blazing mouths.

29. As moths with exceeding speed pass into a lighted fire to

perish, so pass the worlds with exceeding speed into Thy mouths to perish.

HYMN, AND LITURGY 193

30. Thou devourest and lickest up all the worlds around with

flaming mouths ; filling the whole universe with radiance, grim glow Thy splendours, O Vishnu !

31. Relate to me who Thou art in this grim form. Homage to

Thee, chief of gods ; be gracious ! I would fain know Thee as First Being. . . .

Thereupon Vishnu reassumes his friendly Krishna-form. Ar- yuna s petition to comprehend the incomprehensible is not granted him. It is forbidden to man, as Luther says, to soar into the height of Majesty : he must confine himself to the Word of gracious Promise. Such a word is imparted. The tremendous chapter closes with the words which expositors take as the sum and epitome of the whole Glta :

65. * He who does what he does for Me alone ; who is given over to Me, who is devoted to Me, void of attachment, without hatred to any born being, O son of Pandu, comes to Me.

TJie Numinous in Hymn and Liturgy.

A comparison of two poems may indicate the difference between a merely rational glorification of the Godhead and one that also prompts to a feeling of the non-rational, the numinous, in its aspect of mysterium tremendum . Gellert can sing of The Honour of God from Nature powerfully and finely enough

Die Himmel riihmen des Ewigen Ehre, Ihr Schall pflanzt seinen Namen fort.

Here everything is bright, rational, and intimate up to the last verse :

Ich bin Dein Scho pfer, bin Weisheit und Glite,

Ein Gott der Ordnung und Dein Heil.

Ich bin s ! Mich liebe von ganzem Gemtite,

Und ii i in in an meiner Gnade teil.

But, beautiful as this hymn is, we do not encounter there the 1 honour of God in all its fullness. Some element is missing, and what this is we feel at once when we compare with this hymn that composed at an earlier date by E. Lange, To the Majesty of God :

Vor Dir erbebt der Engel Chor, Sie schlagen Aug und Antlitz nieder, So schrecklich kommst Du ihnen vor Und davon schallen ihre Lieder. . . . O

194 NUMINOUS IN POETRY, HYMN, AND LITURGY

Denn Dein ist Kraft und Ruhm,

Das Reich und Heiligtum,

Da mich Entsetzen niir entreisset.

Bei Dir ist Majestat

Die iiber alles geht,

Und heilig, heilig, heilig, heisset.

That goes farther than Gellert. And yet even here there is still something lacking, something that we find in the Song of the Seraphim in Isaiah vi. Even Lange, despite his numb amaze ment , sings ten long stanzas ; the angels sing a bare two lines. And he incessantly speaks to God in the second person singular ; whereas the angels speak before Yahweh in the third person. 1

A liturgy unusually rich in numinous hymns and prayers is that of Yom Kippur, the great Day of Atonement of the Jews. It is overshadowed by the Holy, Holy, Holy of the Seraphim (Isa. vi), which recurs more than once, and it has prayers in it as wonderful as the ubelcen ten pachdeM :

1 So then, let Thy fear, O Yahweh our God, come over all Thy creatures, and reverent dread (emateka) of Thee upon all that Thou hast made, that all Thy creatures may fear Thee and every being bow before Thee and that they may all become bonded together to do Thy will with all their heart, even as we know, O Yahweh our God, that Thine is the lordship, that might is in Thy hand and power in Thy right hand and Thy name exalted above all that Thou hast created.

APPENDIX III ORIGINAL NUMINOUS SOUNDS

FEELINGS and emotions, as states of mental tension, find their natural relaxation in uttered sounds. It is evident that the numinous feeling also, in its first outbreak in consciousness, must

1 In point of fact one cannot always speak to God as Thou , and sometimes not at all. St. Theresa addresses God as Eternal Majesty , and the French readily use Vous for Tu . And Goethe came very near to the tremendum mysterium -when he said to Eckermann (Dec. 31, 1823) : People treat the name of God as though the inconceivable and wholly incomprehensible supreme Being were not far more than such as they. Else they would not say : " The Lord God," " the dear God," " the good God." Were they penetrated through and through by a sense of His greatness, they would be dumb and unable to name Him for very veneration.

ORIGINAL NUMINOUS SOUNDS 195

have found sounds for its expression, and at first inarticulate sounds rather than words ; but it is improbable that it devised special and peculiar sounds for itself. Analogous as it is to other feelings, it no doubt adopted the already familiar sounds expressive of the emotions of terror, amazement, joy, and the like. But it could, and sometimes did, put, as it were, a special stamp upon sounds coined for a different use. The German interjection Hu I , for instance, expresses to-day invariably and exclusively, not terror in general, but terror accompanied by shuddering, i.e. numinous terror . So, too, whereas hus in vulgar Arabic is, I am told, a sound expressive of soothing in general, the correspond ing Hebrew sound has is only found in a numinous context. (Cf. Amos vi. 10 : Hold thy tongue (7ms), for we may not make men tion of the name of the Lord. Zeph. i. 7: Hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord God. Hab. ii. 20; Judges iii. 19; also Amos viii. 3.) Such a specialization of a common interjection has very possibly often come about. When the ecstatic Dervishes of Islam bring their Zikr to an end, they break into ejaculations, such as Allah Akbar , which end finally in a protracted groan ing Hu. This IlQ has indeed been explained on rational grounds as the Arabic personal pronoun of the third person, He , i.e. Allah. But any one who has actually heard these ejaculations finds it hard to think of them simply as pronouns. Rather we have the impression that in this sound the numinous feeling is seeking to discharge itself.

This specialization is perhaps the clue to the understanding of the Sanskrit word atcarya, to which reference has been made more than once. Its derivation has been hitherto an enigma ; but one may conjecture that the explanation is in fact very simple, and that the word is just a compound of the two words as and carya. Carya = agendum , that which is done or is to be done ; while as is a primitive sound to express the stupendum , the long protracted open vowel of wonder (a, oh, ha), combining with the sibilant, which in all languages is used to express or produce a terrified silence (cf. Hist! Sh ! Sst !). An fe-carya l would not then be properly and primarily anything conceptual at all, nor even a marvel , but simply that in the presence

1 Compare the exactly parallel forms a-kfira, ahan-kdra: and vide Soderblom, Da$ Werden des (Jottcsglaubens, 1916, p. 90, on the Manitu of the Indians.

o 2

196 ORIGINAL NUMINOUS SOUNDS

of which we must exclaim " as ! as! ". If this interpreta tion is correct, we can detect in this word just the original shudder of numinous awe in the first and earliest form in which it expressed itself, before any figure of speech, objective represen tation, or concept had been devised to explicate it ; it bursts forth crudely and vehemently in this primal cry and is unable to name its object otherwise than as a something before which such sounds must involuntarily be uttered. Professor Geldner has kindly sent me a reference to a passage in the Kena-Upanishad (iv. 29) which seems to me to be an excellent confirmation of this and at the same time to illustrate how the primal numinous feel ing did originally emerge as pure feeling, before any concept or concrete representation of it had come into being. The fine, nal ve old Kena-Upanishad aims at making perceptible to the disciple that before which * all words turn back , and proceeds just as we do, by trying to produce in him an appropriate feeling- reflex by means of a simile. The lines run :

This is the way It (sc. Brahman) is to be illustrated : When lightnings have been loosened :

aaah ! When that has made the eyes to be closed

aaah ! So far concerning Deity (devata).

What, then, is the devata, the Brahman? It is an a-caryam, i. e. that in whose presence we must exclaim "aaah ! " And one cannot * illustrate the numinous character of this aaah by any better analogy than that of the lightning here given. The unexpectedness and suddenness of the lightning-flash, its dreadful weirdness, its overpoweringness and dazzling splendour, the fright and the delight of it, give it an almost numinous impressiveness, and indeed often do produce an actual numinous impression on the mind.

This reference of Professor Geldner s seems to me all the more significant from the fact that it appears to me to adumbrate quite a new method of solving the old puzzle of the Brahman , and what it means. For this task philosophical speculation is too elevated, mere etymology too insufficient, a method. What is necessary in order really to get at the heart of the matter is to have rediscovered and recaptured the feelings which this word originally connoted and which thrill through it. And for this we have again a very

ORIGINAL NUMINOUS SOUNDS 197

instructive passage in that which, immediately preceding the one just quoted (Kena, iii. 15). at the same time serves to elucidate it. It is where the Devas catch for the first time an intimation of the Brahman . They ask, in amazement, and yet obviously also in extreme eagerness : Kim idamydksam ? of which Deussen s trans lation What marvellous thing (Wunderding) is this? is too tame a rendering. It is more exactly: What un-thing (Unding) is this? in the sense in which this expression is popularly used for a thing of which no one can say what it is or whence it comes, and in whose presence we have the feeling of the uncanny. Yaks a , like Unding , is sometimes a word for a ghost, and is originally the unyehcucr , monstrous , in the sense of the un canny, e<-rie, apparition , or spectre. And it is just as such that the Brahman* in this passage behaves. It does the things goblins and magical creatures usually do, vanishing suddenly like a true phantom at the climax of the transaction. Such feelings, which we meet at the commencement of the great Mysticism of Brahman, attend its course continually, and he who cannot recognize and detect their presence there cannot do more than reconstruct the meagre skeleton of concepts they have left behind. And the same thing, mutatis mutandis, holds good also for Western Mysticism.

Another original sound in which the numinous feeling is articulated is certainly the holy syllable t om\ It likewise has no sort of conceptual connotation. Like the particle as, it is simply an articulated sound no word, nor even a complete syllable, for the m in which it ends is not an ordinary m , but simply the long protracted nasal continuation of the deep o sound. It is really simply a sort of growl or groan, sounding up from within as the quasi-reflex expression of profound emotion in circumstances of a numinous-magical nature, and serving to relieve consciousness of a felt burden, almost physical in its constraining force. And this constraint and compulsion to expression are still recoverable to our feeling when we recapture this mood of submergence and absorption in the wholly other .

This Om is exactly parallel to the similar sound in Sanskrit, Hum like it, nothing but a numinous ejaculation, with probably no further significance.

It would be a task for the history and psychology of religion alike to examine the innumerable nainea of gods and demons, anJ

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perhaps also the various designations for ghost, soul, and spirit, with a view to seeing whether many of them may not simply have arisen from original numinous sounds and thus be parallels to the name d&carya, already considered. 1

APPENDIX IV

SPIRIT AND SOUL AS NUMINOUS ENTITIES

THE non-rational which we were looking for in the Idea of the divine was found in the numinous, and in our recognition of this we came to see that rationalistic speculation tends to conceal the divine in God, and that before God becomes for us rationality, absolute reason, a personality, a moral will, He is the wholly non-rational and * other , the being of sheer mystery and marvel. We had to turn to the feelings of horror and shudder and spectral haunting in order, by means of these caricatures of the authentic numinous emotions, to break through the hard crust of rationalism and bring into play the feelings buried deep down in our religious consciousness.

Now what is true of our apprehension of the divine is true also of its counterpart in the creature soul and spirit. Gregory of Nyssa well says : Since one of the signs of the Divine Nature is its essential incomprehensibility, in this also must the copy be like the original. For were the nature of the copy comprehended, when the original was above comprehension, the copy would be a mistaken one. But, inasmuch as the nature of our spirit is above our understanding, it has here an exact resemblance to the all-sublime, representing by its own unfathomableness the incom prehensible Being of God. Here, too, we need to break up anew

1 K. Miiller suggests that the divine name Yah, Yahu, may have had this origin. Euoios , the secondary name of Bacchus, may also denote simply him in whose presence one ejaculates Euoi . He could cite in his support Jelaleddin, who says in Divan 31. 8: I know no other than Yahu. This is here certainly nothing but one of the most familiar dervish cries (as the translator adds in a note, p. 282), and will then mean, in accordance with the usual rendering, he , or, as we rather suspect, simply hu\ Nicholson puts Yahweh in brackets, without further justification. Cf. R. A. Nicholson, Selected Poems from the Divani Sharnsi Tabriz, Cambridge, 1898.

SPIRIT 1 AND SOUL AS NUMINOUS ENTITIES 199

our hardened and crusted feelings and to withstand the intellec- tualizing tendency to which we are so prone in our doctrine of the soul and its creation in God s image. For this divine image in man also does not merely consist in the fact that he is reasonable, moral, intelligent, and a person, but primarily in the fact that in its profoundest depths his being is indeed for religious self-con sciousness something numinous that the soul is mystery and marvel. This is ho\v Mysticism apprehends it, and we can understand at once why this is so from our definition of Mysticism as the tendency to stress up to an extreme and exaggerated point the non-rational aspect of religion. And what was already stir ring in crude fashion at the earliest and lowest stage of numinous feeling recurs at the most exalted level of Mysticism with after effects that colour the whole experience. In the mystic s praise of the soul, and in that fundus animae of which he tells the mysteries, there echoes the stupor before the wholly other that characterized the primitive belief in souls and even primitive feeling of the presence of ghosts.

We said above (p. 124) that the most interesting point in the primitive idea of soul is not the form given to it in fantasy, multifarious in its variations, but the element of feeling stupor which it liberates, and the character of mystery and wholly otherness which surrounds it. This fact is obscured in the measure in which the soul becomes later the subject of myth, fairy story, and narrative, speculation and doctrine, and finally of psychological investigation. It then becomes more and more something entirely rational ; its origin in magic and mystery becomes overlaid with concepts, scholastic terms, and classifica tions. The Doctrine of souls or * Atman of the Indian Sankhya system is the best example of this. But even this cannot entirely conceal the fact that Soul or Atman is properly the thing of marvel and stupefaction, quite undefinable, outsoaring all concep tions, wholly alien to our understanding. And this finds wonderful expression in the verses of the Glta, 2. 29, which we transcribe here of intention in the original :

AScaryavat paSyati kaScid enam. AScaryavad vadati tathaiva can yah. AScaryavac cainam an yah Srinoti,

Srutva pyenam veda na caiva kaScit.

The sound of these verses suggests a magic formula, almost a

200 SPIRIT AND < SOUL

conjuration, especially when they are heard intoned in the peculiar sacred sing-song in which such lines are commonly recited. The note of magic and mystery is very palpable in them. As for the translation, it is usual to render Ascaryam by strange ,

• wondrous , * a thing of wonder or marvel ; but we should

perhaps catch the emotional accent in the lines more exactly as follows :

As wholly other doth one gaze upon it (sc. Atman).

He speaketh of the * wholly other , who speaketh of the Atman.

Something wholly other hath he learned, who hath learned

the Atman. Yet none, albeit he hath learned it, may come to know it.

But, however they be rendered into another language, there is living in these old phrases a profoundly numinous self-feeling, which still retains a trace of the stupor before an apparition of spirits. And it is continued where the Glta (2. 25) designates the Atman the acintya , i. e. that which is incomprehensible by thought. In this it is exactly like the fundus animae , the

• spark , i Synderesis , or * Inner Abyss of our own Western

mystics. In both cases we have, surviving in an ennobled form, the primal awe and shrinking before the presence of dscaryam and adbhutam , the haunting presence that prompts the earliest numinous feelings. For, as an old mystic tells us, the soul and its bottommost depth lie hidden away, ineffable as God himself so that no human skill ever attains to be able to know what the Soul is in its bottommost depth. For that a supernatural skill is needed. It is what is without a name. And the heights and depths which are disclosed in these Men can be grasped by no human sense or reason, for they surpass in their profundities all understanding - 1

Finally, it may be said that we catch a last reflection of the numinous wonder in the wonder, one might almost say in the eager curiosity, with which Augustine roves through the chambers of the soul, even when he is pursuing * psychological discussion. He feels that he has a story of marvel to tell when he describes the soul. His psychology is half nurninology . Cf. Confessions, x. 6-27.

The clearer insight into the inmost marvel of the soul is not set free as a sort of reflex : it comes in the experience as an uprush,

1 Greith, pp. 70 and 80.

AS NUMINOUS ENTITIES 201

an irruption, a burst of illumination, * like a flash , in the English phrase, as a sudden aper?u , in Goethe s. And so it easily shows the two elements ; on the one hand there is an entry or penetra tion into consciousness of inspiration, sudden, unmeditated, once and for all achieved ; and on the other hand there is a reminis cence (anamnesis), a recollection of something that was a familiar possession in the obscurity of feeling even before the moment of insight. Both of these elements are indicated in the old Kena- Upanishad, when (iv. 30), after speaking of the Brahman in the significant verses we have already considered (p. 196), the text goes on at once to speak of the Atman, in words which may be rendered thus :

Now in respect to the Atman:

It is as though something forces its way into consciousness And consciousness suddenly remembers

Such a state of mind illustrates the awakening of knowledge of the Atman.

We may compare the saying of Plato, already quoted (p. 98 n.); and, finally, the words of Meister Eckhart :

Upon this matter a heathen sage hath a fine saying in speech with another sage: " I become aware of something in me which flashes upon my reason. I perceive of it that it is something, but what it is I cannot conceive. Only meseems that, could I conceive it, I should comprehend all truth." (W. Lehmann, Meister Eckhart, Gottingen, 1917, p. 243.)

And the obscure Heracleitus says: Thou canst not discover the bounds of the soul albeit thou pacest its every road: so deep is its foundation.

APPENDIX V

THE SUPRA-PERSONAL IN THE NUMINOUS

WE said above that the feeling of the wholly other gives rise in Mysticism to the tendency to follow the via negationis , by which every predicate that can be stated in words becomes excluded from the absolute Numen i. e. from Deity till finally the Godhead LJ designated aa nothingness and nullity , bearing

202 THE SUPRA-PERSONAL

in mind always that these terms denote in truth immeasurable plenitude of being. Now this is also the origin of that tendency to let the conception of personality and the personal also be sub merged in the same nothingness , a tendency which is in appear ance so irreligious. We need not dispute that the denial of personality to God does often in fact denote a wholly irreligious attitude ; mostly it is simply a disguised form of atheism, or betokens a desperate attempt to equate faith in God with belief in natural law and with naturalism. But it would be a huge error to suppose that anything of this kind is in the minds of the mystics when they set themselves to oppose the idea of personality in God. We shall be in a better position to understand what they are contending for if we take Mysticism following our previous definition as meaning the preponderance in religious conscious ness, even to the point of one-sided exaggeration, of its non- rational features. What we have, then, is a sort of antinomy, arising from the inner duality in the idea of the divine and the tension of its more rational and its more non-rational elements. (The non-rational assumes thus an apparently irrational character.) It is the wholly other aspect of the numen, resisting every analogy, every attempted comparison, and every determination; so that it is here really true that omnis determinatio est negatio.

Now this holds good not only in the case of the most lofty and reverent feelings, in which devotion and worship reach their con summation, but also in the case of that primary and elemental awe of which we spoke on pages 129-132. Let us glance once more at the experience given in the story of Jacob at Bethel, there cited (Gen. xxviii. 16-17). If we use as a clue to it our own power of imagina tive sympathy, introspection will show that even this experience contains a clear antinomy, a conflict of opposites. We said that the pure elemental awe mirrored in Jacob s first words, How dreadful is this place ! , is rendered explicit in the words that fol low. The simple experience of avvefulness is intej-pretcd all but instinctively, and apart from reflection and the interpretation is, in the English phrase, a presence , a real, present, and personal being. Now though we certainly feel that such an interpretation is needed and in some sense right, and that we should in Jacob s place have found no other to explicate our feeling, yet we are no less certainly conscious of a counter-impulse in us which resists

IN THE NUMINOUS 203

it, suggesting that, when all is said, such expressions as Being , 1 Person , Thou , He , are strangely alien and repugnant to the very import of tho experience. Does this Power that impresses us with such awe admit of being comprised in such a firm outline, admit of question and answer in the second person ? Is not this interpretation at first glance distinctly anthropomorphic? The abstract English expression, a presence , is itself a good indica tion of this for a presence is simply felt, and the English usage of words is chary of saying anything more specific. The Personalism of the later developed mythology and the later developments of ordered worship (mostly practised on a wholly personalist basis) have tended more and more to extrude this authentic and sensitive element of feeling from the religious experience; and the daemon or god , which they both con tributed to shape, is not richer but poorer in content than the object of that primal awe , corresponding only to certain sides and aspects of it. Before the gods were the hard-outlined, clear-featured goda of the myths, they were numina , and, though the numcn certainly gains something from subsequent mythology in definitenoss and fixity of representation, it also certainly loses something of its original wealth of meaning in the process. In drawing more near to earth and to humanity, it comes itself to acquire human traits, and, that this tendency may not be carried too far, it is necessary now and then to melt down, as it were, the human lineaments of God in the more elemental entirety of the original experience. Tho numen has, no doubt, in itself per sonal features, which somehow enable the worshipper to refer to it by a pronoun, as he or she . But, while the limits of the personal are at this stage still fluid, they cannot (any more than in the case of the more definite figure of the God ) quite com prise the full import of the inapprehensible and unnameable, which presses out beyond them.

Thus already, at the cutset, w find in the numen of primitive religious feeling that tension between the personal and the supra- personal which recurs again in the maturer stages of the developing experience of God. It is to be found next in the comparatively low level of the daemonic , where it is disclosed in an actual difference in the verbid forms employed. The Greek Baip^v is indisputably a single, concrete, personal Being ; the SaifMoviov, that, for example, of Socrates, is certainly none of these neither

204 THE SUPRA-PERSONAL

concrete, nor personal, and hardly even to be called a being or individual entity. Yet in the impressiveness and devout awe which it suggests Sou/toi/iov is, if anything, the richer of the two terms. In Indian terminology rdksds is the concrete, personal, and masculine Daemon , but a transposition of the accent to the first syllable gives raksas (the neuter), t the daemonic , or rather demonic ; a word, perhaps, more charged with terror than is raksas ; and the fact that the difference is merely one of accent shows very clearly how easily the one meaning passes into the other. But exactly the same thing is seen again at that highest stage, at which the unfolding of the numinous consciousness reaches its climax in India : brahman is the everlasting Lord and God, the personal Brahma ; while brahman is the divine Absolute, the supra-personal Brahma, an It rather than a * He . And the two are bound together in indissoluble union as the two essential poles of the eternal unity of the Numen. And here, again, the closeness of their interconnexion is emphatically shown by the fact that they are denoted by one and the same word and distinguished by a mere change of accent and gender.

Now it is generally supposed that there is something peculiarly and specifically oriental in this characteristic of Indian religion. But this is by no means the case. On the contrary, one may venture to assert that all gods are more than mere (personal) gods, and that all the greater representations of deity show from time to time features which reveal their ancient character as numina and burst the bounds of the personal and theistic. This is obviously the case where the experienced relation of the worshipper to his god does not exclusively take the form of contact with a

• beyond and transcendent being, but comes somehow as the

experience of seizure and possession by the god, as being filled by him, an experience in which the god wholly or partially enters the believer and dwells in him, or assimilates him to his own divine nature, commingling with his spirit and becoming very part of him ; or, again, where the god becomes the sphere in which we live and move and have our being . And what god has not in some sense had this character ? It is certainly true of the personal Isvara of India, who, besides his personal character, pervades his Bhakta as antaryamin , the immanent Indweller; it is true of Ahura-maeda, who by his spirits does the same ; and it is true of Dionysus, Apollo, and Zeus. No less than the mere

IN THE NUMINOUS 205

crude daemon can the god become 7rvef/ia and permeate the soul of man. And in so far the notion of a god passes beyond the sphere of social and personal ideas and breaks through the confines of the merely personal. Persons cannot strictly inter penetrate, cannot become one inclusive of another. Such relations experienced between man and deity become altogether irrational, if we judge them by the standard of personality.

The Yahweh of the Old Testament is also more than a god in the merely personal sense, for though it is a sign of his superior value to all tribal gods, that the personal traits are so incompar ably more strongly marked in him, yet other and non-personal features are not lacking. We come up against these in groping fashion in the comparison made between God s dealings with men and the working of an inexplicable force spontaneously released. But the second name of Yahweh, * Elohim , is also a proof of their existence. Elohim is gods , in the plural ; and * in the begin ning created (sing.) " gods" heaven and earth . Our way to-day, when we try to escape from the too narrow confines of the notion of unitary personality applied to God, is to use either an abstract noun, deity (die Gottheit), or an adjectival neuter expression, the divine (das gottliche). In Israel the same groping instinct had recourse to the adoption or adaptation of a plural substantive form, which was yet made to govern a verb in the singular ! There cannot be a more uncompromising expression of what we called the antinomy or conflict of opposites in the experience of the numinous. It is very similar when later Shamayim, l Heaven , becomes a name for God to be used once as such also in the Gospel. It does not in the least signify an abstract way of conceiving God ; but rather the feeling that endeavours to escape from any too anthropomorphic conception. Above all does the God of Job burst the bounds of interpretation by mere persona lity, as we have already seen. Moreover, Yahweh also is the nuinen which, blowing in the form of spirit, enters as ruach and TTveu/za into his chosen, mingling with their spirit, an antaryamin in full completion.

And so, when we turn to the New Testament, we see that the Pneumatology and doctrine of Immanence in Paul and John, which give such unmistakable expression to the supra-personal aspect of the divine as the Light and the Life , do not mean a sudden irruption into religion of a wholly novel and alien

206 THE SUPRA-PERSONAL

element, but merely the complete realization of what was all the while potential in the character of Yahweh in his essence as a numen.

And what of the loftiest of all Christian claims, God is Love ? Usually we hear this saying without remarking how extraordinary it is. If we think of God in strictly and narrowly personal terms, He can indeed be He that loves , the loving One . But the God who is Love, who pours Himself out as love and becomes the love whereby Christians love, is something more even than this. 1 In fine, even our GOD is more than merely god . And, when Meister Eckhart says that one must stand apart from God in order to find deity, his error is certainly grave, but it is one which we can easily conceive as springing from the very heart of religion. 2

But it is very evident that the religious attitude in face of this supra-personal aspect of the numen must be different from the ordinary attitude in personal intercourse by petition, prayer, colloquy. These have all assuredly pertained to the essence of religion from the earliest times, yet from the beginning they were not the only forms of intercourse. The numen on its side has intercourse with man in attracting him to it, seizing upon him, possessing him, breathing upon him, filling and permeating him. Its function is fvepytio-Oai, and on his side the man, the eve/ryov/x.ei os, is filled, possessed, made one with the numen. And what is true at the lower levels is true also at the highest. The Divine,

1 There is an echo of this antinomy in the dispute of the Scholastics whether the love whereby we love is the Spiritus Sanctus ,i.e. Godllimself, or merely His donum .

8 We have seen that it is an indication of its superiority that in the Biblical conception of God the pole of the personal rather than of the impersonal is altogether preponderant. Taoism stands at the opposite extreme ; but it too is genuine and deeply felt religion, moving as it does wholly in the numinous. H. Hackmann says of it: Taoism originates in the contemplative speculation upon the secret of the world, the mystery of existence. Its basic instinct is to pay reverent and surmiseful heed to the marvellous forces operative in our phenomenal life, which give to its particular details system and connexion with the great unknown background of the universe. The word " mystery" the mysterhtm tre- mendum occupies a more central position in Taoism than in almost any other religion. . . . Here sounds a genuine note in the prodigious symphony of that life of the Boul the religious life which searches and surmises a deeper unity and a firm foundation in the beyond behind the happenings upon earth. (H. Hackmann, Die Monchsregeln des Klostertaoismus , Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, .yii. p. 170.) For this whole question cf. the same author s essay : Uber Objekt und Gebietsumfang der Religion, in Nieuto Theologisch Tijdschrift, 1918.

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experienced as light , fire , and TTVCV/IO, cannot properly accost or be accosted. It is a penetrating glow and illumination, fulfil ment, transfiguration most of all where it is experienced as

• Life , or (what is but the intensification of this) as very Being .

One can make a petition for life, but not to life. One is simply quickened through and through by it ; one cannot address it as Thou . And so intercourse with the numen comprises a way other than that of personal intercourse, that of the mystic . Each of the two, the personal and the mystical, belongs to the other, and the language of devotion uses very naturally the phrases and expressions of both commingled. They are not different forms of religion, still less different stages in religion, the one higher and better than the other, but the two essentially united poles of a single fundamental mental attitude, the religious atti tude. In Luther s conception of faith they are found in this relation openly manifested, where fides denotes both fiducia or trust a term implying personal intercourse and adhaesio , or intimate contact, a term essentially mystical.

It is in the light of this primal fact of religion that we must seek an answer to the question as to the general place of Per- sonalism and Supra-personalism in religious history, and only so are we likely to avoid confounding this question with the question of Theism and Pantheism, with which it has nothing in common. In my books Vishnu-Narayana (pp. 59, 63) and Sid- dhanta dc* Ilamanuja (pp. 2, 80) I have referred further to the subject. And I have shown in a paper, Neues Singen (Christ- liche Welt, 1919, No. 48), its important practical bearings for religious conduct and its expression in prayer and hymn. I reproduce the relevant passage :

Our usual Prayers and Hymns confine themselves to the region which I call the "rational". They lack that element which I call the non-rational or the " numinous ". But this is the other half of religion, its profounder and more mysterious background and basis. Yet only seldom has hymnody hitherto done justice to it. Consequently we are very deficient in the great and impressive "Hymns of Reverence ", the hymns of the (grammatical) third person, and our hymns are almost entirely in the second person, " Thou ", not " He ". Now there is something lacking in this constant, direct, obvious mode of accosting God in the second person singular. The Seraphim in Isaiah vi do not venture on such an address, and many a glorious Ekteny and Litany of the older Liturgies follows their example. The creature

208 THE SUPRA-PERSONAL IN THE NUMINOUS

is simply unable to stand face to face with the Eternal without interruption ; his vision cannot bear the perpetual sight of Holi ness without an occasional screen. He needs sometimes the oblique as well as the straight, frontal approach, the indirect relationship with face half averted and covered, as well as the direct ; and consequently his utterance should not be so continu ally in the form of an address to God as to exclude prayerful and thoughtful discourse about Him. The same holds good of prayer in general, not merely of hymns. " Third person " hymns in this sense are not necessarily less, but under certain conditions may even be more genuine and first-hand utterances than those which address God as "Thou ". There is a further consequence. It is often thought that the designations of deity in impersonal, neuter terms (" It "), rather than in terms of person and masculine pronoun ("He", "Thou"), are too poor and too pale to gain a place in our Christian thought of God. But this is not always correct. Frequently such terms indicate the mysterious overplus of the non-rational and numinous, that cannot enter our " concepts " because it is too great and too alien to them ; and in this sense they are quite indispensable, even in hymns and prayers. It is a defect in our devotional poetry that it hardly knows any other image for the eternal mystery of the Godhead than those drawn from social intercourse and personal relationship, and so it tends to lose sight of just the mysterious transcendent aspect of deity. Assuredly God is for us " Thou " and a Person. But this Per sonal character is that side of His nature which is turned man- ward it is like a "Cape of Good Hope", jutting out from a mountain range which, as it recedes, is lost to view in the " tene- brae aeternae " only to be expressed by the suspension of speech and the inspiration of sacred song.

So far we have spoken of the personal and supra-personal as applied to the supreme, spiritual Being. But what is true here is no less true of that which was created in its image, our own human soul or spirit. In us too all that we call person and per sonal, indeed all that we can know or name in ourselves at all, is but one element in the whole. Beneath it lies, even in us, that wholly other , whose profundities, impenetrable to any concept, can yet be grasped in the numinous self-feeling l by one who has experience of the deeper life.

1 We say numinous self -feeling , not numinous self -consciousness , as Schleiermacher called it, who may be said to have re-discovered it. The ambiguity of his nomenclature, however, does not detract from the importance of his discovery.

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APPENDIX VI

THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT IN LUTHER S CONCEPTION OF FAITH

IN connexion with the discussion of Luther s conception of faith on page 107, I would refer to my book, Die Anschauung vom Heiligen Gciste bei Luther, the chapter Geist und Glaube (pp. 25-46), which includes the inquiry into Luther s conception of Faith and how far Faith for him is not merely confidence and trust (confidere, fiducia), but also a * cleaving to God in feeling and will (adhaerere Deo). And then let the reader study the noble little work of Johann von Kastl, De Adhacrcndo Deo, to recognize the inner connexion of Luther with Mysticism in regard to his conception of faith, especially the 12th chapter, De Amore Dei quod efficax sit. Luther says nothing of the impelling power of Faith to bring to new birth, to justify and to sanctify, that is not also said in this chapter of the * Amor Mysticus .

• Solus amor est, quo convertimur ad Deum, transformamur in

Deum, adhaeremus Deo, unimur Deo, ut simus unus spiritus cum eo, et beatificemur cum eo. *

Here * amor is the potent, active, creative thing that changes us and brings us to new birth . * Love , too, like Faith, is the affect that knows no quiescence.

• Proinde nihil amore acutius, nihil subtilius, aut penetrabilius.

Nee quiescit, donee universaliter totam amabilis penetravit virtu- tern et profunditatem ac totalitatem, et unum se vult facere cum amato. Vchcmenter tendit in eum et ideo nunquam quiescit, donee omnia transeat et ad ipsuin in ipsum veniat. 2

The effect of this adhaesio is thus exactly that which Luther also frequently describes :

Quippe qui Deo adhaeret, versatur in lumine . . . qua ex re est

1 It is Love alone whereby we are turned to God, and changed into the form of God, whereby we cleave to God and are made one with God, so that we are one spirit with Him and are beatified with Him.

• For nothing is keener, nothing more subtle or more penetrating, than

Love. Nor does it rest until it has penetrated the whole power and depth and entirety of its object, and its will is to make itself one with the loved one. It strives towards him with vehemence and so never has rest until it has passed through all things and reached him and entered into him.

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hominis in hac vita sublimior perfectio, ita Deo uniri, ut tota anima cum omnibus potentiis suis et viribus in Dominum Deum suum sit collecta, et unus fiat spiritus cum eo. l

Luther calls this, in a still more violent expression, mit Gott ein Kuche werden (to become kneaded into one cake with God).

It should at the same time be noted that in Johann von Kastl this amor is already permeated through and through by Faith, Trust, Comfort, and the longing for certitude, and that for him no less than for Luther the Remission of Sins stands as the first step in the ordo salutis , the order of salvation. Thus :

Sic scilicet in Domino Deo de omni sua necessitate audcat plene totaliter confidere. Hoc ipso facto in tantum Deo complacet, ut suam ei gratiam largiatur et per ipsam grutiam veram sentiat caritatem et dilectionem, omnemque ambiguitatem et timorem expel- lentem in Deoque confidenter sperantem 2 (op. cit, ch. 5).

And so adhaesio may come about just as well by means of

• faith : sed tantum fide et bona voluntate adhaerere Deo 3

(ch. 6).

Here, too, are freedom from care and the assurance of consola tion the things to be prized : et eius consolatione suaviter reficitur 4 (ch. 7).

And the whole series of religious experiences, so often recurring in Luther, are already displayed in Johann von Kastl in their characteristic order:

. . . peccatorum remissio, amaritudinis expressio, collatio dulcedinis et securitatis, infusio gratiae et misericordiae, attractio et corroboratio familiaritatis atque abundans de ipso consolatio, firmaque adhaesio et unio. 5

1 He indeed who cleaves to God abides in light. . . . Wherefore is it man s loftier perfection in this life to be so united to God that the whole soul with all its strength and all its powers is gathered into its Lord and God and becomes one spirit with Him.

2 So then let (the soul) of its very necessity make the venture to trust wholly and completely in the Lord God. In this very wise is the soul so pleasing to God, that He bestows His own grace upon it, and by that very grace it comes to feel the true love and affection which drives away all doubt and all fear and hopes confidently in God.

3 but only to cleave to God in faith and good will.

• and by his consolation is (the soul) sweetly restored.

B The forgiveness of sins, the expelling of bitterness, the bestowal of sweetness and security, the inpouring of grace and of mercy, the attraction and the strengthening of friendship with Him and abundant comfort in Him, and a firm cleaving to Him and union with Him.

LUTHER S CONCEPTION OF FAITH 211

But a complete judgement upon Luther s connexion with Mysti cism will only be possible when all the manuscript remains of the popular mystical preaching of his time become known, which as yet lie undisturbed in our libraries. They will show the back ground and setting of Luther s thought and phraseology, the soil out of which they grew, and how many similarities and analogues there are to the feelings to which Luther gives expression. Were we unaware that the pamphlet Of the Liberty of a Christian was by Luther, we should probably count it among these writings. And in any case there are to be found within the limits of the so- called mystical literature contrasts in mental attitude that go farther than that between this work of Luther s and that of Johann von Kastl from which we have been quoting. And Luther is really far more akin to such a mystic as Meister Eckhart in his attitude than are either Plotinus on the one hand or, on the other, the crowd of God-enamoured monks and nuns, the doctores ecstatici and seraphici , such as Ignatius and John of the Cross, Theresa and Madame Guyon.

But such comparisons as this are illuminating not only upon the question of the historical relation between Lutheranism and mystical religion, which is, after all, not a very important issue, but also upon the question as to the connexion between the two in their essential nature. It has been said that for a Protestant to love Mysticism is mere dilettantism : if he is in earnest, he must become a Catholic. But then Mysticism is an ambiguous term. If we mean by it the melting transport of a transcendent quasi- nuptial rapture, then the assertion may be justified. But the really typical moments of mysticism creature-feeling and union are not less but more possible upon the basis of Luther s fides ( faith as fiducia and adhaesio ) than upon the basis of the amor mysticus .

Johann Arndt says at the commencement of his Four Books of True Christianity (ch. 5) : By this heart-felt confidence and heart felt trust man gives his heart to God utterly, reposes only in God, surrenders himself and attaches himself to Him, unites himself with God, becomes a sharer in all that is of God and of Christ, becomes one God with God. This is simply Luther s doc trine (his fides as fiducia and adhaesio ), clarified and raised to a higher power. These expressions might well be found in Luther s Of the Liberty of a Christian indeed their meaning is

p 2

212 THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT IN LUTHER

to be found there. St. Paul says the same, only more forcibly still, in Gal. ii. 20 and 1 Cor. vi. 17.

But this question of the possibility of the transition from fides to the experience of union is not to be definitely decided by a citation of texts from Luther or from the Bible, but by a consideration of what Faith is in essence. Faith is more than a conviction of the truth of the eternal verities. It is a deeply felt state of tension with regard to them and of absorption in them ; and, as trust , it is the most intimate feeling of nearness. But in all this it contains in itself the core of that which is meant by mysterious terms like union , something that is more than the knowledge or the love of the earlier mystic schools. And this becomes still plainer to any one who has clearly recognized by deeper contemplation the profoundly non-rational elements to be found in the very act of faith.

APPENDIX VII

SIGNS FOLLOWING

(I GIVE here a passage from my Leben und Wirken Jesu rele vant to this subject, touched upon on p. 176.)

Jesus begins his work on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and the Gospels present us with its main features unmistakably. He preaches in the synagogues, in the houses of his friends, on every sort of occasion at table and under the open sky, now sojourning in one spot, now journeying from place to place. His fame is spread abroad especially by means of the mysterious gift of healing which is active in him.

What are we to say of this ? The Jesus who works the miracles in the Synoptic narrative is, as we saw above, not the wonder worker par excellence, of whom we read in St. John s Gospel or whom the traditional view presents to us. But even in those passages which can be least impugned by criticism there is some thing incommensurable with our rational standards in the setting in which we see his figure, and this gift of healing is an example of it. The narratives of these acts of healing stand out with such

SIGNS FOLLOWING 213

an assured and plain simplicity, with a clarity so wellnigh disconcerting, that they cannot be the fabrications of legend. We have only to read the sober account it is almost like an official report of the healing of Peter s wife s mother (Mark i. 29-31), or that of the healing of the man with the palsy (Mark ii. 1-12), with its concreteness of detail. And it is the same with many other cases. The story of the centurion of Capernaum, and Jesus astonished wonder at the faith of this Gentile ; the story of the woman of Canaan, and of how Jesus, at first reluctant, comes to be inwardly won over ; this is not the way of imagination and legend. Moreover, there is the fact that we encounter exactly similar occurrences among the early Christian communities. Even if we are ready to impugn the accounts of Jesus s miracles of healing in the Gospels, we cannot impugn the accounts in the Pauline epistles of the same thing as happening among the Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans, and to Paul himself. Here they stand in the full light of history and with the fullest testi mony of history. It is quite evident that both Paul and the first Christian communities were firmly convinced that they had the charismata , the gifts , among them. St. Paul gives, in 1 Cor. xii. 4-11, a formal catalogue of these, in which the gifts of healing the sick and of the exercise of super-normal physical power and other abnormal psychical gilts take their place alongside the gifts of tongues and prophecy. No doubt he says (1 Cor. xiii) that something is higher and more precious than all gifts , namely, the simple Christian virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love, and Love the greatest among these . But it is implied thereby that those other gifts too are a reality and a present possession. He has them in himself and frequently exercises them, and in every Christian congregation they make their appearance. In fact we have sure historical warrant for holding that gifts of this kind were in evidence for a long time beyond the borders of the early Church just as, for that matter, we have similar warrant for recognizing that analogous phenomena have been since observed in other than Christian surroundings. Will this mysterious region one day be clearly revealed to us ? We can at any rate say this: that our procedure is very uncritical if we propose to rule it out as non-existent simply because it does not square with our current conceptions of agreement with the natural order . Now tho fewer the preconceptions which we bring to our reading

214 SIGNS FOLLOWING

of the narrative-material of the Gospels, as reviewed and guaran teed by a thorough criticism, the stronger becomes the impression that in Jesus these powers were present with a rare potency. We have in a sense a key to the matter in the peculiar predisposition and endowment for their calling which marked the great prophets of the Old Testament. What characterized them really was not omniscience and not the capacity of predicting a future many hundred years distant : it was beyond question in many cases a unique power of forefeeling and foreboding impending super normal occurrences that threatened to break in upon the natural course of events. This gift we have held to be not something

• supernatural and miraculous in the old sense of the word, i. e.

something that falls altogether outside all analogies of what happens elsewhere ; on the contrary, analogies in plenty for this extraordinary prophetic gift are to be found in the phenomena of clairvoyance, presentiment, second-sight, &c. Now it is possible that the gift of healing of Jesus which appears so puzzling was merely a heightened and intense form of capacities which lie dormant in human nature in general. But for a manifestation of the influence exerted by the psychical upon the physical we need in fact go no farther than the power of our will to move our body the power, that is, of a spiritual cause to bring about a mechani cal effect. There assuredly is an absolutely insoluble riddle, and it is only the fact that we have grown so used to it that prevents it from seeming a miracle to us. But, this granted, who can pronounce beforehand what intenser and heightened manifesta tions of this power may not be possible ? Who can presume to determine what direct results a will may not achieve which, wholly concentrated and at one with itself, rests altogether upon God ? We have had in recent years many indications of parallels and analogies to the miraculous power of Jesus in the newly- discovered methods of suggestion and hypnotism, in telepathy, action at a distance , and (in my opinion) animal magnetism. All these suppositions may be accepted without misgiving, only with this addition, that what Jesus did passed gradually far beyond anything known to us in these fields ; and moreover, that Jesus whole power grew out of his consciousness of his mission, and his will, unusually strong as it was, drew its strength only from his religious and moral consciousness, from the fact that he was rooted and grounded in God.

SIGNS FOLLOWING 215

If it be granted that Jesus really had an abnormal power in action, it is evident that this very fact would stimulate rumour and imagination to exaggeration and embellishment and invention of miraculous incident. It is evident that we may quite properly approach the miracle narratives with a certain expectation of finding such features in them ; and that it will not do, in face of some sheer prodigy, to rest content with the mysterious gift as a solution to every difficulty. Thus a raising from the dead, as that of Lazarus, or a changing of water into wine (both stories only in St. John), is excluded from the region of the historically conceivable and admissible. And there is in the Synoptists also matter enough that passes these limits, e. g. the walking on the sea, the feeding of the five thousand, the tale of the Gadarene swine. When such stories have been deducted, then practically all that is left in the Synoptic narrative are cases of healing, though of course some of these are of an astonishing character. There are also two cases of raising from the dead that of Jairus s daughter and that of the young man of Nain. Criticism will be inclined to reject these. It must, however, be granted that there is a real difference between these stories and that in St. John of the raising of Lazarus. Jairus s daughter had not lain three days in the grave, like Lazarus ; she had only lost consciousness a short time before the miracle. Where is the margin that divides complete death from the last faint glow of the spark of life, very likely already passed into unconsciousness? May not he who by his will had power to restore a consciousness confused by madness have had also the power to arrest a con sciousness just vanishing over the borders of life, and even awaken again in the body one that has but just vanished ? Here the account is strikingly concrete. Even the very words Jesus uses to awaken the girl as uttered in Aramaic Talitha Cumi are still given in the Aramaic form by the Greek narrator. There is nothing grandiose or theatrical, as is customarily the case with a miracle designed for display. Jesus only admits the most intimate even of his disciples, and the whole incident closes with the soberly practical injunction to give the newly restored child food, and with the direct prohibition to talk further about the event. We have only to compare with this the raising of Lazarus ; here is the exact opposite, a genuine miracle of display. The wonder-worker designedly delays his arrival, so

216 SIGNS FOLLOWING 1

that a miracle becomes necessary ; the whole proceeding, with its solemn mise en-scene, takes place in public, and is accompanied by a prayer, which is at the same time a sort of address to the sur rounding spectators. The act is to be performed expressly

• because of the people which stand by . This is how a miracle-

narrative looks when it is the offspring of literary art. The raisings from the dead given in St. Mark are quite other than this, and consequently a circumspect criticism may perhaps in their case suspend judgement.

APPENDIX VIII SILENT WORSHIP

Still-born Silence, thou that art Flood-gate of the deeper heart.

I TAKE these lines 1 from a little Quaker book on Silent Worship" 2 which, recently translated into German, should give the German public a good impression of the worship of silent waiting upon God which has been a feature of the Quaker community from the days of George Fox up to the present day. It is the most spiritual form of divine service which has ever been practised, and contains an element which no form of worship ought to be without, but which, as has been hinted on a former page, is unduly neglected in our Protestant devotional life. We must learn it once again from the Quakers, and thereby restore to our divine service a spirit of consecration the loss of which has cost it dearly.

Devotional Silence may have a threefold character. There is the numinous silence of Sacrament, the silence of Waiting, and the silence of Union or Fellowship.

1. The first of these is that silence meant in the verse of the Prophet (Hab. ii. 20), Let all the earth keep silence before him.

1 They are quoted from Charles Lamb s essay, A Quakers Meeting , (Trans.)

2 Silent Worship : The Way of Wonder, by Violet Hodgkin.

SILENT WORSHIP 217

Such impressive moments of silence were known not only in the worship of Israel but in that of other peoples. They are the culminating sacramental point in the worship, denoting as they do the instant when God is in the midst , experienced as numen praesens . All the preceding part of the service is but a preparation for this, a preparation for the moment of which the words hold good, Das Unzuliingliche, hier wird s Ereignis, the Insufficient here becomes Event . For what was previously only possessed in insufficiency, only longed for, now comes upon the scene in living actuality, the experience of the transcendent in gracious intimate presence, the * Lord s Visitation of His people . Such a realization is Sacrament, and what occasions it, attends, or prepares for it, must be termed sacramental. Such a silence is therefore a sacramental silence. It was found in the forms of worship of ancient Israel, and it is found to-day in the Roman Mass, in the moment of transubstantiation*.

2. Next there is the silence of Waiting. The meaning of this is primarily other than sacramental. When the Quakers assemble for a quiet time together, this is first and foremost a time of waiting, and it has in this sense a double value. It means our submergence, i. e. inward concentration and detachment from the manifold outward distractions ; but this again has value as a preparation of the soul to become the pencil of the unearthly writer, the bent bow of the heavenly archer, the tuned lyre of the divine musician. This silence is, then, primarily not so much a dumbness in the presence of Deity, as an awaiting His coming, in expectation of the Spirit and its message. But it passes over naturally into the Sacramental Silence of which we have spoken. And in fact Silent Worship may remain without words from first to last it may exclude all utterance of the Spirit s message in vocal form, and in that case the worshippers part, as they met, without any audible exhortation or thanksgiving. Yet the worship need not have been in any way defective, for the silence may have been a direct numinous experience, as well as a wait ing upon God. Tho Eternal was present in the stillness and His presence was palpable without a word spoken. The solemn observance of silence became a Sacrament.

3. The consummation of the Sacrament is the achievement of unity, i. e. fellowship and Communion. This third silence is the completion of the waiting and the sacramental silences. The Silent

218 SILENT WORSHIP

Worship of the Quakers is in fact a realization of Communion in both senses of the word inward oneness and fellowship of the individual with invisible present Reality and the mystical union of many individuals with one another. In this regard there is the plainest inward kinship between the two forms of worship which, viewed externally, seem to stand at the opposite poles of religious development, viz. the Quaker meeting and the Roman Catholic Mass. Both are solemn religious observances of a numinous and sacramental character, loth are communion, loth exhibit alike an inner straining not only * to realize the presence of God, but to attain to a degree of oneness with Him.

II

Silent Worship , in the fully-formed character in which the Quakers practise it, is not possible in a Church , as we under stand the word to-day, but only within the narrower limits of a more intimate * Brotherhood of the Spirit . May God grant that such a brotherhood may one day arise among us, not as a sect or a Church alongside our other Churches, but as a circle of self- dedicated enthusiasts, who have rediscovered the ancient heritage of the early Church the Spirit and its sevenfold gifts !

But if the Quaker Silence is excluded, still less is any imitation of the Sacramental Silence in the form of the Catholic Mass possible in our Protestant services. All that tends in this direc tion is bound to go astray. The Communion Service does, it is true, celebrate Christ s Passion, that event which in all world history is the numinous event par excellence, the entry of the divine in fullest and loftiest presence upon the human scene. But the Communion Service is emphatically not a Mass, and the Mass has grown to be a distortion of its true form. The Communion Service is, in the original intention of its first celebration or insti tution, not a piece of public ceremonial at all, far less a drama to be performed by one or at most a few participants in the presence of spectators, but a tender mystery, restricted to a fellowship of brothers, pertaining to a special time and hour, and needing particular preparation in short, something that should be pre cious and rare. For Protestants it is to be kept entirely apart from the regular and congregational Divine Service, and should be reserved for particular feasts, for celebration at evening or in the

SILENT WORSHIP 219

night stillness. It ought to be withdrawn .altogether from the use and wont of every day and become the most intimate privilege which Christian worship has to offer.

But though these two means are excluded, it is yet possible to find another way to introduce Silent Worship into our ordinary Sunday services, and so to give these a consecration which is as yet lacking to them. We can make the service culminate and find its climax in a short period of silence, which shall be at once the silence of sacrament and the silence of waiting, and which may become, at least for the more practical, also a realization of union. Wo may devise an opportunity of silent dedication which will avoid the ceremonial apparatus and mythology of the doctrine of Traiisubstantiation. , and yet in its simplicity and pure spirituality may be more deeply sacramental than the Mass, for which many are again beginning to crave. We have only to follow the indications afforded by the example of the Silent Worship of the Quakers.

Whore lies the essence of the sacramental ? It is in fact in the expression of the English High Churchmen the real pre sence , the real presence of the transcendent and holy in its very nature in adoration and fellowship, so as to be laid hold of and enjoyed in present possession. No form of devotion which does not offer or achieve this mystery for the worshipper can be per fect or can give lasting contentment to a religious mind. And it is just because our usual Divine Services fall short in this that we see to-day again quite comprehensibly such a ferment and stirring of all sorts of uneasy High Church , * Ritualistic , and 4 Sacramental movements.

But we may well be asked has it any meaning to ask for the presence of the divine ? Does not that Sacramental idea at once cancel itself, when thought out? Is not God omnipresent and really present always and everywhere ?

Such a view ia often put forward, and with a confident air of assurance which is in sharp conflict with the testimony of genuine religious experience; so much so, indeed, that one is tempted to venture a very blunt reply to it. We say, then, that this doctrine of the omnipresence of God as though by a necessity of His being He must be bound to every time and to every place, like a natural force pervading space is a frigid invention of metaphysical speculation, entirely without religious import. Scripture knows

220 SILENT WORSHIP

nothing of it. Scripture knows no * Omnipresence , neither the expression nor the meaning it expresses ; it knows only the God who is where He wills to be, and is not where He wills not to be, the deus mobilis , who is no mere universally extended being, but an august mystery, that comes and goes, approaches and withdraws, has its time and hour, and may be far or near in infinite degrees, closer than breathing to us or miles remote from us. The hours of His visitation and His return are rare and solemn occasions, different essentially not only from the profane life of every day, but also from the calm confiding mood of the believer, whose trust is to live ever before the face of God. They are the topmost summits in the life of the Spirit. They are not only rare occasions, they must needs be so for our sakes, for no creature can bear often or for long the full nearness of God s majesty in its beatitude and in its awefulness. Yet there must still be such times, for they show the bright vision and com pletion of our sonship, they are a bliss in themselves and potent for redemption. They are the real sacrament, in comparison with which all high official ceremonials, Masses, and rituals the world over become the figurings of a child. And a Divine Service would be the truest which led up to such a mystery and the riches of grace that ensue upon the realization of it. And if it be asked whether a Divine Service is able to achieve this, let us answer that, though God indeed comes where and when He chooses, yet He will choose to come when we sincerely call upon Him and prepare ourselves truly for His visitation.

221

APPENDIX IX A NUMINOUS EXPERIENCE OF JOHN RUSKIN

MY attention has been called by Professor Deutschbein to the following passage in Ruskin, in which he recounts experiences of his youth that repeatedly recurred. They are purely numinous in character and wellnigh all the moments which we discovered reappear here quite spontaneously. I give the passage without detailed comment :

Lastly, although there was no definite religious sentiment mingled with it, there was a continual perception of Sanctity in the whole of nature, from the slightest thing to the vastest ; an instinctive awe, mixed with delight ; an indefinable thrill, such as we sometimes imagine to indicate the presence of a disembodied spirit. I could only feel this perfectly when I was alone ; and then it would often make me shiver from head to foot with the joy and fear of it, when after being some time away from hills I first got to the shore of a mountain river, where the brown water circled among the pebbles, or when I first saw the swell of distant land against the sunset, or the first low broken wall, covered with mountain moss. I cannot in the least describe the feeling ; but I do not think this is my fault, nor that of the English language, for I am afraid no feeling is describable. If we had to explain even the sense of bodily hunger to a person who had never felt it, we should be hard put to it for words ; and the joy in nature seemed to me to come of a sort of heart-hunger, satisfied with the presence of a Great and Holy Spirit. . . . These feelings remained in their full intensity till I was eighteen or twenty, and then, as the reflective and practical power increased, and the " cares of this world" gained upon me, faded gradually away, in the manner described by Wordsworth in his "Intimations of Immortality ". {Modern Painters, Popular Edition, vol. iii, p. 309. George Allen.) Schleiermacher calls such an experience intuition and feeling of the infinite ; wo give it the name divination . Schleiermacher was right in saying that even greater than all this divination in the sphere of nature is divination in the sphere of history. Will not a Ruskin arise to divine and reveal the non-rational and numinous character of our own epoch?

222

APPENDIX X THE EXPRESSION OF THE NUMINOUS IN ENGLISH 1

ALTHOUGH it could hardly be disputed that the German philo sophical vocabulary is superior to the English both in fullness and in precision, in regard to the subjects discussed in this book our language does not seem to be altogether at a disadvantage. Indeed, the English wealth of synonyms has presented the trans lator with an embarrassment at the very outset. In place of the single German adjective lieilig, with its derivative noun and verb, we have the words sacred and holy, sacredness, holiness and sanctity, hallow and sanctify. G-ottheit again gives us a triad of synonyms, deity, divinity, Godhead. Each of these alternatives is probably the most appropriate rendering in some special context, and in choosing any one of them we are bound to sacrifice subtle differ ences in meaning which would be suggested by the others, and which are perhaps implicit in the single German equivalent. The deciding factor in the choice of holy rather than sacred as the regular rendering of lieilig was the fact that it is the Biblical word, found especially in those great passages (e. g. Isaiah vi) of which this book makes repeated use, and which seem central to its argu ment. Holy will be felt, I believe, to be a distinctly more 1 numinous word than sacred : it retains about it more markedly the numinous atmosphere. And although, as is urged in the text with perhaps still more reason of its German equivalent, it refers mainly to the higher levels of religious experience at which the numinous has been interpreted in rational and moral terms, and therefore means to us mainly goodness, the word holy is found also in contexts where this more exalted meaning is excluded, and where it is simply the numinous at an early and savage stage of development. The well-known lines from Coleridge s Kulla Khan give an example of such a use :

A savage place ! as holy and enchanted

As e er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover !

This is a finely numinous passage, but it is the numinous at the primitive, pre-religious, * daemonic level : it conveys nothing of

1 Added by the translator.

EXPRESSION OF THE NUMINOUS IN ENGLISH 223

sanctity. For, while the daring use of holy in this context may be just permissible, we reserve sanctity , if I mistake not, for the more restricted and elevated meaning.

Apart from these words it would appear that the English lan guage is in general rich in numinous terms. Dr. Otto has him self noted (p. 14) that the English awe has a numinous suggestion lacking in the German scheu , and (p. 131 n.) that haunt has no precise German equivalent in all its range of significance. And besides uncanny (a more or less exact rendering of unlicimlich) I have made use of words like weird and eerie, which convey the indefinable numinous atmosphere unmistakably. The old word freit (a supernatural intimation or sign) may be another such ; and possibly the obsolete verb-form oug, which gives us ugly, may have conveyed originally a suggestion of unnatural, uncanny, daunting or repulsion. It should be noticed that these numinous words are all (except awe ) concerned primarily with the cruder and more primitive forms of the experience : they are not in the first instance religious words in the higher sense, though, unlike such words as gnte, grisly, and ghastly, they can be used with a loftier and more ennobled, as well as with a lower and more primitive meaning. And it can, finally, be hardly an accident that they all, or nearly all, are northern in origin. A peculiar susceptibility to numinous impressions what Dr. Otto would call a peculiarly sensitive faculty of divination would seem, indeed, to be a characteristic of the North British. Such phenomena as those of Clairvoyance and Second-sight would seem to make for the same conclusion.

Apart from the expressiveness of single English words, it would be easy to amass from English poetry and prose alike passages (like that from Coleridge already quoted) illustrative of the different elements in numinous apprehension which have been discussed in this book. I venture to give three further citations.

On page 193 the contrast between the piety in which the rational moments predominate and that in which a more numinous feeling is to be noted is illustrated from two German hymns of praise.

The same antithesis could hardly be shown more clearly than by the contrast between two poems familiar to every English reader, Addison s hymn based on Psalm xix, and Blake s poem The Tyger . Both poets are hymning the Creator as revealed in

224 THE EXPRESSION OF THE

his creation, but the difference of temper is unmistakable. On the one hand there is the mood of tranquil confidence, serene dignity, thankful and understanding praise ; on the other, a mood of trepidation, awed surmise, the hush of mystery, in which rings none the less a strange exultation.

The spacious firmament on high

With all the blue ethereal sky,

And spangled heavens, a shining frame,

Their great Original proclaim.

The unwearied sun, from day to day,

Does his Creator s power display

And publishes to every land

The work of an Almighty hand.

Soon as the evening shades prevail

The moon takes up the wondrous tale

And nightly to the listening earth

Repeats the story of her birth ;

While all the stars that round her burn,

And all the planets in their turn,

Confirm the tidings as they roll

And spread the truth from pole to pole.

What though in solemn silence all

Move round the dark terrestrial ball ;

What though no real voice or sound

Amid their radiant orbs be found ?

In reason s ear they all rejoice,

And utter forth a glorious voice ;

For ever singing as they shine :

The hand that made us is Divine.

This is, confessedly, rational piety ; it is reason that listens to nature s hymn of praise. As such it is characteristic not only of a certain type of mind, but of the particular age in which it was written. And the contrasted numinous note can hardly be missed in Blake s wonderful verses :

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry ?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire ?

What the hand dare seize the fire ?

And what shoulder and what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart ?

And, when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand and what dread feet?

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What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain ? What the anvil ? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp ?

When the stars threw down their Bpears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee ?

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry ?

The remark of the author on page 221 suggests my last quota tion. Wordsworth, in the tenth book of The Prelude, recounts the profound impression made upon him by the terrific events in which the French Kevolution culminated. Then, as now, out ward convulsion and catastrophe had their inward counterpart in spiritual tumult and overthrow, in widespread disillusionment and despair. And Wordsworth tells us in effect how the very tremendousness of the time, its portentousness , became to him a revelation of the sustaining presence of the holy and the divine (see The Prelude, x. 437-4G9) :

. . . So, with devout humility be it said,

So, did a portion of that spirit fall

On me uplifted from the vantage-ground

Of pity and sorrow to a state of being

That through the time s exceeding fierceness saw

Glimpses of retribution, terrible,

And in the order of sublime behests :

But, even if that were not, amid the awe

Of unintelligible chastisement,

Not only acquiescences of faith

Survived, but daring sympathies with power,

Motions not treacherous or profane, else why

Within the folds of no ungentle breast

Their dread vibration to this hour prolonged ? . . .

Then was the truth received into my heart,

That, under heaviest sorrow earth can bring,

If from the affliction somewhere do not grow

Honour which could not else have been, a faith,

An elevation, and a sanctity,

If new strength be not given nor old restored,

The blame ia ours, not Nature s.

226

APPENDIX XI

THE MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM IN ROBERTSON AND WATTS

A profound expression of the Mysterium Tremendum may be found in the sermon of F. W. Robertson on Jacob s Wrestling ; (Ten Sermons ), point 2, The revelation of mystery.

It was revealed by dive. Very significantly are we told that the divine antagonist seemed, as it were, anxious to depart as the day was about to dawn ; and that Jacob held Him more con vulsively fast, as if aware that the daylight was likely to rob him of his anticipated blessing : in which there seems concealed a very deep truth. God is approached more nearly in that which is indefinite than in that which is definite and distinct. He is felt in awe, and wonder and ivorsliip rather than in clear conception. There is a sense in which darkness has more of God than light has. He dwells in the thick darkness. Moments of tender, vague mystery often bring distinctly the feeling of His presence. When day breaks and distinctness comes the Divine has evapo rated from the soul like morning dew. In sorrow, haunted by uncertain presentiments, we feel the infinite around us. The gloom disperses, the world s joy comes again, and it seems as if God were gone the Being who had touched us with a withering hand and wrestled with us, yet whose presence, even when most terrible, was more blessed than His absence. It is true, even literally, that the darkness reveals God: every morning God draws the curtain of the garish light across His eternity, and we lose the Infinite. We look down on earth instead of up to heaven, on a narrower and more contracted spectacle that which is examined by the microscope when the telescope is laid aside smallness, instead of vastness. "Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour till the evening " ; and in the dust and pettiness of life we seem to cease to behold Him : then at night He un draws the curtain again, and we see how much of God and Eternity the bright distinct day has hidden from us. Yes, in solitary, silent, vague darkness, the Awful One is near .

Names have a power, a strange power of hiding God.

THE MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM 227

Who does not know how we satisfy ourselves with the name of some strange bird or plant, or the name of some new law in nature? It is a mystery perplexing us before. We get the name and fancy we understand something more than we did before ; but in truth we are more hopelessly ignorant : for before we felt there was a something we had not attained, and so we inquired and searched now, we fancy we possess it, because we have got the name by which it is known : and the word covers over the abyss of our ignorance. If Jacob had got a word, that word might have satisfied him. . . . God s plan was not to give names and words, but truths of feeling. That night, in that strange scene, He impressed on Jacob s soul a religious awe, which was hereafter to develop not a set of formal expressions, which would have satisfied with husks the craving of the intellect and shut up the soul: Jacob felt the Infinite, who is more truly felt when least named.

The following hymn of Watts expresses the numinous feeling more adequately than many that are more familiar.

Eternal Power, whose high abode Becomes the grandeur of a God, Infinite length beyond the bounds Where stars revolve their little rounds : Thee while the first Archangel sings, He hides his face beneath his wings ; And ranks of shining ones around Fall worshipping and spread the ground. Lord, what shall earth and ashes do ? We would adore our Maker too : From Sin and dust to Thee we cry, The Great, the Holy, and the High I Earth from afar has heard thy fame And we have learned to lisp Thy name ; But oh the glories of Thy mind Leave all our soaring thoughts behind. God is in Heaven, and men below ; Be short our tunes, our words be few ; A sacred reverence checks our songs, And praise sits silent on our tongues.

228

APPENDIX XII THE RESURRECTION AS A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

I "know that my Redeemer liveth * : I lelieve in Jesus Christ, risen from the dead : such is the Christian s confession.

I know and * I believe or have faith these are not here mutually exclusive expressions. This knowing is not that with which scientific theory is concerned, based upon empirical sense- knowledge ; it is rather faith-knowledge, and faith-knowledge does not rely on the evidence of the senses, but is, in the scriptural phrase, the evidence of things not seen , that is, not presented to sense-perception ; and it would lose its essential nature and be transformed into a mere sorry empirical knowledge, if it relied on any other evidence than the witness of the Holy Spirit , which is not that of sense-experience. And so we cannot afford to account Christ s resurrection, and our own, known facts, in this lower scientific sense of knowledge. The simplest understanding feels this. To speak of resurrection is to utter a mystery, and mystery is a subject for faith, not science. And, for Christianity, how this faith itself comes to be is no less a mystery, indeed the greatest of all mysteries. But if faith were knowledge, directly attested by the senses or based upon the tradition of a former occurrence attested by the senses, this mystery would wholly disappear.

And so we hold that in endeavouring to account for our assur ance of the Risen Christ two sorts of interpretation must be excluded, the naively supernaturalistic and the rationalistic. The former is that which has recourse to the * Empty Tomb . It holds that Christ s tomb was proved to be empty by the evidence of the senses, that the Risen Christ was perceived by the senses, and that the truth of the facts so certified in sense-experience was then handed down by human testimony. On this view the con viction of the resurrection was from the first not faith, but a piece of empirical knowledge. This is the most serious objection that can be brought against the naive supernaturalist interpretation, a more serious objection than the uncertain and legendary char-

RESURRECTION AS A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 229

acter of the Empty Tomb narrative or the fact that the earliest and most authentic witness to the resurrection of Christ that of St. Paul in 1 Cor. xv makes no mention of the empty tomb, although there the Apostle is at pains to assemble all possible reasons for assurance in the reality of the Resurrection.

But the ordinary rationalistic interpretation is equally inad missible. A deep impression of the person of Jesus had remained, so it is said, with the disciples and especially with Peter, and from this impression grew their conviction after His death, Such an one cannot have remained dead . And this conviction, thus born in their minds, took imaginative and figurative form in visions, which must therefore be regarded as purely subjective. But this explanation is patently forced and unsatisfactory, and seems to us to miss altogether the uniqueness and coherence of the experience centring in the Resurrection. The two lines of interpretation have this in common, however: they both entirely ignore the fundamental fact about the experience, that it was a mystery ; both agree in disregarding altogether its mystery character.

We can only get beyond the opposition between supernaturalism and rationalism by frankly recognizing that the experiences con cerned with the Resurrection were mystical experiences and their source the Spirit . It is only * of the Spirit that the higher knowledge is born. It is the eye of Spirit, not the eye of sense that beholds the eternal things ; but what it sees is not a mere insecure, half-w r oven fabric of * convictions , but the adamantine certainty of the eternal truth itself!

II

To understand the matter truly we need to make clear to our selves by examples drawn from occurrences in the Bible record to what more general class of experience those that are concerned with the Resurrection belong, and then to grasp what the essential character of this wider class is. Isaiah tells (ch. vi) how in that mysterious experience in the Temple his inward eye was opened to behold Yahweh in His holiness and majesty, how he received His command and became thereby the messenger of Yahweh to His people. This supreme, mysterious vision becomes thus for Isaiah his summons and his ordination, and his whole subsequent activity as prophet in its wider significance is founded upon this

230 THE RESURRECTION AS

experience. And the occurrence is not one without a parallel, but rather is typical of all the great men who received God s summons (compare Jer. i, Ezek. i and ii, Amos i, Hosea i).

But what really took place in these mystical experiences ? Has God a body ? Is He really seated upon a throne, or has He any place in a physical sense ? Do beings such as the Cherubim and Seraphim are described surround Him in visible form ? Has He a voice audible to our actual sense of hearing ? Even those who, so far as concerns the Resurrection of Christ, think to base their faith upon an actually perceived Empty Tomb and a Body \vhich, however transfigured , yet remained an object to see and touch even they will answer these questions with a decided negative as regards the vision of Isaiah. Even they will admit that these forms of imagery, in which the experience of Isaiah clothes itself, are nothing more than forms of imagery, born of the ideas of the time and merely a vesture for something seen and apprehended by other means than by stimulation of the senses, with which it indeed has nothing to do.

On the other side, the naturalistic rationalist will set up some sort of plausible psychological * explanation , differing according to the empirical psychology that is at his disposal ; or, resorting to a still simpler mode of explanation, he will be inclined to say that such occurrences never occurred at all. But whoever knows anything of the Spirit and its miraculous nature, whoever feels in himself the Spirit active in those mysterious experiences that build up the Christian s life, will reject such explanations. He alone has the key to the truth of the matter. Just as the Scriptures as a whole, as the Christian believes, require the Spirit if they are to be taught or understood, so too is it with these occurrences. Only a first-hand spiritual experience teaches a man to see and enables him to estimate a spiritual experience of a former day. Possession of the Spirit at first hand becomes here a faculty of retrospective prophecy , which is recognition in the sense of re-cognition or knowing again for oneself. And so only on the basis of a first-hand religious experience, of and from the Spirit, is there any possibility of obtaining a real and genuine historical knowledge of these things, for only such an experience is acquainted with and can estimate the effect of all the factors of the explanation. What the Spirit gives is not a view that tran scends the historical, but the genuine historical view. And the

A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 231

naturalistic view gives on the other hand a falsification of history, for it has ignored an essential part of the facts it seeks to explain.

Ill

Let us now turn to the New Testament. Once we have come to understand aright, that is, in the Spirit, the experiences of the great prophets, we can recognize plainly how similar they are to the narratives of the great visions of Jesus at the outset and at the full height of His ministry the vision at His Baptism and the vision at His Transfiguration . As with the prophets, so with Jesus : these, too, are manifestly spiritual and mystical experi ences ; but these, too, were objectively real occurrences. And they are also to be counted as belonging to the same class of experiences for the reason that they too are manifestly visions of Call and Ordination. As before, we do not doubt that all that is recounted in perceptual terms stands upon just the same footing as the perceptual imagery that invests the mystical experience of Isaiah, the essential and unshakeable truth of which lies not in that vesture, but in the knowledge and assurance born of the Spirit .

And if we pass on to the Resurrection-experience of Paul on the road to Damascus, do we not at once recognize the same charac teristic features ? Have we here sense-perception or spiritual experience ? Paul nowhere describes how and in what form he beheld the Risen Christ. That does not in itself make it the less likely that he did see Him in some form, probably as a royal figure of radiant glory rather than merely as a dazzling light. The material of his vision was no doubt supplied him by the current ideas of his time concerning royal splendour and messianic kinghood, and then his faculty of vision gave this material an individual and special form. That is but to say that the vision would have a vesture of outward form just as that of Isaiah did ; but this does not, for Paul any more than for Isaiah, touch the inmost import of the experience, which is here : He lives ; He lives as the accepted of God, the preserved of God, the exalted of God, the transfigured of God, as the conqueror of Judgement, of the Cross, and of Death. And at the same time that further point of resemblance with the occurrences already mentioned is manifest, which, strangely enough, is here not generally noticed.

232 THE RESURRECTION AS

For this vision of Paul, like those others, is not merely a vision of the Risen Christ, but again precisely inaugural, a vision of Calling and Ordination.

At the same time this experience of Paul has its place among a second class of experiences, which in turn stand fully illumined in the Pauline writings. For it is but the first link in a whole chain of spiritual happenings which develop in him and in his congregations. These are the charismata or gifts of the Spirit , and among them is included the gift of horasis * or mystic vision which Paul himself possessed. And what took place on the road to Damascus is not only the first link in the chain, but more fundamental and potent than all that followed. There it was that the pneuma * first broke through, the Spirit which man makes not nor can bestow upon himself, which blows whither it lists, and kindles what it wills, and whose * prick was already felt in Paul s heart.

Paul puts his experience on a parity with those of Peter and others, an indication that these also were of the same class as his own. And we could ourselves recognize as much even without Paul s express testimony. According to Paul s statement Peter was the first to receive the new revelation of the Risen Christ, and what we know otherwise of Peter is in accord with this. He has the gift of * vision , as the story in Acts x shows, and it had been manifested more than once while his Master was still on earth, as at the time of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor. And the Synoptic record gives other more general indications of his rare spiritual endowment. Further, for Peter and the others to whom the experience came, the vision of the Risen Christ is once again an inaugural experience of Call and Ordination, as is indicated in the words, Go ye therefore and teach all nations , which we are to take as a spiritual realization of mission just in the same way as the command of Yahweh to Isaiah : * Go and tell this people , and which, no less than the experience of the prophets, attest themselves as having been really * heard in spiritual perception at a definite place and time. And again in the case of these original witnesses to the Resurrection, the vision of the Risen Christ is no more an isolated experience than in the case of Paul. For Paul and his converts are not the first to receive the Spirit and its sevenfold gifts. These gifts are the possession of the earliest Christian community from the first, and

A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 233

characterize it, as Paul himself avows, when he justifies his position as an apostle in showing that he and his converts also possess the same spiritual gifts which the Christians of Jerusalem had from the first.

And so the consciousness of the Risen Christ loses its isolated character and is already manifested as one of a class of spiritual experiences, a mystical and spiritual apprehension of truth, beyond the opposition of supernaturalism and rationalism.

IV

The apostles proclaim their Lord not only as raised from the dead , but as exalted and ascended* into heaven. That is in harmony with the picture of the universe which they shared with antiquity as a whole. But whoever thinks it necessary to retain the bodily, physical idea in raised from the dead ought to realize that he is bound to do the same with the expression 4 exalted . For that also conveys in its literal sense a spatial idea ; it presupposes the old notion that Heaven , God s eternal realm, is somewhere high above us in space. This notion was natural enough in antiquity ; but for us heaven and the eternal world of God is no more in space or time than God Himself is : it is in God s eternity, which is apart from space and time. This does not at all mean that the expressions resurrection , raising from the dead , lose their meaning. In contrast to the idea of immortality , which properly is the denial of any state of real death, they affirm the restoration from real death to real life, or rather the admittance for the first time into plenary and genuine life. Nor have they in the Biblical view reference solely to the body. It is not the body merely, but the man that dies ; and it is as soul as well as body that he sinks into the state of death, 1 the dread night of death , from which he can only be delivered and

1 To die is to lose not being but life. The fleshly body does not cease at first to be but to exercise the function we call living . . . . And so the eoul sinks not into not-being, nonentity, but into death, i.e. the cessation of its living function. Thin state is spoken of in Scripture as passing into Hades (wrongly rendered Hell ) and is compared to sleep, which is essentially life whose potentiality has been suspended. A closer analogy still to the tate of soul-death is that of cataleptic lethargy or impotence. We have to think of the condition of the soul sundered from the organ necessary to its essential nature as that of utter impotence, deprivation of life but not of being.

234 THE RESURRECTION AS

raised up by the power of God. If he is to live, man needs to be thus awakened, brought up out of Hades and from the shadow of death, and raised again from the dead . To be sure, according to Paul s idea, there is combined with this at the same time a bodily restoration. But, as is often noticed, this is for him not a raising up of the old body, a * resurrection of the flesh . Rather he would on his own presuppositions have emphatically rejected such a notion ; for the flesh which is for him the essence of antagonism to God is to pass away like the seed of corn sown in the earth, and the resurrection of the body is for him rather the bestowal of a new and quite other l spiritual body, provided and prepared of God. This is also the direction in which our thought must turn if we are to attempt to represent to ourselves the new life of the resurrection. We too are unable to think of the completed perfected life of the Spirit without ascribing to the Spirit some instrument or organ whereby it realizes itself in practice. Now l body is the instrument of spirit, and the phrase spiritual body affirms in an unambiguous manner that this instrument is not a fleshly body, not even * transfigured flesh a contradiction in itself but is itself spiritual in kind. And that implies that it is not bound up with any one point in space or time, and so is in no sense a physical body, which cannot be severed from material and spatial determination.

But whatever our thought may be upon this matter, one thing at any rate holds good : the meaning of the Christian knowledge that is by Faith lies in this, that Christ Himself who really died was brought again by God to real life and perfected unto the glory of the eternal life of God ; and that we live in expectation of the same with Him. This is a * knowing which, for us to-day no less than for the apostles, can be born of the Spirit, but only of the Spirit. Whether the body belongs to the being of this Christ and to our own completed being is a physiological not a religious question, and one which pertains not at all to our con fession of faith. But to any one who has to meet this issue we would say, the Risen Christ is to be our comfort , not a source of trouble in our conscientious fidelity to truth ; and for a true understanding of the experiences bearing on the Resurrection we would refer him to the nature of spiritual revelation as recounted in Isaiah vi.

As regards the narratives of the Empty Tomb , we shall

A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE 235

judge of these as of the narratives of a later date which gathered about the birth of Jesus, appraising them as a holy legend, in which the supra-rational relation of the eternal to the temporal is mirrored in the medium of contemporary thought. They have an enduring value to us from the incomparable beauty and power with which they symbolize the essence of the mystery . We would not be without them in our Bible, nor yet in the pictorial art of the churches, nor in the hymns that express our devotion. And we can retain them thus without being false to the obligation of the most rigid honesty if we remain fully conscious of that other obligation, without fulfilling which we neither can nor indeed should have either Biblical instruction or Christian doctrine. And that is the obligation we are under to train ourselves and the mind of our time to a sincere and devout understanding of three things. In the first place we need to realize the fringe of legend that surrounds the entire narrative of Holy Scripture and recurs as a constant problem from the first page of the Bible to the last. Secondly, we need to appreciate the signal value and beauty and the profound import which distinguish the Biblical narrative, even where it is of the nature of legend ; and, finally, the fact that even in the holy saga and legend, shaped and fashioned uncon sciously by the spirit of a people or a fellowship, there is present the vt ry same eternal Spirit of God, which Hebrew prophecy and poetry and history also manifest, that Spirit which, in every form of its expression, is the Spirit of revelation and truth.

APPENDIX XIII

RELIGIOUS ESSAYS, A SUPPLEMENT TO l TUE IDEA OF THE UOLY (O.U.P.)

I. THEOLOGY. i. What is Sin?

ii. The Battle between Flesh and Spirit, in. The Christian Idea of Lostness . iv. The Religious Idea of Original Guilt. v. The Prophets Experience of God. vi. The Lord s Supper as a Numinous Fact.

236 RELIGIOUS ESSAYS

vii. Towards a Liturgical Keform.

1. A Form of Divine Service.

2. A Form for Celebrating the Lord s Supper.

II. SCIENCE OF RELIGION.

viu. How Schleiermacher Rediscovered the Sensus Numinis.

ix. The Wholly Other* in Religious History and Theology.

x. Parallels and Convergences in the History of Religion,

xi. A Universal Religion (?).

xn. Darwinism and Religion.

III. APPENDIXES.

xin. The Common Tasks of Protestantism, xiv. An Inter-religious League.

INDEX

A.

Adbhuta, 133.

Addison, J. (quoted), 224.

Aesthetic judgement, the, 138, 148,

15-2 ff., 165. Ahndung, 1">0. Ahura-Uazda, 133, 204. Allah, numinous character of, 77,

92, 94.

Amor Mys icus, 107-8, 209 ff. Amos, 115, 141. Anselm, 55 n. Aristotle, 97, 93, 119n. Arndt, Joliann, 108, 211. Arnold, Gottfried, 108. Art, expression of the Numinous

in, 68-73. Atcarya, 195. Asura, 132. Atman, 199ff. Atonement, the doctrine of, its

numinous character, 56 ff. Augustine, St., 28 n., 97, 142 n., 200.

B.

Bach, J. S., 72.

Beautiful, the, and the Holy, 138,

148, 152, 165. Bergson, 112 n. Bernard, St., of Cluny, 84. Bt-sant, Mrs., 112. Bhagarad-Gita, the, 65, 109, 191 ff.,

Blake, Wm. (quoted), 224.

Boehme, Jacob, 38; on wrath of

God, 110 ft". Brahman, Brahmanism, 133, 196 ff,

204.

Buddha (Gautama), 67. Buddhism, 30, 89, 69.

C.

Catherine, St., of Genoa, 38. Chinese art, its numinous character. 69, 71.

Chrysostom, St., 84, 183-90.

Coleridge, 222.

Confucius, 76.

Creature-feeling , 9 ff., 20 ff., 52 ff.,

92 ff. Cross, the, 177.

D.

Daemon, the daemonic , 15, 16, 28, 126 ff., 129, 203; (in Goethe), 155 ff.

Dead, worship of the, 123.

Determinism, its difference from pre destination, 92.

Do Wette, W., on Ahndung, 150, 151.

Dionysius the Areopagite, 97.

Divination , as a faculty, 148 ff.

DunsScotus, 100.

Durga, 64, 109.

Eckermann, Talks with Goethe quoted,

154ff., 194 n. Eckhart, Meister, 110, 111, 201, 206,

211. Election, doctrine of, its numinous

character, 90 ff. Elohim, significance of the name, 76,

205.

Epigenesis, 44, 116, 118. Erasmus, 24, 101. Evolution, meaning of, 44 ff., 118 ff.,

169.

Eyth, Max (quoted), 83. Ezt-kiel, 79.

F.

Fairy stories, 126.

Faith, its meaning for Luther, 107-8,

142ff.,207, 209 ff. Fichte, 24.

Fries, J. P., 150, 151. Fundus anitnat, 116, 120 n., 199, 200.

G.

Gellert, C. F., 198. Gerhardt, Joliann, 112.

238

INDEX

Geulincx, 93.

Ghost stories and ghosts, 15, 16,28,

29, 131. Goethe, 24,40, 112 n. ; < divination of

the daemonic in, 154 ff. ; on God,

194 n. ; (quoted), 1, 41, 153. Gothic, its numinous character, 70. Grace , numinous significance of,

32 ff., 145.

Gregory of Nyssa, 190, 195. Guyon, Madame, 211.

H.

Hackmann, H., on Taoism, 206. Harnack, A., on Marcion, 190. Haunted places, 130 ff. Hegel, 96, 111. Heracleitus, 201. Hugo of St. Victor, 52 n.

I.

Ignatius (Loyola), 211.

Isaiah, 52, 63, 65, 78, 177, 207, 227, 228.

Islam, its conception of Allah, 77, 92 ; of predestination, 94 ; of sal vation, 170.

J.

James, William : The Varieties of Reli gious Experience (quoted), 10 n., 38, 55 n.

Jel-aleddin, 198 n.

Jeremiah, 177.

Jesus Christ; the paradox of His gospel, 85 ff. ; the supreme object of divination , 159 ff., 172 If. ; His miracles, 212 ff.

Job, The Book of, on the myste rious , 80 ff., 104, 155, 177, 205.

Johann von Knstl, 209, 210.

John, St., 95, 96, 205.

John Baptist, St., 86.

John of the Cross, St., 109, 211.

K.

Kant, 5, 46 ; Critique of Pure .Reason, 116ff. ; Critique of Judgement, 65, 152 ; Lectures on Psychology (quoted), 120 n.

Kena-Upanishad, the, 196, 201.

Lactantius, 23 n., 99, 111. Lang, Andrew, 133. Lange, E., 193. Leibniz, 90, 119n. Lucifer, significance of, 110 n. Luiz, Thomas, 73.

Luther, 15, 100 ; on miracles, 67 ; on wrath of God, 101 ff., Ill; His mystery , 104 ff. ; His fasci nation , 106; meaning of faith for, 107, 141 ff., 207, 209 ff.; on deus absconditus , 139; De Servo Arbitrio, 24, 101 ff. ; On the Liberty of a Christian, 211 ; Table Talk, 142 n.

M.

Magic, a form of the numinous, 121 ; in art, 68-70.

Mana, 125.

Marcion, 190.

Marett, R. K. : The Threshold of Religion, 15 n., 20 n., 76 n.

Mass, the, numinous moments in, 67, 72, 218.

Mendelssohn, 73.

Miracles and the miraculous, 65 ff., 147-8 ; the miracles of Jesus, 176, 212-16.

Mohammed, 67. (See Islam.)

Music, analogy of, with the numin ous , 49 ff., 72, 75, 76, 155.

Mysticism, what it is, 21 ff., 88 n., 199, 202; of void and nothingness, 20, 29, 30, 93 ; in Luther, 107 ff., 211.

N.

Nirvana, 39, 170.

0.

Occasionalists, the, 93. Orenda, 125.

P.

Paracelsus, 111.

Parker, Theodore, 55 n.

Passion, the, 88, 176.

Paul, St., 37, 88 ff., 139, 167, 172, 205, 212, 229, 230, 232.

Persia, religion of, 170.

Personal, the, and the supra-per sonal. 201-8.

Peter, St., 230.

Pharisaism, 86.

Plato, 97, 98, 141.

Plotinus, 97, 211.

Pordage, Johann, llln.

Predestination, doctrine of, in St. Paul, 90 ff.; in Luther, 105; in Islam, 92 ff.

Primitive Monotheism, 133 ff.

Q.

Quakers, the, 142 n., 216 ff.

INDEX

239

R.

Raphael, 64.

Reeejae, 23.

Redemption, doctrine of, 65, 168 ff.

Resurrection, 2L6 11.

Rig-Veda, the, 13o.

Ritschl, 19, 66, 95.

Ruskin, 221.

S.

Schematization , 46 ff., 144 ff.

Schiller,112n.; (quoted), 65,132, 152.

Schleiermacher, on feeling of abso lute dependence , 9, 10, 20, 21, 112; on divination and intui tion , 150-4, 158 ff., 221 ; 36, 91, 1G4, 208 n.

Scholasticism, 27.

Schopenhauer, 24, 51.

Shiva, 109.

Silence, numinous value of, 70 ff., 216ff.

Soderblom, N., 15 n., 76, 195 n.

Sophocles. 40.

Souls and spirits, primitive belief in, 27, 124 ; as numinous entities, 198ff.

Spener, P. J., 108.

Spinoza, 90.

Spiritualism, 27 n.

Sublime, the, and the holy, 42, 47, C5.

Supernatural, the conception of the, 12-2, 148.

Suso, 63 n., 109, 120.

Synteresis, 142n.

T.

Taoism, 69, 206 n. Tauler, 107. Tenteegen, 17, 71, 183. Theosophy, 111. Theresa, St., 194 n., 211.

Ungtheuer, 41.

r.

V.

Vishnu, 65, 191 ff.

Void , numinous significance of, 80, 89 ; in art, 71, 72.

W.

Wagner, 50.

Wellhausen, 167.

Wordsworth, 225.

Worringer, on Gothic, 70.

Wrath of God, meaning of, 18-19, 23-4, 32, 78, 99, 145 ; in St. Paul, 88 ; in Luther, 102 ff. ; in Boehme, 110.

Wundt, 122.

Y. Yahweh, 66, 74, 76 ff., 89, 116, 205.

Z.

Zwingli, 92.

OTHER WRITINGS OF RUDOLPH OTTO

NATURALISM AND RELIGION WESTERN AND EASTERN MYSTICISM

INDIA S RELIGION OP GRACE AND CHRISTIANITY COMPARED AND CONTRASTED

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION BASED ON KANT AND FRIES

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE SON OF MAN (English translation in preparation)

DAS GEFUHL DES UBERWELTLICHEN

GOTTHEIT UND GOTTHE1TEN DER ARIER

BHAGAVAD-GITA, DEUTSCHE UBERSETZUNG

KATHA-UPANISHAD, DEUTSCHE UBERSETZUNO

VISHNU-NARAYANA

FEINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. O33TOBD BY JOHN JOHNSON. PRINTER TO THB UNIVEfiSITY