except as he is identified with an inherent spiritual experience. This identification mysticism effected. It saw in Jesus the Christ.

And yet, in doing this, mysticism almost lost the historic Jesus.25 The intellectual and scholarly instinct came in to supplement both the mystical and the institutional interests. Since mysticism was concerned with Jesus only spiritually, and the church was concerned with him, in the main, neither historically nor mystically, but practically and sacramentally, it is clear that, except for the instinct and service of pure scholarship, we should have had no clear and reliable understanding of the Jesus of history.

Not that there is any fundamental disharmony between mysticism and learning. On the contrary, mysticism has been most closely allied with the development of theology and philosophy. It has, as we have seen, a strong speculative and literary bent. But in the study of history, as of science as a matter of patient investigation, mysticism as such has had little interest.

As a result mysticism has missed, to a large degree, the historic factor in Christianity. It has not sufficiently grasped the ideal which

25 "Die Mystik wird überall in eben dem Masse ungesund, in dem sie alles Geschichtliche abzustreifen und hinter sich zu lassen sucht." Wobbermin: Geschichte und Historie in die Religions Wissenschaft, p. 3.

is coming more and more to command the thought of our time-that is, Christianity as the historic consummation of a revelation that pervades the entire religious life of humanity. The study both of history and of comparative religion is necessary to enable us to see in Jesus Christ the highest possible revelation of God, significant for the whole human race as its only adequate Ideal.

A Christo-centric theology, in the true sense, is possible only as the mystical theology and the historical unite in giving us a Christ in whom are blended the Lord of Faith and Jesus of Nazareth.

CHAPTER V

MYSTICISM AND RATIONALITY

THE strength of mysticism as a philosophy of life lies chiefly in two facts. The first is that it persistently contends that ultimate truth is a matter of immediate personal experience, and the second is that it persistently endeavors to express and interpret the experience in rational and moral terms. Hence its close association, on the one hand with simple, unreflective faith, and, on the other, with philosophy, theology, and literature. Though pronouncing his experience ineffable, the mystic has proven abundantly able both to state and to defend it.

I

The interplay of these two impulses, the one toward immediate and intuitive truth, the other toward interpretative and analytical truth, appears throughout the history of human thought in movements, in schools, and in individual thinkers. Harmonious in Plato, intuition and ratiocination became divergent in his

successors. Reunited in Christianity, they again diverge, again seek each other in early scholasticism, again part, and in the period of dominant rationalism almost lose touch with one another; but again draw toward one another in the philosophy of the nineteenth century, and thus, through action and reaction, strife and adjustment, temper and supplement one another. In individual thinkers the same claimancy of the two principles—the rationalizing and the mystical-is often witnessed, the one that is slighted ultimately demanding its rights. Thus Hegel and Schleiermacher, beginning with the mystical tendency, move in the direction of rationalism, the one to the almost complete absorption of the mystical in the rational, the other toward a truer harmony; while Schelling and Fichte, starting with the predominance of the intellectual element, gravitate toward the mystical.'

This twofold character of mysticism as experience and as interpretation has exposed it to a twofold attack, the first from without, against reliance upon experience (immediacy) as the criterion of truth, and the second from

1 Professor George P. Adams writes of Hegel: "Perhaps the most interesting and significant problem in the interpretation of Hegelian philosophy, and, indeed, of all absolute idealism, is precisely this relation between the two motives in tuition and discursive thought, experience and its intellectual elaboration, mysticism and rationalism" (The Mystical Element in Hegel's Early Theological Writings. University of California Publications).

within, against the attempt to justify and interpret experience by and for the intellect. Let us take up, first, the common objections to the mystical reliance upon intuition.

II

Two singularly contradictory arguments have been made against intuition, first to prove it to be mere untrustworthy subjectivism, and, second, to show that it is only a swift process of sound ratiocination, unconscious of its movement and aware only of its result. If either of these can be proven, it renders the other void.

In answer to the first of these objections the mystic virtually replies: "I know the truth of the spiritual world with a conclusive sense of conviction, as I know myself. This is not mere emotion, it takes hold of my whole being and convinces me of its reality. The heart has reasons which the mind knows not of.' Moreover, the conviction is not mine alone; my fellow believer has the same sense of certainty and assures me of it." And in answer to the second objection he replies: "A process of reasoning of which I am unconscious is a pure assumption. Unconscious, or semiconscious, reasoning is not reasoning at all. It is of the very nature of reasoning that it be