[page 44]
AMONGST the problems which have to be met by those who
incline to a mystical view of Christianity — that view which
lays special emphasis on the growth and experience of the
individual soul, its ascent to union with God, as the very
aim and object of religion — one of the most pressing is that
which centres on the doctrine of the Atonement. It is
clear that many people feel that such a mystical and empirical
view of religion leaves no room for this doctrine, or for the
idea which it represents; that they are convinced that there
is here a real conflict between two incompatible views of the
Christian faith. On the one hand, they see orthodox Christianity still centred on the "atoning act" of Christ, with its
implications of reconciliation and vicarious suffering, of the
divine life humiliating itself, in order to do within the temporal
order something for man which man cannot do for himself;
a doctrine which retains its attraction and value, because so
full of hope and mercy for the sinful and the weak. On the
other hand, they see that demand of personal and individual
growth, purification, life-enhancement, progressive union with
God — helped doubtless by grace, but no less dependent on
will — as the condition of attaining Eternal Life, which seems
to be made by mystical theology. The opposition, in fact, is
supposed to be between a concept of spiritual life in which
each man must himself do and be, achieve and actualize in his
own person, and not merely as the acceptor of a creed or the
[page 45]
member of a Church — must not only accept the gift, but must
set himself to be an imitator, so far as he may, of the Giver —
and one in which a special manifestation in time and space
of the divine power and love, for Christians the sacrifice of
Christ on the Cross, does something for the man accepting
it, which he cannot do for himself. In the one case, we are
saved one by one, by effort, response, growth; in the other,
we are saved as members of a group. Here the individual
and the corporate ideals in their most intense forms face one
another.
It does, then, seem at first as though we had here an irreconcilable opposition. Yet before we discard either of these
ideas, it is worth while to enquire whether they need really
entail conflict, or can be regarded as two sides of a greater
whole. It is true that there are certain extreme views of
the Atonement which do appear to be hopelessly irreconcilable with the mystical view of religion: especially those
which lay peculiar stress, not on the latent powers, but on
the essential impotence of man; centring the soul's salvation
on " imputed righteousness," and finding the whole meaning
and reason of the Incarnation in the one historical "propitiatory act" of Calvary. There is real conflict between
such a creed, centred on the idea of something done once for
all to the soul — to the world — from outside, and that which
is centred on the idea of a life perpetually welling up in the
soul, on growth, movement, organic change. Yet, on the
other hand, is there not a curious similarity between these
two apparently opposite views of salvation? Is not the
drama of the divine life incarnate, humbling and limiting
itself to the human life to save it, essentially a dramatic
representation of that other experience, of the divine life
limiting itself and mysteriously emerging within each soul,
to transmute, regenerate, infinitize it, which the mystics
describe to us? Is not what theologians call "grace" —
that essential factor of the mystic life-process — a making
[page 46]
good by the addition of a new dower of transcendent vitality,
of the shortcomings of the merely human creature regarded
as an " inheritor of Eternal Life"; just as the historical
surrender of Calvary is conceived by orthodox Christianity
to make good the shortcomings of the whole race, regarded as
heirs of the Kingdom? And if this be so, then can the
opposition between these two ideas of salvation — the vital
and the theological — be as real as it sometimes appears?
Are they not both plans in which atonement plays a part?[Some of this language appears to relate to the philosophical school of Vitalism, from which EU later distanced herself — see the preface to the 12th edition of Mysticism — but which early in her writing career she espoused more strongly. Nevertheless, I believe that the phenomenon which she was interpreting in Vitalist terms remains a fact of mystical experience, and does not disappear with the subsequent discrediting of Vitalism. DCW]
After all, both these views of the Christian scheme have
emerged and diverged from the same source. St. Paul, the
greatest of all Christian mystics — soaked, too, in the idea of
grace and of growth in grace, and deeply impressed with the
fact of the soul's individual responsibility — is also supremely
the theologian of the Atonement. Though no doubt his
teaching on the subject was first called forth by the practical
need of finding some meaning in the tragedy wf the crucifixion,
it is yet a development of that profound conception of His
own death as a filling up to the brim of the cup of sacrifice and
surrender, which seems to have inspired Christ Himself. If
there were indeed a fundamental inconsistency between these
two ideas in their pure and original form, then St. Paul would
be inconsistent; for he certainly held them both. We all
know that the usual way of studying St. Paul's "doctrines"
for purposes of edification has been to isolate each of his ardent
and poetic utterances, place it, as it were, in cold storage till
it is no longer reminiscent of the living mobile body from
which it came, and then subject it to analysis. We are also
beginning to know that this method is not quite fair to a man
who was a poet, an artist, a lover, as well as a constructive
genius of unequalled power. The Pauline utterances are
mostly impassioned efforts to express something which Paul
knows in his own person; descriptions of the way in which the
Christian revelation has met his own needs, regenerated his
own nature. They are closely connected with the interior
[page 47]
adventures which have attended on his new spiritual existence "in Christ." To adopt a well-known phrase of St. Bonaventura, they come "of grace, not of doctrine; of desire, not
of intellect; of the ardours of prayer, not of the teaching of
the schools." To put it in another way, they are the fruits
of his mystical consciousness, which he is trying to express in
artistic or intellectual terms. If we accept this statement
then the fact of Paul's mystical experience and all that it
means to him must never be absent from our minds when we
are trying to understand his declarations. He lives in that
supernal atmosphere which he calls " Christ-Spirit "; he
speaks to us from that sphere. Nothing outside of it is real
to him. Whatever its other bearings may be, his doctrine of
Atonement is solidly real on that plane — the mystic's plane,
the plane of union — or not at all. When he says he is "crucified with Christ," "hid in God with Christ," he means these
things. They are not vaguely pious utterances, but desperate
attempts towards the communication of a real state, really
felt and known. Paul does feel himself welded together with
that Transcendent Life, at once so intimate and personal, so
infinite and universal, which he identifies with the glorified
Jesus. Because of this union — and only because of it — the
acts, powers, holiness, adventures of that life avail for him,
Paul. He is a bit of its Body, in his own bold metaphor.
So that the first great factor of salvation, as he sees it, is the
essentially mystical factor of the "union" of the soul with
Christ; the "doing away of the flame of separation." The
Atonement follows, as it were almost logically, from this.
The general content of his letters makes us feel that St.
Paul had an extremely rich, deep view of life; so great,
indeed, that it refuses to be hammered into a consistent
system, and we can never manage to embrace it all at once.
Always bits get left out, and hence there is apt to be a certain
distortion in all our views of the Pauline universe. There
was a wonderful wholeness, a strongly affirmative quality
[page 48]
about his sense of existence; subtractions and negations were
unnatural to him. Any paradoxes and inconsistencies which
we find in his statements are the inevitable result of an effort
to express the enormous sweep, the living multiplicity, and
(to borrow a word from William James) the thickness of his
vision of Reality. Hence it follows that he was able to see
and treat the soul of man, both as intensely individual and
responsible, and at the same time as a part of the body of all
life; that "mystical body of many members" of which the
head is Christ-Spirit, the Divine Humanity which appeared
in Jesus — a corporation actualized in the Christian Church,
but potentially co-extensive with the whole of mankind.
These two — the separate and the corporate — are aspects of
one whole. They seem to us to conflict, only because the
totality to which they contribute is beyond the focus of the
mind. Thus Paul could and did demand of the individual,
on the one hand the self-mergence of faith, the corporate
sense, the humble acknowledgment of personal impotence;
and on the other hand, could demand of that same man the
personal industry and self-dependence which "works out its
own salvation," "runs for an imperishable garland," and "presses on towards the goal."
All through those passages in the Epistle to the Romans
on which the doctrine of the Atonement was afterwards built,
Paul seems to be trying to express — often by the use of
traditional images, which of course revenge themselves
upon his free handling of them, as imagery so often revenges
itself upon poets — his vision of something supreme, some
enormous uplift to eternal levels, some fundamental change,
achieved by, for, in the human race. He has this vision
just because, and in so far as, this supreme thing has been
achieved by, for, in him, the mystic Paul. Behind the
formula, we feel the first-hand experience. What is this
crucial change? Surely it is the fundamental mystical
achievement, the fundamental religious fact; the human
[page 49]
soul's conscious attainment of God. At bottom, atonement is
wanted simply and solely to help man to do that; to enable
the spirit of life to reach its goal. If we did not want God,
we should be very well satisfied as we are: but we are not
satisfied — "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts
shall find no rest save in Thee." No doubt Paul's eschatological views, the whole tendency of his time, made him
connect this achievement, which he knew at first hand, with
the imminent coming of a Liberator. For him, it was part
of the preparation, the new vitality already given to those who
were destined to live the new life. Achieved in one, it permeated the whole "new race" of spiritual men; but this is
only the interpretation which a complex of causes made him
put upon the transcendent fact. The prominence given to
Paul's legal imagery, its isolation from the general trend of
his life and thought, has made us inclined to forget all this.
But if we try to see Reality from his angle, to catch the wild
accents of his enthusiasm and his love, the theory that he
seriously held anything approaching what would be called a "commercial" theory of atonement falls to the ground at
once. That he should sometimes have argued in this sense
when cornered by Judaizing opponents, is likely enough:
and it is characteristic of the mystical temperament to ignore
the discrepancy between such intellectual exercises and the
fundamental intuition by which it lives. Life and love are
as much the key-words of Paul's system as they are of the
Fourth Gospel itself. He was the noblest of souls; and we
cannot imagine a soul with a spark of nobility wanting atonement as a buying-off of penalty incurred, as a paying by
another of a debt which it owes, a mere saving of it from pain
or any other retribution. The living, loving soul can only
want atonement as a road-making act; a bridge thrown
out to the infinite, on which man can travel to his home in
God. Now, Paul had made that journey in the spirit. He
knew already, at first hand, that Divine Reality was accessible
[page 50]
to him, and that this contact was the greatest thing in life.
But he knew and felt, too, that however much he, Paul, had
really achieved this new state, this fruition of Eternity, by
difficult growth from within; yet first, he could never have
done it at all without the enormous uplift of enhancing-grace,
that new dower of energy which was poured in on him from
beyond the confines of his own nature; and secondly, great
though the change had been, yet it was nothing compared
with the immeasurable human possibilities achieved in Christ.
For Paul, these two achievements — the victory of Christ and
the victory of the Christian soul — are intimately connected.
True, one is infinitely great, the other very little. Except
Christ, "all have fallen short of the glory"; have failed to
grow up to the "fullness of the stature," to actualize the
immense spiritual possibilities of man. Still, we are all in
the same line; partakers of the same kind of life, "grace"
or immanent Spirit, and aiming, consciously or unconsciously,
at the same goal — union with God. Now, total dependence
on God, the centring of our whole interest and attention on
the Spiritual Order, is the very essence of union with Him.
Everything short of that total dependence, that supreme
rightness of relation, is trespass; a backing of the finite against
the infinite. In the death of Jesus, that total dependence,
that perfect relation, was completely achieved at last: the
supreme mystic act, the self-donation of love, was done
perfectly, and in this sense "once for all." Aleph, it is enough.
The spirit of man, in this "new man," had overcome its limitations, the downward drag of instinct, and had leapt to the
heights. This was the "redemption that is in Christ Jesus."
In this unique vindication of humanity, this exhibition of
regnant spirit overcoming the world, Christ-Spirit crowned
with splendour all the tentative efforts of man, and, because
of the corporate nature of humanity, conferred that splendour
on the race.
But there is far more in it than this. And first, the
[page 51]
Christian's achievement of God, such as it is — from that of the
least of believers to that of the greatest of the mystical saints —
is really and practically conditioned by the known fact and
known character of the achievement of Christ. It is the
addition of this fact, this distinct historic happening, to the
racial consciousness, which makes possible the specially
Christian apprehension of God; differentiates it, say, from
that of a Hindu or a Neoplatonic saint. A reference to the
phenomena of apperception will help us to understand this.
As in the world of nature or art our perception of each new
object is governed by the images and ideas already dominant
within the mind, so, too, in the religious sphere. If Christians
had not got the idea of Calvary in their consciousness — if the
image of the surrender of Jesus, His sublime exhibition of
love and faith, were not there first as a clue, something about
which to group and arrange their spiritual intuitions — it
would make a vital difference to their interpretation of the
relation of the soul to God; and this means that the relation
itself would be quite different for the conscious self, other
elements would be stressed, and different results would flow
from it. It is only because the sacrifice of Jesus is now part
of the Christian's "apperceiving mass" — because, coming
to the contemplation of the spiritual world, he inevitably
brings the Cross with him — that he is able to make the characteristically Christian contact with God. That Christian
contact is a direct gift to him, from the historic Person and
the historic act. We approach the Transcendent Order with
that, or, as Paul tersely puts it, "in Christ"; and our fruition of Reality results, not, as some extreme mystics have liked
to think, from any "naked apprehension" — for naked apprehension has no meaning, no content, for the mind — but from
a fusion of that which we bring with us and that to which we
ascend; tradition and experience, the past and the present.
Through love of Christ the Christian comes to the Cross, and
through the Cross he enters a spiritual region he could not
[page 52]
reach in any other way. So we find that even for the most
transcendental of Christian contemplatives, still "in the Cross
all doth consist." It has for him a terror and a rapture which
the judicious philosopher can never know; and reveals to
him strange secrets beyond the province of philosophy.
" Vocce legendo, en croce legendo
nel libro che c'è ensanguinato
Ca essa scrittura me fa en natura
ed en filosofia conventato;
O libro signato che dentro se' aurato,
e tutto fiorito d'amore!"
That Cross gives the Infinite a colour which it did not have
before. So, even from the point of view of the most hardened
and thorough-going psychologist, Paul's statement that "through one act of righteousness, the free gift came unto all
men" is literally accurate. It is true — and that not in any
conjuring-trick sense, but in a sense which fulfils on highest
levels life's basic laws — that "by the grace of one man" "the gift has abounded to the many," entincturing and
altering the whole universe, and hence the whole experience,
of every receptive soul; atoning for the faulty attitude, the
imperfect love, of average man.
But still this is not all. There are other laws of life gathered
up in, and redistributed from, this great lens. Essentially
the idea which the Christ of the Gospels seems to have had of
His own death is the idea of a making good of some general
falling-short on life's part: a "filling-up of the cup" of
sacrifice and surrender, to balance the other overflowing cup
of error and sin. It is not only man's unaccomplished aim,
but God's unaccomplished aim in life, which He is represented
as fulfilling; and the fact that this conception owes a good deal
to Old Testament prophecy need not invalidate its mystical
truth. If we accept this idea, then, as well as showing
individual man the way to perfect union with God — "building
the bridge and reforming the road which leads to the Father's
[page 53]
heart," as St. Catherine of Siena has it — Christ in His willing
death is somehow performing the very object of life, in the
name of the whole race. The true business of an atoner is a
constructive one. He is called upon to heal a disharmony;
bridge a gap between two things which, though separate, desire
to be one. Even the sacrificed animal of primitive religions
seems most often to be a reconciling victim, the medium of
union between the worshipper and his deity. In religions of
a mystical type, then, the Atoner or Redeemer will surely be
one who makes patent those latent possibilities of man which
are at once the earnests of his future blessedness and the
causes of his present unrest. He will achieve the completion
and sublimation of our vague instinct for sacrifice and love,
and thus bridge the space between that which is most divine
in humanity and that which is most human in divinity;
filling up the measure of that "glory," that real and divine
life, of which we all fall short, yet without which we can never
be content. Is not this again what St. Paul feels that Christ
did? What he seems, at bottom, to see in the Passion —
though the imagery by which he tries to communicate it
often sounds harsh in our ears — is, the mysterious fulfilment
of all cosmic meanings; the perfect surrender to infinite ideals
of Man, the compound inhabitant of two possible orders of
reality, who by this painful self-loss achieves perfect identifica- tion with the Divine will. This fulfilment was, as he distinctly
tion with the Divine will. This fulfilment was, as he distinctly
says, the duty and destiny of the human soul. All creation
looks for it "with outstretched neck." But all have fallen
short. Christ, the perfect man, does it, does what man was
always meant to do; and because of the corporate character
of humanity, in His utter transcendence of self-hood and of all
finite categories He inevitably lifts up, to share His union
with God, all who are in union with Him. The essence of the
Atonement, then, would not lie so much in the sacrificial
act as in the lift-up of the human spirit which that act
guarantees; the new levels of life which it opens for the
[page 54]
race. "Much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved in
his life," says Paul.
"In his life" a new summit has been conquered by
humanity. But are we to stop there? Is not the attainment
of that same summit, the achievement of that life-giving
surrender to the Universal Spirit — "a life-giving life," Ruysbroeck calls it — just what the great mystics, following as well
as they can the curve of the life of Christ, try to do according
to their measure? Theirs, after all, is the vision which sees
that "there is no other way to life but the way of the Cross,"
and that the human life of Christ is "the door by which all
must come in." Thus the spiritual victory of the Cross is
for them not so much a unique, as a pioneer act. It is the
first heroic cutting of a road on which they are to travel as
far as they can; not merely the vicarious setting-right of the
balance between God and man, upset by man's wilful sin.
In their ascent towards union with God, ,are not they road-makers, or at any rate road-menders, too? Are they not
forging new links between two orders of reality, which are
separate for the once-born consciousness? If so, then we
may regard each one of them as a bit of the slowly achieved
atonement of the race; that gradual pressing-on of humanity
into the heart of the Transcendent Order. For Christians,
this movement was initiated by Christ. But surely it is continued and helped by every soul in union with Him, even those
who knew not His Name; and Julian of Norwich was right
when she said that she knew she was "in the Cross with
Him."
Two things are perpetually emphasized in modern presentations of religion. First, the stress tends more and more to be
upon experience. Nothing which authority tells us is done
for us truly counts, unless we feel and realize it as done in us.
In so far as this is so, the tendency is to a mystical concept of
religion; and, speaking generally, to just the concept of
religion which is supposed to conflict with the idea of atonement
[page 55]
as usually understood. But, secondly, the social and
corporate character of Christianity is strongly emphasized;
and, where this corporate character is admired more than it is
understood, mysticism is harshly criticized as the religion of
the spiritual individualist, a "vertical relation," the "flight
of the alone to the Alone." St. Paul's "completing opposites,"
in fact, are still in the foreground of our religious life; and so
perhaps some re-statement of the solution by which he found
room for both of them, and hence both for personal responsibility and atonement, may be possible and fruitful for us, too.
And first we notice that those enthusiasts for the corporate
idea who condemn the mystics as religious egoists seem to
forget that they are contradicting themselves; that if their
vision of the Church of Christ as a mystical body be true, then
the mystic's ascent to God cannot be a flight of the Alone.
The poisonous implication of that phrase — true in its context
but always misunderstood — has stuck like mud to the white
robes of the saints. But the mystic is not merely a self
going out on a solitary quest of Reality. He can, must, and
does go only as a member of the whole body, performing as it
were the function of a specialized organ. What he does, he
does for all. He is, in fact, an atoner pure and simple:
something stretched out to bridge a gap, something which
makes good in a particular direction the general falling-short.
The special kind of light or life which he receives, he receives
for the race; and, conversely, the special growth which he is
able to achieve comes from the race. He depends on it for
his past; it depends on him for its future. All are part of
life's great process of becoming; there are no breaks. Although there is perfect individualization, there is interpenetration too. His attainment is the attainment of the
whole, pressing on behind him, supporting him. Thus — to
take an obvious example — the achievement of peculiar
sanctity by the member of a religious order is the achievement
of that order in him; and this not in a fantastic and metaphorical
[page 56]
sense. The support of the Rule, the conditions
of the life, the weight of tradition, the special characters which
each religious family inherits from its Patriarch, have all
contributed something to make the achievement possible;
and are factors governing the type which that achievement
assumes. We recognize the Cistercian stamp upon St. Bernard, the Dominican on Suso and Tauler, the Carmelite on
St. John of the Cross. Each such case vindicates once more
the incarnational principle; it is the true spirit of the community, flowering in this representative of theirs, which we
see. Thus, as we may regard Christ from one point of view
as supremely ideal Man incarnate — the "heavenly man " as
Paul calls Him — summing up, fulfilling, lifting to new heights
all that came before, and therefore actualizing all that humanity
was ever intended to do, and changing for ever more the
character of its future achievements; so, in a small way, we
may regard St. Teresa as Carmel, the ideal Carmel, incarnate.
Each is a concrete fact which atones for the falling-short of
a whole type, and yet is conditioned by that type. The
thought of what the Carmelite life was meant to do, the
pressure of that idea seeking manifestation, did condition
Teresa's achievement. Are we not also bound to say that the
thought of the Jewish visions of an ideal humanity, of the Son
of Man and the Suffering Servant, did condition the external
accidents of the life and death of Christ?
So as to the past. Still more as to the future are the
corporate and individual aspects of spiritual life inextricably
twined together. As that done by one is an outbirth of
the whole, so that done to one may avail for the whole. Only
by staying within the circle of this thought — a thought which
surely comes very close to the doctrine of Atonement — can
we form a sane and broad idea of what the mystic, and the
mystic's experience, mean for the race. Consider again the
case of Teresa. As, even in a time and place of considerable
monastic corruption — for no one who has read her life and
[page 57]
letters can regard the Convent of the Incarnation as a forcing
house of the spiritual life — still the idea of her order conditioned her great and Godward-tending soul, and her dedicated life filled up the measure of its glory; yet more has
Teresa's own, separate, unique achievement conditioned
the spirit of her order ever since. All the saints which it
has nourished have been salted with her salt. All that she
won has flowed out from her in life-giving streams to others.
She has been a regenerator of the religious life, has achieved
the ideal of Richard Rolle, and become a "pipe of life"
through which the living water can pass from God to man.
Is not this, too, rather near the idea of Atonement, a curiously
close and faithful imitation of Christ; especially when we
consider the amount of unselfish suffering which such a career
entails?
The objective of the Christian life, we say, is union with
God: that paradoxical victory-in-surrender of love which
translates us from finite to infinite levels. Most of us in this
present life and in our own persons fall short of the glory of
this. We are not all equally full of grace; we do not all grow
up to the full stature of the Sons of God; and it is no use
pretending that we do. But the mystical saint does achieve
this, and by this act of mediation — this "vicarious" achievement, if you like to put it so — performed by a member of
our social organism, the gift does really "abound unto the
many." For what other purpose, indeed, are these apparently elect souls bred up? What other social value can we
attribute to them than that which we see them actually
possessing in history — the value, that is, of special instruments put forth by the race, to do or suffer something which
the average self cannot do, but which humanity as a whole,
in its Godward ascent, must, can, and shall do; ducts, too,
whereby fresh spiritual energy flows in to mankind; eyes,
open to visions beyond the span of average sight; parents of
new life. Carlyle said that a hero was "a man sent hither
[page 58]
to make the divine mystery more impressively known to us"
— to atone, in fact, for the inadequacy of our own perception
of Reality, our perpetual relapses to lower levels of life; to
make a bridge between us and the Transcendent Order.
And when the hero as mystic does this, is he not in a special
sense a close imitator of Christ?
We seem to have here the highest example of a principle
which is operative through the whole of the seething complex
of life, for there is a sense on which every great personality
fulfils the function of an atoner. On the one hand he does
something towards the making good of humanity's "falling
short" in one direction or another; on the other hand, he
gives to his fellow-men — adds to their universe — something
which they did not possess before. Burke, speaking of the
social contract, has said that society is a partnership in all
science, all art, every virtue, and all perfection; and, since
the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained but in
many generations, it is a partnership between the living, the
dead, and the unborn. "Each contract of each particular
state," he says, "is but a clause in the great primæval contract
of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures,
connecting the visible and the invisible world, according to a
fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds
all physical and all moral natures each in their appointed
place." In such a partnership — linking higher and lower,
visible and invisible worlds in one — the creative spirits in
every department of life may properly be called "atoners,"
for they have a corporate and racial value which is in exact
proportion to their individual achievement of reality. Thus
the great artist, or the great musician, really redeems his
fellows from slavery to a lower level of colour, form, sound.
He atones for their dullness towards that which has always
been there, and endows them with new possibilities of vision
and hearing; gives them, in fact, more abundant life; is
the Door, the Way, to a wider universe. His creative acts
[page 59]
open new gates to the whole race. The fact that he has lived
and worked has effected a permanent change in the stream of
life, which can never again be that which it was before. If
we were more accustomed, on the one hand, to look at the
achievements of religious genius from the artistic and creative
point of view, and on the other hand, to discern the work of
the Holy Spirit in the artistic as well as the religious field,
I believe that we should find a close parallel between the work
of supreme personality redeeming spirit, and the work of the
great artist redeeming sense, from servitude to old imperfections and disharmonies.
We might almost make it the test of true greatness, this
wonderful power of flinging out the filaments of life in all
directions; this way in which noble and creative personalities
of every type seem to be so much more than themselves —
to count for so much more than themselves — to be, in their
generous activities, the servants of all life. They appear to
be the sum of tendencies which preceded them; and to gather
those tendencies to a focus and distribute them again, enhanced
and re-directed, to succeeding generations of souls. Such a
personality has to the full the divine power of giving and of
taking. Whilst he seems specially original, it is always true
that the past, the race, nourishes him to an enormous extent.
Christ Himself conformed to this law. The great man is
rooted in history, plaited up in the life of his own time:
absorbs from the human as well as from the spiritual. His
feet are in Time, though his head is in Eternity. He is never
isolated and ring-fenced. Where he seems so, that appearance is found on examination to be deceptive, as Dr. Rufus
Jones has shown in the case of Jacob Boehme, and Baron
von Hugel in that of George Fox. So, again, the special act,
vision, or experience of the spiritual genius never ends with
him. He is a centre of divine fecundity — it is the mystics'
own phrase. The touch of the divine life stimulates him to
creation. He is a regenerator, a whirlpool of new forces, a
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parent of new things. It seems that life's "tendency to lag
behind," its tendency not to do its best, receives its corrective
in all such great spirits; and the Christian atonement becomes
the supreme, the divine manifestation of a vital law which we
find operative on every level of existence.
If we acknowledge the extent to which Grace, Spirit,
God, works on man through personality, through specific
men — as a communication of transcendent vitality to certain
souls ("elect," if you like) in order that they may bring forth
new life, new vision, new goodness, may fertilize the race
afresh---then shall we not expect to find that Christianity,
being a vital, dynamic system, has exhibited and emphasized
these facts throughout the whole of her great career? This
outward thrust of great personalities from the social organism,
these fresh unique saving contacts made by the individual
in the name of the All, these sudden, incalculable, upward
leaps of life, these changes in the national consciousness which
the hero, poet, prophet can produce — we shall expect to find
all this operative in the highest degree in the Christian Church.
We shall expect to find her claiming for her greatest and
most God-achieving spirits, not only special honour, but a
special value, a special redeeming power in respect of the
corporate body to which they belong; and this, of course,
is exactly what we do find. The mystical saints, in fact,
seem to provide us with a link between the doctrine of the
Atonement — of the special racial value of the utterly surrendered life in God, which was once, and once only, perfectly
achieved — and the doctrine of the Communion of Saints,
or interpenetration and mutual help of all souls "in Christ."
From these two ideas there follows of necessity that further
doctrine of the "prevailing merits" of the saints, their
special "atoning" value for other men, the corporate social
work done by heroic virtue flowering in individual souls, which
the Catholic Church has always deduced from them. At
the back of both ideas we find the same fact; that Life and
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Love, when supremely evoked within the temporal order,
cannot keep themselves to themselves. Such life and such
love have, in spite of their marked individuality, a profoundly
social character; they are violently contagious; they spread,
they interpenetrate, they transmute all selves that will
receive them. They entincture the whole stream of duration,
make good its shortcomings, make widening circles of splendour
within the flux.
So, if we want to think of a Celestial Hierarchy, actual
to us, founded in history, related with us by a thousand
links, it is surely of the saints and the mystics that we ought to
think; rising as it were in graduated orders, according to the
strength and purity of their union with God, the fullness of
their possession of Eternal Life, towards the Cross in which
their tendencies are perfected and gathered up. These are
amongst the highest values which life has given to us. The
apostolic type; the men of action, dynamic manifestations
of the Spirit. The prophetic type; men of supreme vision,
enlarging the horizons of the world. The martyr-type;
men of utter sacrifice and complete interior surrender. These
are the three ways in which the mystical passion for God
breaks out through humanity. These three types make good
— atone for — our corporate spiritual shortcomings; redeem
the dead level of that race which has thrust them forth towards
the Infinite.
Perhaps it seems to us that their difference from us is
too great; that they are cut off, divided by a chasm from
the common experience of man to form an exclusive, "other-worldly" type. Their life rises up like a great mountain,
full of beauty and strangeness; and ours is like the homely
plain. But there is no break between the plain and the
mountain. It is pushed out from us, it is part of us; its
value is bound up with the value of the whole — with our
value, as struggling, growing men. It, every inch of it,
atones for our flatness and enhances the average level of the
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race. We have all seen in Catholic countries how a sudden
hill with a Calvary on its summit can glorify and atone for the
whole landscape — so poor without it, so noble with it — from
which it is lifted up. Now the Cross is, and remains, the
central feature in the Christian landscape too: but is it
not the long slope of that hill, going from the common level
to the heights, which makes it so homely to us, so accessible
to us, so supremely a part of us, and completes its task of
linking humanity and divinity?
These are some of the reasons why the doctrine of Atonement seems to be closely bound up with the mystical vision
of life, and hard to understand — whether we mean by it a
spiritual principle or a historic event — without that mystical
vision. We have Christianity saying to us, on the one hand,
that the utmost ideal of humanity, the ideal of perfect self-donation to the purposes of Spirit, perfect self-surrender to
the interests of the All, was completely and transcendently
achieved in Jesus. In Him man leapt to the heights; and
this unique attainment counts for the whole race. But, on
the other hand, it says that all who can are called to go as
far as they are able on the same road; to "fill up the measure
of the sufferings," to "grow to the full stature," to "press
on to the high calling" of the human soul. Through these
more vital personalities — the mystics, the twice-born, the
saints — the radiance of the spiritual streams out on the race;
God speaks to man through man. Such personalities act as
receivers and transmitters; they really and practically
distribute the flashes of the Uncreated Light. Their activities
are vicarious; they do atone for the disabilities of other men.
Therefore the social value of the mystics, their place in the
organism, is intimately connected with the atoning idea.
Were it not for the principle which the doctrine of Atonement
expresses, the mystics would be spiritual individualists, whose
life and experience would be meaningless except for themselves. And were it not for the continuance of the mystical
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life, the perpetual renewal of the mystical self-donation in
love, its known value for the race, then the historic Atonement
of Jesus would be an isolated act, unrelated to the great
processes of the Spiritual World, of which it should form the
crown.
END