ETERNAL LIFE > * * Printed by MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED, FOR T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH. tOKDON .' 8IMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND CO. I.IMITHO. MEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS ETERNAL LIFE A STUDY OF ITS IMPLICATIONS AND APPLICATIONS BY BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUGEL MEMBER OF THE CAMBRIDGE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY AUTHOR OF " THE MYSTICAL ELEMENT OF RELIGION, AS STUDIED IN SAINT CATHERINE OF GENOA AND HER FRIENDS*' EDINBURGH : T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET 1912 I WAS as a beast before Thee. Nevertheless I am continually with Thee : Thou holdest me fast by my right hand. Whom have I in heaven but Thee ? And beside Thee I desire naught upon earth. Though my flesh and my heart fail : Thou, God, abidest my rock and my portion for ever. PS. Ixxiii. 22, 23, 25, 26. HEREIN is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us. We love, because He first loved us. i JOHN iv. 10, 19. THOU hast created us unto Thyself, O Lord ; and our heart finds no rest until it rests in Thee. ST. AUGUSTINE, Confessions, i. i. i. PREFACE THE history of the following book is indeed simple yet somewhat unusual. The Rev. Dr. James Hastings invited me to contribute to his Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics ; and his instructions concerning " Eternal Life," the first of the articles thus undertaken by me, were to make the paper as long as the subject-matter might seem to deserve or require. He was, in this, doubtless thinking primarily of his Encyclopaedia as a whole ; whereas I myself became so engrossed in my subject that I allowed my composition to grow as long as its great subject-matter pressed it to become. The result, anyhow, was that the article, when sent in, was found to be far too long for the scope of the Encyclopaedia ; and Dr. Hastings kindly arranged with Messrs. T. & T. Clark, the publishers of the Encyclopaedia, to issue my article as a separate book the present volume. Both Dr. Hastings and Messrs. Clark have been very patient and truly generous in V 206G9G7 vi Preface their dealings with me throughout these agree- ments ; and I now beg to thank them cordially. This little private history is recounted here in order to explain how any writer possessed of even average modesty could venture on so be- wilderingly vast a subject. I sincerely doubt whether I would ever have dared directly to undertake a volume upon this subject-matter. Yet this task, thus originally undertaken as but one of several articles, did not, somehow, appear preposterously ambitious ; the work, once it was started, seemed to grow under my hands; and nothing as yet attempted by me has flown so readily from my pen. The subject had doubt- less been occupying my mind and life for many a year; and thus there is some reason to hope that these pages may, in their turn, live for a while and that they may, here and there, help some religious students and strugglers. This is presumably the right place for saying a few words about certain peculiarities of the book, in the order of their appearance within its pages. The Method is very deliberately an analysis of more or less advanced states of soul of con- siderable spiritual experience and of considerable articulation of such experience ; it is not a history Preface vii claiming to begin with the beginnings, or at least with the really early experiences and utter- ances of mankind. Much is now made of the savage, the supposedly brute-like beginnings of man ; and a purely historical, an entirely genetic method and account is now often demanded. Yet, as a matter of simple fact, we really know man only as man; and the interior significance of his earlier and earliest acts and utterances we understand, where we understand them at all, only from analyses of his more advanced and more articulate condition. I am, of course, fully aware that Buddhism and the Dionysiac Cult appeared late in the history of man. Yet at this, comparatively late, stage we are offered an amount of experience, and of articulation of this experience, sufficient, when explained in the light of still later experiences and articula- tions, for us to arrive at some sober, reasonably certain conclusions ; whereas much further back we do not get such volume and such clearness of material. I have striven hard throughout the book never to lose sight of the very important element of truth embodied, even, I think, exaggerated, in the attempts at a "purely genetic method," and in such Naturalism in Anthropology. Hence I have endeavoured to remain continuously viii Preface alive to the profound need and continuous action of the body, of the senses, of sensible objects and of the physical environment, within and for man's mental, spiritual, religious life. And I have attempted, on reaching at last the very late period at which this fundamental fact has been systematically recognized even to excess, sincerely to appraise the strength and the weakness of this Method and Naturalism. A strong insistence will be found throughout these pages upon the Parousia, the Proximate Second Coming upon the Eschatological Ele- ment operative in the life and teaching of Our Lord and in all genuine and fruitful Christianity. The problem involved is so delicate and so far- reaching that we cannot wonder if the great majority of believers have, ever since the first enthusiastic age, turned away from it with instinctive fear or sickening dismay. Yet no repudiation of historico-critical scholars, however audacious or one-sided they may be in part of their conclusions, will prevent the battle con- cerning Christianity the testing of its claim abidingly to supply the full sanity and truth of religion and of life from turning, more and more, in this and the next two or three genera- tions, around the precise significance, place, Preface ix and range of this element in Christian teaching. In any case, the writer could not, in a serious study of Eternal Life, pass over this, the deepest and most operative revelation concerning the Temporal and the Eternal ever vouchsafed to man. And here he would take his stand very deliberately with those who indeed find a genuine and full eschatological element in Our Lord's life and teaching, yet who discover it there as but one of two movements or elements, a gradual, prophetic, immanental, predominantly ethical element ; and this sudden, apocalyptic, transcendental, purely religious element. Indeed, the interaction, the tension, between these two elements or move- ments, is ultimately found to be an essential con- stituent, and part of the mainspring, of Christianity, of religion, and (in some form) even of all the deepest spiritual life. It is, surely, very interesting to note how that brilliant German-French teacher and writer, Albert Schweitzer, who insists, more exclusively again than Professor Loisy, upon one single element, the Eschatological and Apocalyptic, in Our Lord's life and teaching, has found even this picture of Christ so deeply fascinating for his own soul, that he has abandoned his high posts and brilliant prospects in Europe, and has gone, as a simple medical missionary the Lutheran x Preface Church authorities having refused him a clerical ordination and appointment to labour at win- ning the heathen to this purely ascetical and trans- cendental Messiah -Christ and Saviour. This picture of Our Lord is deeply repulsive I am convinced, most rightly repulsive to the large majority of believers. And yet the Eschatological element will have to be apprehended, accepted, and practised with renewed vigour and a new range within a larger, more varied world than ever before, as one out of two movements in the Life of our life. And so practised, as an enriching heroism and wise enthusiasm apprehensive of the Eternal God, it will reawaken Christianity to its fullest attractiveness and vigour. I have had much trouble as to where to draw the line between Modern Times and the Present Day as to how to group Kant and his deriva- tives. I first attempted to take Kant, his four great successors (Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Schopenhauer), and Ritschl, all together ; as already conjointly forming part of our con- temporary life. But this arrangement refused to work well. So then I tried to treat Kant and his four immediate successors as concluding the Historical Retrospect, and to retain Ritschl alone in the Contemporary Survey. I found, how- Preface xi ever, that especially Schleiermacher and Schopen- hauer, and indeed also Fichte and Hegel, are more copiously and more directly operative within our own lives than is Kant ; and, again, that Ritschlianism, though it could never have existed without Kant, is, nevertheless, largely determined by a quite un-Kantian attitude towards the Historic Christ and towards the Christian Community. I continue to dislike the break between Kant and those four great followers of his, and, still more, the position, so far away and so far down, of Ritschlianism. Yet Kant, those four Kantians, and Ritschl appear thus at last to occupy the places naturally marked out for them by their origins and affinities. Especially does Ritschlianism really belong to the group of Institutional Religion, in spite of its largely forced interpretation and its grave impoverishing of the experience and tradition furnished by these Institutions. There is throughout the book a vigilant attention to the nature, range, and implications of our know- ledge to Epistemology, especially to the ontologi- cal character and witness of Religion the central position occupied, in the fullest experiences and articulations of Religion, by the Reality, the Difference, and yet the Likeness, of God. A xii Preface critical Realism a Realism not of Categories or Ideas but of Organisms and Spirits, of the Spirit, a purified but firm Anthropomorphism are here maintained throughout as essential to the full vigour and clear articulation of Religion. It is plain that this difficult subject is indeed inexhaust- ible, and that much discussion and discrimination will be required in this matter from ourselves and from our successors ; yet it is, surely, quite as plain that Subjectivism has had its day for a good long while to come. Certainly, nothing can well be more arid, more drearily reiterative and useless, in face of the entrancing richness a.nd the tragic reality of life, than is most of the still copious literature, not seldom proceeding from thinkers of distinction and technical competence, which attempts to find or to make a world worthy of man's deepest, ever costly and difficult, re- quirements and ideals, within avowedly mere projections of himself. We have thus everywhere man's wants and man's illusions illusions which, at their best, are of a tribal or even racial range and utility, but which, one and all, convey no trust- worthy intimation of any trans-subjective, more than merely human validity and reality whatsoever. The chapter on our present-day Social Problems does not, of course, aim at any Preface xiii description or solution of these problems as such, but only endeavours to elucidate the causes at work here against or for the experience and conception of Eternal Life. The largely still obscure, but abiding and deep, instincts and needs of a spiritual kind struggling for expres- sion in the present acute social agitations and troubles appear to fit in well with the Theory of Knowledge articulated in this book, and especially with the Two Movements found here to be essential to all fully fruitful religion. And thus these very agitations and troubles contribute powerful, because quite spontaneous and un- expected, additional reasons for holding those analyses of philosophy and of religion to be sub- stantially true and adequate to the central facts of life. We have up to this point simply sought and sincerely followed the lines of the fullest life and of continual rebirth : and hence the joys as well as the pangs of expansion can now be ours, and not the sorry pleasures and dreary pains of contraction or, at least, of rigidity in face of the agitated present and the dim future apparently confronting our race. And that joy, pang, and expansion is, each and all, in the closest touch with, and is occasioned and sustained by, the experience of Eternal Life the reality of the Abiding God. xiv Preface I much wished to avoid the acute problems and conflicts of the present concerning Church Authority, and thus to keep myself and my reader in regions undisturbed by such immediate and embittering controversies. But I soon discovered o that I could only escape the questions concerning Religious Institutions on the hypothesis that Eternal Life can be vividly experienced and clearly conceived outside all such Institutions. Yet all sane and full Epistemology, and all the more complete, characteristic and fruitful religious ex- periences and personalities imperatively demand, in the writer's judgment, some genuine Institu- tionalism. And the excesses and defects traceable in Epistemology and in Religion compel us to search out the precise place, function, need, and checks of Institutionalism within the full religious complex, and especially within the experience of Eternal Life as these have been, and continue to be apprehended by earnest and saintly souls. If man's spirit is awakened by contact with the things of sense, and if his con- sciousness of the Eternal and the Omnipresent is aroused and (in the long run) sustained only by the aid of Happenings in Time and in Space, then the Historical, Institutional, Sacramental must be allowed a necessary position and function in the full religious life. No cutting of knots however Preface xv difficult, no revolt against, no evasion of abuses however irritating or benumbing, are adequate solutions. Only the proper location, the heroic use, the wise integration of the Institutional within the full spiritual life are really sufficient. The writer is no Quaker, but a convinced Roman Catholic ; and hence, do what he will, he cannot avoid, he cannot even minimize these for himself utterly intrinsic questions. The Bibliography has been kept very short and sober only such works have been mentioned here as appeared to be of first-rate importance for the elucidation of the subject, and amongst these, generally only such as have been fully assimilated by the writer's mind. The book makes no pre- tension to exhaustiveness ; and bibliographies, in proportion as they are at all complete, readily distract both writer and reader from the experiences and realities professedly in view. I regret, however, not to have found room for the following authors and writings so entirely within my two conditions. After Kierkegaard, it would have been well briefly to have quoted and analysed the utterances concerning Eternal Life to be found in Paul de Lagardes Paper on the Relation of the German State to Theology, Church, and Religion, first published in 1873 and finally reprinted in his xvi Preface "Deutsche Schriften," ed. 1886. Amidst much that is prejudiced, wayward, even perverse, we get here a poignant sense of the continuous real presence of the Eternal, and of our persistent need and search of the Eternal, within all religious History and Succession a sense all the more striking since it proceeds from one engrossed throughout a lifetime in the most minute textual and linguistic studies. There ought to have appeared, perhaps as the conclusion to the remarks upon Naturalism in Anthropology, a grateful acceptance of the admirable pages of C. P. Tiele, in his " Elements of the Science of Religion," 1897, v l- n '-> concern- ing the Infinite present within man pages which sprang so fresh and deep and admirably adequate from the pen of that great scholar and genuine believer. It would have been right, perhaps in connection with Kant's Epistemology, to have made appreci- ative mention of Oswald Kulpes "Einleitung in die Philosophic." For this little volume, first published in 1895, and already at its fifth edition in 1910, is a cheering proof that a carefully self-consistent, sober, and non-subjectivist theory of knowledge can, in the Germany of our day, be furnished in a short handbook, and that it can find there a large world of appreciative readers. Preface xvii And, finally, some careful attention ought pro- bably to have been given, at the end of the Feuerbach section, to Professor Paul Natorp's positions in his "Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der Humanitat," 2nd ed. 1908. This exquisitely written booklet is indeed but a variant (distin- guished by greater sobriety, elasticity, and paeda- gogic, accommodating tact) of the Feuerbachian Illusionism. Yet the attempt to "save" Religion by the elimination of all Ontology, and by re- ducing it to a purely human-social Moralism, is too characteristic of the atmosphere of our times, and is too subtly and completely destructive of religion, not to deserve the most repeated study and refutation. The Contents and Index, on the contrary, err, if at all, on the side of over-copiousness ; yet such a book as the present, if serviceable at all, seemed to require ready aids to its study in almost any reasonable direction and combination. There now remain only two obligations, as pressing as they are pleasant. I have very gratefully to thank the friends who have most kindly helped me to make this work less unworthy of its great theme. Mr. Edmund G. Gardner, Lecturer on Dante at University College, London, aided me especially b xviii Preface in the sections on St. Thomas, Darwin, and Marx, and in the chapter on Institutional Religion. I remain indeed alone responsible for everything printed here ; yet I am anxious to acknowledge the support which I have derived from the careful reading of this my fellow- Roman Catholic. Mr. Clement C. J. Webb, Wilde Lecturer on Natural and Comparative Religion in the Univer- sity of Oxford, was of much service on points connected with Plato and Aristotle, in regard to the translations from Spinoza, and also as to Kant and Schopenhauer, and concerning Epi- genesis and Evolution. And two other friends have most patiently and skilfully criticized throughout the form and sequence of the book ; and it is to their generous aid that the reader largely owes such clearness and sim- plicity as these pages may now show. And I have once again, as in the case of my Mystical Element, to submit these my conclu- sions conclusions which cannot fail to be at least imperfect in many ways and degrees to my fellow-workers, and above all to the test and judgment of my fellow-Christians and of the Catholic Church. FRIEDRICH VON HUGEL. KENSINGTON, \st October 1912. CONTENTS INTRODUT1ON PAGES A generous range and development necessary in any fruitful study of Eternal Life . ''-. . . I Eternal Life, an experience and conception latent, and in various degrees patent, throughout all specifically human life ; but fully operative and vividly recognized in re- ligion alone . . . . . 1, 2 It involves, in proportion to such fulness and vividness, Simultaneity, a complete Present and Presence . 2 Indication of the three parts of this work an Historical Retrospect, a Contemporary Survey, and Prospects and Conclusions , . . . . .2,3 PART I HISTORICAL RETROSPECT Rough division into evidences furnished by the Oriental religions, properly so called, and those supplied by the Grasco-Roman and the Jewish- Christian worlds and their intermixtures, inclusive of Mediaeval and Modern West European and North American civilization . CHAPTER I THE ORIENTAL RELIGIONS The writer without first hand experience or knowledge here. Range of his competence and contribution . 7, 8 Four Oriental complexes of life and doctrine of special interest for Eternal Life ..... 8 xx Contents 1. Buddhism. The Nirvana described and analyzed by Lehmann and Oldenberg . . . 8, 9 Belief in Nirvana and apprehension of life as sheer flux strictly interconnected. Lesson of this interconnec- tion, with respect to Eternal Life . .10 2. Hindooism. Ramanuja largely escapes from Monism into Theism and belief in Free- Will and Grace . 10-12 The apprehension and conception of Eternal Life traceable here . . . . . .12 3. Zarathustra : the Gatha-hymns may well go back to him. Their doctrine profoundly ethical and dualistic. The Yasht-hymns teach an Eternal Light . . 12, 13 How far Eternal Life is apprehended here . . 13 4. The old Egyptian religion articulates or implies with certainty little or nothing concerning Eternal Life. Illustration : the God Ra and the souls identified with him . . . . . . . 13, 14 CHAPTER II ISRAELITISH RELIGION First of seven chapters devoted to the Jewish-Christian, Graeco-Roman, and Modern European revelations, con- ceptions, civilizations . . . . .15 Range of Israelitish times ; considerably narrower range of the Israelitish utterances concerning Eternal Life . 15, 16 1. Utterances of the Israelitish Jahvist writer, and the history of Elijah's conflict with the Baal worship . 16, 17 The prophet Amos : Israel's special responsibilities and moial dispositions, declared more central than all ritual observance . . . . .17 Isaiah of Jerusalem : the vision of his vocation ; his parable of God and His vineyard . . . 17, 18 The prophet Micah : the ethical character of God . 18 2. Jeremiah : God the fountain of living waters . . 18 Deuteronomy : man is to love God with all he is and has ....... 18 3. Ezekiel : God as the good shepherd ; as re-animating the dead ; as the boundless healing waters . . 19, 20 The Priestly Code, akin to Ezekiel's spirit . . 20 4. Lateness of Israel's awaking to conviction of soul's full, indeed heightened, life after death. Reasons and profound instructiveness of this fact . .21,22 The Greeks in full contrast with all this. Yet the Greeks gradually contribute much towards articulation and completion of the Jewish spiritual outlook . 22, 23 Contents xxi CHAPTER III THE HELLENIC EXPERIENCES PAGES Their range in time ...... 23 1. The Orgiastic Cultus of Dionysus, as described by Rohde : ecstatic states here awaken apprehension of the Non-successive, the Eternal . . . 23-25 The soul here felt itself immortal, divine the soul as out of the body, in spite of the body . . .25, 26 Centre of the experience is here the apparent timeless- ness, eternity of the trance state . . .27 2. The Orphics utilize and transform the Dionysiac cult ; their doctrine of the Dionysian and the Titanic elements in man . . . . . 27, 28 The soul's escape from the wheel of births, like yet unlike here to Buddhism , . . .28, 29 The soul here is to regain memory of her earthly life in the Beyond oblivion is here an evil . . 29, 30 Two currents of conception in the Orphic Tablets ; traces in the mystical current of two characteristics of ecstatic states . . . . . . 30, 31 3. Parmenides first precisely formulates the Totttm Simul of Eternity. The clearest of all purely abstract and monistic, static, and determinist professions . . 31, 32 4. Plato attains the most vivid apprehension and formula- tion of Eternity as distinct from Time . . .32 Three stages of his growth and corresponding three groups of his writings. Only last two groups furnish teachings concerning Eternal Life . . .32, 33 (1) Passages concerning Eternal Life in the Phcedrus and Republic ; in the Thecetettis ; in the Sophist ; and in the Parmenides . . . 33> 34 The passages concerning Purgation in this second group 35 (2) Passages in the third group the Symposium and the Ttmceus ...... 35-37 Plato's two defects. The four great insights, com- bined in Plato for the first and the last time amongst Graeco-Roman non-Christian souls : the position of philosophy well within a large national and individual life ; the need of purification and the function of the Thumos ; the continuous search for the organism in all reality ; and a deep sense of an inexhaustible transcendent Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, man's love of which constitutes all his worth . . . . . . 37, 38 xxii Contents 5. Aristotle drops Plato's Purification and his Thirst after the Transcendent. Yet conception of the Un- moving Energy here a profound contribution to expression of the experiences concerning Eternal Life 38 (1) The Pure Energeia of God, in the Ethics and the Metaphysics. Dr. Schiller's analysis of the doctrine .... . 38-40 (2) Nous and Energeia as operative in human life . 40, 41 Intolerably abstract features of this scheme. Yet abiding greatness of intuition that succession not an essential, but a defect, of life. The richness of the life will, however, alone give full worth to the simultaneity, as the simultaneity gives same to the richness . . . . . . 41, 42 CHAPTER IV JEWISH HELLENISTIC TIMES Range of these times, and stages of interaction between the Pagan and the Jewish currents . . . . 42, 43 1. Stoicism. Oriental, partly Semitic, origin of all its earlier chiefs and the historical circumstances of its beginnings largely explain its three peculiarities. (1) Its Pantheistic-materialistic basis. The system has no room for Eternal Life .... 43-45 (2) Its Ethical Rigorism and abstractness of outlook . 45, 46 (3) Yet its deeply organic conception of human society prepares and eventually aids articulation of experiences concerning Eternal Life . . 47, 48 2. The Post- Exilic Biblical, Apocryphal, and Pseud- epigraphic Jewish books, upon the whole less rich and pregnant than the Israelitish writings . . .48 But there are here (1) A series of magnificent utterances in the Psalms, most of which probably belong to this period ; . 48 (2) The first explicit mention of " Eternal " or " Ever- lasting Life," with a clear enunciation of the resurrection of some souls to it, and of some other souls to "everlasting contempt," in the book of Daniel; and statements in Ecclesiasticus, the Second Book of Maccabees, the Apocalypse of Baruch and the Psalms of Solomon ; . .49, 50 (3) Clear indications of the qualitative conception of Eternal Life in the Wisdom of Solomon. Two remarks concerning such qualitativeness . . 50 Contents xxiii 3. The Alexandrian Jew Philo : his attempt to interpret the Israelite and Jewish religion by means of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic categories . . 50, 51 (1) God, as Pure Action and as Eternal outside of Time ...... 51 (2) God's relation to Life conceived in two-fold manner. God possesses fullest Life ; hence He can and does communicate it in a lesser degree and kind . 52, 53 Or God is above, more than Life ; He is He Who is 53 Yet the devoted Jew Philo often pictures God as self-communicative, and man as insufficient to himself . . . . . . 53, 54 (3) The Stoic Apathy far too influential here. Yet, on this point also, the spontaneity and richness of the Jewish religion predominates . . . 54 CHAPTER V PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY The Primitive Christian utterances form three groups, as proceeding from Jesus Himself, or from St. Paul, or from the Johannine writer . . . . -55 I. The actual utterances of Our Lord\he. three con- ditions of their right apprehension ; their abiding power . . . . . . 55, 56 (1) The Kingdom of God in the foreground here, and nowhere clearly pictured as a pure simultaneity . 56 The Kingdom is future, imminent, sudden, a pure gift of God (and apparently successive) . . 56, 57 Relation of " Life " and of " Life Everlasting " to the Kingdom . ,, .... V. . . 57, 58 Certainty of presence and operativeness of the four- fold conviction concerning the Kingdom within Our Lord's life and teaching. Difficulty, since early times, especially concerning the imminence. Yet this teaching of Our Lord, if taken generally, and as one of two essential movements, found to convey the deepest religious experience and truth 58, 59 (2) This purely religious, intensely transcendental out- look certainly prevalent in Our Lord's teaching from Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi onwards. But another, relatively immanental, predominantly ethical outlook on to present, slow, humanly operative realities, also to be admitted, especially in earlier period of Jesus's life . .59,60 xxiv Contents This results from His attitude concerning the exorcisms ...... 60 from His plant-parables . . 60, 61 from His references to His personal presence . . . . 61, 62 (3) Our Lord conceives the Kingdom everywhere as a social organism : four sets of indications . . 62, 63 (4) And the Future Life also to be rich, indeed complete, as to each soul's powers, and social as to each soul's occupation with other souls amidst the same soul's vision and adoration of God . . 63, 64 (5) Yet God here, everywhere, beginning, centre, medium, and end of the entire final life. The soul's self-donation to Him, effected in utter dependence upon His aid, yet with fullest actua- tion of its noblest feelings, motives, passions, supremely exemplified by Our Lord's own life . 64, 65 The negative movement thus planted right within even the purest attachments to the best of things; with the whole impelled by, and culminating in, apprehension and lovingly awed acceptance of the deepest Reality, a holy Love and all-wise Will 65, 66 2. St. Pauts teachings, though affected only by a part of Our Lord's life and revelation, generally more complex or systematic than Jesus's sayings. Yet enthusiastic absorption in most fundamental dis- positions and aims of the historic Jesus, and in development of Christian organism gives to St. Paul's speculation a deep experimental content . . 66, 67 Dominating double fact of St. Paul's life his conversion to a present Christ, yet without having known the earthly Jesus. He turns away from the past, earthly, Jewish Messiah to the present, eternal Christ, the universal Saviour ; his dominant category becomes, not Kingdom of God, nor Eternal Life, but Pneuma, the Spirit . . . . . .67 (1) St. Paul's fully developed anthropological scheme : Psyche and Flesh ; and Pneuma and Body : their connotations . . . . 67-69 (2) A certain de-personalization observable in the Pauline Christ-image. Christ-Spirit taken as though an element . . . . .69 (3) The presence of this, intrinsically eternal, Spirit within us here and now, our surety of immortality and resurrection. The Kingdom of God thus, here also, partly a present possession . . 70 (4) This Christ-Spirit effects and maintains the universal human brotherhood : its articulation in Contents xxv the Christian Church. The Stoic World-City here far exceeded in tenderness, vitality, spirituality . 71, 72 (5) And Stoicism again overcome by an amazing range of experience, and by sense of provenience and omnipresent holiness and love of God . . 72 , The Johannine Writings Pauline in their central Christian convictions, Philonian in their general con- ception of God and of His worship, and in their free allegorical treatment of O.T. . . . -73 Utilization of the Logos conception ; the earthly life of Jesus here set in a frame of Eternity . . .73, 74 (1) All true existence comes from above, as already in St. Paul ; but heightened stress laid here upon " knowing " and " truth " . .* . 74> 75 (2) Eternal Life here the culminating conviction. Its meaning, compared with the Synoptic and Pauline sayings ..... 75-77 Eternal Life, an already present possession . . 77, 78 (3) The interpenetration of spirits ; the abiding of the Father in the Son, and of the Son in the Father ; and the prevenience of God in His relations with man . . . . . . . 78, 79 (4) Range and variety of perfect life here much re- stricted, as compared with life actually lived and proposed by Jesus Himself. Yet here every- where a keen sense of the two great concrete Realities God fully extant and operative inde- pendently of our apprehension and action ; and Jesus, who actually lived in the flesh here below, the lowly servant of human souls . .79, 80 CHAPTER VI CHRISTIAN HELLENISTIC TIMES Their range and three representatives . . .81 i. Plotinus : Instructiveness of conflict throughout his writings between profound religious experiences and intensely abstract philosophy . . . . 8r, 82 (1) Thus God, utterly transcendent ; nevertheless the soul consists and breathes in Him, and strives after contact with Him. But nowhere here does the One strive after us . . . 82-84 (2) Plotinus drives home the trend of Greek philosophy, increasingly abstractive from Plato onwards, con- cerning God, man, the extant world, and relations between God and man all in contradiction to xxvi Contents his, Plotinus's, own deep experiences and intuitions ... . . 85 (3) What to retain from Plotinus's teaching : spaceless, timeless nature of God ; His distinct reality and otherness, and yet immense nearness to, and contact with, human soul ; and priority and excess of all reality over all theory concerning it . 86, 87 2 St. Augustine the historical circumstances of his life . 87 (1) He takes over and deepens Plotinus's apprehensions concerning non-spatial and non-temporal nature, the Eternity, of God .... 87-89 (2) Experience of Eternity achieved by St. Augustine in time . . . . . 89, 90 (3) Sense of Eternity, of Beatitude, proceeds from immediate presence of God within our lives . 90, 91 Insistence upon God's prevenience . . . 91, 92 (4) Keen apprehension of Historical Element of religion the self-humiliation of the Eternal in Time and Space . . . . . . 92, 93 (5) Emphasis upon need of Social Organism the Church. The Two Cities : certain excesses here ; yet the fierceness intermingled with the very spirit of Jesus Christ ' . . .93, 94 Here again our Lord's own statements alone quite full and balanced . . . .94 3. Pseudo-Dionysius, the last great expression of thirst after Eternal Life of ancient European and Near Eastern world. His profound, abiding influence. His country, position, date, character. He takes over Proclus on the largest scale. (1) Proclus, the great Neo - Platonist scholastic, a hierophant. The circular process of Plotinus here everywhere articulated in triadic develop- ment. Beings perfect in proportion to poverty of their attributes. Especially the One is even above Being. But the intermediaries between the One and man's even highest constituents more numerous than in Plotinus .... 95, 96 But Proclus, as against Plotinus, sometimes censures those who hold that the soul can become the very One ....... 96 (2) Pseudo-Dionysius assimilates practically all the chief doctrines, terms, similes of Proclus ; and forms a compound of Christian priestly and sacramental organization and of Proclian ultra- transcendence and abstractiveness. Yet tender truth of Plotinus's experiences and supreme reality of Jesus's life and teaching vivify much of this strange amalgam .... 97-99 Contents xxvii PAGES (3) And in about one-fourth of his text Dionysius adopts Aristotle's general identification between relative elevation in scale of reality and relative rich- ness of attributes ; and applies this principle, in full contradiction to Neo-Platonism, to God Himself . . . . . 99 (4) But Dionysius, following here many Greek Fathers, speaks with almost as little reserve as Plotinus of the " Deification " of the perfect soul . . 100 (5) Absence of historic sense, and purely negative character attributed to Evil, here grave defects ; but these partly balanced by Platonist and Christian insistence upon the need of purification by the soul that would experience Eternal Life . 100 CHAPTER VII MIDDLE AGES Two teachers selected here . . . . ; -. , 100 i. St. Thomas Aquinas: His antecedents, times, character, life-work, and fortunes. His strength and limita- tions . . . . . . IOT, 102 (1) Aquinas compared with Augustine, as to temper, sources, and authorities of his religion . 102,103 (2) His usual, and his exceptional but deeper, teaching concerning man's knowledge of God . 103, 104 (3) Aquinas follows Boethius on Eternity. His position concerning Aevum, as between Time and Eternity, a groping after Durte . . . 104-106 (4) His two currents of teaching concerning the perfect life: (a) The solus cum Solo, abstractive, more intel- lectualist, Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist current . ' . . . 107, 108 (b) The social, concrete current, which finds perfection in creative power and love, and is deeply Christian . . 108, 109 (5) Within latter current, a deep sense of right and dignity of true individuality . . . 109 (6) Evil mostly held to be negative, in wake of Dionysius ; the estimate of human nature, milder than in Augustine, yet still rather Pauline than Synoptic .... . 109, 110 2 Joannes Eckhart : His antecedents and character . no Vivid apprehension of one, and predominant blindness to other, of two movements of religious life. The xxviii Contents PAGES Monistic instinct has here largely the last word, and hence acts destructively . . . 1 10, 1 1 1 (1) His fundamental position : absolute identity of God and Being . . , . . 1 1 1 (2) His anthropology : the soul's highest powers touch Eternity, the lower touch Time. The Reason more truly God's servant than the Will or Love. This Reason penetrates to the simple, unmoving Divine Being which neither gives nor takes 112, 113 (3) ' God ' and ' Godhead ' sharply contrasted in more characteristic passages. Abstractive nature of this contrast .... 113, 114 (4) God's relation to the world : impressive and inade- quate representations of it. Time and space here frequently without any function in spiritual life. Monistic conception of Creation, and Neo- Platonist insistence upon mere negativity of Evil . . . . . . 115, 116 (5) Eckhart's Ethics (a) partly rich, religious, Christian ; . .116 (V) partly monistic to vanishing-point . .117 (6) Completion of Circle by soul's return to its Origin the bare Godhead . . . . 117,118 General considerations. The three thirsts in Eckhart : they presuppose a mighty thirster, and a profound Cause or Causer, and a Quencher, of all this thirst. The religious thirst by far the deepest, and implies volitional and positive char- acter of Evil. Eckhart drawn away, not by experience but by abstractive logic, from all history and concreteness, from all richness in reality especially'the supreme richness of God 118, 119 Rome's condemnation objectively deserved. Indeed the further experiences concerning conditions governing spiritual fruitfulness point away from Eckhart's scheme. . . . 119,120 CHAPTER VIII MODERN TIMES The two thinkers chosen here . .... 121 i. Baruch Spinoza : Circumstances of his life . . 121 Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, Mathematical Physics and strongest prejudice against historic and dogmatic elements of Jewish and Christian religion continuously operative in his mind . . . . 121, 122 Contents xxix Yet he is perennially instructive through combination of deeply religious temper, a keen instinct as to man's constant need of purification, and a steady sense of help supplied towards such discipline by Determinist Science, with mistaken conception as to character of deepest Reality apprehended by man, as to means, categories, tests appropriate to this apprehension, and hence as to place and range of such Science within man's Spiritual Life . . . . 122, 123 (1) Ultimate object of philosophy conceived Stoic-wise with strain of Neo-Platonism : as directly ethical, practical, individual ; as difficult and of rare attain- ment ..... 123, 124 (2) Method every where mathematical (geometrical); the test, utter clearness . . . 124, 125 (3) Fundamental category, Substance. Its Attributes varyingly conceived . . . 125, 126 The Attributes apprehended by us in countless Modes, none of which necessarily involve existence or eternity ..... 126,127 Eternity, in logic of system, rather a simultaneous infinite spatial extension ; and Time here ever considered as clearly as possible, i.e. as merely Clock-Time. Thus the system as such without depth of life, hence without Eternal Life . . 127 (4) Utter Determinism and purely negative conception of Evil pervade the system . . 128,129 (5) Spinoza's self-contradictions concerning the Attri- butes and Modes, the Human Passions, and Reality and Perfection . . . .130 (6) Culminating inconsistency : admission of ethical emancipation by individual soul . . 130, 131 Spinoza here especially utterly sincere, and driven to acute self-contradiction by facts of deeper life and by his sensitiveness to their signific- ance ...... 131, 132 (7) He is also ceaselessly awake to continuous influence and importance of human body ; to organic character and irreplaceable educative worth of human society ; and to necessity for inclusion within highest perfection of right self-seeking 132, 133 But this self-seeking here far too superficial pene- tration by God's Spirit, and Christ's Cross badly wanted here. . . . . 133 Determinist Science useful for purification only in middle distance and as means. And test of truth of convictions, not utter clearness, but richness and fruitfulness .... 133, 134 Yet Faith and Libertarianism themselves require xxx Contents Fate and Science to be largely operative within seeking and finding of Eternal Life . 134, 135 2. Immanuel Kant : his greatness lies not in Religion, but in Epistemology and Ethics, and even here more in detection of precise nature and position of certain crucial problems than in consistency and adequacy of proposed solutions .... 135, 136 His origin and chief life-dates ; his three periods ; restriction of present study to his critical period 136, 137 His nobly ethical motive against Hume . . 137, 138 (1) Kant's Epistemology : its most important positions for present purpose. (a) Assumption of possibility of conceiving knowledge as independent of an object 139, 140 (b) Contradiction between fundamental principle that reason cannot be used assertively con- cerning any Noumena, and ceaseless assertive conviction that Reality is en- tirely heterogeneous to our conception of it . . . ; . 140, 141 (c) Assimilation of cognition to manufacture or building. . . . 141,142 (ft) Wise admission, with Leibniz, of immeasur- able range of our obscure apprehensions, as compared with narrow extent of our clear apprehensions . . 142, 143 (e) And fruitful retention of certain parallelism, even at deeper levels of life, between Space and Time ; but failure to discriminate, in each, between the real and the concep- tual, and to consider them of any import- ance in soul's deepest, i.e. its religious, life . . . . . 143, 144 (2) Kant's Ethics bring one great help and two grave obstacles to experience and conception of Eternal Life. (a) Evil here everywhere not privation, or a substance ; but positive, and an act or habit of the will . . . 144,146 (b) Ethics here formalist, monotonous virtue recognized only where laborious and dis- tasteful, and the affective element treated with suspicion. Causes of this . 146,147 (c) Excessive individualism of these Ethics arises from same causes . . 147, 148 Life's experience far richer than Kant's prescriptions . . . 148, 149 (3) The Critical Kant's Religion, hardly more than his critical Epistemology and Ethics applied to a Contents xxxi subject-matter recalcitrant to both, yet which says nothing specific to him and raises no suspicion in him as to truth or applicability of those tests . 1 50 (a) Kant's opposition to Ontological Argument for Existence of God, the inevitable conse- quence of his epistemological principles 150, 151 His objections . . . 151,152 Traditional (Anselmian) form of argument, largely unsatisfactory. Yet the argument, at its best, covers three great abiding facts and necessities of life and mind . 152,153 All knowledge, knowledge of reality. Our knowledge of things, ever accompanied by sense of their contingency, insufficiency, not furnished by themselves, even in their totality. Thorough failure of attempts to explain this sense as mere projection of man's empty wishes . . 153, 154 Kant's position here instructively halting. Continuous inconsistency of scepticism 154, 155 What the Ontological argument, taken alone, does and what it does not prove . 155, 156 (V) Kant's declarations, where he is critically active and unchecked by his more religious apprehensions, concerning Grace . 156, 157 Religious Worship . . 157, 158 Religious History . . 158, 159 Kant's motives here also understandable and high. Yet abuses of Religion satisfac- torily curable only by deepening of Religion . . . . 159, 1 60 Religion ever centrally Adoration . 160,161 Is a Certainty, proclaims a Givenness. Hypothesis and Stoicism no equivalents . 161 Kant's objections with regard to Grace, refuted by experience of life also in non- religious fields . . . 161, 162 His objections to Religious Worship stand and fall with his Epistemology . 162, 163 And those against History disclose diffi- culties and dangers of appeal to contingent happenings, but leave need of concrete persons and events as strong as ever 164, 165 Kant's hostility to treatment of Jesus Christ even as simply unique, again inevitably results from his theory of knowledge. Lessing's self-contradiction concerning religious equivalence and religious unique- ness .... 165, 166 xxx a Contents Nevertheless Kant's deepest strivings against an impossible universal equival- ence of religion. Religion deep and strong only as a particular religion. . 167 PART II CONTEMPORARY SURVEY Four Philosophies derivative from Kant, and their main present-day utilizations, to be taken together. Next a great Biological Doctrine. Then Socialism and other now prevalent social problems and conditions. And lastly Institutional Religion . . . .171 CHAPTER IX PHILOSOPHIES DERIVATIVE FROM KANT Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Schopenhauer to be studied in conjunction here. Reasons why . . .172 I. J. G. Fichte. His violently ethical character, and change from Spinoza to Kant. His Epistemology more uniformly conceives knowledge as independent of its object than Kant ; and his Religion as entirely rooted is Categorical Imperative as with Kant. Yet Fichte increasingly possesses a deeper religious apprehension than Kant . . . 172, 173 (1) Fichte's entirely Immanental Critical System articu- lates wide-spread present-day feelings of con- straint from whatever is not somehow my own mind or its creation . . . 173,174 (2) Yet he insists upon a Moral Ordering outside finite moral beings, but opposes conception of an Orderer ...... 174 Nevertheless this Ordering is conceived religiously 174, 175 Deeply religious sayings of his later stage con- cerning Love, the Blessed Life and Death 175, 176 (3) Close interdependence of souls, and even self- subsistence of the Absolute affirmed ; and Kant's rigorism overcome . . . . 176, 177 Yet mysterious uniqueness attaching to all History never adequately recognized . . . 177 (4) Accusation of Atheism against Fichte not altogether unfair. His account in 1792 of origin and worth of idea of God as sceptical as anything to be found in Kant - . . . . 177, 178 Contents xxxiii PAGES Fichte re-stated by Hugo Miinsterberg : weaknesses of Fichtean positions even here . . 178, 179 Rudolf Eucken blends a Fichtean trend with Platonist and Hegelian doctrines ; and a con- tinuous keen sense of significance of History and of Evil makes him very largely satisfactory. Yet even here Fichte's influence unfortunate upon two points ..... 179, 1 80 2. Friedrich Schleiermacher. His nature more aesthetic than religious, and more religious than ethical. His upbringing and career .... 180, 181 His times. Moravian, then Spinozist influences affect him throughout his two periods, of the Reden and of the Glaubenslehre . . . . 181-183 (i) In the Reden, (a) Essence of Religion : Intuition and Feeling of Infinite, of the Universe . . 183,184 This Intuition-Feeling, an influence of the universe contemplated . . 184, 185 The generative moment of Religion . 185, 1 86 Consideration of these positions. Satisfactory points . . . . . 186 Yet we still have here an anti-dogmatic dogmatist Epistemology . . 186-188 And the intuition is hardly religious . 188, 189 ($) Intuition ever something simple, separate. Not religion but its systematizers have filled the world with strife . . . .189 Indeed religious feelings naturally paralyse man's energy of action. Yet religious feelings also vehement and shattering : men should do nothing from Religion but every- thing with Religion. Yet love, compassion, gratitude, humility, contrition, are not Morality but Religion . . 189, 190 These positions considered : As to Intuition-Feeling . . 190, 191 and as to Religion and Practical Action 191, 192 Schleiermacher, however, sees greatly further than Kant in that Religion here is also contemplative and recollective, and that the deep worth and religious root of love, humility, contrition are laid bare . .192 (c) History in strictest sense, the highest object of Religion all here to be organic life . 192 Yet God only one of many religious ways of viewing universe . . . 192, 193 And Immortality considered as mostly taken in a spirit directly contrary to Religion 193, 194 c xxxiv Contents Here the emphasis upon History shatters entire Pantheistic scheme and temper. In- difference to Theism and Immortality be- come then impossible or affectatious 194, 195 (2) The Glaubenslehre : its four changes. (a) Religion now the consciousness of our unlimited dependence, i.e. of our relatedness to God . . . . 195, 196 Persistent inadequacy traced here . . 196 (b) Everywhere now we have God ; but the determinations concerning Him are Spin- ozistic. So too with Sin and with Prayer . 197 (c) Now Christ and Christianity enclose, in their past and future, the entirety and finality of religion. Schleiermacher here goes even beyond average orthodoxy. Double danger of this intense Christocentrism . 197, 198 (d) And now root of Religion found in the experience of the religious community. This change a profound improvement . 198 Ernst Troeltsch considers himself largely a suc- cessor of Schleiermacher, yet his superiority great. Troeltsch's four profound apprehensions . 199 His declarations concerning Eternal Life tension and polarity of religion . . . 199,200 3. G. W. F. Hegel : main dates of his life . . .201 All-important influence of Schelling . . . 201 Change to opposition against the Identity-Philosophy. Yet Hegel adopts an anti-identity principle, but retains two positions of identification . 201, 202 (l) His profound, rich principle : Reality not substance but subject, system ; it is self-subsisting, definite, self-knowing ..... 202 This a deliberate traversing of the Identity- Philosophy ...... 203 Hegel's admirable survey and comparison of the categories of the human mind, from emptiest to fullest, i.e. most real bare Being to Spirit (Absolute Spirit and Absolute Knowledge no more belong to this principle) . . . 203 So far, rock-ground. We know God is at least all our fullest categories carry with them . 203, 204 Thus a Critical Anthropomorphism, the sole self- consistent escape from sheer mythology . 204, 205 Also outside Philosophy, insistent evidences and motives for such Anthropomorphism . 205, 206 In any case, sincerity demands admission that our imperishable requirements are truly of this Theistic kind . 206 Contents xxxv (2) But Hegel prevented from this logical consequence of his own anti-identity principle by his two positions of identification . . . 206, 207 (a) Identification of Thinking and Reality transformation of Logic into Metaphysic, indeed Life . . . 207, 208 Trendelenburg's analysis of this procedure 208, 209 The crucial passages containing this transi- tion from abstractions to realities. 209, 210 Impossibility of such a jump . 210,211 (b) Identification of human and Absolute Reason and Consciousness . . .211 How Hegel arrives at this identification 211, 212 Crucial passages . ' . . 212, 213 He shrinks from, yet ventures upon, full identification of human history and of history of the Absolute, and then attempts some distinction . . . 213,215 Absolute Knowledge indeed the system's culmination ; Religion here never more than the penultimate end and standard of man .... 215, 216 Identification here of two very distinct, even different things the need and reality of history for durational man, and the nature and operation of the Eternal God 216, 217 Accumulation of improbabilities thus intro- duced .... 217, 218 (3) The deceased English Hegelians : T. H. Green, R. L. Nettleship, John and Edward Caird. How much they owed to Hegel, and how much Hegel owed to them . . .> . 218-220 Yet even here Hegel's influence not simply bene- ficent : Insufficient recognition of the senses, the body, the material world their function within the mind's life .* . . . . 220 Of essentially ontological character of the religious affirmations adoration and sense of sin ..... 220, 221 Of insistent need of the Institutional in religion ..... 221, 222 And of abiding distinction between Philosophy and Religion .... 222, 223 (4) T. E. M^Taggarfs peculiar combination of convictions ..... 223, 224 (a) His declarations concerning The need of metaphysics in Life and in Religion ..... 224 xxxvi Contents His declarations concerning Personal identity, as consisting in identity of substance .... 224 A non -omnipotent, non-creative God, as a conception worthy of serious con- sideration . . . 224, 225 A perfect community of spirits as the actual reality and as excluding any single omnipotent Person . 224, 225 Immortality as necessarily coupled with Pre-existence, and lapse of memory as no bar to identity of lives thus separ- ated ; and Time and Existence as two distinct, separable characteristics 225, 226 () Consideration of these declarations. Satisfactoriness of Metaphysical attitude 226, 227 But strange revival here of a Monadism less interior than Leibniz's own . 227, 228 The Realized Perfection thus resides at any one moment not in Hegel's highest cate- gory, self-consciousness, but in lower cate- gory, substance. Reason of this choice 228, 229 Man here great even simply in himself contrary to Christianity and experience . 229 The God here refused and the God con- sidered possible, only mannikins, as against God of Christianity and Roman Church who alone penetrates depths of human mind and will . . 229, 230 The scheme leaves virtually unexplained and unutilized the characteristic, indelibly human sense of the Infinite, the Other, of dissatisfaction with all that is merely human ..... 230 What admissions appear to be necessary here .... 230-232 The Christian consciousness finds multi- plicity of Persons in God's Unity ; but 'Person' here not as in Dr. M'Taggart's construction .... 232 (5) Ludwig Feuerbach, ablest exponent of destructive implications of Hegelian Absolutism. Lesson fully cogent only by inclusion of contrast between his Essence of Christianity 1841, and his Essence of Religion 1851 ..... 233 (a) His main positions in 1841. Our consciousness of Infinite, merely con- sciousness of Infinity of our conscious- ness .... 233, 234 Contents xxxvii PAGES God a purely human presupposition. Yet that man alone the true Atheist to whom the predicates of the Divine Being Love, Wisdom, Justice are nothing, not he to whom merely the subject of these pre- dicates is nothing ... A, 234 But religion knows nothing of anthropomor- phisms ; they are pronounced such only by the understanding which reflects on religion . . . <.. , 235 (b) Consideration of these positions. At last here the human mind unambigu- ously knows nothing whatsoever but itself, and attains this real self-knowledge by means of no other realities than itself 235, 236 Yet in actual life we never know ourselves alone, but only with, on occasion of, by means of, other realities . 236, 237 Our consciousness of Infinite cannot, then, be straightaway declared necessarily nothing but consciousness of Infinity of this our consciousness. And the specific- ally religious consciousness testifies to a different Infinite to a Perfect Present Reality _ . . . 237, 238 Soul's consciousness of this Infinite awakes only with consciousness of mind and of senses to their several objects and activities. But this true of our every other consciousness and knowledge 238, 239 Man's religious apprehensions never entirely adequate, and often erroneous, as are also his apprehensions in Physical Science. Yet no necessary connection between some error and all illusion : in both cases reality really apprehended from first . . 239 Conditions and effects of religious attestation witness strongly against a conclusion of all illusion .... 240, 241 Painful sense of inadequacy of all merely human apprehension left unexplained 241, 242 Yet this sense, noblest, costliest, most fruit- ful possessed by man : special intolerable- ness of scepticism here . . 242, 243 Religion, as sense of Infinite, does know of anthropomorphisms e.g. St. Paul and St. John of the Cross . . . 243 (c) Feuerbach's own final utter scepticism and materialism, in 1851, a tragic proof that xxxviii Contents PAGES denial of an abiding subject to predicates love, wisdom, goodness, does matter most profoundly .... 243, 244 3. Arthur Schopenhauer, to be studied here in four of his positions ..... 244, 245 His antecedents and character. Practically author of one single book ..... 245 (1) His Epistemology as a Metaphysical Dualism 245, 246 Leading to an Oriental Dreaminess . . 246, 247 A strangely un-Kantian conclusion from Kantian premises ...... 247 One admirable epistemological instinct here : preference of intuition to abstraction . . 248 (2) His Epistemology as radically inconsistent in its attainment of the Thing-in-itself. This Thing-in- itself, the will a will bereft of all reason and logic ...... 248, 249 Angry denunciation of Pantheism. Its reason. Fine insight into special intolerableness of Pantheistic Optimism .... 249 History everywhere to be driven out . . 249,250 The three self-contradictions of this position . 250 Its two truths ..... 250, 251 (3) Schopenhauer's Pessimism : its general character . 251 Opposition to Hegelianism, Judaism, Moham- medanism, as optimistic ; esteem of Christianity and Buddhism as pessimistic . . 251,252 Condemnation of anti-celibate Protestantism and rationalist Christianity . . ... 252 The Fall, the one valuable doctrine' of O.T. . 252, 253 Criticism. Truth and need of a pessimistic and ascetical movement. But this movement must stand within larger whole of two interdependent movements ...... 253 Need of movement of attachment for awakening sense of Infinite ..... 254 The asceticism here, not Christian but Gnostic : purificableness of body, essential to Christianity . 255 Consequent injustice to Judaism and Islam. Fulness of spiritual life requires both preliminary Pessi- mism and final Optimism . . . 255, 256 (4) His Nirvana : statements concerning it . ' 256,257 Schopenhauer's intensity of yearning after, and real faith in, an unutterable Perfect Life and Abiding Reality appear thus at the last . . . 257 And we learn weakness and strength, with respect to religion, of such dim, mostly despairing outlooks. Their weakness . . . .258 Their strength . . , , , . 258,259 Contents xxxix The double requirement of Religion with regard to Philosophy here is advantageous to Philosophy . 259 Relation to Schopenhauer of Richard Wagner and Leo Tolstoi, but especially of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche ...... 260 (5) Soren Kierkegaard. His historic affinities : his special interest combination of deep modernity of mind with massively ontological religion . . 260 His declarations concerning God's Reality and Difference, and our utter need of Him . . 261 Lesson of his life : all-importance for Religion of Reality and Difference, but also of Likeness of God ; the last wanting in Kierkegaard . . 262 Ibsen's Brand, suggested by Kierkegaard's figure, vividly drives home this lesson . . . 262 (6) Friedrich Neitzsche. Primary causes of his great vogue. Which of his writings are likely to live. His anti-religious excesses spring doubtless largely from a thirst for what religion alone can satisfy e.g. his Super-man . . . 263-264 CHAPTER X BIOLOGY AND EPIGENESIS Range of present study on Darwin and the thinkers especi- ally influenced by him . . ' . . 264,265 1. Charles Darwin's- declarations concerning his own sense of religion, of poetry, of metaphysics . 265, 266 Theism . . . . . 266, 267 Immortality . . . . . . 268 Conscience, Duty, Sin .... 268 2. Study of these declarations and their implications. (1) Profound difference between Evolution proper and Epigenesis ..... 268, 269 Darwin confuses the two . . . 269, 270 His one great obstacle to full continuous adhesion to Theism : its probable origin . . 270, 271 (2) The Sciences recommend some doctrine of Descent ; but precise character and mechanism of this Descent certainly very complex and still pre- dominantly obscure for us. Kernel of the riddle lies in continuous presence of the necessary beginnings of useful variations ( Weissmanri) . 271 We are thus thrown back upon some Providing Power. Purely mythological character of the alternatives ...... 272 xl Contents (3) A. R. Wallace on the faculties special to man ; on three stages in development of organic world where some new cause must necessarily have come into action : and on reality of these changes, however imperceptible at their origin . 272, 273 Even greater definiteness of statement desirable here ...... 273, 274 Significance of Dr. Wallace's example . . 274 (4) Professor Huxley : original position and question of his Romanes Lecture . . . 274,275 A direct challenge to inevitable concomitant of every doctrine of Descent taken as self-explanatory . 275 Professor Andrew Seth completes and guards the challenge . . . . . .275 Only one further requirement here : a plurality of worlds ..... 276, 277 The Huxley-Seth positions alone furnish a sufficient home for Darwin's own sense of duty . . 277 (5) Anthropology and Comparative History of Religions still largely influenced by Naturalism. This all but inevitable .... 277, 278 R. R. Marretfs "Anthropology" instructively com- bines all the insights and some of the imperfections here considered .... 278, 279 The finest of the analytic historical workers appar- ently penetrate deeper into humanity, present and past, than do even the most learned "purely genetic " biological explorers . . . 279 3. . Confirmation and growth brought, in three respects, to apprehension and formulation of religious and moral experience, by biological-evolutionary move- ment. (i) The movement, at its best, brings scientific attention back from dead or abstract things to concrete, living beings. Illustrations from Darwin's own life . . . . . . 280, 281 Full adhesion here of all fruitful Epistemology, Ethics, Religion, Life in general . . .281 This graduated love of the graduated realities of the rich, real world will triumph over the fierce passion for levelling all reality down to abstraction of purely mechanical causality. Ernst Haeckel: his main positions . . . . 281, 282 His cheery destruction of all "dualism," i.e. religion ..... 282, 283 The more abstract and unreal the notions, the more they here oust concrete, experienced reality. Three causes of vogue of such materialistic Monism ...... 283 Contents xli (2) The Rev. F. R. Tennanfs attempt to elucidate experiences of temptation and guilt by Descent Theory : its interest . . . 283, 284 Main positions of Tennant and of Archdeacon Wilson ..... 284, 285 Insufficiencies and satisfactory points of this attempt ..... 285, 286 (3) Continuity and Immediacy of Divine Action in- volved in adequate doctrine of Creation, allowed, indeed required, by an Epigenesis content to be a process and description .... 286 The Rev. Philip Waggetfs statements . 286, 287 Two additions suggested here . . 287, 288 4. Two philosophers, Herbert Spencer and Henri Bergson, might be considered here. Henri Bergson chosen out . . . . ' . .288 Grateful acceptance of his central conception Duree as distinct from Clock-time ; of his more restricted descriptions of both ; and specially of his insist- ence on essential role played by Duration in man's entire life. Here only certain still more funda- mental applications or conceptions of Bergson to be considered: as to Time and Space, and as to Finalism and place and character of Trans- formism ..... 288, 289 (1) Bergson's Essai : its fundamental antinomy the Durational (Qualitative) and the Extensional (Quantitative). Origin of latter . . 289, 290 Time as really experienced and Time as clearly pictured. Function of Space . . 290, 291 Considerations. Difference of method pursued here as to Time and as to Space . . 291, 292 Intense abstractness of the two " realities " here remaining ..... 292 Bergson himself indicates that Duration is not sheer Becoming . . .. 293,294 He has broken our living organic conscious- ness into two separate worlds, each unreal, and jointly exclusive of personality . . 294 (2) Bergson's Evolution Creatrice : its fundamental thesis : utter heterogeneity and unpurposive character of all Duration and Life ; Transformism essentially a dissociation and distinction of elements ..... 294, 295 Yet, here too, indications of persistence, purpose, graduated worth . . . . 295, 296 Nevertheless the system here conceives existence as strictly for existence only ; change or advance here only in the means, not in the end of life 296, 297 xlii Contents (3) General conclusions. Man requires Real Space and Conceptual Space as well as Real Time (Duration) and Conceptual Time ; and, in his consciousness of Duration, a sense of Simultaneity as well as of Succession 297, 298 Duration at its highest in its element of Perman- ence . . . . . .298 Bergson's conception of Liberty too "pure," i.e. artificially one-sided . . . 298, 299 This shown by facts of consciousness, especially of conation ..... 299 And by insufficiency of reasons given for his high esteem of the Free Act .. . 299-301 He has removed the mechanical obstacles to Liberty, but has not discovered its spiritual conditions ..... 301 As to Eternal Life : the distinctive being of personality is inversely as its dependence on successiveness (Bosanquet) . . 301, 302 Religion can and must experience and conceive full Eternity as the characteristic of the Eternal God present and operative within man's durational, i.e. quasi-eternal spirit. . . 302 CHAPTER XI SOCIALISM AND PRESENT SOCIAL PROBLEMS The world of the West European and North American workmen genuinely new. Chief causes operative here 303, 304 This complex to be studied here only in its relation to Eternal Life in its anti-transcendental trend ; in the reasons productive of such secularism ; and in the conditions and dispositions here hopeful or already satisfactory for religion ..... 304 i. Karl Marx : his two great discoveries the Material- istic Conception of History and the secret of Capitalist Production. The former derived from Hegel through Feuerbach . . . 304, 305 Yet this conception pushed by Marx and Engels to the full materialism and anti-religiousness of Feuerbach's last period ..... 304, 305 Capitalistic question here passed over. Yet re- minder necessary that original Marxist Socialism wages relentless war against all the natural organizations other than the State, omnipotent and sole ..... . 306-307 Contents xliii PAGES 2. Three causes generally operative within these classes and movements in direction of Secularism. (1) Man's limited capacity of attention and interests ordinarily extended only by great, unbroken traditions of spiritual experience and training. These traditions practically unknown here ; men absorbed here in other needs which appear to be more immediately important . . . 307 Baffling complexity, scale, acuteness of these needs ..... 307, 308 Only a great moral miracle could preserve such a world from all Secularism . . 308, 309 (2) A positive revulsion against the Churches and Sects here frequent ; predominantly social and political in origin, it is largely religious (i.e. anti-religious) in effect ...... 309 (3) A peculiar atrophy and deformation of the soul. First, widespread ignorance or misunderstand- ing of religion and of perennial spiritual needs of man . . . . 309, 310 Clear superficial abstraction thus wins against dimmer deep reality .... 310 Leads to highly militant, acutely problematic creed of purely immanental yet apocalyptic millennial character ..... 310, 311 Allows a superficial expectation of soul's full satis- faction by entire realization of such purely earthly programme, as against John Mill's deepest insight 311 And, by concentration of entire man upon this admittedly difficult realization, it greatly increases the Secularism already furnished by the absorp- tion and revulsion already considered . . 312 3. Three sets of conditions and dispositions here religiously hopeful. (1) Certain general effects operative within all men throughout the countries concerned : Our confrontation by masses of men free from the maladies of the more fully educated mind, and possessing a certain sincerity, simplicity, self-sacrifice ; . . 312, 313 and the awakening of upper classes by the social- ist militancy in various much-needed ways . 313 (2) This double general gain can be specially advan- tageous to religious souls, particularly as regards Eternal Life. For thus we attain insight into large dependence of religion of average man upon certain social and physical conditions. The " poor " declared blessed by our Lord and by the Poverello . . , , , . ^ 314 xliv Contents PAGES This dependence parodied by the Socialists and more wisely apprehended by the Christian social workers . . . 3*5 And thus too we are thrown anew upon the costly two-fold movement Christianity's renovative power. For religion thus forced to be more than ever Temporal Spatial Immanental . 315, 316 Yet also more than ever Eternal and Omnipresent Transcendent . . . . 316, 317 Only the two movements together of the real, durational soul supported by the real Eternal God here adequate . . . . . 317 Sir Charles Booth's testimony concerning London 317, 318 And only such Transcendence in Immanence can preserve enthusiasm from fanaticism followed by cynicism ..... 318, 319 (3) Symptoms amongst Socialist leaders and masses of subsidence of angry Secularism, perhaps also of indifference to religion in Germany . . . . . 319, 320 Belgium and Italy . . . . 320 France : M. Georges Sorel on mystery and pessimism ; on Pantheism ; and on Institutional Christianity . 320, 322 on the Encyclopedists ; on monastic asceti- cism ; on the Christian tradition . 322, 323 Sorel not far from fuller experience and clearer conception of Eternal Life . . 323 CHAPTER XII INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION To be studied only as home and training ground of Eternal Life as bringing help or occasioning obstacles, or as itself purified and checked by this life. Three groups of facts and questions to be studied . . 323, 325 i. Increasing clearness as to central position held in religion by Cultus Social Worship, and by Symbols and Sacraments contacts between spirit and matter 325 Instances of powerful operation of the Institutional 325, 326 This Social Institutional need really treble : (i) Need of common worship : Professor Troeltsch's utterances ..... 326, 327 Our Lord's institutions and the intrinsic needs of religion ..... 327, 328 Contents xlv PAGES (2) Need of efficacious sensible signs and contacts : weakness of Liberal Protestantism here . 328, 329 The anti-sacramental passion historically under- standable ; yet it has not resolved the problem and has exceeded the facts and necessities of human nature and of religion . . . 329 Use and commendation of such signs by Our Lord, St. Paul, the Fourth Gospel ; and the intrinsic requirements of religion here . . 329, 330 (3) And need of interrelation between Religion and the other complexes and organizations of human life . 330 Wilhelm Hermann here essentially inadequate in his opposition to all Mysticism . . 330, 331 And in his reduction of Religion to recognition of Categorical Imperative and the Historic Jesus 331, 332 Impossible for religion to ignore or suppress the other activities, or for these activities to suppress religion. Especially impossible for Christianity . 332 Increasing impossibility of such reduction amongst educated West Europeans. Official Church persistently conceives and practises life in an all- inclusive manner .... 332, 333 (4) Yet the fully developed Institutional Religions losing ground for many a day in Germany .... 333, 334 France, Portugal, Spain, Italy . . . 334 United States ..... 334 and in England ..... 335 These losses not all simply ascribable to perversity of human nature . . . . -335 Where, then, besides the social causes already studied, are we to seek the inhibition ? . 335, 336 2. Essential strength and incidental weakness of Institu- tional Religion, studied from within Roman Catholic Church, appears in five pairs of closely related power and defect ... . 336 (1) Large continuous utilization by Religion of Philo- sophy and Science. Its antiquity and ad- vantages .*v- Ua . . . 337,338 Yet two great weaknesses here : Philosophy essentially free .. . . 338 but Theology often oppressive towards Philo- sophy . . 338, 339 And Aristotelianism in particular profoundly unhistorical in temper .... 340 As to Natural Science : a tolerable latitude appears finally assured to it . . . . 340, 341 (2) Close connection of Religion with History : right- ness, necessity, fruitfulness of this . . 342, 343 xlvi Contents The difficulties of all the Institutional Religions here ...... 343, 344 Rome's special difficulties from her rejection of Pietism 344,345 and from her very large and ancient toleration of the uncertain and legendary in history . 345 No grave intrinsic difficulty with respect to earliest, mostly sober constituents of such beliefs, within secondary subject-matters. But more or less grave trouble surrounds questions concerning factual character of certain constituents of the complex of Christian doctrine . . . 346 The Church's abiding insistence apparently covers three points. Limits to reasonable demands of theologians in historical and documentary matters. Parallel of the Heliocentric controversy . 346, 347 (3) Insistence upon supreme importance of Religious Truth and Unity. Deep, abidingly precious insight thus manifested . . . 348 The corresponding trouble : persecution. Instances of it throughout Church History . . 348, 349 Yet contrary current also very real in ancient Church ..... 349, 350 amongst Popes of late antiquity and of Middle Ages . . . . . .35 in the great Jesuit theologian Cardinal de Lugo and Pope Pius IX. . . . 350,351 Implications of the Church's solemn self-commit- ment to entire O.T. as divinely inspired . ' . 351 Excommunications. Schisms. Cardinal Manning on supernatural grace amongst non-Roman Catholic Christians ..... 351, 352 And great variety of spiritual types within Roman Church also aids this wider, gentler out- look ...... 352 Permanent predominance of the gentler current would again render the Roman Church fully lovable. In any case, scepticism and indifferencr only excuse and aggravate bigotry and persecution. A vigilant sense of Reality of Abiding God are here alone of sufficient avail . . 352,353 (4) Persistence, consolidation, domination of Canon Law. Religion rightly conceived as also concerned with Law. Christianity contrary to Gnosti- cism here. Evidence of Acts of the Apostles. Hence only the spirit, position, and effects of such law can reasonably be called in question .... 353, 354 Contents xlvii Yet Church's persuasiveness now for long in inverse ratio to her coercive character. Contentions of Lutheran Canonist Rudolf Sohm : Catholicism essentially the non-discrimination between Church in the religious sense and Church in the legal sense . . 354, 355 Christians knew from first only one Church, the same Catholic Church; the only change since, an all-pervading interior transformation of this One Church from an entirely free, charismatic body into a predominantly coercive, legalist organisation . . .,- . 355>356 Considerations : Primitive Christian, average Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Curialist attitudes towards relation between Visible and Invisible Church. Neither simple identity nor complete inde- pendence are primitive or fruitfully possible solutions .... 356, 357 Here again all superfine Idealism, all " pure " spirituality a snare . . . -357 Yet Canon Law largely late medieval, i.e. strongly theocratic. It was then largely checked and completed by other forces still vigorous in those times . . 357, 358 The Protestant Reformation, still more the French Revolution, have changed habits of mind operative when this part of Canon Law flourished, and yet have also abolished the checks within Church upon this Law's full development. Operative constitution of visible Roman Church now an autocracy * 358, 359 Three reflections and encouragements as to future possibilities .... 360 (5) Insistence upon connection between Religion and Politics. Undeniable as a general principle . 361 Yet no modern, Western attempt at a direct con- nection long successful. Hostility of the finest of present-day religious minds to such combina- tion . . . . . . 361, 362 Apparent deathlessness of political ambitions with- in Roman Curia .A 362, 363 Hopes with regard to this trouble . . 363, 364 , How the experiences and convictions of Eternal Life, which Institutions alone fully awaken, can aid against the evils incidental to Institutionalism to be now de- scribed and illustrated. Limitations of this double study. xlviii Contents (1) The complex of vivid operative convictions con- nected with Eternal Life, fundamentally fivefold : Double sense of Abidingness - Divine Eternity, human Duration . 365, 366 Special work effected by this sense . . 366 Sense of Otherness in Likeness We are like and are unlike the Realized Perfection ..... 360 Function of this sense . . . 366, 367 Sense of Other- Worldliness in contrast with This- Worldliness spiritual personality begun here, consummated hereafter . . . 367 Effect of this sense . . . 367, 368 Sense of Reality realities environing us, real beings, and the Reality of realities sustaining all . . . . .368 Consequences of this sense . . 368, 369 Finally, sense of Unity in all multiplicity and of multiplicity in all Unity organisms every- where in the real world . . 369, 370 Operation of this sense . . . 370,371 (2) Illustrations of Institutions awakening, and their operation kept pure by, strong sense of Eternal Life. Sir Charles Booth's London experiences . 371 Poignant literary expression of this sense in recent Jewish, Anglican, Greek-Russian Church writings . . . 371, 372 Four recent Roman Catholic examples dwelt on in some detail. Father Damien at Antipodes slowly dying amongst the lepers .... 372 The Beatified Cure d'Ars, J. B. Vianney his sayings as to Prayer, God alone, and Suffering . . . 372, 373 Eugenie Smet, Mere Marie de la Providence, her heroic life and painful blissful death 373, 374 And the Abbe Huvelin. His personality and life-work . . 374, 375 His sayings in connection with S. Frangois de Sales . . 375, 376 Pere de Condren .... 376 M. Olier . . . . .376 S. Vincent de Paul . . 376, 377 and the Trappist Abbe de Ranee . 377 General conclusion concerning all these examples .... 377, 378 Contents xlix PART III PROSPECTS AND CONCLUSIONS CHAPTER XIII FINAL DISCRIMINATIONS PAGES Attempt at sketch of lines along which consciousness of Eternal Life has been revealed to us and requires to grow ....... 381 1. Operative conviction of Eternal Life primarily a matter not of speculation but of characteristically human experience awakened and illuminated by Religion . 382 2. Not an ultimate cause evolving living subjects, but simply the effect of a living Reality within other realities . ... . . 382, 383 3. Eternal Life in fullest sense involves plenitude of all goods and energizings that abide, entire self- consciousness of Being which constitutes them, and pure activity, non-successiveness, of this Being. It excludes space and clock-time : reasons why . . 383 4. Eternal Life, in a real but not the fullest sense, attributable to man ; Duration its true form . 383, 384 5. Man's apprehension of Eternal Life ever achieved only more or less in, contrasting with, finite, changing things ; and obscurely, but with immense range of influence. Its ultimate cause : the actual presence of the Eternal Living Spirit within man's durational spirit 384, 385 6. Hence necessity of Real Time, Duration, for develop- ment of human consciousness of Divine Eternity 386, 387 7. Necessity also of spatial imagery and concepts : the reasons of this .... 387, 388 Place of Mathematics in full spiritual life. Preliminary Pantheism, the preservative against Ultimate Pantheism . . . . 388 8. Material things also continuously check or stimulate durational human spirits in this life at least. Matter and things a rich, wise contact with them as occasions and means of soul's awaking to Eternal Life ....... 389 9. The sole self-consistent alternative to such costly acceptance of Eternal Life, a more or less obscure but real and profoundly operative evasion of man's true call, of his deepest requirements a self-stultifica- tion and spiritual death . . . 389, 390 d Contents Eventual difference of souls thus quantitative as well as qualitative : almost fully eternalized spirits and almost entirely phenomenalized souls . . 390, 391 10. Eternal Life requires deep sense of human weakness and sin, and of our constant need of God's preveni- ence and purification, but excludes conceptions of total corruption of human nature or of essential impurity of human body. Our Lord's own practice and utterances give the normative balance and combination . . . . . 391, 392 11. And Eternal Life not simply a Moralism plus a reference to God as its source and sanction, but centrally Religious Adoration, a Cultus, and a Finding of God in Art, Speculation, and Analysis, in the Senses and the Body, as well as in Ethics and Heroic Self-dedication . * 392 12. All this seems hopelessly to bind us to exclusive ecclesiasticism, indeed to persecution and oppression. But three strong counteractions against this con- tinuously operative in religion as here conceived 392, 393 Religion true in its degree exists and functions here in various stages ..... 393 Religion, even in its totality, here not the only activity and response of man's spirit . . . 393, 394 And Religion here ever conscious of a real inter- dependence between all these various realities and complexes as all caused and sustained by the Reality of realities, the self-giving Eternal God . 394 13. Apparently intolerable complexity of all this. Parallel of all simple-seeming life and its attempted ever elaborate analysis. Three essentials of Religion continually bring to it expansion and simplicity . 395 Religion social horizontally a division of labour amongst souls . . . . . -395 Social vertically asustainment of the soul by God 395, 396 And essentially also other-worldly a life beyond the grave for fullest energizing of durational man within the utterly Abiding God, pure Eternal Life ...... 396 INTRODUCTION ETERNAL LIFE INTRODUCTION ETERNAL Life cannot be studied with any fruit, except a generous range and a careful, many- sided development be allowed to its study. For the direct subject-matter here is not, indeed, Time and Eternity, nor Body and Spirit, nor the Supreme Good, subjects predominantly phil- osophical. Nor is it Immortality or Eschatology, nor the Kingdom of God, nor Ecstasy or Pure Love, all primarily religious matters. Yet some- thing about all these things will have, all but continuously, to be implied, said, and decided here. We shall have to begin by roughly assuming and defining, and we hope to end by clearly exhibit- ing, Eternal Life as an experience, requirement, force, conception, ideal which is, in endless degrees and ways, latent or patent in every specifically human life and act ; which, in its fullest operativeness and its most vivid recog- 2 Eternal Life: Introduction nition, is specifically religious ; and which, in proportion to such fulness and recognition, is found to involve the consciousness, or posses- sion, of all the highest realities and goods sought after or found by man, and the sense (more or less) of non-succession, of a complete Present and Presence, of an utterly abiding Here and Now. Let us, then, in a First Part, look back, at some length, upon the chief types and stages of this experience and conception, as furnished by the great religious revealers and the chief philo- sophical formulators of the past. Precise leading utterances will here be given some precise con- sideration or criticism. Let us next, in a Second Part, look round at the present-day situation, the chief needs, forces, aids, and difficulties operative now in religious and philosophical and also in apparently quite non-religious or non-philosophical departments, for or against that experience and conception. Here again we shall be busy with specific, characteristic declarations, although we can more confidently attempt to reach back, through these, to the forces moving the personalities that uttered them. And let us finally, in a Third Part, attempt a more abiding and systematic elucidation of the elements and realities involved in Eternal Life, and some forecast of, and some demands upon, the future, in this case simply Temporal Things, Durational Men, Eternal God 3 in our own words and with a direct reference to practice. Here again we shall have to utilize philosophy ; yet what we now, at last, attempt directly to make explicit, and thus to strengthen, appears, in this its fulness, as a specifically religious sense a sense of the closest of re- lations, of the most delicate difference within affinity, between two, the deepest and most real of all realities really known to us, our finite, durational spirit, and the infinite, eternal Spirit, God. PART I HISTORICAL RETROSPECT PART I HISTORICAL RETROSPECT WE can conveniently, though somewhat artifici- ally, divide the historical evidences into those furnished by the Oriental religions, properly so called ; and those supplied by the Grseco- Roman and the Jewish-Christian worlds and their inter- mixtures, inclusive of the Mediaeval and the Modern European (and American) civilization and philosophies, which are still so predominantly derived from these two worlds and their manifold conflicts and combinations. CHAPTER I THE ORIENTAL RELIGIONS Introductory Buddhism Hindooism Zarathustrism Egyptian Religion. THE present writer cannot pretend to any first- hand experience, or knowledge of, the Oriental religions, and must restrict himself to a repro- 7 8 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect duction of some translations of texts and of the most sober conclusions maintained by careful and sympathetic specialists in these difficult subject- matters, with simply the addition of certain general applications of his own. We can, in strictness, ignore Mohammedanism, since its orthodox type hardly seems to contain any clear or vivid apprehension of non-successive- ness, whilst the Sufis and their like exhibit a type of religious life and doctrine, full indeed of the sense of Eternity, but most probably derived from, and certainly closely like, either Vedantic Pantheism, or the Buddhist Nirvana, or Neo-Platonism. We arrive thus at four, predominantly original and characteristic, Oriental types of experience and conception which, really or seemingly, are concerned with Eternal Life. i. In Buddhism (Gautama Buddha died B.C. 477) we appear to get, in the Nirvana, in so far as we can take it as not simply annihilation, a state or condition ultimate, abiding, eternal. Yet, as Professor Lehmann impressively puts it, "in the Buddhist Weltanschauung we have colossal dimensions, innumerable worlds, a ver- tiginous succession of endlessnesses constituting the course of time, everything without beginning and without end, everything in process of be- The Buddhist Nirvana and Sheer Flux 9 coming and of passing away. It knows no Brahma, no Atman, as the World-spirit, no Being that consists in itself and through which other things exist. There is here no fixed point for existence, no genuine being." And Professor Oldenberg says strikingly : " The speculation of the Brahmans finds Being in all Becoming ; the speculation of the Buddhists finds, in all apparent Being, nothing but Becoming." Thus "an Ego," declares Lehmann, " exists only apparently for the Buddhist ; there exists, for him, a series of concepts and of other forms of con- sciousness, but a self-subsisting subject of all these conditions can neither be traced nor thought" in this system. "The Nirvana is the condition in which the suffering life's endless reincarnations are abolished. It is declared to involve the extinction of Desire and of Cognition ; and though we are not told that it also includes the extinction of Life, such an extinction would be in the logical consequence of Buddhism, since the evil from which man is to save himself, namely, suffering, consists precisely in existence. The Nirvana can," however, "only be defined negatively : not Desire, and not Consciousness, not Life, yet also not Death. Only this can be said positively concerning it, that it is the condition in which the soul is freed from transmigration ; io Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect only from the point of view of the endless births, with their life and death and death and life, is it possible to attach any conception whatsoever to the term Nirvana." 1 Thus, even if the Nirvana still be life of some kind, and even though all succession appears to be eliminated from it, we do not get here any positive affirmation of Eternal Life. Yet we are here given perhaps the most impressive of all ex- emplifications of the intolerable horror felt, by the wide-awake human soul, for mere succession of any kind. The pain of such sheer flux, already simply because it is sheer flux, is here seen to be such that the soul, which is haunted by the image and sense of such a flux, is too much absorbed in the relief afforded by any and every complete escape from this pain to move on towards the ap- prehension of full spiritual life, of duration, and of perfect Simultaneity, as respectively the cease- less characteristic and the deepest implication of that life. And yet that horror eloquently expresses this very characteristic and this very implication of the human soul's deeper and deepest life. 2. In Hindooism there is the great Ramanuja who, in the eleventh century A.D., founded a 1 Edvin Lehmann, in Chantepie de la Saussaye's Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 3rd ed., 1905, vol. ii. pp. 90, 91, 93, 96, 97 ; Oldenberg, Buddha^ 3rd ed., 1897, pp. 304-328. Ramanujds Theistic Hindooism 1 1 sect which indeed conceives the world, as does the orthodox Vedanta, thoroughly monistically. There exists nothing but the one, all-compre- hending Being. Yet this Being is not mere Thought and Existence without qualities; Exist- ence and Thought are here not the substance, they are simply qualities, of Being ; the Absolute does not consist of Existence and Thinking, but is a Being which exists and thinks and which possesses all other qualities, and these in so perfect a way that they confer upon it absolute power and absolute worth. Thus Brahma is here conceived as an all-penetrating, all-powerful, all- knowing, all-merciful Being. He is not an un- differentiated Unity, for the manifold world of reality exists in Him ; souls and the material elements form His body but not His nature ; they are subordinate to Him as our body is to our spirit, and exist in Him with a relative independence. All that lives is in process of transmigration (samsara), from which the soul can free itself, through the knowledge of Brahma, not through good works ; the soul is then raised into the world of Brahma, to an eternal, blessed life, and participates in Brahma's divine qualities, except in His power to emit and to rule the world and to receive it back into Himself. Sometimes it is even said, not that 12 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect souls exist in Brahma, but that Brahma dwells in them as their constitutive principle. And the soul here does not attain liberation from trans- migration, through recognizing Brahma and being absorbed in Him by means of its own power, but through its learning to know and to con- template His nature by the gracious aid of Brahma Himself, and thus attaining to the highest condition of eternal liberty and beatitude in His heaven. 1 Here indeed, especially in so far as Brahma's own life may be considered to be non-successive in itself, we clearly have Eternal Life, its apprehension and conception. 3. Zarathustra lived in North- Western Media, probably between 700 and 650 B.C. ; and the oldest parts of the Avesta, especially the Gatha- hymns, may well go back to him or to his im- mediate disciples. In these Gat has the supreme God does not yet bear the proper name of, but is already qualified as, Ahura Mazda, the Lord possessing Wisdom, the perfect discrimination between Good (Faith) and Evil (Delusion). Or 1 Edv. Lehmann, ibid, p. 143. See the actual texts of Ramanuja, in his Commentary to the Vedanta- Sutras, tr. by G. Thibaut, Oxford, 1904, esp. p. 208: "The Brahman ... is nothing else but the highest Person capable of the thought 'of becoming many' by manifesting himself in a world comprising manifold sentient and non-sentient creatures." Zarathustra 's Excessive Spiritual Dualism 13 he is called the Holy Spirit, and we are told : "In the beginning were the two Spirits, which were there as twins and each by itself." "And when the two Spirits met each other they created, as first created things, Life and Death, and that, at the last, Hell should be for the Wicked and Heaven for the Just." And in the younger Ftf-sv^-hymns the soul of the departed just man is led, by his religion, his own profession of faith, to his good thoughts, to his good words, to his good works ; and, through these three forecourts of Paradise, he arrives at the Eternal Light." 1 Here, in the insistence upon Good and Evil, as equally powerful ; upon these positive forces, as productive of abiding consequences ; and upon good works, as the fullest and most final of the essentials for salvation ; we get some elements of an even excessively ethical religion, yet which, as such, is in fruitful contrast to the thin in- tellectualism, and to the conception of Evil as merely negative, so dominant elsewhere. And Eternal Light may here, apparently, be taken as non-successive Life, apprehended as such in God, or even lived by the soul itself. 4. The old Egyptian religion, so bewilderingly rich in its habits and conceptions with regard to 1 Edv. Lehmann, ibid. pp. 170, 171, 174, 188, 199, 223. 14 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect the dead and to a life beyond or in the grave, appears to articulate, or even to imply with certainty, little or nothing of Eternal life. For the Gods are here, apparently, all and always, conceived as occupied in purely successive actions ; and the texts from all periods (right back to the most ancient pyramid-texts), which identify the individual dead with a God, ever represent this individual as occupied, together with or in this God, in such purely successive, even if monotonously repeated, actions. Thus the dead can be completely identified with Ra, the Sun-God, the dispenser of all life ; but this confers upon them no more than the God himself possesses and does, for the dead man now arises in the heavens, courses through them, descends in the West and arises again in the East. 1 We have, here, Immortality indeed, but, ap- parently, not a touch of Eternity. 1 H. O. Lange, in Chantepie de la Saussaye's Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte^ 3rd ed., 1905, vol. i. pp. 124, 200. Three Stages of Israelite Prophetism 1 5 CHAPTER II ISRAELITISH RELIGION The Jahvist Narratives and the first Prophets : Elijah, Amos, Isaiah, Micah Deuteronomy and Jeremiah Ezekiel and the Priestly Code Late appearance of belief in a fulness of life after death, and abiding significance of this fact. IN now taking the Jewish-Christian, the Grseco- Roman, and the Modern European revelations, conceptions, civilizations, in so far as these are concerned with Eternal Life, we shall do so as constituting seven periods, stages, and conditions of inter-relation, help, and check. Continuing our numeration from our Chapter on the Oriental Religions we thus get Chapters concerned with the following times; II. Israelitish ; III. Hellenic; IV. Jewish Hellenistic ; V. Primitive Christian ; VI. Christian Hellenistic; VII. Mediaeval; and VIII. Modern. The Israelitish times range from, say, B.C. 1320, the Israelite Exodus from Egypt under Moses, to B.C. 597, the first deportation of the Jews and their King Jehoiachin to Babylon, indeed to B.C. 538, the return of the Jews from the Captivity. But we find little or nothing 1 6 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect to our purpose till about B.C. 880 (the Book of the Covenant in its present form, Exodus xxi.-xxiii.), and about B.C. 850 (the Jahvist document of the Pentateuch), the times of King Omri's building of Samaria and of the activity of the great prophets Elijah and Elisha. i. The Jahvist tells us, in the beautiful story of Hagar's desolation in the wilderness, of "the well of the Living One who seeth me " (Gen. xvi. 14, xxiv. 62, xxv. n); and however much the occasion of the interpretation may be a previous, pagan, proper name of the well, the Jahvist writer himself is evidently full of the sense of God's living presence. Indeed Ezekiel, after B.C. 593, still makes God asseverate, "As I live, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked " (xxxiii. 1 1 ) : God's power and His merciful love are thus bound up with His livingness. The magnificent account of Elijah (i Kings xvii.- xix., xxi.) doubtless goes back, by oral tradition, to eye-witnesses, and, even in its written form, must be almost entirely as old as about B.C. 790. And here we see how for Elijah " there existed everywhere only one holy, only one mighty Power, that revealed Itself, not like Baal, in the life of mere nature, but, like Jahveh, in the ethical Elijah, Amos, Isaiah, upon God 17 requirements of the spirit." 1 In the great ordeal upon Carmel, Jahveh is apprehended by Elijah as so alive and active, and Baal as so dead and inert, that, thoughout that long day, the prophet mockingly invites the throng of Baal-priests to invoke Baal and to sacrifice to him (i Kings xviii. 25-29). The oldest of the literary prophets, Amos, with his eyes fixed upon the approach of the Assyrians (about B.C. 760), makes Jahveh announce to the Israelites: "You only have I known of all the families of the earth : therefore it is you I will punish for all your iniquities." And again : " Seek good and not evil, that ye may live." And finally . "Though ye offer Me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them. . . . Take thou away from Me the noise of thy song . . . but let judgment roll along as waters, and righteous- ness as a mighty stream" (iii. 2, v. 14, 22-24). Here the Israelite's special privileges are made the very ground of special responsibilities, and the living God is one to whom moral dispositions are above all ritual observance. And then the great Isaiah of Jerusalem tells us how, in about B.C. 740, he "saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and the hems 1 J. Wellhausen, Abriss der Geschichte Israels und Judas, 1884, P- 33- 1 8 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect of His garment filled the temple. Seraphs stood before Him, each with six wings. With twain each covered his face . . . And one cried to the other : Holy, holy, holy is Jahveh of hosts, all lands His glory fills." And Isaiah exclaims : " Woe is me, I am undone ; for I am a man of impure lips " (vi. 1-3, 5). The living God is thus realized to be transcendent as well as im- manent, and man, in His presence, feels himself painfully weak and sinful. And then the prophet, with his lips purified, not by himself but by an angel of God, addresses, in God's name, a parable to God's people : " Now judge, I pray you, betwixt Me and My vineyard. What more could have been done to My vineyard, that I have not done in it ? " (v. 4). Thus this overflowingly living, all-powerful God truly cares for weak, sinful man. Micah y in about 696 B.C., exclaims : " Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams ? . . . shall I perchance give my firstborn . . . in penance for my life ? He hath told thee, O man, what is good ; and what doth Jahveh demand of thee, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly before thy God ? " (vi. 7, 8). The ethical character of the all- powerful, living One is here again magnificently emphasized. Mica/i, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, upon God 19 2. Jeremiah, called to the prophetical office in 628 B.C., makes God declare Himself "the fountain of living waters," which His people have forsaken ; and insists that " the Lord is the living God and an everlasting King ; at His wrath the earth shall tremble" (ii. 13, x. 11). Thus God more clearly appears as One possessing the reason of His existence within Himself, and who, as such, is ceaselessly, perfectly active. And then Deuteronomy reasserts, and interprets by means of some two and a half centuries of prophetic teaching, and closely in the spirit of Jeremiah, the earlier ( Mosaic, Covenantal, Jahvist, and Ephraimite) teachings, and exhorts Israel : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might" (vi. 5), and thus strenuously insists, as central to man's life, upon the most living of relations with the Living One. 3. And, finally, at the beginning of the Exile, the priest-prophet Ezekiel (called in B.C. 593, his book completed in 573 B.C.) announces in the name of Jahveh ; " Behold, I am against the shepherds, and I will require My flock at their hands. Behold, I Myself will search My sheep. I will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day. 2O Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect I will feed My flock ; I will seek that which was lost, and will bind up that which was broken. Ye are My flock, . . . and I am your God " (xxxiv. 10-12, 1 6, 31). And in the prophet's vision of the valley full of bones, it is God, "the ever- lasting," who " will put breath into them, and they shall live" (xxxvii. I, 6). And finally, in his vision of the new temple, the prophet is shown waters that issue from under the threshold of the temple-house, and these, flowing eastward, rapidly become " a river that could not be crossed over." And the interpreting angel explains to Ezekiel : " These waters go down into the Araba, and when they come into the sour waters " of the Dead Sea, " the waters shall be sweetened. And everything that liveth, whithersoever the waters shall come, shall live ; and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, they shall be as the fish of the great sea" (xvii. i, 5, 8, 9, 10). Thus here God Himself, all life, purity, health, ex- pansion, self-donation, moves out to the weak, the impure, the stricken and contracted, and Himself vivifies, heals, purifies, and infinitely fructifies all He touches. The Priestly Code too contains, amidst much detailed legalism and dry schematism, passages of magnificent insight and outlook, akin to those of the priest Ezekiel. Attention to Immortality, late in Israel 21 4. It is especially impressive to note how, throughout these eight centuries, the emphasis and the detail of the religious experience and teaching are ever upon God, not upon man, and, neverthe- less, upon this life, not upon the next. The various heathen round about had, indeed, much of necro- mancy, animism, preoccupation with a temporal beyond of all kinds, and little sense of anything otherwise beyond nature, they had, as yet, but a very slender spiritual and ethical sense. But Israel, in spite of not a few still lingering traces of analogous worship (here, of a mountain- and storm-god) and a largely hard and fierce social code, is, by the prophets, made to abstain from all such animistic practices and indeed from any active thought concerning the individual soul's beyond ; and nevertheless it is made to realize, with, at that time, incomparable power and purity, the Other Life of God, present somehow within the soul, here and now, and the unique joy and self- realization, to be found by man's soul, in belonging to Him alone in all its acts and states. And we shall find that it is these spiritual-ethical "this- life" experiences and teachings, and not those naturalistic-magical guesses and practices as to a subsequent life, which heralded, prepared, and entered into the substance of, whatever was fully fruitful and abiding in the further, eventually also 22 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect "next-life," teachings concerning Eternal Life. In a word, it is the convictions of the reality and the spiritual-ethical character of God, of a spiritual-ethical soul in man, and of this soul's relation to that God the reality of a spiritual- ethical kind, already within this life before the body's death that are the root of every sane and spiritual apprehension of Eternal Life. And though these convictions involve logically, and in the long run are developed by, the faith in the soul's non-diminished life after the body's death, it is not this faith in survival after death that is the basis of these great convictions, but it is, contrariwise, these great convictions that support and postulate that faith. 1 And yet, as our third Chapter will now show, how much light has been thrown upon the workings of man's mind and spirit, and how much noble, at bottom deeply religious, aspira- tion, precisely concerning Eternal Life, has been contributed by the Greeks ! Indeed how much, after the dross and fever of their earlier experi- ences and speculations had been dropped and 1 For an admirable account of the long abstention of the Jewish religious world from all other-life speculations and practices, and of the causes and effects of this strikingly persistent religious concentration and reserve, see Dr. R. H. Charles's Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, 1899 ; or .his quite short "Rise and Development in Israel of the Belief in a Future Life," Expositor , January 1903. Maladif Beginnings of the Greek Experiences 23 overcome, did they aid in helping even the Jewish saints and seers to articulate and to complete their spiritual outlook ! The Dionysiac Cult Orphism Parmenides Plato and his four abiding contributions Aristotle and the Unmoving Energeia. THE Hellenic experiences here considered range, from about 550 B.C., to the deaths of Alexander the Great and Aristotle, 323, 321 B.C. i. The precise local and temporal antecedents and occasions of Orphism are still, in some measure, matters of debate. I shall here, for these questions, follow chiefly Miss Jane Harrison and Professor Gilbert Murray. But the psychic experiences, disagreeably maladif or even im- moral though they doubtless largely were, can be securely traced ; and in this, the point that alone directly concerns us, Erwin Rohde's great Psyche book remains a guide, unsurpassed in delicate penetration and power of sympathetic re-evocation. It is, in any case, certain that the orgiastic 24 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect worship of Dionysus, was one of the occasions of Orphism, so largely different in its attitude and spirit. Rohde describes the beginnnigs of that worship in the change that came over Greek thought in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. : " The continuous life of the soul, which the cultus of the dead presupposes and guarantees, is," so far, "completely tied to the memory of the survivors upon earth, to the care which these survivors may choose to devote to the soul of the prede- ceased ancestor. If this memory ceases, if the reverent care of the living relaxes, the element is withdrawn from the soul of the departed, in which alone it still possessed a shadow of exis- tence. Not from such a cultus could the idea arise of a true immortality of the soul, of its persistent life, working independently within its own energy. If the soul is truly immortal, it is, in its essential quality, equal to God. He who, amongst the Greeks, says immortal, says God; the conceptions are interchangeable. And, in the religion of the Greek people, it is a funda- mental principle that, in the divine order of the world, humanity and Divine Being are locally and essentially separate and distinct, and are intended to remain so. The religious relation of man to the Divine is essentially based upon this difference ; the ethics of the Greek popular con- Orgiastic Night-Worship of Dionysus 25 sciousness are rooted in willing resignation to the limitation and relativity of human capacity and of human claims to happiness and power, all this as essentially different from the life and lot of the world of the Gods." And yet, " since a certain time there appears in Greece, and nowhere so early in such clear articulation as in Greece, the thought of the divinity of the human soul, and of the immortality resulting from this, its divine, nature. This thought belongs entirely to Mysticism, a second kind of religion which, but little noticed by the popular religion, created a field for itself in isolated sects, influenced cer- tain philosophical schools, and was able, thence, to convey to far-away posterity in the West and in the East the doctrine of the essential unity, of the union to be striven for by religion, between the divine and the human spirit of the divine nature of the soul, and of its eternity." The orgiastic night - worship of Dionysus Sabasios in the Thracian mountain-forests leads to the experience of, here a wild, feverish, thus all the more easily observed, " possession," /eare^ofieixH K TOV Oeov, evOeoi, : and an absence of the mind, o vovs ovxen ev avry eve&Tiv : the soul's going out, standing out, of the body, e/co-racrt? (Plato, Meno, 99 D ; Ion, 534 B). This ecstasy is here a sacred madness, in which the soul unites itself 26 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect with the Godhead : lepopdvia (Clemens Alex., Protrept. g D ; Plato, Phcedr. 253 D). And this experience could not fail strongly to aid a peculiar development of belief in the immortality, indeed in the eternity, of the soul. Thus Herodotus and others tell of Thracian tribes whose faith "made men immortal " Tirai ol aOava-ri^ovre^ (4. 93, 94). Transmigration of souls appears to have been taught. But it is the cultus itself, its aim and its return-effect upon the worshipper's conviction, that we can follow out clearly. " The aim, indeed the task, of the cultus, was to drive its participants as far as 'ecstasy,' to tear their souls out of their ordinary, humanly limited, mode of existence, and to raise them, as free gods, to communion with the God and his satellites. This experience could be gained in ecstasy by the soul, but by it alone, the spiritual being living invisibly within man, not by the entire human being, composed of body and soul. The feeling of its own divinity, of its eternity, which, in the ecstasy, had revealed itself, as in a lightning-flash, to the soul, could develop into the abiding conviction that this soul is of a divine nature, called to a divine life, as soon as the body leaves it free as in ecstasy for a short while, so in death for ever." 1 1 Erwin Rohde, Psyche, 2nd ed., 1898, vol. ii. pp. i, 2, n, 12, 28, 32, 33. The entire section, pp. 1-37, is a classic of the purest water. Sense of Simultaneity Central in Ecstasy 27 I would only insist, even more than Rohde, upon the fact that all states of trance, or indeed of rapt attention, notoriously appear to the experiencing soul, in proportion to their con- centration, as timeless ; i.e. as non-successive, simultaneous, hence as eternal. They appear thus to the soul, if not during, at least soon after, the experience. And hence the eternity of the soul is not, here, a conclusion drawn from the apparent God-likeness, in other respects, of the soul when in this condition, but the eternity, on the contrary, is the very centre of the experience itself, and is the chief inducement to the soul for holding itself to be divine. The soul's immortality cannot be experienced in advance of death, whilst its eternity, in the sense indicated, is, or seems to be, directly experienced in such " this-life " states ; hence the belief in immortality is here derivative, that in eternity is primary. 2. It was the religious sect of the Orphics that took over this experience and conviction from those orgiastic Dionysus-worshippers, whilst greatly altering, in part directly reversing, the cultual acts and the ethical practice and disposi- tions. Orphic communities appear to have formed themselves in Greek regions soon after 550 B.C. ; certainly Onomakritos established such 28 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect a community in Athens, under the Peisistratidae, about 530-510 B.C., and presents the Orphic doctrines in poetic form. In the poetry and cultus of the sect a long genealogy of the Gods ended with Dionysus or Zagreus, the son of Zeus and Persephone, entrusted by his father with the rule of the world. The Titans, Zeus's enemies, attack Dionysus, who escapes in various disguises ; but at last, in the form of a bull, Dionysus is overcome, torn to pieces, and devoured by his savage enemies. Zeus destroys the Titans with a thunderbolt ; and out of their ashes arises the human race, possessing the good which descends from Dionysus, mixed up with the evil derived from the Titans. Thus the good, in the several human souls, is so many fragments of one single soul, broken up by a crime ; and man's task is to free himself from the Titanic element in his present nature, and to bring his Dionysian part back pure to the God of whom, essentially, it forms a part. Thus the soul will escape " the circle of necessity," "the wheel of births," o T/OO%O? T?}? 7evecrea>9, endless transmigrations ; here we have a truly Buddhist feeling. But this escape can only be brought by Orpheus and his Bacchic initiations. It is Ai6wa-o9 etrr/,!/' ravrfji, 8' e?rt a^/iar' eaffi TroXXa /AttX', a>9 a\edpuv 32 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect ov\ov fjbovvoyeves re Kal ar/ae/ie? ^S' areXecrroy. ouSe TTOT ^z/ ouS' co-rat, eVet i/Ov eo-rtv o/ioO 7rai>, /, crvvexes. 1 " There remains then still only to give an account of One way that Being exists indeed. Many directing posts stand upon it : because unborn, it is also indestructible, entire, only- begotten, unshakable, and without end. It never was and it will never be, since it is, all of it together, only present in the Now, one and in- divisible." Thus the first clear promulgation of the Totum Simul of Eternity is also the clearest of all purely abstractive and Monistic, utterly static and determinist, professions of faith, and, like all such professions, takes Mathematical transparency and lucid spatial picturings as directly applicable to the deepest of realities, and as the test and measure of our attaining to the truth concerning them. 4. But it is in Plato (born in Athens about 427 B.C., died there in 347) that the apprehension of an Eternal Now, and the conception of a Totum Simul, attain their greatest vividness and clearness, though far from their greatest richness of content, so far for all time. Let us accept as 1 8. 1-3, 5, 6. Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker^ 2te Aufl., 1906, vol. i. pp. i r 8, 119. Three Stages in Plattfs Teaching 33 now established, in at least their main outlines, the three stages of Plato's growth, and the three corresponding groups of the Platonic writings. The first, beginning with the Lysis and ending with the Meno, is a continuation of Socrates's work, and hardly more articulated than it ; the second, beginning with the Gorgias and ending with the Phcedrus, turns away from the Here to the There ; and the third, beginning with the Symposium and ending with the Laws, is a com- promise between the later orientation towards the Beyond and the earlier position in the visible world. Hence only in the second and third groups do we find teachings to our purpose. The Republic is a mosaic of contributions from all three periods. (i) In the second group, then, we get the passages in the Phcedrus and Republic, which are already mentioned as hostile to forgetfulness, and so strongly insist upon how Remembering-Again, avd^vqa-^ (like unto the Orphic ^vrj^oavvt], Memory), and not Unmindfulness or Forgetting, is the lot of the purified soul in the Beyond. In the Thecetetus (i?6a, b) Socrates affirms : " It behoves us to attempt to escape hence thither, as swiftly as possible ; and this flight thither consists in a likeness to God (o/AoiWi? TO> 0e&>) as far as possible ; and this likeness consists in becoming just and 3 34 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect holy and wise." Thus the soul is not identical with God : it can attain to some likeness to Him ; and He is possessed of ethical qualities in a supreme degree and way. Indeed in the Sophist (248^, 2490), the Eleatic stranger breaks out with : " Can we, O heavens, ever be made to believe that motion and life and soul and mind are not present in Absolute Being ? Can we imagine Being to be devoid of life and mind, and to remain a venerable, holy, mindless, unmoving fixture (d/aV^Tov eo-nfc) ? " The clear, cold, fixed, empty abstraction of Parmenides has, here at least and for a little while, been replaced by a vivid, warm apprehension of the Reality, as full of life and energy and as rich in self-communication. And the Parmenides vigorously criticizes, surely, as a reductio ad absurdum, the doctrine of One, or of the One, when taken strictly, as exclusive of all multiplicity and relations, and thus criticizes it also in respect to its view of Time. " The One cannot exist in Time at all," it is argued (141 A) ; the various forms of Time are each examined and rejected, and amongst such forms appears also " is," " is not ' is ' simply the form of Time when now present?" (141 E) ; and hence, these forms of Time being the only possible modes of Being, " the One " of Parmenides, it is concluded, " cannot possibly partake of Being" (141 E). Intrinsic Voluntary Purification, in Plato 35 It is in this second group also that we find most of Plato's utterances and picturings as to an after- death purification from bad habits in souls that are good in their active, dominant intention at the moment of death, a purification deliberately chosen by such souls. These intrinsically neces- sary purifications, freely willed by the soul itself, most advantageously replace the quite un-intrinsic delay in attaining to a blissful consciousness noted by us in the Orphic Tablets. These chief purga- torial passages occur in the Gorgias, pp. 525^, c, 526^, d\ the Ph&drus, p. 249^; the Republic, x. pp. 617^, 619^, 920^; and the Phcedo, pp. nob- 1 1^. 1 (2) It is, however, in the third period and group of writings that Plato most strenuously strives after, and most nearly attains to, a way from the Contingent to the Necessary, and gives us a clear definition of the essential nature of, and contrast between, Time and Eternity. In the Symposium, Diotima, in her great speech as to the soul's mounting up, by 1 For the sequence of the Dialogues, see Prof. Henry Jackson's "Plato's later Theory of Ideas," The Journal of Philology, Cam- bridge, vols. x.-xv., 1882-1886. I have accepted the three stages in the composition of the Republic demanded by Rohde, Psyche, ed. 1898, vol. i. pp. 266, 269 note, and E. Pfleiderer, Socrates und Plato, 1896, pp. 124-136. For Plato's Purgatorial teachings, see my Mystical Element of Religion, 1908, vol. ii. pp. 123-126, 205-211. 36 Eternal Life : Historical Retrospect ever greater purification and abstraction, to the momentary vision of, and union with, Eternal Beauty, tells us how, when the purified seeker " comes towards the end, he will suddenly perceive a Nature of wondrous beauty, neither growing nor decaying . . . but Beauty absolute, separate, simple and everlasting " del bv KOI ov're yiyvopevov ovre dTToX\v/jLvov (2io E, 2ii A). Here we have indeed an Eternal that truly is, and indeed that is even, somehow, supremely beautiful. Yet not all the rapture of the loving soul can prevent that Eternal from here appearing cold and unattrac- tive ; for it is not here possessed, as, for a moment, it was in the Sophist, of energy and life and, at least by implication, of self-communication. Eros, the soul's movement up to the Eromenon, the beloved One, is indeed here ; but the Eromenon is not an Eron, there is no previous movement down to the soul from the One ; no longing for our longing, no "He hath first loved us," hardly the dawn of Agape, is as yet discover- able here. It is in the Tim&us that Plato achieves the clearest extant contrast between Eternity and Time. For, in the account of the fashioning of the world, we see how the Father who begat the world " whilst he was ordering the universe, made, of Eternity which abides in unity, an Gods Utter Simultaneity, in Plato 37 eternal image moving according to number, even that which we have named Time. . . . Days and nights and months and years, are all portions of Time ; and was and shall be are forms of Time that have come to be, although we are wont wrongly to ascribe them to the Eternal Essence. For we say that It was and shall be, yet, in truth, is alone belongs to It" (37 E). " Is," taken thus strictly, is here no more one of the forms of Time, but is the characteristic form of Eternity. Hence Eternity is essentially simultaneous, and quite distinct from everlasting duration, from succession, from Time. 1 In spite of his distressing insensibility to the odiousness of certain Pagan vices, and of his dangerous, because excessively abstractive, method and temper, especially during his middle period, Plato, at his best, remains the first and last of the Graeco-Roman non-Christian souls and thinkers to unite, especially also in his thirst and search after Eternal Life, four things never to be disunited without a great impoverishment of experience and outlook. Philosophy with him stands in the midst of a great social and political as well as individual life, and strives to understand and to aid this life ; it ever retains the need and 1 For the passage in the Timceus, see Archer Hind's good notes, 1880. 38 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect practice of purification, whilst enlisting in this struggle all the nobler passions, the Thumos as well as the Reason, against the lower passions ; it ever strives to find multiplicity in all unity, and unity in all multiplicity ; and it never ceases to be kept profoundly alive, and very largely humble and sweet, by the sense of an inexhaustible, transcendent Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, our love of which constitutes all our worth. 5. In Aristotle, Alexander the Great's great tutor, 384-322 B.C., we miss much of what, in Plato, deep souls will never let die, especially the fcdOapcris, the turning of the whole soul, as ever the essential condition for its attainment of spiritual truth and life ; the retention and training of the Thumos, as the born auxiliary of reason in its difficult fight against ignoble passion ; and the, already largely theistic, thirst after more than all merely human, merely contingent, things and states. Yet, in his conception of the Unmoving Energy, Aristotle also has made a profound and permanent contribution to the expression and stimulation of the experiences and problems involved in Eternal Life. (i) In the Nicomachean Ethics there are such sayings as that "to be is to be active," eV/iey 8' ia (ix. 1 1 68#, 3) ; that " men are unable to be The Unmoving Energeia^ in Aristotle 39 continuously active, and hence pleasure does not continuously arise in their lives, for pleasure follows upon energeia " (x. 1 1750, 9) ; and that " all men have held the gods to be alive and to energize, and not to be asleep like Endymion " (x. 1178^, 7). God alone is always completely and actually all that He can be ; hence the divine energeia is kept up inexhaustively, and ever generates the supreme pleasure of self-contempla- tion (vo^cris vorjaews) which constitutes the divine happiness. It follows, as a matter of course, that this evepyeia is above fcivr)(ri), with forethought for the world and for all things in the world" (Diog. Laert. 147). But all this, taken as part of the system, means no more than the necessity, the law, entirely immanent in the material universe. God is the Universe, and the Universe is God. Hence we cannot, here, consistently speak of Eternal Life, in the sense of an abiding con- sciousness on the part of the human soul, or even of a momentary consciousness on the part of the First Principle, of the Infinite God. The finite spirit here survives the body, at longest, up to the Ecpyrosis only ; and an Infinite Spirit, self-conscious and distinct from the world, exists at no time, since, when implicit, such Stoicism, as suck, without Eternal Life 45 spirit as is allowed at all is but pure material fire, and, when explicit, this fire moves through material changes, or itself constitutes these changes, having, during part of this time, self- conscious finite minds for its concomitants and effects. A certain appearance of livingness and richness is, indeed, introduced through the con- ception of the First Principle as also the Logos, as Reason, which permeates, conjoins, sustains all things, and which thus resembles Plato's World-Soul, but is in strong contrast with the Platonic supreme Idea, conceived as outside of all movement and becoming. Yet the identification of this Logos with material fire, its complete immanence in the world, and its lack of con- sciousness effectually disqualify it from acceptance as the sufficient bearer, cause, and object of Eternal Life, in the fuller sense of the word. (2) And the Ethical Rigorism also takes us farther away from Eternal Life than was Plato, if we hold such Life to retain, indeed to consummate, the development, purification, harmony and organization of all man's nobler passions and emotions, or of their deepest roots and equivalents. "Whilst the earlier philosophers did not abolish perturbations of soul from out of man, but only restricted their range, Zeno required his sage to be free from them all, as so many diseases 46 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect of the soul," says Cicero (Acad. i. 10, 38). The objects to be striven after or avoided are also greatly restricted : " Good things consist for the Stoics in the virtues," prudence (^poz^o-i?) standing first; "evil things consist in the opposite," thoughtlessness coming first; "and the things that are neither good nor evil are those that neither benefit nor damage us, such as life, health . . . and their opposites, death, dis- ease . . ." Again, the perfect life and its acts have here lost indefinitely in variety, dramatic contrast, and fruitful tension. " The Stoics declare that the sage practises all the virtues in each one of his acts, since his entire activity is perfect," Stobseus tells us (Eel. ii. p. 116). The outlook on mankind is terribly simplified : " Zeno holds that there exist only two classes of men, the class of the earnest (the good) and that of the worthless ; and that, throughout their respective lives, the former practise the virtues, the latter the vices" (Stobaeus, Ed. ii. p. 198). And above all, there is no deep richness of relation between spirits, because there is no sufficiently intimate dependence of spirit upon Spirit: "monstro quod ipse tibi possis dare," " I here prescribe what you yourself can give yourself," says Juvenal, truly Stoically, of the very highest devotedness and resignation. The Stoic World-City 47 (3) And yet the system nobly preaches the profound necessity of self-control and of the renunciation of all petty or low desires. And, in its deeply organic conception of human society, it directly prepares, and eventually aids, the powerful articulation of the requirements and of the conception of Eternal Life as effected by Christianity. " They consider the world to be, as it were, a common city and state of men and of Gods, and that each one of us constitutes a part of that world, whence it follows that we should put the common advantage above our own," says Cicero (de Fin. iii. 19, 64). And the Stoic Seneca tells us : " We are members of one great body"; "it behoves thee to live for thy neighbour, if thou wouldst live for thyself" (Ep. 95, 52, 47, 3). From Zeno's work, the Politeia, through the writings of Polybius and Cicero, up to the school's culmination, as to tenderness, in the discourses of the freedman Epictetus, and as to mournful, moral splendour of human outlook, in the memoirs of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, we get this most fruitful per- ception of the essentially organic character of human society, and insistence upon finding its image in the human body, which is constituted by, and which still more constitutes, the several, yet interdependent and mutually complementary, 48 Eteynal Life: Historical Retrospect parts and members and their differing specific positions, functions, and characters. 1 2. The experiences and conceptions of the Jews since the return from the Exile, 538 B.C., and especially since their submission to Alexander the Great, 332 B.C., and to his successors, are, upon the whole, less rich and pregnant than are the deepest of the previous Israelitish prophetic teachings. (i) There is, indeed, a series of magnificent utterances in the Psalms, of which the greater part probably belong to this period, such as, "With Thee is the fountain of Life, and in Thy light we shall see light " (xxxvi. 9) ; and " Whom have I in heaven but Thee ? and, having Thee, I delight not in aught that is on earth. My flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the rock of my heart and my portion for ever" (Ixxiii. 25, 26). Thus here, without any speculation concerning time and eternity, we have the fundamental elements of Eternal Life, the human spirit finding its peace and support in the Divine Spirit, its origin and home. 1 E. Zeller's standard account in his Philosophic der Griechen, part iii. vol. i., ed. 1880, has been the chief help here. Von Arnim's Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta gives Zeno in vol. i., 1905, pp. 1-71, and Cleanthes, pp. 103-139. See also James Adam in The Vitality of Platonism, 1911, pp. 104-189, for a beautiful account of Stoicism at its best. The Psalms, Daniel, Ecclesiasticus upon Life 49 (2) The Book of Daniel (an apocalyptic con- solatory address, which but little resembles the pre-Exilic prophecies, written between 168 and 165 B.C.) gives a description of the era of sal- vation : " Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to everlasting contempt" (xii. 2) the only passage in the Old Testament which explicitly speaks of "everlasting" or "eternal" life. The resurrection extends here as yet only to " many " apparently only to the Jewish martyrs and to their persecutors ; and still we cannot press the " everlasting " as involving simultaneity. Amongst the Apocryphal and the Pseudo-Epi- graphic writings, Ecclesiasticus, originally written in Hebrew between 190 and 170 B.C., still articulates only the quantitative conception, the soul's endless duration, together with the resurrec- tion of the body. God is "He that liveth for ever" (o 9dp(ria), ii. 23; "to know Thy power is the root of immortality " (dOavdo-ta), xv. 3; and, above all, "incorruption maketh us near to God," vi. 20. It is important, however, clearly to realize, that simultaneity of itself is as little spiritually qualitative a conception as is succession by itself ; and to note how again, in these passages, it is God, His purity and power, who centrally occupies the soul : intercourse with, proximity to, Him this is Eternal Life. 1 3. And lastly the Alexandrian Jew Philo, who lived from about 30 B.C. to A.D. 50, is deeply interesting in his attempt to retain, indeed to propagate, the intensely personalist, racial and 1 See the excellent collection of translations with introductions and notes, Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des A.T., edited by E. Kautzsch, 2 vols., 1900. Alexandrian Judaism upon Life 51 theistic, Israelite and Jewish, religion, within and by means of the categories of Greek philosophy especially those of Platonism, so largely im- personal, and those of Stoicism, so strongly materialist, pantheistic, and cosmopolitan. (1) Philo, then, insists, adopting Aristotle's terms, upon how " God never ceases from action ; as the fire's property is to burn, so God's property is to act"; indeed "He is the origin of the activity of all things." And He ceases not from this His activity even on the Sabbath (Leg. Alleg. 3, 6 ; Cohn and Wendland's ed. of Philo, vol. i., 1896, pp. 62, 65). And, following Plato, he describes God's Eternity as exclusive of all succession : " God is withdrawn from both ends of Time. For His Life is not so much Time as Eternity (alwv), the archetype and pattern of Time. And in Eternity there is nothing past and nothing future, but only present" (Quod Deus sit Immut. 6 ; CW. ii. 63). (2) As to Life, Philo is subject to two currents of thought. Along one current God is possessed of the fullest life, and, because of this, can and does communicate it, in a lesser degree and kind ; " There are three kinds of life : life as it concerns God ; life as it concerns the creature ; and a third, intermediate life, a mixture of the former two. Now life as it concerns God has not descended 52 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect to us, nor has it entered into the necessities of the body." The second kind of life is "life according to sense," "life as resident in the blood (far) ei/ai/Ao?)." But only those who live the third kind of life are "truly living": for Moses tells us that " the soul's nature is double : that of the soul generally is blood, that of its most leading part is divine spirit " (irvev^a Oelov). And Philo finds, here following the Stoics, this Pneuma to be Logos. " Hence there are two kinds of men those living by the divine spirit and reason (Xeyioyiifo), and those living by the blood and the lust of the flesh" (Quis rer. div. keres, 9, n, 12; CW. iii. n, 13, 14). "God" Himself "breathed into man's earthly mind the power of the true life ; thus it is that man becomes a mental, a truly living soul." Hence God is the fountain of reason, and such a reasonable life is a life of God (Leg. Alleg. i, 12; CW. i. 69; Poster. Cain, 20; CW. ii. 15). Indeed this divine life, even as man can begin to live it here by a holy life, and still more as, after such a life, he will live it in the Beyond, is sometimes character- ized as strictly eternal, i.e. non-successive. " Is not the flight to true Being (TO 6v) Life Eternal ? " To such souls " Moses promises incorruption : ' Ye shall live to-day,' for 'to-day' is boundless and inexhaustible eternity (aiow)." "They participate Philo upon God and Life 53 in the immaterial and incorruptible life of the Unbegotten and Incorruptible" (Profug. 15; CW. iii. 126 ; de Fuga, ii. ; CW. iii. 122 ; Gigant. 3 ; CW. ii. 44). Yet Philo follows also another current in which, fully adopting and pushing home certain tendencies of Plato, he already largely anticipates the exclusive transcendence and excessive abstrac- tion of Plotinus, perhaps even of Proclus. God, here, is indeed " the cause of soul and life " ; but "God" Himself "is something more than life; He is, as He says Himself, the ever-flowing fountain of life" (de Fuga, 36; CW. iii. 152). For Philo, in this his more strictly philosophical mood, God is not the Living One, but He Who Is (o WV, TO 6V, 6 6VTW9 &V, TO 6VT(0? 6V, TO 7T/309 a\7)9eiav 6V). And yet this devoted Jew is too sensitively religious with the great, historical religion of the Old Testament, not also (and then enthusiastically) to picture God as graciously self-communicative to man's spirit, which spirit, in deliberate differ- ence from Stoicism, is here not sufficient to itself. Thus "often," beyond all man's endeavours and in spite of all man's temptations and corruption, " God, by His grace, pours a sweet flood of waters, in place of its salt flood, into the soul " ; "it is God who moves and leads the soul's chariot 54 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect whither He chooses " ; and "the soul must confess that, not its own power has effected the moral good, but He who vouchsafed to it its very love for this good" (Leg. Alleg. ii. 9, 21 ; CW. i. 97, 107, iii. 46; CW. 143). (3) The Stoic Apathy, again, influences Philo far too much. Thus " Moses considers it necessary that all desire shall be excised from the soul, since he loves not a moderation of the passions but a complete apathy." Yet on this point also the spontaneity and richness of the Jewish religion mostly predominates, e.g., "virtue is naturally a matter of delight, and he who possesses it rejoices continually" (Leg. Alleg. iii. 46; CW. i. 143; de Mutat. nom. 31 ; CW. iii. 1 James Drummond's Philo Judceus, 2 vols., 1888, remains the fullest, and an excellent, account : " Time and Eternity," i. 292- 295 ; "The Two Conceptions of God," i. 1-64 ; "Apathy and the Higher Anthropology," ii. 320-324. J. Grill, Untersuchungen iiber Entstehung des merten Evangeliums, 1902, " ' Life ' in Philo," 207-211. Our Lord's Personal Teaching : its Character 55 CHAPTER V PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY The utterances of Jesus : the Kingdom Teachings of St. Paul : the Spirit Conceptions of the Johannine writer : Eternal Life. THE chief Primitive Christian teachings fall into three groups, according as they proceed from Jesus Himself, from St. Paul, or from the Johannine Writer. i. The actual utterances of Our Lord, as we can still find them in the Synoptic Gospels, cannot be rightly estimated unless they are first taken as entirely occasional hence are interpreted within their context of special circumstances ; as utterly exoteric homely words addressed to the homely spiritual and ethical experiences and needs of simple unlettered folk, or to the (almost as homely) preachers' requirements of His apostolic little band ; and as specifically not philosophical nor even moral, but religious. Studied, above all practised thus, as far as possible in the spirit of their first enunciation, they reveal, across the experience of the ages, within their grandly baffling simplicity, a richness of elements, indeed 56 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect a tension of apparently irreconcilable antinomies^ which keep them, in their substance, as operative and soul-transforming now as on the day when He uttered His sacred spirit through them. (i) Now in Jesus' personal teaching, not Eternal Life, but the Kingdom of God is in the foreground. And this Kingdom is presented, directly and emphatically, as, not present but future ; not distant, but imminent ; not gradual, but sudden ; not as at all achieved by man, but as simply given by God. Nor is this Kingdom presented as consisting, for man, when it does come to him, of an Eternal Now ; indeed, the life of God Himself is here nowhere clearly pictured as a pure Simultaneity. The Kingdom is future : " many shall come . . . and shall recline ... in the Kingdom of heaven " ; "ye shall sit upon twelve thrones " ; "then shall the just shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their father" ; and " I shall drink the generation of the vine with you anew in the Kingdom of God" (Matt. viii. n, xix. 28, xiii. 43 ; Mark xiv. 25). The Kingdom is imminent : "Amen I say unto you, there are some here standing who shall not taste of death until they see the Son of Man coming in His Kingdom " ; "Amen I say unto you, this generation shall not pass until all these things shall be fulfilled " ; Jesus s Kingdom, partly Transcendent ', Ascetic 57 " henceforth ye shall see the Son of Man coming * o upon the clouds of heaven" (Matt. xvi. 28, xxiv. 33, xxvi. 64). The Kingdom is sudden : " as the lightning cometh forth from the east and shineth unto the west," "as men in the days of Noah knew not till the flood came," "so shall the coming," the presence, frapovaia, "of the Son of Man be" ; and "if the master of the house knew at what hour the thief would come, he would watch" (Matt. xxiv. 27, xxxix. 43). Every- where, here and in other places, the Kingdom is not a human achievement but a pure gift of God, as also in the Apocalypse of John, xxi. 2, the "New Jerusalem" descends "from heaven, from God, prepared as a bride for her husband." And Life in the Kingdom appears as simply successive : "many shall recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob " at the Messianic banquet ; indeed God's own life seems to be successive, since it includes the very feeding of the fowls of the air, and the clothing of the grass of the field (Matt. viii. n, vi. 26, 30). Where "life" or " life everlasting " occurs in Jesus' own sayings, it is ever placed in the future, as a reward for previous virtue, and expresses the totality of good to be conferred in the Kingdom of God. " Good master, what shall I do, that I may inherit eternal life?" Jesus is asked. And He answers, " Thou knowest the 58 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect commandments," and " sell all thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven"; and declares "how hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of God!" (Mark x. 17, 19, 21, 23). Nothing can well be more certain than the presence and deep operativeness of this con- viction, as to the futurity, imminence, sudden- ness, and pure God-givenness of the Kingdom of God, within our Lord's life and teaching. One especially amongst the features of this out- look the imminence has, almost from the first, been a grave difficulty for those whom reason and conscience constrain to combine a frank acceptance of the textual evidences with a deep conviction of Our Lord's profound spiritual insight and supreme normality. And yet this His attitude of mind and will, if taken generally, and as one of two essential spiritual movements, is found, by the spiritually fully awake and earnest soul, to inflict upon it, and ever anew to awaken within it, an easily overlooked or forgotten, yet most necessary, utterly abiding, element and re- quirement of the deepest spiritual life. Detach- ment, even from the very things to which also we owe attachment ; the irremediable inadequacy of even the totality of all our present earthly conditions, though improved to the utmost, in Jesus s Kingdom, partly Immanental, Expansive 59 so far as these conditions do not include, or lead up to, God and His presence, to satisfy the soul's wants ; our utter dependence upon a Will, a Spirit, distinct from our own, Who precedes, and from Whom proceed, all our very capacities for good, and Whose very "rewards" are rooted in an order of pure creative donation, indeed of self-donation : all this and more, of specifically religious truth and fact, is given us here. And it is all presented with so forcible a dramatic vivid- ness, and with such richness of Jewish details, as easily to obscure, for even religious spirits, in our own lands and times, the sobriety in sublimity of the abiding substance thus conveyed. (2) Now the purely religious, intensely tran- scendent and dualistic, outlook, with its apocalyptic form, as just described, appears to have been attained and developed by Our Lord's humanity under the stress of the resistance to His teach- ing, and of the approach of a violent death and apparently utter defeat. Certainly it is from the great scene of Peter's confession at Csesarea Philippi onwards (Mark viii. 31 = Matt. xvi. 21 = Luke ix. 22) that this outlook prevails in His teaching. Nevertheless, especially in the earlier period, another outlook which is, relatively, im- manental, monistic, and ethical, and possesses prophetical form, must also be admitted in Jesus's 60 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect temper and teaching, unless we would, more or less violently, explain away texts no less certain than those of the transcendental and apocalyptic kind, and would thus artificially unify His life. Thus, on Jesus's very first public appearance, <( all marvelled saying . . . 'He even commands the impure spirits and they obey Him'" (Mark i. 27); whilst Jesus declares, even considerably later, "if I cast out devils in the spirit of God, the Kingdom of God has indeed come to you" (e0curev e' fyta?) (Matt. xii. 28), and He can then tell His disciples, who assure Him "the devils also obey us in Thy name," " I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven" (Luke x. 17, 18). The Kingdom of God is thus in process of estab- lishment, in proportion as the kingdom of Satan is driven back and broken up. Hence the disciples are bidden simultaneously to "preach that the Kingdom of heaven is at hand," and to "heal the sick" and "cast out devils" (Matt. x. 7, 8 ; Luke x. 9). Again, the plant-life parables (as truly charac- teristic of this first, relatively peaceful, period as are the expectancy parables of the second, storm-and-stress period) are full of corre- sponding conceptions. The fundamental parable, that of the Sower (Mark iv. 3-9 and parallels), indicates how the Kingdom of God is subject, Instances of Jesus s Immanental Teaching 61 in its growth, to laws analogous to those obtaining in the natural world ; since the results of the preaching of the Kingdom depend upon the differing dispositions of the hearers' hearts, much as the results of sowing plant-seed depend upon the nature of the soil sown upon. And the profoundly authentic and fresh parable of the Seed that grows of itself (Mark iv. 26-29) l a Y s the stress of the comparison upon the gradual un- folding and prosperity of the seed which takes time to grow. Thus similarly the Kingdom of God, once it is planted, rises slowly but surely to an ever-richer development, and reaches maturity simply through the divine power immanent within it. And finally, Jesus's answer to the Baptist's messengers as to whether He is the Messiah a simple reference to the cures, awakenings, preach- ings they see Him perform (Matt. xi. 4) also implies that the Kingdom is already present. Indeed, Jesus's very presence involves, in a very real degree and way, the presence of the Kingdom. " The acceptable year of the Lord " (Luke iv. 19) is itself already present ; the disciples cannot fast, since "the bridegroom is" already now "with them" (Mark ii. 19); and "blessed are the eyes that see what you are" actually "seeing" (Luke x. 23). Hence Jesus can speak of when they 62 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect "shall see the Kingdom of God coming in power" (Mark ix. i), in contradistinction to the Kingdom as already come in obscurity and weakness. 1 (3) The Kingdom of God, whether insisted upon apocalyptically or prophetically, is through- out conceived by Our Lord as a social organism. For the Kingdom of God, present wheresoever God's will is done on earth as in heaven (Matt, vi. 10, n), evidently coincides with the totality of those through whom God's will is ac- complished we have thus, not one soul but many. If the Kingdom is primarily an interior disposition, it must contain many differently situated, yet similarly disposed, souls since only thus can there be lesser and greater (Matt. v. 19, xi. n). And if the perfection of the Kingdom consists in the greatest within it being he who is the servant of all (Matt. xx. 26, 27), it must again be an organized community. And indeed Jesus forms and sends out a special little 1 H. J. Holtzmann's Lehrbuch der N.T. Theologie y and ed. 1911, vol. i. pp. 284-295, in its admirable sobriety as to the Kingdom of God, has, after much independent study of my own, been chiefly followed above. Brilliant, very instructive, but, I think, too exclusive, insistence upon the apocalyptic element, in Albert Schweitzer's Von Reimarus zu Wrede, 1907 ; Eng. trans., The Quest of the Historic Jesus, 1909 ; and even in Alfred Loisy's Les Evangiles Synoptiques, 2 vols., 1901, a work of quite extra- ordinary penetration, in most of its treatment of the discourses. Jesus s Kingdom, Social and Concrete 63 band of apostles to aid them in winning this larger community (Matt. ix. 35 - x. 16, and parallels). These apostles are, in the future world, to sit with Jesus as judges over the tribes of Israel (Matt. xix. 28) ; and meanwhile they are to be the salt of the earth, the yeast that is to leaven the Jewish people (Matt. v. 13, xiii. 33). 1 (4) And the future, final life of souls is to remain, and more than ever to become, not only social as between soul and soul, but also complete as regards each soul's powers. Nowhere is there a trace, in Our Lord's conception of this ultimate life, of the solus cum solo, or of the survival of the abstractive intellect alone, as we found the latter in Aristotle, and as we shall find the former in Plotinus. Thus the very angels who "see in heaven, without ceasing, the face of God," are also simultaneously attentive to any contempt shown towards their human charges upon earth (Matt, xviii. 10); and "there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner doing penance" upon earth (Luke xv. 10). Indeed, everywhere these popular sayings, with their current imagery of the Messianic banquet and the thrones and other strongly spatial pictures, vividly portray and insist on the great fact and truth that the inner spiritual life, to be deep and genuine, per- 1 See H. J. Holtzmann, Lehrbuch der N.T. Theologie, pp. 265-268. 64 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect manently requires a rich variety and organization within a strongly social life with fellow-souls. (5) Yet it is not man or men, but God Who, here as everywhere in Jesus's experience and teaching, is the beginning, centre, medium, and end of the whole of this final life. " Have you not read what was said to you [Ex. iii. 6] by God : ' I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob ' ? He is, then, ' not the God of the dead but of the living ' ' (Matt. xxii. 32). The Simultaneity, as well as the Self- Identity, of the intensely living God is doubtless here implied, as alone upholding, because exceeding and enclosing, the minor alive- ness and successiveness of the generations of men. The soul's perfection is thus practised and proclaimed by Jesus as its complete self-donation to the service of man for God and of God in man. And this self-donation is effected in utter depend- ence upon God's aid, and yet with the fullest actuation of all the feelings, motives, and passions of chaste fear, tender pity, manly wrath, childlike simplicity and humility, homely heroism, joy in God, love of our very enemies, sense of and contrition for sin, and trust in God's fatherly care even in deep desolation and an agonizing death. The expansive happiness of His early ministry ; the loving observation of flower and bird, sky, Eternity in Time, Transcendence in Immanence 65 wind, and wave ; the lonely night-watches on the mountain-side ; the delight in children ; the merci- fulness to publicans and sinners ; the standing in the midst of the disciples as a servant (Luke xxii. 27) ; the emphatic anger in purifying the temple ; the sadness of the Last Supper ; the craving for the disciples' sympathy and the terror of death in Gethsemane ; the lofty silence before Caiaphas and Pilate ; the cry of desolation on the Cross : are here all constituents, occasions, and expressions of a ceaseless sense, possession, and operativeness of Eternal Life. Thus the negative movement, of detachment and renunciation, is planted here, by the de- voted soul, not outside of, but right within, even the purest attachments to the best of things, in order to keep them and itself (ever, in itself, so weak and changeable) pure and fruitful. A wise and noble, warm because ever love- impelled, asceticism is here the instrument, concomitant and guardian, though never the first motive or last end, of the entire life, in precise proportion to this life's depth and richness. Plato's wisely wide acceptance of the Thumos is here far surpassed by the delicacy, elasticity, and depth with which the entire gamut of the soul's impulsions and necessities is utilized, cultivated, and organized ; and the Stoic renunciation is 5 66 Eternal Life : Historical Retrospect practised here, within a boundless, richly difficult material, with infinite variety, tension, and fruit- fulness. And both the acceptance and the re- nunciation, each in and through and with the other, are not here caused by, nor do they here end in, the sorry superficiality of a mere self- culture, but they follow upon, or lead up to, the vivid apprehension and awed acceptance of the deepest Reality as Spirit, a holy Love and all- wise Will. All here comes from, or leads to, a life lived, within the more or less successiveness of our own mode of existence, in willed touch and deliberate union with God, the Simultaneous and Eternal. 1 2. St. Paul's spontaneous self-communications and formal teachings, whilst demonstrably affected by, and occupied with, only a part of the immense range and depth of Our Lord's life and revelation, are mostly far more complex or sys- tematic than Jesus's sayings. They are, in their form, where at all doctrinal, utterances of a rabbinically trained theologian, in which Philo- like, Platonic, and Stoic ingredients are often not 1 The above insistence upon two complementary movements, as equally necessary to the deepest religion and Christianity, has been largely learnt from Ernst Troeltsch's great writings, especially his "Was ist Wesen des Christenthums?" in Die Christliche Welt, 1903, i., coll. 583, 584. St. Paul's Training and Experiences 67 difficult to trace. And yet it is the manner and degree in which his great soul is filled with the love and reproduction of the most fundamental of the dispositions and aims of the historic Jesus, and with the conception and development of the spiritual organism of the Christian community, which give to these and to the other currents of his reflective thought an experimental content and rich sobriety far beyond what they bring by themselves alone. The dominating double fact of St. Paul's life, his conversion to enthusiastic faith in a present Christ, yet this without ever having known the earthly Jesus, led him to concentrate all his attention and love, away from the earthly, the past, the Jewish Jesus, upon the heavenly, the present and eternal Christ, the Saviour of Man- kind. Indeed, in the earthly life only the Passion and Death and the Resurrection of Jesus were retained, as constituting, respectively, the sowing and death, and the up-springing and life, of the Seed of the Second Adam, the heavenly Man. And since Christ had revealed Himself to Saul on the way to Damascus, in a substantially pneumatic manner, the convert Saul's, Paul's dominant category is, henceforth, not the Kingdom of God, not Eternal Life, but Pneuma, the Spirit. (i) St. Paul's fully developed scheme as to 68 Eternal Life: Historical Retrospect man's natural endowments and supernatural gifts says relatively little about man's highest natural endowment, his vow, or Mind, but insists much upon two strongly contrasted, indeed mutually exclusive, couples : a couple of natural, strictly human, incurably mortal constituents, ^y%?, the sensual soul, and aap%, the flesh ; and a couple consisting of Ilvevpa, Spirit, which is essentially divine and eternal, and of