Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Christian Mysticism by William Ralph Inge
page 32 of 389 (08%)
personality to Divine. A few words must be said, before I conclude, on
both these matters.

The Unity of all existence is a fundamental doctrine of Mysticism. God
is in all, and all is in God. "His centre is everywhere, and His
circumference nowhere," as St. Bonaventura puts it. It is often argued
that this doctrine leads direct to Pantheism, and that speculative
Mysticism is always and necessarily pantheistic. This is, of course,
a question of primary importance. It is in the hope of dealing with it
adequately that I have selected three writers who have been frequently
called pantheists, for discussion in these Lectures. I mean Dionysius
the Areopagite, Scotus Erigena, and Eckhart. But it would be
impossible even to indicate my line of argument in the few minutes
left me this morning.

The mystics are much inclined to adopt, in a modified form, the old
notion of an _anima mundi_. When Erigena says, "Be well assured that
the Word--the second Person of the Trinity--is the Nature of all
things," he means that the Logos is a cosmic principle, the
Personality of which the universe is the external expression or
appearance.[47]

We are not now concerned with cosmological speculations, but the
bearing of this theory on human personality is obvious. If the Son of
God is regarded as an all-embracing and all-pervading cosmic
principle, the "mystic union" of the believer with Christ becomes
something much closer than an ethical harmony of two mutually
exclusive wills. The question which exercises the mystics is not
whether such a thing as fusion of personalities is possible, but
whether, when the soul has attained union with its Lord, it is any
DigitalOcean Referral Badge