Christian Mysticism by William Ralph Inge
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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 |
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