"O Thou Eternal One, whose presence bright All space doth occupy, all motions guide, Unchanged through time's all-devastating flight! Whom none can comprehend and none explore, Being whom we call God, and know no more . . . And when the tongue is eloquent no more, 3. Because God is the absolute Being, every true revelation of him as Spirit must reveal also the mystery of his being as the absolute. Agnosticism fancies that because God is a mystery he cannot be known; anthropomorphism fancies that because God is known he cannot be a mystery. But a revelation without mystery would be a God revealed away, and therefore no God. To every finite mind the knowledge of God shines on a background of mystery, like lightning on the blackness of a cloud. This is true of God's revelation of himself in nature and in man. The lily is clothed with mystery not less than with beauty. Every pebble, every blade of grass, every insect, brings us, as we investigate it, to questions which man cannot answer, which carry our thought to the absolute and the infinite. Consciousness can take no cognizance of its own origin, and thought can give no proof of the ultimate principles by which all thinking is regulated. Both the beginning and the end of the thread of man's consciousness are beyond his grasp. Thus all things go out into mystery, and therein all things reveal the absolute Being, and this is God. And no enlargement of the revelation can clear away the mystery. Because it is the absolute Being that is revealed, the more fully he is revealed the more fully must we see the mystery of the absolute Being. Because it is the finite in which he reveals himself, the finite can never be commensurate with the infinite and the completed revelation of it. Because it is finite minds to whom God reveals himself, the revelation must be commensurate with the capacity of the recipient, and the apprehension of God by a finite mind can never be the full comprehension of him. Therefore no enlargement of the revelation can clear it of mystery. God's progressive revelation of himself, however far it may be advanced, must always be the revelation of himself as the absolute Being transcending all finite media of revelation and the largest capacity of a finite mind. "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than Sheol; what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea" (Job xi. 7-9). On the contrary, the greater the revelation, the greater the consciousness of the mystery revealed. Science aims to clear from obscurity an area of knowledge. But the larger the clear area, the larger the horizon of the unknown which bounds it. The telescope penetrates the depths of space and reveals to scientific knowledge innumerable suns and systems. But the extension of knowledge multiplies the questions which we must ask but cannot answer questions which could not have been asked when the firmament was only an expanse dotted with shining spangles. The microscope reveals the invisible; chemistry discloses the molecular constitution of bodies. But the unanswered questions are multiplied, questions which could not have been asked when there were supposed to be but four elements, fire, air, earth, and water. It is like entering a spacious hall with locked doors on every side which we long to enter. If one is opened we find another more spacious hall with its locked doors. As the ancients imagined the earth to be flat and surrounded by an ocean overhung with everlasting darkness, the sphere of human knowledge is encircled on every side by the unknowable, whose waves we hear rolling beneath the impenetrable night. And human knowledge is thus encompassed by the darkness visible of conscious ignorance, because the universe is embosomed in the absolute Reason, whose eternal light, broken and reflected in the finite universe, reveals him to us, but, in its infinite, unbroken, and all-encompassing brightness, blinds us with excess of light. The same principle is exemplified in the revelation of God in Christ. A recent writer carries his anthropomorphism so far that he says Christ never presented truth transcending the limits of the human mind. He quotes our Lord's words on the new birth, in the third chapter of John, as exemplifying this transparent simplicity. But this very declaration of Jesus was a mystery to Nicodemus. And Jesus, as if laying the foundation of the Baconian philosophy, rebukes Nicodemus because he does not first ascertain the fact before objecting to it that he does not see the how, the why, and the wherefore of it; and he enforces his rebuke by referring to the undisputed fact of the changes of the wind, which at that day were entirely inexplicable. While no revealer of God ever disclosed to human view vistas opening so widely and so far into the grandeur and glory of the divine as are disclosed in the life and teaching of Jesus, certainly no one has revealed more of the mystery of God which encompasses and transcends those opening vistas. His revelations awaken innumerable questions which a fetichist or a polytheist could never have asked. In this sense it is always true that the more a man knows the more conscious he is of his ignorance. It is not that he believes that he has less knowledge, for he knows that his knowledge is increased. It means only that by the increase of his knowledge the horizon of the visible unknown is enlarged, and the points of as yet unsatisfied inquiry and investigation multiplied. It follows that any alleged revelation of God or any system of theology which makes its boast that it is free from mystery is thereby proved not to be true. If revelation is a chain let down from the throne of God, it must ascend beyond my reach and sight. If I can see and handle it up to the staple in the beam on which it hangs, I know it does not descend from the throne of God. If I can dip up the whole of a quantity of water in a tea-cup, it proves that the water is not the ocean. If I can fully comprehend in my finite mind a God revealed, it proves that it is not a revelation of the true God. Any professed revelation of God which boasts that it prunes away all mystery, and teaches only what is level to human capacity and transparent to the human mind, is by that fact proved to be not a revelation of the true God. It is a God whom I can handle and turn over in my own mind and look at on every side, as I might a statue of Apollo. It is an idol, an image created by my mind, if not graven by my hand. In this sense, and not in the sense of agnosticism, are the sayings true: "A God understood would be no God"; "To think that God is as I can think him to be is blasphemy"; "The last and highest consecration of all true religion must be an altar to The Unknown God." 4. While God as the absolute Being is the greatest of all mysteries, as the absolute Spirit in whom reason is eternal he is the solution of all. God cannot be accounted for by reference to any cause, nor explained by relation to any being or to any rational principle, law, or end, independent of himself. He is utterly inexplicable. But he is himself the absolute Spirit, the eternal Reason, the source of all causal energy and of all principles, laws, perfection, and good. Thus he accounts for and explains all things. God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. Light cannot be illuminated, but it illuminates all things. Physical science, as it pushes its investigations to the utmost, finds itself confronted with questions which it cannot answer, with breaks in the law of continuity which it cannot bridge, and even with seeming contradictions which it cannot resolve. It is only as it recognizes that the universe is grounded in the absolute Reason, ever immanent and energizing in it, that its ultimate questions can be answered, its law of continuity preserved, its fundamental axioms justified, and its seeming contradictions resolved. Philosophical science also issues in contradictions or antinomies if there is no God. Here, also, if God, the absolute Reason, is immanent and active in the universe, the contradictions are resolved into complemental truths. Thus the very existence of empirical and philosophical science rests on the existence of God, the absolute Reason, and his progressive revelation of his eternal and archetypal thought in it. "The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep." And God said, Let light be, and light was. And it is only because he speaks his all-creating and all-ordering word that light and order have appeared, that the universe is the expression of the thought of perfect reason, and so is capable of being comprehended in science, and that thus, instead of chaos, we have a cosmos. Clouds and darkness are round about him, but they are gathered up from the face of the universe, leaving it in light. 5. The revelation of the mystery of the divine Being is essential to the religious or spiritual life and its practical efficiency in renovating mankind. The revelation of this mystery is itself the revelation of God as the absolute Being. An essential element of religion is a consciousness, however inadequate, of the absolute Being and of having to do with him. It is a consciousness of the mystery behind all phenomena, and revealing itself in them. The object of religious faith is not the material world, it is not man, it is not the universe. It is the Power behind them all, and revealed in them all. It is the absolute Power, revealed also as the absolute Reason, as the absolute and eternal Life, Wisdom, and Love. And because the absolute transcends the finite it must always be a mystery to a finite mind. If man's knowledge cannot reach above the finite, if there is no Power, no rational Spirit, no Wisdom and Love, above the fixed course of nature and the finiteness of man, then man is incapable of religion. Then there is nothing by which he can lift himself above the finite and the transitory and connect himself and his destiny with the Absolute, the All-perfect, and the Eternal. Then he cannot know himself in his true greatness as a rational and free child of God. He cannot know the true ideal of his own perfection and well-being, and must forever fail to realize it. It is of the essence of religion that the man recognize his connection with that which transcends the finite; that he know his life, his duty, and his privilege, as in communication with God and participating in the Life, the Light, and the Love which are in him, and from him are imparted to men. Otherwise the man, in the world but without hope, finds himself, as Hegel says, stranded "on the sand-bank of the temporal." And whatever is substituted as the object of a proposed religion without God, the absolute Being, is itself finite, and cannot lift the soul on the waters of eternal life, which flow only from the sanctuary of God. The revelation of the mystery of God brings home to our consciousness the fact that, however near to us God may be, however gracious, to whatever intimacy with himself he may admit us, he is not altogether such a one as ourselves, but is the absolute Being, transcending us and the universe in his incomprehensible greatness. The revelation of mystery keeps fresh within us the consciousness that we are related to something above the earthly, the material and the finite, that our lives are lifted above sense into fellowship with the eternal, the infinite, the divine. It is often said that ignorance is the mother of devotion. But the wonder of knowledge is greater than the wonder of ignorance. It is the presence of mystery, ever greatening in the background of our ever greatening knowledge 1 Phil. der Religion, Einleitung. |