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ERNST TROELTSCH
From:
Ernst Troeltsch, The social teaching of the Christian
Churches, v. II,
tr. Olive Wyon, 1931, pp. 730 - 741. Here published without footnotes.
Page 10
German mysticism evolved this theory as the foundation of practical reform, in connection with the emancipation of late mediaeval lay-Christianity from its ancient setting; at the same time, with varying consistency, it remained in touch with the objective institution of the Church, and, so far as lay in its power, it preserved the main Christian tendency by its emphasis upon personality. According to this theory, the finite spirit achieves actual reality in the world process; in its selfish resistance towards the Spirit of God it commits real sin, and through the working of the Divine Spirit which lays hold of it in Christianity it is raised to the true centre of personality and united with God. It is true that the ultimate end of union with God in contemplation, or in the surrender of the will to the Divine Love, still somehow always involves a certain loss of selfhood in God. In this respect Dante himself found it difficult to preserve the distinction. There can, however, be no doubt that mysticism intends to maintain the elevation, salvation, and deification of the true and genuine centre of personality. The whole mystical idea itself is indeed at the service of a personal living piety, of an "interior life" which has a direct experience of salvation. This fact, together with the relation between the inner working of the Spirit and the stimulation, heightened power, and intensification which come from history (which was somehow always maintained), distinguishes this Christian mysticism from its ancient foundation of Neo-Platonism, quite apart from the fact that the Trinitarian-Christological doctrine was retained and interpreted in this sense.
The mysticism of the period of the Reformation arose out of this old mystical tradition, and its foundation in the New Testament, which constantly inspired it with fresh life. It is a matter of common knowledge that Luther himself was greatly influenced by it. Calvin, however, came far less under its influence. His doctrine of the Eucharist, too, does not agree with it, but rather with anti-Catholicism, and with the tendency to place a great gulf between the Creator and the creature. Calvinism is related to the sect-type, but not to mysticism. In spite of that, however, mysticism penetrated into it through all the avenues which were then possible, just as it penetrated into the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation and into Lutheran Pietism. While in connection with Catholicism its strength lay in its desire to represent itself as the complement of the exaggerated emphasis upon the purely objective aspect of religion, and in its power to unite itself with the Catholic doctrine of justification in the shape of an inward substantial transformation of the believer; on the other hand mysticism had a great attraction for Protestantism in its fundamental emphasis upon personal assurance of salvation, and, particularly in Lutheranism, in the doctrine of the present happiness of those whom Christ has set free.
