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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 6
This theme is then presented as the abstract content of mystical experience, and is made the general universal essence of all inward and genuine religious processes. A union with God of this kind, however, further requires a general cosmic theory in which is established both the possibility and the manner of realizing this process of salvation. It also requires a technique of causation and completion of the mystical experience deduced from this theory.
A theory of this kind must be able to show how it came to pass that, in God, a separation between God and finite spirits could take place, and how this separation can be overcome by the very fact that the finite spirits have their being within God. It shows how all that is finite proceeds from God and returns unto God, for the sense of identity persisting through the separation becomes the very means by which the sense of separation is removed. This theory defines the degrees by which the creature falls away from and then rises up again into God; finally, it shows clearly that reflection upon and understanding of this process explains the religious experience to itself, and thus it attains an understanding of its own particular central content. The purely intellectual process of this association of ideas, so it is said, is, where it is really genuine and independent thought, the religious experience itself, and through this intellectual process the religious experience again interprets and clarifies its own ideas. From this there arise also the degrees of this experience, which are simply the stages of this intellectual process translated into terms of spiritual experience, to the point of the conscious attainment of the full sense of identity.
This type of mysticism becomes an independent religious philosophy, which recognizes that the religious process is the same universal expression and consciousness of the metaphysical connection between absolute and finite being, and which discovers everywhere, beneath all the concrete forms of religion, the same religious germ, which, however, only reaches complete and pure maturity under its fostering care. Thus mysticism becomes independent of concrete popular religion, timeless and nonhistorical, at most concealed under historical symbols, the only valid interpretation of the religious process, under whatever form it may be clothed. It becomes anti-personal and ascetic, since it allows personality to be absorbed in God, because it regards the senses and finite existence as the wall of separation between God Transcendent and God Immanent. This type of mysticism gives rise to that form of Pantheism which, however, in the philosophical sense is no Pantheism, because in it the separation of the finite ego from God is as important as its reunion with God. This therefore tends to develop into the crudest Dualism or into a gradual descending system of Emanations. It becomes a peculiar kind of intellectualism, an intellectualism which looks down with contempt upon the sense-bound standards of the intellect, and which replaces the common, carnal, and unhallowed ways of thought by a religious logic which is intelligible only to the religious mind. It can, however, also become pure voluntarism, as soon as the dangers of thought for religious inwardness are felt, and the main stress is laid upon union of the will with God, or upon the decline of the will to live. Thus Brahmanistic speculative mysticism and Buddhistic voluntary mysticism, the Dominican mysticism of knowledge and the Franciscan mysticism of the will and of love, are all able to exist side by side.
