away from its hidden function and meaning. “The Jews ask for signs (miracles), and the Greeks seek wisdom (philosophy); but we preach Christ crucified, who is to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Gentiles foolishness; but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” And the cause of this difference of interpretation is shown to lie in the various interior dispositions of the hearers: “The animal man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he is incapable of understanding them, because they are spiritually discerned; but the spiritual man discerneth all things.”[18]
And yet this mystery of religion has to be externally offered, to be preached to us, and is preached to all men; it is intended by God to be known by all, and hence it is He who stimulates men to external preaching and external hearing, as to one of the pre-requisites of its acceptance: “The mystery which was hidden from the ages has now been made manifest”; he desires the Colossians to be strengthened in “the knowledge of the mystery of God and Christ”; and has to “speak the mystery of the Christ,” to “make it manifest.”[19]
And since this preaching, to be effective, absolutely requires, as we have seen, interior dispositions and interior illumination of the hearers, and since these things are different in different men, the degrees of initiation into this identical mystery are to be carefully adapted to the interior state of those addressed. “We preach wisdom amongst the perfect τέλειοι,” the technical term in the heathen Greek Mysteries for those who had received the higher grades of initiation. “I was not able to speak unto you as unto spiritual men, but (only) as unto fleshly ones, as unto infants in Christ. I have fed you with milk, not strong food, for you were not yet able.”[20]
And since all good, hence also the external preaching, comes from God, still more must this all-important interior apprehension of it come from Him. In a certain real sense the Spirit is thus organ as well as object of this interior light. “God has revealed unto us the wisdom of God through the Spirit; for the Spirit searcheth all things, even the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, unless the spirit of man that is in him? even so no man knoweth the things of God, except the Spirit of God.”[21]
But further, the mystery revealed in a unique degree and form in Christ’s life, is really a universal spiritual-human law; the law of suffering and sacrifice, as the one way to joy and possession, which has existed, though veiled till now, since the foundation of the world. “The mystery of Christ, which in former generations was not made manifest unto the sons of men, but has now been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets in the spirit.” And this law, which is Christ’s life, must reappear in the life of each one of us. “We have been buried together with Him through Baptism unto death, in order that, as Christ rose again from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in the newness of life”; “We know that our old man has been crucified together with Him. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall live with Him”; “If the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, He who raised Jesus from the dead will quicken your mortal bodies through His Spirit dwelling within you.”[22]
Christ’s life can be thus the very law of all life, because “He is the first-born of all creation, for in Him all things were created in heaven and on earth,” “all things were created through Him”; “and He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together”; “all things are summed up in Christ”; “Christ is all in all.” So that in the past, before His visible coming, the Jews in the desert “drank from the spiritual rock which followed them, and the rock was Christ.” And as He Himself is the perfect image of God, so all things are, in varying degrees, created in the image of Christ: “(Christ) who is the image of the living God”; “all things were created unto Him.” And since man is, in his original and potential essence, in a very special sense “the image and glory of God,” his perfecting will consist in a painful reconquest and development of this obscured and but potential essence, by becoming, as far as may be, another Christ, and living through the successive stages of Christ’s earthly life. We are bidden “all attain unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ,” so that, in the end, we may be able to say with the Apostle himself: “I live no more in myself, but Christ lives in me”; a consummation which appears so possible to St. Paul’s mind, that he eagerly, painfully longs for it: “My children, with whom I am again in travail, until Christ be formed in you.” And indeed “we all, with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord, the Spirit.”[23]
We have then in St. Paul not only a deeply mystical element, but mysticism of the noblest, indeed the most daringly speculative, world-embracing type.
5. The “Joannine” group: its characteristic truths.
And finally the Joannine group furnishes us with an instance, as strong as is conceivable within the wide pale of a healthy Christian spirit, of the predominance of an interior and intuitive, mystical, universalistic, spiritual and symbolic apprehension and interpretation both of external fact and of explicit reasoning.
The Visible and Historical is indeed emphasized, with a full consciousness of the contrasting Gnostic error, in the culminating sentence of the solemn Prologue of the Gospel, “And the Word was made Flesh and tabernacled amongst us, and we saw His glory,” and in the equally emphatic opening sentence of the First Epistle: “That which was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have beholden, and our hands have handled, … we announce unto you.” Hence too the Historical, Temporal Last Judgment, with its corporal resurrection, remains as certainly retained in this Gospel as in St. Matthew: “The hour cometh in which all those that are in the monuments shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and those that have done good shall come forth unto the resurrection of life, but those that have worked evil, unto the resurrection of judgment.”[24]
And Reasoning of a peculiarly continuous, rhythmically recurrent pattern, is as present and influential everywhere, as it is difficult to describe or even to trace. For it is here but the instrument and reflex of certain Mystical conceptions and doctrines, of a tendency to see, in everything particular and temporal, the Universal and Eternal; to apprehend Unity, a changeless Here and Now, in all multiplicity and succession, and hence to suppress explicit reasoning and clear distinctions, movement, growth, and change, as much as may be, both in the method of presentation and in the facts presented. If the Synoptists give us the successive, and write, unconsciously but specially, under the category of Time: the Fourth Gospel consciously presents us with simultaneity, and works specially under the category of Space.
The Successive is here conceived as but the appearance of the Simultaneous, of the Eternal and Abiding. Hence the historical development in the earthly experiences, teachings, and successes of Christ is ignored: His Godhead, that which is, stands revealed from the first in the appearances of His earthly life. Hence too the various souls of other men are presented to us as far as possible under one eternal and changeless aspect; they are types of various abiding virtues and iniquities, rather than concrete, composite mortals.
God appears here specially as Light, as Love, and as Spirit. Yet these largely thing-like attributions co-exist with personal qualities, and with real, ethical relations between God and the world: “God so loved the world, as that He gave His only begotten Son, in order that anyone who believeth in Him may not perish, but may have everlasting life.” The Father “draws” men, and “sends” His Son into the world.[25]
And this Son has eternally pre-existed with the Father; is the very instrument and principle of the world’s creation; and “is the true Light that enlightened every man that cometh into the world.” And this Word which, from the first, was already the Light of all men, became Flesh specially to manifest fully this its Life and Light. Indeed He is the only Light, and Way, and Truth, and Life; the only Door; the Living Bread; the true Vine.[26]
This Revelation and Salvation is indeed assimilated by individual souls and is received by them at a given moment, by a birth both new and from above,