Among the Latin fathers the stress was entirely different. Here the idea was that man was being redeemed, not from corruption primarily, but from guilt. He was redeemed from the punishment which had to be inflicted upon him for the sin of Adam. Whereas the Greek theologians regarded God as primarily Absolute Spirit, the Latin theologians regarded God as Governor and Lawgiver, with the mind of a Roman lawyer (their theology tends to be in legalistic terms). The doctrine was developed slowly, but we get in St Augustine a continual stress on the horror of original sin and on the idea that guilt is fully inherited by all members of the human race, so that an unbaptized child must necessarily go directly to hell.
This view was developed over the centuries, and there was a long period of discussion about the question of the ransom. To whom was the ransom of the death of Christ paid? There were many theologians who insisted that the ransom was paid to Satan, that God had handed the world over to Satan but wished to take it back again and had to pay this enormous price to Satan for the privilege. On the other hand, there were theologians who insisted that the ransom was paid to satisfy the honour of God. God had been infinitely offended, and the only reparation for an infinite offence was an infinite satisfaction, the death of the God-man, Christ.
It was the latter view which prevailed in the more or less official doctrine formulated by St Anselm in the twelfth century. Anselm said that the death of this infinite Person produced a surplus of satisfaction, which constituted a kind of fund of merit that could be used for the absolution of sins. It was on the basis of this doctrine that the medieval church enlarged the practice of selling indulgences, which led in due course to the Reformation.
In the Reformation we find Calvin, who felt that retributive justice was an essential part of the character of God and that Christ was actually bearing the punishment which was due to man. ‘The Christ’—these are the words he used—‘bore the weight of the Divine anger … and experienced all the signs of an angry and avenging God.’ These views were modified by the Arminians and the Socinians and by Hugo Grotius in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and have given place gradually to a more ethical and spiritual view in modern Protestantism.
Now I would like to quote the passage in which Professor Adams Brown sums up the whole of this very strange history:
The atoning character of Christ’s death is found now in its penal quality as suffering, now in its ethical character as obedience. It is represented now as a ransom to redeem man from Satan, now as a satisfaction due to the honour of God, now as a penalty demanded by His justice. Its necessity is grounded now in the nature of things, and, again, is explained as a result of an arrangement due to God’s mere good pleasure or answering his sense of fitness. The means by which its benefits are mediated to men are sometimes mystically conceived as in the Greek theology of the Sacrament; sometimes legally, as in the Protestant formula of imputation; and, still again, morally and spiritually, as in the more personal theories of recent Protestantism. Surveying differences so extreme, one might well be tempted to ask, with some recent critics, whether indeed we have here to do with an essential element in Christian doctrine, or simply with a survival of primitive ideas whose presence in the Christian system can constitute a perplexity rather than aid to faith. But the differences we have discussed are not greater than may be paralleled in the case of every other Christian doctrine.
The reasons for these differences even in particular doctrines are to be sought in fundamental differences in man’s conception of God and of His relation to the world. Where God is thought to be Absolute Spirit the atonement is conceived as the Greek theologians conceived it; in the theology of Roman Catholicism and earlier Protestantism, God is conceived primarily as governor and judge and legal phraseology seems a natural expression of religious faith; where ethical doctrines come to the fore, as in modern views of the atonement, a kind of ethical and spiritual language is used. This confusion indicates very clearly the extraordinary difficulties we are up against when we embark upon a systematic theologization of experience into conceptual and symbolic terms. The advantages which certainly accrue from accurate theological expression seem to me offset by the very great disadvantages which the history of organized religion makes evident.
What has been the attitude of the proponent of religion as immediate experience towards the religion expressed in terms of symbols? Meister Eckhart, one of the great mystics of the Middle Ages, expresses it in an extreme form: ‘Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.’ Here we have to make a short digression on the use of the word ‘truth’ in religious literature. The word ‘truth’ is used in at least three common senses. It is used synonymously with Reality when we say ‘God is Truth’, which means that God is the Primordial Fact. It is used in the sense of immediate experience, as in the fourth Gospel, where it is said that God must be worshipped ‘in Spirit and in Truth’ (John 4:24), meaning with an immediate apprehension of Divine Reality. Finally, it is used in the common sense of the word, as correspondence between symbolic propositions and the fact to which they refer. Eckhart was a theologian as well as a mystic and he would not have denied that truth in the third sense was to some degree possible in theology. He would have said that some theological propositions were certainly truer than others. But he would have denied that there was any possibility of the final end of man, the union with God—truth in the second sense—being achieved by means of manipulating theological symbols.
This insistence on the inefficacy of symbolic religion for the ultimate purpose of union with God has been stressed by all the Oriental religions. We find it in the literature of Hinduism, in the literature of Mahayana Buddhism, of Taoism, and so on. Hui-neng says that the truth has never been preached by the Buddha, seeing that one has to realize it within oneself, and that what is known of the teaching of Buddha is not the teaching of Buddha, which has to be an interior experience. Then we get a paradoxical phrase: ‘What is the ultimate teaching of the Buddha? You won’t understand it unless you have it.’ The author goes on to say, ‘Don’t be so ignorant as to mistake the pointing finger for the moon at which you are pointing,’ and he says that the habit of imagining that the pointing finger is the moon condemns all efforts to realize oneness with Reality to total failure. There were even Zen masters who prescribed that anybody who used the word ‘Buddha’ should have his mouth washed out with soap because it was so remote from the goal of immediate experience.
This has been the usual attitude of mystics at all times, but above all in the Orient, where philosophy has been in one respect profoundly different from Western Philosophy. Oriental philosophy has always been what I may call a kind of transcendental operationalism; it starts with somebody doing something about the self and then, from the experience attained, going on to speculate and theorize about the significance of the experience. In contrast, all too frequently Western philosophy, above all modern Western philosophy, is pure speculation based on theoretical knowledge that ends only in theoretical conclusions. However, there have been many exceptions to this rule in the West, above all among the mystics, who have insisted just as strongly as their Oriental counterparts on the necessity for direct experience and on the inefficacy of symbols and of ordinary discursive thought. St John of the Cross says categorically, ‘Nothing that the imagination may conceive or the understanding comprehend, in this life, is or can be a proximate means of union with God.’
The same idea is expressed by the great Anglican mystic of the eighteenth century, William Law:
To find or know God in reality by any outward proofs, or by anything but by God Himself made manifest and self-evident to you, will never be your case either here or hereafter. For neither God, nor heaven, nor hell, nor the devil, nor the flesh, can be any otherwise knowable in you or by you but their own existence and manifestation in you. And all pretended knowledge of any of these things, beyond and without this self-evident sensibility of their birth within you, is only such knowledge of them as the blind man hath of the light that hath never entered into him.
What is the mystical experience? I take it that the mystical experience is essentially the being aware of and, while the experience lasts, being identified with a form of
