Great Western Mystics: Their Lasting Significance 9780231883283

Table of contents :
Foreword
Preface
Contents
I: What Is Mysticism ?
II: Mysticism of Inwardness
III: Mysticism of Nature and History
Notes

Citation preview

Great Western Mystics MATCHETTE

FOUNDATION NUMBER

DELIVERED AT C O L U M B I A

1955

LECTURES

IV UNIVERSITY

Great Western Mystics THEIR

LASTING

By D A V I D

SIGNIFICANCE

BAUMGARDT

New York • Columbia University Press • 1961

The Bollingen Foundation Inc. has generously provided funds toward the cost of publication of this book

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-10165

Published 1961, Columbia University Press, New York Published in Great Britain, India, and Pakistan by the Oxford University Press London, Bombay, and Karachi Printed in the Netherlands

TO HUNTINGTON

CAIHNS

CHARLES WABREN JAMES IN

EVERETT

GUTMANN

FRIENDSHIP

AND GRATITUDE

Foreword

In the foreword to an earlier volume of Matchette Lectures given under the auspices of the Department of Philosophy of Columbia University, a series of which the present volume is the fourth to be published, Irwin Edman wrote: "The Franklin J. Matchette Foundation, Inc., under whose sponsorship the lectures which compose this book were presented at Columbia University in November, 1950, was established by a bequest provided in the will of Franklin J. Matchette, one of those rare and admirable phenomena in American life, the disinterested amateur in philosophy and education. In a long career as both inventor and business man, he was increasingly led to reflect on the philosophical issues involved in human experience and in the problems of education. In 1930, at the age of sixty-seven, he retired from business to devote his full time to the formulation and development of a philosophical system which had been evolving in his mind for some forty years. This system he called the Absolute-Relative theory, and in 1939 Mr. Matchette published a series of pamphlets giving his theory in condensed form, describing the movement of nature as he saw it from the Zero-Atom to the Absolute. The Matchette Foundation has subsequently edited and published posthumously the manuscripts of Franklin J. Matchette in a book entitled

viii

Foreword

Outline of a Metaphysics, which gives a systematic view of his philosophy. "Mr. Matchette left a considerable part of his fortune for a foundation to interest the public in philosophy. The lectures published in this volume are among the fruits of that benefaction; with their combined humanism and sense of responsibility to scientific knowledge, they have a happy consonance with the intentions of the Matchette Foundation." The combination of humanistic and responsible scientific scholarship to which Irwin Edman called attention with reference to Bertrand Russell's The Impact of Science on Society assuredly marks David Baumgardt's study of Great Western Mystics. This should also be said of an intervening series of Matchette Lectures at Columbia, delivered in 1953 by Walter T. Stace of Princeton. The title of Professor Stace's lectures, which were not published in this series because the author decided to incorporate them in a larger work, was "Mysticism and Human Destiny." The circumstance that two series of Matchette Lectures considered aspects of mysticism will seem to readers of Franklin Matchette's Outline of a Metaphysics altogether in accord with his outlook. Both Stace's and Baumgardt's interpretations show that mystical experience can appropriately be studied by the methods of humanistic and naturalistic philosophy. To such philosophies mystical experiences are characterized by their intensity, pervasiveness, and tendency to influence enduring human values. These may be "transvaluations," to use Nietzsche's term, but they may be reaffirmations of values previously held, though with new conviction. They may, of course, be religious values, as in many of Professor Baumgardt's great Western mystics, though this is not necessarily so unless the pervasivenes and intensity of

Foreword

ix

values are regarded as being, in themselves, essentially religious. In any case they are surely worthy of philosophic study and interpretation. It is a pleasure to salute Professor Baumgardt on the seventieth anniversary of his birth. Columbia University April 20,1960

JAMES

GUTMANN

Preface

This small book has had to set itself the seemingly hopeless task of serving two masters. As the public audience to which these lectures were addressed had, comprehensively, little inclination to listen to detailed epistemological discussions or to extended scholarly references, I tried to keep the text of the lectures themselves as elementary and "readable" as the previous group in this series, Lord Russell's addresses on The Impact of Science on Society. But the notes I have added to these public lectures, delivered in 1955 at the invitation of Columbia University and the Matchette Foundation, try to do justice to the interests of the scholar as well. To Professor James Gutmann, Executive Officer of the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, Professor Charles Warren Everett of Columbia University, and the Franklin J. Matchette Foundation I feel deeply obliged for having given me the opportunity to deliver these lectures; and further warmest thanks go to the Bollingen Foundation without whose generous assistance they could not have been published nor other research of mine carried out. Finally, special thanks are due to Mr. Fred Forrest, formerly of Columbia University Libraries, for allowing me ample exploitation of the treasures of his collections, and to the late

xii

Preface

Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Professor Joseph Frank of the University of Minnesota, and my wife for their most welcome stylistic help. DAVID

BAUMGABDT

Contents

Foreword by James Gutmann Preface

vii xi

i: What Is Mysticism?

1

n: Mysticism of Inwardness

16

in: Mysticism of Nature and History

40

Notes

67

Great Western Mystics

I: What Is Mysticism ?

What is mysticism? About fifty years ago it would have looked rather strange to ponder too much over such a question. Only William James, Josiah Royce, and the true Quaker mystic Rufus M. Jones might have nodded with approval had they heard of the topic of these lectures. But the majority of American philosophers would not have had much patience with any detailed discussion of medieval mysticism. Even Catholic scholars often thought slightingly of the great mystical tradition of their own Church, and instead favored the far more rationalistic thought of scholasticism. Today, however, we have in Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism an ever expanding interest in mystical currents of the past. And yet, this interest is often jeopardized by the intricacies of the subject. If we speak of astronomy, botany, or zoology, everyone immediately knows what the subject matters of these disciplines are. But as soon as we go into philosophy, metaphysics, mysticism, or even positivism, we meet with considerable difficulties even in defining our topics. In most branches of philosophy including mysticism the mere etymology of a term does not convey too much. The word mystic is derived from the Greek (IU