St. Paul's conception of Christ as the Life as well as the Light of
the world has two consequences besides those which have been already
mentioned. In the first place, it is fatal to religious individualism.
The close unity which joins us to Christ is not so much a unity of the
individual soul with the heavenly Christ, as an organic unity of all
men, or, since many refuse their privileges, of all Christians, with
their Lord. "We, being many, are one body in Christ, and severally
members one of another.[98]" There must be "no schism in the
body,[99]" but each member must perform its allotted function. St.
Augustine is thoroughly in agreement with St. Paul when he speaks of
Christ and the Church as "unus Christus." Not that Christ is
"divided," so that He cannot be fully present to any individual--that
is an error which St. Paul, St. Augustine, and the later mystics all
condemn; but as the individual cannot reach his real personality as an
isolated unit, he cannot, as an isolated unit, attain to full
communion with Christ.
The second point is one which may seem to be of subordinate
importance, but it will, I think, awaken more interest in the future
than it has done in the past. In the 8th chapter of the Epistle to the
Romans, St. Paul clearly teaches that the victory of Christ over sin
and death is of import, not only to humanity, but to the whole of
creation, which now groans and travails in pain together, but which
shall one day be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the
glorious liberty of the sons of God. This recognition of the
spirituality of matter, and of the unity of all nature in Christ, is
one which we ought to be thankful to find in the New Testament. It
will be my pleasant task, in the last two Lectures of this course, to
show how the later school of mystics prized it.
The foregoing analysis of St. Paul's teaching has, I hope, justified
the statement that all the essentials of Mysticism are to be found in
his Epistles. But there are also two points in which his authority has
been claimed for false and mischievous developments of Mysticism.
These two points it will be well to consider before leaving the
subject.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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