The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c40.s13.39

v2.c40.s13.39

A stronger claim,³ however, has been made for the value of the doctrine of the Upaniṣads as a school of mysticism, ‘ an attempt to gain personal experience of God found within the heart as a result of self-purification ’, or ‘ as a constant process of self-purification to the intent that God may be found within ’, definitions in which as applied to the Upaniṣads God must be understood as the Brahman. It is claimed from this point of view that the Upaniṣads have the superiority over Christian mysticism in originality, since that depends vitally on Plotinus, while it is admitted that the mysticism of the Upaniṣads is too purely metaphysical, and lacks the ethical and social content of Christian mysticism. Much of Christian mysticism, however, seems defective in this regard equally with the Upaniṣads, though it may be conceded that, unlike the Upaniṣads, the Christian mystics professed a faith in which essential stress was laid on morality. Christian mysticism,¹ however, is undoubtedly differentiated from that of the Upaniṣads by reason of the difference between the conception of God and that of the Brahman, even though in certain mystics the personal character of the divinity tends to be merged, while in the later Upaniṣads a personal deity appears in lieu of an impersonal absolute. In harmony with this distinction is the normally greater personal character of the mysticism of Christian seers, men and women alike. From this point of view the Upaniṣads may justly be accorded greater value and importance than from that of philosophy proper, and it is significant that it is in Christian mystics that we find utterances which the seers of the Upaniṣads would have found far easier to interpret than the Kantian system, such as that of St. Catherine, ‘My being is God, not by simple participation, but by a true transformation of being’, or Eckhardt’s, ‘When the soul has lost itself and everything in God, it finds itself again in God when it attains to the knowledge of Him, and it finds also everything which it had abandoned in God’, or his emphatic denial that God has any definite character of his own.²