MYSTICISM:

A Study in Nature and Development

of Spiritual Consciousness

by

Evelyn Underhill

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Title: Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual
Consciousness
Creator(s): Underhill, Evelyn
Rights: Public Domain
CCEL Subjects: All; Mysticism; Classic; Proofed
LC Call no: BV5081 .U55
LC Subjects:

Practical theology
Practical religion. The Christian life
Mysticism
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PREFACE TO THE TWELFTH EDITION

Since this book first appeared, nineteen years ago, the study of
mysticism—not only in England, but also in France, Germany and Italy—has
been almost completely transformed. From being regarded, whether critically
or favourably, as a byway of religion, it is now more and more generally
accepted by theologians, philosophers and psychologists, as representing in
its intensive form the essential religious experience of man. The labours of
a generation of religious psychologists—following, and to some extent
superseding the pioneer work of William James—have already done much to
disentangle its substance from the psycho-physical accidents which often
accompany mystical apprehension. Whilst we are less eager than our
predecessors to dismiss all accounts of abnormal experience as the fruit of
superstition or disease, no responsible student now identifies the mystic
and the ecstatic; or looks upon visionary and other “extraordinary
phenomena” as either guaranteeing or discrediting the witness of the
mystical saints. Even the remorseless explorations and destructive
criticisms of the psycho-analytic school are now seen to have effected a
useful work; throwing into relief the genuine spiritual activities of the
psyche, while explaining in a naturalistic sense some of their less
fortunate psycho-physical accompaniments. The philosophic and theological
landscape also, with its increasing emphasis on Transcendence, its new
friendliness to the concept of the Supernatural, is becoming ever more
favourable to the metaphysical claims of the mystics. On one hand the prompt
welcome given to the work of Rudolf Otto and Karl Barth, on the other the
renewed interest in Thomist philosophy, seem to indicate a growing
recognition of the distinctness and independence of the Spiritual Order. and
a revival of the creaturely sense, strongly contrasting with the temper of
late nineteenth-century thought.

Were I, then, now planning this book for the first time, its arguments would
be differently stated. More emphasis would be given (a) to the concrete,
richly living yet unchanging character of the Reality over against the
mystic, as the first term, cause and incentive of his experience; (b) to
that paradox of utter contrast yet profound relation between the Creator and
the creature, God and the soul, which makes possible his development; (c) to
the predominant part played in that development by the free and prevenient
action of the Supernatural—in theological language, by “grace”—as against
all merely evolutionary or emergent theories of spiritual transcendence. I
feel more and more that no psychological or evolutionary treatment of man’s
spiritual history can be adequate which ignores the element of
“given-ness” in all genuine mystical knowledge. Though the mystic Life means
organic growth, its first term must be sought in ontology; in the Vision of
the Principle, as St. Gregory the Great taught long ago. For the real
sanction of that life does not inhere in the fugitive experiences or even
the transformed personality of the subject; but in the metaphysical Object
which that subject apprehends.

Again, it now seems to me that a critical realism, which found room for the
duality of our full human experience—the Eternal and the Successive,
supernatural and natural reality—would provide a better philosophic
background to the experience of the mystics than the vitalism which
appeared, twenty years ago, to offer so promising a way of escape from
scientific determinism. Determinism—more and more abandoned by its old
friends the physicists—is no longer the chief enemy to such a spiritual
interpretation of life as is required by the experience of the mystics. It
is rather a naturalistic monism, a shallow doctrine of immanence unbalanced
by any adequate sense of transcendence, which now threatens to re-model
theology in a sense which leaves no room for the noblest and purest reaches
of the spiritual life.

Yet in spite of the adjustments required by such a shifting at the
philosophic outlook, and by nearly twenty years of further study and
meditation, the final positions which seem to me to be required by the
existence of mysticism remain substantially unchanged. Twenty years ago, I
was already convinced that the facts of man’s spiritual experience pointed
to a limited dualism; a diagram which found place for his contrasting
apprehension of Absolute and Contingent, Being and Becoming, Simultaneous
and Successive. Further, that these facts involved the existence in him too
of a certain doubleness, a higher and lower, natural and transcendental
self—something equivalent to that “Funklein” spark, or apex of the soul on
which the mystics have always insisted as the instrument of their special
experience. Both these opinions were then unpopular. The second, in
particular, has been severely criticized by Professor Pratt and other
authorities on the psychology of religion. Yet the constructive work which
has since been done on the metaphysical implications of mystical experience
has tended more and more to establish their necessity, at least as a basis
of analysis; and they can now claim the most distinguished support.

The recovery of the concept of the Supernatural—a word which no respectable
theologian of the last generation cared to use—is closely linked with the
great name of Friedrich von Hügel. His persistent opposition to all merely
monistic, pantheist and immanental philosophies of religion, and his
insistence on the need of a “two-step diagram” of the Reality accessible to
man, though little heeded in his life-time, are now bearing fruit. This
re-instatement of the Transcendent, the “Wholly Other,” as the religious
fact, is perhaps the most fundamental of the philosophic changes which have
directly affected the study of mysticism. It thus obtains a metaphysical
background which harmonizes with its greatest declarations, and supports its
claim to empirical knowledge of the Truth on which all religion rests.
Closely connected with the transcendence of its Object, are the twin
doctrines emphasized in all Von Hügel’s work. First, that while mysticism is
an essential element in full human religion, it can never be the whole
content of such religion. It requires to be embodied in some degree in
history, dogma and institutions if it is to reach the sense-conditioned
human mind. Secondly, that the antithesis between the religions of
“authority” and of “spirit,” the “Church” and the “mystic,” is false. Each
requires the other. The “exclusive” mystic, who condemns all outward forms
and rejects the support of the religious complex, is an abnormality. He
inevitably tends towards pantheism, and seldom exhibits in its richness the
Unitive Life. It is the “inclusive” mystic, whose freedom and originality
are fed but not hampered by the spiritual tradition within which he appears,
who accepts the incarnational status of the human spirit, and can “find the
inward in the outward as well as the inward in the inward,” who shows us in
their fullness and beauty the life-giving possibilities of the soul
transfigured in God.

Second in importance among the changes which have come over the study of
mysticism, I should reckon the work done during the last decade upon the
psychology of prayer and contemplation. I cannot comment here upon the
highly technical discussions between experts as to the place where the line
is to be drawn between “natural” and “supernatural,” “active” and
“infused” operations of the soul in communion with God; or the exact
distinction between “ordinary” and “extraordinary” contemplation. But the
fact that these discussions have taken place is itself significant; and
requires from religious psychology the acknowledgement of a genuine
two-foldness in human nature—the difference in kind between Animus the
surface-self and Anima the transcendental self, in touch with supernatural
realities. Here, the most important work has been done in France; and
especially by the Abbé Bremond, whose “Prière et Poésie” and “Introduction a
la Philosophie de la Prière”—based on a vast acquaintance with mystical
literature—mark, I believe, the beginning of a new understanding of the
character of contemplation. The Thomist philosophy of Maritain, and the
psychological researches of Maréchal, tend to support this developing view
of the mystical experience, even in its elementary forms, as an activity of
the transcendental self; genuinely supernatural, yet not necessarily
involving any abnormal manifestations, and linked by the ascending “degrees
of prayer” with the subject’s “ordinary” religious life. This disentangling
of the substance of mysticism from the psycho-physical accidents of trance,
ecstasy, vision and other abnormal phenomena which often accompany it, and
its vindication as something which gives the self a genuine knowledge of
transcendental Reality—with its accompanying demonstration of the soberness
and sanity of the greatest contemplative saints—is the last of the
beneficent changes which have transformed our study of the mystics. In this
country it is identified with the work of two Benedictine scholars; Abbot
Chapman of Downside and Dom Cuthbert Butler, whose “Western Mysticism” is a
masterly exhibition of the religious and psychological normality of the
Christian contemplative life, as developed by its noblest representatives.

Since this book was written, our knowledge of the mystics has been much
extended by the appearance of critical texts of many writings which had only
been known to us in garbled versions; or in translations made with an eye to
edification rather than accuracy. Thus the publication of the authentic
revelations of Angela of Foligno—one of the most interesting discoveries of
recent years—has disclosed the unsuspected splendour of her mystical
experience. The critical texts of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross which
are now available amend previous versions in many important respects. We
have reliable editions of Tauler and Ruysbroeck; of “The Cloud of
Unknowing,” and of Walter Hilton’s works. The renewed interest in
seventeenth-century mysticism, due in part to the Abbé Bremond’s great work,
has resulted in the publication of many of its documents. So too the
literary, social and historical links between the mystics, the influence of
environment, the great part played by forgotten spiritual movements and
inarticulate saints, are beginning to be better understood. Advantage has
been taken of these facts in preparing the present edition. All quotations
from the mystics have been revised by comparison with the best available
texts. The increased size of the historical appendix and bibliography is
some indication of the mass of fresh material which is now at the disposal
of students; material which must be examined with truth-loving patience,
with sympathy, and above all with humility, by those who desire to make
valid additions to our knowledge of the conditions under which the human
spirit has communion with God.

Easter 1930 E. U.
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PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

This book falls naturally into two parts; each of which is really complete
in itself, though they are in a sense complementary to one another. Whilst
the second and longest part contains a somewhat detailed study of the nature
and development of man’s spiritual or mystical consciousness, the first is
intended rather to provide an introduction to the general subject of
mysticism. Exhibiting it by turns from the point of view of metaphysics,
psychology, and symbolism, it is an attempt to gather between the covers of
one volume information at present scattered amongst many monographs and
text-books written in divers tongues, and to give the student in a compact
form at least the elementary facts in regard to each of those subjects which
are most closely connected with the study of the mystics.

Those mystics, properly speaking, can only be studied in their works: works
which are for the most part left unread by those who now talk much about
mysticism. Certainly the general reader has this excuse, that the
masterpieces of mystical literature, full of strange beauties though they
be, offer considerable difficulties to those who come to them unprepared. In
the first seven chapters of this book I have tried to remove a few of these
difficulties; to provide the necessary preparation; and to exhibit the
relation in which mysticism stands to other forms of life. If, then, the
readers of this section are enabled by it to come to the encounter of
mystical literature with a greater power of sympathetic comprehension than
they previously possessed, it will have served the purpose for which it has
been composed.

It is probable that almost every such reader, according to the angle from
which he approaches the subject, will here find a good deal which seems to
him superfluous. But different types of mind will find this unnecessary
elaboration in different places. The psychologist, approaching from the
scientific standpoint, eager for morbid phenomena, has little use for
disquisitions on symbolism, religious or other. The symbolist, approaching
from the artistic standpoint, seldom admires the proceedings of psychology.
I believe, however, that none who wish to obtain an idea of mysticism in its
wholeness, as a form of life, can afford to neglect any of the aspects on
which these pages venture to touch. The metaphysician and the psychologist
are unwise if they do not consider the light thrown upon the ideas of the
mystics by their attitude towards orthodox theology. The theologian is still
more unwise if he refuse to hear the evidence of psychology. For the benefit
of those whose interest in mysticism is chiefly literary, and who may care
to be provided with a clue to the symbolic and allegorical element in the
writings of the contemplatives, a short section on those symbols of which
they most often make use has been added. Finally, the persistence amongst us
of the false opinion which confuses mysticism with occult philosophy and
psychic phenomena, has made it necessary to deal with the vital distinction
which exists between it and every form of magic.

Specialists in any of these great departments of knowledge will probably be
disgusted by the elementary and superficial manner in which their specific
sciences are here treated. But this book does not venture to address itself
to specialists. From those who are already fully conversant with the matters
touched upon, it asks the indulgence which really kindhearted adults are
always ready to extend towards the efforts of youth. Philosophers are
earnestly advised to pass over the first two chapters, and theologians to
practise the same charity in respect of the section dealing with their
science.

The giving of merely historical information is no part of the present plan:
except in so far as chronology has a bearing upon the most fascinating of
all histories, the history of the spirit of man. Many books upon mysticism
have been based on the historical method: amongst them two such very
different works as Vaughan’s supercilious and unworthy “Hours with the
Mystics” and Dr. Inge’s scholarly Bampton lectures. It is a method which
seems to be open to some objection: since mysticism avowedly deals with the
individual not as he stands in relation to the civilization of his time, but
as he stands in relation to truths that are timeless. All mystics, said
Saint-Martin, speak the same language and come from the same country. As
against that fact, the place which they happen to occupy in the kingdom of
this world matters little. Nevertheless, those who are unfamiliar with the
history of mysticism properly so called, and to whom the names of the great
contemplatives convey no accurate suggestion of period or nationality, may
be glad to have a short statement of their order in time and distribution in
space. Also, some knowledge of the genealogy of mysticism is desirable if we
are to distinguish the original contributions of each individual from the
mass of speculation and statement which he inherits from the past. Those
entirely unacquainted with these matters may find it helpful to glance at
the Appendix before proceeding to the body of the work; since few things are
more disagreeable than the constant encounter of persons to whom we have not
been introduced.

The second part of the book, for which the first seven chapters are intended
to provide a preparation, is avowedly psychological. It is an attempt to set
out and justify a definite theory of the nature of man’s mystical
consciousness: the necessary stages of organic growth through which the
typical mystic passes, the state of equilibrium towards which he tends. Each
of these stages—and also the characteristically mystical and still largely
mysterious experiences of visions and voices, contemplation and
ecstasy—though viewed from the standpoint of psychology, is illustrated from
the lives of the mystics; and where possible in their own words. In planning
these chapters I have been considerably helped by M. Delacroix’s brilliant
“Etudes sur le Mysticisme,” though unable to accept his conclusions: and
here gladly take the opportunity of acknowledging my debt to him and also to
Baron von Hügel’s classic “Mystical Element of Religion.” This book, which
only came into my hands when my own was planned and partly written, has
since been a constant source of stimulus and encouragement.

Finally, it is perhaps well to say something as to the exact sense in which
the term “mysticism” is here understood. One of the most abused words in the
English language, it has been used in different and often mutually exclusive
senses by religion, poetry, and philosophy: has been claimed as an excuse
for every kind of occultism, for dilute transcendentalism, vapid symbolism,
religious or aesthetic sentimentality, and bad metaphysics. On the other
hand, it has been freely employed as a term of contempt by those who have
criticized these things. It is much to be hoped that it may be restored
sooner or later to its old meaning, as the science or art of the spiritual
life.

Meanwhile, those who use the term “Mysticism” are bound in self-defence to
explain what they mean by it. Broadly speaking, I understand it to be the
expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete
harmony with the transcendental order; whatever be the theological formula
under which that order is understood. This tendency, in great mystics,
gradually captures the whole field of consciousness; it dominates their life
and, in the experience called “mystic union,” attains its end. Whether that
end be called the God of Christianity, the World-soul of Pantheism, the
Absolute of Philosophy, the desire to attain it and the movement towards
it—so long as this is a genuine life process and not an intellectual
speculation—is the proper subject of mysticism. I believe this movement to
represent the true line of development of the highest form of human
consciousness.

It is a pleasant duty to offer my heartiest thanks to the many kind friends
and fellow students, of all shades of opinion, who have given me their help
and encouragement. Amongst those to whom my heaviest debt of gratitude is
due are Mr. W. Scott Palmer, for much valuable, generous, and painstaking
assistance, particularly in respect of the chapter upon Vitalism: and Miss
Margaret Robinson, who in addition to many other kind offices, has made all
the translations from Meister Eckhart and Mechthild of Magdeburg here given.

Sections of the MS. have been kindly read by the Rev. Dr. Inge, by Miss May
Sinclair, and by Miss Eleanor Gregory; from all of whom I have received much
helpful and expert advice. To Mr. Arthur Symons my thanks and those of my
readers are specially due; since it is owing to his generous permission that
I am able to make full use of his beautiful translations of the poems of St.
John of the Cross. Others who have given me much help in various directions,
and to whom most grateful acknowledgments are here offered, are Miss
Constance Jones, Miss Ethel Barker, Mr. J. A. Herbert of the British
Museum—who first brought to my notice the newly discovered “Mirror of Simple
Souls”—the Rev. Dr. Arbuthnot Nairn, Mr. A. E. Waite, and Mr. H. Stuart
Moore, F.S.A. The substance of two chapters—those upon “The Characteristics
of Mysticism” and “Mysticism and Magic”—has already appeared in the pages of
The Quest and The Fortnightly Review. These sections are here reprinted by
kind permission of their respective editors.

Feast of St. John of the Cross E. U.

1910
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“What the world, which truly knows nothing, calls ‘mysticism’ is the science
of ultimates, . . . the science of self-evident Reality, which cannot be
‘reasoned about,’ because it is the object of pure reason or perception. The
Babe sucking its mother’s breast, and the Lover returning, after twenty
years’ separation, to his home and food in the same bosom, are the types and
princes of Mystics.”

COVENTRY PATMORE,

“The Rod, the Root, and the Flower”
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T he most highly developed branches of the human family have in common one
peculiar characteristic. They tend to produce—sporadically it is true, and
often in the teeth of adverse external circumstances—a curious and definite
type of personality; a type which refuses to be satisfied with that which
other men call experience, and is inclined, in the words of its enemies, to
“deny the world in order that it may find reality.” We meet these persons in
the east and the west; in the ancient, mediaeval, and modern worlds. Their
one passion appears to be the prosecution of a certain spiritual and
intangible quest: the finding of a “way out” or a “way back” to some
desirable state in which alone they can satisfy their craving for absolute
truth. This quest, for them, has constituted the whole meaning of life. They
have made for it without effort sacrifices which have appeared enormous to
other men: and it is an indirect testimony to its objective actuality, that
whatever the place or period in which they have arisen, their aims,
doctrines and methods have been substantially the same. Their experience,
therefore, forms a body of evidence, curiously self-consistent and often
mutually explanatory, which must be taken into account before we can add up
the sum of the energies and potentialities of the human spirit, or
reasonably speculate on its relations to the unknown world which lies
outside the boundaries of sense.

All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis
whom they call Truth. With most, this has been a passing passion: they have
early seen its hopelessness and turned to more practical things. But others
remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of
their love, the vision which they make to themselves of the beloved object
varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: an adorable yet
intangible figure, found in this world yet revealing the next. To others she
seems rather an evil but an irresistible enchantress: enticing, demanding
payment and betraying her lover at the last. Some have seen her in a test
tube, and some in a poet’s dream: some before the altar, others in the
slime. The extreme pragmatists have even sought her in the kitchen;
declaring that she may best be recognized by her utility. Last stage of all,
the philosophic sceptic has comforted an unsuccessful courtship by assuring
himself that his mistress is not really there.

Under whatsoever symbols they have objectified their quest, none of these
seekers have ever been able to assure the world that they have found, seen
face to face, the Reality behind the veil. But if we may trust the reports
of the mystics—and they are reports given with a strange accent of certainty
and good faith—they have succeeded where all these others have failed, in
establishing immediate communication between the spirit of man, entangled as
they declare amongst material things, and that “only Reality,” that
immaterial and final Being, which some philosophers call the Absolute, and
most theologians call God. This, they say—and here many who are not mystics
agree with them—is the hidden Truth which is the object of man’s craving;
the only satisfying goal of his quest. Hence, they should claim from us the
same attention that we give to other explorers of countries in which we are
not competent to adventure ourselves; for the mystics are the pioneers of
the spiritual world, and we have no right to deny validity to their
discoveries, merely because we lack the opportunity or the courage necessary
to those who would prosecute such explorations for themselves.

It is the object of this book to attempt a description, and also—though this
is needless for those who read that description in good faith—a
justification of these experiences and the conclusions which have been drawn
from them. So remote, however, are these matters from our ordinary habits of
thought, that their investigation entails, in those who would attempt to
understand them, a definite preparation: a purging of the intellect. As with
those who came of old to the Mysteries, purification is here the gate of
knowledge. We must come to this encounter with minds cleared of prejudice
and convention, must deliberately break with our inveterate habit of taking
the “visible world” for granted; our lazy assumption that somehow science is
“real” and metaphysics is not. We must pull down our own card
houses—descend, as the mystics say, “into our nothingness”—and examine for
ourselves the foundations of all possible human experience, before we are in
a position to criticize the buildings of the visionaries, the poets, and the
saints. We must not begin to talk of the unreal world of these dreamers
until we have discovered—if we can—a real world with which it may be
compared.

Such a criticism of reality is of course the business of philosophy. I need
hardly say that this book is not written by a philosopher, nor is it
addressed to students of that imperial science. Nevertheless, amateurs
though we be, we cannot reach our starting-point without trespassing to some
extent on philosophic ground. That ground covers the whole area of first
principles: and it is to first principles that we must go, if we would
understand the true significance of the mystic type.

Let us then begin at the beginning: and remind ourselves of a few of the
trite and primary facts which all practical persons agree to ignore. That
beginning, for human thought, is of course the I, the Ego, the
self-conscious subject which is writing this book, or the other
self-conscious subject which is reading it; and which declares, in the teeth
of all arguments, I AM. [1] Here is a point as to which we all feel quite
sure. No metaphysician has yet shaken the ordinary individual’s belief in
his own existence. The uncertainties only begin for most of us when we ask
what else is .

To this I, this conscious self “imprisoned in the body like an oyster in his
shell,” [2] come, as we know, a constant stream of messages and experiences.
Chief amongst these are the stimulation of the tactile nerves whose result
we call touch, the vibrations taken up by the optic nerve which we call
light, and those taken up by the ear and perceived as sound.

What do these experiences mean? The first answer of the unsophisticated Self
is, that they indicate the nature of the external world: it is to the
“evidence of her senses” that she turns, when she is asked what the world is
like. From the messages received through those senses, which pour in on her
whether she will or no, battering upon her gateways at every instant and
from every side, she constructs that “sense-world” which is the “real and
solid world” of normal men. As the impressions come in—or rather those
interpretations of the original impressions which her nervous system
supplies—she pounces on them, much as players in the spelling game pounce on
the separate letters dealt out to them. She sorts, accepts, rejects,
combines: and then triumphantly produces from them a “concept” which is, she
says, the external world. With an enviable and amazing simplicity she
attributes her own sensations to the unknown universe. The stars, she says,
are bright; the grass is green. For her, as for the philosopher Hume,
“reality consists in impressions and ideas.”

It is immediately apparent, however, that this sense-world, this seemingly
real external universe—though it may be useful and valid in other
respects—cannot be the external world, but only the Self’s projected picture
of it. [3] It is a work of art, not a scientific fact; and, whilst it may
well possess the profound significance proper to great works of art, is
dangerous if treated as a subject of analysis. Very slight investigation
shows that it is a picture whose relation to reality is at best symbolic and
approximate, and which would have no meaning for selves whose senses, or
channels of communication, happened to be arranged upon a different plan.
The evidence of the senses, then, cannot be accepted as evidence of the
nature of ultimate reality: useful servants, they are dangerous guides. Nor
can their testimony disconcert those seekers whose reports they appear to
contradict.

The conscious self sits, so to speak, at the receiving end of a telegraph
wire. On any other theory than that of mysticism, it is her one channel of
communication with the hypothetical “external world.” The receiving
instrument registers certain messages. She does not know, and—so long as she
remains dependent on that instrument—never can know, the object, the reality
at the other end of the wire, by which those messages are sent; neither can
the messages truly disclose the nature of that object. But she is justified
on the whole in accepting them as evidence that something exists beyond
herself and her receiving instrument. It is obvious that the structural
peculiarities of the telegraphic instrument will have exerted a modifying
effect upon the message. That which is conveyed as dash and dot, colour and
shape, may have been received in a very different form. Therefore this
message, though it may in a partial sense be relevant to the supposed
reality at the other end, can never be adequate to it. There will be fine
vibrations which it fails to take up, others which it confuses together.
Hence a portion of the message is always lost; or, in other language, there
are aspects of the world which we can never know.

The sphere of our possible intellectual knowledge is thus strictly
conditioned by the limits of our own personality. On this basis, not the
ends of the earth, but the external termini of our own sensory nerves, are
the termini of our explorations: and to “know oneself” is really to know
one’s universe. We are locked up with our receiving instruments: we cannot
get up and walk away in the hope of seeing whither the lines lead.
Eckhart’s words are still final for us: “the soul can only approach created
things by the voluntary reception of images.” Did some mischievous Demiurge
choose to tickle our sensory apparatus in a new way, we should receive by
this act a new universe.

William James once suggested as a useful exercise for young idealists, a
consideration of the changes which would be worked in our ordinary world if
the various branches of our receiving instruments exchanged duties; if, for
instance, we heard all colours and saw all sounds. Such a remark throws a
sudden light on the strange and apparently insane statement of the visionary
Saint-Martin, “I heard flowers that sounded, and saw notes that shone”; and
on the reports of other mystics concerning a rare moment of consciousness in
which the senses are fused into a single and ineffable act of perception,
and colour and sound are known as aspects of one thing. [4]

Since music is but an interpretation of certain vibrations undertaken by the
ear, and colour an interpretation of other vibrations performed by the eye,
this is less mad than it sounds and may yet be brought within the radius of
physical science. Did such an alteration of our senses take place the world
would still send us the same messages—that strange unknown world from which,
on this hypothesis, we are hermetically sealed—but we should interpret them
differently. Beauty would still be ours, though speaking another tongue. The
bird’s song would then strike our retina as a pageant of colour: we should
see the magical tones of the wind, hear as a great fugue the repeated and
harmonized greens of the forest, the cadences of stormy skies. Did we
realize how slight an adjustment of our organs is needed to initiate us into
such a world, we should perhaps be less contemptuous of those mystics who
tell us that they apprehended the Absolute as “heavenly music” or “Uncreated
Light”: less fanatical in our determination to make the solid “world of
common sense” the only standard of reality. This “world of common sense” is
a conceptual world. It may represent an external universe: it certainly does
represent the activity of the human mind. Within that mind it is built up:
and there most of us are content “at ease for aye to dwell,” like the soul
in the Palace of Art.

A direct encounter with absolute truth, then, appears to be impossible for
normal non-mystical consciousness. We cannot know the reality, or even prove
the existence, of the simplest object: though this is a limitation which few
people realize acutely and most would deny. But there persists in the race a
type of personality which does realize this limitation: and cannot be
content with the sham realities that furnish the universe of normal men. It
is necessary, as it seems, to the comfort of persons of this type to form
for themselves some image of the Something or Nothing which is at the end of
their telegraph lines: some “conception of being,” some “theory of
knowledge.” They are tormented by the Unknowable, ache for first principles,
demand some background to the shadow show of things. In so far as man
possesses this temperament, he hungers for reality, and must satisfy that
hunger as best he can: staving off starvation, though he many not be filled.

It is doubtful whether any two selves have offered themselves exactly the
same image of the truth outside their gates: for a living metaphysic, like a
living religion, is at bottom a strictly personal affair—a matter, as
William James reminded us, of vision rather than of argument. [5]
Nevertheless such a living metaphysic may—and if sound generally does—escape
the stigma of subjectivism by outwardly attaching itself to a traditional
School; as personal religion may and should outwardly attach itself to a
traditional church. Let us then consider shortly the results arrived at by
these traditional schools—the great classic theories concerning the nature
of reality. In them we see crystallized the best that the human intellect,
left to itself, has been able to achieve.

I. The most obvious and generally accepted explanation of the world is of
course that of Naturalism, or naive Realism: the point of view of the plain
man. Naturalism states simply that we see the real world, though we may not
see it very well. What seems to normal healthy people to be there, is
approximately there. It congratulates itself on resting in the concrete; it
accepts material things as real. In other words, our corrected and
correlated sense impressions, raised to their highest point of efficiency,
form for it the only valid material of knowledge: knowledge itself being the
classified results of exact observation.

Such an attitude as this may be a counsel of prudence, in view of our
ignorance of all that lies beyond: but it can never satisfy our hunger for
reality. It says in effect, “The room in which we find ourselves is fairly
comfortable. Draw the curtains, for the night is dark: and let us devote
ourselves to describing the furniture.” Unfortunately, however, even the
furniture refuses to accommodate itself to the naturalistic view of things.
Once we begin to examine it attentively, we find that it abounds in hints of
wonder and mystery: declares aloud that even chairs and tables are not what
they seem.

We have seen that the most elementary criticism, applied to any ordinary
object of perception, tends to invalidate the simple and comfortable creed
of “common sense”; that not merely faith but gross credulity, is needed by
the mind which would accept the apparent as the real. I say, for instance,
that I “see” a house. I can only mean by this that the part of my receiving
instrument which undertakes the duty called vision is affected in a certain
way, and arouses in my mind the idea “house.” The idea “house” is now
treated by me as a real house, and my further observations will be an
unfolding, enriching, and defining of this image. But what the external
reality is which evoked the image that I call “house,” I do not know and
never can know. It is as mysterious, as far beyond my apprehension, as the
constitution of the angelic choirs. Consciousness shrinks in terror from
contact with the mighty verb “to be.” I may of course call in one sense to
“corroborate,” as we trustfully say, the evidence of the other; may approach
the house, and touch it. Then the nerves of my hand will be affected by a
sensation which I translate as hardness and solidity; the eye by a peculiar
and wholly incomprehensible sensation called redness; and from these purely
personal changes my mind constructs and externalizes an idea which it calls
red bricks. Science herself, however, if she be asked to verify the reality
of these perceptions, at once declares that though the material world be
real, the ideas of solidity and colour are but hallucination. They belong to
the human animal, not to the physical universe: pertain to accident not
substance, as scholastic philosophy would say.

“The red brick,” says Science, “is a mere convention. In reality that bit,
like all other bits of the universe, consists, so far as I know at present,
of innumerable atoms whirling and dancing one about the other. It is no more
solid than a snowstorm. Were you to eat of Alice-in-Wonderland’s mushroom
and shrink to the dimensions of the infra-world, each atom with its
electrons might seem to you a solar system and the red brick itself a
universe. Moreover, these atoms themselves elude me as I try to grasp them.
They are only manifestations of something else. Could I track matter to its
lair, I might conceivably discover that it has no extension, and become an
idealist in spite of myself. As for redness, as you call it, that is a
question of the relation between your optic nerve and the light waves which
it is unable to absorb. This evening, when the sun slopes, your brick will
probably be purple, a very little deviation from normal vision on your part
would make it green. Even the sense that the object of perception is outside
yourself may be fancy; since you as easily attribute this external quality
to images seen in dreams, and to waking hallucinations, as you do to those
objects which, as you absurdly say, are ‘really there.’”

Further, there is no trustworthy standard by which we can separate the
“real” from the “unreal” aspects of phenomena. Such standards as exist are
conventional: and correspond to convenience, not to truth. It is no argument
to say that most men see the world in much the same way, and that this
“way” is the true standard of reality: though for practical purposes we have
agreed that sanity consists in sharing the hallucinations of our neighbours.
Those who are honest with themselves know that this “sharing” is at best
incomplete. By the voluntary adoption of a new conception of the universe,
the fitting of a new alphabet to the old Morse code—a proceeding which we
call the acquirement of knowledge—we can and do change to a marked extent
our way of seeing things: building up new worlds from old sense impressions,
and transmuting objects more easily and thoroughly than any magician. “Eyes
and ears,” said Heracleitus, “are bad witnesses to those who have barbarian
souls”: and even those whose souls are civilized tend to see and hear all
things through a temperament. In one and the same sky the poet may discover
the habitation of angels, whilst the sailor sees only a promise of dirty
weather ahead. Hence, artist and surgeon, Christian and rationalist,
pessimist and optimist, do actually and truly live in different and mutually
exclusive worlds, not only of thought but also of perception. Only the happy
circumstance that our ordinary speech is conventional, not realistic,
permits us to conceal from one another the unique and lonely world in which
each lives. Now and then an artist is born, terribly articulate, foolishly
truthful, who insists on “Speaking as he saw.” Then other men, lapped warmly
in their artificial universe, agree that he is mad: or, at the very best, an
“extraordinarily imaginative fellow.”

Moreover, even this unique world of the individual is not permanent. Each of
us, as we grow and change, works incessantly and involuntarily at the
re-making of our sensual universe. We behold at any specific moment not
“that which is,” but “that which we are”, and personality undergoes many
readjustments in the course of its passage from birth through maturity to
death. The mind which seeks the Real, then, in this shifting and subjective
“natural” world is of necessity thrown back on itself: on images and
concepts which owe more to the “seer” than to the “seen.” But Reality must
be real for all, once they have found it: must exist “in itself” upon a
plane of being unconditioned by the perceiving mind. Only thus can it
satisfy that mind’s most vital instinct, most sacred passion—its “instinct
for the Absolute,” its passion for truth.

You are not asked, as a result of these antique and elementary propositions,
to wipe clean the slate of normal human experience, and cast in your lot
with intellectual nihilism. You are only asked to acknowledge that it is but
a slate, and that the white scratches upon it which the ordinary man calls
facts, and the Scientific Realist calls knowledge, are at best relative and
conventionalized symbols of that aspect of the unknowable reality at which
they hint. This being so, whilst we must all draw a picture of some kind on
our slate and act in relation therewith, we cannot deny the validity—though
we may deny the usefulness—of the pictures which others produce, however
abnormal and impossible they may seem; since these are sketching an aspect
of reality which has not come within our sensual field, and so does not and
cannot form part of our world. Yet as the theologian claims that the
doctrine of the Trinity veils and reveals not Three but One, so the varied
aspects under which the universe appears to the perceiving consciousness
hint at a final reality, or in Kantian language, a Transcendental Object,
which shall be, not any one, yet all of its manifestations; transcending yet
including the innumerable fragmentary worlds of individual conception. We
begin, then, to ask what can be the nature of this One; and whence comes the
persistent instinct which—receiving no encouragement from sense
experience—apprehends and desires this unknown unity, this all-inclusive
Absolute, as the only possible satisfaction of its thirst for truth.

2. The second great conception of Being— Idealism— has arrived by a process
of elimination at a tentative answer to this question. It whisks us far from
the material universe, with its interesting array of “things,” its
machinery, its law, into the pure, if thin, air of a metaphysical world.
Whilst the naturalist’s world is constructed from an observation of the
evidence offered by the senses, the Idealist’s world is constructed from an
observation of the processes of thought. There are but two things, he says
in effect, about which we are sure: the existence of a thinking subject, a
conscious Self, and of an object, an Idea, with which that subject deals. We
know, that is to say, both Mind and Thought. What we call the universe is
really a collection of such thoughts; and these, we agree, have been more or
less distorted by the subject, the individual thinker, in the process of
assimilation. Obviously, we do not think all that there is to be thought,
conceive all that there is to be conceived; neither do we necessarily
combine in right order and proportion those ideas which we are capable of
grasping. Reality, says Objective Idealism, is the complete, undistorted
Object, the big thought, of which we pick up these fragmentary hints: the
world of phenomena which we treat as real being merely its shadow show or
“manifestation in space and time.”

According to the form of Objective Idealism here chosen from amongst many as
typical—for almost every Idealist has his own scheme of metaphysical
salvation [6] —we live in a universe which is, in popular language, the
Idea, or Dream of its Creator. We, as Tweedledum explained to Alice in the
most philosophic of all fairy tales, are “just part of the dream.” All life,
all phenomena, are the endless modifications and expressions of the one
transcendent Object, the mighty and dynamic Thought of one Absolute Thinker,
in which we are bathed. This Object, or certain aspects of it—and the place
of each individual consciousness within the Cosmic Thought, or, as we say,
our position in life, largely determines which these aspects shall be—is
interpreted by the senses and conceived by the mind, under limitations which
we are accustomed to call matter, space and time. But we have no reason to
suppose that matter, space, and time are necessarily parts of reality; of
the ultimate Idea. Probability points rather to their being the pencil and
paper with which we sketch it. As our vision, our idea of things, tends to
approximate more and more to that of the Eternal Idea, so we get nearer and
nearer to reality: for the idealist’s reality is simply the Idea, or Thought
of God. This, he says, is the supreme unity at which all the illusory
appearances that make up the widely differing worlds of “common sense,” of
science, of metaphysics, and of art dimly hint. This is the sense in which
it can truly be said that only the supernatural possesses reality; for that
world of appearance which we call natural is certainly largely made up of
preconception and illusion, of the hints offered by the eternal real world
of Idea outside our gates, and the quaint concepts which we at our receiving
instrument manufacture from them.

There is this to be said for the argument of Idealism: that in the last
resort, the destinies of mankind are invariably guided, not by the concrete
“facts” of the sense world, but by concepts which are acknowledged by every
one to exist only on the mental plane. In the great moments of existence,
when he rises to spiritual freedom, these are the things which every man
feels to be real. It is by these and for these that he is found willing to
live, work suffer, and die. Love, patriotism, religion, altruism, fame, all
belong to the transcendental world. Hence, they partake more of the nature
of reality than any “fact” could do; and man, dimly recognizing this, has
ever bowed to them as to immortal centres of energy. Religions as a rule are
steeped in idealism: Christianity in particular is a trumpet call to an
idealistic conception of life, Buddhism is little less. Over and over again,
their Scriptures tell us that only materialists will be damned.

In Idealism we have perhaps the most sublime theory of Being which has ever
been constructed by the human intellect: a theory so sublime, in fact, that
it can hardly have been produced by the exercise of “pure reason” alone, but
must be looked upon as a manifestation of that natural mysticism, that
instinct for the Absolute, which is latent in man. But, when we ask the
idealist how we are to attain communion with the reality which he describes
to us as “certainly there,” his system suddenly breaks down; and discloses
itself as a diagram of the heavens, not a ladder to the stars. This failure
of Idealism to find in practice the reality of which it thinks so much is
due, in the opinion of the mystics, to a cause which finds epigrammatic
expression in the celebrated phrase by which St. Jerome marked the
distinction between religion and philosophy. “Plato located the soul of man
in the head; Christ located it in the heart.” That is to say, Idealism,
though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their
application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own
methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain
instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but
does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and
more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living
thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation
to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth.

3. But there is yet another Theory of Being to be considered: that which may
be loosely defined as Philosophic Scepticism. This is the attitude of those
who refuse to accept either the realistic or the idealistic answer to the
eternal question: and, confronted in their turn with the riddle of reality,
reply that there is no riddle to solve. We of course assume for the ordinary
purposes of life that for every sequence a: b: present in our consciousness
there exists a mental or material A: B: in the external universe, and that
the first is a strictly relevant, though probably wholly inadequate,
expression of the second. The bundle of visual and auditory sensations, for
instance, whose sum total I am accustomed to call Mrs. Smith, corresponds
with something that exists in the actual as well as in my phenomenal world.
Behind my Mrs. Smith, behind the very different Mrs. Smith which the X rays
would exhibit, there is, contends the Objective Idealist, a transcendental,
or in the Platonic sense an ideal Mrs. Smith, at whose qualities I cannot
even guess; but whose existence is quite independent of my apprehension of
it. But though we do and must act on this hypothesis, it remains only a
hypothesis; and it is one which philosophic scepticism will not let pass.

The external world, say the sceptical schools, is—so far as I know it—a
concept present in my mind. If my mind ceased to exist, so far as I know the
concept which I call the world would cease to exist too. The one thing which
for me indubitably is, isthe self’s experience, its whole consciousness.
Outside this circle of consciousness I have no authority to indulge in
guesses as to what may or may not Be. Hence, for me, the Absolute is a
meaningless diagram, a superfluous complication of thought: since the mind,
wholly cut off from contact with external reality, has no reason to suppose
that such a reality exists except in its own ideas. Every effort made by
philosophy to go forth in search of it is merely the metaphysical squirrel
running round the conceptual cage. In the completion and perfect unfolding
of the set of ideas with which our consciousness is furnished, lies the only
reality which we can ever hope to know. Far better to stay here and make
ourselves at home: only this, for us, truly is.

This purely subjective conception of Being has found representatives in
every school of thought: even including by a curious paradox, that of
mystical philosophy—its one effective antagonist. Thus Delacroix, after an
exhaustive and even sympathetic analysis of St. Teresa’s progress towards
union with the Absolute, ends upon the assumption that the God with whom she
was united was the content of her own subconscious mind. [7] Such a
mysticism is that of a kitten running after its own tail: a different path
indeed from that which the great seekers for reality have pursued. The
reductio ad absurdum of this doctrine is found in the so-called
“philosophy” of New Thought, which begs its disciples to “try quietly to
realize that the Infinite is really You.” [8] By its utter denial not merely
of a knowable, but of a logically conceivable Transcendent, it drives us in
the end to the conclusion of extreme pragmatism; that Truth, for us, is not
an immutable reality, but merely that idea which happens to work out as true
and useful in any given experience. There is no reality behind appearance;
therefore all faiths, all figments with which we people that nothingness are
equally true, provided they be comfortable and good to live by.

Logically carried out, this conception of Being would permit each man to
regard other men as non-existent except within his own consciousness: the
only place where a strict scepticism will allow that anything exists. Even
the mind which conceives consciousness exists for us only in our own
conception of it; we no more know what we are than we know what we shall be.
Man is left a conscious Something in the midst, so far as he knows, of
Nothing: with no resources save the exploring of his own consciousness.

Philosophic scepticism is particularly interesting to our present inquiry,
because it shows us the position in which “pure reason,” if left to itself,
is bound to end. It is utterly logical; and though we may feel it to be
absurd, we can never prove it to be so. Those who are temperamentally
inclined to credulity may become naturalists, and persuade themselves to
believe in the reality of the sense world. Those with a certain instinct for
the Absolute may adopt the more reasonable faith of idealism. But the true
intellectualist, who concedes nothing to instinct or emotion, is obliged in
the end to adopt some form of sceptical philosophy. The horrors of nihilism,
in fact, can only be escaped by the exercise of faith, by a trust in man’s
innate but strictly irrational instinct for that Real “above all reason,
beyond all thought” towards which at its best moments his spirit tends. If
the metaphysician be true to his own postulates, he must acknowledge in the
end that we are all forced to live, to think, and at last to die, in an
unknown and unknowable world: fed arbitrarily and diligently, yet how we
know not, by ideas and suggestions whose truth we cannot test but whose
pressure we cannot resist. It is not by sight but by faith—faith in a
supposed external order which we can never prove to exist, and in the
approximate truthfulness and constancy of the vague messages which we
receive from it—that ordinary men must live and move. We must put our trust
in “laws of nature” which have been devised by the human mind as a
convenient epitome of its own observations of phenomena, must, for the
purposes of daily life, accept these phenomena at their face value: an act
of faith beside which the grossest superstitions of the Neapolitan peasant
are hardly noticeable.

The intellectual quest of Reality, then, leads us down one of three blind
alleys: (1) To an acceptance of the symbolic world of appearance as the
real; (2) to the elaboration of a theory also of necessity symbolic—which,
beautiful in itself, cannot help us to attain the Absolute which it
describes; (3) to a hopeless but strictly logical skepticism.

In answer to the “Why? Why?” of the bewildered and eternal child in us,
philosophy, though always ready to postulate the unknown if she can, is
bound to reply only, “Nescio! Nescio!” In spite of all her busy map-making,
she cannot reach the goal which she points out to us, cannot explain the
curious conditions under which we imagine that we know; cannot even divide
with a sure hand the subject and object of thought. Science, whose business
is with phenomena and our knowledge of them, though she too is an idealist
at heart, has been accustomed to explain that all our ideas and instincts,
the pictured world that we take so seriously, the oddly limited and illusory
nature of our experience, appear to minister to one great end: the
preservation of life, and consequent fulfilment of that highly mystical
hypothesis, the Cosmic Idea. Each perception, she assures us, serves a
useful purpose in this evolutionary scheme: a scheme, by the way, which has
been invented—we know not why—by the human mind, and imposed upon an
obedient universe.

By vision, hearing, smell, and touch, says Science, we find our way about,
are warned of danger, obtain our food. The male perceives beauty in the
female in order that the species may be propagated. It is true that this
primitive instinct has given birth to higher and purer emotions; but these
too fulfil a social purpose and are not so useless as they seem. Man must
eat to live, therefore many foods give us agreeable sensations. If he
overeats, he dies; therefore indigestion is an unpleasant pain. Certain
facts of which too keen a perception would act detrimentally to the
life-force are, for most men, impossible of realization: i.e. , the
uncertainty of life, the decay of the body, the vanity of all things under
the sun. When we are in good health, we all feel very real, solid, and
permanent; and this is of all our illusions the most ridiculous, and also
the most obviously useful from the point of view of the efficiency and
preservation of the race.

But when we look closer, we see that this brisk generalization does not
cover all the ground—not even that little tract of ground of which our
senses make us free; indeed, that it is more remarkable for its omissions
than for its inclusions. Récéjac has well said that “from the moment in
which man is no longer content to devise things useful for his existence
under the exclusive action of the will-to-live, the principle of (physical)
evolution has been violated.” [9] Nothing can be more certain than that man
is not so content. He has been called by utilitarian philosophers a
tool-making animal—the highest praise they knew how to bestow. More surely
he is a vision-making animal; [10] a creature of perverse and unpractical
ideals, dominated by dreams no less than by appetites—dreams which can only
be justified upon the theory that he moves towards some other goal than that
of physical perfection or intellectual supremacy, is controlled by some
higher and more vital reality than that of the determinists. We are driven
to the conclusion that if the theory of evolution is to include or explain
the facts of artistic and spiritual experience—and it cannot be accepted by
any serious thinker if these great tracts of consciousness remain outside
its range—it must be rebuilt on a mental rather than a physical basis.

Even the most ordinary human life includes in its range fundamental
experiences—violent and unforgettable sensations—forced on us as it were
against our will, for which science finds it hard to account. These
experiences and sensations, and the hours of exalted emotion which they
bring with them—often recognized by us as the greatest, most significant
hours of our lives—fulfil no office in relation to her pet “functions of
nutrition and reproduction.” It is true that they are far-reaching in their
effects on character; but they do little or nothing to assist that character
in its struggle for physical life. To the unprejudiced eye many of them seem
hopelessly out of place in a universe constructed on strictly
physico-chemical lines—look almost as though nature, left to herself, tended
to contradict her own beautifully logical laws. Their presence, more, the
large place which they fill in the human world of appearance, is a puzzling
circumstance for deterministic philosophers; who can only escape from the
dilemma here presented to them by calling these things illusions, and
dignifying their own more manageable illusions with the title of facts.

Amongst the more intractable of these groups of perceptions and experiences
are those which we connect with religion, with pain and with beauty. All
three, for those selves which are capable of receiving their messages,
possess a mysterious authority far in excess of those feelings, arguments,
or appearances which they may happen to contradict. All three, were the
universe of the naturalists true, would be absurd; all three have ever been
treated with the reverence due to vital matters by the best minds of the
race.

A. I need not point out the hopelessly irrational character of all great
religions: which rest, one and all, on a primary assumption that can never
be intellectually demonstrated, much less proved—the assumption that the
supra-sensible is somehow important and real, and is intimately connected
with the life of man. This fact has been incessantly dwelt upon by their
critics, and has provoked many a misplaced exercise of ingenuity on the part
of their intelligent friends. Yet religion—emphasizing and pushing to
extremes that general dependence on faith which we saw to be an inevitable
condition of our lives—is one of the most universal and ineradicable
functions of man, and this although it constantly acts detrimentally to the
interests of his merely physical existence, opposes “the exclusive action of
the will-to-live,” except in so far as that will aspires to eternal life.
Strictly utilitarian, almost logical in the savage, religion becomes more
and more transcendental with the upward progress of the race. It begins as
black magic; it ends as Pure Love. Why did the Cosmic Idea elaborate this
religious instinct, if the construction put upon its intentions by the
determinists be true?

B. Consider again the whole group of phenomena which are known as “the
problem of suffering”: the mental anguish and physical pain which appear to
be the inevitable result of the steady operation of “natural law” and its
voluntary assistants, the cruelty, greed, and injustice of man. Here, it is
true, the naturalist seems at first sight to make a little headway, and can
point to some amongst the cruder forms of suffering which are clearly useful
to the race: punishing us for past follies, spurring to new efforts, warning
against future infringements of “law.” But he forgets the many others which
refuse to be resumed under this simple formula: forgets to explain how it is
that the Cosmic Idea involves the long torments of the incurable, the
tortures of the innocent, the deep anguish of the bereaved, the existence of
so many gratuitously agonizing forms of death. He forgets, too, the strange
fact that man’s capacity for suffering tends to increase in depth and
subtlety with the increase of culture and civilization; ignores the still
more mysterious, perhaps most significant circumstance that the highest
types have accepted it eagerly and willingly, have found in Pain the grave
but kindly teacher of immortal secrets, the conferrer of liberty, even the
initiator into amazing joys.

Those who “explain” suffering as the result of nature’s immense fecundity—a
by-product of that overcrowding and stress through which the fittest tend to
survive—forget that even were this demonstration valid and complete it would
leave the real problem untouched. The question is not, whence come those
conditions which provoke in the self the experiences called sorrow, anxiety,
pain: but, why do these conditions hurt the self? The pain is mental; a
little chloroform, and though the conditions continue unabated the suffering
is gone. Why does full consciousness always include the mysterious capacity
for misery as well as for happiness—a capacity which seems at first sight to
invalidate any conception of the Absolute as Beautiful and Good? Why does
evolution, as we ascend the ladder of life, foster instead of diminishing
the capacity for useless mental anguish, for long, dull torment, bitter
grief? Why, when so much lies outside our limited powers of perception, when
so many of our own most vital functions are unperceived by consciousness,
does suffering of some sort form an integral part of the experience of man?
For utilitarian purposes acute discomfort would be quite enough; the Cosmic
Idea, as the determinists explain it, did not really need an apparatus which
felt all the throes of cancer, the horrors of neurasthenia, the pangs of
birth. Still less did it need the torments of impotent sympathy for other
people’s irremediable pain the dreadful power of feeling the world’s woe. We
are hopelessly over-sensitized for the part science calls us to play.

Pain, however we may look at it, indicates a profound disharmony between the
sense-world and the human self. If it is to be vanquished, either the
disharmony must be resolved by a deliberate and careful adjustment of the
self to the world of sense, or, that self must turn from the sense-world to
some other with which it is in tune. [11] Pessimist and optimist here join
hands. But whilst the pessimist, resting in appearance, only sees “nature
red in tooth and claw” offering him little hope of escape, the optimist
thinks that pain and anguish—which may in their lower forms be life’s harsh
guides on the path of physical evolution—in their higher and apparently
“useless” developments are her leaders and teachers in the upper school of
Supra-sensible Reality. He believes that they press the self towards another
world, still “natural” for him, though “supernatural” for his antagonist, in
which it will be more at home. Watching life, he sees in Pain the complement
of Love: and is inclined to call these the wings on which man’s spirit can
best take flight towards the Absolute. Hence he can say with A Kempis,
“Gloriari in tribulatione non est grave amanti,” [12] and needs not to speak
of morbid folly when he sees the Christian saints run eagerly and merrily to
the Cross. [13]

He calls suffering the “gymnastic of eternity,” the “terrible initiative
caress of God”; recognizing in it a quality for which the disagreeable
rearrangement of nerve molecules cannot account. Sometimes, in the excess of
his optimism, he puts to the test of practice this theory with all its
implications. Refusing to be deluded by the pleasures of the sense world, he
accepts instead of avoiding pain, and becomes an ascetic; a puzzling type
for the convinced naturalist, who, falling back upon contempt—that favourite
resource of the frustrated reason—can only regard him as diseased.

Pain, then, which plunges like a sword through creation, leaving on the one
side cringing and degraded animals and on the other side heroes and saints,
is one of those facts of universal experience which are peculiarly
intractable from the point of view of a merely materialistic philosophy.

C. From this same point of view the existence of music and poetry, the
qualities of beauty and of rhythm, the evoked sensations of awe, reverence,
and rapture, are almost as difficult to account for. The question why an
apparent corrugation of the Earth’s surface, called for convenience’ sake an
Alp, coated with congealed water, and perceived by us as a snowy peak,
should produce in certain natures acute sensations of ecstasy and adoration,
why the skylark’s song should catch us up to heaven, and wonder and mystery
speak to us alike in “the little speedwell’s darling blue” and in the
cadence of the wind, is a problem that seems to be merely absurd, until it
is seen to be insoluble. Here Madam How and Lady Why alike are silent. With
all our busy seeking, we have not found the sorting house where loveliness
is extracted from the flux of things. We know not why “great” poetry should
move us to unspeakable emotion, or a stream of notes, arranged in a peculiar
sequence, catch us up to heightened levels of vitality: nor can we guess how
a passionate admiration for that which we call “best” in art or letters can
possibly contribute to the physical evolution of the race. In spite of many
lengthy disquisitions on Esthetics, Beauty’s secret is still her own. A
shadowy companion, half seen, half guessed at, she keeps step with the
upward march of life: and we receive her message and respond to it, not
because we understand it but because we must .

Here it is that we approach that attitude of the self, that point of view,
which is loosely and generally called mystical. Here, instead of those broad
blind alleys which philosophy showed us, a certain type of mind has always
discerned three strait and narrow ways going out towards the Absolute. In
religion, in pain, and in beauty—and not only in these, but in many other
apparently useless peculiarities of the empirical world and of the
perceiving consciousness—these persons insist that they recognize at least
the fringe of the real. Down these three paths, as well as by many another
secret way, they claim that news comes to the self concerning levels of
reality which in their wholeness are inaccessible to the senses: worlds
wondrous and immortal, whose existence is not conditioned by the “given”
world which those senses report. “Beauty,” said Hegel, who, though he was no
mystic, had a touch of that mystical intuition which no philosopher can
afford to be without, “is merely the Spiritual making itself known
sensuously.” [14] In the good, the beautiful, the true,” says Rudolph
Eucken, “we see Reality revealing its personal character. They are parts of
a coherent and substantial spiritual world.” [15] Here, some of the veils of
that substantial world are stripped off: Reality peeps through and is
recognized, dimly or acutely, by the imprisoned self.

Récéjac only develops this idea when he says, [16] “If the mind penetrates
deeply into the facts of aesthetics, it will find more and more, that these
facts are based upon an ideal identity between the mind itself and things.
At a certain point the harmony becomes so complete, and the finality so
close that it gives us actual emotion. The Beautiful then becomes the
sublime; brief apparition, by which the soul is caught up into the true
mystic state, and touches the Absolute. It is scarcely possible to persist
in this Esthetic perception without feeling lifted up by it above things and
above ourselves, in an ontological vision which closely resembles the
Absolute of the Mystics.” It was of this underlying reality—this truth of
things—that St. Augustine cried in a moment of lucid vision, “Oh, Beauty so
old and so new, too late have I loved thee!” [17] It is in this sense also
that “beauty is truth, truth beauty”: and as regards the knowledge of
ultimate things which is possible to ordinary men, it may well be that


“That is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

“Of Beauty,” says Plato in an immortal passage, “I repeat again that we saw
her there shining in company with the celestial forms; and coming to earth
we find her here too, shining in clearness through the clearest aperture of
sense. For sight is the most piercing of our bodily senses: though not by
that is wisdom seen; her loveliness would have been transporting if there
had been a visible image of her, and the other ideas, if they had visible
counterparts, would be equally lovely. But this is the privilege of Beauty,
that being the loveliest she is also the most palpable to sight. Now he who
is not newly initiated, or who has been corrupted, does not easily rise out
of this world to the sight of true beauty in the other. . . . But he whose
initiation is recent, and who has been the spectator of many glories in the
other world, is amazed when he sees anyone having a godlike face or form,
which is the expression of Divine Beauty; and at first a shudder runs
through him, and again the old awe steals over him. . . .” [18]

Most men in the course of their lives have known such Platonic hours of
initiation, when the sense of beauty has risen from a pleasant feeling to a
passion, and an element of strangeness and terror has been mingled with
their joy. In those hours the world has seemed charged with a new vitality;
with a splendour which does not belong to it but is poured through it, as
light through a coloured window, grace through a sacrament, from that
Perfect Beauty which “shines in company with the celestial forms” beyond the
pale of appearance. In such moods of heightened consciousness each blade of
grass seems fierce with meaning, and becomes a well of wondrous light: a
“little emerald set in the City of God.” The seeing self is indeed an
initiate thrust suddenly into the sanctuary of the mysteries: and feels the
“old awe and amazement” with which man encounters the Real. In such
experiences, a new factor of the eternal calculus appears to be thrust in on
us, a factor which no honest seeker for truth can afford to neglect; since,
if it be dangerous to say that any two systems of knowledge are mutually
exclusive, it is still more dangerous to give uncritical priority to any one
system. We are bound, then, to examine this path to reality as closely and
seriously as we should investigate the most neatly finished safety-ladder of
solid ash which offered a salita alle stelle.

Why, after all, take as our standard a material world whose existence is
affirmed by nothing more trustworthy than the sense-impressions of “normal
men”; those imperfect and easily cheated channels of communication? The
mystics, those adventurers of whom we spoke upon the first page of this
book, have always declared, implicitly or explicitly, their distrust in
these channels of communication. They have never been deceived by phenomena,
nor by the careful logic of the industrious intellect. One after another,
with extraordinary unanimity, they have rejected that appeal to the unreal
world of appearance which is the standard of sensible men: affirming that
there is another way, another secret, by which the conscious self may reach
the actuality which it seeks. More complete in their grasp of experience
than the votaries of intellect or of sense, they accept as central for life
those spiritual messages which are mediated by religion, by beauty, and by
pain. More reasonable than the rationalists, they find in that very hunger
for reality which is the mother of all metaphysics, an implicit proof that
such reality exists; that there is something else, some final satisfaction,
beyond the ceaseless stream of sensation which besieges consciousness. “In
that thou hast sought me, thou hast already found me,” says the voice of
Absolute Truth in their ears. This is the first doctrine of mysticism. Its
next is that only in so far as the self is real can it hope to know Reality:
like to like: Cot ad cot loquitur. Upon the propositions implicit in these
two laws the whole claim and practice of the mystic life depends.

“Finite as we are,” they say—and here they speak not for themselves, but for
the race—“lost though we seem to be in the woods or in the wide air’s
wilderness, in this world of time and of chance, we have still, like the
strayed animals or like the migrating birds, our homing instinct. . . . We
seek. That is a fact. We seek a city still out of sight. In the contrast
with this goal, we live. But if this be so, then already we possess
something of Being even in our finite seeking. For the readiness to seek is
already something of an attainment, even if a poor one.” [19]

Further, in this seeking we are not wholly dependent on that homing
instinct. For some, who have climbed to the hill-tops, that city is not
really out of sight. The mystics see it and report to us concerning it.
Science and metaphysics may do their best and their worst: but these
pathfinders of the spirit never falter in their statements concerning that
independent spiritual world which is the only goal of “pilgrim man.” They
say that messages come to him from that spiritual world, that complete
reality which we call Absolute: that we are not, after all, hermetically
sealed from it. To all who will receive it, news comes of a world of
Absolute Life, Absolute Beauty, Absolute Truth, beyond the bourne of time
and place: news that most of us translate—and inevitably distort in the
process—into the language of religion, of beauty, of love, or of pain.

Of all those forms of life and thought with which humanity has fed its
craving for truth, mysticism alone postulates, and in the persons of its
great initiates proves, not only the existence of the Absolute, but also
this link: this possibility first of knowing, finally of attaining it. It
denies that possible knowledge is to be limited (a) to sense impressions,
(b) to any process of intellection, (c) to the unfolding of the content of
normal consciousness. Such diagrams of experience, it says, are hopelessly
incomplete. The mystics find the basis of their method not in logic but in
life: in the existence of a discoverable “real,” a spark of true being,
within the seeking subject, which can, in that ineffable experience which
they call the “act of union,” fuse itself with and thus apprehend the
reality of the sought Object. In theological language, their theory of
knowledge is that the spirit of man, itself essentially divine, is capable
of immediate communion with God, the One Reality. [20]

In mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the beginning of all
philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes on the assured
aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses and argues, the
mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language
of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence
whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram—impersonal and
unattainable—the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive.

“Oh, taste and see!” they cry, in accents of astounding certainty and joy.
“Ours is an experimental science. We can but communicate our system, never
its result. We come to you not as thinkers, but as doers. Leave your deep
and absurd trust in the senses, with their language of dot and dash, which
may possibly report fact but can never communicate personality. If
philosophy has taught you anything, she has surely taught you the length of
her tether, and the impossibility of attaining to the doubtless admirable
grazing land which lies beyond it. One after another, idealists have arisen
who, straining frantically at the rope, have announced to the world their
approaching liberty; only to be flung back at last into the little circle of
sensation. But here we are, a small family, it is true, yet one that refuses
to die out, assuring you that we have slipped the knot and are free of those
grazing grounds. This is evidence which you are bound to bring into account
before you can add up the sum total of possible knowledge; for you will find
it impossible to prove that the world as seen by the mystics, ‘unimaginable,
formless, dark with excess of bright,’ is less real than that which is
expounded by the youngest and most promising demonstrator of a
physicochemical universe. We will be quite candid with you. Examine us as
much as you like: our machinery, our veracity, our results. We cannot
promise that you shall see what we have seen, for here each man must
adventure for himself; but we defy you to stigmatize our experiences as
impossible or invalid. Is your world of experience so well and logically
founded that you dare make of it a standard? Philosophy tells you that it is
founded on nothing better than the reports of your sensory apparatus and the
traditional concepts of the race. Certainly it is imperfect, probably it is
illusion in any event, it never touches the foundation of things. Whereas
‘what the world, which truly knows nothing, calls “mysticism” is the science
of ultimates, . . . the science of self-evident Reality, which cannot be
“reasoned about,” because it is the object of pure reason or perception.’“
[21]
_________________________________________________________________

[1] Even this I AM, which has seemed safe ground to most metaphysicians, is
of course combated by certain schools of philosophy. “The word Sum ,” said
Eckhart long ago, “can be spoken by no creature but by God only: for it
becomes the creature to testify of itself Non Sum .” In a less mystical
strain Lotze, and after him Bradley and other modern writers, have devoted
much destructive criticism to the concept of the Ego as the starting-point
of philosophy: looking upon it as a large, and logically unwarrantable,
assumption.

[2] Plato, “Phaedrus,” § 250.

[3] Thus Eckhart, “Every time that the powers of the soul come into contact
with created things, they receive the create images and likenesses from the
created thing and absorb them. In this way arises the soul’s knowledge of
created things. Created things cannot come nearer to the soul than this, and
the soul can only approach created things by the voluntary reception of
images. And it is through the presence of the image that the soul approaches
the created world: for the image is a Thing, which the soul creates with her
own powers. Does the soul want to know the nature of a stone—horse—a man?
She forms an image.”—-Meister Eckhart, Pred. i. (“Mystische Schriften,” p.
15).

[4] Thus Edward Carpenter says of his own experience of the mystical
consciousness, “The perception seems to be one in which all the senses unite
into one sense” (quoted in Bucke’s “Cosmic Consciousness,” p. 198).

[5] “A Pluralistic Universe,” p. 10.

[6] There are four main groups of such schemes: (1) Subjective; (2)
Objective; (3) Transcendental (Kantian); (4) Absolute (Hegelian). To this
last belongs by descent the Immanental Idealism of Croce and Gentile.

[7] Delacroix, “Études sur le Mysticisme,” p. 62.

[8] E. Towne, “Just how to Wake the Solar Plexus,” p. 25.

[9] “Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique,” p. 15.

[10] Or, as Aristotle, and after him St. Thomas Aquinas, suggest, a
contemplative animal, since “this act alone in man is proper to him, and is
in no way shared by any other being in this world” (“Summa Contra
Gentiles,” 1. iii, cap. xxxvii., Rickaby’s translation).

[11] All the healing arts, from Aesculapius and Galen to Metchnikoff and
Mrs. Eddy, have virtually accepted and worked upon these two principles.

[12] “De Imitatione Christi.” I. ii. cap. vi.

[13] “Such as these, I say, as if enamoured by My honour and famished for
the food of souls, run to the table of the Most holy Cross, willing to
suffer pain. . . . To these, My most dear sons, trouble is a pleasure, and
pleasure and every consolation that the world would offer them are a toil”
(St. Catherine ofSiena, Dialogo, cap. xxviii.). Here and throughout I have
used Thorold’s translation.

[14] “Philosophy of Religion,” vol. ii. p. 8.

[15] “Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens,” p. 148.

[16] “Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique,” p. 74.

[17] Aug. Conf., bk. x. cap. xxvii.

[18] “Phaedrus,” § 250 (Jowett’s translation). The reference in the phrase
“he whose initiation is recent” is to the rite of admission into the Orphic
Mysteries. It is believed by some authorities that the neophyte may have
been cast into an hypnotic sleep by his “initiator,” and whilst in this
condition a vision of the “glories of the other world” suggested to him. The
main phenomena of “conversion” would thus be artificially produced: but the
point of attack being the mind rather than the heart, the results, as would
appear from the context, were usually transient.

[19] Royce, “The World and the Individual,” vol. i. p. 181.

[20] The idea of Divine Union as man’s true end is of course of great
antiquity. Its first definite appearance in the religious consciousness of
Europe seems to coincide with the establishment of the Orphic Mysteries in
Greece and Southern Italy in the sixth century B.C. See Rohde: “Psyche,”
cap. 10, and Adam, “The Religious Teachers of Greece,” p. 92.

[21] Coventry Patmore, “The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” “Aurea Dicta,”
cxxviii.
_________________________________________________________________

W e glanced, at the beginning of this inquiry, at the universes which result
from the various forms of credulity practised by the materialist, the
idealist, and the sceptic. We saw the mystic denying by word and act the
validity of the foundations on which those universes are built: substituting
his living experience for their conceptual schemes. But there is another way
of seeing reality or, more correctly, one aspect of reality. This scheme of
things possesses the merit of accepting and harmonizing many different forms
of experience; even those supreme experiences and intuitions peculiar to the
mystics. The first distinct contribution of the twentieth century to man’s
quest of the Real, it entered the philosophic arena from several different
directions; penetrating and modifying current conceptions not only of
philosophy but of religion, science, art and practical life. It was applied
by Driesch [22] and other biologists in the sphere of organic life. Bergson,
[23] starting from psychology, developed its intellectual and metaphysical
implications; whilst Rudolph Eucken [24] constructed from, or beside it, a
philosophy of the Spirit, of man’s relations to the Real.

In all these we find the same principle; the principle of a free spontaneous
and creative life as the essence of Reality. Not law but aliveness,
incalculable and indomitable, is their subject-matter: not human logic, but
actual living experience is their criterion of truth. Vitalists, whether the
sphere of their explorations be biology, psychology or ethics, see the whole
Cosmos, the physical and spiritual worlds, as instinct with initiative and
spontaneity: as above all things free. For them, nature, though conditioned
by the matter with which she works, is stronger than her chains. Pushing out
from within, ever seeking expression, she buds and breaks forth into
original creation. [25] The iron “laws” of the determinists are merely her
observed habits, not her fetters: and man, seeing nature in the terms of
“cause and effect,” has been the dupe of his own limitations and prejudices.

Bergson, Nietzsche, Eucken, differing in their opinion as to life’s meaning,
are alike in this vision: in the stress which they lay on the supreme
importance and value of life—a great Cosmic life transcending and including
our own. This is materialism inside out: for here what we call the universe
is presented as an expression of life, not life as an expression or
by-product of the universe. The strange passionate philosophy of Nietzsche
is really built upon an intense belief in this supernal nature and value of
Life, Action and Strength: and spoilt by the one-sided individualism which
prevented him from holding a just balance between the great and significant
life of the Ego and the greater and more significant life of the All.

Obviously, the merit of vitalistic philosophy lies in its ability to satisfy
so many different thinkers, starting from such diverse points in our common
experience. On the phenomenal side it can accept and transfigure the
statements of physical science. In its metaphysical aspect it leaves place
for those ontological speculations which seem to take their rise in
psychology. It is friendly to those who demand an important place for moral
and spiritual activity in the universe. Finally—though here we must be
content with deduction rather than declaration—it leaves in the hands of the
mystics that power of attaining to Absolute Reality which they have always
claimed: shows them as the true possessors of freedom, the torch-bearers of
the race.

Did it acknowledge its ancestors with that reverence which is their due,
Vitalism would identify itself with the mystic philosopher, Heracleitus;
who, in the fifth century B.C., introduced its central idea to the European
world [26] : for his “Logos” or Energizing Fire is but another symbol for
that free and living Spirit of Becoming, that indwelling creative power,
which Vitalism acknowledges as the very soul or immanent reality of things.
It is in essence both a Hellenic and a Christian system of thought. In its
view of the proper function of the intellect it has some unexpected
affinities with Aristotle, and after him with St. Thomas Aquinas; regarding
it as a departmental affair, not the organ of ultimate knowledge. Its theory
of knowledge is close to that of the mystics: or would be, if those gazers
on reality had interested themselves in any psychological theory of their
own experiences.

A philosophy which can harmonize such diverse elements as these, and make
its influence felt in so many fields of thought, may be useful in our
present attempt towards an understanding of mysticism: for it illustrates
certain aspects of perceived reality which other systems ignore. It has the
further recommendation of involving not a mere diagram of metaphysical
possibilities, but a genuine theory of knowledge. Its scope includes
psychology as well as philosophy: the consideration, not only of the nature
of Reality but also of the self’s power of knowing it—the machinery of
contact between the mind and the flux of things. Thus it has an inclusive
quality lacking in the tidy ring-fenced systems of other schools of thought.
It has no edges, and if it be true to itself should have no negations. It is
a vision, not a map.

The primary difference between Vitalism and the classic philosophic schools
is this. Its focal point is not Being but Becoming. [27] Translated into
Platonic language, not the changeless One, the Absolute, transcending all
succession, but rather His energizing Thought—the Son, the Creative Logos—is
the supreme reality which it proposes as accessible to human consciousness.

“All things,” said Heracleitus, “are in a state of flux.” “Everything
happens through strife.” “Reality is a condition of unrest.” [28] Such is
also the opinion of Bergson and Alexander; who, agreeing in this with the
conclusions of physical science, look upon the Real as dynamic rather than
static, as becoming rather than being perfect, and invite us to see in
Time—the precession or flux of things—the very stuff of reality—


“From the fixed lull of Heaven she saw

Time like a pulse shake fierce

Through all the worlds”— [29]

said Rossetti of the Blessed Damozel. So Bergson, while ignoring if he does
not deny the existence of the “fixed lull,” the still Eternity, the point of
rest, finds everywhere the pulse of Time, the vast unending storm of life
and love. Reality, says Bergson, is pure creative Life; a definition which
excludes those ideas of perfection and finality involved in the idealist’s
concept of Pure Being as the Absolute and Unchanging One. [30] This life, as
he sees it, is fed from within rather than upheld from without. It evolves
by means of its own inherent and spontaneous creative power. The
biologist’s Nature “so careful of the type”; the theologian’s Creator
transcending His universe, and “holding all things in the hollow of His
hand”: these are gone, and in their place we have a universe teeming with
free individuals, each self-creative, each evolving eternally, yet towards
no term.

Here, then, the deep instinct of the human mind that there must be a unity,
an orderly plan in the universe, that the strung-along beads of experience
do really form a rosary, though it be one which we cannot repeat, is
deliberately thwarted. Creation, Activity, Movement; this, says Vitalism,
rather than any merely apparent law and order, any wholeness, is the
essential quality of the Realms the Real: and life is an eternal Becoming, a
ceaseless changefulness. At its highest it may be conceived as “the universe
flowering into deity,” [31] As the Hermetic philosophers found in the
principle of analogy, “Quod inferius sicut quod superius,” [32] the Key of
Creation, so we are invited to see in that uninterrupted change which is the
condition of our normal consciousness, a true image, a microcosm of the
living universe as a part of which that consciousness has been evolved.

If we accept this theory, we must then impute to life in its fullness—the
huge, many levelled, many coloured life, the innumerable worlds which escape
the rhythm of our senses; not merely that patch of physical life which those
senses perceive—a divinity, a greatness of destiny far beyond that with
which it is credited by those who hold to a physico-chemical theory of the
universe. We must perceive in it, as some mystics have done, “the beating of
the Heart of God”; and agree with Heracleitus that “there is but one wisdom,
to understand the knowledge by which all things are steered through the
All.” [33] Union with reality—apprehension of it—will upon this hypothesis
be union with life at its most intense point: in its most dynamic aspect. It
will be a deliberate harmony set up with the Logos which that same
philosopher described as “man’s most constant companion.” Ergo, says the
mystic, union with a Personal and Conscious spiritual existence, immanent in
the world—one form, one half of the union which I have always sought, since
this is clearly life in its highest manifestation. Beauty, Goodness,
Splendour, Love, all those shining words which exhilarate the soul, are but
the names of aspects or qualities picked out by human intuition as
characteristic of this intense and eternal Life in which is the life of men.

How, then, may we knew this Life, this creative and original soul of things,
in which we are bathed; in which, as in a river, swept along? Not, says
Bergson bluntly, by any intellectual means. The mind which thinks it knows
Reality because it has made a diagram of Reality, is merely the dupe of its
own categories. The intellect is a specialized aspect of the self, a form of
consciousness: but specialized for very different purposes than those of
metaphysical speculation. Life has evolved it in the interests of life; has
made it capable of dealing with “solids,” with concrete things. With these
it is at home. Outside of them it becomes dazed, uncertain of itself; for it
is no longer doing its natural work, which is to help life, not to know it.
In the interests of experience, and in order to grasp perceptions, the
intellect breaks up experience, which is in reality a continuous stream, an
incessant process of change and response with no separate parts, into purely
conventional “moments,” “periods,” or psychic “states.” It picks out from
the flow of reality those bits which are significant for human life; which
“interest” it, catch its attention. From these it makes up a mechanical
world in which it dwells, and which seems quite real until it is subjected
to criticism. It does, says Bergson, the work of a cinematograph: takes
snapshots of something which is always moving, and by means of these
successive static representations—none of which are real, because Life, the
object photographed, never was at rest—it recreates a picture of life, of
motion. This rather jerky representation of divine harmony, from which
innumerable moments are left out, is useful for practical purposes: but it
is not reality, because it is not alive. [34]

This “real world,” then, is the result of your selective activity, and the
nature of your selection is largely outside your control. Your cinematograph
machine goes at a certain pace, takes its snapshots at certain intervals.
Anything which goes too quickly for these intervals, it either fails to
catch, or merges with preceding and succeeding movements to form a picture
with which it can deal. Thus we treat, for instance, the storm of vibrations
which we convert into “sound” and “light.” Slacken or accelerate its
clock-time, change its rhythmic activity, and at once you take a different
series of snapshots, and have as a result a different picture of the world.
Thanks to the time at which the normal human machine is set, it registers
for us what we call, in our simple way, “the natural world.” A slight
accession of humility or common sense might teach us that a better title
would be “ our natural world.”

Let human consciousness change or transcend its rhythm, and any other aspect
of any other world may be ours as a result. Hence the mystics’ claim that in
their ecstasies they change the conditions of consciousness, and apprehend a
deeper reality which is unrelated to human speech, cannot be dismissed as
unreasonable. Do not then confuse that surface-consciousness which man has
trained to be an organ of utility and nothing more—and which therefore can
only deal adequately with the “given” world of sense—with that mysterious
something in you, that ground of personality, inarticulate but
inextinguishable, by which you are aware that a greater truth exists. This
truth, whose neighbourhood you feel, and for which you long, is Life. You
are in it all the while, “like a fish in the sea, like a bird in the air,”
as St. Mechthild of Hackborn said many centuries ago. [35]

Give yourself, then, to this divine and infinite life, this mysterious
Cosmic activity in which you are immersed, of which you are born. Trust it.
Let it surge in on you. Cast off, as the mystics are always begging you to
do, the fetters of the senses, the “remora of desire”; and making your
interests identical with those of the All, rise to freedom, to that
spontaneous, creative life which, inherent in every individual self, is our
share of the life of the Universe. You are yourself vital —a free centre of
energy—did you but know it. You can move to higher levels, to greater
reality, truer self-fulfilment, if you will. Though you be, as Plato said,
like an oyster in your shell, you can open that shell to the living waters
without, draw from the “Immortal Vitality.” Thus only—by contact with the
real—shall you know reality. Cot ad cot loquitur.

The Indian mystics declare substantially the same truth when they say that
the illusion of finitude is only to be escaped by relapsing into the
substantial and universal life, abolishing individuality. So too, by a
deliberate self-abandonment to that which Plato calls the “saving madness”
of ecstasy, did the initiates of Dionysus “draw near to God.” So their
Christian cousins assert that “self-surrender” is the only way: that they
must die to live, must lose to find: that knowing implies being: that the
method and secret which they have always practiced consists merely in a meek
and loving union—the synthesis of passion and self-sacrifice—with that
divine and unseparated life, that larger consciousness in which the soul is
grounded, and which they hold to be an aspect of the life of God. In their
hours of contemplation, they deliberately empty themselves of the false
images of the intellect, neglect the cinematograph of sense. Then only are
they capable of transcending the merely intellectual levels of
consciousness, and perceiving that Reality which “hath no image.”

“Pilgrimage to the place of the wise,” said Jalalu ‘ddin, “is to find escape
from the flame of separation.” It is the mystics’ secret in a nutshell.
“When I stand empty in God’s will and empty of God’s will and of all His
works and of God Himself,” cries Eckhart with his usual violence of
language, “then am I above all creatures and am neither God nor creature,
but I am what I was and evermore shall be.” [36] He attains, that is to say,
by this escape from a narrow selfhood, not to identity with God—that were
only conceivable upon a basis of pantheism—but to an identity with his own
substantial life, and through it with the life of a real and living
universe; in symbolic language, with “the thought of the Divine Mind”
whereby union with that Mind in the essence or ground of the soul becomes
possible. The first great message of Vitalistic philosophy is then seen to
be—Cease to identify your intellect and your self: a primary lesson which
none who purpose the study of mysticism may neglect. Become at least aware
of, if you cannot “know,” the larger, truer self: that root and depth of
spirit, as St. François de Sales calls it, from which intellect and feeling
grow as fingers from the palm of the hand—that free creative self which
constitutes your true life, as distinguished from the scrap of consciousness
which is its servant.

How then, asks the small consciously-seeking personality of the normal man,
am I to become aware of this, my larger self, and of the free, eternal,
spiritual life which it lives?

Here philosophy, emerging from the water-tight compartment in which
metaphysics have lived too long retired, calls in psychology; and tells us
that in intuition, in a bold reliance on contact between the totality of the
self and the external world—perhaps too in those strange states of lucidity
which accompany great emotion and defy analysis—lies the normal man’s best
chance of attaining, as it were, a swift and sidelong knowledge of this
real. Smothered in daily life by the fretful activities of our surface-mind,
reality emerges in our great moments; and, seeing ourselves in its radiance,
we know, for good or evil, what we are. “We are not pure intellects . . .
around our conceptional and logical thought there remains a vague, nebulous
Somewhat, the substance at whose expense the luminous nucleus we call the
intellect is formed.” [37] In this aura, this diffused sensitiveness, we are
asked to find man’s medium of communication with the Universal Life.

Such fragmentary, dim and unverifiable perceptions of the Real, however,
such “excursions into the Absolute,” cannot be looked upon as a satisfaction
of man’s hunger for Truth. He does not want to peep, but to live. Hence he
cannot be satisfied with anything less than a total and permanent adjustment
of his being to the greater life of reality. This alone can resolve the
disharmonies between the self and the world, and give meaning and value to
human life. [38] The possibility of this adjustment—of union between man’s
life and that “independent spiritual life” which is the stuff of reality—is
the theme alike of mysticism and of Eucken’s spiritual vitalism or
Activistic Philosophy. [39] Reality, says Eucken, is an independent
spiritual world, unconditioned by the apparent world of sense. To know it
and to live in it is man’s true destiny. His point of contact with it is
personality: the inward fount of his being: his heart, not his head. Man is
real, and in the deepest sense alive, in virtue of this free personal
life-principle within him; but he is bound and blinded by the ties set up
between his surface-intelligence and the sense-world. The struggle for
reality must be a struggle on man’s part to transcend the sense-world,
escape its bondage. He must renounce it, and be “re-born” to a higher level
of consciousness; shifting his centre of interest from the natural to the
spiritual plane. According to the thoroughness with which he does this, will
be the amount of real life he enjoys. The initial break with the “world,”
the refusal to spend one’s life communing with one’s own cinematograph
picture, is essential if the freedom of the infinite is to be attained. We
are amphibious creatures: our life moves upon two levels at once—the natural
and the spiritual. The key to the puzzle of man lies in the fact that he is
“the meeting point of various stages of Reality.” [40] All his difficulties
and triumphs are grounded in this. The whole question for him is, which
world shall be central for him—the real, vital, all-embracing life we call
spirit, or the lower life of sense? Shall “Existence,” the superficial
obvious thing, or “Substance,” the underlying verity, be his home? Shall he
remain the slave of the senses with their habits and customs, or rise to a
plane of consciousness, of heroic endeavour, in which—participating in the
life of spirit—he knows reality because he is real?

The mystics, one and all, have answered this question in the same sense, and
proved in their own experience that the premises of “Activism” are true.
This application of the vitalistic idea to the transcendental world, does in
fact fit the observed facts of mysticism far more closely even than it fits
the observed facts of man’s ordinary mental life.

(1) The primary break with the sense-world. (2) The “new” birth and
development of the spiritual consciousness on high levels—in Eucken’s eyes
an essential factor in the attainment of reality. (3) That ever closer and
deeper dependence on and appropriation of the fullness of the Divine Life; a
conscious participation, and active union with the infinite and eternal.
These three imperatives, as we shall see later, form an exact description of
the psychological process through which the mystics pass. If then this
transcendence is the highest destiny of the race, mysticism becomes the
crown of man’s ascent towards Reality; the orderly completion of the
universal plan.

The mystics show us this independent spiritual life, this fruition of the
Absolute, enjoyed with a fullness to which others cannot attain. They are
the heroic examples of the life of spirit; as the great artists, the great
discoverers, are the heroic examples of the life of beauty and the life of
truth. Directly participating, like all artists, in the Divine Life, they
are usually persons of great vitality: but this vitality expresses itself in
unusual forms, hard of understanding for ordinary men. When we see a picture
or a poem, hear a musical composition, we accept it as an expression of
life, an earnest of the power which brought it forth. But the deep
contemplations of the great mystic, his visionary reconstructions of
reality, and the fragments of them which he is able to report, do not seem
to us—as they are—the equivalents, or more often the superiors of the
artistic and scientific achievements of other great men.

Mysticism, then, offers us the history, as old as civilization, of a race of
adventurers who have carried to its term the process of a deliberate and
active return to the divine fount of things. They have surrendered
themselves to the life-movement of the universe, hence have lived with an
intenser life than other men can ever know; have transcended the
“sense-world” in order to live on high levels the spiritual life. Therefore
they witness to all that our latent spiritual consciousness, which shows
itself in the “hunger for the Absolute,” can be made to mean to us if we
develop it; and have in this respect a unique importance for the race. It is
the mystics, too, who have perfected that method of intuition, that
knowledge by union, the existence of which philosophy has been driven to
acknowledge. But where the metaphysician obtains at best a sidelong glance
at that Being “unchanging yet elusive,” whom he has so often defined but
never discovered, the artist a brief and dazzling vision of the Beauty which
is Truth, they gaze with confidence into the very eyes of the Beloved.

The mystics, again, are, by their very constitution, acutely conscious of
the free and active “World of Becoming,” the Divine Immanence and its
travail. It is in them and they are in it: or, as they put it in their blunt
theological way, “the Spirit of God is within you.” But they are not
satisfied with this statement and this knowledge; and here it is that they
part company with vitalism. It is, they think, but half a truth. To know
Reality in this way, to know it in its dynamic aspect, enter into “the great
life of the All”: this is indeed, in the last resort, to know it supremely
from the point of view of man—to liberate from selfhood the human
consciousness—but it is not to know it from the point of view of God. There
are planes of being beyond this; countries dark to the intellect, deeps into
which only the very greatest contemplatives have looked. These, coming
forth, have declared with Ruysbroeck that “God according to the Persons is
Eternal Work, but according to the Essence and Its perpetual stillness He is
Eternal Rest.” [41]

The full spiritual consciousness of the true mystic is developed not in one,
but in two apparently opposite but really complementary directions:—


“. . . io vidi

Ambo le corte del ciel manifeste.” [42]

On the one hand he is intensely aware of, and knows himself to be at one
with that active World of Becoming, that immanent Life, from which his own
life takes its rise. Hence, though he has broken for ever with the bondage
of the senses, he perceives in every manifestation of life a sacramental
meaning; a loveliness, a wonder, a heightened significance, which is hidden
from other men. He may, with St. Francis, call the Sun and the Moon, Water
and Fire, his brothers and his sisters: or receive, with Blake, the message
of the trees. Because of his cultivation of disinterested love, because his
outlook is not conditioned by “the exclusive action of the will-to-live,” he
has attained the power of communion with the living reality of the universe;
and in this respect can truly say that he finds “God in all and all in
God.” Thus, the skilled spiritual vision of Lady Julian, transcending the
limitations of human perception, entering into harmony with a larger world
whose rhythms cannot be received by common men, saw the all-enfolding Divine
Life, the mesh of reality. “For as the body is clad in the cloth,” she said,
“and the flesh in the skin and the bones in the flesh and the heart in the
whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God and enclosed.
Yea, and more homely: for all these may waste and wear away, but the
Goodness of God is ever whole.” [43] Many mystical poets and pantheistic
mystics never pass beyond this degree of lucidity.

On the other hand, the full mystic consciousness also attains to what is, I
think, its really characteristic quality. It develops the power of
apprehending the Absolute, Pure Being, the utterly Transcendent: or, as its
possessor would say, can experience “passive union with God.” This all-round
expansion of consciousness, with its dual power of knowing by communion the
temporal and eternal, immanent and transcendent aspects of reality—the life
of the All, vivid, flowing and changing, and the changeless, conditionless
life of the One—is the peculiar mark, the ultimo sigillo of the great
mystic, and must never be forgotten in studying his life and work.

As the ordinary man is the meeting-place between two stages of reality—the
sense-world and the world of spiritual life—so the mystic, standing head and
shoulders above ordinary men, is again the meeting-place between two orders.
Or, if you like it better, he is able to perceive and react to reality under
two modes. On the one hand he knows, and rests in, the eternal world of Pure
Being, the “Sea Pacific” of the Godhead, indubitably present to him in his
ecstasies, attained by him in the union of love. On the other, he knows—and
works in—that “stormy sea,” the vital World of Becoming which is the
expression of Its will. “Illuminated men,” says Ruysbroeck, “are caught up,
above the reason, into naked vision. There the Divine Unity dwells and calls
them. Hence their bare vision, cleansed and free, penetrates the activity of
all created things, and pursues it to search it out even to its height.”
[44]

Though philosophy has striven since thought began—and striven in vain—to
resolve the paradox of Being and Becoming, of Eternity and Time, she has
failed strangely enough to perceive that a certain type of personality has
substituted experience for her guesses at truth; and achieved its solution,
not by the dubious processes of thought, but by direct perception. To the
great mystic the “problem of the Absolute” presents itself in terms of life,
not in terms of dialectic. He solves it in terms of life: by a change or
growth of consciousness which—thanks to his peculiar genius—enables him to
apprehend that two-fold Vision of Reality which eludes the perceptive powers
of other men. It is extraordinary that this fact of experience a central
fact for the understanding of the contemplative type—has received so little
attention from writers upon mysticism. As we proceed with our inquiry, its
importance, its far-reaching implications in the domains of psychology, of
theology, of action, will become more and more evident. It provides the
reason why the mystics could never accept the diagram of the Vitalists or
Evolutionists as a complete statement of the nature of Reality. “Whatever be
the limits of your knowledge, we know”—they would say—“that the world has
another aspect than this: the aspect which is present to the Mind of God.”
“Tranquillity according to His essence, activity according to His nature:
perfect stillness, perfect fecundity,” [45] says Ruysbroeck again, this is
the two-fold character of the Absolute. That which to us is action, to Him,
they declare, is rest, “His very peace and stillness coming from the
brimming fullness of His infinite life.” [46] That which to us is Many, to
that Transcendent Knower is One. Our World of Becoming rests on the bosom of
that Pure Being which has ever been the final Object of man’s quest: the
“river in which we cannot bathe twice” is the stormy flood of life flowing
toward that divine sea. “How glorious,” says the Voice of the Eternal to St.
Catherine of Siena, “is that soul which has indeed been able to pass from
the stormy ocean to Me, the Sea Pacific, and in that Sea, which is Myself,
to fill the pitcher of her heart.” [47]

The evolution of the mystic consciousness, then, brings its possessors to
this transcendent point of view: their secret is this unity in diversity,
this stillness in strife. Here they are in harmony with Heracleitus rather
than with his modern interpreters. That most mystical of philosophers
discerned a hidden unity beneath the battle, transcending all created
opposites, and taught his disciples that “Having hearkened not unto me but
unto the Logos, it is wise to confess that all things are one.” [48] This is
the secret at which the idealists’ and concept of Pure Being has tried, so
timidly, to hint: and which the Vitalists’ more intimate, more actual
concept of Becoming has tried, so unnecessarily, to destroy. We shall see
the glorious raiment in which the Christian mystics deck it when we come to
consider their theological map of the quest.

If it be objected—and this objection has been made by advocates of each
school of thought—that the existence of the idealists’ and mystics’
“Absolute” is utterly inconsistent with the deeply alive, striving life
which the Vitalists identify with reality, I reply that both concepts at
bottom are but symbols of realities which the human mind can never reach:
and that the idea of stillness, unity and peace is and has ever been
humanity’s best translation of its intuition of the achieved Perfection of
God. “‘In the midst of silence a hidden word was spoken to me.’ Where is
this Silence, and where is the place in which this word is spoken? It is in
the purest that the soul can produce, in her noblest part, in the Ground,
even the Being of the Soul.” [49] So Eckhart: and here he does but subscribe
to a universal tradition. The mystics have always insisted that “Be still,
be still, and know ” is the condition of man’s purest and most direct
apprehensions of reality: that he experiences in quiet the truest and
deepest activity: and Christianity when she formulated her philosophy made
haste to adopt and express this paradox.

“Quid es ergo, Deus meus?” said St. Augustine, and gave an answer in which
the vision of the mystic, the genius of the philosopher, combined to hint
something at least of the paradox of intimacy and majesty in that
all-embracing, all-transcending One. “Summe, optime, potentissime,
omnipotentissime, misericordissime et justissime, secretissime et
presentissime, pulcherrime et fortissime; stabilis et incomprehensibilis;
immutabilis, mutans omnia. Numquam novus, nunquam vetus. . . . Semper agens,
semper quietus: colligens et non egens: portans et implens et protegens;
creans et nutriens et perficiens: quaerens cum nihil desit tibi. . . . Quid
dicimus, Deus meus, vita mea, dulcedo mea sancta? Aut quid dicit aliquis,
cum de te dicit?” [50]

It has been said that “Whatever we may do, our hunger for the Absolute will
never cease.” This hunger—that innate craving for, and intuition of, a final
Unity, an unchanging good—will go on, however heartily we may feed on those
fashionable systems which offer us a dynamic or empirical universe. If, now,
we admit in all living creatures—as Vitalists must do—an instinct of
self-preservation, a free directive force which may be trusted and which
makes for life: is it just to deny such an instinct to the human soul? The
“entelechy” of the Vitalists, the “hidden steersman,” drives the phenomenal
world on and up. What about that other sure instinct embedded in the race,
breaking out again and again, which drives the spirit on and up; spurs it
eternally towards an end which it feels to be definite yet cannot define?
Shall we distrust this instinct for the Absolute, as living and ineradicable
as any other of our powers, merely because philosophy finds it difficult to
accommodate and to describe?

“We must,” says Plato in the “Timaeus,” “make a distinction of the two great
forms of being, and ask, ‘What is that which Is and has no Becoming, and
what is that which is always becoming and never Is?’“ [51] Without
necessarily subscribing to the Platonic answer to this question, we may
surely acknowledge that the question itself is sound and worth asking; that
it expresses a perennial demand of human nature; and that the analogy of
man’s other instincts and cravings assures us that these his fundamental
demands always indicate the existence of a supply. [52] The great defect of
Vitalism, considered as a system, is that it only answers half the question;
the half which Absolute Idealism disdained to answer at all.

We have seen that the mystical experience, the fullest all-round experience
in regard to the transcendental world which humanity has attained, declares
that there are two aspects, two planes of discoverable Reality. We have seen
also that hints of these two planes—often clear statements concerning
them—abound in mystical literature of the personal first-hand type. [53]
Pure Being, says Boutroux in the course of his exposition of Boehme, [54]
has two characteristic manifestations. It shows itself to us as Power, by
means of strife, of the struggle and opposition of its own qualities. But it
shows itself to us as Reality, in harmonizing and reconciling within itself
these discordant opposites.

Its manifestation as Power, then, is for us in the dynamic World of
Becoming, amidst the thud and surge of that life which is compounded of
paradox, of good and evil, joy and sorrow, life and death. Here, Boehme
declares that the Absolute God is voluntarily self-revealing. But each
revelation has as its condition the appearance of its opposite: light can
only be recognized at the price of knowing darkness, life needs death, love
needs wrath. Hence if Pure Being—the Good, Beautiful and True—is to reveal
itself, it must do so by evoking and opposing its contrary: as in the
Hegelian dialectic no idea is complete without its negative. Such a
revelation by strife, however, is rightly felt by man to be incomplete.
Absolute Reality, the Player whose sublime music is expressed at the cost of
this everlasting friction between bow and lyre, is present, it is true, in
His music. But He is best known in that “light behind,” that unity where all
these opposites are lifted up into harmony, into a higher synthesis; and the
melody is perceived, not as a difficult progress of sound, but as a whole.

We have, then, ( a ) The achieved Reality which the Greeks, and every one
after them, meant by that seemingly chill abstraction which they called Pure
Being: that Absolute One, unconditioned and undiscoverable, in Whom all is
resumed. In the undifferentiated Godhead of Eckhart, the Transcendent Father
of orthodox Christian theology, we see the mind’s attempt to conceive that
“wholly other” Reality, unchanging yet changer of all. It is the great
contribution of the mystics to humanity’s knowledge of the real that they
find in this Absolute, in defiance of the metaphysicians, a personal object
of love, the goal of their quest, a “Living One who lives first and lives
perfectly, and Who, touching me, the inferior, derivative life, can cause me
to live by Him and for His sake” [55] .

( b ) But, contradicting the nihilism of Eastern contemplatives, they see
also a reality in the dynamic side of things: in the seething pot of
appearance. They are aware of an eternal Becoming, a striving, free,
evolving life; not merely as a shadow-show, but as an implicit of their
Cosmos felt also in the travail of their own souls—God’s manifestation or
showing, in which He is immanent, in which His Spirit truly works and
strives. It is in this plane of reality that all individual life is
immersed: this is the stream which set out from the Heart of God and “turns
again home.”

The mystic knows his task to be the attainment of Being, Eternal Life, union
with the One, the “return to the Father’s heart”: for the parable of the
Prodigal Son is to him the history of the universe. This union is to be
attained, first by cooperation in that Life which bears him up, in which he
is immersed. He must become conscious of this “great life of the All,” merge
himself in it, if he would find his way back whence he came. Vae soli .
Hence there are really two distinct acts of “divine union,” two distinct
kinds of illumination involved in the Mystic Way: the dual character of the
spiritual consciousness brings a dual responsibility in its train. First,
there is the union with Life, with the World of Becoming: and parallel with
it, the illumination by which the mystic “gazes upon a more veritable
world.” Secondly, there is the union with Being, with the One: and that
final, ineffable illumination of pure love which is called the “knowledge of
God.” It is through the development of the third factor, the free, creative
“spirit,” the scrap of Absolute Life which is the ground of his soul, that
the mystic can (a) conceive and (b) accomplish these transcendent acts. Only
Being can know Being: we “behold that which we are, and are that which we
behold.” But there is a spark in man’s soul, say the mystics, which is
real—which in fact is—and by its cultivation we may know reality. “Thus,”
says Von Hügel “a real succession, real efforts, and the continuous sense of
limitation and inadequacy are the very means in and through which man
apprehends increasingly (if only he thus loves and wills) the contrasting
yet sustaining Simultaneity, Spontaneity, Infinity, and pure action of the
Eternal Life of God.” [56]

Over and over again—as Being and Becoming, as Eternity and Time, as
Transcendence and Immanence, Reality and Appearance, the One and the
Many—these two dominant ideas, demands, imperious instincts of man’s self
will reappear; the warp and woof of his completed universe. On the one hand
is his intuition of a remote, unchanging Somewhat calling him: on the other
there is his longing for and as clear intuition of an intimate, adorable
Somewhat, companioning him. Man’s true Real, his only adequate God, must be
great enough to embrace this sublime paradox, to take up these apparent
negations into a higher synthesis. Neither the utter transcendence of
extreme Absolutism, nor the utter immanence of the Vitalists will do. Both
these, taken alone, are declared by the mystics to be incomplete. They
conceive that Absolute Being who is the goal of their quest as manifesting
Himself in a World of Becoming: working in it, at one with it yet though
semper agens, also semper quietus .The Divine spirit which they know to be
immanent in the heart and in the universe comes forth from and returns to
the Transcendent One; and this division of persons in unity of substance
completes the “Eternal Circle, from Goodness, through Goodness, to
Goodness.”

Absolute Being and Becoming, the All and the One, are found to be alike
inadequate to their definition of this discovered Real; the “triple star of
Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.” Speaking always from experience—the most
complete experience achieved by man—they assure us of an Absolute which
overpasses and includes the Absolute of philosophy, far transcends that
Cosmic life which it fills and sustains, and is best defined in terms of
Transcendent Personality; which because of its unspeakable richness and of
the poverty of human speech, they have sometimes been driven to define only
by negations. At once static and dynamic, above life and in it, “all love
yet all law,” eternal in essence though working in time, this vision
resolves the contraries which tease those who study it from without, and
swallows up whilst it kindles to life all the partial interpretations of
metaphysics and of science.

Here then stands the mystic. By the help of two types of philosophy, eked
out by the resources of symbolic expression and suggestion, he has contrived
to tell us something of his vision and his claim. Confronted by that
vision—that sublime intuition of eternity—we may surely ask, indeed are
bound to ask, “What is the machinery by which this self, akin to the
imprisoned and sense-fed self of our daily experience, has contrived to slip
its fetters and rise to those levels of spiritual perception on which alone
such vision can be possible to man? How has it brought within the field of
consciousness those deep intuitions which fringe upon Absolute Life; how
developed powers by which it is enabled to arrive at this amazing, this
superhuman concept of the nature of Reality?” Psychology will do something,
perhaps, to help us to an answer to this question; and it is her evidence
which we must examine next. But for the fullest and most satisfying answer
we must go to the mystics; and they reply to our questions, when we ask
them, in the direct and uncompromising terms of action, not in the refined
and elusive periods of speculative thought.

“Come with us,” they say to the bewildered and entangled self, craving for
finality and peace, “and we will show you a way out that shall not only be
an issue from your prison, but also a pathway to your Home. True, you are
immersed, fold upon fold, in the World of Becoming; worse, you are besieged
on all sides by the persistent illusions of sense. But you too are a child
of the Absolute. You bear within you the earnest of your inheritance. At the
apex of your spirit there is a little door, so high up that only by hard
climbing can you reach it. There the Object of your craving stands and
knocks; thence came those persistent messages—faint echoes from the Truth
eternally hammering at your gates—which disturbed the comfortable life of
sense. Come up then by this pathway, to those higher levels of reality to
which, in virtue of the eternal spark in you, you belong. Leave your ignoble
ease, your clever prattle, your absurd attempts to solve the apparent
contradictions of a Whole too great for your useful little mind to grasp.
Trust your deep instincts: use your latent powers. Appropriate that divine,
creative life which is the very substance of your being. Remake yourself in
its interest, if you would know its beauty and its truth. You can only
behold that which you are. Only the Real can know Reality.”

NOTE TO THE TWELFTH EDITION

THE changed philosophic outlook since this chapter was first written,
eighteen years ago, has now given to it a somewhat old-fashioned air. The
ideas of Bergson and Eucken no longer occupy the intellectual foreground.
Were I now writing it for the first time, my examples would be chosen from
other philosophers, and especially from those who are bringing back into
modern thought the critical realism of the scholastics. But the position
which is here defended—that a limited dualism, a “Two-step philosophy,” is
the only type of metaphysic adequate to the facts of mystical experience
remains in my own mind as true as before. Now that mysticism enjoys the
patronage of many pious monists and philosophic naturalists, this view seems
more than ever in need of strong and definite statement.
_________________________________________________________________

[22] “The Science and Philosophy of Organism,” Gifford Lectures. 1907-8.

[23] “Les Données Immédiates de la Conscience” (1889), “Matière et
Mémoire” (1896), “L’Evolution Créatrice” (1907).

[24] “Der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt” (1896), “Der Sinn und Wert
den Lebens” (1908), &c. See Bibliography.

[25] The researches of Driesch ( op. cit .) and of de Pries (“The Mutation
Theory,” 1910) have done much to establish the truth of this contention upon
the scientific plane. Now particularly Driesch’s account of the spontaneous
responsive changes in the embryo sea-urchin, and de Vries’ extraordinary
description of the escaped stock of evening primrose, varying now this way,
now that, “as if swayed by a restless internal tide.”

[26] The debt to Heracleitus is acknowledged by Schiller. See “Studies in
Humanism,” pp. 39, 40.

[27] See, for the substance of this and the following pages, the works of
Henri Bergson already mentioned. I am here also much indebted to the
personal help of my friend “William Scott Palmer,” whose interpretations
have done much towards familiarizing English readers with Bergson’s
philosophy; and to Prof. Willdon Carr’s paper on “Bergson’s Theory of
Knowledge, read before the Aristotelian Society, December 1908.

[28] Heracleitus, Fragments, 46, 84.

[29] First edition, canto x.

[30] E.g. St. Augustine’s “That alone is truly real whichabides unchanged”
(Conf., bk. vii. cap. 10), and among modern thinkers F. von Hügel: “An
absolute Abidingness, pure Simultaneity, Eternity, in God . . . stand out,
in man’s deepest consciousness, with even painful contrast, against all mere
Succession, all sheer flux and change.” (“Eternal Life,” p. 365.)

[31] S. Alexander, “Space, Time and Deity,” vol. ii, p. 410.

[32] See below, Pt. I. Cap. VII.

[33] Heracleitus, op. cit .

[34] On the complete and undivided nature of our experience in its
wholeness,” and the sad work our analytic brains make of it when they come
to pull it to pieces, Bradley has some valuable contributory remarks in ho
“Oxford Lectures on Poetry,” p. 15.

[35] “Liber Specialis Gratiae,” I. ii. cap. xxvi.

[36] Meister Eckhart, Pred. lxxxvii.

[37] Willdon Carr, op. cit .

[38] “It seems as if man could never escape from himself, and yet, when shut
in to the monotony of his own sphere, he is overwhelmed with a sense of
emptiness. The only remedy here is radically to alter the conception of man
himself, to distinguish within him the narrower and the larger life, the
life that is straitened and finite and can never transcend itself, and an
infinite life through which he enjoys communion with the immensity and the
truth of the universe. Can man rise to this spiritual level? On the
possibility of his doing so rests all our hope of supplying any meaning or
value to life” (“Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens,” p. 81).

[39] The essentials of Eucken’s teaching will be found conveniently
summarized in “Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens.”

[40] “Der Sinn und Wert den Lebens,” p. 121.

[41] “De Septem Gradibus Amoral” cap. xiv.

[42] Par. xxx. 95.

[43] “Revelations of Divine Love.” cap. vi.

[44] Ruysbroeck, “Samuel,” cap. viii.

[45] Ibid., “De Vera Contemplatione,” cap. xii.

[46] Von Hügel, “The Mystical Element of Religion,” vol. ii. p. 132.

[47] St. Catherine of Siena, Dialogo, cap. lxxxix.

[48] Heracleitus, op. cit .

[49] Meister Eckhart, Pred. i.

[50] Aug. Conf., bk. i. cap. iv. “What art Thou, then, my God? . . .
Highest, best, most potent [ i.e. , dynamic], most omnipotent [ i.e,
transcendent], most merciful and most just, most deeply hid and yet most
near. Fairest, yet strongest: steadfast, yet unseizable; unchangeable yet
changing all things: never new, yet never old. . . . Ever busy, yet ever at
rest; gathering yet needing not: bearing, filling, guarding: creating,
nourishing and perfecting; seeking though Thou hast no wants. . . . What can
I say, my God, my life, my holy joy? or what can any say who speaks of
Thee?” Compare the strikingly similar Sufi definition of the Nature of God,
as given in Palmer’s “Oriental Mysticism,” pp. 22,23. “First and last, End
and Limit of all things, incomparable and unchangeable, always near yet
always far,” &c. This probably owes something to Platonic influence.

[51] “Timaeus,” § 27.

[52] “A natural craving,” said Aquinas, “cannot be in vain.” Philosophy is
creeping back to this “mediaeval’ point of view. Compare “Summa Contra
Gentiles,” I. ii. cap. lxxix.

[53] Compare Dante’s vision in Par. xxx., where he sees Reality first as the
streaming River of Light, the flux of things; and then, when his sight has
been purged, as achieved Perfection, the Sempiternal Rose.

[54] E. Boutroux, “Le Philosophe Allemand, Jacob Boehme.” p. 18.

[55] F. von Hügel: “Eternal Life, p. 385.

[56] Op. Cit ., p. 387.
_________________________________________________________________

W e come now to consider the mental apparatus which is at the disposal of
the self: to ask what it can tell us of the method by which she may escape
from the prison of the sense-world, transcend its rhythm, and attain
knowledge of—or conscious contact with—a supra-sensible Reality. We have
seen the normal self shut within that prison, and making, by the help of
science and of philosophy, a survey of the premises and furniture: testing
the thickness of the walls and speculating on the possibility of trustworthy
news from without penetrating to her cell. Shut with her in that cell, two
forces, the desire to know more and the desire to love more, are ceaselessly
at work. Where the first of these cravings predominates, we call the result
a philosophical or a scientific temperament; where it is overpowered by the
ardour of unsatisfied love, the self’s reaction upon things becomes poetic,
artistic, and characteristically—though not always explicitly—religious.

We have seen further that a certain number of persons declare that they have
escaped from the prison. Have they done so, it can only be in order to
satisfy these two hungry desires, for these, and these only, make that a
prison which might otherwise be a comfortable hotel; and since, in varying
degrees, these desires are in all of us, active or latent, it is clearly
worth while to discover, if we can, the weak point in the walls, and method
of achieving this one possible way of escape.

Before we try to define in psychological language the way in which the
mystic slips the fetters of sense, sets out upon his journey towards home,
it seems well to examine the machinery which is at the disposal of the
normal, conscious self: the creature, or part of a creature, which we
recognize as “ourselves.” The older psychologists were accustomed to say
that the messages from the outer world awaken in that self three main forms
of activity. (1) They arouse movements of attraction or repulsion, of desire
or distaste; which vary in intensity from the semi-conscious cravings of the
hungry infant to the passions of the lover, artist, or fanatic. (2) They
stimulate a sort of digestive process, in which she combines and cogitates
upon the material presented to her; finally absorbing a certain number of
the resulting concepts and making them part of herself or of her world, (3)
The movements of desire, or the action of reason, or both in varying
combinations, awaken in her a determination by which percept and concept
issue in action; bodily, mental, or spiritual. Hence, the main aspects of
the self were classified as Emotion, Intellect, and Will: and the individual
temperament was regarded as emotional, intellectual, or volitional,
according to whether feeling, thought, or will assumed the reins.

Modern psychologists have moved away from this diagrammatic conception, and
incline more and more to dwell upon the unity of the psyche—that
hypothetical self which none have ever seen—and on some aspect of its
energetic desire, its libido, or “hormic drive” as the ruling factor of its
life. These conceptions are useful to the student of mysticism, though they
cannot be accepted uncritically or regarded as complete.

Now the unsatisfied psyche in her emotional aspect wants, as we have said,
to love more; her curious intellect wants to know more. The awakened human
creature suspects that both appetites are being kept on a low diet; that
there really is more to love, and more to know, somewhere in the mysterious
world without, and further that its powers of affection and understanding
are worthy of some greater and more durable objective than that provided by
the illusions of sense. Urged therefore by the cravings of feeling or of
thought, consciousness is always trying to run out to the encounter of the
Absolute, and always being forced to return. The neat philosophical system,
the diagrams of science, the “sunset-touch,” are tried in turn. Art and
life, the accidents of our humanity, may foster an emotional outlook; till
the moment in which the neglected intellect arises and pronounces such an
outlook to have no validity. Metaphysics and science seem to offer to the
intellect an open window towards truth; till the heart looks out and
declares this landscape to be a chill desert in which she can find no
nourishment. These diverse aspects of things must be either fused or
transcended if the whole self is to be satisfied; for the reality which she
seeks has got to meet both claims and pay in full.

When Dionysius the Areopagite divided those angels who stand nearest God
into the Seraphs who are aflame with perfect love, and the Cherubs who are
filled with perfect knowledge, he only gave expression to the two most
intense aspirations of the human soul, and described under an image the
two-fold condition of that Beatific Vision which is her goal. [57]

There is a sense in which it may be said, that the desire of knowledge is a
part of the desire of perfect love: since one aspect of that all inclusive
passion is clearly a longing to know, in the deepest, fullest, closest
sense, the thing adored. Love’s characteristic activity—for Love, all wings,
is inherently active, and “cannot be lazy,” as the mystics say—is a quest,
an outgoing towards an object desired, which only when possessed will be
fully known, and only when fully known can be perfectly adored. [58]
Intimate communion, no less than worship, is of its essence. Joyous fruition
is its proper end. This is true of all Love’s quests, whether the Beloved be
human or divine—the bride, the Grail, the Mystic Rose, the Plenitude of God.
But there is no sense in which it can be said that the desire of love is
merely a part of the desire of perfect knowledge: for that strictly
intellectual ambition includes no adoration, no self-spending, no
reciprocity of feeling between Knower and Known. Mere knowledge, taken
alone, is a matter of receiving, not of acting: of eyes, not wings: a dead
alive business at the best. There is thus a sharp distinction to be drawn
between these two great expressions of life: the energetic love, the passive
knowledge. One is related to the eager, outgoing activity, the dynamic
impulse to do somewhat, physical, mental, or spiritual, which is inherent in
all living things and which psychologists call conation: the other to the
indwelling consciousness, the passive knowing somewhat, which they call
cognition.

Now “conation” is almost wholly the business of will, but of will stimulated
by emotion: for wilful action of every kind, however intellectual it may
seem, is always the result of interest, and interest involves feeling. We
act because we feel we want to; feel we must. Whether the inspiring force be
a mere preference or an overwhelming urge, our impulse to “do” is a
synthesis of determination and desire. All man’s achievements are the result
of conation, never of mere thought. “The intellect by itself moves
nothing,” said Aristotle, and modern psychology has but affirmed this law.
Hence his quest of Reality is never caused, though it may be greatly
assisted, by the intellectual aspect of his consciousness; for the reasoning
powers as such have little initiative. Their province is analytic, not
exploratory. They stay at home, dissecting and arranging matter that comes
to hand; and do not adventure beyond their own region in search of food.
Thought does not penetrate far into an object in which the self feels no
interest— i.e. , towards which she does not experience a “conative” movement
of attraction, of desire—for interest is the only method known to us of
arousing the will, and securing the fixity of attention necessary to any
intellectual process. None think for long about anything for which they do
not care; that is to say, which does not touch some aspect of their
emotional life. They may hate it, love it, fear it, want it; but they must
have some feeling about it. Feeling is the tentacle we stretch out to the
world of things.

Here the lesson of psychology is the same as that which Dante brought back
from his pilgrimage; the supreme importance and harmonious movement of il
desiro and il velle. Si come rota ch’egualmente è mossa , [59] these move
together to fulfil the Cosmic Plan. In all human life, in so far as it is
not merely a condition of passive “awareness,” the law which he found
implicit in the universe is the law of the individual mind. Not logic, not
“common sense,”but l’amor che move il sole e le altre stelle the motive
force of the spirit of man: in the inventors, the philosophers, and the
artists, no less than in the heroes and in the saints.

The vindication of the importance of feeling in our life, and in particular
its primacy over reason in all that has to do with man’s contact with the
transcendental world, has been one of the great achievements of modern
psychology. In the sphere of religion it is now acknowledged that “God known
of the heart” gives a better account of the character of our spiritual
experience than “God guessed at by the brain”; that the loving intuition is
more fruitful and more trustworthy than the dialectic proof. One by one the
commonplaces of mysticism are thus rediscovered by official science, and
given their proper place in the psychology of the spiritual life. Thus
Leuba, hardly a friendly witness, is found to agree with the Fourth
Evangelist that “Life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is
in the last analysis the end of religion,” [60] and we have seen that life,
as we know it, has the character of a purposive striving, more directly
dependent on will and feeling then on thought. Of this drive, this urge,
thought indeed is but the servant; a skilled and often arrogant servant,
with a constant tendency to usurpation. Some form of feeling—interest,
desire, fear, appetite—must supply the motive power. Without this, the will
would be dormant, and the intellect lapse into a calculating machine.

Further, “the heart has its reasons which the mind knows not of.” It is a
matter of experience that in our moments of deep emotion, transitory though
they be, we plunge deeper into the reality of things than we can hope to do
in hours of the most brilliant argument. At the touch of passion doors fly
open which logic has battered on in vain: for passion rouses to activity not
merely the mind, but the whole vitality of man. It is the lover, the poet,
the mourner, the convert, who shares for a moment the mystic’s privilege of
lifting that Veil of Isis which science handles so helplessly, leaving only
her dirty fingermarks behind. The heart, eager and restless, goes out into
the unknown, and brings home, literally and actually, “fresh food for
thought.” Hence those who “feel to think” are likely to possess a richer,
more real, if less orderly, experience than those who “think to feel.”

This psychological law, easily proved in regard to earthly matters, holds
good also upon the supersensual plane. It was expressed once for all by the
author of “The Cloud of Unknowing” when he said of God, “By love He may be
gotten and holden, but by thought of understanding, never.” [61] That
exalted feeling, that “secret blind love pressing,” not the neat deductions
of logic, the apologist’s “proofs” of the existence of the Absolute, unseals
the eyes to things unseen before. “Therefore,” says the same mystic “what
time that thou purposest thee to this work, and feelest by grace that thou
art called of God, lift then up thine heart unto God with a meek stirring of
love; and mean God that made thee and bought thee, and that graciously hath
called thee to thy degree and receive none other thought of God. And yet not
all these but if thou list; for it sufficeth thee enough, a naked intent
direct unto God without any other cause than Himself.” [62] Here we see
emotion at its proper work; the movement of desire passing over at once into
the act of concentration, the gathering up of all the powers of the self
into a state of determined attention, which is the business of the Will.
“This driving and drawing,” says Ruysbroeck, “we feel in the heart and in
the unity of all our bodily powers, and especially in the desirous
powers.” [63] This act of perfect concentration, the passionate focussing of
the self upon one point, when it is applied “with a naked intent” to real
and transcendental things, constitutes in the technical language of
mysticism the state of recollection: [64] a condition which is peculiarly
characteristic of the mystical consciousness, and is the necessary prelude
of pure contemplation, that state in which the mystic enters into communion
with Reality.

We have then arrived so far in our description of the mechanism of the
mystic. Possessed like other men of powers of feeling, thought, and will, it
is essential that his love and his determination, even more than his
thought, should be set upon Transcendent Reality. He must feel a strong
emotional attraction toward the supersensual Object of his quest: that love
which scholastic philosophy defined as the force or power which causes every
creature to follow out the trend of its own nature. Of this must be born the
will to attain communion with that Absolute Object. This will, this burning
and active desire, must crystallize into and express itself by that definite
and conscious concentration of the whole self upon the Object, which
precedes the contemplative state. We see already how far astray are those
who look upon the mystical temperament as passive in type.

Our next concern, then, would seem to be with this condition of
contemplation: what it does and whither it leads. What is (a) its
psychological explanation and (b) its empirical value? Now, in dealing with
this, and other rare mental conditions, we are of course trying to describe
from without that which can only adequately be described from within; which
is as much as to say that only mystics can really write about mysticism.
Fortunately, many mystics have so written; and we, from their experiences
and from the explorations of psychology upon another plane, are able to make
certain elementary deductions. It appears generally from these that the act
of contemplation is for the mystic a psychic gateway; a method of going from
one level of consciousness to another. In technical language it is the
condition under which he shifts his “field of perception” and obtains his
characteristic outlook on the universe. That there is such a characteristic
outlook, peculiar to no creed or race, is proved by the history of
mysticism; which demonstrates plainly enough that in some men another sort
of consciousness, another “sense,” may be liberated beyond the normal powers
we have discussed. This “sense” has attachments at each point to emotion, to
intellect, and to will. It can express itself under each of the aspects
which these terms connote. Yet it differs from and transcends the emotional,
intellectual, and volitional life of ordinary men. It was recognized by
Plato as that consciousness which could apprehend the real world of the
Ideas. Its development is the final object of that education which his
“Republic” describes. It is called by Plotinus “Another intellect, different
from that which reasons and is denominated rational.” [65] Its business, he
says, is the perception of the supersensual—or, in Neoplatonic language, the
intelligible world. It is the sense which, in the words of the “Theologia
Germanica,” has “the power of seeing into eternity,” [66] the “mysterious
eye of the soul” by which St. Augustine saw “the light that never
changes.” [67] It is, says Al Ghazzali, a Persian mystic of the eleventh
century, “like an immediate perception, as if one touched its object with
one’s hand.” [68] In the words of his great Christian successor, St.
Bernard, “it may be defined as the soul’s true unerring intuition, the
unhesitating apprehension of truth”: [69] which “simple vision of truth,”
says St. Thomas Aquinas, “ends in a movement of desire.” [70]

It is infused with burning love, for it seems to its possessors to be
primarily a movement of the heart: with intellectual subtlety, for its
ardour is wholly spent upon the most sublime object of thought: with
unflinching will, for its adventures are undertaken in the teeth of the
natural doubts, prejudices, languors, and self-indulgence of man. These
adventures, looked upon by those who stay at home as a form of the Higher
Laziness, are in reality the last and most arduous labours which the human
spirit is called to perform. They are the only known methods by which we can
come into conscious possession of all our powers; and, rising from the lower
to the higher levels of consciousness, become aware of that larger life in
which we are immersed, attain communion with the transcendent Personality in
Whom that life is resumed.

Mary has chosen the better, not the idler part; for her gaze is directed
towards those First Principles without which the activity of Martha would
have no meaning at all. In vain does sardonic common sense, confronted with
the contemplative type, reiterate the sneer of Mucius, “Encore sont-ils
heureux que la pauvre Marthe leur fasse la cuisine.” It remains a paradox of
the mystics that the passivity at which they appear to aim is really a state
of the most intense activity: more, that where it is wholly absent no great
creative action can take place. In it, the superficial self compels itself
to be still, in order that it may liberate another more deep-seated power
which is, in the ecstasy of the contemplative genius, raised to the highest
pitch of efficiency.

“This restful travail,” said Walter Hilton, “is full far from fleshly
idleness and from blind security. It is full of ghostly work but it is
called rest, for grace looseth the heavy yoke of fleshly love from the soul
and maketh it mighty and free through the gift of the holy ghostly love for
to work gladly, softly, and delectably. . . . Therefore is it called an holy
idleness and a rest most busy; and so is it in stillness from the great
crying and the beastly noise of fleshly desires.” [71]

If those who have cultivated this latent power be correct in their
statements, the self was mistaken in supposing herself to be entirely shut
off from the true external universe. She has, it seems certain tentacles
which, once she learns to uncurl them, will stretch sensitive fingers far
beyond that limiting envelope in which her normal consciousness is
contained, and give her news of a higher reality than that which can be
deduced from the reports of the senses. The fully developed and completely
conscious human soul can open as an anemone does, and know the ocean in
which she is bathed. This act, this condition of consciousness, in which
barriers are obliterated, the Absolute flows in on us, and we, rushing out
to its embrace, “find and feel the Infinite above all reason and above all
knowledge,” [72] is the true “mystical state.” The value of contemplation is
that it tends to produce this state, release this transcendental sense; and
so turns the “lower servitude” in which the natural man lives under the sway
of his earthly environment to the “higher servitude” of fully conscious
dependence on that Reality “in Whom we live and move and have our being.”

What then, we ask, is the nature of this special sense—this transcendental
consciousness—and how does contemplation liberate it?

Any attempt to answer this question brings upon the scene another aspect of
man’s psychic life: an aspect of paramount importance to the student of the
mystic type. We have reviewed the chief ways in which our surface
consciousness reacts upon experience: a surface consciousness which has been
trained through long ages to deal with the universe of sense. We know,
however, that the personality of man is a far deeper and more mysterious
thing than the sum of his conscious feeling, thought and will: that this
superficial self—this Ego of which each of us is aware—hardly counts in
comparison with the deeps of being which it hides. “There is a root or depth
in thee,” says Law, “from whence all these faculties come forth as lines
from a centre, or as branches from the body of a tree. This depth is called
the centre, the fund, or bottom, of the soul. This depth is the unity, the
Eternity, I had almost said the infinity of thy soul, for it is so infinite
that nothing can satisfy it, or give it any rest, but the infinity of
God.” [73]

Since normal man is utterly unable to set up relations with spiritual
reality by means of his feeling, thought, and will, it is clearly in this
depth of being—in these unplumbed levels of personality—that we must search,
if we would find the organ, the power, by which he is to achieve the mystic
quest. That alteration of consciousness which takes place in contemplation
can only mean the emergence from this “fund or bottom of the soul” of some
faculty which diurnal life keeps hidden “in the deeps.”

Modern psychology, in its doctrine of the unconscious or subliminal
personality, has acknowledged this fact of a range of psychic life lying
below and beyond the conscious field. Indeed, it has so dwelt upon and
defined this shadowy region—which is really less a “region” than a useful
name—that it sometimes seems to know more about the unconscious than about
the conscious life of man. There it finds, side by side, the sources of his
most animal instincts, his least explicable powers, his most spiritual
intuitions: the “ape and tiger,” and the “soul.” Genius and prophecy,
insomnia and infatuation, clairvoyance, hypnotism, hysteria, and
“Christian” science—all are explained by the “unconscious mind.” In his
destructive moods the psychologist has little apparent difficulty in
reducing the chief phenomena of religious and mystical experience to
activities of the “unconscious,” seeking an oblique satisfaction of
repressed desires. Where he undertakes the more dangerous duties of
apologetic, he explains the same phenomena by saying that “God speaks to man
in the subconsciousness,” [74] by which he can only mean that our
apprehensions of the eternal have the character of intuition rather than of
thought. Yet the “unconscious” after all is merely a convenient name for the
aggregate of those powers, parts, or qualities of the whole self which at
any given moment are not conscious, or that the Ego is not conscious of.
Included in the unconscious region of an average healthy man are all those
automatic activities by which the life of the body is carried on: all those
“uncivilized” instincts and vices, those remains of the ancestral savage,
which education has forced out of the stream of consciousness and which now
only send their messages to the surface in a carefully disguised form. There
too work in the hiddenness those longings for which the busy life of the
world leaves no place; and there lies that deep pool, that heart of
personality, from which in moments of lucidity a message may reach the
conscious field. Hence in normal men the best and worst, most savage and
most spiritual parts of character, are bottled up “below the threshold.”
Often the partisans of the “unconscious” forget to mention this.

It follows, then, that whilst we may find it convenient and indeed necessary
to avail ourselves of the symbols and diagrams of psychology in tracking out
the mystic way, we must not forget the large and vague significance which
attaches to these symbols, and the hypothetical character of many of the
entities they represent. Nor must we allow ourselves to use the
“unconscious” as the equivalent of man’s transcendental sense. Here the
mystics have surely displayed a more scientific spirit, a more delicate
power of analysis, than the psychologists. They, too, were aware that in
normal men the spiritual sense lies below the threshold of consciousness.
Though they had not at their command the spatial metaphors of the modern
school, and could not describe man’s ascent toward God in those picturesque
terms of levels and uprushes, margins and fields, projection, repression,
and sublimation, which now come so naturally to investigators of the
spiritual life, they leave us in no doubt as to their view of the facts.
Further, man’s spiritual history primarily meant for them, as it means for
us, the emergence of this transcendental sense; its capture of the field of
consciousness, and the opening up of those paths which permit the inflow of
a larger spiritual life, the perception of a higher reality. This, in so far
as it was an isolated act, was “contemplation.” When it was part of the
general life process, and had permanent results, they called it the New
Birth, which “maketh alive.” The faculty or personality concerned in the
“New Birth”—the “spiritual man,” capable of the spiritual vision and life,
which was dissociated from the “earthly man” adapted only to the natural
life—was always sharply distinguished by them from the total personality,
conscious or unconscious. It was something definite; a bit or spot of man
which, belonging not to Time but to Eternity, was different in kind from the
rest of his human nature, framed in all respects to meet the demands of the
merely natural world. [75] The business of the mystic in the eyes of these
old specialists was to remake, transmute, his total personality in the
interest of his spiritual self; to bring it out of the hiddenness, and unify
himself about it as a centre, thus “putting on divine humanity.”

The divine nucleus, the point of contact between man’s life and the divine
life in which it is immersed and sustained, has been given many names in
course of the development of mystical doctrine. All clearly mean the same
thing, though emphasizing different aspects of its life. Sometimes it is
called the Synteresis, [76] the keeper or preserver of his being: sometimes
the Spark of the Soul, the Fünklein of the German mystics: sometimes its
Apex the point at which it touches the heavens. Then, with a sudden flight
to the other end of the symbolic scale, and in order to emphasize its
participation in pure Being, rather than its difference from mere nature, it
is called the Ground of the Soul, the foundation or basal stuff indwelt by
God, whence springs all spiritual life. Clearly all these guesses and
suggestions aim at one goal and are all to be understood in a symbolic
sense; for, as Malaval observed in answer to his disciples’ anxious
inquiries on this subject, “since the soul of man is a spiritual thing and
thus cannot have divisions or parts, consequently it cannot have height or
depth, summit or surface. But because we judge spiritual things by the help
of material things, since we know these better and they are more familiar to
us, we call the highest of all forms of conception the summit, and the
easier way of comprehending things the surface, of the understanding.” [77]

Here at any rate, whatever name we may choose to give it, is the organ of
man’s spiritual consciousness; the place where he meets the Absolute, the
germ of his real life. Here is the seat of that deep “Transcendental
Feeling,” the “beginning and end of metaphysics” which is, says Professor
Stewart, “at once the solemn sense of Timeless Being—of ‘That which was and
is and ever shall be’ overshadowing us—and the conviction that Life is
good.” “I hold,” says the same writer, “that it is in Transcendental
Feeling, manifested normally as Faith in the Value of Life, and ecstatically
as sense of Timeless Being, and not in Thought proceeding by way of
speculative construction, that Consciousness comes nearest to the object of
metaphysics, Ultimate Reality.” [78]

The existence of such a “sense,” such an integral part or function of the
complete human being, has been affirmed and dwelt upon not only by the
mystics, but by seers and teachers of all times and creeds: by Egypt,
Greece, and India, the poets, the fakirs, the philosophers, and the saints.
A belief in its actuality is the pivot of the Christian position; indeed of
every religion worthy of the name. It is the justification of mysticism,
asceticism, the whole machinery of the self-renouncing life. That there is
an extreme point at which man’s nature touches the Absolute: that his
ground, or substance, his true being, is penetrated by the Divine Life which
constitutes the underlying reality of things; this is the basis on which the
whole mystic claim of possible union with God must rest. Here, they say, is
our link with reality; and in this place alone can be celebrated the
“marriage from which the Lord comes.” [79]

To use another of their diagrams, it is thanks to the existence within him
of this immortal spark from the central fire, that man is implicitly a
“child of the infinite.” The mystic way must therefore be a life, a
discipline, which will so alter the constituents of his mental life as to
include this spark within the conscious field; bring it out of the
hiddenness, from those deep levels where it sustains and guides his normal
existence, and make it the dominant element round which his personality is
arranged.

It is clear that under ordinary conditions, and save for sudden gusts of
“Transcendental Feeling” induced by some saving madness such as Religion,
Art, or Love, the superficial self knows nothing of the attitude of this
silent watcher—this “Dweller in the Innermost”—towards the incoming messages
of the external world: nor of the activities which they awake in it.
Concentrated on the sense-world, and the messages she receives from it, she
knows nothing of the relations which exist between this subject and the
unattainable Object of all thought. But by a deliberate inattention to the
messages of the senses, such as that which is induced by contemplation, the
mystic can bring the ground of the soul, the seat of “Transcendental
Feeling,” within the area of consciousness: making it amenable to the
activity of the will. Thus becoming unaware of his usual and largely
fictitious “external world,” another and more substantial set of
perceptions, which never have their chance under normal conditions, rise to
the surface. Sometimes these unite with the normal reasoning faculties. More
often, they supersede them. Some such exchange, such “losing to find,”
appears to be necessary, if man’s transcendental powers are to have their
full chance.

“The two eyes of the soul of man,” says the “Theologia Germanica,” here
developing a profound Platonic image, “cannot both perform their work at
once: but if the soul shall see with the right eye into eternity, then the
left eye must close itself and refrain from working, and be as though it
were dead. For if the left eye be fulfilling its office toward outward
things, that is holding converse with time and the creatures; then must the
right eye be hindered in its working; that is, in its contemplation.
Therefore, whosoever will have the one must let the other go; for ‘no man
can serve two masters.’“ [80]

There is within us an immense capacity for perception, for the receiving of
messages from outside; and a very little consciousness which deals with
them. It is as if one telegraph operator were placed in charge of a
multitude of lines: all may be in action, but he can only attend to one at a
time. In popular language, there is not enough consciousness to go round.
Even upon the sensual plane, no one can be aware of more than a few things
at once. These fill the centre of our field of consciousness: as the object
on which we happen to have focussed our vision dominates our field of sight.
The other matters within that field retreat to the margin. We know, dimly,
that they are there; but we pay them no attention and should hardly miss
them if they ceased to exist.

Transcendental matters are, for most of us, always beyond the margin;
because most of us have given up our whole consciousness to the occupation
of the senses, and permitted them to construct there a universe in which we
are contented to remain. Only in certain states—recollection, contemplation,
ecstasy and their allied conditions—does the self contrive to turn out the
usual tenants, shut the “gateways of the flesh,” and let those submerged
powers which are capable of picking up messages from another plane of being
have their turn. Then it is the sense-world which retreats beyond the
margin, and another landscape that rushes in. At last, then, we begin to see
something of what contemplation does for its initiates. It is one of the
many names applied to that chain of processes which have for their object
this alteration of the mental equilibrium: the putting to sleep of that
“Normal Self” which usually wakes, and the awakening of that “Transcendental
Self” which usually sleeps. To man, “meeting-point of various stages of
reality,” is given—though he seldom considers it—this unique power of
choosing his universe.

The phenomenon known as double or disintegrated personality may perhaps give
us a hint as to the mechanical nature of the change which contemplation
effects. In this psychic malady the total character of the patient is split
up; a certain group of qualities are, as it were, abstracted from the
surface-consciousness and so closely associated as to form in themselves a
complete “character” or “personality”—necessarily poles asunder from the
“character” which the self usually shows to the world, since it consists
exclusively of those elements which are omitted from it. Thus in the
classical case of Miss Beauchamp, the investigator, Dr. Morton Prince,
called the three chief “personalities,” from their ruling characteristics,
“the Saint,” “the Woman,” and “the Devil.” [81] The totality of character
which composed the “real Miss Beauchamp” had split up into these contrasting
types; each of which was excessive, because withdrawn from the control of
the rest. When, voluntarily or involuntarily, the personality which had
possession of the field of consciousness was lulled to sleep, one of the
others emerged. Hypnotism was one of the means which most easily effected
this change.

Now in persons of mystical genius, the qualities which the stress of normal
life tends to keep below the threshold of consciousness are of enormous
strength. In these natural explorers of Eternity the “transcendental
faculty,” the “eye of the soul,” is not merely present in embryo, but is
highly developed; and is combined with great emotional and volitional power.
The result of the segregation of such qualities below the threshold of
consciousness is to remove from them the friction of those counterbalancing
traits in the surface mind with which they might collide. They are “in the
hiddenness,” as Jacob Boehme would say. There they develop unchecked, until
a point is reached at which their strength is such that they break their
bounds and emerge into the conscious field: either temporarily dominating
the subject as in ecstasy, or permanently transmuting the old self, as in
the “unitive life.” The attainment of this point may be accelerated by
processes which have always been known and valued by the mystics; and which
tend to produce a state of consciousness classed by psychologists with
dreams, reverie, and the results of hypnosis. In all these the normal
surface-consciousness is deliberately or involuntarily lulled, the images
and ideas connected with normal life are excluded, and images or faculties
from “beyond the threshold” are able to take their place.

Of course these images or faculties may or may not be more valuable than
those already present in the surface-consciousness. In the ordinary subject,
often enough, they are but the odds and ends for which the superficial mind
has found no use. In the mystic, they are of a very different order: and
this fact justifies the means which he instinctively employs to secure their
emergence. Indian mysticism founds its external system almost wholly on ( a
) Asceticism, the domination of the senses, and ( b ) the deliberate
practice of self-hypnotization; either by fixing the eyes on a near object,
or by the rhythmic repetition of the mantra or sacred word. By these
complementary forms of discipline, the pull of the phenomenal world is
diminished and the mind is placed at the disposal of the subconscious
powers. Dancing, music, and other exaggerations of natural rhythm have been
pressed into the same service by the Greek initiates of Dionysus, by the
Gnostics, by innumerable other mystic cults. That these proceedings do
effect a remarkable change in the human consciousness is proved by
experience: though how and why they do it is as yet little understood. Such
artificial and deliberate production of ecstasy is against the whole
instinct of the Christian contemplatives; but here and there amongst them
also we find instances in which ecstatic trance or lucidity, the liberation
of the “transcendental sense,” was inadvertently produced by purely physical
means. Thus Jacob Boehme, the “Teutonic theosopher,” having one day as he
sat in his room “gazed fixedly upon a burnished pewter dish which reflected
the sunshine with great brilliance,” fell into an inward ecstasy, and it
seemed to him as if he could look into the principles and deepest
foundations of things. [82] The contemplation of running water had the same
effect on St. Ignatius Loyola. Sitting on the bank of a river one day, and
facing the stream, which was running deep, “the eyes of his mind were
opened, not so as to see any kind of vision, but so as to understand and
comprehend spiritual things . . . and this with such clearness that for him
all these things were made new.” [83] This method of attaining to mental
lucidity by a narrowing and simplification of the conscious field, finds an
apt parallel in the practice of Immanuel Kant, who “found that he could
better engage in philosophical thought while gazing steadily at a
neighbouring church steeple.” [84]

It need hardly be said that rationalistic writers, ignoring the parallels
offered by the artistic and philosophic temperaments, have seized eagerly
upon the evidence afforded by such instances of apparent mono-ideism and
self-hypnotization in the lives of the mystics, and by the physical
disturbances which accompany the ecstatic trance, and sought by its
application to attribute all the abnormal perceptions of contemplative
genius to hysteria or other disease. They have not hesitated to call St.
Paul an epileptic. St. Teresa the “patron saint of hysterics”; and have
found room for most of their spiritual kindred in various departments of the
pathological museum. They have been helped in this grateful task by the
acknowledged fact that the great contemplatives, though almost always
persons of robust intelligence and marked practical or intellectual
ability—Plotinus, St. Bernard, the two Ss. Catherine, St. Teresa, St. John
of the Cross, and the Sufi poets Jàmi and Jalalu ‘ddin are cases in
point—have often suffered from bad physical health. More, their mystical
activities have generally reacted upon their bodies in a definite and
special way; producing in several cases a particular kind of illness and of
physical disability, accompanied by pains and functional disturbances for
which no organic cause could be discovered, unless that cause were the
immense strain which exalted spirit puts upon a body which is adapted to a
very different form of life.

It is certain that the abnormal and highly sensitized type of mind which we
call mystical does frequently, but not always, produce or accompany strange
and inexplicable modifications of the physical organism with which it is
linked. The supernatural is not here in question, except in so far as we are
inclined to give that name to natural phenomena which we do not understand.
Such instances of psycho-physical parallelism as the stigmatizations of the
saints—and indeed of other suggestible subjects hardly to be ranked as
saints—will occur to anyone. [85] I here offer to the reader another less
discussed and more extraordinary example of the modifying influence of the
spirit on the supposed “laws” of bodily life.

We know, as a historical fact, unusually well attested by contemporary
evidence and quite outside the sphere of hagiographic romance, that both St.
Catherine of Siena and her namesake St. Catherine of Genoa—active women as
well as ecstatics, the first a philanthropist, reformer, and politician, the
second an original theologian and for many years the highly efficient matron
of a large hospital—lived, in the first case for years, in the second for
constantly repeated periods of many weeks, without other food than the
consecrated Host which they received at Holy Communion. They did this, not
by way of difficult obedience to a pious vow, but because they could not
live in any other way. Whilst fasting, they were well and active, capable of
dealing with the innumerable responsibilities which filled their lives. But
the attempt to eat even a few mouthfuls—and this attempt was constantly
repeated, for, like all true saints, they detested eccentricity [86] —at
once made them ill and had to be abandoned as useless. [87]

In spite of the researches of Murisier, [88] Janet, [89] Ribot, [90] and
other psychologists, and their persevering attempts to find a pathological
explanation which will fit all mystic facts, this and other marked physical
peculiarities which accompany the mystical temperament belong as yet to the
unsolved problems of humanity. They need to be removed both from the sphere
of marvel and from that of disease—into which enthusiastic friends and foes
force them by turn—to the sphere of pure psychology; and there studied
dispassionately with the attention which we so willingly bestow on the less
interesting eccentricities of degeneracy and vice. Their existence no more
discredits the sanity of mysticism or the validity of its results than the
unstable nervous condition usually noticed in artists—who share to some
extent the mystic’s apprehension of the Real—discredits art. “In such cases
as Kant and Beethoven,” says Von Hügel justly, “a classifier of humanity
according to its psycho-physical phenomena alone would put these great
discoverers and creators, without hesitation, amongst hopeless and useless
hypochondriacs.” [91]

In the case of the mystics the disease of hysteria, with its astounding
variety of mental symptoms, its strange power of disintegrating, rearranging
and enhancing the elements of consciousness, its tendencies to automatism
and ecstasy, has been most often invoked to provide an explanation of the
observed phenomena. This is as if one sought the source of the genius of
Taglioni in the symptoms of St. Vitus’s dance. Both the art and the disease
have to do with bodily movements. So too both mysticism and hysteria have to
do with the domination of consciousness by one fixed and intense idea or
intuition, which rules the life and is able to produce amazing physical and
psychical results. In the hysteric patient this idea is often trivial or
morbid [92] but has become—thanks to the self’s unstable mental condition—an
obsession. In the mystic the dominant idea is a great one: so great in fact,
that when it is received in its completeness by the human consciousness,
almost of necessity it ousts all else. It is nothing less than the idea or
perception of the transcendent reality and presence of God. Hence the
mono-ideism of the mystic is rational, whilst that of the hysteric patient
is invariably irrational.

On the whole then, whilst psycho-physical relations remain so little
understood, it would seem more prudent, and certainly more scientific, to
withhold our judgment on the meaning of the psychophysical phenomena which
accompany the mystic life; instead of basing destructive criticism on facts
which are avowedly mysterious and at least capable of more than one
interpretation. To deduce the nature of a compound from the character of its
byproducts is notoriously unsafe.

Our bodies are animal things, made for animal activities. When a spirit of
unusual ardour insists on using its nerve-cells for other activities, they
kick against the pricks; and inflict, as the mystics themselves acknowledge,
the penalty of “mystical ill-health.” “Believe me, children,” says Tauler,
“one who would know much about these high matters would often have to keep
his bed, for his bodily frame could not support it.” [93] “I cause thee
extreme pain of body,” says the voice of Love to Mechthild of Magdeburg. “If
I gave myself to thee as often as thou wouldst have me, I should deprive
myself of the sweet shelter I have of thee in this world, for a thousand
bodies could not protect a loving soul from her desire. Therefore the higher
the love the greater the pain.” [94]

On the other hand the exalted personality of the mystic—his self-discipline,
his heroic acceptance of labour and suffering, and his inflexible
will—raises to a higher term that normal power of mind over body which all
possess. Also the contemplative state—like the hypnotic state in a healthy
person—seems to enhance life by throwing open deeper levels of personality.
The self then drinks at a fountain which is fed by the Universal Life. True
ecstasy is notoriously life-enhancing. In it a bracing contact with Reality
seems to take place, and as a result the subject is himself more real.
Often, says St. Teresa, even the sick come forth from ecstasy healthy and
with new strength; for something great is then given to the soul. [95]
Contact has been set up with levels of being which the daily routine of
existence leaves untouched. Hence the extraordinary powers of endurance, and
independence of external conditions, which the great ecstatics so often
display.

If we see in the mystics, as some have done, the sporadic beginning of a
power, a higher consciousness, towards which the race slowly tends; then it
seems likely enough that where it appears nerves and organs should suffer
under a stress to which they have not yet become adapted, and that a spirit
more highly organized than its bodily home should be able to impose strange
conditions on the flesh. When man first stood upright, a body long
accustomed to go on all fours, legs which had adjusted themselves to bearing
but half his weight, must have rebelled against this unnatural proceeding;
inflicting upon its author much pain and discomfort if not absolute illness.
It is at least permissible to look upon the strange “psycho-physical” state
common amongst the mystics as just such a rebellion on the part of a normal
nervous and vascular system against the exigencies of a way of life to which
it has not yet adjusted itself. [96]

In spite of such rebellion, and of the tortures to which it has subjected
them, the mystics, oddly enough, are a long-lived race: an awkward fact for
critics of the physiological school. To take only a few instances from
amongst marked ecstatics, St. Hildegarde lived to be eighty-one, Mechthild
of Magdeburg to eighty-seven, Ruysbroeck to eighty-eight, Suso to seventy,
St. Teresa to sixty-seven, St. Catherine of Genoa and St. Peter of Alcantara
to sixty-three. It seems as though that enhanced life which is the reward of
mystical surrender enabled them to triumph over their bodily disabilities:
and to live and do the work demanded of them under conditions which would
have incapacitated ordinary men.

Such triumphs, which take heroic rank in the history of the human mind, have
been accomplished as a rule in the same way. Like all intuitive persons, all
possessors of genius, all potential artists—with whom in fact they are
closely related—the mystics have, in psychological language, “thresholds of
exceptional mobility.” That is to say, a slight effort, a slight departure
from normal conditions, will permit their latent or “subliminal” powers to
emerge and occupy the mental field. A “mobile threshold” may make a man a
genius, a lunatic, or a saint. All depends upon the character of the
emerging powers. In the great mystic, these powers, these tracts of
personality lying below the level of normal consciousness, are of unusual
richness; and cannot be accounted for in terms of pathology. “If it be
true,” says Delacroix, “that the great mystics have not wholly escaped those
nervous blemishes which mark nearly all exceptional organizations, there is
in them a vital and creative power, a constructive logic, an extended scale
of realization—in a word, a genius—which is, in truth, their essential
quality. . . . The great mystics, creators and inventors who have found a
new form of life and have justified it . . . join, upon the highest summits
of the human spirit, the great simplifiers of the world.” [97]

The truth, then, so far as we know it at present, seems to be that those
powers which are in contact with the Transcendental Order, and which
constitute at the lowest estimate half the self, are dormant in ordinary
men; whose time and interest are wholly occupied in responding to the
stimuli of the world of sense. With those latent powers sleeps the landscape
which they alone can apprehend. In mystics none of the self is always
dormant. They have roused the Dweller in the Innermost from its slumbers,
and round it have unified their life. Heart, Reason, Will are there in full
action, drawing their incentive not from the shadow-show of sense, but from
the deeps of true Being; where a lamp is lit, and a consciousness awake, of
which the sleepy crowd remains oblivious. He who says the mystic is but half
a man, states the exact opposite of the truth. Only the mystic can be called
a whole man, since in others half the powers of the self always sleep. This
wholeness of experience is much insisted on by the mystics. Thus the Divine
Voice says to St. Catherine of Siena, “I have also shown thee the Bridge and
the three general steps, placed there for the three powers of the soul; and
I have told thee how no one can attain to the life of grace unless he has
mounted all three steps, that is, gathered together all the three powers of
the soul in My Name.” [98]

In those abnormal types of personality to which we give the name of genius,
we seem to detect a hint of the relations which may exist between these deep
levels of being and the crust of consciousness. In the poet, the musician,
the great mathematician or inventor, powers lying below the threshold, and
hardly controllable by their owner’s conscious will, clearly take a major
part in the business of perception and conception. In all creative acts, the
larger share of the work is done subconsciously: its emergence is in a sense
automatic. This is equally true of mystics, artists, philosophers,
discoverers, and rulers of men. The great religion, invention, work of art,
always owes its inception to some sudden uprush of intuitions or ideas for
which the superficial self cannot account; its execution to powers so far
beyond the control of that self, that they seem, as their owner sometimes
says, to “come from beyond.” This is “inspiration”; the opening of the
sluices, so that those waters of truth in which all life is bathed may rise
to the level of consciousness.

The great teacher, poet, artist, inventor, never aims deliberately at his
effects. He obtains them he knows not how: perhaps from a contact of which
he is unconscious with that creative plane of being which the Sufis call the
Constructive Spirit, and the Kabalists Yesod, and which both postulate as
lying next behind the world of sense. “Sometimes,” said the great
Alexandrian Jew Philo, “when I have come to my work empty, I have suddenly
become full; ideas being in an invisible manner showered upon me, and
implanted in me from on high; so that through the influence of divine
inspiration, I have become greatly excited, and have known neither the place
in which I was, nor those who were present, nor myself, nor what I was
saying, nor what I was writing; for then I have been conscious of a richness
of interpretation, an enjoyment of light, a most penetrating insight, a most
manifest energy in all that was to be done; having such an effect on my mind
as the clearest ocular demonstration would have on the eyes.” [99] This is a
true creative ecstasy, strictly parallel to the state in which the mystic
performs his mighty works.

To let oneself go, be quiet, receptive, appears to be the condition under
which such contact with the Cosmic Life may be obtained. “I have noticed
that when one paints one should think of nothing: everything then comes
better,” says the young Raphael to Leonardo da Vinci. [100] The superficial
self must here acknowledge its own insufficiency, must become the humble
servant of a more profound and vital consciousness. The mystics are of the
same opinion. “Let the will quietly and wisely understand,” says St. Teresa,
“that it is not by dint of labour on our part that we can converse to any
good purpose with God.” [101] “The best and noblest way in which thou mayst
come into this Life,” says Eckhart, “is by keeping silence and letting God
work and speak. Where all the powers are withdrawn from their work and
images, there is this word spoken . . . the more thou canst draw in all thy
powers and forget the creature the nearer art thou to this, and the more
receptive.” [102]

Thus Boehme says to the neophyte, [103] “When both thy intellect and will
are quiet and passive to the expressions of the eternal Word and Spirit, and
when thy soul is winged up above that which is temporal, the outward senses
and the imagination being locked up by holy abstraction, then the eternal
Hearing, Seeing, and Speaking will be revealed in thee. Blessed art thou
therefore if thou canst stand still from self thinking and self willing, and
canst stop the wheel of thy imagination and senses.” Then, the conscious
mind being passive, the more divine mind below the threshold—organ of our
free creative life—can emerge and present its reports. In the words of an
older mystic, “The soul, leaving all things and forgetting herself, is
immersed in the ocean of Divine Splendour, and illuminated by the Sublime
Abyss of the Unfathomable Wisdom.” [104]

The “passivity” of contemplation, then, is a necessary preliminary of
spiritual energy: an essential clearing of the ground. It withdraws the tide
of consciousness from the shores of sense, stops the “wheel of the
imagination.” “The Soul,” says Eckhart again, “is created in a place between
Time and Eternity: with its highest powers it touches Eternity, with its
lower Time.” [105] These, the worlds of Being and Becoming, are the two
“stages of reality” which meet in the spirit of man. By cutting us off from
the temporal plane, the lower kind of reality, Contemplation gives the
eternal plane, and the powers which can communicate with that plane, their
chance. In the born mystic these powers are great, and lie very near the
normal threshold of consciousness. He has a genius for transcendental—or as
he would say, divine—discovery in much the same way as his cousins, the born
musician and poet, have a genius for musical or poetic discovery. In all
three cases, the emergence of these higher powers is mysterious, and not
least so to those who experience it. Psychology on the one hand, theology on
the other, may offer us diagrams and theories of this proceeding: of the
strange oscillations of the developing consciousness, the fitful visitations
of a lucidity and creative power over which the self has little or no
control, the raptures and griefs of a vision by turns granted and withdrawn.
But the secret of genius still eludes us, as the secret of life eludes the
biologist.

The utmost we can say of such persons is, that reality presents itself to
them under abnormal conditions and in abnormal terms, and that subject to
these conditions and in these terms they are bound to deal with it. Thanks
to their peculiar mental make up, one aspect of the universe is for them
focussed so sharply that in comparison with it all other images are blurred,
vague, and unreal. Hence the sacrifice which men of genius—mystics, artists,
inventors—make of their whole lives to this one Object, this one vision of
truth, is not self-denial, but rather self-fulfilment. They gather
themselves up from the unreal, in order to concentrate on the real. The
whole personality then absorbs or enters into communion with certain rhythms
or harmonies existent in the universe, which the receiving apparatus of
other selves cannot take up. “Here is the finger of God, a flash of the Will
that can!” exclaims Abt Vogler, as the sounds grow under his hand. “The
numbers came!“ says the poet. He knows not how, certainly not by deliberate
intellection.

So it is with the mystic. Madame Guyon states in her autobiography, that
when she was composing her works she would experience a sudden and
irresistible inclination to take up her pen; though feeling wholly incapable
of literary composition, and not even knowing the subject on which she would
be impelled to write. If she resisted this impulse it was at the cost of the
most intense discomfort. She would then begin to write with extraordinary
swiftness; words, elaborate arguments, and appropriate quotations coming to
her without reflection, and so quickly that one of her longest books was
written in one and a half days. “In writing I saw that I was writing of
things which I had never seen: and during the time of this manifestation, I
was given light to perceive that I had in me treasures of knowledge and
understanding which I did not know that I possessed.” [106]

Similar statements are made of St. Teresa, who declared that in writing her
books she was powerless to set down anything but that which her Master put
into her mind. [107] So Blake said of “Milton” and “Jerusalem,” “I have
written the poems from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or
thirty lines at a time, without premeditation and even against my will. The
time it has taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent, and an immense
poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produced
without labour or study.” [108]

These are, of course, extreme forms of that strange power of automatic
composition, in which words and characters arrive and arrange themselves in
defiance of their authors’ will, of which most poets and novelists possess a
trace. Such composition is probably related to the automatic writing of
“mediums” and other sensitives; in which the often disorderly and incoherent
subliminal mind seizes upon this channel of expression. The subliminal mind
of the great mystic, however, is not disorderly. It is abnormally sensitive,
richly endowed and keenly observant—a treasure house, not a lumber room—and
becomes in the course of its education, a highly disciplined and skilled
instrument of knowledge. When, therefore, its contents emerge, and are
presented to the normal consciousness in the form of lucidity,
“auditions,” visions, automatic writing, or any other translations of the
supersensible into the terms of sensible perception, they cannot be
discredited because the worthless unconscious region of feebler natures
sometimes manifests itself in the same way. Idiots are often voluble: but
many orators are sane.

Now, to sum up: what are the chief characteristics which we have found to
concern us in this sketch-map of the mental life of man?

(1) We have divided that life, arbitrarily enough, along the fluctuating
line which psychologists call the “threshold of his consciousness” into the
surface life and the unconscious deeps.

(2) In the surface life, though we recognized its essential wholeness, we
distinguished three outstanding and ever-present aspects: the Trinity in
Unity of feeling, thought, and will. Amongst these we were obliged to give
the primacy to feeling, as the power which set the machinery of thought and
will to work.

(3) We have seen that the expression of this life takes the two
complementary forms of conation, or outgoing action and cognition, or
indwelling knowledge; and that the first, which is dynamic in type, is
largely the work of the will stimulated by the emotions; whilst the second,
which is passive in type, is the business of the intellect. They answer to
the two main aspects which man discerns in the universal life: Being and
Becoming.

(4) Neither conation nor cognition—action nor thought—as performed by this
surface mind, concerned as it is with natural existence and dominated by
spatial conceptions, is able to set up any relations with the Absolute or
transcendental world. Such action and thought deal wholly with material
supplied directly or indirectly by the world of sense. The testimony of the
mystics, however, and of all persons possessing an “instinct for the
Absolute,” points to the existence of a further faculty—indeed, a deeper
self—in man; a self which the circumstances of diurnal life usually keep
“below the threshold” of his consciousness, and which thus becomes one of
the factors of his “subliminal life.” This hidden self is the primary agent
of mysticism, and lives a “substantial” life in touch with the real or
transcendental world. [109]

(5) Certain processes, of which contemplation has been taken as a type, can
so alter the state of consciousness as to permit the emergence of this
deeper self; which, according as it enters more or less into the conscious
life, makes man more or less a mystic.

The mystic life, therefore, involves the emergence from deep levels of
man’s transcendental self; its capture of the field of consciousness; and
the “conversion” or rearrangement of his feeling, thought, and will—his
character—about this new centre of life.

We state, then, as the conclusion of this chapter, that the object of the
mystic’s adventure, seen from within, is the apprehension of, or direct
communion with, that transcendental Reality which we tried in the last
section to define from without. Here, as in the fulfilment of the highest
earthly love, knowledge and communion are the same thing; we must be “oned
with bliss” if we are to be aware of it. That aspect of our being by which
we may attain this communion—that “marrow of the Soul,” as Ruysbroeck calls
it—usually lies below the threshold of our consciousness; but in certain
natures of abnormal richness and vitality, and under certain favourable
conditions, it may be liberated by various devices, such as contemplation.
Once it has emerged, however, it takes up, to help it in the work, aspects
of the conscious self. The surface must co-operate with the deeps, and at
last merge with those deeps to produce that unification of consciousness
upon high levels which alone can put a term to man’s unrest. The heart that
longs for the All, the mind that conceives it, the will that concentrates
the whole self upon it, must all be called into play. The self must be
surrendered: but it must not be annihilated, as some Quietists have
supposed. It only dies that it may live again. Supreme success,—the
permanent assurance of the mystic that “we are more verily in heaven than in
earth,”—says the Lady Julian, in a passage which anticipates the
classification of modern psychology, “cometh of the natural Love of our
soul, and of the clear light of our Reason, and of the steadfast Mind.”
[110]

But what is the order of precedence which these three activities are to
assume in the work which is one ?All, as we have seen, must do their part;
for we are concerned with the response of man in his wholeness to the
overwhelming attraction of God. But which shall predominate? The ultimate
nature of the self’s experience of reality will depend on the answer she
gives to this question. What, here, are the relative values of Mind and
Heart? Which will bring her closest to the Thought of God; the real life in
which she is bathed? Which, fostered and made dominant, is most likely to
put her in harmony with the Absolute? The Love of God, which is ever in the
heart and often on the lips of the Saints, is the passionate desire for this
harmony; the “malady of thought” is its intellectual equivalent. Though we
may seem to escape God, we cannot escape some form of this craving; except
at the price of utter stagnation. We go back, therefore, to the statement
with which this chapter opened: that of the two governing desires which
share the prison of the self. We see them now as representing the cravings
of the intellect and the emotions for the only end of all quests. The
disciplined will—the “conative power”—with all the dormant faculties which
it can wake and utilize, can come to the assistance of one of them. Which?
The question is a crucial one, for the destiny of the self depends on the
partner which the will selects.
_________________________________________________________________

[57] The wise Cherubs, according to the beautiful imagery of Dionysius, are
“all eyes,” but the loving Seraphs are “all wings.” Whilst the Seraphs, the
figure of intensest Love, “ move perpetually towards things divine,” ardour
and energy being their characteristics, the characteristic of the Cherubs is
receptiveness their power of absorbing the rays of the Supernal Light.
(Dionysius the Areopagite, “De Caelesti Ierarchia,” vi. 2, and vii. 1.)

[58] So Récéjac says of the mystics, they desire to know, only that they may
love; and their desire for union with the principle of things in God, Who is
the sum of them all, is founded on a feeling which is neither curiosity nor
self-interest” (“Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique,” p. 50).

[59] Par. xxxiii. 143.

[60] The Monist , July, 1901, p. 572.

[61] “The Cloud of Unknowing,” cap. vi.

[62] Op. cit., cap. vii.

[63] “De Ornatu Spiritalium Nuptiarum,” I. ii. cap. v.

[64] See below, Pt. II. Cap. VI.

[65] Plotinus, Ennead vi. 9.

[66] “Theologia Germanica,” cap. vii. (trans. Winkworth).

[67] Aug. Conf., bk. vii. cap. x.

[68] A. Schmölders, “Essai sur les Écoles Philosophique chez les Arabes,” p.
68.

[69] “De Consideration,” bk. ii. cap. ii.

[70] “Summa Theologica,” ii. ii. q. clxxx, art. 3. eds. 1 and 3.

[71] Walter Hilton, “The Scale of Perfection,” bk. ii. cap. xl.

[72] Ruysbroeck, “De Septem Gradibus Amoris,” cap. xiv.

[73] “The Spirit of Prayer” (“Liberal and Mystical Writings of William
Law,” p, 14). So too St. François de Sales says: “This root is the depth of
the spirit, Mens , which others call the Kingdom of God.” The same doctrine
appears, under various symbols, in all the Christian Mystics.

[74] Cutten, “Psychological Phenomena of Christianity,” p. 18. James,
“Varieties of Religious Experience,” p. 155. For a temperate and balanced
discussion, see Pratt: “The Religious Consciousness.”

[75] Note to the 12th Edition. During the eighteen years which have elapsed
since this chapter was written, much work has been done on the psychology of
mysticism. After suffering severely at the hands of the “new
psychologists” the contemplative faculty is once more taken seriously; and
there is even some disposition to accept or restate the account of it given
by the mystics. Thus Bremond (“Prière et Poésie” and “Introduction à la
Philosophie de la Prière”) insists on the capital distinction between the
surface-mind, capable of rational knowledge, and the deeper mind, organ of
mystical knowledge, and operative in varying degrees in religion poetic, and
Esthetic apprehensions.

[76] An interesting discussion of the term “Synteresis” will be found in Dr.
Inge’s “Christian Mysticism,” Appendix C, pp. 359, 360.

[77] “La Pratique de la Vraye Theologie Mystique,” vol. 1. p. 204.

[78] J. A. Stewart, ‘*The Myths of Plato,” pp. 41, 43. Perhaps I may point
out that this Transcendental Feeling—the ultimate material alike of prayer
and of poetry—has, like the mystic consciousness, a dual perception of
Reality: static being and dynamic life. See above, p. 42.

[79] Tauler, Sermon on St. Augustine (“The Inner Way,” p. 162).

[80] “Theologia Germanica,” cap. vii. Compare “De Imitatione Christi,” 1.
iii. cap. 38.

[81] Morton Prince, “The Dissociation of a Personality,” p. 16.

[82] Martensen, “Jacob Boehme,” p. 7.

[83] Testament, cap. iii.

[84] Starbuck, “The Psychology of Religion,” p. 388.

[85] See, for instances, Cutten, ‘The Psychological Phenomena of
Christianity,” cap. viii.

[86] “Singularity,” says Gertrude More, “is a vice which Thou extremely
hatest.” (‘The Spiritual Exercises of the most vertuous and religious Dame
Gertrude More,” p. 40). All the best and sanest of the mystics are of the
same opinion.

[87] See E. Gardner, “St. Catherine of Siena,” pp. 12and 48; and E. von
Hügel, “The Mystical Element of Religion,” vol. i. p. 135.

[88] “Les Maladies des Sentiments Religieux.”

[89] “L’État Mentale des Hysteriques,” and “Une Extatique” ( Bulletin de
l’Institut Psychologique , 1901).

[90] “La Psychologie des Sentiment,” 1896.

[91] Op. cit ., vol. ii. p. 42.

[92] For examples consult Pierre Janet, op. cit.

[93] Sermon for First Sunday after Easter (Winkworth, p. 302).

[94] “Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit,” pt. ii. cap. xxv.

[95] Vida, cap. xx. sect. 29.

[96] Boyce Gibson (“God with Us,” cap. iii.) has drawn a striking parallel
between the ferment and “interior uproar” of adolescence and the profound
disturbances which mark man’s entry into a conscious spiritual life. His
remarks are even more applicable to the drastic rearrangement of personality
which takes place in the case of the mystic, whose spiritual life is more
intense than that of other men.

[97] Delacroix, “Études sur le Mysticisme,” p. iii.

[98] Dialogo, cap. lxxxvi.

[99] Quoted by James (“Varieties of Religious Experience,” p. 481) from
Clissold’s “The Prophetic Spirit in Genius and Madness,” p. 67.

[100] “Mérejkowsky, “Le Roman do Leonard de Vinci,” p. 638.

[101] Vida, cap. xv. 9.

[102] Meister Eckhart, Pred. i. (“Mystische Schriften,” p. 18).

[103] “Three Dialogues of the Supersensual Life,” p. 14.

[104] Dionysius the Areopagite, “De Divinis Nominibus,” vii. 3.

[105] Pred. xxiii. Eckhart obtained this image from St. Thomas Aquinas,
“Summa Contra Gentiles,” I. iii. cap. lxi. “The intellectual soul is created
on the confines of eternity and time.”

[106] Vie, t. ii. pp. 120, 223, 229. It might reasonably be objected that
Madame Guyon does not rank high among the mystics and her later history
includes some unfortunate incidents. This is true. Nevertheless she exhibit
such a profusion of mystical phenomena and is so candid in her
self-disclosures, that she provides much valuable material for the student.

[107] G. Cunninghame Graham, “Santa Teresa,” vol. i. p. 202.

[108] “Letters of William Blake,” April 25, 1803.

[109] This insistence on the twofold character of human personality is
implicit in the mystics. “It is” says Bremond, “the fundamental dogma of
mystical psychology—the distinction between the two selves: Animus, the
surface self; Anima , the deep self; Animus , rational knowledge; and Anima
, mystical or poetic knowledge . . . the I, who feeds on notions and words,
and enchants himself by doing so; the Me, who is united to realities”
(Bremond “Prière et Poésie,” cap. xii.).

[110] Julian of Norwich, “Revelations of Divine Love,” cap, lv.
_________________________________________________________________

T he spiritual history of man reveals two distinct and fundamental attitudes
towards the unseen; and two methods whereby he has sought to get in touch
with it. For our present purpose I will call these methods the “way of
magic” and the “way of mysticism.” Having said this, we must at once add
that although in their extreme forms these methods are sharply contrasted,
their frontiers are far from being clearly defined: that, starting from the
same point, they often confuse the inquirer by using the same language,
instruments, and methods. Hence, much which is really magic is loosely and
popularly described as mysticism. They represent as a matter of fact the
opposite poles of the same thing: the transcendental consciousness of
humanity. Between them lie the great religions, which might be described
under this metaphor as representing the ordinarily habitable regions of that
consciousness. Thus, at one end of the scale, pure mysticism “shades off”
into religion—from some points of view seems to grow out of it. No deeply
religious man is without a touch of mysticism; and no mystic can be other
than religious, in the psychological if not in the theological sense of the
word. At the other end of the scale, as we shall see later, religion, no
less surely, shades off into magic.

The fundamental difference between the two is this: magic wants to get,
mysticism wants to give—immortal and antagonistic attitudes, which turn up
under one disguise or another in every age of thought. Both magic and
mysticism in their full development bring the whole mental machinery,
conscious and unconscious, to bear on their undertaking: both claim that
they give their initiates powers unknown to ordinary men. But the centre
round which that machinery is grouped, the reasons of that undertaking, and
the ends to which those powers are applied differ enormously. In mysticism
the will is united with the emotions in an impassioned desire to transcend
the sense-world, in order that the self may be joined by love to the one
eternal and ultimate Object of love; whose existence is intuitively
perceived by that which we used to call the soul, but now find it easier to
refer to as the “cosmic” or “transcendental” sense. This is the poetic and
religious temperament acting upon the plane of reality. In magic, the will
unites with the intellect in an impassioned desire for supersensible
knowledge. This is the intellectual, aggressive, and scientific temperament
trying to extend its field of consciousness, until it includes the
supersensual world: obviously the antithesis of mysticism, though often
adopting its title and style.

It will be our business later to consider in more detail the characteristics
and significance of magic. Now it is enough to say that we may class broadly
as magical all forms of self-seeking transcendentalism. It matters little
whether the apparatus which they use be the incantations of the old
magicians, the congregational prayer for rain of orthodox Churchmen, or the
consciously self-hypnotizing devices of “New Thought”: whether the end
proposed be the evocation of an angel, the power of transcending
circumstance, or the healing of disease. The object is always the same: the
deliberate exaltation of the will, till it transcends its usual limitations
and obtains for the self or group of selves something which it or they did
not previously possess. It is an individualistic and acquisitive science: in
all its forms an activity of the intellect, seeking Reality for its own
purposes, or for those of humanity at large.

Mysticism, whose great name is too often given to these supersensual
activities, has nothing in common with this. It is non-individualistic. It
implies, indeed, the abolition of individuality; of that hard separateness,
that “I, Me, Mine” which makes of man a finite isolated thing. It is
essentially a movement of the heart, seeking to transcend the limitations of
the individual standpoint and to surrender itself to ultimate Reality; for
no personal gain, to satisfy no transcendental curiosity, to obtain no
other-worldly joys, but purely from an instinct of love. By the word heart,
of course we here mean not merely “the seat of the affections,” “the organ
of tender emotion,” and the like: but rather the inmost sanctuary of
personal being, the deep root of its love and will, the very source of its
energy and life. The mystic is “in love with the Absolute” not in any idle
or sentimental manner, but in that vital sense which presses at all costs
and through all dangers towards union with the object beloved. Hence, whilst
the practice of magic—like the practice of science—does not necessarily
entail passionate emotion, though of course it does and must entail interest
of some kind, mysticism, like art, cannot exist without it. We must feel,
and feel acutely, before we want to act on this hard and heroic scale.

We see, then, that these two activities correspond to the two eternal
passions of the self, the desire of love and the desire of knowledge:
severally representing the hunger of heart and intellect for ultimate truth.
The third attitude towards the supersensual world, that of transcendental
philosophy, hardly comes within the scope of the present inquiry; since it
is purely academic, whilst both magic and mysticism are practical and
empirical. Such philosophy is often wrongly called mysticism, because it
tries to make maps of the countries which the mystic explores. Its
performances are useful, as diagrams are useful, so long as they do not ape
finality; remembering that the only final thing is personal experience—the
personal and costly exploration of the exalted and truth-loving soul.

What then do we really mean by mysticism? A word which is impartially
applied to the performances of mediums and the ecstasies of the saints, to
“menticulture” and sorcery, dreamy poetry and mediaeval art, to prayer and
palmistry, the doctrinal excesses of Gnosticism, and the tepid speculations
of the Cambridge Platonists—even, according to William James, to the higher
branches of intoxication [111] —soon ceases to have any useful meaning. Its
employment merely confuses the inexperienced student, who ends with a vague
idea that every kind of supersensual theory and practice is somehow
“mystical.” Hence the need of fixing, if possible, its true characteristics:
and restating the fact that Mysticism, in its pure form, is the science of
ultimates, the science of union with the Absolute, and nothing else, and
that the mystic is the person who attains to this union, not the person who
talks about it. Not to know about but to Be, is the mark of the real
initiate.

The difficulty lies in determining the point at which supersensual
experience ceases to be merely a practical and interesting extension of
sensual experience—an enlarging, so to speak, of the boundaries of
existence—and passes over into that boundless life where Subject and Object,
desirous and desired, are one. No sharp line, but rather an infinite series
of gradations separate the two states. Hence we must look carefully at all
the pilgrims on the road; discover, if we can, the motive of their travels,
the maps which they use, the luggage which they take, the end which they
attain.

Now we have said that the end which the mystic sets before him is conscious
union with a living Absolute. That Divine Dark, that Abyss of the Godhead,
of which he sometimes speaks as the goal of his quest, is just this
Absolute, the Uncreated Light in which the Universe is bathed, and
which—transcending, as it does, all human powers of expression—he can only
describe to us as dark. But there is—must be—contact “in an intelligible
where” between every individual self and this Supreme Self, this Ultimate.
In the mystic this union is conscious, personal, and complete. “He
enjoys,” says St. John of the Cross, “a certain contact of the soul with the
Divinity; and it is God Himself who is then felt and tasted.” [112] More or
less according to his measure, he has touched—or better, been touched by—the
substantial Being of Deity, not merely its manifestation in life. This it is
which distinguishes him from the best and most brilliant of other men, and
makes his science, in Patmore’s words, “the science of self-evident
Reality.” Gazing with him into that unsearchable ground whence the World of
Becoming comes forth “eternally generated in an eternal Now,” we may see
only the icy darkness of perpetual negations: but he, beyond the coincidence
of opposites, looks upon the face of Perfect Love.

As genius in any of the arts is—humanly speaking—the final term of a power
of which each individual possesses the rudiments, so mysticism may be looked
upon as the final term, the active expression, of a power latent in the
whole race: the power, that is to say, of so perceiving transcendent
reality. Few people pass through life without knowing what it is to be at
least touched by this mystical feeling. He who falls in love with a woman
and perceives—as the lover really does perceive—that the categorical term
“girl” veils a wondrous and unspeakable reality: he who, falling in love
with nature, sees the landscape “touched with light divine,”—a charming
phrase to those who have not seen it, but a scientific statement to the
rest—he who falls in love with the Holy, or as we say “undergoes
conversion”: all these have truly known for an instant something of the
secret of the world. [113]


“. . . Ever and anon a trumpet sounds

From the hid battlement of Eternity,

Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then

Round the half-glimpsèd turrets slowly wash again.”

At such moments “Transcendental Feeling, welling up from another ‘Part of
the Soul’ whispers to Understanding and Sense that they are leaving out
something. What? Nothing less than the secret plan of the Universe. And what
is that secret plan? The other ‘Part of the Soul’ indeed comprehends it in
silence as it is, but can explain it to the Understanding only in the
symbolical language of the interpreter, Imagination—in Vision.” [114]

Here, in this spark or “part of the soul” where the spirit, as religion
says, “rests in God who made it,” is the fountain alike of the creative
imagination and the mystic life. Now and again something stings it into
consciousness, and man is caught up to the spiritual level, catches a
glimpse of the “secret plan.” Then hints of a marvellous truth, a unity
whose note is ineffable peace, shine in created things; awakening in the
self a sentiment of love, adoration, and awe. Its life is enhanced, the
barrier of personality is broken, man escapes the sense-world, ascends to
the apex of his spirit, and enters for a brief period into the more extended
life of the All.

This intuition of the Real lying at the root of the visible world and
sustaining its life, is present in a modified form in the arts: perhaps it
were better to say, must be present if these arts are so justify themselves
as heightened forms of experience. It is this which gives to them that
peculiar vitality, that strange power of communicating a poignant emotion,
half torment and half joy, which baffle their more rational interpreters. We
know that the picture which is “like a photograph,” the building which is at
once handsome and commodious, the novel which is a perfect transcript of
life, fail to satisfy us. It is difficult to say why this should be so,
unless it were because these things have neglected their true business;
which was not to reproduce the illusions of ordinary men but to catch and
translate for us something of that “secret plan,” that reality which the
artistic consciousness is able, in a measure, to perceive. “Painting as well
as music and poetry exists and exults in immortal thoughts,” says Blake.
[115] That “life-enhancing power” which has been recognized as the supreme
quality of good painting, [116] has its origin in this contact of the
artistic mind with the archetypal—or, if you like, the transcendental—world:
the underlying verity of things.

A critic, in whom poetic genius has brought about the unusual alliance of
intuition with scholarship, testifies to this same truth when he says of the
ideals which governed early Chinese painting, “In this theory every work of
art is thought of as an incarnation of the genius of rhythm, manifesting the
living spirit of things with a clearer beauty and intenser power than the
gross impediments of complex matter allow to be transmitted to, our senses
in the visible world around us. A picture is conceived as a sort of
apparition from a more real world of essential life.” [117]

That “more real world of essential life” is the world in which the “free
soul” of the great mystic dwells; hovering like the six-winged seraph before
the face of the Absolute. [118] The artist too may cross its boundaries in
his brief moments of creation: but he cannot stay. He comes back to us,
bearing its tidings, with Dante’s cry upon his lips—


“. . . Non eran da ciò le proprie penne

se non che la mia mente fu percossa

da un fulgore, in che sua voglia venne.” [119]

The mystic may say—is indeed bound to say—with St. Bernard, “My secret to
myself.” Try how he will, his stammering and awestruck reports can hardly be
understood but by those who are already in the way. But the artist cannot
act thus. On him has been laid the duty of expressing something of that
which he perceives. He is bound to tell his love. In his worship of Perfect
Beauty faith must be balanced by works. By means of veils and symbols he
must interpret his free vision, his glimpse of the burning bush, to other
men. He is the mediator between his brethren and the divine, for art is the
link between appearance and reality. [120]

But we do not call every one who has these partial and artistic intuitions
of reality a mystic, any more than we call every one a musician who has
learnt to play the piano. The true mystic is the person in whom such powers
transcend the merely artistic and visionary stage, and are exalted to the
point of genius: in whom the transcendental consciousness can dominate the
normal consciousness, and who has definitely surrendered himself to the
embrace of Reality. As artists stand in a peculiar relation to the
phenomenal world, receiving rhythms and discovering truths and beauties
which are hidden from other men, so this true mystic stands in a peculiar
relation to the transcendental world, there experiencing actual, but to us
unimaginable tension and delight. His consciousness is transfigured in a
particular way, he lives at different levels of experience from other
people: and this of course means that he sees a different world, since the
world as we know it is the product of certain scraps or aspects of reality
acting upon a normal and untransfigured consciousness. Hence his mysticism
is no isolated vision, no fugitive glimpse of reality, but a complete system
of life carrying its own guarantees and obligations. As other men are
immersed in and react to natural or intellectual life, so the mystic is
immersed in and reacts to spiritual life. He moves towards that utter
identification with its interests which he calls “Union with God.” He has
been called a lonely soul. He might more properly be described as a lonely
body: for his soul, peculiarly responsive, sends out and receives
communications upon every side.

The earthly artist, because perception brings with it the imperative longing
for expression, tries to give us in colour, sound or words a hint of his
ecstasy, his glimpse of truth. Only those who have tried, know how small a
fraction of his vision he can, under the most favourable circumstance,
contrive to represent. The mystic, too, tries very hard to tell an unwilling
world his secret. But in his case, the difficulties are enormously
increased. First, there is the huge disparity between his unspeakable
experience and the language which will most nearly suggest it. Next, there
is the great gulf fixed between his mind and the mind of the world. His
audience must be bewitched as well as addressed, caught up to something of
his state, before they can be made to understand.

Were he a musician, it is probable that the mystic could give his message to
other musicians in the terms of that art, far more accurately than language
will allow him to do: for we must remember that there is no excuse but that
of convenience for the pre-eminence amongst modes of expression which we
accord to words. These correspond so well to the physical plane and its
adventures, that we forget that they have but the faintest of relations with
transcendental things. Even the artist, before he can make use of them, is
bound to re-arrange them in accordance with the laws of rhythm: obeying
unconsciously the rule by which all arts “tend to approach the condition of
music.”

So too the mystic. Mysticism, the most romantic of adventures, from one
point of view the art of arts, their source and also their end, finds
naturally enough its closest correspondences in the most purely artistic and
most deeply significant of all forms of expression. The mystery of music is
seldom realized by those who so easily accept its gifts. Yet of all the arts
music alone shares with great mystical literature the power of waking in us
a response to the life-movement of the universe: brings us—we know not
how—news of its exultant passions and its incomparable peace. Beethoven
heard the very voice of Reality, and little of it escaped when he translated
it for our ears. [121]

The mediaeval mind, more naturally mystical than ours, and therefore more
sharply aware of the part which rhythmic harmony plays in the worlds of
nature and of grace, gave to music a cosmic importance, discerning its
operation in many phenomena which we now attribute to that dismal figment,
Law. “There are three kinds of music,” says Hugh of St. Victor, “the music
of the worlds, the music of humanity, the music of instruments. Of the music
of the worlds, one is of the elements, another of the planets, another of
Time. Of that which is of the elements, one is of number, another of
weights, another of measure. Of that which is of the planets, one is of
place, another of motion, another of nature. Of that which is of Time, one
is of the days and the vicissitudes of light and darkness; another of the
months and the waxing and waning of the moon; another of the years and the
changes of spring, summer, autumn and winter. Of the music of humanity, one
is of the body, another of the soul, another in the connexion that is
between them.” [122] Thus the life of the visible and invisible universe
consists in a supernal fugue.

One contemplative at least, Richard Rolle of Hampole, “the father of English
mysticism,” was acutely aware of this music of the soul, discerning in it a
correspondence with the measured harmonies of the spiritual universe. In
those enraptured descriptions of his inward experience which are among the
jewels of mystical literature, nothing is more remarkable than his constant
and deliberate employment of musical imagery. This alone, it seems, could
catch and translate for him the character of his experience of Reality. The
condition of joyous and awakened love to which the mystic passes when his
purification is at an end is to him, above all else, the state of Song. He
does not “see” the spiritual world: he “hears” it. For him, as for St.
Francis of Assisi, it is a “heavenly melody, intolerably sweet.” [123]

“Song I call,” he says, “when in a plenteous soul the sweetness of eternal
love with burning is taken, and thought into song is turned, and the mind
into full sweet sound is changed.” [124] He who experiences this joyous
exaltation “says not his prayers like other righteous men” but “is taken
into marvellous mirth: and, goodly sound being descended into him, as it
were with notes his prayers he sings.” [125] So Gertrude More—“O lett me
sitt alone, silent to all the world and it to me, that I may learn the song
of Love.” [126]

Rolle’s own experience of mystic joy seems actually to have come to him in
this form: the perceptions of his exalted consciousness presenting
themselves to his understanding under musical conditions, as other mystics
have received them in the form of pictures or words. I give in his own words
the classic description of his passage from the first state of “burning
love” to the second state of “songful love”—from Calor to Canor— when “into
song of joy meditation is turned.” “In the night, before supper, as I my
psalms sung, as it were the sound of readers or rather singers about me I
beheld. Whilst, also praying, to heaven with all desire I took heed,
suddenly, in what manner I wot not, in me the sound of song I felt; and
likeliest heavenly melody I took, with me dwelling in mind. Forsooth my
thought continually to mirth of song was changed, and my meditation to
praise turned; and my prayers and psalm-saying, in sound I showed.” [127]

The song, however, is a mystic melody having little in common with its
clumsy image, earthly music. Bodily song “lets it”; and “noise of janglers
makes it turn again to thought,” “for sweet ghostly song accords not with
outward song, the which in churches and elsewhere is used. It discords much:
for all that is man’s voice is formed with bodily ears to be heard; but
among angels’ tunes it has an acceptable melody, and with marvel it is
commended of them that have known it.” To others it is incommunicable.
“Worldly lovers soothly words or ditties of our song may know, for the words
they read: but the tone and sweetness of that song they may not learn.”
[128]

Such symbolism as this—a living symbolism of experience and action, as well
as of statement—seems almost essential to mystical expression. The mind must
employ some device of the kind if its transcendental perceptions—wholly
unrelated as they are to the phenomena with which intellect is able to
deal—are ever to be grasped by the surface consciousness. Sometimes the
symbol and the perception which it represents become fused in that
consciousness; and the mystic’s experience then presents itself to him as
“visions” or “voices” which we must look upon as the garment he has himself
provided to veil that Reality upon which no man may look and live. The
nature of this garment will be largely conditioned by his temperament—as in
Rolle’s evident bias towards music, St. Catherine of Genoa’s leaning towards
the abstract conceptions of fire and light—and also by his theological
education and environment. Cases in point are the highly dogmatic visions
and auditions of St. Gertrude, Suso, St. Catherine of Siena, the Blessed
Angela of Foligno; above all of St. Teresa, whose marvellous self-analyses
provide the classic account of these attempts of the mind to translate
transcendental intuitions into concepts with which it can deal.

The greatest mystics, however—Ruysbroeck, St. John of the Cross, and St.
Teresa herself in her later stages—distinguish clearly between the ineffable
Reality which they perceive and the image under which they describe it.
Again and again they tell us with Dionysius and Eckhart, that the Object of
their contemplation “hath no image”: or with St. John of the Cross that “the
soul can never attain to the height of the divine union, so far as it is
possible in this life, through the medium of any forms or figures.” [129]
Therefore the attempt which has sometimes been made to identify mysticism
with such forms and figures—with visions, voices, “supernatural favours” and
other abnormal phenomena—is clearly wrong.

“The highest and most divine things which it is given us to see and to
know,” says Dionysius the Areopagite plainly, “are but the symbolic language
of things subordinate to Him who Himself transcendeth them all: through
which things His incomprehensible Presence is shown, walking on those
heights of His Holy Places which are perceived by the mind. [130]

The mystic, as a rule, cannot wholly do without symbol and image, inadequate
to his vision though they must always be: for his experience must be
expressed if it is to be communicated, and its actuality is inexpressible
except in some side-long way, some hint or parallel which will stimulate the
dormant intuition of the reader, and convey, as all poetic language does,
something beyond its surface sense. Hence the large part which is played in
all mystical writings by symbolism and imagery; and also by that rhythmic
and exalted language which induces in sensitive persons something of the
languid ecstasy of dream. The close connection between rhythm and heightened
states of consciousness is as yet little understood. Its further
investigation will probably throw much light on ontological as well as
psychological problems. Mystical, no less than musical and poetic
perception, tends naturally—we know not why—to present itself in rhythmical
periods: a feature which is also strongly marked in writings obtained in the
automatic state. So constant is this law in some subjects that Baron von
Hügel adopted the presence or absence of rhythm as a test whereby to
distinguish the genuine utterances of St. Catherine of Genoa from those
wrongly attributed to her by successive editors of her legend. [131]

All kinds of symbolic language come naturally to the articulate mystic, who
is often a literary artist as well: so naturally, that he sometimes forgets
to explain that his utterance is but symbolic—a desperate attempt to
translate the truth of that world into the beauty of this. It is here that
mysticism joins hands with music and poetry: had this fact always been
recognized by its critics, they would have been saved from many regrettable
and some ludicrous misconceptions. Symbol—the clothing which the spiritual
borrows from the material plane—is a form of artistic expression. That is to
say, it is not literal but suggestive: though the artist who uses it may
sometimes lose sight of this distinction. Hence the persons who imagine that
the “Spiritual Marriage” of St. Catherine or St. Teresa veils a perverted
sexuality, that the vision of the Sacred Heart involved an incredible
anatomical experience, or that the divine inebriation of the Sufis is the
apotheosis of drunkenness, do but advertise their ignorance of the mechanism
of the arts: like the lady who thought that Blake must be mad because he
said that he had touched the sky with his finger.

Further, the study of the mystics, the keeping company however humbly with
their minds, brings with it as music or poetry does—but in a far greater
degree—a strange exhilaration, as if we were brought near to some mighty
source of Being, were at last on the verge of the secret which all seek. The
symbols displayed, the actual words employed, when we analyse them, are not
enough to account for such effect. It is rather that these messages from the
waking transcendental self of another, stir our own deeper selves in their
sleep. It were hardly an extravagance to say, that those writings which are
the outcome of true and first-hand mystical experience may be known by this
power of imparting to the reader the sense of exalted and extended life.
“All mystics,” says Saint-Martin, “speak the same language, for they come
from the same country.” The deep undying life within us came from that
country too: and it recognizes the accents of home, though it cannot always
understand what they would say.

Now, returning to our original undertaking, that of defining if we can the
characteristics of true mysticism, I think that we have already reached a
point at which William James’s celebrated “four marks” of the mystic state,
Ineffability, Noetic Quality, Transiency, and Passivity, [132] will fail to
satisfy us. In their place I propose to set out, illustrate and, I hope,
justify four other rules or notes which may be applied as tests to any given
case which claims to take rank amongst the mystics.

1. True mysticism is active and practical, not passive and theoretical. It
is an organic life-process, a something which the whole self does; not
something as to which its intellect holds an opinion.

2. Its aims are wholly transcendental and spiritual. It is in no way
concerned with adding to, exploring, re-arranging, or improving anything in
the visible universe. The mystic brushes aside that universe, even in its
supernormal manifestations. Though he does not, as his enemies declare,
neglect his duty to the many, his heart is always set upon the changeless
One.

3. This One is for the mystic, not merely the Reality of all that is, but
also a living and personal Object of Love; never an object of exploration.
It draws his whole being homeward, but always under the guidance of the
heart.

4. Living union with this One—which is the term of his adventure—is a
definite state or form of enhanced life. It is obtained neither from an
intellectual realization of its delights, nor from the most acute emotional
longings. Though these must be present they are not enough. It is arrived at
by an arduous psychological and spiritual process—the so-called Mystic
Way—entailing the complete remaking of character and the liberation of a
new, or rather latent, form of consciousness; which imposes on the self the
condition which is sometimes inaccurately called “ecstasy,” but is better
named the Unitive State.

Mysticism, then, is not an opinion: it is not a philosophy. It has nothing
in common with the pursuit of occult knowledge. On the one hand it is not
merely the power of contemplating Eternity: on the other, it is not to be
identified with any kind of religious queerness. It is the name of that
organic process which involves the perfect consummation of the Love of God:
the achievement here and now of the immortal heritage of man. Or, if you
like it better—for this means exactly the same thing—it is the art of
establishing his conscious relation with the Absolute.

The movement of the mystic consciousness towards this consummation, is not
merely the sudden admission to an overwhelming vision of Truth: though such
dazzling glimpses may from time to time be vouchsafed to the soul. It is
rather an ordered movement towards ever higher levels of reality, ever
closer identification with the Infinite. “The mystic experience,” says
Récéjac, “ends with the words, ‘I live, yet not I, but God in me.’ This
feeling of identification, which is the term of mystical activity, has a
very important significance. In its early stages the mystic consciousness
feels the Absolute in opposition to the Self . . . as mystic activity goes
on, it tends to abolish this opposition. . . . When it has reached its term
the consciousness finds itself possessed by the sense of a Being at one and
the same time greater than the Self and identical with it: great enough to
be God, intimate enough to be me.” [133]

This is that mystic union which is the only possible fulfilment of mystic
love: since


“All that is not One must ever

Suffer with the wound of Absence

And whoever in Love’s city

Enters, finds but room for One

And but in One-ness, Union.” [134]

The history of mysticism is the history of the demonstration of this law
upon the plane of reality.

Now, how do these statements square with the practice of the great mystics;
and with the various forms of activity which have been classified at one
time or another as mystical?

(1) Mysticism is practical, not theoretical.

This statement, taken alone, is not, of course, enough to identify
mysticism; since it is equally true of magic, which also proposes to itself
something to be done rather than something to be believed. It at once comes
into collision, however, with the opinions of those who believe mysticism to
be “the reaction of the born Platonist upon religion.”

The difference between such devout philosophers and the true mystic, is the
difference which George Tyrrell held to distinguish revelation from
theology. [135] Mysticism, like revelation, is final and personal. It is not
merely a beautiful and suggestive diagram but experience in its most intense
form. That experience, in the words of Plotinus, is the soul’s solitary
adventure: “the flight of the Alone to the Alone.” [136] It provides the
material, the substance, upon which mystical philosophy cogitates; as
theologians cogitate upon the revelation which forms the basis of faith.
Hence those whom we are to accept as mystics must have received, and acted
upon, intuitions of a Truth which is for them absolute. If we are to
acknowledge that they “knew the doctrine” they must have “lived the life”;
submitted to the interior travail of the Mystic Way, not merely have
reasoned about the mystical experiences of others. We could not well
dispense with our Christian Platonists and mystical philosophers. They are
our stepping-stones to higher things; interpret to our dull minds, entangled
in the sense-world, the ardent vision of those who speak to us from the
dimension of Reality. But they are no more mystics than the milestones on
the Dover Road are travellers to Calais. Sometimes their words—the wistful
words of those who know but cannot be—produce mystics; as the sudden sight
of a signpost pointing to the sea will rouse the spirit of adventure in a
boy. Also there are many instances of true mystics, such as Eckhart, who
have philosophized upon their own experiences, greatly to the advantage of
the world; and others—Plotinus is the most characteristic example—of
Platonic philosophers who have passed far beyond the limits of their own
philosophy, and abandoned the making of diagrams for an experience, however
imperfect, of the reality at which these diagrams hint. It were more
accurate to reverse the epigram above stated, and say, that Platonism is the
reaction of the intellectualist upon mystical truth.

Over and over again the great mystics tell us, not how they speculated, but
how they acted. To them, the transition from the life of sense to the life
of spirit is a formidable undertaking, which demands effort and constancy.
The paradoxical “quiet” of the contemplative is but the outward stillness
essential to inward work. Their favourite symbols are those of action:
battle, search, and pilgrimage.


“In an obscure night

Fevered with love’s anxiety

(O hapless, happy plight!)

I went , none seeing me

Forth from my house, where all things quiet be,” [137]

said St. John of the Cross, in his poem of the mystic quest.

“It became evident to me,” says Al Ghazzali of his own search for mystic
truth, “that the Sufis are men of intuition and not men of words. I
recognized that I had learnt all that can be learnt of Sufiism by study, and
that the rest could not be learnt by study or by speech.” [138] “Let no one
suppose,” says the “Theologia Germanica,” “that we may attain to this true
light and perfect knowledge . . . by hearsay, or by reading and study, nor
yet by high skill and great learning.” [139] “It is not enough,” says Gerlac
Petersen, “to know by estimation merely: but we must know by experience.”
[140] So Mechthild of Magdeburg says of her revelations, “The writing of
this book was seen, heard, and experienced in every limb. . . . I see it
with the eyes of my soul, and hear it with the ears of my eternal spirit.”
[141]

Those who suppose mystical experience to be merely a pleasing consciousness
of the Divine in the world, a sense of the “otherness” of things, a basking
in the beams of the Uncreated Light, are only playing with Reality. True
mystical achievement is the most complete and most difficult expression of
life which is as yet possible to man. It is at once an act of love, an act
of surrender, and an act of supreme perception; a trinity of experiences
which meets and satisfies the three activities of the self. Religion might
give us the first and metaphysics the third of these processes. Only
Mysticism can offer the middle term of the series; the essential link which
binds the three in one. “Secrets,” says St. Catherine of Siena, “are
revealed to a friend who has become one thing with his friend and not to a
servant.” [142]

(2) Mysticism is an entirely Spiritual Activity.

This rule provides us with a further limitation, which of course excludes
all the practisers of magic and of magical religion: even in their most
exalted and least materialistic forms. As we shall see when we come to
consider these persons, their object—not necessarily an illegitimate one—is
to improve and elucidate the visible by help of the invisible: to use the
supernormal powers of the self for the increase of power, virtue, happiness
or knowledge. The mystic never turns back on himself in this way, or tries
to combine the advantages of two worlds. At the term of his development he
knows God by communion, and this direct intuition of the Absolute kills all
lesser cravings. He possesses God, and needs nothing more. Though he will
spend himself unceasingly for other men, become “an agent of the Eternal
Goodness,” he is destitute of supersensual ambitions and craves no occult
knowledge or power. Having his eyes set on eternity, his consciousness
steeped in it, he can well afford to tolerate the entanglements of time.
“His spirit,” says Tauler, “is as it were sunk and lost in the Abyss of the
Deity, and loses the consciousness of all creature-distinctions. All things
are gathered together in one with the divine sweetness, and the man’s being
is so penetrated with the divine substance that he loses himself therein, as
a drop of water is lost in a cask of strong wine. And thus the man’s spirit
is so sunk in God in divine union, that he loses all sense of distinction .
. . and there remains a secret, still union, without cloud or colour.” [143]
“I wish not,” said St. Catherine of Genoa, “for anything that comes forth
from Thee, but only for Thee, oh sweetest Love!” [144] “Whatever share of
this world,” says Rabi’a, “Thou dost bestow on me, bestow it on Thine
enemies, and whatever share of the next world thou dost give me, give it to
Thy friends. Thou art enough for me!” [145] “The Soul,” says Plotinus in one
of his most profound passages, “having now arrived at the desired end, and
participating of Deity, will know that the Supplier of true life is then
present. She will likewise then require nothing farther; for, on the
contrary it will be requisite to lay aside other things, to stop in this
alone, amputating everything else with which she is surrounded.” [146]

(3) The business and method of Mysticism is Love.

Here is one of the distinctive notes of true mysticism; marking it off from
every other kind of transcendental theory and practice and providing the
answer to the question with which our last chapter closed. It is the eager,
outgoing activity whose driving power is generous love, not the absorbent,
indrawing activity which strives only for new knowledge, that is fruitful in
the spiritual as well as in the physical world.

Having said this, however, we must add—as we did when speaking of the
“heart”—that the word Love as applied to the mystics is to be understood in
its deepest, fullest sense; as the ultimate expression of the self’s most
vital tendencies, not as the superficial affection or emotion often
dignified by this name. Mystic Love is a total dedication of the will; the
deep-seated desire and tendency of the soul towards its Source. It is a
condition of humble access, a life-movement of the self: more direct in its
methods, more valid in its results—even in the hands of the least lettered
of its adepts—than the most piercing intellectual vision of the greatest
philosophic mind. Again and again the mystics insist upon this. “For silence
is not God, nor speaking is not God; fasting is not God nor eating is not
God; onliness is not God nor company is not God; nor yet any of all the
other two such quantities, He is hid between them, and may not be found by
any work of thy soul, but all only by love of thine heart. He may not be
known by reason, He may not be gotten by thought, nor concluded by
understanding; but he may be loved and chosen with the true lovely will of
thine heart. . . . Such a blind shot with the sharp dart of longing love may
never fail of the prick, the which is God.” [147]

“‘Come down quickly,’” says the Incomprehensible Godhead to the soul that
has struggled like Zaccheus to the topmost branches of the theological tree,
“‘for I would dwell with you to-day.’ And this hasty descent to which he is
summoned by God is simply a descent by love and desire in to that abyss of
the Godhead which the intellect cannot understand. But where intelligence
must rest without, love and desire can enter in.” [148]

Volumes of extracts might be compiled from the works of the mystics
illustrative of this rule, which is indeed their central principle. “Some
there are,” says Plotinus, “that for all their effort have not attained the
Vision; the soul in them has come to no sense of the splendour there. It has
not taken warmth; it has not felt burning within itself the flame of love
for what is there to know.” [149] “Love,” says Rolle, “truly suffers not a
loving soul to bide in itself, but ravishes it out to the Lover, that the
soul is more there where it loves, than where the body is that lives and
feels it.” “Oh singular joy of love everlasting,” he says again, “that
ravishes all his to heavens above all worlds, them binding with bands of
virtue! Oh dear charity, in earth that has thee not is nought wrought,
whatever it hath! He truly in thee that is busy, to joy above earthly is
soon lifted! Thou makest men contemplative, heaven-gate thou openest, mouths
of accusers thou dost shut, God thou makest to be seen and multitude of sins
thou hidest. We praise thee, we preach thee, by thee the world we quickly
overcome, by whom we joy and the heavenly ladder we ascend.” [150]

Love to the mystic, then, is (a) the active, conative, expression of his
will and desire for the Absolute; (b) his innate tendency to that Absolute,
his spiritual weight. He is only thoroughly natural, thoroughly alive, when
he is obeying its voice. For him it is the source of joy, the secret of the
universe, the vivifying principle of things. In the words of Récéjac,
“Mysticism claims to be able to know the Unknowable without any help from
dialectics; and believes that, by the way of love and will it reaches a
point to which thought alone is unable to attain.” Again, “It is the heart
and never the reason which leads us to the Absolute.” [151] Hence in St.
Catherine of Siena’s exquisite allegory it is the feet of the soul’s
affection which brings it first to the Bridge, “for the feet carry the body
as affection carries the soul.” [152]

The jewels of mystical literature glow with this intimate and impassioned
love of the Absolute; which transcends the dogmatic language in which it is
clothed and becomes applicable to mystics of every race and creed. There is
little difference in this between the extremes of Eastern and Western
thought: between A Kempis the Christian and Jalalu ‘d Din the Moslem saint.

“How great a thing is Love, great above all other goods: for alone it makes
all that is heavy light, and bears evenly all that is uneven. . . .

“Love would be aloft, nor will it be kept back by any lower thing. Love
would be free, and estranged from all worldly affection, that its inward
sight be not hindered: that it may not be entangled by any temporal comfort,
nor succumb to any tribulation.

“Nought is sweeter than love, nought stronger, nought higher, nought wider:
there is no more joyous, fuller, better thing in heaven or earth. For love
is born of God, and cannot rest save in God, above all created things.

“The lover flies, runs, and, rejoices: he is free, and cannot be restrained.
He gives all for all, and has all in all; for he rests in One Supreme above
all, from whom all good flows and proceeds.

“He looks not at the gift, but above all goods turns himself to the giver.

“. . . He who loves knows the cry of this voice. For this burning affection
of the soul is a loud cry in the ears of God when it saith ‘My God, My Love,
Thou art all mine, and I am all Thine.’” [153]

So much for the Christian. Now for the Persian mystic.


“While the thought of the Beloved fills our hearts

All our work is to do Him service and spend life for Him.

Wherever He kindles His destructive torch

Myriads of lovers’ souls are burnt therewith.

The lovers who dwell within the sanctuary

Are moths burnt with the torch of the Beloved’s face.

O heart, hasten thither! for God will shine upon you,

And seem to you a sweet garden instead of a terror.

He will infuse into your soul a new soul,

So as to fill you, like a goblet, with wine.

Take up your abode in His Soul!

Take up your abode in heaven, oh bright full moon!

Like the heavenly Scribe, He will open your heart’s book

That he may reveal mysteries unto you.” [154]

Well might Hilton say that “Perfect love maketh God and the soul to be as if
they both together were but one thing,” [155] and Tauler that “the well of
life is love, and he who dwelleth not in love is dead.” [156]

These, nevertheless, are objective and didactic utterances; though their
substance may be—probably is—personal, their form is not. But if we want to
see what it really means to be “in love with the Absolute,”—how intensely
actual to the mystic is the Object of his passion, how far removed from the
spheres of pious duty or philosophic speculation, how concrete, positive and
dominant such a passion may be—we must study the literature of
autobiography, not that of poetry or exhortation. I choose for this purpose,
rather than the well-known self-analyses of St. Augustine, St. Teresa or
Suso, which are accessible to every one, the more private confessions of
that remarkable mystic Dame Gertrude More, contained in her “Spiritual
Exercises.”

This nun, great-great-granddaughter of Sir Thomas More, and favourite pupil
of the celebrated Benedictine contemplative, the Ven. Augustine Baker,
exhibits the romantic and personal side of mysticism more perfectly than
even St. Teresa, whose works were composed for her daughters’ edification.
She was an eager student of St. Augustine, “my deere deere Saint,” as she
calls him more than once. He had evidently influenced her language; but her
passion is her own.

Remember that Gertrude More’s confessions represent the most secret
conversations of her soul with God. They were not meant for publication;
but, written for the most part on blank leaves in her breviary, were
discovered and published after her death. “She called them,” says the
title-page with touching simplicity, “ Amor ordinem nescit: an Ideot’s
Devotions. Her only spiritual father and directour, Father Baker, styled
them Confessiones Amantis, A Lover’s Confessions. Amans Deum anima sub Deo
despicit universa. A soul that loveth God despiseth all things that be
inferiour unto God.” [157]

The spirit of her little book is summed up in two epigrams: epigrams of
which her contemporary, Crashaw, might have been proud. “To give all for
love is a most sweet bargain.” [158] “O let me love, or not live!” [159]
Love indeed was her life: and she writes of it with a rapture which recalls
at one moment the exuberant poetry of Jacopene da Todi, at another the love
songs of the Elizabethan poets.

“Never was there or can there be imagined such a Love, as is between an
humble soul and thee. Who can express what passeth between such a soul and
thee? Verily neither man nor Angell is able to do it sufficiently. . . . In
thy prayse I am only happy, in which, my Joy, I will exult with all that
love thee. For what can be a comfort while I live separated from thee, but
only to remember that my God, who is more myne than I am my owne, is
absolutely and infinitely happy? . . . Out of this true love between a soul
and thee, there ariseth such a knowledge in the soul that it loatheth all
that is an impediment to her further proceeding in the Love of thee. O Love,
Love, even by naming thee, my soul loseth itself in thee. . . . Nothing can
Satiate a reasonable soul but only thou: and having of thee, who art indeed
all, nothing could be said to be wanting to her. . . . Blessed are the
cleans of hart for they shall see God. O sight to be wished, desired, and
longed for; because once to have seen thee is to have learnt all things.
Nothing can bring us to this sight but love. But what love must it be? not a
sensible love only, a childish love, a love which seeketh itself more than
the beloved. No, no, but it must be an ardent love, a pure love, a
courageous love, a love of charity, an humble love, and a constant love, not
worn out with labours, not daunted with any difficulties. . . . For that
soul that hath set her whole love and desire on thee, can never find any
true satisfaction, but only in thee.” [160]

Who will not see that we have here no literary exercise, but the fruits of
an experience of peculiar intensity? It answers exactly to one of the best
modern definitions of mysticism as “in essence, the concentration of all the
forces of the soul upon a supernatural Object, conceived and loved as a
living Person.“ [161] “Love and desire,” says the same critic, “are the
fundamental necessities; and where they are absent man, even though he be a
visionary, cannot be called a mystic.” [162] Such a definition, of course,
is not complete. It is valuable however, because it emphasizes the fact that
all true mysticism is rooted in personality; and is therefore fundamentally
a science of the heart.

Attraction, desire, and union as the fulfilment of desire; this is the way
Life works, in the highest as in the lowest things. The mystic’s outlook,
indeed, is the lover’s outlook. It has the same element of wildness, the
same quality of selfless and quixotic devotion, the same combination of
rapture and humility. This parallel is more than a pretty fancy: for mystic
and lover, upon different planes, are alike responding to the call of the
Spirit of Life. The language of human passion is tepid and insignificant
beside the language in which the mystics try to tell the splendours of their
love. They force upon the unprejudiced reader the conviction that they are
dealing with an ardour far more burning for an Object far more real.

“This monk can give lessons to lovers!” exclaimed Arthur Symons in
astonishment of St. John of the Cross. [163] It would be strange if he could
not; since their finite passions are but the feeble images of his infinite
one, their beloved the imperfect symbol of his First and only Fair. “I saw
Him and sought Him: I had Him and I wanted Him,” says Julian of Norwich, in
a phrase which seems to sum up all the ecstasy and longing of man’s soul.
Only this mystic passion can lead us from our prison. Its brother, the
desire of knowledge, may enlarge and improve the premises to an extent as
yet undreamed of: but it can never unlock the doors.

(4) Mysticism entails a definite Psychological Experience.

That is to say, it shows itself not merely as an attitude of mind and heart,
but as a form of organic life. It is not only a theory of the intellect or a
hunger, however passionate, of the heart. It involves the organizing of the
whole self, conscious and unconscious, under the spur of such a hunger: a
remaking of the whole character on high levels in the interests of the
transcendental life. The mystics are emphatic in their statement that
spiritual desires are useless unless they initiate this costly movement of
the whole self towards the Real.

Thus in the visions of Mechthild of Magdeburg, “The soul spake thus to her
Desire, ‘Fare forth and see where my Love is. Say to him that I desire to
love.’ So Desire sped forth, for she is quick of her nature, and came to the
Empyrean and cried, ‘Great Lord, open and let me in!’ Then said the
Householder of that place: ‘What means this fiery eagerness?’ Desire
replied, ‘Lord I would have thee know that my lady can no longer bear to
live. If Thou wouldst flow forth to her, then might she swim: but the fish
cannot long exist that is left stranded on the shore.’ ‘Go back,’ said the
Lord, ‘I will not let thee in unless thou bring to me that hungry soul, for
it is in this alone that I take delight.’” [164]

We have said [165] that the full mystic consciousness is extended in two
distinct directions. So too there are two distinct sides to the full
mystical experience. (A) The vision or consciousness of Absolute Perfection.
(B) The inward transmutation to which that Vision compels the mystic, in
order that he may be to some extent worthy of that which he has beheld: may
take his place within the order of Reality. He has seen the Perfect; he
wants to be perfect too. The “third term,” the necessary bridge between the
Absolute and the Self, can only, he feels, be moral and spiritual
transcendence—in a word, Sanctity— for “the only means of attaining the
Absolute lies in adapting ourselves to It.” [166] The moral virtues are for
him, then, the obligatory “ornaments of the Spiritual Marriage” as
Ruysbroeck called them: though far more than their presence is needed to
bring that marriage about. Unless this impulse for moral perfection be born
in him, this travail of the inner life begun, he is no mystic: though he may
well be a visionary, a prophet, a “mystical” poet.

Moreover, this process of transmutation, this rebuilding of the self on
higher levels, will involve the establishment within the field of
consciousness, the making “central for life,” of those subconscious
spiritual perceptions which are the primary material of mystical experience.
The end and object of this “inward alchemy” will be the raising of the whole
self to the condition in which conscious and permanent union with the
Absolute takes place and man, ascending to the summit of his manhood, enters
into that greater life for which he was made. In its journey towards this
union, the subject commonly passes through certain well-marked phases, which
constitute what is known as the “Mystic Way.” This statement rules out from
the true mystic kingdom all merely sentimental and affective piety and
visionary poetry, no less than mystical philosophy. It brings us back to our
first proposition—the concrete and practical nature of the mystical act.

More than the apprehension of God, then, more than the passion for the
Absolute, is needed to make a mystic. These must be combined with an
appropriate psychological make-up, with a nature capable of extraordinary
concentration, an exalted moral emotion, a nervous organization of the
artistic type. All these are necessary to the successful development of the
mystic life process. In the experience of those mystics who have left us the
records of their own lives, the successive stages of this life process are
always traceable. In the second part of this book, they will be found worked
out at some length. Rolle, Suso, St. Teresa, and many others have left us
valuable self-analyses for comparison: and from them we see how arduous, how
definite, and how far removed from mere emotional or intellectual activity,
is that educational discipline by which “the eye which looks upon
Eternity” is able to come to its own. “One of the marks of the true
mystic,” says Leuba—by no means a favourable witness—“is the tenacious and
heroic energy with which he pursues a definite moral ideal.” [167] “He
is,” says Pacheu, “the pilgrim of an inward Odyssey.” [168] Though we may be
amazed and delighted by his adventures and discoveries on the way, to him
the voyage and the end are all. “The road on which we enter is a royal road
which leads to heaven,” says St. Teresa. “Is it strange that the conquest of
such a treasure should cost us rather dear?” [169]

It is one of the many indirect testimonies to the objective reality of
mysticism that the stages of this road, the psychology of the spiritual
ascent, as described to us by different schools of contemplatives, always
present practically the same sequence of states. The “school for saints” has
never found it necessary to bring its curriculum up to date. The
psychologist finds little difficulty, for instance, in reconciling the
“Degrees of Orison” described by St. Teresa [170] —Recollection, Quiet,
Union, Ecstasy, Rapt, the “Pain of God,” and the Spiritual Marriage of the
soul—with the four forms of contemplation enumerated by Hugh of St. Victor,
or the Sufi’s “Seven Stages” of the soul’s ascent to God, which begin in
adoration and end in spiritual marriage. [171] Though each wayfarer may
choose different landmarks, it is clear from their comparison that the road
is one.

(5) As a corollary to these four rules, it is perhaps well to reiterate the
statement already made, that True Mysticism is never self-seeking. It is
not, as many think, the pursuit of supernatural joys; the satisfaction of a
high ambition. The mystic does not enter on his quest because he desires the
happiness of the Beatific Vision, the ecstasy of union with the Absolute, or
any other personal reward. That noblest of all passions, the passion for
perfection for Love’s sake, far outweighs the desire for transcendental
satisfaction. “O Love,” said St. Catherine of Genoa, “I do not wish to
follow thee for sake of these delights, but solely from the motive of true
love.” [172] Those who do otherwise are only, in the plain words of St. John
of the Cross, “spiritual gluttons”: [173] or, in the milder metaphor here
adopted, magicians of the more high-minded sort. The true mystic claims no
promises and makes no demands. He goes because he must, as Galahad went
towards the Grail: knowing that for those who can live it, this alone is
life. He never rests in that search for God which he holds to be the
fulfilment of his highest duty; yet he seeks without any certainty of
success. He holds with St. Bernard that “He alone is God who can never be
sought in vain: not even when He cannot be found.” [174] With Mechthild of
Magdeburg, he hears the Absolute saying in his soul, “O soul, before the
world was I longed for thee: and I still long for thee, and thou for Me.
Therefore, when our two desires unite, Love shall be fulfilled.” [175]

Like his type, the “devout lover” of romance, then, the mystic serves
without hope of reward. By one of the many paradoxes of the spiritual life,
he obtains satisfaction because he does not seek it; completes his
personality because he gives it up. “Attainment,” says Dionysius the
Areopagite in words which are writ large on the annals of Christian ecstasy,
“comes only by means of this sincere, spontaneous, and entire surrender of
yourself and all things.” [176] Only with the annihilation of selfhood comes
the fulfilment of love. Were the mystic asked the cause of his often
extraordinary behaviour, his austere and steadfast quest, it is unlikely
that his reply would contain any reference to sublime illumination or
unspeakable delights. It is more probable that he would answer in some such
words as those of Jacob Boehme, “I am not come to this meaning, or to this
work and knowledge through my own reason or through my own will and purpose;
neither have I sought this knowledge, nor so much as to know anything
concerning it. I sought only for the heart of God, therein to hide
myself.” [177]

“Whether we live or whether we die,” said St. Paul, “we are the Lord’s.” The
mystic is a realist, to whom these words convey not a dogma but an
invitation: an invitation to the soul to attain that fullness of life for
which she was made, to “lose herself in That which can be neither seen nor
touched; giving herself entirely to this sovereign Object without belonging
either to herself or to others; united to the Unknown by the most noble part
of herself and because of her renouncement of knowledge; finally drawing
from this absolute ignorance a knowledge which the understanding knows not
how to attain. [178] Mysticism, then, is seen as the “one way out” for the
awakened spirit of man; healing that human incompleteness which is the
origin of our divine unrest. “I am sure,” says Eckhart, “that if a soul knew
the very least of all that Being means, it would never turn away from it.”
[179] The mystics have never turned away: to do so would have seemed to them
a self-destructive act. Here, in this world of illusion, they say, we have
no continuing city. This statement, to you a proposition, is to us the
central fact of life. “Therefore, it is necessary to hasten our departure
from hence, and detach ourselves in so far as we may from the body to which
we are fettered, in order that with the whole of our selves, we may fold
ourselves about Divinity, and have no part void of contact with Him.” [180]

To sum up. Mysticism is seen to be a highly specialized form of that search
for reality, for heightened and completed life, which we have found to be a
constant characteristic of human consciousness. It is largely prosecuted by
that “spiritual spark,” that transcendental faculty which, though the life
of our life, remains below the threshold in ordinary men. Emerging from its
hiddenness in the mystic, it gradually becomes the dominant factor in his
life; subduing to its service, and enhancing by its saving contact with
reality, those vital powers of love and will which we attribute to the
heart, rather than those of mere reason and perception, which we attribute
to the head. Under the spur of this love and will, the whole personality
rises in the acts of contemplation and ecstasy to a level of consciousness
at which it becomes aware of a new field of perception. By this awareness,
by this “loving sight,” it is stimulated to a new life in accordance with
the Reality which it has beheld. So strange and exalted is this life, that
it never fails to provoke either the anger or the admiration of other men.
“If the great Christian mystics,” says Leuba, “could by some miracle be all
brought together in the same place, each in his habitual environment, there
to live according to his manner, the world would soon perceive that they
constitute one of the most amazing and profound variations of which the
human race has yet been witness.” [181]

A discussion of mysticism, regarded as a form of human life, will therefore
include two branches. First the life process of the mystic: the remaking of
his personality; the method by which his peculiar consciousness of the
Absolute is attained, and faculties which have been evolved to meet the
requirements of the phenomenal, are enabled to do work on the
transcendental, plane. This is the “Mystic Way” in which the self passes
through the states or stages of development which were codified by the
Neoplatonists, and after them by the mediaeval mystics, as Purgation,
Illumination, and Ecstasy. Secondly, the content of the mystical field of
perception; the revelation under which the contemplative becomes aware of
the Absolute. This will include a consideration of the so called doctrines
of mysticism: the attempts of the articulate mystic to sketch for us the
world into which he has looked, in language which is only adequate to the
world in which the rest of us dwell. Here the difficult question of
symbolism, and of symbolic theology, comes in: a point upon which many
promising expositions of the mystics have been wrecked. It will be our
business to strip off as far as may be the symbolic wrapping, and attempt a
synthesis of these doctrines; to resolve the apparent contradictions of
objective and subjective revelations, of the ways of negation and
affirmation, emanation and immanence, surrender and deification, the Divine
Dark and the Inward Light; and finally to exhibits if we can, the essential
unity of that experience in which the human soul enters consciously into the
Presence of God.
_________________________________________________________________

[111] See “Varieties of Religious Experience,” p. 387, “The Drunken
Consciousness is a bit of the Mystic Consciousness.”

[112] Llama de Amor Viva, II. 26.

[113] Compare above, pp. 24, 26, 57.

[114] J. A. Stewart, “The Myths of Plato,” p. 40.

[115] “Descriptive Catalogue.”

[116] See T. Rolleston, “Parallel Paths.”

[117] Laurence Binyon, “Painting in the Far East,” p. 9.

[118] “The Mirror of Simple Souls,” Pt. III, cap. 1.

[119] Par. xxxiii. 139. “Not for this were my wings fitted: save only that
my mind was smitten by a lightning flash wherein came to it its desire.”

[120] In this connexion Godfernaux ( Revue Philosophique, February, 1902)
has a highly significant remark to the effect that romanticism represents
the invasion of secular literature by mystic or religious emotion. It is, he
says, the secularization of the inner life. Compare also Bremond, “Prière et
Poesie.”

[121] I take from Hebert’s monograph “Le Divin” two examples of the analogy
between mystical and musical emotion. First that of Gay, who had “the soul,
the heart, and the head full of music, of another beauty than that which is
formulated by sounds.” Next that of Ruysbroeck, who, in a passage that might
have been written by Keats, speaks of contemplation and Love as “two
heavenly pipes” which, blown upon by the Holy Spirit, play “ditties of no
tone” ( op. cit . p. 29).

[122] Hugh of St. Victor, “Didascalicon de Studio Legendi.”

[123] “Fioretti.” Delle Istimati. (Arnold’s translation.)

[124] Richard Rolle, ‘The Fire of Love” (Early English Text Society), bk. i.
cap. xv. In this and subsequent quotations from Rolle’s Incendium Amoris I
have usually adopted Misyn’s fifteenth-century translation; slightly
modernizing the spelling, and, where necessary, correcting from the Latin
his errors and obscurities.

[125] Op. cit., bk. i. cap. xxiii. Compare bk. ii. caps. v. and vi.

[126] “Spiritual Exercises,” p. 30.

[127] Op. cit., bk. i. cap. xv.

[128] Op. cit., bk. ii. caps, iii. and xii. Shelley is of the same
opinion:— “The world can hear not the sweet notes that move The Sphere whose
light is melody to lovers.” (“The Triumph of Life “)

[129] “Subida del Monte Carmelo,” I. ii. cap. xv.

[130] “De Mystica Theologia,” i. 3.

[131] Von Hügel, “The Mystical Element of Religion,” vol. i. p. 189.

[132] “Varieties of Religious Experience,” p. 380.

[133] “Les Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique,” p. 45.

[134] Jámí. Quoted in “Jalalu ‘d Din” (Wisdom of the East Series), p. 25.

[135] “Through Scylla and Charybdis,” p. 264.

[136] Ennead vi. 9.

[137] “En una Noche Escura,” Stanza 1. I quote from Arthur Symons’s
beautiful translation, which will be found in vol. ii. of his Collected
Poems.

[138] Schmölders, “Les Écoles Philosophiques chez les Arabes,” p. 55.

[139] Cap. xix.

[140] “Ignitum cum Deo Soliloquium,” cap. xi.

[141] “Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit,” pt. iv. cap, 13.

[142] Dialogo, cap. lx.

[143] Tauler, Sermon for Septuagesima Sunday (Winkworth’s translation, p.
253).

[144] Vita e Dottrina, cap. vi.

[145] M. Smith, “Rabi’a the Mystic,” p. 30.

[146] Ennead vi. 9.

[147] “An Epistle of Discretion.” This beautiful old English tract, probably
by the author of “The Cloud of Unknowing,” is printed by E. Gardner, ‘ The
Cell of Self Knowledge,” p. 108.

[148] Ruysbroeck, “De Ornatu Spiritalium Nuptiarum,” I. i. cap. xxvi.

[149] Ennead, vi. 9.

[150] “The Mending of Life,” cap. xi.

[151] “Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique,” p. 7.

[152] Dialogo, cap. xxvi.

[153] “De Imitatione Christi,” I. ii. cap. v.

[154] Jalalu ‘d Din (Wisdom of the East Series), p. 79.

[155] Treatise to a Devout Man, cap. viii.

[156] Sermon for Thursday in Easter Week (Winkworth’s translation, p. 294).

[157] They were printed in 1658, “At Paris by Lewis de la Fosse in the Carme
Street at the Signe of the Looking Glass,” and have lately been republished.
I quote from the original edition.

[158] P. 138.

[159] P. 181.

[160] Op. cit. pp. 9, 16, 25, 35, 138, 175.

[161] Berger, “William Blake,” p. 72.

[162] Ibid ., p. 74.

[163] Contemporary Review, April, 1899.

[164] “Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit,” pt. iii. cap. 1.

[165] Supra. p. 35.

[166] Récéjac, op. cit ., p. 35.

[167] Revue Philosophique, July, 1902.

[168] “Psychologie des Mystiques Chrétiens,” p 14.

[169] “Camino de Perfeccion,” cap. xxiii.

[170] In “El Castillo Interior.”

[171] See Palmer, “Oriental Mysticism,” pt. v. ch. v.

[172] Vita, p. 8.

[173] “Subida del Monte Carmelo,” I. ii. cap. vii.

[174] “De Consideratione,” I. v. cap. xi.

[175] “Das Fliessende Light der Gottheit,” pt. vii. cap. 16.

[176] “De Mystica Theologia,” i. 1.

[177] “Aurora,” English translation, 1764, p. 237.

[178] Dionysius the Areopagite. “De Mystica Theologia,” i. 3.

[179] “Mystische Schriften,” p. 137.

[180] Plotinus, Ennead vi. 9.

[181] Op. cit.
_________________________________________________________________

I n the last chapter we tried to establish a distinction between the mystic
who tastes supreme experience and the mystical philosopher who cogitates
upon the data so obtained. We have now, however, to take account of the fact
that often the true mystic is also a mystical philosopher; though there are
plenty of mystical philosophers who are not and could never be mystics.

Because it is characteristic of the human self to reflect upon its
experience, to use its percepts as material for the construction of a
concept, most mystics have made or accepted a theory of their own
adventures. Thus we have a mystical philosophy or theology—the comment of
the intellect on the proceedings of spiritual intuition—running side by side
with true or empirical mysticism: classifying its data, criticizing it,
explaining it, and translating its vision of the supersensible into symbols
which are amenable to dialectic.

Such a philosophy is most usually founded upon the formal creed which the
individual mystic accepts. It is characteristic of him that in so far as his
transcendental activities are healthy he is generally an acceptor and not a
rejector of such creeds. The view which regards the mystic as a spiritual
anarchist receives little support from history; which shows us, again and
again, the great mystics as faithful sons of the great religions. Almost any
religious system which fosters unearthly love is potentially a nursery for
mystics: and Christianity, Islam, Brahmanism, and Buddhism each receives its
most sublime interpretation at their hands. Thus St. Teresa interprets her
ecstatic apprehension of the Godhead in strictly Catholic terms, and St.
John of the Cross contrives to harmonize his intense transcendentalism with
incarnational and sacramental Christianity. Thus Boehme believed to the last
that his explorations of eternity were consistent with the teaching of the
Lutheran Church. The Sufis were good Mohammedans, Philo and the Kabalists
were orthodox Jews. Plotinus even adapted—though with what difficulty—the
relics of paganism to his doctrine of the Real.

Attempts, however, to limit mystical truth—the direct apprehension of the
Divine Substance—by the formula of any one religion, are as futile as the
attempt to identify a precious metal with the die which converts it into
current coin. The dies which the mystics have used are many. Their
peculiarities and excrescences are always interesting and sometimes highly
significant. Some give a far sharper, more coherent, impression than others.
But the gold from which this diverse coinage is struck is always the same
precious metal: always the same Beatific Vision of a Goodness, Truth, and
Beauty which is one. Hence its substance must always be distinguished from
the accidents under which we perceive it: for this substance has an
absolute, and not a denominational, importance.

Nevertheless, if we are to understand the language of the mystics, it is
evident that we must know a little of accident as well as of substance: that
is to say, of the principal philosophies or religions which they have used
in describing their adventures to the world. This being so, before we
venture to apply ourselves to the exploration of theology proper, it will be
well to consider the two extreme forms under which both mystics and
theologians have been accustomed to conceive Divine Reality: that is to say,
the so-called “emanation-theory” and “immanence-theory” of the
transcendental world.

Emanation and Immanence are formidable words; which though perpetually
tossed to and fro by amateurs of religious philosophy, have probably, as
they stand, little actuality for practical modern men. They are, however,
root-ideas for the maker of mystical diagrams: and his best systems are but
attempts towards their reconciliation. Since the aim of every mystic is
union with God, it is obvious that the vital question in his philosophy must
be the place which this God, the Absolute of his quest, occupies in the
scheme. Briefly, He has been conceived—or, it were better to say,
presented—by the great mystics under two apparently contradictory modes.

(1) The opinion which is represented in its most extreme form by the theory
of Emanations, declares His utter transcendence. This view appears early in
the history of Greek philosophy. It is developed by Dionysius, by the
Kabalists, by Dante: and is implied in the language of Rulman Merswin, St.
John of the Cross and many other Christian ecstatics.

The solar system is an almost perfect symbol of this concept of Reality;
which finds at once its most rigid and most beautiful expression in Dante’s
“Paradiso.” [182] The Absolute Godhead is conceived as removed by a vast
distance from the material world of sense; the last or lowest of that system
of dependent worlds or states which, generated by or emanating from the
Unity or Central Sun, become less in spirituality and splendour, greater in
multiplicity, the further they recede from their source. That Source—the
Great Countenance of the Godhead—can never, say the Kabalists, be discerned
by man. It is the Absolute of the Neoplatonists, the Unplumbed Abyss of
later mysticism: the Cloud of Unknowing wraps it from our sight. Only by its
“emanations” or manifested attributes can we attain knowledge of it. By the
outflow of these same manifested attributes and powers the created universe
exists, depending in the last resort on the latens Deitas: Who is therefore
conceived as external to the world which He illuminates and vivifies.

St. Thomas Aquinas virtually accepts the doctrine of Emanations when he
writes: [183] “As all the perfections of Creatures descend in order from
God, who is the height of perfection, man should begin from the lower
creatures and ascend by degrees, and so advance to the knowledge of God. . .
. And because in that roof and crown of all things, God, we find the most
perfect unity, and everything is stronger and more excellent the more
thoroughly it is one; it follows that diversity and variety increase in
things, the further they are removed from Him who is the first principle of
all.” Suso, whose mystical system, like that of most Dominicans, is entirely
consistent with Thomist philosophy, is really glossing Aquinas when he
writes: “The supreme and superessential Spirit has ennobled man by
illuminating him with a ray from the Eternal Godhead. . . . Hence from out
the great ring which represents the Eternal Godhead there flow forth . . .
little rings, which may be taken to signify the high nobility of natural
creatures.” [184]

Obviously, if this theory of the Absolute be accepted the path of the
soul’s ascent to union with the divine must be literally a transcendence: a
journey “upward and outward,” through a long series of intermediate states
or worlds till, having traversed the “Thirty-two paths of the Tree of
Life,” she at last arrives, in Kabalistic language, at the Crown: fruitive
knowledge of God, the Abyss or Divine Dark of the Dionysian school, the
Neoplatonic One. Such a series of worlds is symbolized by the Ten Heavens of
Dante, the hierarchies of Dionysius, the Tree of Life or Sephiroth of the
Kabalah: and receives its countersign in the inward experience, in the long
journey of the self through Purgation and Illumination to Union. “We
ascend,” says St. Augustine, “thy ways that be in our heart, and sing a song
of degrees; we glow inwardly with thy fire, with thy good fire, and we go,
because we go upwards to the peace of Jerusalem.” [185]

This theory postulates, under normal and non-mystical conditions, the
complete separation of the human and the divine; the temporal and the
eternal worlds. “Never forget,” says St. John of the Cross, “that God is
inaccessible. Ask not therefore how far your powers may comprehend Him, your
feeling penetrate Him. Fear thus to content yourself with too little, and
deprive your soul of the agility which it needs in order to mount up to
Him.” [186] The language of pilgrimage, of exile, comes naturally to the
mystic who apprehends reality under these terms. To him the mystical
adventure is essentially a “going forth” from his normal self and from his
normal universe. Like the Psalmist “in his heart he hath disposed to ascend
by steps in this vale of tears” from the less to the more divine. He, and
with him the Cosmos—for to mystical philosophy the soul of the individual
subject is the microcosm of the soul of the world—has got to retrace the
long road to the Perfection from which it originally came forth; as the fish
in Rulman Merswin’s Vision of Nine Rocks must struggle upwards from pool to
pool until they reach their Origin.

Such a way of conceiving Reality accords with the type of mind which William
James called the “sick soul.” [187] It is the mood of the penitent; of the
utter humility which, appalled by the sharp contrast between itself and the
Perfect which it contemplates, can only cry “out of the depths.” It comes
naturally to the temperament which leans to pessimism, which sees a “great
gulf fixed” between itself and its desire, and is above all things sensitive
to the elements of evil and imperfection in its own character and in the
normal experience of man. Permitting these elements to dominate its field of
consciousness, wholly ignoring the divine aspect of the World of Becoming,
such a temperament constructs from its perceptions and prejudices the
concept of a material world and a normal self which are very far from God.

(2) Immanence. At the opposite pole from this way of sketching Reality is
the extreme theory of Immanence, which plays so large a part in modern
theology. To the holders of this theory, who commonly belong to James’s
“healthy minded” or optimistic class, the quest of the Absolute is no long
journey, but a realization of something which is implicit in the self and in
the universe: an opening of the eyes of the soul upon the Reality in which
it is bathed. For them earth is literally “crammed with heaven.” “Thou wert
I, but dark was my heart, I knew not the secret transcendent,” says Téwekkul
Bég, a Moslem mystic of the seventeenth century. [188] This is always the
cry of the temperament which leans to a theology of immanence, once its eyes
are opened on the light. “God,” says Plotinus, “is not external to anyone,
but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that He is so.”
[189] In other and older words, “The Spirit of God is within you.” The
Absolute Whom all seek does not hold Himself aloof from an imperfect
material universe, but dwells within the flux of things: stands as it were
at the very threshold of consciousness and knocks awaiting the self’s slow
discovery of her treasures. “He is not far from any one of us, for in Him we
live and move and have our being,” is the pure doctrine of Immanence: a
doctrine whose teachers are drawn from amongst the souls which react more
easily to the touch of the Divine than to the sense of alienation and of
sin, and are naturally inclined to love rather than to awe.

Unless safeguarded by limiting dogmas, the theory of Immanence, taken alone,
is notoriously apt to degenerate into pantheism; and into those extravagant
perversions of the doctrine of “deification” in which the mystic holds his
transfigured self to be identical with the Indwelling God. It is the
philosophical basis of that practice of introversion, the turning inward of
the soul’s faculties in contemplation, which has been the “method” of the
great practical mystics of all creeds. That God, since He is in all—in a
sense, is all—may most easily be found within ourselves, is the doctrine of
these adventurers; [190] who, denying or ignoring the existence of those
intervening “worlds” or “planes” between the material world and the
Absolute, which are postulated by the theory of Emanations, claim with
Ruysbroeck that “by a simple introspection in fruitive love” they “meet God
without intermediary.” [191] They hear the Father of Lights “saying
eternally, without intermediary or interruption, in the most secret part of
the spirit, the one, unique, and abysmal Word.” [192]

This discovery of a “divine” essence or substance, dwelling, as Ruysbroeck
says, at the apex of man’s soul is that fundamental experience—found in some
form or degree in all genuine mystical religion—which provides the basis of
the New Testament doctrine of the indwelling spirit. It is, variously
interpreted, the “spark of the soul” of Eckhart, the “ground” of Tauler, the
Inward Light of the Quakers, the “Divine Principle” of some modern
transcendentalists; the fount and source of all true life. At this point
logical exposition fails mystic and theologian alike. A tangle of metaphors
takes its place. We are face to face with the “wonder of wonders”—that most
real, yet most mysterious, of all the experiences of religion, the union of
human and divine, in a nameless something which is “great enough to be God,
small enough to be me.” In the struggle to describe this experience, the
“spark of the soul,” the point of juncture, is at one moment presented to us
as the divine to which the self attains: at another, as that transcendental
aspect of the self which is in contact with God. On either hypothesis, it is
here that the mystic encounters Absolute Being. Here is his guarantee of
God’s immediate presence in the human heart; and, if in the human heart,
then in that universe of which man’s soul resumes in miniature the essential
characteristics.

According to the doctrine of Immanence, creation, the universe, could we see
it as it is, would be perceived as the self-development, the self-revelation
of this indwelling Deity. The world is not projected from the Absolute, but
immersed in God. “I understood,” says St. Teresa, “how our Lord was in all
things, and how He was in the soul: and the illustration of a sponge filled
with water was suggested to me.” [193] The world-process, then, is the slow
coming to fruition of that Divine Spark which is latent alike in the Cosmos
and in man. “If,” says Boehme, “thou conceivest a small minute circle, as
small as a grain of mustard seed, yet the Heart of God is wholly and
perfectly therein: and if thou art born in God, then there is in thyself (in
the circle of thy life) the whole Heart of God undivided.” [194] The idea of
Immanence has seldom been more beautifully expressed.

It is worth noticing that both the theological doctrines of reality which
have been acceptable to the mystics implicitly declare, as science does,
that the universe is not static but dynamic; a World of Becoming. According
to the doctrine of Immanence this universe is free, self-creative. The
divine action floods it: no part is more removed from the Godhead than any
other part. “God,” says Eckhart, “is nearer to me than I am to myself; He is
just as near to wood and stone, but they do not know it.” [195]

These two apparently contradictory explanations of the Invisible have both
been held, and that in their extreme form, by the mystics: who have found in
both adequate, and indeed necessary, diagrams by which to suggest something
of their rich experience of Reality. [196] Some of the least lettered and
most inspired amongst them—for instance, St. Catherine of Siena, Julian of
Norwich—and some of the most learned, as Dionysius the Areopagite and
Meister Eckhart, have actually used in their rhapsodies language appropriate
to both the theories of Emanation and of Immanence. It would seem, then,
that both these theories convey a certain truth; and that it is the business
of a sound mystical philosophy to reconcile them. It is too often forgotten
by quarrelsome partisans of a concrete turn of mind that at best all these
transcendental theories are only symbols, methods, diagrams; feebly
attempting the representation of an experience which in its fullness is
always the same, and of which the dominant characteristic is ineffability.
Hence they insist with tiresome monotony that Dionysius must be wrong if
Tauler be right: that it is absurd to call yourself the Friend of God if
unknowableness be that God’s first attribute: that Plato’s Perfect Beauty
and St. Catherine of Siena’s Accepter of Sacrifices cannot be the same: that
the “courteous and dear-worthy Lord” who said to Lady Julian, “My darling, I
am glad that thou art come to Me, in all thy woe I have ever been with
thee,” [197] rules out the formless and impersonal One of Plotinus, the
“triple circle” of Suso and Dante. Finally, that if God be truly immanent in
the material world it is either sin or folly to refuse that world in order
that we may find Him; and if introversion be right, a plan of the universe
which postulates intervening planes between Absolute Being and the
phenomenal world must be wrong.

Now as regards the mystics, of whom we hold both these doctrines, these ways
of seeing truth—for what else is a doctrine but that?—it is well to remind
ourselves that their teaching about the relation of the Absolute to the
finite, of God to the phenomenal world, must be founded in the first
instance on what they know by experience of the relation between that
Absolute and the individual self. This experience is the valid part of
mysticism, the thing which gives to it its unique importance amongst systems
of thought, the only source of its knowledge. Everything else is really
guessing aided by analogy. When therefore the mystic, applying to the
universe what he knows to be true in respect of his own soul, describes
Divine Perfection as very far removed from the material world, yet linked
with it by a graduated series of “emanations”—states or qualities which have
each of them something of the godlike, though they be not God—he is trying
to describe the necessary life-process which he has himself passed through
in the course of his purgation and spiritual ascent from the state of the
“natural man” to that other state of harmony with the spiritual universe,
sometimes called “deification,” in which he is able to contemplate, and
unite with, the divine. We have in the “Divina Commedia” a classic example
of such a twofold vision of the inner and the outer worlds: for Dante’s
journey up and out to the Empyrean Heaven is really an inward alchemy, an
ordering and transmuting of his nature, a purging of his spiritual sight
till—transcending all derived beatitude—it can look for an instant on the
Being of God.

The mystic assumes—because he tends to assume an orderly basis for
things—that there is a relation, an analogy, between this microcosm of
man’s self and the macrocosm of the world-self. Hence his experience, the
geography of the individual quest, appears to him good evidence of the
geography of the Invisible. Since he must transcend his natural life in
order to attain consciousness of God, he conceives of God as essentially
transcendent to the natural world. His description of that geography,
however—of his path in a land where there is no time and space, no inner and
no outer, up or down—will be conditioned by his temperament, by his powers
of observation, by the metaphor which comes most readily to his hand, above
all by his theological education. The so-called journey itself is a
psychological and spiritual experience: the purging and preparation of the
self, its movement to higher levels of consciousness, its unification with
that more spiritual but normally unconscious self which is in touch with the
transcendental order, and its gradual or abrupt entrance into union with the
Real. Sometimes it seems to the self that this performance is a retreat
inwards to that “ground of the soul” where, as St. Teresa says, “His Majesty
awaits us”: sometimes a going forth from the Conditioned to the
Unconditioned, the “supernatural flight” of Plotinus and Dionysius the
Areopagite. Both are but images under which the self conceives the process
of attaining conscious union with that God who is “at once immanent and
transcendent in relation to the Soul which shares His life.” [198]

He has got to find God. Sometimes his temperament causes him to lay most
stress on the length of the search; sometimes the abrupt rapture which
brings it to a close makes him forget that preliminary pilgrimage in which
the soul is “not outward bound but rather on a journey to its centre.” The
habitations of the Interior Castle through which St. Teresa leads us to that
hidden chamber which is the sanctuary of the indwelling God: the hierarchies
of Dionysius, ascending from the selfless service of the angels, past the
seraphs’ burning love, to the God enthroned above time and space: the
mystical paths of the Kabalistic Tree of Life which lead from the material
world of Malkuth through the universes of action and thought, by Mercy,
Justice and Beauty, to the Supernal Crown; [199] all these are different
ways of describing this same pilgrimage.

As every one is born a disciple of either Plato or Aristotle, so every human
soul leans to one of these two ways of apprehending reality. The artist, the
poet, every one who looks with awe and rapture on created things,
acknowledges in this act the Immanent God. The ascetic, and that
intellectual ascetic the metaphysician, turning from the created, denying
the senses in order to find afar off the uncreated, unconditioned Source, is
really—though often he knows it not—obeying that psychological law which
produced the doctrine of Emanations.

A good map then, a good mystical philosophy, will leave room for both these
ways of interpreting our experience. It will mark the routes by which many
different temperaments claim to have found their way to the same end. It
will acknowledge both the aspects under which the patria splendida Truth has
appeared to its lovers: the aspects which have called forth the theories of
emanation and immanence and are enshrined in the Greek and Latin names of
God. Deus, whose root means day, shining, the Transcendent Light; and Theos,
whose true meaning is supreme desire or prayer—the Inward Love—do not
contradict, but complete each other. They form, when taken together, an
almost perfect definition of that Godhead which is the object of the
mystic’s desire: the Divine Love which, immanent in the soul spurs on that
soul to union with the transcendent and Absolute Light—at once the source,
the goal, the life of created things.

The true mystic—the person with a genius for God—hardly needs a map himself.
He steers a compass course across the “vast and stormy sea of the divine.”
It is characteristic of his intellectual humility, however, that he is
commonly willing to use the map of the community in which he finds himself,
when it comes to showing other people the route which he has pursued.
Sometimes these maps have been adequate. More, they have elucidated the
obscure wanderings of the explorer; helped him; given him landmarks; worked
out right. Time after time he puts his finger on some spot—some great hill
of vision, some city of the soul—and says with conviction, “Here have I
been.” At other times the maps have embarrassed him, have refused to fit in
with his description. Then he has tried, as Boehme did and after him Blake,
to make new ones. Such maps are often wild in drawing, because good
draughtsmanship does not necessarily go with a talent for exploration.
Departing from the usual convention, they are hard—sometimes impossible—to
understand. As a result, the orthodox have been forced to regard their
makers as madmen or heretics: when they were really only practical men
struggling to disclose great matters by imperfect means.

Without prejudice to individual beliefs, and without offering an opinion as
to the exclusive truth of any one religious system or revelation—for here we
are concerned neither with controversy nor with apologetics—we are bound to
allow as a historical fact that mysticism, so far, has found its best map in
Christianity. Christian philosophy, especially that Neoplatonic theology
which, taking up and harmonizing all that was best in the spiritual
intuitions of Greece, India, and Egypt, was developed by the great doctors
of the early and mediaeval Church, supports and elucidates the revelations
of the individual mystic as no other system of thought has been able to do.

We owe to the great fathers of the first five centuries—to Clement of
Alexandria and Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine; above all to
Dionysius the Areopagite, the great Christian contemporary of Proclus—the
preservation of that mighty system of scaffolding which enabled the Catholic
mystics to build up the towers and bulwarks of the City of God. The peculiar
virtue of this Christian philosophy, that which marks its superiority to the
more coldly self-consistent systems of Greece, is the fact that it re-states
the truths of metaphysics in terms of personality: thus offering a third
term, a “living mediator” between the Unknowable God, the unconditioned
Absolute, and the conditioned self. This was the priceless gift which the
Wise Men received in return for their gold, frankincense, and myrrh. This
solves the puzzle which all explorers of the supersensible have sooner or
later to face: come si convenne l’imago al cerchio, [200] the reconciliation
of Infinite and intimate, both known and felt, but neither understood. Such
a third term, such a stepping-stone, was essential if mysticism were ever to
attain that active union that fullness of life which is its object, and
develop from a blind and egoistic rapture into fruitful and self-forgetting
love.

Where non-Christian mystics, as a rule, have made a forced choice between
the two great dogmatic expressions of their experience, ( a ) the long
pilgrimage towards a transcendent and unconditioned Absolute, ( b ) the
discovery of that Absolute in the “ground” or spiritual principle of the
self; it has been possible to Christianity, by means of her central doctrine
of the Trinity, to find room for both of them and to exhibit them as that
which they are in fact—the complementary parts of a whole. Even Dionysius,
the godfather of the emanation doctrine, combines with his scheme of
descending hierarchies the dogma of an indwelling God: and no writer is more
constantly quoted by Meister Eckhart, who is generally considered to have
preached immanence in its most extreme and pantheistic form.

Further, the Christian atmosphere is the one in which the individual mystic
has most often been able to develop his genius in a sane and fruitful way;
and an overwhelming majority of the great European contemplatives have been
Christians of a strong impassioned and personal type. This alone would
justify us in regarding it as embodying, at any rate in the West, the
substance of the true tradition: providing the “path of least resistance”
through which that tradition flows. The very heretics of Christianity have
often owed their attraction almost wholly to the mystical element in their
teachings. The Gnostics, the Fraticelli, the Brethren of the Free Spirit,
the Quietists, the Quakers, are instances of this. In others, it was to an
excessive reliance on reason when dealing with the suprarational, and a
corresponding absence of trust in mystical intuition that heresy was due.
Arius and Pelagius are heretics of this type.

The greatest mystics, however, have not been heretics but Catholic saints.
In Christianity the “natural mysticism” which like “natural religion,” is
latent in humanity, and at a certain point of development breaks out in
every race, came to itself; and attributing for the first time true and
distinct personality to its Object, brought into focus the confused and
unconditioned God which Neoplatonism had constructed from the abstract
concepts of philosophy blended with the intuitions of Indian ecstatics, and
made the basis of its meditations on the Real. It is a truism that the chief
claim of Christian philosophy on our respect does not lie in its
exclusiveness but in its Catholicity: in the fact that it finds truth in a
hundred different systems, accepts and elucidates Greek, Jewish, and Indian
thought, fuses them in a coherent theology, and says to speculative thinkers
of every time and place, “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare
I unto you.”

The voice of that Truth which spoke once for all on Calvary, and there
declared the ground plan of the universe, was heard more or less perfectly
by all the great seers, the intuitive leaders of men, the possessors of
genius for the Real. There are few of the Christian names of God which were
not known to the teachers of antiquity. To the Egyptians He was the Saviour,
to the Platonists the Good, Beautiful and True, to the Stoics the Father and
Companion. The very words of the Fourth Gospel are anticipated by Cleanthes.
Heracleitus knew the Energizing Fire of which St. Bonaventura and Mechthild
of Magdeburg speak. Countless mystics, from St. Augustine to St. John of the
Cross, echo again and again the language of Plotinus. It is true that the
differentia which mark off Christianity from all other religions are strange
and poignant: but these very differentia make of it the most perfect of
settings for the mystic life. Its note of close intimacy, of direct and
personal contact with a spiritual reality given here and now—its astonishing
combination of splendour and simplicity, of the sacramental and
transcendent—all these things minister to the needs of the mystical type.

Hence the Christian system, or some colourable imitation of it, has been
found essential by almost all the great mystics of the West. They adopt its
nomenclature, explain their adventures by the help of its creed, identify
their Absolute with the Christian God. Amongst European mystics the most
usually quoted exception to this rule is Blake; yet it is curious to notice
that the more inspired his utterance, the more passionately and dogmatically
Christian even this hater of the Churches becomes:—


“We behold

Where Death eternal is put off eternally. O Lamb

Assume the dark satanic body in the Virgin’s womb!

O Lamb divine ! it cannot thee annoy! O pitying One

Thy pity is from the foundation of the world, and thy Redemption

Begins already in Eternity.” [201]

This is the doctrine of the Incarnation in a nutshell: here St. Thomas
himself would find little to correct. Of the two following extracts from
“Jerusalem,” the first is but a poet’s gloss on the Catholic’s cry, “O felix
culpa!” the second is an almost perfect epitome of Christian theology and
ethics:—


“If I were pure, never could I taste the sweets

Of the forgiveness of sins. If I were holy I never could behold the tears

Of Love . . . O Mercy! O divine Humanity!

O Forgiveness, O Pity and Compassion! If I were pure I should never

Have known Thee.”

“Wouldst thou love one who never died

For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee?

And if God dieth not for man, and giveth not Himself

Eternally for Man, Man could not exist, for Man is Love

As God is Love. Every kindness to another is a little death

In the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by brotherhood.” [202]

Whether the dogmas of Christianity be or be not accepted on the scientific
and historical plane, then, those dogmas are necessary to an adequate
description of mystical experience—at least, of the fully developed dynamic
mysticism of the West. We must therefore be prepared in reading the works of
the contemplatives for much strictly denominational language; and shall be
wise if we preface the encounter by some consideration of this language, and
of its real meaning for those who use and believe it.

No one needs, I suppose, to be told that the two chief features of Christian
schematic theology are the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation. They
correlate and explain each other: forming together, for the Christian, the
“final key” to the riddle of the world. The history of practical and
institutional Christianity is the history of the attempt to exhibit their
meaning in space and time. The history of mystical philosophy is the
history—still incomplete—of the demonstration of their meaning in eternity.

Some form of Trinitarian dogma is found to be essential, as a method of
describing observed facts, the moment that mysticism begins either ( a ) to
analyse its own psychological conditions, or ( b ) to philosophize upon its
intuitive experience of God. It must, that is to say, divide the aspects
under which it knows the Godhead, if it is to deal with them in a fruitful
or comprehensible way. The Unconditioned One, which is, for Neoplatonic and
Catholic mystic alike, the final object of their quest, cannot of itself
satisfy the deepest instincts of humanity: for man is aware that diversity
in unity is a necessary condition if perfection of character is to be
expressed. Though the idea of unity alone may serve to define the End—and
though the mystics return to it again and again as a relief from that
“heresy of multiplicity” by which they are oppressed—it cannot by itself be
adequate to the description of the All.

The first question, then, must be—How many of such aspects are necessary to
a satisfactory presentment of the mystic’s position? How many faces of
Reality does he see? We observe that his experience involves at least a
twofold apprehension. ( a ) That Holy Spirit within, that Divine Life by
which his own life is transfused and upheld, and of which he becomes
increasingly conscious as his education proceeds. ( b ) That Transcendent
Spirit without, the “Absolute,” towards union with which the indwelling and
increasingly dominant spirit of love presses the developing soul. In his
ecstasy, it seems to the mystic that these two experiences of God become
one. But in the attempt to philosophize on his experiences he is bound to
separate them. Over and over again the mystics and their critics
acknowledge, explicitly or implicitly, the necessity of this discrimination
for human thought.

Thus even the rigid monotheism of Israel and Islam cannot, in the hands of
the Kabalists and the Sufis, get away from an essential dualism in the
mystical experience. According to the Zohar “God is considered as immanent
in all that has been created or emanated, and yet is transcendent to all.”
[203] So too the Sufis. God, they say, is to be contemplated (a) outwardly
in the imperfect beauties of the earth; (b) inwardly, by meditation.
Further, since He is One, and in all things, “to conceive one’s self as
separate from God is an error: yet only when one sees oneself as separate
from God, can one reach out to God. ” [204]

Thus Delacroix, speaking purely as a psychologist, and denying to the
mystical revelation—which he attributes exclusively to the normal content of
the subliminal mind—any transcendental value, writes with entire approval of
St. Teresa, that she “set up externally to herself the definite God of the
Bible, at the same time as she set up within her soul the confused God of
the Pseudo-Areopagite: the One of Neoplatonism. The first is her guarantee
of the orthodoxy of the second, and prevents her from losing herself in an
indistinction which is non-Christian. The confused God within is highly
dangerous. . . . St. Teresa knew how to avoid this peril, and, served by her
rich subconscious life, by the exaltation of her mental images, by her
faculty of self-division on the one hand, on the other by her rare powers of
unification, she realized simultaneously a double state in which the two
Gods [ i.e. , the two ways of apprehending God, transcendence and immanence]
were guarantees of each other, mutually consolidating and enriching one
another: such is the intellectual vision of the Trinity in the Seventh
Habitation.” [205]

It is probable that St. Teresa, confronted by this astonishing analysis,
would have objected that her Trinity, unlike that of her eulogist, consisted
of three and not two Persons. His language concerning confused interior and
orthodox exterior Gods would certainly have appeared to her delicate and
honest mind both clumsy and untrue: nor could she have allowed that the
Unconditioned One of the Neoplatonists was an adequate description of the
strictly personal Divine Majesty, Whom she found enthroned in the inmost
sanctuary of the Castle of the Soul. What St. Teresa really did was to
actualize in her own experience, apprehend in the “ground of her soul” by
means of her extraordinarily developed transcendental perceptions, the three
distinct and personal Aspects of the Godhead which are acknowledged by the
Christian religion.

First, the Father, pure transcendent Being, creative Source and Origin of
all that Is: the Unconditioned and Unknowable One of the Neoplatonists: Who
is “neither This nor That” and must be conceived, pace M. Delacroix, as
utterly transcendent to the subject rather than “set up within the soul.”

Secondly, in the Person of Christ, St. Teresa isolated and distinguished the
Logos or Creative Word; the expression, or outbirth, of the Father’s
thought. Here is the point at which the Divine Substance first becomes
apprehensible by the spirit of man; that mediating principle “raised up
between heaven and earth” which is at once the Mirror of Pure Being and the
Light of a finite world. The Second Person of the Christian Trinity is for
the believer not only the brightness or express image of Deity, but also the
personal, inexhaustible, and responsive Fount of all life and Object of all
love: Who, because of His taking up (in the Incarnation) of humanity into
the Godhead, has become the Bridge between finite and infinite, between the
individual and the Absolute Life, and hence in mystic language the “true
Bridegroom” of every human soul.

Thirdly, she recognized within herself the germ of that Absolute Life, the
indwelling Spirit which is the source of man’s transcendental consciousness
and his link with the Being of God. That is to say, the Holy Spirit of
Divine Love, the Real Desirous seeking for the Real Desired, without Whose
presence any knowledge of or communion with God on man’s part would be
inconceivable.

In the supreme Vision of the Trinity which was vouchsafed to St. Teresa in
the Seventh Habitation of the soul, these three aspects became fused in One.
In the deepest recesses of her spirit, in that abyss where selfhood ceases
to have meaning, and the individual soul touches the life of the All,
distinction vanished and she “saw God in a point.” Such an experience, such
an intuition of simple and undifferentiated Godhead—the Unity—beyond those
three centres of Divine Consciousness which we call the Trinity of Persons,
is highly characteristic of mysticism. The German mystics—temperamentally
miles asunder from St. Teresa—described it as the attainment of the “still
wilderness” or “lonely desert of Deity”: the limitless Divine Abyss,
impersonal, indescribable, for ever hid in the Cloud of Unknowing, and yet
the true Country of the Soul. [206]

These statements, which appear when thus laid down to be hopelessly
academic, violently divorced from life, were not for St. Teresa or any other
Christian mystic abstract propositions; but attempts towards the description
of first-hand experience.

“By some mysterious manifestation of the truth,” she says, “the three
Persons of the most Blessed Trinity reveal themselves, preceded by an
illumination which shines on the spirit like a most dazzling cloud of light.
The three Persons are distinct from one another; a sublime knowledge is
infused into the soul, imbuing it with a certainty of the truth that the
Three are of one substance, power, and knowledge, and are one God. Thus that
which we hold as a doctrine of faith, the soul now, so to speak, understands
by sight, though it beholds the Blessed Trinity neither by the eyes of the
body nor of the soul, this being no imaginary vision. All the Three Persons
here communicate Themselves to the soul, speak to it, and make it understand
the words of our Lord in the Gospel, that He and the Father and the Holy
Ghost will come and make their abode with the soul which loves Him and keeps
His commandments.

O my God, how different from merely hearing and believing these words is it
to realize their truth in this way! Day by day a growing astonishment takes
possession of this soul, for the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity seem
never to depart; that They dwell far within its own centre and depths;
though for want of learning it cannot describe how, it is conscious of the
indwelling of these divine Companions.” [207]

Mystical writers constantly remind us that life as perceived by the human
minds shows an inveterate tendency to arrange itself in triads: that if they
proclaim the number Three in the heavens, they can also point to it as
dominating everywhere upon the earth. Here Christianity did but give form to
a deep instinct of the human mind: an instinct which made Pythagoras call
Three the number of God, because beginning, middle, and end were contained
therein. Thus to Hindu thought the Absolute Godhead was unknowable, but He
disclosed three faces to man—Brahma the Creator, Shiva the Destroyer,
Krishna the Repairer—and these three were One. So too the Neoplatonists
distinguished three worlds; the Sensible or Phenomenal, the Rational or
Intellectual, the Intelligible or Spiritual; and three aspects of God—the
Unconditioned Absolute, the Logos or Artificer, and the divine Essence or
Soul of the World which is both absolute and created. Perhaps we have in
such triads a first sketch of the Christian Trinity; though falling far
short of the requirements of man’s spiritual experience. The dry bones await
the breath of more abundant life. Corresponding with this diagram of God’s
nature the Platonists see also three grades of beauty; the Corporeal, the
Spiritual, and the Divine.

Man, that “thing of threes,” of body, soul and spirit, of understanding,
memory and will, follows in his path towards unity the Threefold Way: for
“our soul,” says Lady Julian, “is made-trinity like to the unmade blissful
Trinity, known and loved from without beginning, and in the making oned to
the Maker.” [208] We still tend to analyse our psychic life into emotional,
volitional, and intellectual elements. Even the Subject and Object implied
in every experience required a third term, the relation between them,
without which no thought can be complete. Thus the very principle of analogy
imposes upon man a Trinitarian definition of Reality as the one with which
his mind is best able to cope. [209] It is easy for the hurried rationalist
to demonstrate the absurdity of this fact but he will find it a very
different matter when it comes to disproving it.

“I could wish,” says St. Augustine, “that men would consider these three
things that are in themselves . . . To Be, to Know, and to Will. For I am,
and I know, and I will, I am knowing and willing, and I know myself to be
and to will; and I will to be and to know. In these three therefore let him
who can, see how inseparable a life there is—even one life, one mind, one
essence: finally how inseparable is the distinction, and yet a distinction.
Surely a man hath it before him: let him look into himself and see and tell
me. But when he discovers and can see anything of these, let him not think
that he has discovered that which is above these Unchangeable: which Is
unchangeably and Knows unchangeably and Wills unchangeably.” [210]

In a well-known passage, Julian of Norwich tells us how she saw the Trinity
of the Divine Nature shining in the phenomenal as well as in the spiritual
world. “He showed me,” she says, “a little thing, the quantity of an hazel
nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked
thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought, What may this be?
And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. . . . In this
Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the
second is that God loveth it, the third is that God keepeth it. But what is
to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover, I cannot tell.” [211]

Julian, a simple and deeply human Englishwoman of middle age dwelling alone
in her churchyard cell, might well be called the poet of the Trinity. She
treats this austere and subtle dogma—of which the mediaeval mystics write
with a passion little understood by those who look upon it as “orthodoxy
reduced to mathematics”—with an intimacy and vigour which carry with them a
conviction of her own direct and personal apprehension of the theological
truth she struggles to describe. “I beheld,” she says of a vision which is
close to that of St. Teresa in the “Seventh Habitation of the Soul,” and
more lucidly if less splendidly expressed, “the working of all the blessed
Trinity: in which beholding, I saw and understood these three properties:
the property of the Fatherhood, the property of the Motherhood, and the
property of the Lordhood, in one God. In our Father Almighty we have our
keeping and our bliss as anent our natural Substance, [212] which is to us
by our making, without beginning. And in the Second Person in wit and wisdom
we have our keeping as anent our Sense-soul: our restoring and our saving;
for He is our Mother, Brother, and Saviour. And in our good Lord, the Holy
Ghost, we have our rewarding and our meed-giving for our living and our
travail, and endless overpassing of all that we desire, in His marvellous
courtesy of His high plenteous grace. For all our life is in three: in the
first we have our Being, in the second we have our Increasing, and in the
third we have our Fulfilling; the first is Nature, the second is Mercy, and
the third is Grace. [213] . . . The high Might of the Trinity is our Father,
and the deep Wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, and the great Love of the
Trinity is our Lord: and all this we have in Nature and in our Substantial
Making.” [214]

Again, in a passage of exquisite tenderness, “As verily as God is our
Father, so verily God is our Mother; and that shewed He in all [her
revelations] and especially in these sweet words where He saith: I it am.
That is to say, I it am, the Might and the Goodness of the Fatherhood; I it
am, the Wisdom of the Motherhood, I it am the Light and the Grace that is
all blessed Love. I it am, the Trinity, I it am, the Unity: I am the
sovereign Goodness of all manner of things. I am that maketh thee to love. I
am that maketh thee to long: I it am, the endless fulfilling of all true
desires. ” [215]

So Christopher Hervey—


“The whole world round is not enough to fill

The heart’s three corners, but it craveth still.

Only the Trinity that made it can

Suffice the vast triangled heart of Man.” [216]

Any attempt towards a definition of God which does not account for and
acknowledge these three aspects is found in experience to be incomplete.
They provide objectives for the heart, the intellect, and the will: for they
offer to the Self material for its highest love, its deepest thought, its
act of supreme volition. Under the familiar Platonic terms of Goodness,
Truth, and Beauty, they represent the divine source and end of Ethics,
Science, and Art, the three supreme activities of man. Thus the ideals of
artist, student, and philanthropist, who all seek under different modes the
same reality, are gathered up in the mystic’s One; as the pilgrimage of the
three kings ended in the finding of one Star

“What is God?” says St. Bernard. “Length, breadth, height, and depth.
‘What,’ you say, ‘you do after all profess to believe in the fourfold
Godhead which was an abomination to you?’ Not in the least. . . . God is
designated One to suit our comprehension, not to describe his character. His
character is capable of division, He Himself is not. The words are
different, the paths are many, but one thing is signified; the paths lead to
one Person.” [217]

All possible ways of conceiving this One Person in His living richness are
found in the end to range themselves under three heads. He is “above all and
through all and in you all,” [218] said St. Paul, anticipating the Councils
in a flash of mystic intuition and giving to the infant Church the shortest
and most perfect definition of its Triune God. Being, which is above all,
manifests itself as Becoming; as the dynamic omnipresent Word of Life. The
Divine Love immanent in the heart and in the world comes forth from, and
returns to, the Absolute One. “Thou, my God, who art Love,” says Nicolas of
Cusa, “art Love that loveth, and Love that is loveable, and Love that is the
bond between these twain.” [219] Thus is completed “the Eternal Circle from
Goodness, through Goodness, to Goodness.” It is true that to these
fundamental respects of the perceived Godhead—that Being, Becoming, and
Desire whereto the worlds keep time—the mystics have given many and various
names; for they have something of the freedom of true intimates in treating
of the Reality which they love. In particular, those symbols of the Absolute
which are drawn from the great and formless forces of the universe, rather
than from the orthodox but necessarily anthropomorphic imagery of human
relationship, have always appealed to them. Their intense apprehension of
Spirit seems to find freer and more adequate expression in such terms, than
in those in which the notion of space is involved, or which suggest a
concrete picture to the mind. Though they know as well as the philosophers
that “there must always he something symbolic in our way of expressing the
spiritual life,” since “that unfathomable infinite whose spiritual character
is first recognized in our human experience, can never reveal itself fully
and freely under the limitations of our earthly existence”; [220] yet they
ever seek, like the artists they are, some new and vital image which is not
yet part of the debased currency of formal religion, and conserves its
original power of stinging the imagination to more vivid life.

Thus “the Kingdom of Heaven,” says Law, “stands in this threefold life,
where three are one, because it is a manifestation of the Deity, which is
Three and One; the Father has His distinct manifestation in the Fire, which
is always generating the Light; the Son has His distinct manifestation in
the Light, which is always generated from the Fire; the Holy Ghost has His
manifestation in the Spirit, that always proceeds from both, and is always
united with them. It is this eternal unbeginning Trinity in Unity of Fire,
Light, and Spirit, that constitutes Eternal Nature, the Kingdom of Heaven,
the heavenly Jerusalem, the Divine Life, the Beatific Visibility, the
majestic Glory and Presence of God. Through this Kingdom of Heaven, or
Eternal Nature, is the invisible God, the incomprehensible Trinity,
eternally breaking forth and manifesting itself in a boundless height and
depth of blissful wonders, opening and displaying itself to all its
creatures as in an infinite variation and endless multiplicity of its
powers, beauties, joys, and glories.” [221]

Perhaps an easier, better, more beautiful example of these abstract symbols
of the Trinity than Law’s Fire, Light, and Spirit is that of Light, Life,
and Love: a threefold picture of the Real which is constantly dwelt upon and
elaborated by the Christian mystics. Transcendent Light, intangible but
unescapable, ever emanating Its splendour through the Universe: indwelling,
unresting, and energizing Life: desirous and directive Love—these are
cardinal aspects of Reality to which they return again and again in their
efforts to find words which will express something of the inexpressible
truth.

( a ) LIGHT, ineffable and uncreated, the perfect symbol of pure
undifferentiated Being: above the intellect, as St. Augustine reminds us,
but known to him who loves. [222] This Uncreated Light is the “deep yet
dazzling darkness” of the Dionysian school, “dark from its surpassing
brightness . . . as the shining of the sun on his course is as darkness to
weak eyes.” [223] It is St. Hildegarde’s lux vivens, Dante’s somma luce,
wherein he saw multiplicity in unity, the ingathered leaves of all the
universe [224] : the Eternal Father, or Fount of Things. “For well we
know,” says Ruysbroeck “that the bosom of the Father is our ground and
origin, wherein our life and being is begun.” [225]

( b ) LIFE, the Son, hidden Steersman of the Universe, the Logos, Fire, or
cosmic Soul of Things. This out-birth or Concept of the Father’s Mind, which
He possesses within Himself, as Battista Vernazza was told in her ecstasy,
[226] is that Word of Creation which since It is alive and infinite, no
formula can contain. the Word eternally “spoken” or generated by the
Transcendent Light. “This is why,” says Ruysbroeck again, “all that lives in
the Father unmanifested in the Unity, is also in the Son actively poured
forth in manifestation.” [227] This life, then, is the flawless expression
or character of the Father, Sapientia Patris. It is at once the personal and
adorable comrade of the mystic’s adventure and the inmost principle, the
sustaining power, of a dynamic universe; for that which intellect defines as
the Logos or Creative Spirit, contemplative love knows as Wonderful,
Counsellor, and Prince of Peace.

Since Christ, for the Christian philosopher, is Divine Life Itself—the drama
of Christianity expressing this fact and its implications “in a point”—it
follows that His active spirit is to be discerned, not symbolically, but in
the most veritable sense, in the ecstatic and abounding life of the world.
In the rapturous vitality of the birds, in their splendid glancing flight:
in the swelling of buds and the sacrificial beauty of the flowers: in the
great and solemn rhythms of the sea—there is somewhat of Bethlehem in all
these things, somewhat too of Calvary in their self-giving pains. It was
this re-discovery of Nature’s Christliness which Blake desired so
passionately when he sang—


“I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.”

Here then it is, on this pinnacle of faith, at the utmost boundaries of
human speech, that mystical theology suddenly shows herself—not as the
puzzle-headed constructor of impossible creeds, but as accepting and
transmuting to a more radiant life those two profound but apparently
contradictory metaphysical definitions of Reality which we have already
discussed. [228] Eternal Becoming, God immanent and dynamic, striving with
and in His world: the unresting “flux of things” of Heracleitus, the crying
aloud of that Word “which is through all things everlastingly”—the
evolutionary world-process beloved of modern philosophers—is here placed
once for all in true relation with pure transcendent and unmoved Being; the
Absolute One of Xenophanes and the Platonists. This Absolute is discerned by
mystic intuition as the “End of Unity” in whom all diversities must cease;
[229] the Ocean to which that ceaseless and painful Becoming, that unresting
river of life, in which we are immersed, tends to return: the Son going to
the Father.

( c ) LOVE, the principle of attraction, which seems to partake at once of
the transcendental and the created worlds. If we consider the Father as
Supreme Subject—“origin,” as Aquinas says, “of the entire procession of
Deity” [230] —and the Son or generated Logos as the Object of His thought,
in whom, says Ruysbroeck, “He contemplates Himself and all things in an
eternal Now”; [231] then this personal Spirit of Love, il desiro e il velle,
represents the relation between the two, and constitutes the very character
of God. “The heavenly Father,” says Ruysbroeck, “as a living Ground, with
all that lives in Him, is actively turned towards His Son as to His own
Eternal Wisdom. And that same Wisdom, with all that lives in it, is actively
turned back towards the Father, that is towards that very ground from which
it comes forth. And of this meeting is born the third Person, between the
Father and the Son, that is the Holy Spirit, their mutual Love.” [232]
Proceeding, according to Christian doctrine, from Light and Life, the Father
and Son—implicit, that is, in both the Absolute Source and dynamic flux of
things—this divine spirit of desire is found enshrined in our very selfhood;
and is the agent by which that selfhood is merged in the Absolute Self. “My
love is my weight,” said St. Augustine. [233] It is the spiritual equivalent
of that gravitation which draws all things to their place. Thus Bernard
Holland says in his Introduction to Boehme’s “Dialogues,” “In a deep sense,
the desire of the Spark of Life in the Soul to return to its Original Source
is part of the longing desire of the universal Life for its own heart or
centre. Of this longing, the universal attraction striving against
resistance, towards a universal centre, proved to govern the phenomenal or
physical world, is but the outer sheath and visible working.” Again, “Desire
is everything in Nature; does everything. Heaven is Nature filled with
divine Life attracted by Desire.” [234]

“The best masters say,” says Eckhart, “that the love wherewith we love is
the Holy Spirit. [235] Some deny it. But this is always true: all those
motives by which we are moved to love, in these is nothing else than the
Holy Spirit.” [236]

“God wills,” says Ruysbroeck, gathering these scattered symbols to unity
again, “that we should come forth from ourselves in this Eternal Light; that
we should reunite ourselves in a supernatural manner with that image which
is our true Life, and that we should possess it with Him actively and
fruitively in eternal blessedness . . . this going forth of the
contemplative is also in Love: for by fruitive love he overpasses his
created being and finds and tastes the riches and delights which are God
Himself, and which He causes to pour forth without ceasing in the most
secret chamber of the soul, at that place where it is most like unto the
nobility of God.” [237]

Here only, in the innermost sanctuary of being, the soul’s “last
habitation,” as St. Teresa said, is the truth which these symbols express
truly known: for “as to how the Trinity is one and the Trinity in the Unity
of the nature is one, whilst nevertheless the Trinity comes forth from the
Unity, this cannot be expressed in words,” says Suso, “owing to the
simplicity of that deep abyss. Hither it is, into this intelligible where
that the spirit, spiritualizing itself, soars up; now flying in the
measureless heights, now swimming in the soundless deeps, of the sublime
marvels of the Godhead!” [238]

Mystical philosophy, then, has availed itself gladly of the doctrine of the
Trinity in expressing its vision of the nature of that Absolute which is
found, by those who attain the deep Abyss of the Godhead, to be essentially
One. But it is by the complementary Christian dogma of the Incarnation that
it has best been able to describe and explain the nature of the inward and
personal mystic experience. The Incarnation, which is for traditional
Christianity synonymous with the historical birth and earthly life of
Christ, is for mystics of a certain type, not only this but also a perpetual
Cosmic and personal process. It is an everlasting bringing forth, in the
universe and also in the individual ascending soul, of the divine and
perfect Life, the pure character of God, of which the one historical life
dramatized the essential constituents. Hence the soul, like the physical
embryo, resumes in its upward progress the spiritual life-history of the
race. “The one secret, the greatest of all,” says Patmore, is “the doctrine
of the Incarnation, regarded not as an historical event which occurred two
thousand years ago, but as an event which is renewed in the body of every
one who is in the way to the fulfilment of his original destiny.” [239]

We have seen that for mystical theology the Second Person of the Trinity is
the Wisdom of the Father, the Word of Life. The fullness of this Word could
therefore only be communicated to the human consciousness by a Life. In the
Incarnation this Logos, this divine character of Reality, penetrated the
illusions of the sensual world—in other words, the illusions of all the
selves whose ideas compose that world—and “saved” it by this infusion of
truth. A divine, suffering, self-sacrificing Personality was then shown as
the sacred heart of a living, striving universe: and for once the Absolute
was exhibited in the terms of finite human existence. Some such event as
this breaking through of the divine and archetypal life into the temporal
world is perceived by the mystical philosopher to be a necessity, if man was
ever to see in terms of life that greatness of life to which he belongs:
learn to transcend the world of sense, and rebuild his life upon the levels
of reality. “For Thou art,” says Nicolas of Cusa, “the Word of God
humanified, and Thou art man deified.” [240] Thus it is that the Catholic
priest in the Christmas Mass gives thanks, not for the setting in hand of
any commercial process of redemption, but for a revelation of reality, “Quia
per incarnati Verbi mysterium nova mentis nostrae oculis lux tuae claritatis
infulsit: ut dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium
amorem rapiamur.” The essence of mystical Christianity seems to be summed up
in these lovely words. [241]

“The Son of God, the Eternal Word in the Father, who is the glance, or
brightness, and the power of the light eternity” says Boehme, “must become
man and be born in you, if you will know God: otherwise you are in the dark
stable and go about groping.” [242] “The Word,” says Ruysbroeck finely, “is
no other than See. And this is the coming forth and the birth of the Son of
the Eternal Light, in Whom all blessedness is seen and known.” [243] Once at
any rate, they say in effect, the measure of that which it was possible for
the Spirit of Life to do and for living creatures to be, was filled to the
brim. By this event, all were assured that the ladder of Creation was made
whole; in this hypostatic union, the breach between appearance and reality,
between God and man, was healed. The Bridge so made—to use St. Catherine of
Siena’s allegory again—is eternal, since it was “laid before the foundation
of the world” in the “Eternal Now.” Thus the voice of the Father says to her
in that vision, “I also wish thee to look at the Bridge of My only-begotten
Son, and see the greatness thereof, for it reaches from Heaven to earth;
that is, that the earth of your humanity is joined to the greatness of the
Deity thereby. I say, then, that this Bridge reaches from Heaven to earth,
and constitutes the union which I have made with man. . . . So the height of
the Divinity, humbled to the earth, and joined with your humanity made the
Bridge and reformed the road. Why was this done? In order that man might
come to his true happiness with the angels. And observe that it is not
enough, in order that you should have life, that My son should have made you
this Bridge, unless you walk thereon.” [244] “Our high Father God Almighty,
which is Being,” says Lady Julian, “He knew and loved us from afore any
time. Of which knowing, in His marvellous deep charity, and the foreseeing
counsel of all the blessed Trinity, He willed that the Second Person should
become our Mother.” [245]

It is of course this assertion of the quickening communication of grace to
nature, of God to man—an influx of ultimate reality, possible of
assimilation by all—which constitutes the strength of the Christian
religion. Instead of the stony diet of the philosophers, it offers to the
self hungry for the Absolute that Panis Angelorum, the vivifying principle
of the world. That is to say, it gives concrete and experimental knowledge
of a supreme Personality—absorption into His mystical body—instead of the
artificial conviction produced by concentration on an idea. It knits up the
universe; shows the phenomenal pierced in all directions by the real, the
natural as the vehicle of the supernatural. It provides a solid basis for
mysticism, a basis which is at once metaphysical and psychological: and
shows that state towards which the world’s deepest minds have always
instinctively aspired, as a part of the cosmic return through Christ to God.


“Quivi è la sapienza e la possanza

ch’ aprì le strade intra il cielo e la terra

onde fu già sì lunga disianza.” [246]

This is what the Christian mystics mean to express when they declare over
and over again that the return to the Divine Substance, the Absolute, which
is the end of the soul’s ascent, can only be made through the humanity of
Christ. The Son, the Word, is the character of the Father: that in which the
Ineffable Godhead knows Himself, as we only know ourselves in our own
characters. He is thus a double link: the means of God’s self-consciousness,
the means of man’s consciousness of God. How then, asks mystic theology,
could such a link complete its attachments without some such process as that
which the Incarnation dramatized in time and space? The Principle of Life is
also the Principle of Restitution; by which the imperfect and broken life of
sense is mended and transformed into the perfect life of spirit. Hence the
title of Repairer applied by Boehme to the Second Person of the Trinity.

In the last resort, the doctrine of the Incarnation is the only safeguard of
the mystics against the pantheism to which they always tend. The
Unconditioned Absolute, so soon as it alone becomes the object of their
contemplation, is apt to be conceived merely as Divine Essence; the idea of
Personality evaporates. The union of the soul with God is then thought of in
terms of absorption. The distinction between Creator and creature is
obliterated and loving communion is at an end. This is probably the reason
why many of the greatest contemplatives—Suso and St. Teresa are cases in
point—have found that deliberate meditation upon the humanity of Christ,
difficult and uncongenial as this concrete devotion sometimes is to the
mystical temperament, was a necessity if they were to retain a healthy and
well-balanced inner life.

Further, these mystics see in the historic life of Christ an epitome—or if
you will, an exhibition—of the essentials of all spiritual life. There they
see dramatized not only the cosmic process of the Divine Wisdom, but also
the inward experience of every soul on her way to union with that Absolute
“to which the whole Creation moves.” This is why the expressions which they
use to describe the evolution of the mystical consciousness from the birth
of the divine in the spark of the soul to its final unification with the
Absolute Life are so constantly chosen from the Drama of Faith. In this
drama they see described under veils the necessary adventures of the spirit.
Its obscure and humble birth, its education in poverty, its temptation,
mortification and solitude, its “illuminated life” of service and
contemplation, the desolation of that “dark night of the soul” in which it
seems abandoned by the Divine: the painful death of the self, its
resurrection to the glorified existence of the Unitive Way, its final
reabsorption in its Source—all these, they say, were lived once in a supreme
degree in the flesh. Moreover, the degree of closeness with which the
individual experience adheres to this Pattern is always taken by them as a
standard of the healthiness, ardour, and success of its transcendental
activities.


“Apparve in questa forma

Per dare a noi la norma.”

sang Jacopone da Todi. “And he who vainly thinketh otherwise,” says the
“Theologia Germanica” with uncompromising vigour, “is deceived. And he who
saith otherwise, lieth.” [247]

Those to whom such a parallel seems artificial should remember that
according to the doctrine of mysticism that drama of the self-limitation and
self-sacrifice of the Absolute Life, which was once played out in the
phenomenal world—forced, as it were, upon the consciousness of dim-eyed
men—is eternally going forward upon the plane of reality. To them the Cross
of Calvary is implicit in the Rose of the World. The law of this Infinite
Life which was in the Incarnation expressing Its own nature in human terms,
must then also be the law of the finite life; in so far as that life aspires
to transcend individual limitations, rise to freedom, and attain union with
Infinity. It is this governing idea which justifies the apparently fanciful
allegorizations of Christian history which swarm in the works of the
mystics.

To exhibit these allegorizations in detail would be tedious. All that is
necessary is that the principle underlying them should be understood. I
give, then, but one example: that which is referred by mystical writers to
the Nativity, and concerns the eternal Birth or Generation of the Son or
Divine Word.

This Birth is in its first, or cosmic sense, the welling forth of the Spirit
of Life from the Divine Abyss of the unconditioned Godhead. “From our proper
Ground, that is to say from the Father and all that which lives in Him,
there shines,” says Ruysbroeck, “an eternal Ray, the which is the Birth of
the Son.” [248] It is of this perpetual generation of the Word that Meister
Eckhart speaks, when he says in his Christmas sermon, “We are celebrating
the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never
ceases to bear in all Eternity: whilst this birth also comes to pass in Time
and in human nature. Saint Augustine says this Birth is ever taking
place.” At this point, with that strong practical instinct which is
characteristic of the mystics, Eckhart turns abruptly from speculation to
immediate experience, and continues “But if it takes not place in me, what
avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me.” [249]
Here in a few words the two-fold character of this Mystic Birth is
exhibited. The interest is suddenly deflected from its cosmic to its
personal aspect; and the individual is reminded that in him, no less than in
the Archetypal Universe, real life must be born if real life is to be lived.
“When the soul brings forth the Son,” says Eckhart in another place, “it is
happier than Mary.” [250]

Since the soul, according to mystic principles, can only perceive Reality in
proportion as she is real, know God by becoming Godlike, it is clear that
this birth is the initial necessity. The true and definitely directed
mystical life does and must open with that most actual, though indescribable
phenomenon, the coming forth into consciousness of man’s deeper, spiritual
self, which ascetical and mystical writers of all ages have agreed to call
Regeneration or Re-birth. Nothing that is within him is able of its own
power to achieve this. It must be evoked by an energy, a quickening Spirit,
which comes from beyond the soul, and “secretly initiates what He openly
crowns.” [251]

We nave already considered [252] the New Birth in its purely psychological
aspect, as the emergence of the transcendental sense. Here its more profound
and mystical side is exhibited. By a process which may indifferently be
described as the birth of something new or the coming forth of something
which has slept—since both these phrases are but metaphors for another and
more secret operation—the eye is opened on Eternity, the self, abruptly made
aware of Reality, comes forth from the cave of illusion like a child from
the womb and begins to live upon the supersensual plane. Then she feels in
her inmost part a new presence, a new consciousness—it were hardly an
exaggeration to say a new Person—weak, demanding nurture, clearly destined
to pass through many phases of development before its maturity is reached;
yet of so strange a nature, that in comparison with its environment she may
well regard it as Divine.

“This change, this upsetting, is called re-birth. To be born simply means to
enter into a world in which the senses dominate, in which wisdom and love
languish in the bonds of individuality. To be re-born means to return to a
world where the spirit of wisdom and love governs and animal-man obeys.”
[253] So Eckartshausen. It means, says Jane Lead, “the bringing forth of a
new-created Godlike similitude in the soul.” [254] He is brought forth, says
Eckartshausen again, in the stable previously inhabited by the ox of passion
and the ass of prejudice. [255] His mother, says Boehme, is the Virgin
Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, or Mirror of the Being of God. With the emergence
of this new factor into the conscious field—this spiritual birth—the mystic
life begins: as the Christian epoch began with the emergence of Divine
Spirit in the flesh. Paradise, says Boehme, is still in the world, but man
is not in Paradise unless he be born again. In that case, he stands therein
in the New Birth, [256] and tastes here and now that Eternal Life for which
he has been made.

Here then are some characteristics of the map which the Christian mystics
are most inclined to use. There are, of course, other great landmarks upon
it: and these we shall meet as we follow in detail the voyages of the
questing soul. One warning, however, must be given to amateur geographers
before we go on. Like all other maps, this one at its best can but represent
by harsh outline and conventional colour the living earth which those
travellers trod and the mysterious seas on which they sailed. It is a
deliberately schematic representation of Reality, a flat and sometimes arid
symbol of great landscapes, rushing rivers, awful peaks: dangerous unless
these its limitations be always kept in mind. The boy who defined Canada as
“very pink” was not much further off the track than those who would limit
the Adorable Trinity to the definitions of the “Athanasian” Creed; however
useful that chart may be, and is, within the boundaries imposed by its form.

Further, all such maps, and we who treat of them, can but set down in cold
blood and with a dreadful pretence of precision, matters which the true
explorers of Eternity were only able to apprehend in the ardours of such a
passion, in the transports of such a union as we, poor finite slaves of our
frittered emotions, could hardly look upon and live. “If you would truly
know how these things come to pass,” says St. Bonaventura, in a passage
which all students of theology should ever keep in mind, “ask it of grace,
not of doctrine; of desire, not of intellect; of the ardours of prayer, not
of the teachings of the schools; of the Bridegroom, not of the Master; of
God, not of man; of the darkness, not of the day; not of illumination, but
of that Fire which enflames all and wraps us in God with great sweetness and
most ardent love. The which Fire most truly is God, and the hearth thereof
is in Jerusalem.” [257]
_________________________________________________________________

[182] “La gloria di colui che tutto move per l’universo penetra, e resplende
in una parte più e meno altrove” (Par. i. 1-3). The theological ground-plan
of the Cantica is epitomized in this introductory verse.

[183] “Summa Contra Gentiles,” 1. iv. cap. 1. (Rickaby’s translation).

[184] Leben, cap. lvi.

[185] Aug. Conf., bk. xiii. cap. xi.

[186] Avisos y Sentencias Espirituales, N. 51.

[187] “Varieties of Religious Experience,” Lecture vi.

[188] Quoted by W. L. Lilly, “Many Mansions,” p. 140.

[189] Ennead vi. 9.

[190] Thus Aquinas says, “Since God is the universal cause of all Being, in
whatever region Being can be found, there must be the Divine Presence”
(“Summa Contra Gentiles,” 1. iii. cap. lxviii.). And we have seen that the
whole claim of the mystics ultimately depends on man’s possession of pure
being in “the spark of the soul.”

[191] “De Ornatu Spiritualium Nuptiarum,” I. ii. cap. lxvii.

[192] Op. cit., I. iii. cap. i.

[193] Relaccion ix. 10. But this image of a sponge, which also suggested
itelf to St. Augustine, proved an occasion of stumbling to his more
metaphysical mind: tending to confuse his idea of the nature of God with the
category of space. Vide Aug. Conf., bk. vii. cap. v.

[194] “The Threefold Life of Man,” cap. vi. § 71.

[195] Eckhart, Pred, lxix. So too we read in the Oxyrhyncus Papyri, “Raise
the stone and there thou shalt find Me. Cleave the wood and there am I.”

[196] Compare above, cap. ii.

[197] “Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. xl.

[198] Boyce Gibson, “God with Us,” p. 24.

[199] See A. E. Waite, “ TheDoctrine and Literature of the Kabalah,” pp.
36-53.

[200] Par. xxxiii. 137.

[201] “Vala,” viii. 237.

[202] “Jerusalem,” lxi. 44 and xcv. 23.

[203] A. E. Waite, “The Doctrine and Literature of the Kabalah,” p. 35.

[204] Palmer. “Oriental Mysticism,” pt. i. cap. i

[205] Delacroix, “Études sur le Mysticisme,” p. 75. The reference in the
last sentence is to St. Teresa’s “Castillo Interior.”

[206] See Tauler, Sermon on St. John Baptist, and Third Instruction (“ The
Inner Way,” pp. 97 and 321); Suso, “Buchlein von der Warheit,” cap. v.;
Ruysbroeck, “De Ornatu Spiritalium Nuptiarum,” 1. iii. caps, ii. and vi.

[207] St. Teresa, “El Castillo Interior,” Moradas; Sétimas, cap. i.

[208] Julian of Norwich, “Revelations of Divine Love.” cap. lv. Julian here
repeats a familiar Patristic doctrine. So St. Thomas says (“Summa Contra
Gentiles,” 1. iv. cap. xxvi), “A likeness of the Divine Trinity is
observable in the human mind.”

[209] “The three Persons of the Trinity,” said John Scotus Erigena, “are
less modes of the Divine Substance than modes under which our mind conceives
the Divine Substance”—a stimulating statement of dubious orthodoxy.

[210] Aug. Conf., bk. xiii. cap. xi.

[211] Op. cit., cap. v.

[212] Substance is here, of course, to be understood in the scholastic
sense, as the reality which underlies merely phenomenal existence.

[213] I.e. , the Second Person of the Christian Trinity is the redemptive,
“fount of mercy,” the medium by which Grace, the free gift of transcendental
life, reaches and vivifies human nature: “permeates it,” in Eucken’s words,
“with the Infinite and Eternal” (“Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens,” p. 181).

[214] “Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. lviii.

[215] Op. cit. , cap. lix.

[216] “The School of the Heart,” Epigram x. This book, which is a free
translation of the “Scola Cordis” of Benedict Haeften (1635), is often, but
wrongly attributed to Francis Quarles.

[217] “De Consideratione,” bk. v. cap. viii.

[218] Ephesians iv. 6.

[219] “De Visione Dei,” cap. xvii.

[220] Eucken, “Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens,” p. 131.

[221] “An Appeal to All who Doubt” (“Liberal and Mystical Writings of
William Law” p. 54). Law’s symbols are here borrowed from the system of his
master, Jacob Boehme. (See the “De Signatura Rerum” of Boehme, cap. xiv.)

[222] Aug. Conf., bk. vii. cap. x.

[223] Tauler, 3rd Instruction (“The Inner Way,” p. 324).

[224] Par. xxxiii 67, 85.

[225] “De Ornatu Spiritalium Nuptiarum,” I. iii. cap. iii.

[226] Von Hügel, “The Mystical Element of Religion,” vol. i. p. 357.

[227] Ruysbroeck, op. cit. ., loc. cit.

[228] Supra, Cap. II.

[229] Tauler, op. cit., loc. cit.

[230] “Summa Contra Gentiles,” I. iv. cap. xxvi.

[231] “De Ornatu Spiritalium Nuptiarum,” I. ii. cap. iv.

[232] Op. cit., I. ii. cap. xxxvii.

[233] Aug. Conf., bk. xiii. cap. ix.

[234] Introduction to “Three Dialogues of the Supersensual Life,” p. xxx.

[235] The doctrine is found in St. Augustine, and is frequently reproduced
by the mediaeval mystics. Eckhart is perhaps here quoting St. Thomas
Aquinas, a usual source of his more orthodox utterances. Compare “Summa
Contra Gentiles,” I. iv. cap. xxiii: “Since the Holy Ghost proceeds as the
love wherewith God loves Himself, and since God loves with the same love
Himself and other beings for the sake of His own goodness, it is clear that
the love wherewith God loves us belongs to the Holy Ghost. In like manner
also the love wherewith we love God.”

[236] Pred. xii.

[237] “De Ornatu Spiritalium Nuptiarum “ I. iii. cap. iii.

[238] Suso, Leben, cap. lvi.

[239] “The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” “Homo,” xix.

[240] “De Visione Dei,” cap. xxiii.

[241] “Because by the mystery of the Incarnate Word the new light of Thy
brightness hath shone upon the eyes of our mind: that we, knowing God seen
of the eyes, by Him may be snatched up into the love of that which eye hath
not seen” (Missale Romanum. Praefatio Solemnis de Nativitate).

[242] “The Threefold Life of Man, cap. iii. § 31.

[243] Ruysbroeck, op. cit ., 1. iii. cap. i.

[244] Dialogo, cap. xxii.

[245] “Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. lix.

[246] Par. xxiii. 37. “Here is the Wisdom and the Power which opened the
ways betwixt heaven and earth, for which there erst had been so long a
yearning.”

[247] “Theologia Germanica,” cap. xviii.

[248] “De Ornatu Spiritalium Nuptiarum,” 1. iii. cap. v. The extreme
antiquity of this idea is illustrated by the Catholic practice, dating from
Patristic times, of celebrating three Masses on Christmas Day. Of these the
first, at midnight, commemorates the Eternal Generation of the Son; the
second, at dawn, His incarnation upon earth; the third His birth in the
heart of man. Compare the Roman Missal: also Kellner, “Heortology” (English
translation, London, 1908), p. 156.

[249] Eckhart, Pred. i., “Mystische Schriften,” p. 13. Compare Tauler,
Sermon on the Nativity of Our Lady (“The Inner Way,” p. 167).

[250] This idea of re-birth is probably of Oriental origin. It can be traced
back to Egypt, being found in the Hermetic writings of the third century,
B.C. See Petrie, “Personal Religion in Egypt before Christianity,” p. 167.

[251] F. von Hügel, “The Life of Prayer,” p. 24.

[252] Supra , p. 53.

[253] “The Cloud upon the Sanctuary,” p. 77.

[254] The Enochian Walks with God,” p. 3.

[255] Op. cit ., p. 81.

[256] “De Signatura Rerum,” viii. 47.

[257] “De Itinerado Mentis in Deo,” cap. vii.
_________________________________________________________________

I n our study of theology we saw the Christian mystic adopting, as chart and
pilot book of his voyages and adventures, the scheme of faith, and diagram
of the spiritual world, which is accepted by ordinary Christian men. We saw
that he found in it a depth and richness of content which the conventional
believer in that theology, the “good churchman,” seldom suspects: and that
which is true of the Christian mystic is also true in its measure and as
regards their respective theologies, of the Pagan, the Mahommedan and the
Buddhist.

But since the spiritual adventures of the mystic are not those of ordinary
men, it will follow that this map, though always true for him, is not
complete. He can press forward to countries which unmystical piety must mark
as unexplored, Pushing out from harbour to “the vast and stormy sea of the
divine,” he can take soundings, and mark dangers the existence of which such
piety never needs to prove. Hence it is not strange that certain maps,
artistic representations or symbolic schemes, should have come into being
which describe or suggest the special experiences of the mystical
consciousness, and the doctrines to which these experiences have given
birth. Many of these maps have an uncouth, even an impious appearance in the
eyes of those unacquainted with the facts which they attempt to translate:
as the charts of the deep-sea sailor seem ugly and unintelligible things to
those who have never been out of sight of land. Others—and these the most
pleasing, most easily understood—have already been made familiar, perhaps
tiresomely familiar, to us by the poets; who, intuitively recognizing their
suggestive qualities, their links with truth, have borrowed and adapted them
to their own business of translating Reality into terms of rhythm and
speech. Ultimately, however, they owe their origin to the mystics, or to
that mystical sense which is innate in all true poets: and in the last
resort it is the mystic’s kingdom, and the mystic’s experience, which they
affect to describe.

These special mystical diagrams, these symbolic and artistic descriptions of
man’s inward history—his secret adventures with God—are almost endless in
their variety: since in each we have a picture of the country of the soul
seen through a different temperament. To describe all would be to analyse
the whole field of mystical literature, and indeed much other literature as
well; to epitomize in fact all that has been dreamed and written concerning
the so-called “inner life”—a dreary and a lengthy task. But the majority of
them, I think, express a comparatively small number of essential doctrines
or fundamental ways of seeing things; and as regards their imagery, they
fall into three great classes, representative of the three principal ways in
which man’s spiritual consciousness reacts to the touch of Reality, the
three primary if paradoxical facts of which that consciousness must be
aware. Hence a consideration of mystic symbols drawn from each of these
groups may give us a key with which to unlock some at least of the verbal
riddles of the individual adventurer.

Thanks to the spatial imagery inseparable from human thinking and human
expression, no direct description of spiritual experience is or can be
possible to man. It must always be symbolic, allusive, oblique: always
suggest, but never tell, the truth: and in this respect there is not much to
choose between the fluid and artistic language of vision and the arid
technicalities of philosophy. In another respect, however, there is a great
deal to choose between them: and here the visionary, not the philosopher,
receives the palm. The greater the suggestive quality of the symbol used,
the more answering emotion it evokes in those to whom it is addressed, the
more truth it will convey. A good symbolism, therefore, will be more than
mere diagram or mere allegory: it will use to the utmost the resources of
beauty and of passion, will bring with it hints of mystery and wonder,
bewitch with dreamy periods the mind to which it is addressed. Its appeal
will not be to the clever brain, but to the desirous heart, the intuitive
sense, of man.

The three great classes of symbols which I propose to consider, appeal to
three deep cravings of the self, three great expressions of man’s
restlessness, which only mystic truth can fully satisfy. The first is the
craving which makes him a pilgrim and wanderer. It is the longing to go out
from his normal world in search of a lost home, a “better country”; an
Eldorado, a Sarras, a Heavenly Syon. The next is that craving of heart for
heart, of the soul for its perfect mate, which makes him a lover. The third
is the craving for inward purity and perfection, which makes him an ascetic,
and in the last resort a saint.

These three cravings, I think, answer to three ways in which mystics of
different temperaments attack the problem of the Absolute: three different
formulae under which their transcendence of the sense-world can be
described. In describing this transcendence, and the special adventures
involved in it, they are describing a change from the state of ordinary men,
in touch with the sense-world, responding to its rhythms, to the state of
spiritual consciousness in which, as they say, they are “in union” with
Divine Reality, with God. Whatever be the theological creed of the mystic,
he never varies in declaring this close, definite, and actual intimacy to be
the end of his quest. “Mark me like the tulip with Thine own streaks,” says
the Sufi. [258] “I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand
is to a man,” says the German contemplative. [259] “My me isGod, nor do I
know my self-hood save in Him,” says the Italian saint. [260]

But, since this Absolute God is for him substance, ground or underlying
Reality of all that is : present yet absent, near yet far: He is already as
truly immanent in the human soul as in the Universe. The seeker for the Real
may therefore objectify his quest in two apparently contradictory, yet
really mutually explanatory ways. First he may see it as an outgoing journey
from the world of illusion to the real or transcendental world: a leaving of
the visible for the invisible. Secondly, it may appear to him as an inward
alteration, remaking or regeneration, by which his personality or character
is so changed as to be able to enter into communion with that Fontal Being
which he loves and desires; is united with and dominated by the indwelling
God who is the fount of his spiritual life. In the first case, the objective
idea “God” is the pivot of his symbolism: the Blazing Star, or Magnet of the
Universe which he has seen far off, and seeing, has worshipped and desired.
In the second case, the emphasis falls on the subjective idea “Sanctity,”
with its accompanying consciousness of a disharmony to be abolished. The
Mystic Way will then be described, not as a journey, but as an alteration of
personality, the transmuting of “earthly” into “heavenly” man. Plainly these
two aspects are obverse and reverse of one whole. They represent that mighty
pair of opposites, Infinite and Finite, God and Self, which it is the
business of mysticism to carry up into a higher synthesis. Whether the
process be considered as outward search or inward change, its object and its
end are the same. Man enters into that Order of Reality for which he was
made, and which is indeed the inciting cause of his pilgrimage and his
purification: for however great the demand on the soul’s own effort may be,
the initiative always lies with the living Divine World itself. Man’s small
desire is evoked, met, and fulfilled by the Divine Desire, his “separated
will” or life becomes one with the great Life of the All.

From what has been said in the last chapter, it will be clear that the
symbolism of outward search and of inward change will be adopted
respectively by the two groups of selves whose experience of “union with the
Divine” leans (1) to the Transcendent or external, (2) to the Immanent or
internal way of apprehending Reality. A third or intermediate group of
images will be necessary to express the experience of those to whom mystic
feeling—the satisfaction of love—is the supreme factor in the mystic life.
According, then, to whether man’s instinct prompts him to describe the
Absolute Reality which he knows and craves for as a Place, a Person, or a
State—all three of course but partial and inadequate translations of the one
Indescribable Truth—so will he tend to adopt a symbolism of one or other of
these three types.

A. Those who conceive the Perfect as a beatific vision exterior to them and
very far off, who find in the doctrine of Emanations something which answers
to their inward experience, will feel the process of their entrance into
reality to be a quest, an arduous journey from the material to the spiritual
world. They move away from, rather than transmute to another form, the life
of sense. The ecstasies of such mystics will answer to the root-meaning of
that much perverted word, as a “standing out” from themselves; a flight to
happier countries far away. For them, the soul is outward bound towards its
home.

B. Those for whom mysticism is above all things an intimate and personal
relation, the satisfaction of a deep desire—who can say with Gertrude More,
“never was there or can there be imagined such a love, as is between an
humble soul and Thee”—will fall back upon imagery drawn largely from the
language of earthly passion. Since the Christian religion insists upon the
personal aspect of the Godhead, and provides in Christ an object of such
intimacy, devotion and desire, an enormous number of Christian mystics
inevitably describe their experiences under symbolism of this kind.

C. Those who are conscious rather of the Divine as a Transcendent Life
immanent in the world and the self, and of a strange spiritual seed within
them by whose development man, moving to higher levels of character and
consciousness, attains his end, will see the mystic life as involving inward
change rather than outgoing search. Regeneration is their watchword, and
they will choose symbols of growth or transmutation: saying with St.
Catherine of Genoa, “my Being is God, not by simple participation, but by a
true transformation of my Being.” [261]

These three groups of mystics, then, stand for three kinds of temperament;
and we may fairly take as their characteristic forms of symbolic expression
the Mystic Quest, the Marriage of the Soul, and the “Great Work” of the
Spiritual Alchemists.

I

The pilgrimage idea, the outgoing quest, appears in mystical literature
under two different aspects. One is the search for the “Hidden Treasure
which desires to be found.” Such is the “quest of the Grail” when regarded
in its mystic aspect as an allegory of the adventures of the soul. The other
is the long, hard journey towards a known and definite goal or state. Such
are Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”; each in their
manner faithful descriptions of the Mystic Way. The goal of the quest—the
Empyrean of Dante, the Beatific Vision or fulfilment of love—is often called
Jerusalem by the Christian mystics: naturally enough since that city was for
the mediaeval mind the supreme end of pilgrimage. By Jerusalem they mean not
only the celestial country Heaven, but also the spiritual life, which is
“itself a heaven.” [262] “Right as a true pilgrim going to Jerusalem,” says
Hilton, “leaveth behind him house and land, wife and child, and maketh
himself poor and bare from all that he hath, that he may go lightly without
letting: right so, if thou wilt be a ghostly pilgrim, thou shalt make
thyself naked from all that thou hast . . . then shalt thou set in thy heart
wholly and fully that thou wouldst be at Jerusalem, and at none other place
but there.” “Jerusalem,” he says in this same chapter, “is as much as to say
a sight of peace; and betokeneth contemplation in perfect love of God.”
[263]

Under this image of a pilgrimage—an image as concrete and practical, as
remote from the romantic and picturesque, for the mediaeval writers who used
it, as a symbolism of hotel and railway train would be to us—the mystics
contrived to summarize and suggest much of the life history of the ascending
soul; the developing spiritual consciousness. The necessary freedom and
detachment of the traveller, his departure from his normal life and
interests, the difficulties, enemies, and hardships encountered on the
road—the length of the journey, the variety of the country, the dark night
which overtakes him, the glimpses of destination far away—all these are seen
more and more as we advance in knowledge to constitute a transparent
allegory of the incidents of man’s progress from the unreal to the real.
Bunyan was but the last of a long series of minds which grasped this fact.

The Traveller, says the Sufi ‘Aziz bin Mahommed Nafasi, in whose book, “The
Remotest Aim,” the pilgrimage-symbolism is developed in great detail, is the
Perceptive or Intuitive Sense of Man. The goal to which he journeys is
Knowledge of God. This mysterious traveller towards the only country of the
soul may be known of other men by his detachment, charity, humility, and
patience. These primary virtues, however—belonging to ethical rather than to
spiritual life—are not enough to bring his quest to a successful
termination. They make him, say the Sufis, “perfect in knowledge of his goal
but deficient in the power of reaching it.” Though he has fraternal love for
his fellow-pilgrims, detachment from wayside allurements, untiring
perseverance on the road, he is still encumbered and weakened by unnecessary
luggage. The second stage of his journey, therefore, is initiated like that
of Christian by a casting off of his burden: a total self-renouncement, the
attainment of a Franciscan poverty of spirit whereby he becomes “Perfectly
Free.”

Having got rid of all impediments to the spiritual quest, he must now
acquire or develop in their stead the characteristic mystical qualities, or
Three Aids of the Pilgrim; which are called in this system Attraction,
Devotion, and Elevation. Attraction is consciousness of the mutual desire
existing between man’s spirit and the Divine Spirit: of the link of love
which knits up reality and draws all things to their home in God. This is
the universal law on which all mysticism is based. It is St. Augustine’s
“Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts can find no rest except in
Thee.” This “natural magnetism,” then, once he is aware of it, will draw the
pilgrim irresistibly along the road from the Many to the One. His second
aid, Devotion, says the “Remotest Aim” in a phrase of great depth and
beauty, is “the prosecution of the journey to God and in God.” [264] It
embraces, in fact, the whole contemplative life. It is the next degree of
spiritual consciousness after the blind yielding to the attraction of the
Real, and the setting in order of man’s relation to his source.

The Traveller’s journey to God is complete when he attains knowledge of
Him—“Illumination,” in the language of European mystics. The point at which
this is reached is called the Tavern or resting-place upon the road, where
he is fed with the Divine Mysteries. There are also “Wine Shops” upon the
way, where the weary pilgrim is cheered and refreshed by a draught of the
wine of Divine Love. [265] Only when the journey to God is completed begins
the “Journey in God”—that which the Christian mystics call the Unitive
Way—and this, since it is the essence of Eternal Life, can have no end.
Elevation, the pilgrim’s third aid, is the exalted or ecstatic form of
consciousness peculiar to the contemplative, and which allows the traveller
a glimpse of the spiritual city towards which he goes. [266]

The Sufi poet ‘Attar, in his mystical poem, “The Colloquy of the Birds,” has
described the stages of this same spiritual pilgrimage with greater
psychological insight, as the journey through “Seven Valleys.” The lapwing,
having been asked by other birds what is the length of the road which leads
to the hidden Palace of the King, replies that there are Seven Valleys
through which every traveller must pass: but since none who attain the End
ever come back to describe their adventures, no one knows the length of the
way.

(1) The first valley, says the lapwing, is the Valley of the Quest. It is
long and toilsome: and there the traveller must strip himself of all earthly
things, becoming poor, bare, and desolate: and so stay till the Supernal
Light casts a ray on his desolation. It is in fact, Dante’s Purgatorio, the
Christian Way of Purgation: the period of self-stripping and purification
which no mystic system omits.

(2) When the ray of Supernal Light has touched the pilgrim he enters the
limitless Valley of Love: begins, that is to say, the mystic life. It is
Dante’s “Earthly Paradise,” or, in the traditional system of the mystics,
the onset of Illumination.

(3) Hence he passes to the Valley of Knowledge or Enlightenment—the
contemplative state—where each finds in communion with Truth the place that
belongs to him. No Dante student will fail to see here a striking parallel
with those planetary heavens where each soul partakes of the Divine, “not
supremely in the absolute sense,” as St. Bonaventura has it, but “supremely
in respect of himself.” The mystery of Being is now revealed to the
traveller. He sees Nature’s secret, and God in all things. It is the height
of illumination.

(4) The next stage is the Valley of Detachment, of utter absorption in
Divine Love—the Stellar Heaven of the Saints—where Duty is seen to be all in
all. This leads to—

(5) The Valley of the Unity, where the naked Godhead is the one object of
contemplation. This is the stage of ecstasy, or the Beatific Vision:
Dante’s condition in the last canto of the “Paradiso.” It is transient,
however, and leads to—

(6) The Valley of Amazement; where the Vision, far transcending the
pilgrim’s receptive power, appears to be taken from him and he is plunged in
darkness and bewilderment. This is the state which Dionysius the Areopagite,
and after him many mediaeval mystics, called the Divine Dark, and described
as the truest and closest of all our apprehensions of the Godhead. It is the
Cloud of Unknowing, “dark from excessive bright.” The final stage is—

(7) The Valley of Annihilation of Self: the supreme degree of union or
theopathetic state, in which the self is utterly merged “like a fish in the
sea” in the ocean of Divine Love. [267]

Through all these metaphors of pilgrimage to a goal—of a road followed,
distance overpassed, fatigue endured—there runs the definite idea that the
travelling self in undertaking the journey is fulfilling a destiny, a law of
the transcendental life; obeying an imperative need. The chosen Knights are
destined or called to the quest of the Grail. “All men are called to their
origin,” says Rulman Merswin, and the fishes which he sees in his Vision of
Nine Rocks are impelled to struggle, as it were “against nature,” uphill
from pool to pool towards their source. [268]

All mystical thinkers agree in declaring that there is a mutual attraction
between the Spark of the Soul, the free divine germ in man, and the Fount
from which it came forth. “We long for the Absolute,” says Royce, “only in
so far as in us the Absolute also longs, and seeks, through our very
temporal striving, the peace that is nowhere in Time, but only, and yet
Absolutely, in Eternity.” [269] So, many centuries before the birth of
American philosophy, Hilton put the same truth of experience in lovelier
words. “He it is that desireth in thee, and He it is that is desired. He is
all and He doth all if thou might see Him.” [270]

The homeward journey of man’s spirit, then, may be thought of as due to the
push of a divine life within, answering to the pull of a divine life
without. [271] It is only possible because there is already in that spirit a
certain kinship with the Divine, a capacity for Eternal Life; and the
mystics, in undertaking it, are humanity’s pioneers on the only road to
rest. Hence that attraction which the Moslem mystic discerned as the
traveller’s necessary aid, is a fundamental doctrine of all mysticism: and
as a consequence, the symbolism of mutual desire is here inextricably
mingled with that of pilgrimage. The spiritual pilgrim goes because he is
called; because he wants to go, must go, if he is to find rest and peace.
“God needs man,” says Eckhart. It is Love calling to love: and the journey,
though in one sense a hard pilgrimage, up and out, by the terraced mount and
the ten heavens to God, in another is the inevitable rush of the roving
comet, caught at last, to the Central Sun. “My weight is my love,” said St.
Augustine. [272] Like gravitation, it inevitably compels, for good or evil,
every spirit to its own place. According to another range of symbols, that
love flings open a door, in order that the larger Life may rush in and it
and the soul be “one thing.”

Here, then, we run through the whole gamut of symbolic expression; through
Transcendence, Desire, and Immanence. All are seen to point to one
consummation, diversely and always allusively expressed: the need of union
between man’s separated spirit and the Real, his remaking in the interests
of transcendent life, his establishment in that Kingdom which is both “near
and far.”

“In the book of Hidden Things it is written,” says Eckhart, “‘I stand at the
door and knock and wait’ . . . thou needst not seek Him here or there: He is
no farther off than the door of the heart. There He stands and waits and
waits until He finds thee ready to open and let Him in. Thou needst not call
Him from a distance; to wait until thou openest is harder for Him than for
thee. He needs thee a thousand times more than thou canst need Him. Thy
opening and His entering are but one moment .” [273] “God,” he says in
another place, “can as little do without us, as we without Him.” [274] Our
attainment of the Absolute is not a one-sided ambition, but the fulfilment
of a mutual desire. “For our natural Will,” says Lady Julian, “is to have
God, and the Good will of God is to have us; and we may never cease from
longing till we have Him in fullness of joy.” [275]

So, in the beautiful poem or ritual called the “Hymn of Jesus,” contained in
the apocryphal “Acts of John” and dating from primitive Christian times, the
Logos, or Eternal Christ, is thus represented as matching with His own
transcendent, self-giving desire every need of the soul. [276]

The Soul says:—


“‘I would be saved.’”

Christ replies:—


“‘And I would save.’ Amen.”

The Dialogue continues:—


“‘I would be loosed.’

‘And I would loose.’ Amen.

‘I would be pierced.’

‘And I would pierce.’ Amen.

‘I would be born.’

‘And I would bear.’ Amen.

‘I would eat.’

‘And I would be eaten.’ Amen.

‘I would hear.’

‘And I would be heard.’ Amen.”

“‘I am a Lamp to thee who beholdest Me,

I am a Mirror to thee who perceivest Me,

I am a Door to thee, who knockest at Me,

I am a Way to thee a wayfarer.’”

The same fundamental idea of the mutual quest of the Soul and the Absolute
is expressed in the terms of another symbolism by the great Mahommedan
mystic:—


“No lover ever seeks union with his beloved,

But his beloved is also seeking union with him.

But the lover’s love makes his body lean

While the beloved’s love makes her fair and lusty.

When in this heart the lightning spark of love arises,

Be sure this love is reciprocated in that heart.

When the love of God arises in thy heart,

Without doubt God also feels love for thee.” [277]

The mystic vision, then, is of a spiritual universe held within the bonds of
love: [278] and of the free and restless human soul, having within it the
spark of divine desire, the “tendency to the Absolute,” pnly finding
satisfaction and true life when united with this Life of God. Then, in
Patmore’s lovely image, “the babe is at its mother’s breast,” “the lover has
returned to the beloved.” [279]

Whatever their outward sense, all true mystic symbols express aspects of
this “secret of the world,” this primal verity. But whereas such great
visionary schemes as those of ‘Attar and of Dante show it in its cosmic
form, in many symbolic descriptions—particularly those which we meet in the
writings of the ecstatic saints—the personal subjective note, the
consciousness of an individual relation between that one self and the
Supernal Self, overpowers all general applications. Then philosophy and
formal allegory must step aside: the sacramental language of exalted
emotion, of profoundly felt experience, takes its place. The phases of
mutual love, of wooing and combat, awe and delight—the fevers of desire, the
ecstasy of surrender—are drawn upon and made to contribute something to the
description of the great and secret drama of the soul.

To such symbolic transcripts of intimate experience belongs one amazing
episode of the spiritual life-history which, because it has been given
immortal expression by the greatest mystical poet of modern times, is
familiar to thousands of readers who know little or nothing of the more
normal adventures incidental to man’s attainment of the Absolute. In “The
Hound of Heaven” Francis Thompson described with an almost terrible power,
not the self’s quest of adored Reality, but Reality’s quest of the unwilling
self. He shows to us the remorseless, untiring seeking and following of the
soul by the Divine Life to which it will not surrender: the inexorable
onward sweep of “this tremendous Lover,” hunting the separated spirit,
“strange piteous futile thing” that flees Him “down the nights and down the
days.” This idea of the love-chase, of the spirit rushing in terror from the
overpowering presence of God, but followed, sought, conquered in the end, is
common to all the mediaeval mystics: it is the obverse of their general
doctrine of the necessary fusion of human and divine life, “escape from the
flame of separation.”

“I chased thee, for in this was my pleasure,” says the voice of Love to
Mechthild of Magdeburg; “I captured thee, for this was my desire; I bound
thee, and I rejoice in thy bonds; I have wounded thee, that thou mayst be
united to me. If I gave thee blows, it was that I might be possessed of
thee.” [280]

So in the beautiful Middle English poem of “Quia amore langueo,”—


“I am true love that fals was nevere,

Mi sistyr, mannis soule, I loved hir thus;

Bicause we wolde in no wise discevere

I lefte my Kyngdom glorious.

I purveyde for hir a paleis precious;

She fleyth, I folowe, I sought hir so.

I suffride this peyne piteous

Quia amore langueo,” [281]

Meister Eckhart has the same idea of the inexorable Following Love,
impossible to escape, expressed under less personal images. “Earth,” he
says, “cannot escape the sky; let it flee up or down, the sky flows into it,
and makes it fruitful whether it will or no. So God does to man. He who will
escape Him only runs to His bosom; for all corners are open to Him.” [282]

We find in all the mystics this strong sense of a mysterious spiritual
life—a Reality—over against man, seeking him and compelling him to Its will.
It is not for him, they think, to say that he will or will not aspire to the
transcendental world. [283] Hence sometimes this inversion of man’s long
quest of God. The self resists the pull of spiritual gravitation, flees from
the touch of Eternity; and the Eternal seeks it, tracks it ruthlessly down.
The Following Love, the mystics say, is a fact of experience, not a poetic
idea. “Those strong feet that follow, follow after,” once set upon the
chase, are bound to win. Man, once conscious of Reality, cannot evade it.
For a time his separated spirit, his disordered loves, may wilfully
frustrate the scheme of things: but he must be conquered in the end. Then
the mystic process unfolds itself: Love triumphs: the “purpose of the
worlds” fulfils itself in the individual life.

II

It was natural and inevitable that the imagery of human love and marriage
should have seemed to the mystic the best of all images of his own
“fulfilment of life”; his soul’s surrender, first to the call, finally to
the embrace of Perfect Love. It lay ready to his hand: it was understood of
all men: and moreover, it certainly does offer, upon lower levels, a
strangely exact parallel to the sequence of states in which man’s spiritual
consciousness unfolds itself, and which form the consummation of the mystic
life.

It has been said that the constant use of such imagery by Christian mystics
of the mediaeval period is traceable to the popularity of the Song of Songs,
regarded as an allegory of the spiritual life. I think that the truth lies
rather in the opposite statement: namely, that the mystic loved the Song of
Songs because he there saw reflected, as in a mirror, the most secret
experiences of his soul. The sense of a desire that was insatiable, of a
personal fellowship so real, inward, and intense that it could only be
compared with the closest link of human love, of an intercourse that was no
mere spiritual self-indulgence, but was rooted in the primal duties and
necessities of life—more, those deepest, most intimate secrets of communion,
those self-giving ecstasies which all mystics know, but of which we, who are
not mystics, may not speak—all these he found symbolized and suggested,
their unendurable glories veiled in a merciful mist, in the poetry which man
has invented to honour that august passion in which the merely human draws
nearest to the divine.

The great saints who adopted and elaborated this symbolism, applying it to
their pure and ardent passion for the Absolute, were destitute of the
prurient imagination which their modern commentators too often possess. They
were essentially pure of heart; and when they “saw God” they were so far
from confusing that unearthly vision with the products of morbid sexuality,
that the dangerous nature of the imagery which they employed did not occur
to them. They knew by experience the unique nature of spiritual love: and no
one can know anything about it in any other way.

Thus for St. Bernard, throughout his deeply mystical sermons on the Song of
Songs, the Divine Word is the Bridegroom, the human soul is the Bride: but
how different is the effect produced by his use of these symbols from that
with which he has been charged by hostile critics! In the place of that
“sensuous imagery” which is so often and so earnestly deplored by those who
have hardly a nodding acquaintance with the writings of the saints, we find
images which indeed have once been sensuous; but which are here anointed and
ordained to a holy office, carried up, transmuted, and endowed with a
radiant purity, an intense and spiritual life.

“ ‘Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth.’ Who is it speaks these
words? It is the Bride. Who is the Bride? It is the Soul thirsting for God.
. . . She who asks this is held by the bond of love to him from whom she
asks it. Of all the sentiments of nature, this of love is the most
excellent, especially when it is rendered back to Him who is the principle
and fountain of it—that is, God. Nor are there found any expressions equally
sweet to signify the mutual affection between the Word of God and the soul,
as those of Bridegroom and of Bride; inasmuch as between individuals who
stand in such relation to each other all things are in common, and they
possess nothing separate or divided. They have one inheritance, one
dwelling-place, one table, and they are in fact one flesh. If, then, mutual
love is especially befitting to a bride and bridegroom, it is not unfitting
that the name of Bride is given to a soul which loves.” [284]

To women mystics of the Catholic Church, familiar with the antique and
poetic metaphor which called every cloistered nun the Bride of Christ, that
crisis in their spiritual history in which they definitely vowed themselves
to the service of Transcendent Reality seemed, naturally enough, the
veritable betrothal of the soul. Often, in a dynamic vision, they saw as in
a picture the binding vows exchanged between their spirits and their God.
[285] That further progress on the mystic way which brought with it a sharp
and permanent consciousness of union with the Divine Will, the constant
sustaining presence of a Divine Companion, became, by an extension of the
original simile, Spiritual Marriage. The elements of duty, constancy,
irrevocableness, and loving obedience involved in the mediaeval conception
of the marriage tie, made it an apt image of a spiritual state in which
humility, intimacy, and love were the dominant characteristics. There is
really no need to seek a pathological explanation of these simple facts.
[286] Moreover with few exceptions, the descriptions of spiritual marriage
which the great mystics have left are singularly free from physical imagery.
“So mysterious is the secret,” says St. Teresa, “and so sublime the favour
that God thus bestows instantaneously on the soul, that it feels a supreme
delight, only to be described by saying that our Lord vouchsafes for the
moment to reveal to it His own heavenly glory in a far more subtle way than
by any vision or spiritual delight. As far as can be understood, the soul, I
mean the spirit of this soul, is made one with God, who is Himself a spirit,
and Who has been pleased to show certain persons how far His love for us
extends in order that we may praise His greatness. He has thus deigned to
unite Himself to His creature: He has bound Himself to her as firmly as two
human beings are joined in wedlock and will never separate Himself from
her.” [287]

The great Richard of St. Victor, in one of his most splendid mystical
treatises, [288] has given us perhaps the most daring and detailed
application of the symbolism of marriage to the adventures of the spirit of
man. He divides the “steep stairway of love,” by which the contemplative
ascends to union with the Absolute, into four stages. These he calls the
betrothal, the marriage, the wedlock, and the fruitfulness of the soul.
[289] In the betrothal, he says, the soul “thirsts for the Beloved”; that is
to say, it longs to experience the delights of Reality. “The Spirit comes to
the Soul, and seems sweeter than honey.” It is conversion, the awakening to
mystical truth; the kindling of the passion for the Absolute. “Then the Soul
with pertinacity demands more”: and because of her burning desire she
attains to pure contemplation, and so passes to the second degree of love.
In this she is “led in bridal” by the Beloved. Ascending “above herself” in
contemplation, she “sees the Sun of Righteousness.” She is now confirmed in
the mystic life; the irrevocable marriage vows are made between her spirit
and her God. At this point she can “see the Beloved,” but “cannot yet come
in to Him,” says Richard. This degree, as we shall see later, answers more
or less to that which other mystics call the Illuminative Way: but any
attempt to press these poetic symbols into a cast-iron series, and establish
exact parallels, is foredoomed to failure, and will merely succeed in
robbing them of their fragrance and suggestive power. In Richard’s “third
stage,” however, that of union, or wedlock, it is clear that the soul enters
upon the “Unitive Way.” She has passed the stages of ecstatic and
significant events, and is initiated into the Life. She is “deified,”
“passes utterly into God, and is glorified in Him”: is transfigured, he
says, by immediate contact with the Divine Substance, into an utterly
different quality of being. “Thus,” says St. John of the Cross, “the soul,
when it shall have driven away from itself all that is contrary to the
divine will, becomes transformed in God by love. [290]

“The Soul,” says Richard again, “is utterly concentrated on the One.” She is
“caught up to the divine light.” The expression of the personal passion, the
intimate relation, here rises to its height. But this is not enough. Where
most mystical diagrams leave off, Richard of St. Victor’s “steep stairway of
Love” goes on: with the result that this is almost the only symbolic system
bequeathed to us by the great contemplatives in which all the implications
contained in the idea of the spiritual marriage have been worked out to
their term. He saw clearly that the union of the soul with its Source could
not be a barren ecstasy. That was to mistake a means for an end; and to
frustrate the whole intention of life, which is, on all levels, fruitful and
creative. Therefore he says that in the fourth degree, the Bride who has
been so greatly honoured, caught up to such unspeakable delight, sinks her
own will and “is humiliated below herself.” She accepts the pains and duties
in the place of the raptures of love; and becomes a source, a “parent” of
fresh spiritual life. The Sponsa Dei develops into the Mater Divinae
gratiae. That imperative need of life, to push on, to create, to spread, is
here seen operating in the spiritual sphere. This forms that rare and final
stage in the evolution of the great mystics, in which they return to the
world which they forsook; and there live, as it were, as centres of
transcendental energy, the creators of spiritual families, the partners and
fellow-labourers with the Divine Life. [291]

III

We come now to the symbols which have been adopted by those mystics in whom
temperamental consciousness of their own imperfection, and of the
unutterable perfection of the Absolute Life for which they longed, has
overpowered all other aspects of man’s quest of reality. The “seek, and ye
shall find” of the pilgrim, the “by Love shall He be gotten and holden” of
the bride, can never seem an adequate description of experience to minds of
this type. They are intent on the inexorable truth which must be accepted in
some form by both these classes: the crucial fact that “we behold that which
we are,” or, in other words, that “only the Real can know Reality.” Hence
the state of the inward man, the “unrealness” of him when judged by any
transcendental standard, is their centre of interest. His remaking or
regeneration appears to them as the primal necessity, if he is ever to
obtain rights of citizenship in the “country of the soul.”

We have seen that this idea of the New Birth, the remaking or transmutation
of the self, clothed in many different symbols, runs through the whole of
mysticism and much of theology. It is the mystic’s subjective reading of
those necessary psychological and moral changes which he observes within
himself as his spiritual consciousness grows. His hard work of renunciation,
of detachment from the things which that consciousness points out as
illusory or impure, his purifications and trials, all form part of it. If
that which is whole or perfect is to come, then that which is in part must
be done away: “for in what measure we put off the creature, in the same
measure are we able to put on the Creator: neither more nor less.” [292]

Of all the symbolic systems in which this truth has been enshrined none is
so complete, so picturesque, and now so little understood as that of the
“Hermetic Philosophers” or Spiritual Alchemists. This fact would itself be
sufficient to justify us in examining some of the chief features of their
symbolism. There is a further excuse for this apparently eccentric
proceeding, however, in the fact that the language of alchemy was
largely—though not always accurately and consistently—used by the great
mystic Jacob Boehme, and after him by his English disciple, William Law.
Without, then, some knowledge of the terms which they employed, but seldom
explained, the writings of this important school can hardly be understood.

The alchemic symbols, especially as applied to the mystic life, are full of
an often deliberate obscurity; which makes their exact interpretation a
controversial matter at the best. Moreover, the authors of the various
Hermetic writings do not always use them in the same sense, and whilst many
of these writings are undoubtedly mystical, others clearly deal with the
physical quest of gold: nor have we any sure standard by which to divide
class from class. The elements from which the spiritual alchemists built up
their allegories of the mystic life are, however, easily grasped: and these
elements, with the significance generally attributed to them, are as much as
those who are not specialists can hope to unravel from this very tangled
skein. First, there are the metals; of course the obvious materials of
physical alchemy. These are usually called by the names of their presiding
planets: thus in Hermetic language Luna means silver, Sol gold, etc. Then
there is the Vessel, or Athanor, in which the transmutation of base metal to
gold took place: an object whose exact nature is veiled in much mystery. The
Fire, and various solvents and waters, peculiar to the different alchemistic
recipes, complete the apparatus necessary to the “Great Work.”

The process of this work, sometimes described in chemical, and sometimes in
astrological terms, is more often than not disguised in a strange heraldic
and zoological symbolism dealing with Lions, Dragons, Eagles, Vultures,
Ravens and Doves: which, delightful in its picturesqueness, is unequalled in
its power of confusing the anxious and unwary inquirer. It is also the
subject of innumerable and deliberate allegories, which were supposed to
convey its secrets to the elect, whilst most certainly concealing them from
the crowd. Hence it is that the author of “A Short Enquiry concerning the
Hermetic Art” speaks for all investigators of this subject when he describes
the “Hermetic science” as a “great Labyrinth, in which are abundance of
enquirers rambling to this day, many of them undiscerned by one another.”
Like him, I too “have taken several Turns in it myself, wherein one shall
meet with very few; for ‘tis so large, and almost every one taking a
different Path, that they seldom meet. But finding it a very melancholy
place, I resolved to get out of it, and rather content myself to walk in the
little garden before the entrance, where many things, though not all, were
orderly to be seen. Choosing rather to stay there, and contemplate on the
Metaphor set up, than venture again into the wilderness.” [293]

Coming, then, to the “contemplation of the Metaphor set up,”—by far the most
judicious course for modern students of the Hermetic art—we observe first
that the prime object of alchemy was held to be the production of the
Philosopher’s Stone, that perfect and incorrupt substance or “noble
Tincture,” never found upon our imperfect earth in its natural state, which
could purge all baser metals of their dross, and turn them to pure gold. The
quest of the Stone, in fact, was but one aspect of man’s everlasting quest
of perfection, his hunger for the Absolute; and hence an appropriate symbol
of the mystic life. But this quest was not conducted in some far off
transcendental kingdom. It was prosecuted in the Here and Now within the
physical world.

Gold, the Crowned King, or Sol, as it is called in the planetary symbolism
of the alchemists, was their standard of perfection, the “Perfect Metal.”
Towards it, as the Christian towards sanctity, their wills were set. It had
for them a value not sordid but ideal. Nature, they thought, is always
trying to make gold, this incorruptible and perfect thing; and the other
metals are merely the results of the frustration of her original design. Nor
is this aiming at perfection and achieving of imperfection limited to the
physical world. Quod superius, sicut quod inferius. Upon the spiritual plane
also they held that the Divine Idea is always aiming at “Spiritual
Gold”—divine humanity, the New Man, citizen of the transcendental world—and
“natural man” as we ordinarily know him is a lower metal, silver at best. He
is a departure from the “plan,” who yet bears within himself, if we could
find it, the spark or seed of absolute perfection: the “tincture” which
makes gold. “The smattering I have of the Philosopher’s Stone,” says Sir
Thomas Browne, “(which is something more than the perfect exaltation of
gold) hath taught me a great deal of divinity, and instructed my belief how
that immortal spirit and incorruptible substance of my soul may lie obscure,
and sleep awhile within this house of flesh.” [294] This “incorruptible
substance” is man’s goldness, his perfect principle: for “the highest
mineral virtue resides in Man,” says Albertus Magnus, “and God may be found
everywhere.” [295] Hence the prosecution of a spiritual chemistry is a
proper part of the true Hermetic science.

The art of the alchemist, whether spiritual or physical, consists in
completing the work of perfection, bringing forth and making dominant, as it
were, the “latent goldness” which “lies obscure” in metal or man. The ideal
adept of alchemy was therefore an “auxiliary of the Eternal Goodness.” By
his search for the “Noble Tincture” which should restore an imperfect world,
he became a partner in the business of creation, assisting the Cosmic Plan.
Thus the proper art of the Spiritual Alchemist, with whom alone we are here
concerned, was the production of the spiritual and only valid tincture or
Philosopher’s Stone; the mystic seed of transcendental life which should
invade, tinge, and wholly transmute the imperfect self into spiritual gold.
That this was no fancy of seventeenth-century allegorists, but an idea
familiar to many of the oldest writers upon alchemy—whose quest was truly a
spiritual search into the deepest secrets of the soul—is proved by the words
which bring to an end the first part of the antique “Golden Treatise upon
the Making of the Stone,” sometimes attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.
“This, O Son,” says that remarkable tract, “is the Concealed Stone of Many
Colours, which is born and brought forth in one colour; know this and
conceal it . . . it leads from darkness into light, from this desert
wilderness to a secure habitation, and from poverty and straits to a free
and ample fortune.” [296]

Man, then, was for the alchemists “the true laboratory of the Hermetic
art”; which concealed in an entanglement of vague and contradictory symbols
the life-process of his ascension to that perfect state in which he was able
to meet God. This state must not be confused with a merely moral purity, but
is to be understood as involving utter transmutation into a “new form.” It
naturally followed from this that the indwelling Christ, the “Corner
Stone,” the Sun of Righteousness, became, for many of the Christian
alchemists, identified with the Lapis Philosophorum and with Sol: and was
regarded both as the image and as the earnest of this “great work.” His
spirit was the “noble tincture” which “can bring that which is lowest in the
death to its highest ornament or glory;” [297] transmuting the natural to
the supernatural, operating the “New Birth.” “This,” says Boehme, “is the
noble precious Stone (Lapis Philosophorum), the Philosopher’s Stone, which
the Magi (or wise men) find which tinctureth nature, and generateth a new
son in the old. He who findeth that, esteemeth more highly of it than of
this (outward) world. For the Son is many thousand times greater than the
Father.” Again, “If you take the spirit of the tincture, then indeed you go
on a way in which many have found Sol; but they have followed on the way to
the heart of Sol, where the spirit of the heavenly tincture hath laid hold
on them, and brought them into the liberty, into the Majesty, where they
have Known the Noble Stone, Lapis Philosophorum, the Philosopher’s Stone,
and have stood amazed at man’s blindness, and seen his labouring in vain.
Would you fain find the Noble Stone? Behold, we will show it you plain
enough, if you be a Magus, and worthy, else you shall remain blind still:
therefore fall to work thus: for it hath no more but three numbers. First
tell from one till you come to the Cross, which is ten (X) . . . and there
lieth the Stone without any great painstaking, for it is pure and not
defiled with any earthly nature.”

“In this stone there lieth hidden, whatsoever God and the Eternity, also
heaven, the stars and elements contain and are able to do. There never was
from eternity anything better or more precious than this, and it is offered
by God and bestowed upon man; every one may have it . . . it is in a simple
form, and hath the power of the whole Deity in it.” [298]

Boehme is here using alchemic symbols, according to his custom, in a loose
and artistic manner; for the true Hermetic Philosopher’s Stone is not
something which can be found but something which must be made. The
alchemists, whether their search be for a physical or a spiritual
“tincture,” say always that this tincture is the product of the furnace and
Athanor: and further that it is composed of “three numbers” or elements,
which they call Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury. These, when found, and forced
into the proper combination, form the “Azoth” or “Philosopher’s Egg”—the
stuff or First Matter of the Great Work. Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury,
however, must not be understood in too literal a sense. “You need not look
for our metallic seed among the elements,” says Basil the Monk, “it need not
be sought so far back. If you can only rectify the Mercury, Sulphur, and
Salt (understand those of the sages) until the metallic spirit and body are
inseparably joined together by means of the metallic soul, you thereby
firmly rivet the chain of love and prepare the palace for the Coronation.”
[299]

Of these three ingredients, the important one is the spiritual principle,
the unseizable Mercury; which is far from being the metal which we
ordinarily know by that name. The Mercury which the alchemists sought—often
in strange places—is a hidden and powerful substance. They call it “Mercury
of the Wise”; and he who can discover it, they say, is on the way towards
success. The reader in search of mystical wisdom already begins to be
bewildered; but if he persevere in this labyrinth of symbolism, he presently
discovers—as Basil the Monk indeed hints—that the Sulphur and the Salt, or
“metallic soul and body” of the spiritual chemistry, represent something
analogous to the body and mind of man—Sulphur his earthly nature, seasoned
with intellectual Salt. The Mercury is Spirit in its most mystic sense, the
Synteresis or holy Dweller in the Innermost, the immanent spark or Divine
Principle of his life. Only the “wise,” the mystically awakened, can know
this Mercury, the agent of man’s transmutation: and until it has been
discovered, brought out of the hiddenness, nothing can be done. “This
Mercury or Snowy Splendour, is a Celestial Body drawn from the beams of the
Sun and the Moon. It is the only Agent in the world for this art.” [300] It
is the divine-human “spark of the soul,” the bridge between Gold and Silver,
God and man.

The Three Principles being enclosed in the vessel, or Athanor, which is man
himself, and subjected to a gentle fire—the Incendium Amoris —the process of
the Great Work, the mystic transmutation of natural into spiritual man, can
begin. This work, like the ingredients which compose it, has “three
numbers”: and the first matter, in the course of its transmutation, assumes
three successive colours: the Black, the White, and the Red. These three
colours are clearly analogous to the three traditional stages of the Mystic
Way: Purgation, Illumination, Union.

The alchemists call the first stage, or Blackness, Putrefaction. In it the
three principles which compose the “whole man” of body, soul and spirit, are
“sublimated” till they appear as a black powder full of corruption, and the
imperfect body is “dissolved and purified by subtle Mercury”; as man is
purified by the darkness, misery, and despair which follows the emergence of
his spiritual consciousness. As psychic uproar and disorder seems part of
the process of mental growth, so “ Solve et coagula ”—break down that you
may build up—is the watchword of the spiritual alchemist. The “black
beast,” the passional element, of the lower nature must emerge and be dealt
with before anything further can be done. “There is a black beast in our
forest,” says the highly allegorical “Book of Lambspring,” “his name is
Putrefaction, his blackness is called the Head of the Raven; when it is cut
off, Whiteness appears.” [301] This Whiteness, the state of Luna, or Silver,
the “chaste and immaculate Queen,” is the equivalent of the Illuminative
Way: the highest point which the mystic can attain short of union with the
Absolute. This White Stone is pure, and precious; but in it the Great Work
of man’s spiritual evolution has not yet reached its term. That term is the
attainment of the Red, the colour of Perfection or alchemic gold; a process
sometimes called the “Marriage of Luna and Sol”—the fusion of the human and
divine spirit. Under this image is concealed the final secret of the mystic
life: that ineffable union of finite and infinite—that loving reception of
the inflowing vitality of God—from which comes forth the Magnum Opus:
deified or spiritual man.

“This,” says the author of “A Suggestive Enquiry,” “is the union
supersentient, the nuptials sublime, Mentis et Universi . . . . Lo! behold I
will open to thee a mystery, cries the Adept, the bridegroom crowneth the
bride of the north [ i.e. , she who comes out of the cold and darkness of
the lower nature]. In the darkness of the north, out of the crucifixion of
the cerebral life, when the sensual dominant is occultated in the Divine
Fiat, and subdued, there arises a Light wonderfully about the summit, which
wisely returned and multiplied according to the Divine Blessing, is made
substantial in life.” [302]

I have said, that side by side with the metallic and planetary language of
the alchemists, runs a strange heraldic symbolism in which they take refuge
when they fear—generally without reason—that they are telling their secrets
too plainly to an unregenerate world. Many of these heraldic emblems are
used in an utterly irresponsible manner; and whilst doubtless conveying a
meaning to the individual alchemist and the disciples for whom he wrote,
are, and must ever be, unintelligible to other men. But others are of a more
general application; and appear so frequently in seventeenth-century
literature, whether mystical or non-mystical, that some discussion of them
may well be of use.

Perhaps the quaintest and most celebrated of all these allegories is that
which describes the quest of the Philosopher’s Stone as “the hunting of the
Green Lion.” [303] The Green Lion, though few would divine it, is the First
Matter of the Great Work: hence, in spiritual alchemy, natural man in his
wholeness—Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury in their crude state. He is called
green because, seen from the transcendent standpoint, he is still unripe,
his latent powers undeveloped; and a Lion, because of his strength,
fierceness, and virility. Here the common opinion that a pious effeminacy, a
diluted and amiable spirituality, is the proper raw material of the mystic
life, is emphatically contradicted. It is not by the education of the lamb,
but by the hunting and taming of the wild intractable lion, instinct with
vitality, full of ardour and courage, exhibiting heroic qualities on the
sensual plane, that the Great Work is achieved. The lives of the saints
enforce the same law.


“Our lyon wanting maturitie

Is called greene for his unripeness trust me:

And yet full quickly he can run,

And soon can overtake the Sun.” [304]

The Green Lion, then, in his strength and wholeness is the only creature
potentially able to attain Perfection. It needs the adoption and
purification of all the wealth and resources of man’s nature, not merely the
encouragement of his transcendental tastes, if he is to “overtake the Sun”
and achieve the Great Work. The Kingdom of Heaven is taken by violence, not
by amiable aspiration. “The Green Lion,” says one alchemist, “is the priest
by whom Sol and Luna are wed.” In other words, the raw stuff of indomitable
human nature is the means by which man is to attain union with the Absolute.
The duty of the alchemist, the transmuting process, is therefore described
as the hunting of the Green Lion through the forest of the sensual world.
He, like the Hound of Heaven, is on a love chase down the nights and down
the days.

When the lion is caught, when Destiny overtakes it, its head must be cut off
as the preliminary to the necessary taming process. This is called by the
alchemists “the head of the Raven,” the Crow, or the Vulture, “for its
blackness.” It represents the fierce and corrupt life of the passions: and
its removal is that “death of the lower nature” which is the object of all
asceticism— i.e. , Purgation. The lion, the whole man, Humanity in its
strength, is as it were “slain to the world,” and then resuscitated; but in
a very different shape. By its passage through this mystic death or the
“putrefaction of the Three Principles” the “colour of unripeness” is taken
away. Its taming completed, it receives wings, wherewith it may fly up to
Sol, the Perfect or Divine; and is transmuted, say the alchemists, into the
Red Dragon. This is to us a hopelessly grotesque image: but to the Hermetic
philosophers, whose sense of wonder was uncorrupt, it was the deeply
mystical emblem of a new, strange, and transcendental life, powerful alike
in earth and in heaven. As the angel to the man, so was the dragon to the
world of beasts: a creature of splendour and terror, a super-brute,
veritably existent if seldom seen. We realize something of the significance
of this symbol for the alchemic writers, if we remember how sacred a meaning
it has for the Chinese: to whom the dragon is the traditional emblem of free
spiritual life, as the tiger represents the life of the material plane in
its intensest form. Since it is from China that alchemy is supposed to have
reached the European world, it may yet be found that the Red Dragon is one
of the most antique and significant symbols of the Hermetic Art.

For the Spiritual Chemistry, then, the Red Dragon represents Deified Man;
whose emergence must always seem like the birth of some monstrous and
amazing creature when seen from the standpoint of the merely natural world.
With his coming forth, the business of the alchemist, in so far as he be a
mystic, is done. Man has transcended his lower nature, has received wings
wherewith to live on higher levels of reality. The Tincture, the latent
goldness, has been found and made dominant, the Magnum Opus achieved. That
the trite and inward business of that Work, when stripped of its many
emblematic veils, was indeed the reordering of spiritual rather than
material elements, is an opinion which rests on a more solid foundation than
personal interpretations of old allegories and alchemic-tracts. The Norwich
physician—himself deeply read in the Hermetic science—has declared to us his
own certainty concerning it in few but lovely words. In them is contained
the true mystery of man’s eternal and interior quest of the Stone: its
reconciliation with that other, outgoing quest of “the Hidden Treasure that
desires to be found.”

“Do but extract from the corpulency of bodies, or resolve things beyond
their First Matter, and you discover the habitation of Angels: which, if I
call it the ubiquitary and omnipresent Essence of God, I hope I shall not
offend Divinity.” [305]
_________________________________________________________________

[258] Jámi, “Joseph and Zulaikha. The Poet’s Prayer.”

[259] “Theologia Germanica,” cap. x.

[260] St. Catherine of Genoa, “ Vita e Dottrina,” cap. xiv.

[261] “Vita e Dottrina,” p. 36.

[262] This image seems first to have been elaborated by St. Augustine, from
whom it was borrowed by Hugh of St. Victor, and most of the mediaeval
mystics.

[263] “The Scale of Perfection,” bk. ii. cap. xxi.

[264] So too Ruysbroeck says that “the just man goes towards God by inward
love in perpetual activity and in God in virtue of his fruitive affection in
eternal rest” (“De Ornatu Spiritalium Nuptiarum.” I. ii. cap. lxv).

[265] I need not remind the reader of the fact that this symbolism,
perverted to the purposes of his skeptical philosophy, runs through the
whole of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám.

[266] See Palmer’s “Oriental Mysticism,” pt. I. caps. i., ii., iii., and v.

[267] An abridged translation of ‘Attar’s allegory of the Valleys will be
found in “The Conference of the Birds,” by R. P. Masani (1924). See also W.
S. Lilly’s “Many Mansions,” p. 130.

[268] Jundt, “Rulman Merswin,” p. 27.

[269] Royce, “The World and the Individual,” vol. ii. p. 386.

[270] “The Scale of Perfection,” bk. ii. cap. xxiv.

[271] Compare Récéjac (“Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique,” p. 252).
“According to mysticism, morality leads the soul to the frontiers of the
Absolute and even gives it an impulsion to enter, but this is not enough.
This movement of pure Freedom cannot succeed unless there is an equivalent
movement within the Absolute itself.”

[272] Aug. Conf., bk. xiii. cap. 9. “All those who love,” says Ruysbroeck,
“feel this attraction: more or less according to the degree of their
love.” (“De Calculo sive de Perfectione filiorum Dei.”)

[273] Meister Eckhart, Pred. iii.

[274] Ibid ., Pred. xiii.

[275] “Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. vi.

[276] The Greek and English text will be found in the “Apocrypha Anecdota”
of Dr. M. R. James, series 2 (Cambridge, 1897), pp. 1-25. I follow his
translation. It will be seen that I have adopted the hypotheses of Mr. G. R.
S. Mead as to the dramatic nature of this poem. See his “Echoes from the
Gnosis,” 1896.

[277] Jalalu d’ Din Rumi (Wisdom of the East Series), p. 77.

[278] So Dante—

“ Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna

legato con amore in un volume

cio che per l’universo si squaderna.”
(Par. xxxiii. 85.)

[279] “The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” “Aurea Dicta,” ccxxviii.

[280] “Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit,” pt. i. cap. iii.

[281] “Quia amore langueo,” an anonymous fifteenth-century poem. Printed
from the Lambeth MS. by the E.E.T.S., 1866-67.

[282] Pred. lxxxviii.

[283] So we are told of St. Francis of Assisi, that in his youth he “tried
to flee God’s hand.” Thomas of Celano, Legenda Prima, cap. ii.

[284] Sr. Bernard, “Cantica Canticorum,” Sermon vii. For a further and
excellent discussion of St. Bernard’s mystical language, see Dom Cuthbert
Butler, “Western Mysticism,” 2nd ed., pp. 160 seq .

[285] Vide infra, Pt. II. cap. v.

[286] Professor Pratt, by no means an enthusiastic witness, most justly
observes “There are several excellent reasons why the mystics almost
inevitably make use of the language of human love in describing the joy of
the love of God. The first and simplest is this: that they have no other
language to use . . . the mystic must make use of expressions drawn from
earthly love to describe his experience, or give up the attempt of
describing it at all. It is the only way he has of even suggesting to the
non-mystical what he has felt” (“The Religious Consciousness,” p. 418).

[287] “El Castillo Interior,” Moradas Sétimas, cap ii.

[288] “De Quatuor Gradibus Violentae Charitatis” (Migne, Patrologia Latina,
vol. cxcvi. col. 1207).

[289] “In primo gradu fit desponsatio, in secundo nuptiae, in tertio copula,
in quarto puerperium. . . . De quarto dicitur, Coucepimus, et quasi
parturivimus et peperimus spiritum” (Isa. xviii . 26). ( Op. cit., 1216, D.)

[290] “Subida del Monte Carmelo,” lii. cap. v.

[291] Vide infra , pt. ii. caps. i. and x.

[292] “Theologia Germanica,” cap. i.

[293] “A Short Enquiry Concerning the Hermetic Art,” p. 29.

[294] “Religio Medici,” pt. i.

[295] “A Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery,” p. 143. This rare
and curious study of spiritual alchemy was the anonymous work of the late
Mrs. Atwood. She attempted to suppress it soon after publication under the
impression—common amongst mystics of a certain type—that she had revealed
matters which might not be spoken of; as Coventry Patmore for the same
reason destroyed his masterpiece, “Sponsa Dei.”

[296] Quoted in “A Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery,” p. 107.
The whole of the “Golden Treatise” will be found set out in this work.

[297] Jacob Boehme, “The Threefold Life of Man,” cap. iv. § 23.

[298] Boehme, “The Threefold Life of Man,” cap. vi. § 98; cap. x. §§ 3, 4;
and cap. xiii. § 1.

[299] “The Golden Tripod of the Monk Basilius Valentinus” (“The Hermetic
Museum, “ vol. i. p. 319).

[300] “A Short Enquiry Concerning the Hermetic Art,” p. 17.

[301] “The Hermetic Museum,” vol. i. p. 272.

[302] “A Suggestive Enquiry,” p. 345.

[303] See “A Short Enquiry,” p. 17, and “A Suggestive Enquiry,” pp. 297 et
seq ., where the rhymed Alchemic tract called “Hunting the Greene Lyon” is
printed in full.

[304] Op. cit.

[305] Sir Thomas Browne, “Religio Medici,” pt. i.
_________________________________________________________________

I t is unnecessary to examine in detail the mistakes—in ecclesiastical
language, the heresies—into which men have been led by a feeble, a deformed,
or an arrogant mystical sense. The number of these mistakes is countless;
their wildness almost inconceivable to those who have not been forced to
study them. Too often the loud voices and strange declarations of their
apostles have drowned the quieter accents of the orthodox.

It seems as though the moment of puberty were far more critical in the
spiritual than it is in the physical life: the ordinary dangers of
adolescence being intensified when they appear upon the higher levels of
consciousness. In the condition of psychic instability which is
characteristic of his movement to new states, man is unusually at the mercy
of the suggestions and impressions which he receives. Hence in every period
of true mystical activity we find an outbreak of occultism, illuminism, or
other perverted spirituality and—even more dangerous and confusing for the
student—a borderland region where the mystical and psychical meet. In the
youth of the Christian Church, side by side with genuine mysticism
descending from the Johannine writings or brought in by the Christian
Neoplatonists, we have the arrogant and disorderly transcendentalism of the
Gnostics: their attempted fusion of the ideals of mysticism and magic.
During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance there are the spurious mysticism
of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the occult propaganda of Paracelsus, the
Rosicrucians, the Christian Kabalists; and the innumerable pantheistic,
Manichean, mystery-making, and Quietist heresies which made war upon
Catholic tradition. In the modern world, Theosophy in its various forms is
probably the most widespread and respectable representative of the occult
tradition.

The root idea from which these varied beliefs and practices develop is
always the same; and, since right doctrine is often most easily defined by
contrast with its opposite, its study is likely to help us to fix more
precisely the true characters of mysticism. Leaving therefore the
specifically mystical error of Quietism until we come to the detailed
discussion of the contemplative states, we will consider here some of those
other supernormal activities of the self which we have already agreed to
classify as magic: and learn through them more of those hidden and
half-comprehended forces which she has at her command.

The word “magic” is out of fashion, though its spirit was never more widely
diffused than at the present time. Thanks to the gradual debasement of the
verbal currency, it suggests to the ordinary reader the production of
optical illusions and other parlour tricks. It has dragged with it in its
fall the terrific verb “to conjure,” which, forgetting that it once
undertook to compel the spirits of men and angels, is now content to produce
rabbits from top-hats. These facts would have little importance, were it not
that modern occultists—annoyed, one supposes, by this abuse of their ancient
title—constantly arrogate to their tenets and practices the name of
“Mystical Science.” Vaughan, in his rather supercilious survey of the
mystics, classed all forms of white magic, alchemy, and occult philosophy as
“theurgic mysticism,” [306] and, on the other side of the shield, the
occultists display an increasing eagerness to claim the mystics as masters
in their school. [307] Even the “three-fold way” of mysticism has been
adopted by them and relabelled “Probation, Enlightenment, Initiation.” [308]

In our search for the characteristics of mysticism we have already marked
the boundary which separates it from magic: and tried to define the true
nature and intention of occult philosophy. [309] We saw that it represented
the instinctive human “desire to know more” applied to suprasensible things.
For good or ill this desire, and the occult sciences and magic arts which
express it, have haunted humanity from the earliest times. No student of man
can neglect their investigation, however distasteful to his intelligence
their superficial absurdities may be. The starting-point of all magic, and
of all magical religion—the best and purest of occult activities—is, as in
mysticism, man’s inextinguishable conviction that there are other planes of
being than those which his senses report to him; and its proceedings
represent the intellectual and individualistic results of this
conviction—his craving for the hidden knowledge. It is, in the eyes of those
who really practise it, a moyen de parvenir: not the performance of illicit
tricks, but a serious attempt to solve the riddle of the world. Its result,
according to a modern writer upon occult philosophy, “comprises an actual,
positive, and realizable knowledge concerning the worlds which we denominate
invisible, because they transcend the imperfect and rudimentary faculties of
a partially developed humanity, and concerning the latent potentialities
which constitute—by the fact of their latency—the interior man. In more
strictly philosophical language, the Hermetic science is a method of
transcending the phenomenal world and attaining to the reality which is
behind phenomena.” [310]

Though fragments of this enormous claim seem able to justify themselves in
experience, the whole of it cannot be admitted. The last phrase in
particular is identical with the promise which we have seen to be
characteristic of mysticism. It presents magic as a pathway to reality; a
promise which it cannot fulfil, for the mere transcending of phenomena does
not entail the attainment of the Absolute. Magic even at its best extends
rather than escapes the boundaries of the phenomenal world. It stands, where
genuine, for that form of transcendentalism which does abnormal things, but
does not lead anywhere: and we are likely to fall victims to some kind of
magic the moment that the declaration “I want to know” ousts the declaration
“I want to be” from the chief place in our consciousness. The true “science
of ultimates” must be a science of pure Being, for reasons which the reader
is now in a position to discover for himself. But magic is merely a system
whereby the self tries to assuage its transcendental curiosity by extending
the activities of the will beyond their usual limits; sometimes, according
to its own account, obtaining by this means an experimental knowledge of
planes of existence usually—but inaccurately—regarded as “supernatural.”

Even this modified claim needs justification. For most persons who do not
specialize in the eccentric sciences the occultist can only be said to exist
in either the commercial or the academic sense. The fortune-teller
represents one class; the annotator of improper grimoires the other. In
neither department is the thing supposed to be taken seriously: it is merely
the means of obtaining money, or of assuaging a rather morbid curiosity.

Such a view is far from accurate. In magic, whether regarded as a
superstition or a science, we have at any rate the survival of a great and
ancient tradition, the true meaning of whose title should hardly have been
lost in a Christian country; for it claims to be the science of those Magi
whose quest of the symbolic Blazing Star brought them once, at least, to the
cradle of the Incarnate God. Its laws, and the ceremonial rites which
express those laws, have come down from immemorial antiquity. They appear to
enshrine a certain definite knowledge, and a large number of less definite
theories, concerning the sensual and supersensual worlds, and concerning
powers which man, according to occult thinkers, may develop if he will.
Orthodox persons should be careful how they condemn the laws of magic: for
they unwittingly conform to many of them whenever they go to church. All
ceremonial religion contains some elements of magic. The art of medicine
will never wholly cast it off: many centuries ago it gave birth to that
which we now call modern science. It seems to possess inextinguishable life.
This is not surprising when we perceive how firmly occultism is rooted in
psychology: how perfectly it is adapted to certain perennial characteristics
of the human mind—its curiosity, its arrogance, its love of mystery.

Magic, in its uncorrupted form, claims to be a practical, intellectual,
highly individualistic science; working towards the declared end of
enlarging the sphere on which the human will can work, and obtaining
experimental knowledge of planes of being usually regarded as
transcendental. It is the last descendant of a long line of teaching—the
whole teaching, in fact, of the mysteries of Egypt and Greece—which offered
to initiate man into a certain secret knowledge and understanding of things.
“In every man,” says a modern occultist, “there are latent faculties by
means of which he can acquire for himself knowledge of the higher worlds . .
. as long as the human race has existed there have always been schools in
which those who possessed these higher faculties gave instruction to those
who were in search of them. Such are called the occult schools, and the
instruction which is imparted therein is called esoteric science or the
occult teaching.” [311]

These occult schools, as they exist in the present day, state their doctrine
in terms which seem distressingly prosaic to the romantic inquirer;
borrowing from physics and psychology theories of vibration, attraction,
mental suggestion and subconscious activity which can be reapplied for their
own purposes. According to its modern teachers, magic is simply an extension
of the theory and practice of volition beyond the usual limits. The will,
says the occultist, is king, not only of the House of Life, but of the
universe outside the gates of sense. It is the key to “man limitless” the
true “ring of Gyges,” which can control the forces of nature known and
unknown. This aspect of occult philosophy informs much of the cheap American
transcendentalism which is so lightly miscalled mystical by its teachers and
converts; Menticulture, “New” or “Higher Thought,” and the scriptures of the
so-called “New Consciousness.” The ingenious authors of “Volo,” “The Will to
be Well,” and “Just How to Wake the Solar Plexus,” the seers who assure
their eager disciples that by “Concentration” they may acquire not only
health, but also that wealth which is “health of circumstance,” are no
mystics. They are magicians; and teach, though they know it not, little else
but the cardinal doctrines of Hermetic science, omitting only their
picturesque ceremonial accompaniments. [312]

These cardinal doctrines, in fact, have varied little since their first
appearance early in the world’s history: though, like the doctrines of
theology, they have needed re-statement from time to time. In discussing
them I shall quote chiefly from the works of Eliphas Lévi; the pseudonym
under which Alphonse Louis Constant, the most readable occult philosopher of
the nineteenth century, offered his conclusions to the world.

The tradition of magic, like most other ways of escape which man has offered
to his own soul, appears to have originated in the East. It was formulated,
developed, and preserved by the religion of Egypt. It made an early
appearance in that of Greece. It has its legendary grand master in Hermes
Trismegistus, who gave to it its official name of Hermetic Science, and
whose status in occultism is much the same as that occupied by Moses in the
tradition of the Jews. Fragmentary writings attributed to this personage and
said to be derived from the Hermetic books, are the primitive scriptures of
occultism: and the probably spurious Table of Emerald, which is said to have
been discovered in his tomb, ranks as the magician’s Table of Stone. [313]
In Gnosticism, in the allegories of the Kabalah, in theosophy, in secret
associations which still exist in England, France, and Germany—and even in
certain practices embedded in the ceremonial of the Christian Church— the
main conceptions which constitute the “secret wisdom” of magical tradition
have wandered down the centuries. The baser off-shoots of that tradition are
but too well known, and need not be particularized. [314]

Like the world which it professes to interpret, magic has a body and a soul:
an outward vesture of words and ceremonies and an inner doctrine. The
outward vesture, which is all that the uninitiated are permitted to
perceive, consists of a series of confusing and often ridiculous symbolic
veils: of strange words and numbers, grotesque laws and ritual acts,
personifications and mystifications. The outward vestures of our religious,
political, and social systems—which would probably appear equally irrational
to a wholly ignorant yet critical observer—offer an instructive parallel to
this aspect of occult philosophy. Stripped of these archaic formulae,
symbols, and mystery-mongerings, however, magic as described by its
apologists, is found to rest upon three fundamental axioms which can hardly
be dismissed as ridiculous by those who listen respectfully to the
ever-shifting hypotheses of psychology and physics.

(1) The first axiom declares the existence of an imponderable “medium” or
“universal agent,” which is described as beyond the plane of our normal
sensual perceptions yet interpenetrating and binding up the material world.
This agent, which is not luminous and has nothing to do with the stars, is
known to the occultists by the unfortunate name of “Astral Light”: a term
originally borrowed from the Martinists by Eliphas Lévi. To live in
conscious communication with the “Astral Light” is to live upon the “Astral
Plane,” or in the Astral World: to have achieved, that is to say, a new
level of consciousness. The education of the occultist is directed towards
this end.

This doctrine of the Astral Plane, like most of our other diagrams of the
transcendent, possesses a respectable ancestry, and many prosperous
relations in the world of philosophic thought. Traces of it may even be
detected under veils in the speculations of orthodox physics. It is really
identical with the “Archetypal World” or Yesod of the Kabalah—the “Perfect
Land” of old Egyptian religion—in which the true or spirit forms of all
created things are held to exist. It may be connected with the “real
world” described by such visionaries as Boehme and Blake, many of whose
experiences are far more occult than mystical in character. [315] A
persistent tradition as to the existence of such a plane of being or of
consciousness is found all over the world: in Indian, Greek Egyptian,
Celtic, and Jewish thought. “Above this visible nature there exists another,
unseen and eternal, which, when all things created perish, does not
perish,” says the Bhagavad Gita. According to the Kabalists it is “the seat
of life and vitality, and the nourishment of all the world.” [316] Vitalism
might accept it as one of those aspects of the universe which can be
perceived by a more extended rhythm than that of normal consciousness.
Various aspects of the Astral have been identified with the “Burning Body of
the Holy Ghost” of Christian Gnosticism and with the Odic force of the
old-fashioned spiritualists.

Further, the Astral Plane is regarded as constituting the “Cosmic Memory,”
where the images of all beings and events are preserved, as they are
preserved in the memory of man.


“The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard

The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky”—

all are living in the Astral World. There too the concepts of future
creation are present in their completeness in the Eternal Now before being
brought to birth in the material sphere. On this theory prophecy, and also
clairvoyance—one of the great objects of occult education—consist in opening
the eyes of the mind upon this timeless Astral World: and spiritualists,
evoking the phantoms of the dead, merely call them up from the recesses of
universal instead of individual remembrance. The reader who feels his brain
to be whirling amidst this medley of solemn statement and unproven fairy
tale must remember that the dogmatic part of the occult tradition can only
represent the attempt of an extended or otherwise abnormal consciousness to
find an explanation of its own experiences.

Further, our whole selves—not merely our sentient selves—are regarded as
being bathed in the Astral Light, as in the ether of physics. Hence in
occult language it is a “universal agent” connecting soul with soul, and
becomes the possible vehicle of hypnotism, telepathy, clairvoyance, and all
those supernormal phenomena which are the subject-matter of “psychical
research.” This hypothesis also accounts for the confusing fact of an
initial similarity of experience in many of the proceedings of mystic and
occultist. Both must pass through the plane of consciousness which the
concept of the “Astral” represents, because this plane of perception is the
one which lies “next beyond” our normal life. The transcendental faculties
may become aware of this world; only, in the case of the mystic, to pass
through it as quickly as they can. But the occultist, the medium, the
psychic, rest in the “Astral” and develop their perceptions of this aspect
of the world. It is the medium in which they work.

From earliest times, occult philosophy has insisted on the existence of this
medium: as a scientific fact, outside the range of our normal senses, but
susceptible of verification by the trained powers of the “initiate.” The
possessor of such trained powers, not the wizard or the fortune-teller, is
regarded as the true magician: and it is the declared object of occult
education, or initiation, to actualize this supersensual plane of
experience, to give the student the power of entering into conscious
communion with it, and teach him to impose upon its forces the directive
force of his own will, as easily as he imposes that will upon the
“material” things of senses. [317]

(2) This brings us to the second axiom of magic, which also has a curiously
modern air: for it postulates simply the limitless power of the disciplined
human will. This dogma has been “taken over” without acknowledgment from
occult philosophy to become the trump card of menticulture, “Christian
Science,” and “New Thought.” The preachers of “Joy Philosophy” and other
dilute forms of mental discipline, the Liberal Catholic “priest” producing
“a vast bubble of etheric astromental matter, a thought-edifice, ethereal,
diaphanous, a bubble which just includes the congregation—“ [318] these are
the true hierophants of magic in the modern world. [319]

The first lesson of the would-be magus is self-mastery. “By means of
persevering and gradual athletics,” says Eliphas Lévi, “the powers of the
body can be developed to an amazing extent. It is the same with the powers
of the soul. Would you govern yourself and others? Learn how to will. How
may one learn how to will? This is the first secret of magical initiation;
and it was to make the foundations of this secret thoroughly understood that
the antique keepers of the mysteries surrounded the approach to the
sanctuary with so many terrors and illusions. They did not believe in a will
until it had given its proofs; and they were right. Strength cannot prove
itself except by conquest. Idleness and negligence are the enemies of the
will, and this is the reason why all religions have multiplied their
practices and made their cults difficult and minute. The more trouble one
gives oneself for an idea, the more power one acquires in regard to that
idea. . . . Hence the power of religions resides entirely in the inflexible
will of those who practise them.” [320]

This last sentence alone is enough to define the distinction between
mysticism and magic, and clear the minds of those who tend to confuse the
mystical and magical elements of religion. In accordance with it, real
“magical initiation” is in essence a form of mental discipline,
strengthening and focussing the will. This discipline, like that of the
religious life, consists partly in physical austerities and a deliberate
divorce from the world, partly in the cultivation of will-power: but largely
in a yielding of the mind to the influence of suggestions which have been
selected and accumulated in the course of ages because of their power over
that imagination which Eliphas Lévi calls “The eye of the soul.” There is
nothing supernatural about it. Like the more arduous, more disinterested
self-training of the mystic, it is character-building with an object,
conducted upon an heroic scale. In magic the “will to know” is the centre
round which the personality is rearranged. As in mysticism, unconscious
factors are dragged from the hiddenness to form part of that personality.
The uprushes of thought, the abrupt intuitions which reach us from the
subliminal region, are developed, ordered, and controlled by rhythms and
symbols which have become traditional because the experience of centuries
has proved, though it cannot explain, their efficacy: and powers of
apprehension which normally lie below the threshold may thus be liberated
and enabled to report their discoveries.

“The fundamental principle,” says A. E. Waite, speaking of occult
evocations, “was in the exercise of a certain occult force resident in the
magus, and strenuously exerted for the establishment of such a
correspondence between two planes of nature as would effect his desired end.
This exertion was termed the evocation, conjuration, or calling of the
spirit, but that which in reality was raised was the energy of the inner man
; tremendously developed and exalted by combined will and aspiration, this
energy germinated by sheer force a new intellectual faculty of sensible
psychological perception. To assist and stimulate this energy into the most
powerful possible operation, artificial means were almost invariably used. .
. . The synthesis of these methods and processes was called Ceremonial
Magic, which in effect was a tremendous forcing-house of the latent
faculties of man’s spiritual nature.” [321]

This is the psychological explanation of those apparently absurd rituals of
preparation, doctrines of signs and numbers, pentacles, charms, angelical
names, the “power of the word” which made up ceremonial magic. The power of
such artifices is known amongst the Indian mystics; who, recognizing in the
Mantra, or occult and rhythmic formula, consciously held and repeated, an
invaluable help to the attainment of the true ecstatic state, are not
ashamed to borrow from the magicians. So, too, the modern American schools
of mental healing and New Thought recommend concentration upon a carefully
selected word as the starting-point of efficacious meditation. This fact of
the psychical effect of certain verbal combinations, when allowed to
dominate the field of consciousness, may have some bearing upon that need of
a formal liturgy which is felt by nearly every great religion; for religion,
on its ceremonial side, has certain affinities with magic. It, too, seeks by
sensible means to stimulate supra-sensible energies. The true magic “word”
or spell is untranslatable; because its power resides only partially in that
outward sense which is apprehended by the reason, but chiefly in the rhythm,
which is addressed to the subliminal mind. Symbols, religious and other, and
symbolic acts which appear meaningless when judged by the intellect alone,
perform a similar office. They express the deep-seated instinct of the human
mind that it must have a focus on which to concentrate its volitional
powers, if those powers are to be brought to their highest state of
efficiency. The nature of the focus matters little: its office matters much.

“. . . All these figures, and acts analogous to them,” says Lévi, “all these
dispositions of numbers and of characters [ i.e. sacred words, charms,
pentacles, etc.] are, as we have said, but instruments for the education of
the will, of which they fix and determine the habits. They serve also to
concentrate in action all the powers of the human soul, and to strengthen
the creative power of the imagination. . . . A practice, even though it be
superstitious and foolish, may be efficacious because it is a realization of
the will. . . . We laugh at the poor woman who denies herself a ha’porth of
milk in the morning, that she may take a little candle to burn upon the
magic triangle in some chapel. But those who laugh are ignorant, and the
poor woman does not pay too dearly for the courage and resignation which she
thus obtains. [322]

Magic symbols, therefore, from penny candles to Solomon’s seal, fall in
modern technical language into two classes. The first contains instruments
of self-suggestion, exaltation, and will direction. To this belong all
spells, charms, rituals, perfumes: from the magician’s vervain wreath to the
“Youth! Health! Strength!” which the student of New Thought repeats when she
is brushing her hair in the morning. The second class contains autoscopes:
i.e. , material objects which focus and express the subconscious perceptions
of the operator. The dowser’s divining rod, fortuneteller’s cards, and
crystal-gazer’s ball, are characteristic examples. Both kinds are rendered
necessary rather by the disabilities of the human than by the peculiarities
of the superhuman plane: and the great adept may attain heights at which he
dispenses with these “outward and visible signs.” “Ceremonies being, as we
have said, artificial methods of creating certain habits of the will, they
cease to be necessary when these habits have become fixed.” [323] These
facts, now commonplaces of psychology, have long been known and used by
students of magic. Those who judge the philosophy by the apparent absurdity
of its symbols and ceremonies should remember that the embraces, gestures,
grimaces, and other ritual acts by which we all concentrate, liberate, or
express love, wrath, or enthusiasm, will ill endure the cold revealing light
of a strictly rational inquiry.

(3) The dogmas of the “Astral Light” or universal agent and the “power of
the will” are completed by a third: the doctrine of Analogy, of an implicit
correspondence between appearance and reality, the microcosm of man and the
macrocosm of the universe the seen and the unseen worlds. In this, occultism
finds the basis of its transcendental speculations. Quod superius sicut quod
inferius —the first words of that Emerald Table which was once attributed to
Hermes Trismegistus himself—is an axiom which must be agreeable to all
Platonists. It plays a great part in the theory of mysticism; which, whilst
maintaining an awed sense of the total “otherness” and incomprehensibility
of the Divine, has always assumed that the path of the individual soul
towards loving union with the Absolute is somehow analogous with the path on
which the universe moves to its consummation in God.

The notion of analogy ultimately determines the religious concepts of every
race, and resembles the verities of faith in the breadth of its application.
It embraces alike the appearances of the visible world—which thus become the
mirrors of the invisible—the symbols of religion, the tiresome arguments of
Butler’s “Analogy,” the allegories of the Kabalah and the spiritual
alchemists, and that childish “doctrine of signatures” on which much of
mediaeval science was built. “Analogy,” says Lévi, [324] “is the last word
of science and the first word of faith . . . the sole possible mediator
between the visible and the invisible, between the finite and the
infinite.” Here Magic clearly defines her own limitations; stepping
incautiously from the useful to the universal, and laying down a doctrine
which no mystic could accept—which, carried to its logical conclusion, would
turn the adventure of the infinite into a guessing game.

The argument by analogy is carried by the occultists to lengths which cannot
be described here. Armed with this torch, they explore the darkest, most
terrible mysteries of life: and do not hesitate to cast the grotesque
shadows of these mysteries upon the unseen world. The principle of
correspondence is no doubt sound so long as it works within reasonable
limits. It was admitted into the system of the Kabalah, though that profound
and astute philosophy was far from giving to it the importance which it
assumes in Hermetic “science.” It has been eagerly accepted by many of the
mystics. Boehme and Swedenborg availed themselves of its method in
presenting their intuitions to the world. It is implicitly acknowledged by
thinkers of many other schools: its influence permeates the best periods of
literature. Sir Thomas Browne spoke for more than himself when he said, in a
well-known passage of the “Religio Medici”: “The severe schools shall never
laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes [ i.e. , Trismegistus] that this
visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait,
things are not truly but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some
real substance in that invisible framework.” Such a sense of analogy,
whatever the “severe schools” may say, is indeed the foundation of every
perfect work of art. “Intuitive perception of the hidden analogies of
things,” says Hazlitt in “English Novelists,” “or, as it may be called, his
instinct of the imagination, is perhaps what stamps the character of genius
on the productions of art more than any other circumstance.”

The central doctrine of magic may now be summed up thus:—

(1) That a supersensible and real “cosmic medium” exists, which
interpenetrates, influences, and supports the tangible and apparent world,
and is amenable to the categories both of philosophy and of physics.

(2) That there is an established analogy and equilibrium between the real
and unseen world, and the illusory manifestations which we call the world of
sense.

(3) That this analogy may be discerned, and this equilibrium controlled, by
the disciplined will of man, which thus becomes master of itself and of
fate.

We must now examine in more detail the third of these propositions—that
which ascribes abnormal powers to the educated and disciplined will—for this
assumption lies at the root of all magical practices, old and new. “Magical
operations,” says Eliphas Lévi, “are the exercise of a power which is
natural, but superior to the ordinary powers of nature. They are the result
of a science, and of habits, which exalt the human will above its usual
limits.” [325] This power of the will is now recognized as playing an
important part both in the healing of the body and the healing of the soul;
for our most advanced theories on these subjects are little more than the
old wine of magic in new bottles. The ancient occultists owed much of their
power, and also of their evil reputation, to the fact that they were
psychologists before their time. Effective methods of suggestion, recipes
for the alteration and exaltation of personality and enhancement of
will-power, the artificial production of hypnotic states, photisms,
automatism and ecstasy, with the opening up of the subliminal field which
accompanies these phenomena—concealed from the profane by a mass of
confusing allegories and verbiage—form the backbone of all genuine occult
rituals. Their authors were aware that ceremonial magic has no objective
importance, but depends solely on its effect upon the operator’s mind. That
this effect might be enhanced, it was given an atmosphere of sanctity and
mystery; its rules were strict, its higher rites difficult of attainment.
These rules and rites constituted at once a test of the student’s
earnestness and a veil guarding the sanctuary from the profane. The long and
difficult preparations, majestic phrases, and strange ceremonies of an
evocation had power, not over the spirit of the dead, but over the
consciousness of the living; who was thus caught up from the world of sense
to a new plane of perception. Thus, according to its apologists, the
education of the genuine occult student tends to awaken in him a new view
and a new attitude. It adjusts the machinery of his cinematograph to the
registering of new intervals in the stream of things, which passed it by
before; and thus introduces new elements into that picture by which ordinary
men are content to know and judge the—or rather their— universe.

So much for the principles which govern occult education. Magic
therapeutics, or as it is now called, “mental healing,” is but the
application of these principles upon another plane. It results, first, from
a view of humanity which sees a difference only of degree between diseases
of body and of soul, and can state seriously and in good faith that “moral
maladies are more contagious than physical, and there are some triumphs of
infatuation and fashion which are comparable to leprosy or cholera.” [326]
Secondly, it is worked by that enhancement of will power, that ability to
alter and control weaker forms of life, which is claimed as the reward of
the occult discipline. “All the power of the occult healer lies in his
conscious will and all his art consists in producing faith in the
patient.” [327]

This simple truth was in the possession of occult thinkers at a time when
Church and State saw no third course between the burning or beatification of
its practitioners. Now, under the polite names of mental hygiene,
suggestion, and psycho-therapeutics, it is steadily advancing to the front
rank of medical shibboleths. Yet it is still the same “magic art” which has
been employed for centuries, with varying ritual accompaniments, by the
adepts of occult science. The methods of Brother Hilarian Tissot, who is
described as curing lunacy and crime by “the unconscious use of the
magnetism of Paracelsus,” who attributed his cases “either to disorder of
the will or to the perverse influence of external wills,” and would “regard
all crimes as acts of madness and treat the wicked as diseased,” [328]
anticipated in many respects those of the most modern psychologists.

The doctrine of magic which has here been described shows us the “Secret
Wisdom” at its best and sanest. But even on these levels, it is dogged by
the defects which so decisively separate the occultist from the mystic. The
chief of these is the peculiar temper of mind, the cold intellectual
arrogance, the intensely individual point of view which occult studies seem
to induce by their conscious quest of exclusive power and knowledge, their
implicit neglect of love. At bottom, every student of occultism is striving
towards a point at which he may be able to “touch the button” and rely on
the transcendental world “springing to do the rest.” In this hard-earned
acquirement of power over the Many, he tends to forget the One. In Levi’s
words, “Too deep a study of the mysteries of nature may estrange from God
the careless investigator, in whom mental fatigue paralyses the ardours of
the heart.” [329] When he wrote this sentence Lévi stood, as the greater
occultists have often done, at the frontiers of mysticism. The best of the
Hermetic philosophers, indeed, are hardly ever without such mystical
hankerings, such flashes of illumination; as if the transcendental powers of
man, once roused from sleep, cannot wholly ignore the true end for which
they were made.

In Levi’s case, as is well known, the discord between the occult and
mystical ideals was resolved by his return to the Catholic Church.
Characteristically, he “read into” Catholicism much that the orthodox would
hardly allow; so that it became for him, as it were, a romantic gloss on the
occult tradition. He held that the Christian Church, nursing mother of the
mystics, was also the heir of the magi; and that popular piety and popular
magic veiled the same ineffable truths. He had more justification than at
first appears probable for this apparently wild and certainly heretical
statement. Religion, as we have seen, can never entirely divorce herself
from magic: for her rituals and sacraments must have, if they are to be
successful in their appeal to the mind, a certain magical character. All
persons who are naturally drawn towards the ceremonial aspect of religion
are acknowledging the strange power of subtle rhythms, symbolic words and
movements, over the human will. An “impressive service” conforms exactly to
the description which I have already quoted of a magical rite: it is “a
tremendous forcing-house of the latent faculties of man’s spiritual
nature.” Sacraments, too, however simple their beginnings, always tend, as
they evolve, to assume upon the phenomenal plane a magical aspect—a fact
which does not invalidate their claim to be the vehicles of supernatural
grace. Those who have observed with understanding, for instance, the Roman
rite of baptism, with its spells and exorcisms, its truly Hermetic
employment of salt, anointing chrism and ceremonial lights, must have seen
in it a ceremony far nearer to the operations of white magic than to the
simple lustrations practiced by St. John the Baptist.

There are obvious objections to the full working out of this subject in a
book which is addressed to readers of all shades of belief; but any student
who is interested in this branch of religious psychology may easily discover
for himself the occult elements in the liturgies of the Christian—or indeed
of any other—Church. There are invocative arrangements of the Names of God
which appear alike in grimoire and in Missal. Sacred numbers, ritual
actions, perfumes, purifications, words of power, are all used, and rightly
used by institutional religion in her work of opening up the human mind to
the messages of the suprasensible world. In certain minor observances, and
charm-like prayers, we seem to stand on the very borderland between magician
and priest.

It is surely inevitable that this should be so. The business of the Church
is to appeal to the whole man, as she finds him living in the world of
sense. She would hardly be adequate to this task did she neglect the
powerful weapons which the occultist has developed for his own ends. She,
who takes the simplest and most common gifts of nature and transmutes them
into heavenly food, takes also every discovery which the self has made
concerning its own potentialities, and turns them to her own high purposes.
Founding her external system on sacraments and symbols, on rhythmic
invocations and ceremonial acts of praise, insisting on the power of the
pure and self-denying will and the “magic chain” of congregational worship,
she does but join hands with those Magi whose gold, frankincense, and myrrh
were the first gifts that she received.

But she pays for this; sharing some of the limitations of the system which
her Catholic nature has compelled her to absorb. It is true, of course, that
she purges it of all its baser elements—its arrogance, its curiosity—true
also that she is bound to adopt it, because it is the highest common measure
which she can apply to the spirituality of that world to which she is sent.
But she cannot—and her great teachers have always known that she
cannot—extract finality from a method which does not really seek after
ultimate things. This method may and does teach men goodness, gives them
happiness and health. It can even induce in them a certain exaltation in
which they become aware, at any rate for a moment, of the existence of the
supernatural world—a stupendous accomplishment. But it will not of itself
make them citizens of that world: give to them the freedom of Reality.

“The work of the Church in the world,” says Patmore, “is not to teach the
mysteries of life, so much as to persuade the soul to that arduous degree of
purity at which God Himself becomes her teacher. The work of the Church ends
when the knowledge of God begins.” [330]
_________________________________________________________________

[306] R. A. Vaughan, “Hours with the Mystics,” vol. i. bk. i. ch. v.

[307] In a list published by Papus from the archives of the Martinists, we
find such diverse names as Averroes, St. Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of
Beauvais, and Swedenborg, given as followers of the occult tradition!

[308] See R. Steiner, “The Way of Initiation,” p. 111.

[309] Supra, pp. 70 seq .

[310] A. E. Waite, “The Occult Sciences,” p. 1.

[311] Steiner, “The Way of Initiation,” p. 66.

[312] See E. Towne, “Joy Philosophy” (1903) and “Just How to Wake the Solar
Plexus” (1904); R. D. Stocker, “New Thought Manual” (1906) and “Soul
Culture” (1905); Floyd Wilson, “Man Limitless” (1905). The literature of
these sects is enormous. For a critical and entertaining account, see C. W.
Ferguson, ‘The Confusion of Tongues.” (1929).

[313] It must here be pointed out that the genuine “Hermetica”—a body of
ancient philosophic and religious pieces collected under this general
title—are entirely unconnected with occultism. Cf. “Hermetica,” ed. with
English translation by W. Scott. 3 vols. 1924-8.

[314] A. E. Waite, a life-long student of these byeways of thought, gives,
as the main channels by which “an arcane knowledge is believed to have been
communicated to the West,” Magic, Alchemy, Astrology, the occult
associations which culminated in Freemasonry, and, finally, “an obscure
sheaf of hieroglyphs known as Tarot cards.” He places in another class “the
bewitchments and other mummeries of Ceremonial Magic.” (“The Holy
Kabbalah,” pp. 518-19.)

[315] For a discussion of the Gnostic and Theosophic elements in Blake’s
work see D. Surat, “Blake and Modern Thought” (1929).

[316] A. E. Waite, “Doctrine and Literature of the Kabbalah,” p. 48.

[317] I offer no opinion as to the truth or falsity of these “occult”
claims. For a more detailed discussion the reader is referred to Steiner’s
curious little book, “The Way of Initiation.”

[318] C. W. Leadbeater, “The Science of the Sacraments,” p. 38.

[319] Compare the following: “Imagine that all the world and the starry
hosts are waiting, alert and with shining eyes, to do your bidding. Imagine
that you are to touch the button now, and instantly they will spring to do
the rest. The instant you say, ‘I can and I will,’ the entire powers of the
universe are to be set in motion” (E. Towne, “Joy Philosophy,” p. 52).

[320] “Rituel de la Haute Magie,” pp. 35, 36.

[321] “The Occult Sciences,” p. 14. But references in Mr. Waite’s most
recent work to “the puerilities and imbecility of ceremonial magic” suggest
that he has modified his views. Cf. “The Holy Kabbalah” (1929), p. 521.

[322] “Rituel de la Haute Magie,” p. 71.

[323] “Rituel de la Haute Magie,” p. 139.

[324] “Dogme de la Haute Magie,” p. 361 et seq.

[325] “Rituel de la Haute Magie,” p. 32.

[326] “Dogme de la Haute Magie,” p. 129.

[327] “Rituel,” p. 312.

[328] “Dogma,” p. 134.

[329] “Histoire de la Magie,” p. 514.

[330] “The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” “Knowledge and Science,” xxii.
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________

PART TWO: THE MYSTIC WAY


“As the Pilgrim passes while the Country permanent remains

So Men pass on; but the States remain permanent forever.”

Blake, “Jerusalem.”
_________________________________________________________________

W e are now to turn from general principles and study those principles in
action: to describe the psychological process, or “Mystic Way,” by which
that peculiar type of personality which is able to set up direct relations
with the Absolute is usually developed. The difficulty of this description
will lie in the fact that all mystics differ one from another; as all the
individual objects of our perception, “living” and “not living,” do. The
creative impulse in the world, so far as we are aware of it, appears upon
ultimate analysis to be free and original not bound and mechanical: to
express itself, in defiance of the determinists, with a certain artistic
spontaneity. Man, when he picks out some point of likeness as a basis on
which to arrange its productions in groups, is not discovering its methods;
but merely making for his own convenience an arbitrary choice of one or
two—not necessarily characteristic—qualities, which happen to appear in a
certain number of different persons or things. Hence the most scientific
classification is a rough-and-ready business at the best. [331]

When we come to apply such classification to so delicate and elusive a
series of psychological states as those which accompany the “contemplative
life,” all the usual difficulties are increased. No one mystic can be
discovered in whom all the observed characteristics of the transcendental
consciousness are resumed, and who can on that account be treated as
typical. Mental states which are distinct and mutually exclusive in one
case, exist simultaneously in another. In some, stages which have been
regarded as essential are entirely omitted: in others, their order appears
to be reversed. We seem at first to be confronted by a group of selves which
arrive at the same end without obeying any general law.

Take, however, a number of such definitely mystical selves and make of them,
so to speak, a “composite portrait”: as anthropologists do when they wish to
discover the character of a race. From this portrait we may expect a type to
emerge, in which all the outstanding characteristics contributed by the
individual examples are present together, and minor variations are
suppressed. Such a portrait will of course be conventional: but it will be
useful as a standard, which can be constantly compared with, and corrected
by, isolated specimens.

The first thing we notice about this composite portrait is that the typical
mystic seems to move towards his goal through a series of strongly marked
oscillations between “states of pleasure” and “states of pain.” The
existence and succession of these states—sometimes broken and confused,
sometimes crisply defined—can be traced, to a greater or less degree, in
almost every case of which we possess anything like a detailed record.
Gyrans gyrando radii spiritus . The soul, as it treads the ascending spiral
of its road towards reality, experiences alternately the sunshine and the
shade. These experiences are “constants” of the transcendental life. “The
Spiritual States of the Soul are all Eternal,” said Blake, with the true
mystical genius for psychology. [332]

The complete series of these states—and it must not be forgotten that few
individuals present them all in perfection, whilst in many instances several
are blurred or appear to be completely suppressed—will be, I think, most
conveniently arranged under five heads. This method of grouping means, of
course, the abandonment of the time-honoured threefold division of the
Mystic Way, and the apparent neglect of St. Teresa’s equally celebrated
Seven Degrees of Contemplation; but I think that we shall gain more than we
lose by adopting it. The groups, however, must be looked upon throughout as
diagrammatic, and only as answering loosely and generally to experiences
which seldom present themselves in so rigid and unmixed a form. These
experiences, largely conditioned as they are by surroundings and by
temperament, exhibit all the variety and spontaneity which are
characteristic of life in its highest manifestations: and, like biological
specimens, they lose something of their essential reality in being prepared
for scientific investigation. Taken all together, they constitute phases in
a single process of growth; involving the movement of consciousness from
lower to higher levels of reality, the steady remaking of character in
accordance with the “independent spiritual world.” But as the study of
physical life is made easier for us by an artificial division into infancy,
adolescence, maturity, and old age, so a discreet indulgence of the human
passion for map-making will increase our chances of understanding the nature
of the Mystic Way.

Here, then, is the classification under which we shall study the phases of
the mystical life.

(1) The awakening of the Self to consciousness of Divine Reality. This
experience, usually abrupt and well-marked, is accompanied by intense
feelings of joy and exaltation.

(2) The Self, aware for the first time of Divine Beauty, realizes by
contrast its own finiteness and imperfection, the manifold illusions in
which it is immersed, the immense distance which separates it from the One.
Its attempts to eliminate by discipline and mortification all that stands in
the way of its progress towards union with God constitute Purgation: a state
of pain and effort.

(3) When by Purgation the Self has become detached from the “things of
sense,” and acquired those virtues which are the “ornaments of the spiritual
marriage,” its joyful consciousness of the Transcendent Order returns in an
enhanced form. Like the prisoners in Plato’s “Cave of Illusion,” it has
awakened to knowledge of Reality, has struggled up the harsh and difficult
path to the mouth of the cave. Now it looks upon the sun. This is
Illumination: a state which includes in itself many of the stages of
contemplation, “degrees of orison,” visions and adventures of the soul
described by St. Teresa and other mystical writers. These form, as it were,
a way within the Way: a moyen de parvenir, a training devised by experts
which will strengthen and assist the mounting soul. They stand, so to speak,
for education; whilst the Way proper represents organic growth. Illumination
is the “contemplative state” par excellence. It forms, with the two
preceding states, the “first mystic life.” Many mystics never go beyond it;
and, on the other hand, many seers and artists not usually classed amongst
them, have shared, to some extent, the experiences of the illuminated state.
Illumination brings a certain apprehension of the Absolute, a sense of the
Divine Presence: but not true union with it. It is a state of happiness.

(4) In the development of the great and strenuous seekers after God, this is
followed—or sometimes intermittently accompanied—by the most terrible of all
the experiences of the Mystic Way: the final and complete purification of
the Self, which is called by some contemplatives the “mystic pain” or
“mystic death,” by others the Purification of the Spirit or Dark Night of
the Soul. The consciousness which had, in Illumination, sunned itself in the
sense of the Divine Presence, now suffers under an equally intense sense of
the Divine Absence: learning to dissociate the personal satisfaction of
mystical vision from the reality of mystical life. As in Purgation the
senses were cleansed and humbled, and the energies and interests of the Self
were concentrated upon transcendental things: so now the purifying process
is extended to the very centre of I-hood, the will. The human instinct for
personal happiness must be killed. This is the “spiritual crucifixion” so
often described by the mystics: the great desolation in which the soul seems
abandoned by the Divine. The Self now surrenders itself, its individuality,
and its will, completely. It desires nothing, asks nothing, is utterly
passive, and is thus prepared for

(5) Union: the true goal of the mystic quest. In this state the Absolute
Life is not merely perceived and enjoyed by the Self, as in Illumination:
but is one with it. This is the end towards which all the previous
oscillations of consciousness have tended. It is a state of equilibrium, of
purely spiritual life; characterized by peaceful joy, by enhanced powers, by
intense certitude. To call this state, as some authorities do, by the name
of Ecstasy, is inaccurate and confusing: since the term Ecstasy has long
been used both by psychologists and ascetic writers to define that short and
rapturous trance—a state with well-marked physical and psychical
accompaniments—in which the contemplative, losing all consciousness of the
phenomenal world, is caught up to a brief and immediate enjoyment of the
Divine Vision. Ecstasies of this kind are often experienced by the mystic in
Illumination, or even on his first conversion. They cannot therefore be
regarded as exclusively characteristic of the Unitive Way. In some of the
greatest mystics—St. Teresa is an example—the ecstatic trance seems to
diminish rather than increase in frequency after the state of union has been
attained: whilst others achieve the heights by a path which leaves on one
side all abnormal phenomena.

Union must be looked upon as the true goal of mystical growth; that
permanent establishment of life upon transcendent levels of reality, of
which ecstasies give a foretaste to the soul. Intense forms of it, described
by individual mystics, under symbols such as those of Mystical Marriage,
Deification, or Divine Fecundity, all prove on examination to be aspects of
this same experience “seen through a temperament.”

It is right, however, to state here that Oriental Mysticism insists upon a
further stage beyond that of union, which stage it regards as the real goal
of the spiritual life. This is the total annihilation or reabsorption of the
individual soul in the Infinite. Such an annihilation is said by the Sufis
to constitute the “Eighth Stage of Progress,” in which alone they truly
attain to God. Thus stated, it appears to differ little from the Buddhist’s
Nirvana, and is the logical corollary of that pantheism to which the
Oriental mystic always tends. Thus Jalalu d’Din:


“O, let me not exist! for Non-Existence

Proclaims in organ tones, ‘To Him we shall return.’” [333]

It is at least doubtful, however, whether the interpretation which has been
put by European students upon such passages as this be correct. The language
in which Al Ghazzali attempts to describe the Eighth Stage is certainly more
applicable to the Unitive Life as understood by Christian contemplatives,
than to the Buddhistic annihilation of personality. “The end of Sufi-ism,”
he says, “is total absorption in God. This is at least the relative end to
that part of their doctrine which I am free to reveal and describe. But in
reality it is but the beginning of the Sufi life, for those intuitions and
other things which precede it are, so to speak, but the porch by which they
enter. . . . In this state some have imagined themselves to be amalgamated
with God, others to be identical with Him, others again to be associated
with Him: but all this is sin .” [334]

The doctrine of annihilation as the end of the soul’s ascent, whatever the
truth may be as to the Moslem attitude concerning it, is decisively rejected
by all European mystics, though a belief in it is constantly imputed to them
by their enemies: for their aim is not the suppression of life, but its
intensification, a change in its form. This change, they say in a paradox
which is generally misunderstood, consists in the perfecting of personality
by the utter surrender of self. It is true that the more Orientally-minded
amongst them, such as Dionysius the Areopagite, do use language of a
negative kind which seems almost to involve a belief in the annihilation
rather than the transformation of the self in God: but this is because they
are trying to describe a condition of supersensible vitality from the point
of view of the normal consciousness to which it can only seem a Nothing, a
Dark, a Self-loss. Further it will be found that this language is often an
attempt to describe the conditions of transitory perception, not those of
permanent existence: the characteristics, that is to say, of the Ecstatic
Trance, in which for a short time the whole self is lifted to transcendent
levels, and the Absolute is apprehended by a total suspension of the surface
consciousness. Hence the Divine Dark, the Nothing, is not a state of
non-being to which the mystic aspires to attain: it is rather a paradoxical
description of his experience of that Undifferentiated Godhead, that
Supernal Light whence he may, in his ecstasies, bring down fire from heaven
to light the world.

In the mystics of the West, the highest forms of Divine Union impel the self
to some sort of active, rather than of passive life: and this is now
recognized by the best authorities as the true distinction between Christian
and non-Christian mysticism. “The Christian mystics,” says Delacroix, “move
from the Infinite to the Definite; they aspire to infinitize life and to
define Infinity; they go from the conscious to the subconscious, and from
the subconscious to the conscious. The obstacle in their path is not
consciousness in general, but self -consciousness, the consciousness of the
Ego. The Ego is the limitation, that which opposes itself to the Infinite:
the states of consciousness free from self, lost in a vaster consciousness,
may become modes of the Infinite, and states of the Divine Consciousness.”
[335] So Starbuck: “The individual learns to transfer himself from a centre
of self-activity into an organ of revelation of universal being, and to live
a life of affection for and one-ness with, the larger life outside.” [336]

Hence, the ideal of the great contemplatives, the end of their long
education, is to become “modes of the Infinite.” Filled with an abounding
sense of the Divine Life, of ultimate and adorable reality, sustaining and
urging them on, they wish to communicate the revelation, the more abundant
life, which they have received. Not spiritual marriage, but divine fecundity
is to be their final state. In a sense St. Teresa in the Seventh Habitation,
Suso when his great renunciation is made, have achieved the quest, yet there
is nothing passive in the condition to which they have come. Not Galahad,
but the Grail-bearer is now their type: and in their life, words or works
they are impelled to exhibit that “Hidden Treasure which desires to be
found.”

“You may think, my daughters,” says St. Teresa, “that the soul in this state
[of union] should be so absorbed that she can occupy herself with nothing.
You deceive yourselves. She turns with greater ease and ardour than before
to all that which belongs to the service of God, and when these occupations
leave her free again, she remains in the enjoyment of that companionship.”
[337]

No temperament is less slothful than the mystical one; and the “quiet” to
which the mystics must school themselves in the early stages of
contemplation is often the hardest of their tasks. The abandonment of bodily
and intellectual activity is only undertaken in order that they may, in the
words of Plotinus, “energize enthusiastically” upon another plane. Work they
must but this work may take many forms—forms which are sometimes so wholly
spiritual that they are not perceptible to practical minds. Much of the
misunderstanding and consequent contempt of the contemplative life comes
from the narrow and superficial definition of “work” which is set up by a
muscular and wage-earning community.

All records of mysticism in the West, then, are also the records of supreme
human activity. Not only of “wrestlers in the spirit” but also of great
organizers, such as St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross; of missionaries
preaching life to the spiritually dead, such as St. Francis of Assisi, St.
Ignatius Loyola, Eckhart, Suso Tauler, Fox; of philanthropists, such as St.
Catherine of Genoa or St. Vincent de Paul; poets and prophets, such as
Mechthild of Magdeburg, Jacopone da Todi and Blake, finally, of some
immensely virile souls whose participation in the Absolute Life has seemed
to force on them a national destiny. Of this St. Bernard, St. Catherine of
Siena, and Saint Joan of Arc are the supreme examples. “The soul enamoured
of My Truth,” said God’s voice to St. Catherine of Siena, “never ceases to
serve the whole world in general.” [338]

Utterly remade in the interests of Reality, exhibiting that dual condition
of fruition and activity which Ruysbroeck described as the crowning stage of
human evolution, the “Supreme summit of the Inner Life,” [339] all these
lived, as it were, with both hands towards the finite and towards the
Infinite, towards God and man. It is true that in nearly every case such
“great actives” have first left the world, as a necessary condition of
establishing communion with that Absolute Life which reinforced their own:
for a mind distracted by the many cannot apprehend the One. Hence something
equivalent to the solitude of the wilderness is an essential part of
mystical education. But, having established that communion, re-ordered their
inner lives upon transcendent levels—being united with their Source not
merely in temporary ecstasies, but in virtue of a permanent condition of the
soul, they were impelled to abandon their solitude; and resumed, in some
way, their contact with the world in order to become the medium whereby that
Life flowed out to other men. To go up alone into the mountain and come back
as an ambassador to the world, has ever been the method of humanity’s best
friends. This systole-and-diastole motion of retreat as the preliminary to a
return remains the true ideal of Christian Mysticism in its highest
development. Those in whom it is not found, however great in other respects
they may be, must be considered as having stopped short of the final stage.

Thus St. Catherine of Siena spent three years in hermit-like seclusion in
the little room which we still see in her house in the Via Benincasa,
entirely cut off from the ordinary life of her family. “Within her own
house,” says her legend, “she found the desert; and a solitude in the midst
of people.” [340] There Catherine endured many mortifications, was visited
by ecstasies and visions: passed, in fact, through the states of Purgation
and Illumination, which existed in her case side by side. This life of
solitude was brought to an abrupt end by the experience which is symbolized
in the vision of the Mystic Marriage, and the Voice which then said to her,
“Now will I wed thy soul, which shall ever be conjoined and united to Me!”
Catherine, who had during her long retreat enjoyed illumination to a high
degree, now entered upon the Unitive State, in which the whole of her public
life was passed. Its effect was immediately noticeable. She abandoned her
solitude, joined in the family life, went out into the city to serve the
poor and sick, attracted and taught disciples, converted sinners, and began
that career of varied and boundless activity which has made her name one of
the greatest in the history of the fourteenth century. Nor does this mean
that she ceased to live the sort of life which is characteristic of mystical
consciousness: to experience direct contact with the Transcendental World,
to gaze into “the Abyss of Love Divine.” On the contrary, her practical
genius for affairs, her immense power of ruling men, drew its strength from
the long series of visions and ecstasies which accompanied and supported her
labours in the world. She “descended into the valley of lilies to make
herself more fruitful,” says her legend. [341] The conscious vehicle of some
“power not herself,” she spoke and acted with an authority which might have
seemed strange enough in an uneducated daughter of the people, were it not
justified by the fact that all who came into contact with her submitted to
its influence.

Our business, then, is to trace from its beginning a gradual and complete
change in the equilibrium of the self. It is a change whereby that self
turns from the unreal world of sense in which it is normally immersed, first
to apprehend, then to unite itself with Absolute Reality: finally, possessed
by and wholly surrendered to this Transcendent Life, becomes a medium
whereby the spiritual world is seen in a unique degree operating directly in
the world of sense. In other words, we are to see the human mind advance
from the mere perception of phenomena, through the intuition—with occasional
contact—of the Absolute under its aspect of Divine Transcendence, to the
entire realization of, and union with, Absolute Life under its aspect of
Divine Immanence.

The completed mystical life, then, is more than intuitional: it is
theopathetic. In the old, frank language of the mystics, it is the deified
life .
_________________________________________________________________

[331] Science seems more and more inclined to acquiesce in this judgment.
See especially A. N. Whitehead: “Man and the Modern World” and “Religion in
the Making.”

[332] “Jerusalem,” pt. iii.

[333] Quoted by R. A. Nicholson, “The Mystics of Islam,” p. 168.

[334] Schmölders, “Les Écoles Philosophiques chez les Arabes,” p. 61.

[335] “Études sur le Mysticisme,” p. 235.

[336] “The Psychology of Religion,” p. 147.

[337] “El Castillo Interior,” Moradas Sétimas, cap. i.

[338] Dialogo, cap. vii.

[339] “De Ornatu Spiritalium Nuptiarum,” I. ii. cap. lxxiii.

[340] E. Gardner, “St. Catherine of Siena,” p. 15.

[341] S. Catherine Senensis Vitae (Acta SS. Aprilis t. iii.), ii. ii. § 4.
_________________________________________________________________

F irst in the sequence of the mystic states, we must consider that decisive
event, the awakening of the transcendental consciousness.

This awakening, from the psychological point of view, appears to be an
intense form of the phenomenon of “conversion”; and closely akin to those
deep and permanent conversions of the adult type which some religious
psychologists call “sanctification.” [342] It is a disturbance of the
equilibrium of the self, which results in the shifting of the field of
consciousness from lower to higher levels, with a consequent removal of the
centre of interest from the subject to an object now brought into view: the
necessary beginning of any process of transcendence. It must not, however,
be confused or identified with religious conversion as ordinarily
understood: the sudden and emotional acceptance of theological beliefs which
the self had previously either rejected or treated as conventions dwelling
upon the margin of consciousness and having no meaning for her actual life.
The mechanical process may be much the same; but the material involved, the
results attained, belong to a higher order of reality.

“Conversion,” says Starbuck, in words which are really far more descriptive
of mystical awakening than of the revivalistic phenomena encouraged by
American Protestantism, “is primarily an unselfing. The first birth of the
individual is into his own little world. He is controlled by the deep-seated
instincts of self-preservation and self-enlargement—instincts which are,
doubtless, a direct inheritance from his brute ancestry. The universe is
organized around his own personality as a centre.” Conversion, then, is “the
larger world-consciousness now pressing in on the individual consciousness.
Often it breaks in suddenly and becomes a great new revelation. This is the
first aspect of conversion: the person emerges from a smaller limited world
of existence into a larger world of being. His life becomes swallowed up in
a larger whole.” [343]

All conversion entails the abrupt or gradual emergence of intuitions from
below the threshold, the consequent remaking of the field of consciousness,
an alteration in the self’s attitude to the world. “It is,” says Pratt, “a
change of taste—the most momentous one that ever occurs in human
experience.” [344] But in the mystic this process is raised to the nth
degree of intensity, for in him it means the first emergence of that passion
for the Absolute which is to constitute his distinctive character: an
emergence crucial in its effect on every department of his life. Those to
whom it happens, often enough, are already “religious”: sometimes deeply and
earnestly so. Rulman Merswin, St. Catherine of Genoa, George Fox,
Lucie-Christine—all these had been bred up in piety, and accepted in its
entirety the Christian tradition. They were none the less conscious of an
utter change in their world when this opening of the soul’s eye took place.

Sometimes the emergence of the mystical consciousness is gradual, unmarked
by any definite crisis. The self slides gently, almost imperceptibly, from
the old universe to the new. The records of mysticism, however, suggest that
this is exceptional: that travail is the normal accompaniment of birth. In
another type, of which George Fox is a typical example, there is no
conversion in the ordinary sense; but a gradual and increasing lucidity, of
which the beginning has hardly been noticed by the self, intermittently
accompanies the pain, misery of mind, and inward struggles characteristic of
the entrance upon the Way of Purgation. Conversion and purification then go
hand in hand, finally shading off into the serenity of the Illuminated
State. Fox’s “Journal” for the year 1647 contains a vivid account of these
“showings” or growing transcendental perceptions of a mind not yet at one
with itself, and struggling towards clearness of sight. “Though my exercises
and troubles,” he says, “were very great, yet were they not so continual but
I had some intermissions, and was sometimes brought into such a heavenly joy
that I thought I had been in Abraham’s bosom. . . . Thus in the deepest
miseries, and in the greatest sorrows and temptations that many times beset
me, the Lord in His mercy did keep me. I found that there were two thirsts
in me, the one after the creatures to get help and strength there; and the
other after the Lord, the Creator. . . . It was so with me, that there
seemed to be two pleadings in me. . . . One day when I had been walking
solitarily abroad and was come home, I was wrapped up in the love of God, so
that I could not but admire the greatness of his love. While I was in that
condition it was opened unto me by the eternal Light and Power, and I saw
clearly therein. . . . But O! then did I see my troubles, trials, and
temptations more clearly than ever I had done.” [345]

The great oscillations of the typical mystic between joy and pain are here
replaced by a number of little ones. The “two thirsts” of the superficial
and spiritual consciousness assert themselves by turns. Each step towards
the vision of the Real brings with it a reaction. The nascent transcendental
powers are easily fatigued, and the pendulum of self takes a shorter swing.
“I was swept up to Thee by Thy Beauty, and torn away from Thee by my own
weight,” says St. Augustine, crystallizing the secret of this experience in
an unforgettable phrase. [346]

Commonly, however, if we may judge from those first-hand accounts which we
possess, mystic conversion is a single and abrupt experience, sharply marked
off from the long, dim struggles which precede and succeed it. It usually
involves a sudden and acute realization of a splendour and adorable reality
in the world—or sometimes of its obverse, the divine sorrow at the heart of
things—never before perceived. In so far as I am acquainted with the
resources of language, there are no words in which this realization can be
described. It is of so actual a nature that in comparison the normal world
of past perception seems but twilit at the best. Consciousness has suddenly
changed its rhythm and a new aspect of the universe rushes in. The teasing
mists are swept away, and reveal, if only for an instant, the sharp outline
of the Everlasting Hills. “He who knows this will know what I say, and will
be convinced that the soul has then another life.” [347]

In most cases, the onset of this new consciousness seems to the self so
sudden, so clearly imposed from without rather than developed from within,
as to have a supernatural character. The typical case is, of course, that of
St. Paul: the sudden light, the voice, the ecstasy, the complete alteration
of life. We shall see, however, when we come to study the evidence of those
mystics who have left a detailed record of their preconverted state, that
the apparently abrupt conversion is really, as a rule, the sequel and the
result of a long period of restlessness, uncertainty, and mental stress. The
deeper mind stirs uneasily in its prison, and its emergence is but the last
of many efforts to escape. The temperament of the subject, his surroundings,
the vague but persistent apprehensions of a supersensual reality which he
could not find yet could not forget; all these have prepared him for it.
[348]

When, however, the subconscious intuitions, long ago quickened, are at last
brought to birth and the eyes are opened on new light—and it is significant
that an actual sense of blinding radiance is a constant accompaniment of
this state of consciousness—the storm and stress, the vague cravings and
oscillations of the past life are forgotten. In this abrupt recognition of
reality “all things are made new”: from this point the life of the mystic
begins. Conversion of this sort has, says De Sanctis, three marked
characteristics: a sense of liberation and victory: a conviction of the
nearness of God: a sentiment of love towards God. [349] We might describe it
as a sudden, intense, and joyous perception of God immanent in the universe;
of the divine beauty and unutterable power and splendour of that larger life
in which the individual is immersed, and of a new life to be lived by the
self in correspondence with this now dominant fact of existence.
“Suddenly,” says the French contemplative Lucie-Christine of the beginning
of her mystical life, “I saw before my inward eyes these words— God only . .
. they were at the same time a Light, an Attraction and a Power. A Light
which showed me how I could belong completely to God alone in this world,
and I saw that hitherto I had not well understood this; an Attraction by
which my heart was subdued and delighted; a Power which inspired me with a
generous resolution and somehow placed in my hands the means of carrying it
out.” [350]

I will here set down for comparison a few instances of such mystical
conversion; quoting, where this is available, the actual description left by
the subject of his own experience, or in default of it, the earliest
authentic account. In these cases, when grouped together, we shall see
certain constant characteristics, from which it may be possible to deduce
the psychological law to which they owe their peculiar form.

First in point of time, and perhaps also in importance, amongst those I have
chosen, is the case of that great poet and contemplative, that impassioned
lover of the Absolute, St. Francis of Assisi. The fact that St. Francis
wrote little and lived much, that his actions were of unequalled simplicity
and directness, long blinded his admirers to the fact that he is a typical
mystic: the only one, perhaps, who forced the most trivial and sordid
circumstances of sensual life to become perfect expressions of Reality.

Now the opening of St. Francis’s eyes, which took place in A.D. 1206 when he
was twenty-four years old, had been preceded by a long, hard struggle
between the life of the world and the persistent call of the spirit. His
mind, in modern language, had not unified itself. He was a high-spirited
boy, full of vitality: a natural artist, with all the fastidiousness which
the artistic temperament involves. War and pleasure both attracted him, and
upon them, says his legend, he “miserably squandered and wasted his time.”
[351] Nevertheless, he was vaguely dissatisfied. In the midst of
festivities, he would have sudden fits of abstraction: abortive attempts of
the growing transcendental consciousness, still imprisoned below the
threshold but aware of and in touch with the Real, to force itself to the
surface and seize the reins. “Even in ignorance,” says Thomas of Celano
again, “he was being led to perfect knowledge.” He loved beauty, for he was
by nature a poet and a musician, and shrank instinctively from contact with
ugliness and disease. But something within ran counter to this temperamental
bias, and sometimes conquered it. He would then associate with beggars, tend
the leprous, perform impulsive acts of charity and self-humiliation. [352]

When this divided state, described by the legend as “the attempt to flee
God’s hand,” had lasted for some years, it happened one day that he was
walking in the country outside the gates of Assisi, and passed the little
church of S. Damiano, “the which” (I again quote from Thomas of Celano’s
“Second Life”) “was almost ruinous and forsaken of all men. And, being led
by the Spirit, he went in to pray; and he fell down before the Crucifix in
devout supplication, and having been smitten by unwonted visitations, found
himself another man than he who had gone in.”

Here, then, is the first stage of conversion. The struggle between two
discrepant ideals of life has attained its term. A sudden and apparently
“irrational” impulse to some decisive act reaches the surface-consciousness
from the seething deeps. The impulse is followed; and the swift emergence of
the transcendental sense results. This “unwonted visitation” effects an
abrupt and involuntary alteration in the subject’s consciousness: whereby he
literally “finds himself another man.” He is as one who has slept and now
awakes. The crystallization of this new, at first fluid apprehension of
Reality in the form of vision and audition: the pointing of the moral, the
direct application of truth to the awakened self, follow. “And whilst he was
thus moved, straightway—a thing unheard of for long ages!—the painted image
of Christ Crucified spoke to him from out its pictured lips. And, calling
him by his name, “Francis,” it said, “go, repair My house, the which as thou
seest is falling into decay.” And Francis trembled, being utterly amazed,
and almost as it were carried away by these words. And he prepared to obey,
for he was wholly set on the fulfilling of this commandment. But forasmuch
as he felt that the change he had undergone was ineffable, it becomes us to
be silent concerning it. . . .” From this time he “gave untiring toil to the
repair of that Church. For though the words which were said to him concerned
that divine Church which Christ bought with His own Blood, he would not
hasten to such heights, but little by little from things of the flesh would
pass to those of the Spirit.” [353]

In a moment of time, Francis’s whole universe has suffered complete
rearrangement. There are no hesitations, no uncertainties. The change, which
he cannot describe, he knows to be central for life. Not for a moment does
he think of disobeying the imperative voice which speaks to him from a
higher plane of reality and demands the sacrifice of his career.

Compare now with the experience of St. Francis that of another great saint
and mystic, who combined, as he did, the active with the contemplative life.
Catherine of Genoa, who seems to have possessed from childhood a religious
nature, was prepared for the remaking of her consciousness by years of
loneliness and depression, the result of an unhappy marriage. She, like St.
Francis—but in sorrow rather than in joy—had oscillated between the world,
which did not soothe her, and religion, which helped her no more. At last,
she had sunk into a state of dull wretchedness, a hatred alike of herself
and of life.

Her emancipation was equally abrupt. In the year 1474, she being twenty-six
years old, “The day after the feast of St. Benedict (at the instance of her
sister that was a nun), Catherine went to make her confession to the
confessor of that nunnery; but she was not disposed to do it. Then said her
sister, ‘At least go and recommend yourself to him, because he is a most
worthy religious’; and in fact he was a very holy man. And suddenly, as she
knelt before him, she received in her heart the wound of the unmeasured Love
of God, with so clear a vision of her own misery and her faults, and of the
goodness of God, that she almost fell upon the ground. And by these
sensations of infinite love, and of the offenses that had been done against
this most sweet God, she was so greatly drawn by purifying affection away
from the poor things of this world that she was almost beside herself, and
for this she cried inwardly with ardent love, ‘No more world! no more
sin!’ And at this point if she had possessed a thousand worlds, she would
have thrown all of them away. . . . And she returned home, kindled and
deeply wounded with so great a love of God, the which had been shown her
inwardly, with the sight of her own wretchedness, that she seemed beside
herself. And she shut herself in a chamber, the most secluded she could
find, with burning sighs. And in this moment she was inwardly taught the
whole practice of orison: but her tongue could say naught but this—‘O Love,
can it be that thou has called me with so great a love, and made me to know
in one instant that which worlds cannot express?’” This intuition of the
Absolute was followed by an interior vision of Christ bearing the Cross,
which further increased her love and self-abasement. “And she cried again,
‘O Love, no more sins! no more sins!’ And her hatred of herself was more
than she could endure.” [354]

Of this experience Von Hügel says, “If the tests of reality in such things
are their persistence and large and rich spiritual applicability and
fruitfulness, then something profoundly real and important took place in the
soul of that sad and weary woman of six-and-twenty, within that
convent-chapel, at that Annunciation-tide.” [355] It is certain that for St.
Catherine, as for St. Francis, an utterly new life did, literally, begin at
this point. The centre of interest was shifted and the field of
consciousness remade. She “knew in an instant that which words cannot
express.” Some veil about her heart was torn away; so abruptly, that it left
a wound behind. For the first time she saw and knew the Love in which life
is bathed; and all the energy and passion of a strong nature responded to
its call.

The conversion of Madame Guyon to the mystic life, as told by herself in the
eighth chapter of Part I. of her Autobiography—“How a holy Religious caused
her to find God within her heart, with Admirable Results,” is its
characteristic title—is curiously like a dilute version of this experience
of St. Catherine’s. It, too, followed upon a period of mental distress; also
the result of an uncongenial marriage. But since Madame Guyon’s unbalanced,
diffuse, and sentimental character entirely lacks the richness and dignity,
the repressed ardours and exquisite delicacy of St. Catherine’s mind, so,
too, her account of her own interior processes is marred by a terrible and
unctuous interest in the peculiar graces vouchsafed to her. [356]

Madame Guyon’s value to the student of mysticism partly consists in this
feeble quality of her surface-intelligence, which hence had little or no
modifying or contributory effect upon her spiritual life and makes her an
ideal “laboratory specimen” for the religious psychologist. True to her
great principle of passivity or “quiet,” it lets the uncriticized interior
impulses have their way; thus we are able to observe their workings
uncomplicated by the presence of a vigorous intellect or a disciplined will.
The wind that bloweth where it listeth whistles through her soul: and the
response which she makes is that of a weathercock rather than a windmill.
She moves to every current; she often mistakes a draught for the divine
breath; she feels her gyrations to be of enormous importance. But in the
description of her awakening to the deeper life, even her effusive style
acquires a certain dignity. [357]

Madame Guyon had from her childhood exhibited an almost tiresome taste for
pious observances. At twelve years old she studied St. François de Sales and
St. Jeanne Françoise de Chantal; begged her confessor to teach her the art
of mental prayer; and when he omitted to do so, tried to teach herself, but
without result. [358] She wished at this time to become a nun of the
Visitation, as St. Catherine at the same age wanted to be an Augustinian
canoness; but as the longings of little girls of twelve for the cloister are
seldom taken seriously, we are not surprised to find the refusal of her
parents’ consent chronicled in the chapter which is headed “ Diverses croix
chez M. son père .” Growing up into an unusually beautiful young woman, she
went into society, and for a short time enjoyed life in an almost worldly
way. Her marriage with Jacques Guyon, however—a marriage of which she signed
the articles without even being told the bridegroom’s name—put an end to her
gaiety. “The whole town was pleased by this marriage; and in all this
rejoicing only I was sad . . . hardly was I married, when the remembrance of
my old desire to be a nun overcame me.” [359]

Her early married life was excessively unhappy. She was soon driven to look
for comfort in the practices of religion. “Made to love much, and finding
nothing to love around her, she gave her love to God,” says Guerrier
tersely. [360] But she was not satisfied: like most of her
fellow-contemplatives, she was already vaguely conscious of something that
she missed, some vital power unused, and identified this something with the
“orison of quiet,” the “practice of the presence of God” which mystically
minded friends had described to her. She tried to attain to it deliberately,
and naturally failed. “I could not give myself by multiplicity that which
Thou Thyself givest, and which is only experienced in simplicity.” [361]

When these interior struggles had lasted for nearly two years, and Madame
Guyon was nineteen, the long desired, almost despaired of, apprehension
came—as it did to St. Catherine—suddenly, magically almost; and under
curiously parallel conditions. It was the result of a few words spoken by a
Franciscan friar whom a “secret force” acting in her interest had brought
into the neighbourhood, and whom she had been advised to consult. He was a
recluse, who disliked hearing the confessions of women, and appears to have
been far from pleased by her visit; an annoyance which he afterwards
attributed to her fashionable appearance, “which filled him with
apprehension.” “He hardly came forward, and was a long time without speaking
to me. I, however, did not fail to speak to him and to tell him in a few
words my difficulties on the subject of orison. He at once replied, ‘Madame,
you are seeking without that which you have within. Accustom yourself to
seek God in your own heart, and you will find him.’ Having said this, he
left me. The next morning he was greatly astonished when I again visited him
and told him the effect which these words had had upon my soul: for, indeed,
they were as an arrow, which pierced my heart through and through. I felt in
this moment a profound wound, which was full of delight and of love—a wound
so sweet that I desired that it might never heal. These words had put into
my heart that which I sought for so many years, or, rather, they caused me
to find that which was there. O, my Lord, you were within my heart, and you
asked of me only that I should return within, in order that I might feel
your presence. O, Infinite Goodness, you were so near, and I running here
and there to seek you, found you not!” She, too, like St. Catherine, learned
in this instant the long-sought practice of orison, or contemplation. “From
the moment of which I have spoken, my orison was emptied of all form,
species, and images; nothing of my orison passed through the mind; but it
was an orison of joyous possession in the Will, where the taste for God was
so great, pure, and simple that it attracted and absorbed the two other
powers of the soul in a profound recollection without action or speech.”
[362]

Take now the case of a less eminent mystic, who has also left behind him a
vivid personal description of his entrance upon the Mystic Way. Rulman
Merswin was a wealthy, pious, and respected merchant of Strassburg. In the
year 1347, when he was about thirty-six years old, he retired from business
in order that he might wholly devote himself to religious matters. It was
the time of that spiritual revival within the Catholic Church in Germany
which, largely influenced by the great Rhenish mystics Suso and Tauler, is
identified with the “Friends of God”; and Merswin himself was one of
Tauler’s disciples. [363]

One evening, in the autumn which followed his retirement, “about the time of
Martinmas,” he was strolling in his garden alone. Meditating as he walked, a
picture of the Crucifix suddenly presented itself to his mind. In such an
imaginary vision as this there is nothing, of course, that we can call
abnormal. The thoughts of a devout Catholic, influenced by Tauler and his
school, must often have taken such a direction during his solitary strolls.
This time, however, the mental image of the Cross seems to have released
subconscious forces which had long been gathering way. Merswin was abruptly
filled with a violent hatred of the world and of his own free-will. “Lifting
his eyes to heaven he solemnly swore that he would utterly surrender his own
will, person, and goods to the service of God.” [364]

This act of complete surrender, releasing as it were the earthbound self,
was at once followed by the onset of pure mystical perception. “The reply
from on high came quickly. A brilliant light shone about him: he heard in
his ears a divine voice of adorable sweetness; he felt as if he were lifted
from the ground and carried several times completely round his garden.”
[365] Optical disturbance, auditions, and the sense of levitation, are of
course frequent physical accompaniments of these shiftings of the level of
consciousness. There are few cases in which one or other is not present; and
in some we find all. Coming to himself after this experience, Merswin’s
heart was filled by a new consciousness of the Divine; and by a transport of
intense love towards God which made him undertake with great energy the acts
of mortification which he believed necessary to the purification of his
soul. From this time onwards, his mystical consciousness steadily developed.
That it was a consciousness wholly different in kind from the sincere piety
which had previously caused him to retire from business in order to devote
himself to religious truth, is proved by the name of Conversion which he
applies to the vision of the garden; and by the fact that he dates from this
point the beginning of his real life.

The conversion of Merswin’s greater contemporary, Suso, seems to have been
less abrupt. Of its first stage he speaks vaguely at the beginning of his
autobiography, wherein he says that “he began to be converted when in the
eighteenth year of his age.” [366] He was at this time, as St. Francis had
been, restless, dissatisfied; vaguely conscious of something essential to
his peace, as yet unfound. His temperament, at once deeply human and
ardently spiritual, passionately appreciative of sensuous beauty yet unable
to rest in it, had not “unified itself”: nor did it do so completely until
after a period of purgation which is probably unequalled for its austerity
in the history of the mysticism of the West. “He was kept of God in this,
that when he turned to those things that most enticed him he found neither
happiness nor peace therein. He was restless, and-it seemed to him that
something which was as yet unknown could alone give peace to his heart. And
he suffered greatly of this restlessness. . . . God at last delivered him by
a complete conversion. His brothers in religion were astonished by so quick
a change: for the event took them unawares. Some said of it one thing, and
some another: but none could know the reason of his conversion. It was God
Who, by a hidden light, had caused this return to Himself.” [367]

This secret conversion was completed by a more violent uprush of the now
awakened and active transcendental powers. Suso, whom one can imagine as a
great and highly nervous artist if his genius had not taken the channel of
sanctity instead, was subject all his life to visions of peculiar richness
and beauty. Often these visions seem to have floated up, as it were, from
the subliminal region without disturbing the course of his conscious life;
and to be little more than pictorial images of his ardour towards and
intuition of, divine realities. The great ecstatic vision—or rather
apprehension—with which the series opens, however, is of a very different
kind; and represents the characteristic experience of Ecstasy in its fullest
form. It is described with a detail and intensity which make it a
particularly valuable document of the mystical life. It is doubtful whether
Suso ever saw more than this: the course of his long education rather
consisted in an adjustment of his nature to the Reality which he then
perceived.

“In the first days of his conversion it happened upon the Feast of St.
Agnes, when the Convent had breakfasted at midday, that the Servitor went
into the choir. He was alone, and he placed himself in the last stall on the
prior’s side. And he was in much suffering, for a heavy trouble weighed upon
his heart. And being there alone, and devoid of all consolations—no one by
his side, no one near him—of a sudden his soul was rapt in his body, or out
of his body. Then did he see and hear that which no tongue can express.

“That which the Servitor saw had no form neither any manner of being; yet he
had of it a joy such as he might have known in the seeing of the shapes and
substances of all joyful things. His heart was hungry, yet satisfied, his
soul was full of contentment and joy: his prayers and hopes were all
fulfilled. And the Friar could do naught but contemplate this Shining
Brightness, and he altogether forgot himself and all other things. Was it
day or night? He knew not. It was, as it were, a manifestation of the
sweetness of Eternal Life in the sensations of silence and of rest. Then he
said, ‘If that which I see and feel be not the Kingdom of Heaven, I know not
what it can be: for it is very sure that the endurance of all possible pains
were but a poor price to pay for the eternal possession of so great a
joy.’”

The physical accompaniments of ecstasy were also present. “This ecstasy
lasted from half an hour to an hour, and whether his soul were in the body
or out of the body he could not tell. But when he came to his senses it
seemed to him that he returned from another world. And so greatly did his
body suffer in this short rapture that it seemed to him that none, even in
dying, could suffer so greatly in so short a time. The Servitor came to
himself moaning, and he fell down upon the ground like a man who swoons. And
he cried inwardly, heaving great sighs from the depth of his soul and
saying, ‘Oh, my God, where was I and where am I?’ And again, ‘Oh, my
heart’s joy, never shall my soul forget this hour!’ He walked, but it was
but his body that walked, as a machine might do. None knew from his
demeanour that which was taking place within. But his soul and his spirit
were full of marvels; heavenly lightnings passed and repassed in the deeps
of his being, and it seemed to him that he walked on air. And all the powers
of his soul were full of these heavenly delights. He was like a vase from
which one has taken a precious ointment, but in which the perfume long
remains.”

Finally, the last phrases of the chapter seem to suggest the true position
of this exalted pleasure-state as a first link in the long chain of mystical
development. “This foretaste of the happiness of heaven,” he says, “the
which the Servitor enjoyed for many days, excited in him a most lively
desire for God.” [368]

Mystical activity, then, like all other activities of the self, opens with
that sharp stimulation of the will, which can only be obtained through the
emotional life.

Suso was a scholar, and an embryo ecclesiastic. During the period which
elapsed between his conversion and his description of it, he was a disciple
of Meister Eckhart, a student of Dionysius and St. Thomas Aquinas. His
writings show familiarity with the categories of mystical theology; and
naturally enough this circumstance, and also the fact that they were written
for purposes of edification, may have dictated to some extent the language
in which his conversion-ecstasy is described. As against this, I will give
two first-hand descriptions of mystical conversion in which it is obvious
that theological learning plays little or no part. Both written in France
within a few years of one another, they represent the impact of Reality on
two minds of very different calibre. One is the secret document in which a
great genius set down, in words intended only for his own eyes, the record
of a two hours’ ecstasy. The other is the plain, unvarnished statement of an
uneducated man of the peasant class. The first is, of course, the celebrated
Memorial, or Amulet, of Pascal; the second is the Relation of Brother
Lawrence.

The Memorial of Pascal is a scrap of parchment on which, round a rough
drawing of the Flaming Cross, there are written a few strange phrases,
abrupt and broken words; all we know about one of the strangest ecstatic
revelations chronicled in the history of the mystic type. After Pascal’s
death a servant found a copy of this little document, now lost, sewn up in
his doublet. He seems always to have worn it upon his person: a perpetual
memorial of the supernal experience, the initiation into Reality, which it
describes. Though Bremand has shown that the opening of Pascal’s spiritual
eyes had begun, on his own declaration, eleven months earlier, “d’une
manière douce et obligeante,” [369] the conversion thus prepared was only
made actual by this abrupt illumination; ending a long period of spiritual
stress, in which indifference to his ordinary interests was counterbalanced
by an utter inability to feel the attractive force of that Divine Reality
which his great mind discerned as the only adequate object of desire.

The Memorial opens thus:—

“L’an de grace 1654

lundi, 23 novembre, jour de Saint Clément, pape

et martyr, et autres au martyrologe,

veille de Saint Chrysogone, martyr et autres

depuis environ dix heures et demie du soir jusques

environ minuit et demie,

Feu.”

“From half-past ten till half-past twelve, Fire!” That is all, so far as
description is concerned; but enough, apparently, to remind the initiate of
all that passed. The rest tells us only the passion of joy and conviction
which this nameless revelation—this long, blazing vision of Reality—brought
in its train. It is but a series of amazed exclamations, crude, breathless
words, placed there helter-skelter, the artist in him utterly in abeyance;
the names of the overpowering emotions which swept him, one after the other,
as the Fire of Love disclosed its secrets, evoked an answering flame of
humility and rapture in his soul.


“Dieu d’Abraham, Dieu d’Isaac, Dieu de Jacob,

Non des philosophes et des savants.

Certitude. Certitude. Sentiment. Joie. Paix”.

“Not the God of philosophers and of scholars!” cries in amazement this great
scholar and philosopher abruptly turned from knowledge to love.

“Oubli du monde et de tout hormis Dieu,” he says again, seeing his universe
suddenly swept clean of all but this Transcendent Fact. Then, “Le monde ne
t’a point connu, mais je t’ai connu. Joie! joie joie! pleurs de joie!”
Compare with the classic style, the sharp and lucid definition of the
“Pensées,” the irony and glitter of the “Provinciales,” these little broken
phrases—this child-like stammering speech—in which a supreme master of
language has tried to tell his wonder and his delight. I know few things in
the history of mysticism at once more convincing, more poignant than this
hidden talisman; upon which the brilliant scholar and stylist, the merciless
disputant, has jotted down in hard, crude words, which yet seem charged with
passion—the inarticulate language of love—a memorial of the certitude, the
peace, the joy, above all, the reiterated, all-surpassing joy, which
accompanied his ecstatic apprehension of God.

“ Mon Dieu, me quitterez vous?” he says again; the fire apparently beginning
to die down, the ecstasy drawing to an end. “ Que je n’en sois pas séparé
éternellement!” “Are you going to leave me? Oh, let me not be separated from
you for ever!—the one unendurable thought which would, said Aquinas, rob the
Beatific Vision of its glory, were we not sure that it can never fade. [370]
But the rhapsody is over, the vision of the Fire has gone; and the rest of
the Memorial clearly contains Pascal’s meditations upon his experience,
rather than a transcript of the experience itself. It ends with the
watchword of all mysticism, Surrender—“ Renonciation, totale et douce” in
Pascal’s words—the only way, he thinks, in which he can avoid continued
separation from Reality. [371]

Pascal’s vision of Light, Life, and Love was highly ecstatic; an
indescribable, incommunicable experience, which can only be suggested by his
broken words of certitude and joy. By his simple contemporary, Brother
Lawrence, that Transcendent Reality Who “is not the God of philosophers and
scholars,” was perceived in a moment of abrupt intuition, peculiarly direct,
unecstatic and untheological in type, but absolutely enduring in its
results. Lawrence was an uneducated young man of the peasant class; who
first served as a soldier, and afterwards as a footman in a great French
family, where he annoyed his masters by breaking everything. When he was
between fifty and sixty years of age, he entered the Carmelite Order as a
lay brother; and the letters, “spiritual maxims,” and conversations
belonging to this period of his life were published after his death in 1691.
“He told me,” says the anonymous reporter of the conversations, supposed to
be M. Beaufort, who was about 1660 Grand Vicar to the Cardinal de Noailles,
“that God had done him a singular favour in his conversion at the age of
eighteen. That in the winter, seeing a tree stripped of its leaves, and
considering that within a little time the leaves would be renewed, and after
that the flowers and fruit appear, he received a high view of the Providence
and Power of God, which has never since been effaced from his soul. That
this view had set him perfectly loose from the world and kindled in him such
a love for God that he could not tell whether it had increased in above
forty years that he had lived since.” [372]

Such use of visible nature as the stuff of ontological perceptions, the
medium whereby the self reaches out to the Absolute, is not rare in the
history of mysticism. The mysterious vitality of trees, the silent magic of
the forest, the strange and steady cycle of its life, possess in a peculiar
degree this power of unleashing the human soul: are curiously friendly to
its cravings, minister to its inarticulate needs. Unsullied by the corroding
touch of consciousness, that life can make a contact with the “great life of
the All”; and through its mighty rhythms man can receive a message
concerning the true and timeless World of “all that is, and was, and
evermore shall be.” Plant life of all kinds, indeed, from the “flower in the
crannied wall” to the “Woods of Westermain” can easily become, for selves of
a certain type, a “mode of the Infinite.” So obvious does this appear when
we study the history of the mystics, that Steiner has drawn from it the
hardly warrantable inference that “plants are just those natural phenomena
whose qualities in the higher world are similar to their qualities in the
physical world.” [373]

Though the conclusion be not convincing, the fact remains. The flowery
garment of the world is for some mystics a medium of ineffable perception, a
source of exalted joy, the veritable clothing of God. I need hardly add that
such a state of things has always been found incredible by common sense.
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy,” says Blake, who possessed in an
eminent degree this form of sacramental perception, “is in the Eyes of
others only a green thing that stands in the Way.” [374]

Such a perception of the Divine in Nature, of the true and holy meaning of
that rich, unresting life in which we are immersed, is really a more usual
feature of Illumination than of Conversion. All the most marked examples of
it must be referred to that state; and will be discussed when we come to its
consideration. Sometimes, however, as in the case of Brother Lawrence, the
first awakening of the self to consciousness of Reality does take this form.
The Uncreated Light manifests Itself in and through created things. This
characteristically immanental discovery of the Absolute occurs chiefly in
two classes: in unlettered men who have lived close to Nature, and to whom
her symbols are more familiar than those of the Churches or the schools, and
in temperaments of the mixed or mystical type, who are nearer to the poet
than to the true contemplative, for whom as a rule the Absolute “hath no
image.” “It was like entering into another world, a new state of
existence,” says a witness quoted by Starbuck, speaking of his own
conversion. “Natural objects were glorified. My spiritual vision was so
clarified that I saw beauty in every material object in the universe. The
woods were vocal with heavenly music.” “Oh, how I was changed! Everything
became new. My horses and hogs and everybody became changed!” exclaims with
naive astonishment another in the same collection. [375] “When I went in the
morning into the fields to work,” says a third, “the glory of God appeared
in all His visible creation. I well remember we reaped oats, and how every
straw and head of the oats seemed, as it were, arrayed in a kind of rainbow
glory, or to glow, if I may so express it, in the glory of God.” [376]

Amongst modern men, Walt Whitman possessed in a supreme degree the permanent
sense of this glory, the “light rare, untellable, lighting the very
light.” [377] But evidences of its existence, and the sporadic power of
apprehending it, are scattered up and down the literature of the world. Its
discovery constitutes the awakening of the mystical consciousness in respect
of the World of Becoming: a sharp and sudden break with the old and obvious
way of seeing things. The human cinematograph has somehow changed its
rhythm, and begins to register new and more real aspects of the external
world. With this, the self’s first escape from the limitations of its
conventional universe, it receives an immense assurance of a great and
veritable life surrounding, sustaining, explaining its own. Thus Richard
Jefferies says, of the same age as that at which Suso and Brother Lawrence
awoke to sudden consciousness of Reality, “I was not more than eighteen when
an inner and esoteric meaning began to come to me from all the visible
universe.” “I now became lost, and absorbed into the being or existence of
the universe . . . and losing thus my separateness of being, came to seem
like a part of the whole.” “I feel on the margin of a life unknown, very
near, almost touching it—on the verge of powers which, if I could grasp,
would give men an immense breadth of existence.” [378]

What was this “life unknown” but the Life known to the great mystics, which
Richard Jefferies apprehended in these moments of insight, yet somehow
contrived to miss?

Such participation in the deep realities of the World of Becoming, the
boundless existence of a divine whole—which a modern psychologist has
labelled and described as “Cosmic Consciousness” [379] —whilst it is not the
final object of the mystic’s journey, is a constant feature of it. It may
represent one-half of his characteristic consciousness: an entrance into
communion with the second of the Triune Powers of God, the Word which “is
through all things everlastingly.” Jefferies stood, as so many mystically
minded men have done, upon the verge of such a transcendental life. The
“heavenly door,” as Rolle calls it, was ajar but not pushed wide. He peeped
through it to the greater world beyond; but, unable to escape from the bonds
of his selfhood, he did not pass through to live upon the independent
spiritual plane.

Rolle, Jefferies’s fellow countryman, and his predecessor by close upon six
hundred years in the ecstatic love and understanding of natural things,
shall be our last example of the mystical awakening. He, like his spiritual
brother St. Francis, and other typical cases, had passed through a
preliminary period of struggle and oscillation between worldly life and a
vague but growing spirituality: between the superficial and the deeper self.
“My youth was fond, my childhood vain, my young age unclean,” [380] but
“when I should flourish unhappily, and youth of wakeful age was now come,
the grace of my Maker was near, the which lust of temporal shape restrained,
and unto ghostly supplications turned my desires, and the soul, from low
things lifted, to heaven has borne.” [381]

The real “life-changing,” however, was sharply and characteristically marked
off from this preparatory state. Rolle associates it with the state which he
calls “Heat”: the form in which his ardour of soul was translated to the
surface consciousness. “Heat soothly I call when the mind truly is kindled
in Love Everlasting, and the heart on the same manner to burn not hopingly
but verily is felt. The heart truly turned into fire, gives feeling of
burning love.” [382] This burning heat is not merely a mental experience. In
it we seem to have an unusual but not unique form of psychophysical
parallelism: a bodily expression of the psychic travail and distress
accompanying the “New Birth.” [383] “More have I marvelled than I show,
forsooth,” he says in his prologue, “when I first felt my heart wax warm,
and truly, not imaginingly, but as it were with a sensible fire , burned. I
was forsooth marvelled, as this burning burst up in my soul, and of an
unwonted solace; for in my ignorance of such healing abundance, oft have I
groped my breast, seeing whether this burning were of any bodily cause
outwardly. But when I knew that only it was kindled of ghostly cause
inwardly, and this burning was naught of fleshly love or desire, in this I
conceived it was the gift of my Maker.” [384] Further on, he gives another
and more detailed account. “From the beginning, forsooth, of my
life-changing and of my mind, to the opening of the heavenly door which Thy
Face showed, that the heart might behold heavenly things and see by what way
its Love it might seek and busily desire, three years are run except three
months or four. The door, forsooth, biding open, a year near-by I passed
unto the time in which the heat of Love Everlasting was verily felt in
heart. I sat forsooth in a chapel and whilst with sweetness of prayer and
meditation greatly I was delighted, suddenly in me I felt a merry heat and
unknown. But at first I wondered, doubting of whom it should be; but a long
time I am assured that not of the Creature but of my Maker it was, for more
hot and gladder I found it.” [385]

To this we must add a passage which I cannot but think one of the most
beautiful expressions of spiritual joy to be found in mystical literature.
Based though it certainly is upon a passage in St. Augustine—for the
nightingale is not a Yorkshire bird—its sketch of the ideal mystic life, to
the cultivation of which he then set himself, reveals in a few lines the
most charming aspect of Rolle’s spirituality, its poetic fervour, its
capacity for ardent love.

“In the beginning truly of my conversion and singular purpose, I though I
would be like the little bird that for love of her lover longs, but in her
longing she is gladdened when he comes that she loves. And joying she sings,
and singing she longs, but in sweetness and heat. It is said the nightingale
to song and melody all night is given, that she may please him to whom she
is joined. How muckle more with greatest sweetness to Christ my Jesu should
I sing, that is spouse of my soul by all this present life, that is night in
regard of clearness to come.” [386]

Glancing back at the few cases here brought together, we can see in them, I
think, certain similarities and diversities which are often of great
psychological interest and importance: and have their influence upon the
subsequent development of the mystic life. We see in particular at this
point—before purification, or the remaking of character, begins—the reaction
of the natural self, its heart and its mind, upon that uprush of new truth
which operates “mystical conversion.” This reaction is highly significant,
and gives us a clue not only to the future development of the mystic, but to
the general nature of man’s spiritual consciousness.

We have said [387] that this consciousness in its full development seems to
be extended not in one but in two directions. These directions, these two
fundamental ways of apprehending Reality may be called the eternal and
temporal, transcendent and immanent, absolute and dynamic aspects of Truth.
They comprise the twofold knowledge of a God Who is both Being and Becoming
near and far: pairs of opposites which the developed mystical experience
will carry up into a higher synthesis. But the first awakening of the mystic
sense, the first breaking in of the suprasensible upon the soul, commonly
involves the emergence of one only of these complementary forms of
perception. One side always wakes first: the incoming message always
choosing the path of least resistance. Hence mystical conversion tends to
belong to one of two distinctive types: tends also, as regards its
expression, to follow that temperamental inclination to objectivize Reality
as a Place, a Person, or a State which we found to govern the symbolic
systems of the mystics. [388]

There is first, then, the apprehension of a splendour without: an expansive,
formless, ineffable vision, a snatching up of the self, as it were, from
knowledge of this world to some vague yet veritable knowledge of the next.
The veil parts, and the Godhead is perceived as transcendent to, yet
immanent in, the created universe. Not the personal touch of love
transfiguring the soul, but the impersonal glory of a transfigured world, is
the dominant note of this experience: and the reaction of the self takes the
form of awe and rapture rather than of intimate affection. Of such a kind
was the conversion of Suso, and in a less degree of Brother Lawrence. Of
this kind also were the Light which Rulman Merswin saw, and the mystical
perception of the Being of the universe reported by Richard Jefferies and
countless others.

This experience, if it is to be complete, if it is to involve the definite
emergence of the self from “the prison of I-hood,” its setting out upon the
Mystic Way, requires an act of concentration on the self’s part as the
complement of its initial act of expansion. It must pass beyond the stage of
metaphysical rapture or fluid splendour, and crystallize into a willed
response to the Reality perceived; a definite and personal relation must be
set up between the self and the Absolute Life. To be a spectator of Reality
is not enough. The awakened subject is not merely to perceive transcendent
life, but to participate therein; and for this, a drastic and costly
life-changing is required. In Jefferies’s case this crystallization, this
heroic effort towards participation did not take place, and he never
therefore laid hold of “the glory that has been revealed.” In Suso’s it did,
“exciting in him a most lively desire for God.”

In most cases this crystallization, the personal and imperative concept
which the mind constructs from the general and ineffable intuition of
Reality, assumes a theological character. Often it presents itself to the
consciousness in the form of visions or voices: objective, as the Crucifix
which spoke to St. Francis, or mental, as the visions of the Cross
experienced by Rulman Merswin and St. Catherine of Genoa. Nearly always,
this concept, this intimate realization of the divine, has reference to the
love and sorrow at the heart of things, the discord between Perfect Love and
an imperfect world; whereas the complementary vision of Transcendence
strikes a note of rapturous joy. “The beatings of the Heart of God sounded
like so many invitations which thus spake: Come and do penance, come and be
reconciled, come and be consoled, come and be blessed; come, My love, and
receive all that the Beloved can give to His beloved. . . . Come, My bride,
and enjoy My Godhead.” [389]

It is to this personal touch, to the individual appeal of an immediate
Presence, not to the great light and the Beatific Vision, that the awakened
self makes its most ardent, most heroic response. Not because he was rapt
from himself, but because the figure on the Cross called him by name,
saying, “Repair My Church” did St. Francis, with that simplicity, that
disregard of worldly values which constituted his strength, accept the
message in a literal sense and set himself instantly to the work demanded;
bringing stones, and, in defiance alike of comfort and convention, building
up with his own hands the crumbling walls.

In many conversions to the mystic life, the revelation of an external
splendour, the shining vision of the transcendent spiritual world, is wholly
absent. The self awakes to that which is within, rather than to that which
is without: to the immanent not the transcendent God, to the personal not
the cosmic relation. Where those who look out receive the revelation of
Divine Beauty, those who look in receive rather the wound of Divine Love:
another aspect of the “triple star.” Emotional mystics such as Richard Rolle
and Madame Guyon give us this experience in an extreme form. We find in St.
Catherine of Genoa a nobler example of the same type of response. That
inward revelation in its anguish and abruptness, its rending apart of the
hard tissues of I-hood and vivid disclosures of the poverty of the finite
self, seemed, says the legend of St. Catherine “the wound of Unmeasured
Love,” an image in which we seem to hear the very accents of the saint. “A
wound full of delight,” says the effusive Madame Guyon, “I wished that it
might never heal.” Rolle calls this piercing rapture a great heat: the heat
which is to light the Fire of Love. “As it were if the finger were put in
fire, it should be clad with feeling of burning so the soul with love (as
aforesaid) set afire, truly feels most very heat.” [390]

Love, passionate and all-dominant, here takes the place of that joyous awe
which we noticed as the characteristic reaction upon reality in conversions
of the Transcendent type. In the deep and strong temperaments of the great
mystics this love passes quickly—sometimes instantly—from the emotional to
the volitional stage. Their response to the voice of the Absolute is not
merely an effusion of sentiment, but an act of will: an act often of so deep
and comprehensive a kind as to involve the complete change of the outward no
less than of the inward life. “Divine love,” says Dionysius “draws those
whom it seizes beyond themselves: and this so greatly that they belong no
longer to themselves but wholly to the Object loved.” [391]

Merswin’s oath of self-surrender: St. Catherine of Genoa’s passionate and
decisive “No more world! no more sins!”: St. Francis’s naive and instant
devotion to church-restoration in its most literal sense: these things are
earnests of the reality of the change. They represent—symbolize as well as
they can upon the sensual plane—the spontaneous response of the living
organism to a fresh external stimulus: its first effort of adjustment to the
new conditions which that stimulus represents. They complete the process of
conversion; which is not one-sided, not merely an infusion into the
surface-consciousness of new truth, but rather the beginning of a
life-process, a breaking down of the old and building up of the new. A never
to be ended give-and-take is set up between the individual and the Absolute.
The Spirit of Life has been born: and the first word it learns to say is
Abba, Father. It aspires to its origin, to Life in its most intense
manifestation: hence all its instincts urge it to that activity which it
feels to be inseparable from life. It knows itself a member of that mighty
family in which the stars are numbered: the family of the sons of God, who,
free and creative, sharing the rapture of a living, striving Cosmos, “shout
for joy.”

So, even in its very beginning, we see how active, how profoundly organic,
how deeply and widely alive is the true contemplative life; how truly on the
transcendent as on the phenomenal plane, the law of living things is action
and reaction, force and energy. The awakening of the self is to a new and
more active plane of being, new and more personal relations with Reality;
hence to a new and more real work which it must do.
_________________________________________________________________

[342] See Starbuck, “The Psychology of Religion,” cap. xxix.

[343] Op. cit., cap. xii.

[344] J. B. Pratt, “The Religious Consciousness,” cap. xiii. The whole
chapter deserve careful study.

[345] Journal of George Fox, cap. i.

[346] Aug. Conf., bk. vii. cap. xvii. We can surely trace the influence of
such an experience in St. Paul’s classic description of the “endopsychic
conflict”: Rom. vii. 14-25.

[347] Plotinus, Ennead vi. 9.

[348] “It is certain,” says De Sanctis, “that when we attempt to probe
deeper in our study of sudden converts, we discover that the coup de foudre
, which in the main is observable in only a small minority of conversions,
is in fact the least significant, though the most Esthetic, moment of the
conversion.” (“Religious Conversion,” Eng. trans., p. 65. Compare St.
Augustine’s Confessions, with their description of the years of uncertainty
and struggle which prepared him for the sudden and final “Tolle, lege!” that
initiated him into the long-sought life of Reality.)

[349] Op. cit. , p. 171.

[350] “Journal Spirituel de Lucie-Christine,” p. 11.

[351] Thomas of Celano, Legenda Prima, cap. 1.

[352] Thomas of Celano, Legenda Secunda, cap. v. Compare P. Sabatier. “Vie
de S. François d’Assise,” cap. ii., where the authorities are fully set out.

[353] Thomas of Celano, Legenda Secunda, cap. vi.

[354] “Vita e Dottrina di Santa Caterina da Genova,” cap ii.

[355] Von Hügel, “The Mystical Element of Religion,” vol. ii p. 29.

[356] It is clear from the heading of cap. x. (pt. i.) of her Autobiography
that Madame Guyon’s editors were conscious, if she was not, of some of the
close coincidences between her experiences and those of St. Catherine of
Genoa. The parallel between their early years is so exact and descends to
such minute details that I am inclined to think that the knowledge of this
resemblance, and the gratification with which she would naturally regard it,
has governed or modified her memories of this past. Hence a curious and
hitherto unnoticed case of “unconscious spiritual plagiarism.”

[357] For a thoroughly hostile account see Leuba: ‘The Psychology of
Religious Mysticism,” cap. iv.

[358] Vie, pt. i. cap. iv.

[359] Op. cit., pt. i. cap. vi.

[360] “Madame Guyon,” p. 36.

[361] Vie, pt. i. cap. viii.

[362] Op. cit., loc. cit.

[363] One of the best English accounts of this movement and the great
personalities concerned in it is in Rufus Jones, “Studies in Mystical
Religion,” cap. xiii.

[364] A. Jundt, “Rulman Merswin,” p. 19. M. Jundt has condensed his account
which I here translate, from Merswin’s autobiographical story of his
conversion, published in Breiträge zu den theologischen Wissenschaften , v .
(Jena, 1854). Our whole knowledge of Merswin’s existence depends on the
group of documents which includes this confession, the “Book of Two Men,”
the “Vision of Nine Rocks,” and his other reputed works. The authenticity of
these documents has been much questioned, and they have doubtless suffered
severely from the editorial energy of his followers. Some critics even
regard them as pious fictions, useless as evidence of the incidents of
Merswin’s life. With this view, upheld by Karl Reider (“Der Gottesfreund von
Oberland,” 1905), I cannot agree. A possible solution of the many
difficulties is that of M. Jundt, who believes that we have in Merswin and
the mysterious “Friend of God of the Oberland,” who pervades his spiritual
career, a remarkable case of dissociated personality. Merswin’s peculiar
psychic make up, as described in his autobiography, supports this view: the
adoption of which I shall assume in future references to his life. It is
incredible that the vivid account of his conversion which I quote should be
merely “tendency-literature,” without basis in fact. Compare Jundt’s
monograph, and also Rufus Jones, op. cit. pp . 245-253, where the whole
problem is discussed.

[365] Jundt, op. cit., loc. cit.

[366] “Leben und Schriften” (Diepenbrock), cap. i. Suso’s autobiography is
written in the third person. He refers to himself throughout under the title
of “Servitor of the Eternal Wisdom.”

[367] Op. cit., loc. cit.

[368] Leben, cap. iii.

[369] Bremond, “Histoire Littérario du Sentiment Religieux en France.” vol.
iv. pp. 359 seq.

[370] “Summa contra Gentiles,” I. iii. cap. lxii.

[371] The complete test of the Memorial isprinted, among other places, in
Faugère’s edition of the “Pensées, Fragments et Lettres de Blaise Pascal,”
2nd ed., Paris, 1897. Tome i. p. 269; and is reproduced in facsimile by
Bremond loc. cit. Bremond holds that the Memorial is the record of two
distinct experiences: a “mystical experience in the proper meaning of the
word,” and an “affective meditation arising from it.” This view does not
seem incompatible with my original description, which I therefore retain.
(Note to 12th ed.)

[372] Brother Lawrence, “The Practice of the Presence of God,” p. 9.

[373] “The Way of Initiation,” p. 134.

[374] “Letters of William Blake,” p. 62.

[375] “The Psychology of Religion,” p. 120.

[376] James, “Varieties of Religion Experience,” p. 253. This phenomenon
receives brilliant literary expression in John Masefield’s poem “The
Everlasting Mercy” (1911).

[377] Whitman, “The Prayer of Colombus.”

[378] “The Story of My Heart,” pp. 8, 9, 45, 181.

[379] Bucke, “Cosmic Consciousness, a Study in the Evolution of the Human
Mind.” Philadelphia. 1905.

[380] “Fire of Love,” bk. i. cap. xii.

[381] Ibid. , bk. i. cap. xv.

[382] Ibid., cap. xiv.

[383] Hilton and the author of “The Cloud of Unknowing” both refer to
“sensible heat” as a well-known but dubious concomitant of spiritual
experience. Compare the confession of a modern convert, “I was siezed and
possessed by an interior flame, for which nothing had prepared me; waves of
fire succeeding one another for more than two hours.” (“Madeleine Sémer,
Convertie et Mystique,” 1874-1921, p. 71.)

[384] “Fire of Love,” bk. i. Prologue.

[385] Ibid ., bk. i. cap. xv.

[386] Ibid ., bk. ii. cap. xii.

[387] Supra , p. 35.

[388] Ibid ., p. 128.

[389] St. Mechthild of Hackborn, “Liber Specialis Gratiae,” I. ii. cap. i

[390] “The Fire of Love,” bk. i. cap. i.

[391] Dionysius the Areopagite, “De Divinis Nominibus,” iv. 13.
_________________________________________________________________

H ere , then, stands the newly awakened self: aware, for the first time, of
reality, responding to that reality by deep movements of love and of awe.
She sees herself, however, not merely to be thrust into a new world, but set
at the beginning of a new road. Activity is now to be her watchword,
pilgrimage the business of her life. “That a quest there is, and an end, is
the single secret spoken.” Under one symbol or another, the need of that
long slow process of transcendence, of character building, whereby she is to
attain freedom, become capable of living upon high levels of reality, is
present in her consciousness. Those in whom this growth is not set going are
no mystics, in the exact sense in which that word is here used; however
great their temporary illumination may have been.

What must be the first step of the self upon this road to perfect union with
the Absolute? Clearly, a getting rid of all those elements of normal
experience which are not in harmony with reality: of illusion, evil,
imperfection of every kind. By false desires and false thoughts man has
built up for himself a false universe: as a mollusk by the deliberate and
persistent absorption of lime and rejection of all else, can build up for
itself a hard shell which shuts it from the external world, and only
represents in a distorted and unrecognisable form the ocean from which it
was obtained. This hard and wholly unnutritious shell, this one-sided
secretion of the surface-consciousness, makes as it were a little cave of
illusion for each separate soul. A literal and deliberate getting out of the
cave must be for every mystic, as it was for Plato’s prisoners, the first
step in the individual hunt for reality.

In the plain language of old-fashioned theology “man’s sin is stamped upon
man’s universe.” We see a sham world because we live a sham life. We do not
know ourselves; hence do not know the true character of our senses and
instincts; hence attribute wrong values to their suggestions and
declarations concerning our relation to the external world. That world,
which we have distorted by identifying it with our own self-regarding
arrangements of its elements, has got to reassume for us the character of
Reality, of God. In the purified sight of the great mystics it did reassume
this character: their shells were opened wide, they knew the tides of the
Eternal Sea. This lucid apprehension of the True is what we mean when we
speak of the Illumination which results from a faithful acceptance of the
trials of the Purgative Way.

That which we call the “natural” self as it exists in the “natural”
world—the “old Adam” of St. Paul—is wholly incapable of supersensual
adventure. All its activities are grouped about a centre of consciousness
whose correspondences are with the material world. In the moment of its
awakening, it is abruptly made aware of this disability. It knows itself
finite. It now aspires to the infinite. It is encased in the hard crust of
individuality: it aspires to union with a larger self. It is fettered: it
longs for freedom. Its every sense is attuned to illusion: it craves for
harmony with the Absolute Truth. “God is the only Reality,” says Patmore,
“and we are real only as far as we are in His order and He is in us.” [392]
Whatever form, then, the mystical adventure may take it, must begin with a
change in the attitude of the subject; a change which will introduce it into
the order of Reality, and enable it to set up permanent relations with an
Object which is not normally part of its universe. Therefore, though the end
of mysticism is not adequately defined as goodness, it entails the
acquirement of goodness. The virtues are the “ornaments of the spiritual
marriage” because that marriage is union with the Good no less than with the
Beautiful and the True.

Primarily, then, the self must be purged of all that stands between it and
goodness: putting on the character of reality instead of the character of
illusion or “sin.” It longs ardently to do this from the first moment in
which it sees itself in the all-revealing radiance of the Uncreated Light.
“When love openeth the inner eyes of the soul for to see this truth,” says
Hilton, “with other circumstances that come withal then beginneth the soul
for sooth to be vastly meek. For then by the sight of God it feeleth and
seeth itself as it is, and then doth the soul forsake the beholding and
leaning to itself.” [393]

So, with Dante, the first terrace of the Mount of Purgatory is devoted to
the cleansing of pride and the production of humility: the inevitable—one
might almost say mechanical—result of a vision, however fleeting, of
Reality, and an undistorted sight of the earthbound self. All its life that
self has been measuring its candlelight by other candles. Now for the first
time it is out in the open air and sees the sun. “This is the way,” said the
voice of God to St. Catherine of Siena in ecstasy. “If thou wilt arrive at a
perfect knowledge and enjoyment of Me, the Eternal Truth, thou shouldst
never go outside the knowledge of thyself; and by humbling thyself in the
valley of humility thou wilt know Me and thyself, from which knowledge thou
wilt draw all that is necessary. . . . In self knowledge, then, thou wilt
humble thyself; seeing that, in thyself, thou dost not even exist.” [394]

The first thing that the self observes, when it turns back upon itself in
that awful moment of lucidity—enters, as St. Catherine says, into “the cell
of self-knowledge,”—is the horrible contrast between its clouded contours
and the pure sharp radiance of the Real; between its muddled faulty life,
its perverse self-centred drifting, and the clear onward sweep of that
Becoming in which it is immersed. It is then that the outlook of rapture and
awe receives the countersign of repentance. The harbinger of that new self
which must be born appears under the aspect of a desire: a passionate
longing to escape from the suddenly perceived hatefulness of selfhood, and
to conform to Reality, the Perfect which it has seen under its aspect of
Goodness, of Beauty, or of Love—to be worthy of it, in fact to be real.
“This showing,” says Gerlac Petersen of that experience, “is so vehement and
so strong that the whole of the interior man, not only of his heart but of
his body, is marvellously moved and shaken, and faints within itself, unable
to endure it. And by this means, his interior aspect is made clear without
any cloud, and conformable in its own measure to Him whom he seeks.” [395]

The lives of the mystics abound in instances of the “vehemence of this
showing”: of the deep-seated sense of necessity which urges the newly
awakened self to a life of discomfort and conflict, often to intense poverty
and pain, as the only way of replacing false experience by true. Here the
transcendental consciousness, exalted by a clear intuition of its goal, and
not merely “counting” but perceiving the world to be obviously well lost for
such a prize, takes the reins. It forces on the unwilling surface mind a
sharp vision of its own disabilities, its ugly and imperfect life; and the
thirst for Perfection which is closely bound up with the mystic temperament
makes instant response. “No more sins!” was the first cry of St. Catherine
of Genoa in that crucial hour in which she saw by the light of love her own
self-centred and distorted past. She entered forthwith upon the Purgative
Way, in which for four years she suffered under a profound sense of
imperfection, endured fasting, solitude and mortification; and imposed upon
herself the most repulsive duties in her efforts towards that self-conquest
which should make her “conformable in her own measure” to the dictates of
that Pure Love which was the aspect of reality that she had seen. It is the
inner conviction that this conformity—this transcendence of the unreal—is
possible and indeed normal which upholds the mystic during the terrible
years of Purgation: so that “not only without heaviness, but with a joy
unmeasured he casts back all thing that may him let.” [396]

To the true lover of the Absolute, Purgation no less than Illumination is a
privilege, a dreadful joy. It is an earnest of increasing life. “Let me
suffer or die!” said St. Teresa: a strange alternative in the ears of common
sense, but a forced option in the spiritual sphere. However harsh its form,
however painful the activities to which it spurs him, the mystic recognizes
in this breakup of his old universe an essential part of the Great Work: and
the act in which he turns to it is an act of loving desire, no less than an
act of will. “Burning of love into a soul truly taken all vices purgeth: . .
. for whilst the true lover with strong and fervent desire into God is
borne, all things him displease that from the sight of God withdrawn.” [397]
His eyes once opened, he is eager for that costly ordering of his disordered
loves which alone can establish his correspondences with Transcendental
Life. “Teach me, my only joy,” cries Suso, “the way in which I may bear upon
my body the marks of Thy Love.” “Come, my soul, depart from outward things
and gather thyself together into a true interior silence, that thou mayst
set out with all thy courage and bury and lose thyself in the desert of a
deep contrition.” [398]

It is in this torment of contrition, this acute consciousness of
unworthiness, that we have the first swing back of the oscillating self from
the initial state of mystic pleasure to the complementary state of pain. It
is, so to speak, on its transcendental side, the reflex action which follows
the first touch of God. Thus, we read that Rulman Merswin, “swept away by
the transports of Divine Love,” did not surrender himself to the passive
enjoyment of this first taste of Absolute Being, but was impelled by it to
diligent and instant self-criticism. He was “seized with a hatred of his
body, and inflicted on himself such hard mortifications that he fell ill.”
[399] It is useless for lovers of healthy-mindedness to resent this and
similar examples of self-examination and penance: to label them morbid or
mediaeval. The fact remains that only such bitter knowledge of wrongness of
relation, seen by the light of ardent love, can spur the will of man to the
hard task of readjustment.

“I saw full surely,” says Julian of Norwich, “that it behoveth needs to be
that we should be in longing and in penance, until the time that we be led
so deep into God that we verily and truly know our own soul.” [400]

Dante’s whole journey up the Mount of Purgation is the dramatic presentation
of this one truth. So, too, the celebrated description of Purgatory
attributed to St. Catherine of Genoa [401] is obviously founded upon its
author’s inward experience of this Purgative Way. In it, she applies to the
souls of the dead her personal consciousness of the necessity of
purification; its place in the organic process of spiritual growth. It is,
as she acknowledges at the beginning, the projection of her own
psychological adventures upon the background of the spiritual world: its
substance being simply the repetition after death of that eager and heroic
acceptance of suffering, those drastic acts of purification, which she has
herself been compelled to undertake under the whip of the same psychic
necessity—that of removing the rust of illusion, cleansing the mirror in
order that it may receive the divine light. “It is,” she says, “as with a
covered object, the object cannot respond to the rays of the sun, not
because the sun ceases to shine—for it shines without intermission—but
because the covering intervenes. Let the covering be destroyed, and again
the object will be exposed to the sun, and will answer to the rays which
beat against it in proportion as the work of destruction advances. Thus the
souls are covered by a rust—that is, by sin—which is gradually consumed away
by the fire of purgatory. The more it is consumed, the more they respond to
God their true Sun. Their happiness increases as the rust falls off and lays
them open to the divine ray . . . the instinctive tendency to seek happiness
in God develops itself, and goes on increasing through the fire of love
which draws it to its end with such impetuosity and vehemence that any
obstacle seems intolerable; and the more clear its vision, the more extreme
its pain.” [402]

“Mostratene la via di gire al monte!” cry the souls of the newly-dead in
Dante’s vision, [403] pushed by that “instinctive tendency” towards the
purifying flames. Such a tendency, such a passionate desire, the aspiring
self must have. No cool, well-balanced knowledge of the need of new
adjustments will avail to set it on the Purgative Way. This is a heroic act,
and demands heroic passions in the soul.

“In order to overcome our desires,” says St. John of the Cross, who is the
classic authority upon this portion of the mystic quest, “and to renounce
all those things, our love and inclination for which are wont so to inflame
the will that it delights therein, we require a more ardent fire and a
nobler love—that of the Bridegroom. Finding her delight and strength in Him,
the soul gains the vigour and confidence which enable her easily to abandon
all other affections. It was necessary, in her struggle with the attractive
force of her sensual desires, not only to have this love for the Bridegroom,
but also to be filled with a burning fervour, full of anguish . . . if our
spiritual nature were not on fire with other and nobler passions we should
never cast off the yoke of the senses, nor be able to enter on their night,
neither should we have the courage to remain in the darkness of all things,
and in denial of every desire.” [404]

“We must be filled with a burning fervour full of anguish.” Only this deep
and ardent passion for a perceived Object of Love can persuade the mystic to
those unnatural acts of abnegation by which he kills his lesser love of the
world of sense, frees himself from the “remora of desire,” unifies all his
energies about the new and higher centre of his life. His business, I have
said, is transcendence: a mounting up, an attainment of a higher order of
reality. Once his eyes have been opened on Eternity, his instinct for the
Absolute roused from its sleep, he sees union with that Reality as his duty
no less than his joy: sees too, that this union can only be consummated on a
plane where illusion and selfhood have no place.

The inward voice says to him perpetually, at the least seasonable moments,
“Dimitte omnia transitoria, quaere aeterna.” [405] Hence the purgation of
the senses, and of the character which they have helped to build is always
placed first in order in the Mystic Way; though sporadic flashes of
illumination and ecstasy may, and often do, precede and accompany it. Since
spiritual no less than physical existence, as we know it, is an endless
Becoming, it too has no end. In a sense the whole of the mystical experience
in this life consists in a series of purifications, whereby the Finite
slowly approaches the nature of its Infinite Source: climbing up the
cleansing mountain pool by pool, like the industrious fish in Rulman
Merswin’s vision, until it reaches its Origin. The greatest of the
contemplative saints, far from leaving purgation behind them in their
progress, were increasingly aware of their own inadequateness, the nearer
they approached to the unitive state: for the true lover of the Absolute,
like every other lover, is alternately abased and exalted by his
unworthiness and his good fortune. There are moments of high rapture when he
knows only that the banner over him is Love: but there are others in which
he remains bitterly conscious that in spite of his uttermost surrender there
is within him an ineradicable residuum of selfhood, which “stains the white
radiance of eternity.”

In this sense, then, purification is a perpetual process. That which
mystical writers mean, however, when they speak of the Way of Purgation, is
rather the slow and painful completion of Conversion. It is the drastic
turning of the self from the unreal to the real life: a setting of her house
in order, an orientation of the mind to Truth. Its business is the getting
rid, first of self-love; and secondly of all those foolish interests in
which the surface-consciousness is steeped.

“The essence of purgation,” says Richard of St. Victor, “is
self-simplification.” Nothing can happen until this has proceeded a certain
distance: till the involved interests and tangled motives of the self are
simplified, and the false complications of temporal life are recognized and
cast away.

“No one,” says another authority in this matter, “can be enlightened unless
he be first cleansed or purified and stripped.” [406] Purgation, which is
the remaking of character in conformity with perceived reality, consists in
these two essential acts: the cleansing of that which is to remain, the
stripping of that which is to be done away. It may best be studied,
therefore, in two parts: and I think that it will be in the reader’s
interest if we reverse the order which the “Theologia Germanica” adopts, and
first consider Negative Purification, or self-stripping, and next Positive
Purification, or character-adjustment. These, then, are the branches into
which this subject will here be split. (1) The Negative aspect, the
stripping or purging away of those superfluous, unreal, and harmful things
which dissipate the precious energies of the self. This is the business of
Poverty, or Detachment . (2) The Positive aspect: a raising to their highest
term, their purest state, of all that remains—the permanent elements of
character. This is brought about by Mortification, the gymnastic of the
soul: a deliberate recourse to painful experiences and difficult tasks.

I. Detachment

Apart from the plain necessity of casting out imperfection and sin, what is
the type of “good character” which will best serve the self in its journey
towards union with the Absolute?

The mystics of all ages and all faiths agree in their answer. Those three
virtues which the instinct of the Catholic Church fixed upon as the
necessities of the cloistered life—the great Evangelical counsel of
voluntary Poverty with its departments, Chastity, the poverty of the senses,
and Obedience, the poverty of the will—are also, when raised to their
highest term and transmuted by the Fire of Love, the essential virtues of
the mystical quest.

By Poverty the mystic means an utter self-stripping, the casting off of
immaterial as well as material wealth, a complete detachment from all finite
things. By Chastity he means an extreme and limpid purity of soul, cleansed
from personal desire and virgin to all but God: by Obedience, that
abnegation of selfhood, that mortification of the will, which results in a
complete self-abandonment, a “holy indifference” to the accidents of life.
These three aspects of perfection are really one: linked together as
irrevocably as the three aspects of the self. Their common characteristic is
this: they tend to make the subject regard itself, not as an isolated and
interesting individual, possessing desires and rights, but as a scrap of the
Cosmos, an ordinary bit of the Universal Life, only important as a part of
the All, an expression of the Will Divine. Detachment and purity go hand in
hand, for purity is but detachment of the heart; and where these are present
they bring with them that humble spirit of obedience which expresses
detachment of will. We may therefore treat them as three manifestations of
one thing: which thing is Inward Poverty. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven,” is the motto of all pilgrims on this
road.

“God is pure Good in Himself,” says Eckhart, “therefore will He dwell
nowhere but in a pure soul. There He can pour Himself out: into that He can
wholly flow. What is Purity? It is that a man should have turned himself
away from all creatures and have set his heart so entirely on the Pure Good
that no creature is to him a comfort, that he has no desire for aught
creaturely, save so far as he may apprehend therein the Pure Good, which is
God. And as little as the bright eye can endure aught foreign in it, so
little can the pure soul bear anything in it, any stain on it, that comes
between it and God. To it all creatures are pure to enjoy; for it enjoyeth
all creatures in God, and God in all creatures.” [407]

“To it all creatures are pure to enjoy!” This is hardly the popular concept
of the mystic; which credits him, in the teeth of such examples as St.
Francis, St. Mechthild of Magdeburg, Rolle, Suso, and countless others, with
a hearty dread of natural things. Too many examples of an exaggerated
asceticism—such as the unfortunate story told of the holy Curé d’Ars, who
refused to smell a rose for fear of sin—have supported in this respect the
vulgar belief; for it is generally forgotten that though most mystics have
practised asceticism as a means to an end, all ascetics are not mystics.
Whatever may be the case with other deniers of the senses, it is true that
the soul of the great mystic, dwelling on high levels of reality, his eyes
set on the Transcendental World, is capable of combining with the perfection
of detachment that intense and innocent joy in natural things, as veils and
vessels of the divine, which results from seeing “all creatures in God and
God in all creatures.” “Whoso knows and loves the nobleness of My
Freedom,” said the voice of God to Mechthild of Magdeburg, “cannot bear to
love Me alone, he must love also Me in the creatures.” [408] That
all-embracing love is characteristic of the illumination which results from
a faithful endurance of the Purgative Way; for the corollary of “blessed are
the pure in heart” is not merely a poetic statement. The annals of mysticism
prove it to be a psychological law.

How then is this contradiction to be resolved: that the mystic who has
declared the fundamental necessity of “leaving all creatures” yet finds them
pure to enjoy? The answer to the riddle lies in the ancient paradox of
Poverty: that we only enjoy true liberty in respect of such things as we
neither possess nor desire. “That thou mayest have pleasure in everything,
seek pleasure in nothing. That thou mayest know everything, seek to know
nothing. That thou mayest possess all things, seek to possess nothing. . . .
In detachment the spirit finds quiet and repose, for coveting nothing,
nothing wearies it by elation, and nothing oppresses it by dejection,
because it stands in the centre of its own humility. For as soon as it
covets anything, it is immediately fatigued thereby.” [409]

It is not love but lust—the possessive case, the very food of selfhood—which
poisons the relation between the self and the external world and
“immediately fatigues” the soul. Divide the world into “mine” and “not
mine,” and unreal standards are set up, claims and cravings begin to fret
the mind. We are the slaves of our own property. We drag with us not a
treasure, but a chain. “Behold,” says the “Theologia Germanica,” “on this
sort must we cast all things from us and strip ourselves of them: we must
refrain from claiming anything for our own. When we do this, we shall have
the best, fullest, clearest, and noblest knowledge that a man can have, and
also the noblest and purest love and desire.” [410] “Some there are,” says
Plotinus, “that for all their effort have not attained the Vision. . . .
They have received the authentic Light, all their soul has gleamed as they
have drawn near, but they come with a load on their shoulders which holds
them back from the place of Vision. They have not ascended in the pure
integrity of their being, but are burdened with that which keeps them apart.
They are not yet made one within.” [411] Accept Poverty, however, demolish
ownership, the verb “to have” in every mood and tense, and this downward
drag is at an end. At once the Cosmos belongs to you, and you to it. You
escape the heresy of separateness, are “made one,” and merged in “the
greater life of the All.” Then, a free spirit in a free world, the self
moves upon its true orbit; undistracted by the largely self-imposed needs
and demands of ordinary earthly existence.

This was the truth which St. Francis of Assisi grasped, and applied with the
energy of a reformer and the delicate originality of a poet to every
circumstance of the inner and the outer life. This noble liberty it is which
is extolled by his spiritual descendant, Jacopone da Todi, in one of his
most magnificent odes:—


“Povertá, alto sapere,

a nulla cosa sojacere,

en desprezo possedere

tutte le cose create. . . .

Dio non alberga en core stretto,

tant’é grande quant’ hai affetto,

povertate ha si gran petto

che ci alberga deitate. . . .

Povertate è nulla avere

e nulla cosa poi volere;

ad omne cosa possedere

en spirito de libertate.” [412]

“My little sisters the birds,” said St. Francis, greatest adept of that high
wisdom, “Brother Sun, Sister Water, Mother Earth.” [413] Not my servants,
but my kindred and fellow-citizens; who may safely be loved so long as they
are not desired. So, in almost identical terms, the dying Hindu ascetic:—


“Oh Mother Earth, Father Sky,

Brother Wind, Friend Light, Sweetheart Water,

Here take my last salutation with folded hands!

For to-day I am melting away into the Supreme

Because my heart became pure,

And all delusion vanished,

Through the power of your good company.”

It is the business of Lady Poverty to confer on her lovers this freedom of
the Universe, to eradicate delusion, cut out the spreading growth of
claimfulness, purify the heart, and initiate them into the “great life of
the All.” Well might St. Francis desire marriage with that enchantress, who
gives back ten-fold all that she takes away. “Holy poverty,” he said, “is a
treasure so high excelling and so divine that we be not worthy to lay it up
in our vile vessels; since this is that celestial virtue whereby all earthly
things and fleeting are trodden underfoot, and whereby all hindrances are
lifted from the soul, so that freely she may join herself to God Eternal.”
[414]

Poverty, then, prepares man’s spirit for that union with God to which it
aspires. She strips off the clothing which he so often mistakes for himself,
transvaluates all his values, and shows him things as they are. “There
are,” says Eckhart, “four ascending degrees of such spiritual poverty. 1.
The soul’s contempt of all things that are not God. 2. Contempt of herself
and her own works. 3. Utter self-abandonment. 4. Self-loss in the
incomprehensible Being of God.” [415] So, in the “Sacrum Commercium,” when
the friars, climbing “the steeps of the hill,” found Lady Poverty at the
summit “enthroned only in her nakedness,” she “preventing them with the
blessings of sweetness,” said, “Why hasten ye so from the vale of tears to
the mount of light? If, peradventure, it is me that ye seek, lo, I am but as
you behold, a little poor one, stricken with storms and far from any
consolation.” Whereto the brothers answer, “ Only admit us to thy peace; and
we shall be saved .” [416]

The same truth: the saving peace of utter detachment from everything but
Divine Reality—a detachment which makes those who have it the citizens of
the world, and enabled the friars to say to Lady Poverty as they showed her
from the hill of Assisi the whole countryside at her feet, “Hoc est
claustrum nostrum, Domina,” [417] —is taught by Meister Eckhart in a more
homely parable.

“There was a learned man who, eight years long, desired that God would show
him a man who would teach him the truth. And once when he felt a very great
longing, a voice from God came to him and said, ‘Go to the church, and there
shalt thou find a man who shalt show thee the way to blessedness.’ And he
went thence and found a poor man whose feet were torn and covered with dust
and dirt: and all his clothes were hardly worth three farthings. And he
greeted him, saying:—

“‘God give you good day!’

“He answered: ‘I have never had a bad day.’

“‘God give you good luck.’

“‘I have never had ill luck.’

“‘May you be happy! but why do you answer me thus?’

“‘I have never been unhappy.’

“‘Pray explain this to me, for I cannot understand it.’

“The poor man answered, ‘Willingly. You wished me good day. I never had a
bad day; for if I am hungry I praise God; if it freezes, hails, snows,
rains, if the weather is fair or foul, still I praise God; am I wretched and
despised, I praise God, and so I have never had an evil day. You wished that
God would send me luck. But I never had ill luck, for I know how to live
with God, and I know that what He does is best; and what God gives me or
ordains for me, be it good or ill, I take it cheerfully from God as the best
that can be, and so I have never had ill luck. You wished that God would
make me happy. I was never unhappy; for my only desire is to live in God’s
will, and I have so entirely yielded my will to God’s, that what God wills,
I will.’

“‘But if God should will to cast you into hell,’ said the learned man, ‘what
would you do then?’

“‘Cast me into hell? His goodness forbids! But if He did cast me into hell,
I should have two arms to embrace Him. One arm is true humility, that I
should lay beneath Him, and be thereby united to His holy humanity. And with
the right arm of love, which is united with His holy divinity, I should so
embrace Him that He would have to go to hell with me. And I would rather be
in hell and have God, then in heaven and not have God.’

“Then the Master understood that true abandonment with utter humility is the
nearest way to God.

“The Master asked further: ‘Whence are you come?’

“‘From God.’

“‘Where did you find God?’

“‘When I forsook all creatures.’

“‘Where have you left God?’

“‘In pure hearts, and in men of good will.’

“The Master asked: ‘What sort of man are you?’

“‘I am a king.’

“‘Where is your kingdom?’

“‘My soul is my kingdom, for I can so rule my senses inward and outward,
that all the desires and power of my soul are in subjection, and this
kingdom is greater than a kingdom on earth.’ [418]

“‘What brought you to this perfection?’

“‘My silence, my high thoughts, and my union with God. For I could not rest
in anything that was less than God. Now I have found God; and in God have
eternal rest and peace.’” [419]

Poverty, then, consists in a breaking down of man’s inveterate habit of
trying to rest in, or take seriously, things which are “less than God”: i.e.
, which do not possess the character of reality. Such a habit is the most
fertile of all causes of “world-weariness,” disillusion and unrest: faults,
or rather spiritual diseases, which the mystics never exhibit, but which few
who are without all mystic feeling can hope to escape. Hence the sharpened
perceptions of the contemplatives have always seen poverty as a counsel of
prudence, a higher form of common sense. It was not with St. Francis, or any
other great mystic, a first principle, an end in itself. It was rather a
logical deduction from the first principle of their science—the paramount
importance to the soul of an undistracted vision of reality.

Here East and West are in agreement: “Their science,” says Al Ghazzali of
the Sufis, who practised, like the early Franciscans, a complete
renunciation of worldly goods, “has for its object the uprooting from the
soul of all violent passions, the extirpation from it of vicious desires and
evil qualities; so that the heart may become detached from all that is not
God, and give itself for its only occupation meditation upon the Divine
Being.” [420]

All those who have felt themselves urged towards the attainment of this
transcendental vision, have found that possessions interrupt the view; that
claims, desires, attachments become centres of conflicting interest in the
mind. They assume a false air of importance, force themselves upon the
attention, and complicate life. Hence, in the interest of
self-simplification, they must be cleared away: a removal which involves for
the real enthusiast little more sacrifice than the weekly visit of the
dustman. “Having entirely surrendered my own free-will,” says Al Ghazzali of
his personal experience,” my heart no longer felt any distress in renouncing
fame, wealth, or the society of my children.” [421]

Others have reconciled self-surrender with a more moderate abandonment of
outward things; for possessions take different rank for almost every human
soul. The true rule of poverty consists in giving up those things which
enchain the spirit, divide its interests, and deflect it on its road to
God—whether these things be riches, habits, religious observances, friends,
interests, distastes, or desires—not in mere outward destitution for its own
sake. It is attitude, not act, that matters; self-denudation would be
unnecessary were it not for our inveterate tendency to attribute false value
to things the moment they become our own. “What is poverty of spirit but
meekness of mind, by which a man knows his own infirmity?” says Rolle,
“seeing that to perfect stableness he may not come but by the grace of God,
all thing that him might let from that grace he forsakes, and only in joy of
his Maker he sets his desire. And as of one root spring many branches, so of
wilful poverty on this wise taken proceed virtues and marvels untrowed. Not
as some, that change their clothes and not their souls; riches soothly it
seems these forsake, and vices innumerable they cease not to gather. . . .
If thou truly all thing for God forsake, see more what thou despised than
what thou forsaketh. ” [422]

The Poverty of the mystics, then, is a mental rather than a material state.
Detachment of the will from all desire of possessions is the inner reality,
of which Franciscan poverty is a sacrament to the world. It is the poor in
spirit, not the poor in substance, who are to be spiritually blessed. “Let
all things be forsaken of me,” says Gerlac Petersen, “so that being poor I
may be able in great inward spaciousness, and without any hurt, to suffer
want of all those things which the mind of man can desire; out of or
excepting God Himself.” [423]

“The soul,” says St. John of the Cross, “is not empty, so long as the desire
for sensible things remains. But the absence of this desire for things
produces emptiness and liberty of soul; even when there is an abundance of
possessions.” [424]

Every person in whom the mystical instinct awakes soon discovers in himself
certain tastes or qualities which interrupt the development of that
instinct. Often these tastes and qualities are legitimate enough upon their
own plane; but they are a drain upon the energy of the self, preventing her
from attaining that intenser life for which she was made and which demands
her undivided zest. They distract her attention, fill the field of
perception, stimulate her instinctive life: making of the
surface-consciousness so active a thing that it can hardly be put to sleep.
“Where can he have that pure and naked vision of unchangeable Truth whereby
he see into all things,” says Petersen again, “who is so busied in other
things, not perhaps evil, which operate . . . upon his thoughts and
imagination and confuse and enchain his mind . . . that his sight of that
unique One in Whom all things are is overclouded?” [425]

The nature of these distracting factors which “confuse and enchain the
mind” will vary with almost every individual. It is impossible to predict
what those things will be which a self must give up, in order that the
transcendental consciousness may grow. “It makes little difference whether a
bird be held by a slender thread or by a rope; the bird is bound, and cannot
fly until the cord that holds it is broken. It is true that a slender thread
is more easily broken; still notwithstanding, if it is not broken the bird
cannot fly. This is the state of a soul with particular attachments: it
never can attain to the liberty of the divine union, whatever virtues it may
possess. Desires and attachments affect the soul as the remora is said to
affect a ship; that is but a little fish, yet when it clings to the vessel
it effectually hinders its progress.” [426]

Thus each adventurer must discover and extirpate all those interests which
nourish selfhood, however innocent or even useful these interests may seem
in the eyes of the world. The only rule is the ruthless abandonment of
everything which is in the way. “When any man God perfectly desires to love,
all things as well inward as outward that to God’s love are contrary and
from His love do let, he studies to do away.” [427] This may mean the prompt
and utter self-stripping of St. Francis of Assisi, who cast off his actual
clothing in his relentless determination to have nothing of his own: [428]
the reluctant bit-by-bit renunciations which at last set his follower Angela
of Foligno free, or the drastic proceedings of Antoinette Bourignan, who
found that a penny was enough to keep her from God.

“Being one night in a most profound Penitence,” says the biographer of this
extraordinary woman, “she said from the bottom of her Heart, ‘O my Lord!
what must I do to please Thee? For I have nobody to teach me. Speak to my
soul and it will hear Thee.’” At that instant she heard, as if another had
spoken within her “Forsake all earthly things. Separate thyself from the
love of the creatures. Deny thyself.” From this time, the more she entered
into herself the more she was inclined to abandon all. But she had not the
courage necessary for the complete renunciation towards which her
transcendental consciousness was pressing her. She struggled to adjust
herself to the inner and the outer life, but without success. For such a
character as hers, compromise was impossible. “She asked always earnestly,
When shall I be perfectly thine, O my God? and she thought He still answered
her, When thou shalt no longer possess anything, and shalt die to thyself.
And where shall I do that, Lord? He answered, In the Desert.” At last the
discord between her deeper and her superficial self became intolerable.
Reinforced by the miseries of an unsympathetic home, still more by a threat
of approaching marriage, the impulse to renunciation got its way. She
disguised herself in a hermit’s dress—she was only eighteen, and had no one
to help or advise her—and “went out of her chamber about Four in the
Morning, taking nothing but one Penny to buy Bread for that Day and it being
said to her in the going out, Where is thy Faith? In a Penny? she threw it
away. . . . Thus she went away wholly delivered from the heavy burthen of
the Cares and Good Things of this World.” [429]

An admirable example of the mystic’s attitude towards the soul-destroying
division of interests, the natural but hopeless human struggle to make the
best of both worlds, which sucks at its transcendental vitality, occurs in
St. Teresa’s purgative period. In her case this war between the real and the
superficial self extended over many years; running side by side with the
state of Illumination, and a fully developed contemplative life. At last it
was brought to an end by a “Second Conversion” which unified her scattered
interests and set her firmly and for ever on the Unitive Way. The virile
strength of Teresa’s character, which afterwards contributed to the
greatness of her achievement, opposed the invading transcendental
consciousness; disputed every inch of territory; resisted every demand made
upon it by the growing spiritual self. Bit by bit it was conquered, the
sphere of her deeper life enlarged; until the moment came in which she
surrendered, once for all, to her true destiny. [430]

During the years of inward stress, of penance and growing knowledge of the
Infinite, which she spent in the Convent of the Incarnation, and which
accompanied this slow remaking of character, Teresa’s only
self-indulgence—as it seems, a sufficiently innocent one—was talking to the
friends who came down from Avila to the convent-parlour, and spoke to her
through the grille. Her confessors, unaccustomed to the education of
mystical genius, saw nothing incompatible between this practice and the
pursuit of a high contemplative life. But as her transcendental
consciousness, her states of orison grew stronger, Teresa felt more and more
the distracting influence of these glimpses of the outer world. They were a
drain upon the energy which ought to be wholly given to that new, deep, more
real life which she felt stirring within her, and which could only hope to
achieve its mighty destiny by complete concentration upon the business in
hand. No genius can afford to dissipate his energies: the mystic genius
least of all. Teresa knew that so long as she retained these personal
satisfactions, her life had more than one focus; she was not whole-hearted
in her surrender to the Absolute. But though her inward voices, her deepest
instincts, urged her to give them up, for years she felt herself incapable
of such a sacrifice. It was round the question of their retention or
surrender that the decisive battle of her life was fought.

“The devil,” says her great Augustinian eulogist, Fray Luis de Leon, in his
vivid account of these long interior struggles, “put before her those
persons most sympathetic by nature; and God came, and in the midst of the
conversation discovered Himself aggrieved and sorrowful. The devil delighted
in the conversation and pastime, but when she turned her back on them and
betook herself to prayer, God redoubled the delight and favours, as if to
show her how false was the lure which charmed her at the grating, and that
His sweetness was the veritable sweetness. . . . So that these two
inclinations warred with each other in the breast of this blessed woman, and
the authors who inspired them each did his utmost to inflame her most, and
the oratory blotted out what the grating wrote, and at times the grating
vanquished and diminished the good fruit produced by prayer, causing agony
and grief which disquieted and perplexed her soul: for though she was
resolved to belong entirely to God, she knew not how to shake herself free
from the world: and at times she persuaded herself that she could enjoy
both, which ended mostly, as she says, in complete enjoyment of neither. For
the amusements of the locutorio were embittered and turned into wormwood by
the memory of the secret and sweet intimacy with God; and in the same way
when she retired to be with God, and commenced to speak with Him, the
affections and thoughts which she carried with her from the grating took
possession of her.” [431]

Compare with these violent oscillations between the superficial and mystical
consciousness—characteristic of Teresa’s strong volitional nature, which
only came to rest after psychic convulsions which left no corner of its
being unexplored—the symbolic act of renunciation under which Antoinette
Bourignan’s “interior self” vanquished the surface intelligence and asserted
its supremacy. Teresa must give up her passionate delight in human
friendship. Antoinette, never much tempted in that direction, must give up
her last penny. What society was to Teresa’s generous, energetic nature,
prudence was to the temperamentally shrewd and narrow Antoinette: a
distraction, a check on the development of the all-demanding transcendental
genius, an unconquered relic of the “lower life.”

Many a mystic, however, has found the perfection of detachment to be
consistent with a far less drastic renunciation of external things than that
which these women felt to be essential to their peace. The test, as we have
seen, does not lie in the nature of the things which are retained, but in
the reaction which they stimulate in the self. “Absolute poverty is
thine,” says Tauler, “when thou canst not remember whether anybody has ever
owed thee or been indebted to thee for anything; just as all things will be
forgotten by thee in the last journey of death.” [432] Poverty, in this
sense, may be consistent with the habitual and automatic use of luxuries
which the abstracted self never even perceives. Thus we are told that St.
Bernard was reproached by his enemies with the inconsistency of preaching
evangelical poverty whilst making his journeys from place to place on a
magnificently caparisoned mule, which had been lent to him by the Cluniac
monks. He expressed great contrition: but said that he had never noticed
what it was that he rode upon. [433]

Sometimes, the very activity which one self has rejected as an impediment
becomes for another the channel of spiritual perception. I have mentioned
the Curé d’Ars, who, among other inhibitions, refused to allow himself to
smell a rose. Yet St. Francis preached to the flowers, [434] and ordered a
plot to be set aside for their cultivation when the convent garden was made,
“in order that all who saw them might remember the Eternal Sweetness.” [435]
So, too, we are told of his spiritual daughter, St. Douceline, that “out of
doors one day with her sisters, she heard a bird’s note. ‘What a lovely
song!’ she said: and the song drew her straight way to God. Did they bring
her a flower, its beauty had a like effect .” [436] “To look on trees,
water, and flowers,” says St. Teresa of her own beginnings of contemplation,
“helped her to recollect the Presence of God.” [437] Here we are reminded of
Plato. “The true order of going is to use the beauties of Earth as steps
along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty.” This,
too, is the true order of Holy Poverty: the selfless use, not the selfish
abuse of lovely and natural things.

To say that some have fallen short of this difficult ideal and taken refuge
in mere abnegation is but to say that asceticism is a human, not a
superhuman art, and is subject to “the frailty of the creature.” But on the
whole, these excesses are mainly found amongst saintly types who have not
exhibited true mystic intuition. This intuition, entailing as it does
communion with intensest Life, gives to its possessors a sweet sanity, a
delicate balance, which guards them, as a rule, from such conceptions of
chastity as that of the youthful saint who shut himself in a cupboard for
fear he should see his mother pass by: from the obedience which identifies
the voice of the director with the voice of God; from detachment such as
that exhibited by the Blessed Angela of Foligno, who, though a true mystic,
viewed with almost murderous satisfaction the deaths of relatives who were
“impediments.” [438] The detachment of the mystic is just a restoration to
the liberty in which the soul was made: it is a state of joyous humility in
which he cries, “Nought I am, nought I have, nought I lack.” To have arrived
at this is to have escaped from the tyranny of selfhood: to be initiated
into the purer air of that universe which knows but one rule of action—that
which was laid down once for all by St. Augustine when he said, in the most
memorable and misquoted of epigrams: “Love, and do what you like.”

2. Mortification

By mortification, I have said, is to be understood the positive aspect of
purification: the remaking in relation to reality of the permanent elements
of character. These elements, so far, have subserved the interests of the
old self, worked for it in the world of sense. Now they must be adjusted to
the needs of the new self and to the transcendent world in which it moves.
Their focal point is the old self; the “natural man” and his self-regarding
instincts and desires. The object of mortification is to kill that old self,
break up his egoistic attachments and cravings, in order that the higher
centre, the “new man,” may live and breathe. As St. Teresa discovered when
she tried to reconcile the claims of worldly friendships and contemplation,
one or other must go: a house divided against itself cannot stand. “Who
hinders thee more,” says Thomas a Kempis, “than the unmortified affections
of thy own heart? . . . if we were perfectly dead unto ourselves, and not
entangled within our own breasts, then should we be able to taste Divine
things, and to have some experience of heavenly contemplation.” [439]

In psychological language, the process of mortification is the process of
setting up “new paths of neural discharge.” That is to say, the mystic life
has got to express itself in action: and for this new paths must be cut and
new habits formed—all, in spite of the new self’s enthusiasm, “against the
grain”—resulting in a complete sublimation of personality. The energy which
wells up incessantly in every living being must abandon the old road of
least resistance and discharge itself in a new and more difficult way. In
the terms of the hormic psychology, the conative drive of the psyche must be
concentrated on new objectives; and the old paths, left to themselves, must
fade and die. When they are dead, and the new life has triumphed,
Mortification is at an end. The mystics always know when this moment comes.
Often an inner voice then warns them to lay their active penances aside.

Since the greater and stronger the mystic, the stronger and more stubborn
his character tends to be, this change of life and turning of energy from
the old and easy channels to the new is often a stormy matter. It is a
period of actual battle between the inharmonious elements of the self, its
lower and higher springs of action: of toil, fatigue, bitter suffering, and
many disappointments. Nevertheless, in spite of its etymological
associations, the object of mortification is not death but life: the
production of health and strength, the health and strength of the human
consciousness viewed sub specie aeternitatis . “In the truest death of all
created things, the sweetest and most natural life is hidden.” [440]

“This dying,” says Tauler again, “has many degrees, and so has this life. A
man might die a thousand deaths in one day and find at once a joyful life
corresponding to each of them. This is as it must be: God cannot deny or
refuse this to death. The stronger the death the more powerful and thorough
is the corresponding life; the more intimate the death, the more inward is
the life. Each life brings strength, and strengthens to a harder death. When
a man dies to a scornful word, bearing it in God’s name, or to some
inclination inward or outward, acting or not acting against his own will, be
it in love or grief, in word or act, in going or staying; or if he denies
his desires of taste or sight, or makes no excuses when wrongfully accused;
or anything else, whatever it may be, to which he has not yet died, it is
harder at first to one who is unaccustomed to it and unmortified than to him
who is mortified. . . . A great life makes reply to him who dies in earnest
even in the least things, a life which strengthens him immediately to die a
greater death; a death so long and strong, that it seems to him hereafter
more joyful, good and pleasant to die than to live, for he finds life in
death and light shining in darkness.” [441]

No more than detachment, then, is mortification an end in itself. It is a
process, an education directed towards the production of a definite kind of
efficiency, the adjustment of human nature to the demands of its new life.
Severe, and to the outsider apparently unmeaning—like their physical
parallels the exercises of the gymnasium—its disciplines, faithfully
accepted, do release the self from the pull of the lower nature, establish
it on new levels of freedom and power. “Mortification,” says the Benedictine
contemplative Augustine Baker, “tends to subject the body to the spirit and
the spirit to God. And this it does by crossing the inclinations of sense,
which are quite contrary to those of the Divine Spirit . . . by such
crossing and afflicting of the body, self-love and self-will (the poison of
our spirits) are abated, and in time in a sort destroyed; and instead of
them there enter into the soul the Divine love and Divine will, and take
possession thereof.” [442] This transformation accomplished, mortification
may end, and often does, with startling abruptness. After a martyrdom which
lasted sixteen years, says Suso—speaking as usual in the third person—of his
own experience, “On a certain Whitsun Day a heavenly messenger appeared to
him, and ordered him in God’s name to continue it no more. He at once
ceased, and threw all the instruments of his sufferings [irons, nails,
hair-shirt, etc.] into a river.” [443] From this time onward, austerities of
this sort had no part in Suso’s life.

The Franco-Flemish mystic who wrote, and the English contemplative who
translated, “The Mirror of Simple Souls,” have between them described and
explained in bold and accurate language the conditions under which the soul
is enabled to abandon that “hard service of the virtues” which has absorbed
it during the Purgative Way. The statement of the “French Book” is direct
and uncompromising: well calculated to startle timid piety. “Virtues, I take
leave of you for evermore!” exclaims the Soul. “Now shall mine heart be more
free and more in peace than it hath been before. I wot well your service is
too travaillous. . . . Some time I laid mine heart in you without any
dissevering: ye wot well this: I was in all things to you obedient. O I was
then your servant, but now I am delivered out of your thraldom.”

To this astounding utterance the English translator has added a singularly
illuminating gloss. “I am stirred here,” he says, “to say more to the
matter, as thus: First: when a soul giveth her to perfection, she laboureth
busily day and night to get virtues, by counsel of reason, and striveth with
vices at every thought, at every word and deed that she perceiveth cometh of
them, and busily searcheth vices, them to destroy. Thus the virtues be
mistresses, and every virtue maketh her to war with its contrary, the which
be vices. Many sharp pains and bitterness of conscience feeleth the soul in
this war. . . . But so long one may bite on the bitter bark of the nut, that
at last he shall come to the sweet kernel. Right so, ghostly to understand,
it fareth by these souls that be come to peace. They have so long striven
with vices and wrought by virtues, that they be come to the nut kernel, that
is, to the love of God, which is sweetness. And when the soul hath deeply
tasted this love, so that this love of God worketh and hath his usages in
her soul, then the soul is wondrous light and gladsome. . . . Then is she
mistress and lady over the virtues, for she hath them all within herself. .
. . And then this soul taketh leave of virtues, as of the thraldom and
painful travail of them that she had before, and now she is lady and
sovereign, and they be subjects.” [444]

Jacopone da Todi speaks to the same effect:—


“La guerra è terminata

de le virtu battaglia,

de la mente travaglia

cosa nulla contende”. [445]

Thus, St. Catherine of Genoa, after a penitential period of four years,
during which she was haunted by a constant sense of sin, and occupied by
incessant mortifications, found that “all thought of such mortifications was
in an instant taken from her mind: in such a manner that, had she even
wished to continue such mortifications, she would have been unable to do so
. . . the sight of her sins was now taken from her mind, so that henceforth
she did not catch a glimpse of them: it was as though they had all been cast
into the depths of the sea.” [446] In other words, the new and higher centre
of consciousness, finally established, asserted itself and annihilated the
old. “La guerra e teminata,”all the energy of a strong nature flows freely
in the new channels; and mortification ceases, mechanically, to be possible
to the now unified, sublimated, or “regenerated” self.

Mortification takes its name from the reiterated statement of all ascetic
writers that the senses, or “body of desire,” with the cravings which are
excited by different aspects of the phenomenal world, must be mortified or
killed; which is, of course, a description of psychological necessities from
their special point of view. All those self-regarding instincts—so ingrained
that they have become automatic—which impel the self to choose the more
comfortable part, are seen by the awakened intuition of the embryo mystic as
gross infringements of the law of love. “This is the travail that a man
behoveth, to draw out his heart and his mind from the fleshly love and the
liking of all earthly creatures, from vain thoughts and from fleshly
imaginations, and out from the love and the vicious feeling of himself, that
his soul should find no rest in no fleshly thought, nor earthly
affection.” [447] The rule of Poverty must be applied to the temper of
normal consciousness as well as to the tastes and possessions of the self.
Under this tonic influence, real life will thrive, unreal life will wither
and die.

This mortifying process is necessary, not because the legitimate exercise of
the senses is opposed to Divine Reality, but because those senses have
usurped a place beyond their station; become the focus of energy, steadily
drained the vitality of the self. “The dogs have taken the children’s
meat.” The senses have grown stronger than their masters, monopolized the
field of perception, dominated an organism which was made for greater
activities, and built up those barriers of individuality which must be done
away if true personality is to be achieved, and with it some share in the
boundless life of the One. It is thanks to this wrong distribution of
energy, this sedulous feeding of the cuckoo in the nest, that “in order to
approach the Absolute, mystics must withdraw from everything, even
themselves.” [448] “The soul is plunged in utter ignorance, when she
supposes that she can attain to the high estate of union with God before she
casts away the desire of all things, natural and supernatural, which she may
possess,” says St. John of the Cross, “because the distance between them and
that which takes place in the state of pure transformation in God is
infinite.” [449] Again, “until the desires be lulled to sleep by the
mortification of sensuality, and sensuality itself be mortified in them, so
that it shall war against the spirit no more, the soul cannot go forth in
perfect liberty to union with the Beloved.” [450]

The death of selfhood in its narrow individualistic sense is, then, the
primary object of mortification. All the twisted elements of character which
foster the existence of this unreal yet complex creature are to be pruned
away. Then, as with the trees of the forest, so with the spirit of man,
strong new branches will spring into being, grow towards air and light. “I
live, yet not I” is to be the declaration of the mystic who has endured this
“bodily death.” The self-that-is-to-be will live upon a plane where her own
prejudices and preferences are so uninteresting as to be imperceptible. She
must be weaned from these nursery toys: and weaning is a disagreeable
process. The mystic, however, undertakes it as a rule without reluctance:
pushed by his vivid consciousness of imperfection, his intuition of a more
perfect state, necessary to the fulfilment of his love. Often his entrance
upon the torments of the Purgative Way, his taking up of the spiritual or
material instruments of mortification, resembles in ardour and abruptness
that “heroic plunge into Purgatory” of the newly dead when it perceives
itself in the light of Love Divine, which is described in the “Treatise” of
St. Catherine of Genoa as its nearest equivalent. “As she, plunged in the
divine furnace of purifying love, was united to the Object of her love, and
satisfied with all he wrought in her, so she understood it to be with the
souls in Purgatory.” [451]

This “divine furnace of purifying love” demands from the ardent soul a
complete self-surrender, and voluntary turning from all impurity, a humility
of the most far-reaching kind: and this means the deliberate embrace of
active suffering, a self-discipline in dreadful tasks. As gold in the
refiner’s fire, so “burning of love into a soul truly taken all vices
purgeth.” Detachment may be a counsel of prudence, a practical result of
seeing the true values of things; but the pain of mortification is seized as
a splendid opportunity, a love token, timidly offered by the awakened spirit
to that all-demanding Lover from Whom St. Catherine of Siena heard the
terrible words “I, Fire, the Acceptor of sacrifices, ravishing away from
them their darkness, give the light.” [452] “Suffering is the ancient law of
love,” says the Eternal Wisdom to Suso, “there is no quest without pain,
there is no lover who is not also a martyr. Hence it is inevitable that he
who would love so high a thing as Wisdom should sometimes suffer hindrances
and griefs.” [453]

The mystics have a profound conviction that Creation, Becoming,
Transcendence, is a painful process at the best. Those who are Christians
point to the Passion of Christ as a proof that the cosmic journey to
perfection, the path of the Eternal Wisdom, follows of necessity the Way of
the Cross. That law of the inner life, which sounds so fantastic and yet is
so bitterly true—“No progress without pain”—asserts itself. It declares that
birth pangs must be endured in the spiritual as well as in the material
world: that adequate training must always hurt the athlete. Hence the
mystics’ quest of the Absolute drives them to an eager and heroic union with
the reality of suffering, as well as with the reality of joy. [454]

This divine necessity of pain, this necessary sharing in the travail of a
World of Becoming, is beautifully described by Tauler in one of those
“internal conversations” between the contemplative soul and its God, which
abound in the works of the mystics and are familiar to all readers of “The
Imitation of Christ.” “A man once thought,” says Tauler, “that God drew some
men even by pleasant paths, while other were drawn by the path of pain. Our
Lord answered him thus, ‘What think ye can be pleasanter or nobler than to
be made most like unto Me? that is by suffering. Mark, to whom was ever
offered such a troubled life as to Me? And in whom can I better work in
accordance with My true nobility than in those who are most like Me? They
are the men who suffer. . . . Learn that My divine nature never worked so
nobly in human nature as by suffering; and because suffering is so
efficacious, it is sent out of great love. I understand the weakness of
human nature at all times, and out of love and righteousness I lay no
heavier load on man than he can bear. The crown must be firmly pressed down
that is to bud and blossom in the Eternal Presence of of My Heavenly Father.
He who desires to be wholly immersed in the fathomless sea of My Godhead
must also be deeply immersed in the deep sea of bitter sorrow. I am exalted
far above all things, and work supernatural and wonderful works in Myself:
the deeper and more supernaturally a man crushes himself beneath all things
the more supernaturally will he be drawn far above all things.’” [455]

Pain, therefore, the mystics always welcome and often court: sometimes in
the crudely physical form which Suso describes so vividly and horribly in
the sixteenth chapter of his Life, more frequently in those refinements of
torture which a sensitive spirit can extract from loneliness, injustice,
misunderstanding—above all, from deliberate contact with the repulsive
accidents of life. It would seem from a collation of the evidence that the
typical mystical temperament is by nature highly fastidious. Its passionate
apprehension of spiritual beauty, its intuitive perception of divine
harmony, is counterbalanced by an instinctive loathing of ugliness, a
shrinking from the disharmonies of squalor and disease. Often its ideal of
refinement is far beyond the contemporary standards of decency: a
circumstance which is alone enough to provide ample opportunity of
wretchedness. This extreme sensitiveness, which forms part of the normal
psychophysical make-up of the mystic, as it often does of the equally
highly-strung artistic type, is one of the first things to be seized upon by
the awakened self as a disciplinary instrument. Then humility’s axiom,
“Naught is too low for love” is forced to bear the less lovely gloss,
“Naught must be too disgusting.”

Two reasons at once appear for this. One is the contempt for phenomena,
nasty as well as nice—the longing to be free from all the fetters of
sense—which often goes with the passion for invisible things. Those mystics
to whom the attractions of earth are only illusion, are inconsistent if they
attribute a greater reality to the revolting and squalid incidents of life.
St. Francis did but carry his own principles to their logical conclusion,
when he insisted that the vermin were as much his brothers as the birds.
Real detachment means the death of preferences of all kinds: even of those
which seem to other men the very proofs of virtue and fine taste.

The second reason is nobler. It is bound up with that principle of
self-surrender which is the mainspring of the mystic life. To the
contemplative mind, which is keenly conscious of unity in multiplicity—of
Gods in the world—all disinterested service is service of the Absolute which
he loves: and the harder it is, the more opposed to his self-regarding and
aesthetic instincts, the more nearly it approaches his ideal. The point to
which he aspires—though he does not always know it—is that in which all
disharmony, all appearance of vileness, is resolved in the concrete reality
which he calls the Love of God. Then, he feels dimly, everything will be
seen under the aspect of a cosmic and charitable beauty; exhibiting through
the woof of corruption the web of eternal life.

It is told of St. Francis of Assisi, in whom the love of lovely things was
always paramount, how he forced himself to visit the lepers whose sight and
smell disgusted him: how he served them and even kissed them. [456] “Then as
he departed, in very truth that which had aforetime been bitter unto him, to
wit, the sight and touch of lepers, now changed into sweetness. For, as he
confessed, the sight of lepers had been so grievous unto him that he had
been minded to avoid not only seeing them, but even going nigh their
dwelling. And if at any time he chanced to pass their abodes, or to see
them, albeit he were moved by compassion to do them an alms through another
person, yet alway would he turn aside his face, stopping his nostrils with
his hand. But through the grace of God he became so intimate a friend of the
lepers that, even as he recorded in his will, he did sojourn with them and
did humbly serve them.”

Also, after his great renunciation of all property, he, once a prosperous
young man who had been “dainty in his father’s home,” accustomed himself to
take a bowl and beg scraps of food from door to door: and here too, as in
the case of the lepers, that which at first seemed revolting became to him
sweet. “And when he would have eaten that medley of various meats,” says the
legend, “at first he shrank back, for that he had never been used willingly
even to see, much less to eat, such scraps. At length, conquering himself,
he began to eat; and it seemed to him that in eating no rich syrup had he
ever tasted aught so delightsome.” [457]

The object, then, of this self-discipline is, like the object of all
purgation, freedom: freedom from the fetters of the senses, the “remora of
desire,” from the results of environment and worldly education, from pride
and prejudice, preferences and distaste: from selfhood in every form. Its
effect is a sharp reaction to the joy of self-conquest. The very act that
had once caused in the enchained self a movement of loathing becomes not
merely indifferent, but an occasion of happiness. So Margery Kempe “had
great mourning and sorrowing if she might not kiss a leper when she met them
in the way for the love of our Lord, which was all contrary to her
disposition in the years of her youth and prosperity, for then she abhorred
them most.” [458]

I spare the sensitive reader a detailed account of the loathsome ordeals by
which St. Catherine of Genoa and Madame Guyon strove to cure themselves of
squeamishness and acquire this liberty of spirit. [459] They, like St.
Francis, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and countless other seekers for the Real,
sought out and served with humility and love the sick and the unclean;
deliberately associated themselves with life in its meanest forms; compelled
themselves to contact with the most revolting substances; and mortified the
senses by the traditional ascetic expedient of deliberately opposing
all—even their most natural and harmless—inclinations. “In the first four
years after she received the sweet wound from her Lord,” says the Life of
St. Catherine of Genoa, she “made great penances: so that all her senses
were mortified. And first, so soon as she perceived that her nature desired
anything at once she deprived it thereof, and did so that it should receive
all those things that it abhorred. She wore harsh hair, ate no meat nor any
other thing that she liked; ate no fruit, neither fresh nor dried . . . and
she lived greatly submitted to all persons, and always sought to do all
those things which were contrary to her own will; in such a way that she was
always inclined to do more promptly the will of others than her own.” . . .
“And while she worked such and so many mortifications of all her senses it
was several times asked of her ‘Why do you do this?’ And she answered ‘I do
not know, but I feel myself drawn inwardly to do this . . . and I think it
is God’s will.’” [460]

St. Ignatius Loyola, in the world a highly bred Spanish gentleman of refined
personal habits, found in those habits an excellent opportunity of
mortification. “As he was somewhat nice about the arrangement of his hair,
as was the fashion of those days and became him not ill, he allowed it to
grow naturally, and neither combed it nor trimmed it nor wore any head
covering by day or night. For the same reason he did not pare his finger or
toe nails; for on these points he had been fastidious to an extreme.” [461]

Madame Guyon, a delicate girl of the leisured class, accustomed to the
ordinary comforts of her station, characteristically chose the most crude
and immoderate forms of mortification in her efforts towards the acquirement
of “indifference.” But the peculiar psychic constitution which afterwards
showed itself in the forms of automatism and clairvoyance, seems to have
produced a partial anesthesia. “Although I had a very delicate body, the
instruments of penitence tore my flesh without, as it seemed to me, causing
pain. I wore girdles of hair and of sharp iron, I often held wormwood in my
mouth.” “If I walked, I put stones in my shoes. These things, my God, Thou
didst first inspire me to do, in order that I might be deprived even of the
most innocent satisfactions.” [462]

In the earlier stages of their education, a constant agere contra, even in
apparently indifferent things, seems essential to the mystics; till the
point is reached at which the changes and chances of mortal life are
accepted with a true indifference and do not trouble the life of the soul.
This established ascendancy of the “interior man,” the transcendental
consciousness, over “sensitive nature”—the self in its reactions to the ups
and downs and manifold illusions of daily life—is the very object of
Purgation. It is, then, almost impossible that any mystic, whatever his
religion, character or race, should escape its battles: for none at the
beginning of their growth are in a position to dispense with its good
offices. Neoplatonists and Mahommedans, no less than the Christian ascetics,
are acquainted with the Purgative Way. All realize the first law of
Spiritual Alchemy, that you must tame the Green Lion before you give him
wings. Thus in ‘Attar’s allegory of the Valleys, the valley of
self-stripping and renunciation comes first. [463] So too Al Ghazzali, the
Persian contemplative, says of the period immediately following his
acceptance of the principles of Sufi ism and consequent renunciation of
property, “I went to Syria, where I remained more than two years; without
any other object than that of living in seclusion and solitude, conquering
my desires, struggling with my passions, striving to purify my soul, to
perfect my character, and to prepare my heart to meditate upon God.” At the
end of this period of pure purgation circumstances forced him to return to
the world; much to his regret, since he “had not yet attained to the perfect
ecstatic state, unless it were in one or two isolated moments.” [464]

Such gleams of ecstatic vision, distributed through the later stages of
purification, seem to be normal features of mystical development. Increasing
control of the lower centres, of the surface intelligence and its scattered
desires, permits the emergence of the transcendental perceptions. We have
seen that Fox in his early stages displayed just such an alternation between
the light and shade of the mystic way. [465] So too did that least ascetic
of visionaries, Jacob Boehme. “Finding within myself a powerful contrarium,
namely the desires that belong to the flesh and blood,” he says, “I began to
fight a hard battle against my corrupted nature, and with the aid of God I
made up my mind to overcome the inherited evil will, to break it, and to
enter wholly into the Love of God. . . . This, however, was not possible for
me to accomplish, but I stood firmly by my earnest resolution, and fought a
hard battle with myself. Now while I was wrestling and battling, being aided
by God, a wonderful light arose within my soul. It was a light entirely
foreign to my unruly nature, but in it I recognized the true nature of God
and man, and the relation existing between them, a thing which heretofore I
had never understood, and for which I would never have sought.” [466]

In these words Boehme bridges the gap between Purgation and Illumination:
showing these two states or ways as coexisting and complementary one to
another, the light and dark sides of a developing mystic consciousness. As a
fact, they do often exist side by side in the individual experience: [467]
and any treatment which exhibits them as sharply and completely separated
may be convenient for purposes of study, but becomes at best diagrammatic if
considered as a representation of the mystic life. The mystical
consciousness, as we have seen, belongs—from the psychological point of
view—to that mobile or “unstable” type in which the artistic temperament
also finds a place. It sways easily between the extremes of pleasure and
pain in its gropings after transcendental reality. It often attains for a
moment to heights in which it is not able to rest: is often flung from some
rapturous vision of the Perfect to the deeps of contrition and despair.

The mystics have a vivid metaphor by which to describe that alternation
between the onset and the absence of the joyous transcendental consciousness
which forms as it were the characteristic intermediate stage between the
bitter struggles of pure Purgation, and the peace and radiance of the
Illuminative Life. They call it Ludus Amoris , the “Game of Love” which God
plays with the desirous soul. It is the “game of chess,” says St. Teresa,
“in which game Humility is the Queen without whom none can checkmate the
Divine King.” [468] “Here,” says Martensen, “God plays a blest game with the
soul.” [469] The “Game of Love” is a reflection in consciousness of that
state of struggle, oscillation and unrest which precedes the first
unification of the self. It ceases when this has taken place and the new
level of reality has been attained. Thus St. Catherine of Siena, that
inspired psychologist, was told in ecstasy, “With the souls who have arrived
at perfection, I play no more the Game of Love, which consists in leaving
and returning again to the soul; though thou must understand that it is not,
properly speaking, I, the immovable GOD, Who thus elude them, but rather the
sentiment that My charity gives them of Me.” [470] In other terms, it is the
imperfectly developed spiritual perception which becomes tired and fails,
throwing the self back into the darkness and aridity whence it has emerged.
So we are told of Rulman Merswin [471] that after the period of harsh
physical mortification which succeeded his conversion came a year of
“delirious joy alternating with the most bitter physical and moral
sufferings.” It is, he says, “the Game of Love which the Lord plays with His
poor sinful creature.” Memories of all his old sins still drove him to
exaggerated penances: morbid temptations “made me so ill that I feared I
should lose my reason.” These psychic storms reacted upon the physical
organism. He had a paralytic seizure, lost the use of his lower limbs, and
believed himself to be at the point of death. When he was at his worst,
however, and all hope seemed at an end, an inward voice told him to rise
from his bed. He obeyed, and found himself cured. Ecstasies were frequent
during the whole of this period. In these moments of exaltation he felt his
mind to be irradiated by a new light, so that he knew, intuitively, the
direction which his life was bound to take, and recognized the inevitable
and salutary nature of his trials. “God showed Himself by turns harsh and
gentle: to each access of misery succeeded the rapture of supernatural
grace.” In this intermittent style, torn by these constant fluctuations
between depression and delight, did Merswin, in whom the psychic instability
of the artistic and mystic types is present in excess, pass through the
purgative and illuminated states. [472] They appear to have coexisted in his
consciousness, first one and then the other emerging and taking control.
Hence he did not attain the peaceful condition which is characteristic of
full illumination, and normally closes the “First Mystic Life”; but passed
direct from these violent alternations of mystical pleasure and mystical
pain to the state which he calls “the school of suffering love.” This, as we
shall see when we come to its consideration, is strictly analogous to that
which other mystics have called the “Dark Night of the Soul,” and opens the
“Second Mystic Life” or Unitive Way.

Such prolonged coexistence of alternating pain and pleasure states in the
developing soul, such delay in the attainment of equilibrium, is not
infrequent, and must be taken into account in all analyses of the mystic
type. Though it is convenient for purposes of study to practise a certain
dissection, and treat as separate states which are, in the living subject,
closely intertwined, we should constantly remind ourselves that such a
proceeding is artificial. The struggle of the self to disentangle itself
from illusion and attain the Absolute is a life-struggle. Hence, it will and
must exhibit the freedom and originality of life: will, as a process, obey
artistic rather than scientific laws. It will sway now to the light and now
to the shade of experience: its oscillations will sometimes be great,
sometimes small. Mood and environment, inspiration and information, will all
play their part.

There are in this struggle three factors.

(1) The unchanging light of Eternal Reality: that Pure Being “which ever
shines and nought shall ever dim.”

(2) The web of illusion, here thick, there thin; which hems in, confuses,
and allures the sentient self.

(3) That self, always changing, moving, struggling—always, in fact,
becoming— alive in every fibre, related at once to the unreal and to the
real; and, with its growth in true being, ever more conscious of the
contrast between them.

In the ever-shifting relations between these three factors, the consequent
energy engendered, the work done, we may find a cause of the innumerable
forms of stress and travail which are called in their objective form the
Purgative Way. One only of the three is constant: the Absolute to which the
soul aspires. Though all else may fluctuate, that goal is changeless. That
Beauty so old and so new, “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of
turning,” which is the One of Plotinus, the All of Eckhart and St. John of
the Cross, the Eternal Wisdom of Suso, the Unplumbed Abyss of Ruysbroeck,
the Pure Love of St. Catherine of Genoa, awaits yesterday, to-day, and for
ever the opening of Its creature’s eyes.

In the moment of conversion those eyes were opened for an instant: obtained,
as it were, a dazzling and unforgettable glimpse of the Uncreated Light.
They must learn to stay open: to look steadfastly into the eyes of Love: so
that, in the beautiful imagery of the mystics, the “faithful servant” may
become the “secret friend.” [473] Then it is, says Boehme, that “the divine
glimpse and beam of joy ariseth in the soul, being a new eye, in which the
dark, fiery soul conceiveth the Ens and Essence of the divine light.” [474]
So hard an art is not at once acquired in its perfection. It is in
accordance with all that we know of the conditions of development that a
partial achievement should come first; bewildering moments of lucidity,
splendid glimpses, whose brevity is due to the weakness of the newly opened
and unpractised “eye which looks upon Eternity,” the yet undisciplined
strength of the “eye which looks upon Time.” Such is that play of light and
dark, of exaltation and contrition, which often bridges the gap between the
Purgative and the Illuminative states. Each by turn takes the field and
ousts the other; for “these two eyes of the soul of man cannot both perform
their work at once.” [475]

To use another and more domestic metaphor, that Divine Child which was, in
the hour of the mystic conversion, born in the spark of the soul, must learn
like other children to walk. Though it is true that the spiritual self must
never lose its sense of utter dependence on the Invisible; yet within that
supporting atmosphere, and fed by its gifts, it must “find its feet.” Each
effort to stand brings first a glorious sense of growth, and then a fall:
each fall means another struggle to obtain the difficult balance which comes
when infancy is past. There are many eager trials, many hopes, many
disappointments. At last, as it seems suddenly, the moment comes: tottering
is over, the muscles have learnt their lesson, they adjust themselves
automatically, and the new self suddenly finds itself—it knows not
how—standing upright and secure. That is the moment which marks the boundary
between the purgative and the illuminative states.

The process of this passage of the “new” or spiritual man from his awakening
to the illuminated life, has been set out by Jacob Boehme in language which
is at once poetic and precise. “When Christ the Corner-Stone [ i.e. , the
divine principle latent in man] stirreth himself in the extinguished Image
of Man in his hearty Conversion and Repentance,” he says, “then Virgin
Sophia appeareth in the stirring of the Spirit of Christ in the extinguished
Image, in her Virgin’s attire before the Soul; at which the Soul is so
amazed and astonished in its Uncleanness that all its Sins immediately awake
in it, and it trembleth before her; for then the judgment passeth upon the
Sins of the Soul, so that it even goeth back in its unworthiness, being
ashamed in the Presence of its fair Love, and entereth into itself, feeling
and acknowledging itself utterly unworthy to receive such a Jewel. This is
understood by those who are of our tribe and have tasted of this heavenly
Gift, and by none else. But the noble Sophia draweth near in the Essence of
the Soul, and kisseth it in friendly Manner, and tinctureth its dark Fire
with her Rays of Love, and shineth through it with her bright and powerful
Influence. Penetrated with the strong Sense and Feeling of which, the Soul
skippeth in its Body for great Joy, and in the strength of this Virgin Love
exulteth, and praiseth the great God for his blest Gift of Grace. I will set
down here a short description how it is when the Bride thus embraceth the
Bridegroom, for the consideration of the Reader, who perhaps hath not yet
been in this wedding chamber. It may be he will be desirous to follow us,
and to enter into the Inner Choir, where the Soul joineth hands and danceth
with Sophia, or the Divine Wisdom.” [476]
_________________________________________________________________

[392] “The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” “Magna Moralia,” xxii.

[393] “The Scale of Perfection,” bk. ii. cap. xxxvii.

[394] Dialogo, cap. iv.

[395] “Ignitum cum Deo Soliloquium.” cap. xi.

[396] Richard Rolle, “The Mending of Life,” cap. i.

[397] Ibid ., “The Fire of Love,” bk. i. cap, xxiii.

[398] “Buchlein von der ewigen Weisheit,” cap. v.

[399] Jundt, “Rulman Merswin,” p. 19.

[400] Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. lvi.

[401] I offer no opinion upon the question of authorship. Those interested
may consult Von Hügel, “The Mystical Element of Religion,” vol. i.,
Appendix. Whoever may be responsible for its present form, the Treatise is
clearly founded upon first-hand mystic experience: which is all that our
present purpose requires.

[402] “Trattato di Purgatorio,” caps. ii. and iii.

[403] Purg. ii., 60.

[404] “Subida del Monte Carmelo I. i. cap. xiv.

[405] “De Imitatione Christi,” I. iii. cap. i.

[406] “Theologia Germanica,” cap. xiv.

[407] Meister Eckhart, quoted by Wackernagel, “Altdeutsches Lesebuch,” p.
891.

[408] “Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit.” pt. vi., cap. 4.

[409] St. John of the Cross, “Subida del Monte Carmelo,” bk. i. cap. xiii.

[410] “Theologia Germanica,” cap. v.

[411] Ennead vi. 9.

[412] “Oh Poverty, high wisdom! to be subject to nothing, and by despising
all to possess all created things. . . . God will not lodge in a narrow
heart; and it is as great as thy love. Poverty has so ample a bosom that
Deity Itself may lodge therein. . . . Poverty is naught to have, and nothing
to desire: but all things to possess in the spirit of liberty.”— Jacopone da
Todi. Lauda lix.

[413] “Fioretti,” cap. xvi., and “Speculum,” cap. cxx.

[414] Ibid ., cap. xiii. (Arnold’s translation).

[415] Pfeiffer, Tractato x. (Eng. translation., p, 348).

[416] “Sacrum Commercium Beati Francisci cum Domina Paupertate,” caps. iv.
and v. (Rawnsley’s translation).

[417] Op. cit ., cap. xxii.

[418] So Ruysbroeck, “Freewill is the king of the soul . . . he should dwell
in the chief city of that kingdom: that is to say, the desirous power of the
soul” (“De Ornatu Spiritalium Nuptiarum,” I. i. cap. xxiv.).

[419] Meister Eckhart. Quoted in Martensen’s monograph, p. 107.

[420] Schmölders, “Essai sur les Écoles Philosophiques chez les Arabes,” p.
54.

[421] Schmölders, “Essai sur les Écoles Philosophiques chez les Arabes,” op.
cit., p. 58.

[422] Richard Rolle, “The Mending of Life,” cap. iii.

[423] “Ignitum cum Deo Soliloquium,” cap. i.

[424] “Subida del Monte Carmelo,” I. i. cap. iii.

[425] Gerlac Petersen, op. cit., cap. xi.

[426] St. John of the Cross, op. cit ., cap. xi.

[427] Richard Rolle, “The Fire of Love,” bk. i. cap. xix.

[428] Thomas of Celano, Legenda Prima, cap. vi.

[429] “An Apology for Mrs. Antoinette Bourignan,” pp. 269-70.

[430] St. Teresa’s mystic states are particularly difficult to classify.
From one point of view these struggles might be regarded as the
preliminaries of conversion. She was, however, proficient in contemplation
when they occurred, and I therefore think that my arrangement is the right
one.

[431] Quoted by G. Cunninghame Graham, “Santa Teresa,” vol. i. p. 139. For
St. Teresa’s own account, see Vida, caps. vii-ix.

[432] Sermon on St. Paul (“The Inner Way,” p. 113).

[433] Cotter Morison, “Life and Times of St. Bernard,” p. 68.

[434] Thomas of Celano, Legenda Prima, cap. xxix.

[435] Ibid ., Legenda Secunda, cap. cxxiv.

[436] Anne Macdonell, “St. Douceline,” p. 30.

[437] Vida, cap. ix., p. 6.

[438] “In that time and by God’s will there died my mother, who was a great
hindrance unto me in following the way of God: soon after my husband died
likewise, and also all my children. And because I had commenced to follow
the Aforesaid Way, and had prayed God that He would rid me of them, I had
great consolation of their deaths. (Ste Angèle de Foligno: “Le Livre de
l’Expérience des Vrais Fidèles.” Ed. M. J. Ferry p. 10.)

[439] “De Imitatione Christi,” I. i. caps. iii. and ix.

[440] Tauler, Sermon on St. Paul (“The Inner Way,” p. 114).

[441] Tauler, Second Sermon for Easter Day. (This is not included in either
of the English collections.)

[442] Augustine Baker, “Holy Wisdom,” Treatise ii. Sect. i., cap. 3.

[443] Suso, Leben. cap. xvii.

[444] “The Mirror of Simple Souls,” edited by Clare Kirchberger, p. 12.

[445] “The war is at an end: in the battle of virtues, in travail of mind,
there is no more striving” (Lauda xci.).

[446] “Vita e Dottrina,” cap. v.

[447] Walter Hilton “The Scale of Perfection,” bk. i. cap. 8, xlii.

[448] Récéjac, “Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique,” p. 78. This,
however, is to be understood of the initial training of the mystic; not of
his final state.

[449] “Subida del Monte Carmelo,” I. i. cap. v.

[450] Op. cit., bk. i. cap. xv.

[451] S. Caterina di Genova, “Trattato di Purgatorio,” cap. i.

[452] Dialogo, cap. lxxxv.

[453] Leben, cap. iv.

[454] “This truth, of which she was the living example,” says Huysmans of
St. Lydwine, “has been and will be true for every period. Since the death of
Lydwine, there is not a saint who has not confirmed it. Hear them formulate
their desires. Always to suffer, and to die! cries St. Teresa; always to
suffer, yet not to die, corrects St. Magdalena dei Pazzi; yet more, oh Lord,
yet more! exclaims St. Francis Xavier, dying in anguish on the coast of
China; I wish to be broken with suffering in order that I may prove my love
to God, declares a seventeenth century Carmelite, the Ven. Mary of the
Trinity. The desire for suffering is itself an agony, adds a great servant
of God of our own day, Mother Mary Du Bourg; and she confided to her
daughters in religion that ‘if they sold pain in the market she would hurry
to buy it there.’” (J. K. Huysmans, “Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam,” 3rd
edition, p. 225).Examples can be multiplied indefinitely from the lives and
works of the mystics of all periods.

[455] Tauler, Sermon on St. Paul (“The Inner Way,” p. 114).

[456] Thomas of Celano, Legenda Prima, cap. vii.; 3 Soc. cap. iv.

[457] 3 Soc. cap. vii.

[458] “A Short Treatise of Contemplation taken out of the boke of Margery
Kempe ancresse of Lynne.” London, 1521. Reprinted and ed. by F. Gardner in
“The Cell of Self-Knowledge,” 1910, p. 49.

[459] The curious are referred to the original authorities. For St.
Catherine chapter viii. of the “Vita e Dottrina”: for Madame Guyon, Vie, pt.
i. ch. x.

[460] “Vita e Dottrina,” cap. v.

[461] Testament, cap. ii. (Rix’s translation).

[462] Vie, pt. i. cap. x.

[463] Supra , p. 131.

[464] Schmölders, “Essay sur les Écoles Philosophiques chez les Arabes,” p.
59.

[465] Supra , p. 177.

[466] Hartmann, “Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme,” p. 50.

[467] Compare the case of St. Teresa already cited, supra , p. 213.

[468] “Camino de Perfeccion,” cap. xvii.

[469] Martensen, “Meister Eckhart,” p. 75.

[470] Dialogo, cap. lxxviii.

[471] Jundt, “Rulman Merswin,” pp. 10 and 20.

[472] We recognize here the chief symptoms of the “cyclic type” of
mentality, with its well-marked alternations of depression and exaltation.
This psychological type is found frequently, but not invariably, among the
mystics: and its peculiarities must be taken into account when studying
their experiences. For a technical description, see W. McDougall: “An
Introduction to Abnormal Psychology,” caps. xxii and xxviii.

[473] See Ruysbroeck, “De Calculo,” cap. vii. The metaphor is an ancient one
and occurs in many patristic and mediaeval writers.

[474] “The Epistles of Jacob Boehme,” p. 19.

[475] “Theologia Germanica,” cap. vii.

[476] Jacob Boehme, “The Way to Christ,” pt. i. p. 23 (vol. iv. of the
complete English translation of B