I
The revival of mysticism which has been one of the noteworthy features in the Christianity of our time has presented us with a number of interesting and important questions. We want to know, first of all, what mysticism really is. Secondly, we want to know whether it is a normal or abnormal experience. And omitting many other questions which must wait their turn, we want to know whether mystical experiences actually enlarge our sphere of knowledge, i.e., whether they are trustworthy sources of authentic information and authoritative truth concerning realities which lie beyond the range of human senses.
The answer to the first question appears to be as difficult to accomplish as the return of Ulysses was. The secret is kept in book after book. One can marshall a formidable array of definitions, but they oppose and challenge one another, like the men sprung from the dragon’s teeth. For the purposes of the present consideration we can eliminate what is usually included under psychical phenomena, that is, the phenomena of dreams, visions and trances, hysteria and dissociation and esoteric and occult phenomena. Thirty years ago Professor Royce said: “In the Father’s house are many mansions, and their furniture is extremely manifold. Astral bodies and palmistry, trances and mental healing, communications from the dead and ‘phantasms of the living’—such things are for some people to-day the sole quite unmistakable evidences of the supremacy of the spiritual world.” These phenomena are worthy of careful painstaking study and attention, for they will eventually throw much light upon the deep and complex nature of human personality, are in fact already throwing much light upon it. But they furnish us slender data for understanding what is properly meant by mystical experience and its religious and spiritual bearing.
We can, too, leave on one side the metaphysical doctrines which fill a large amount of space in the books of the great mystics. These doctrines had a long historical development and they would have taken essentially the same form if the exponents of them had not been mystics. Mystical experience is confined to no one form of philosophy, though some ways of thinking no doubt favor and other ways retard the experience, as they also often do in the case of religious faith in general. Mystical experience, furthermore, must not be confused with what technical expert writers call “the mystic way.” There are as many mystical “ways” as there are gates to the New Jerusalem: “On the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates.” One might as well try to describe the way of making love, or the way of appreciating the grand canyon as to describe the way to the discovery of God, as though there were only one way.
I am not interested in mysticism as an ism. It turns out in most accounts to be a dry and abstract thing, hardly more like the warm and intimate experience than the color of a map is like the country for which it stands. “Canada is very pink,” seems quite an inadequate description of the noble country north of our border. It is mystical experience and not mysticism that is worthy of our study. We are concerned with the experience itself, not with second-hand formulations of it. “The mystic,” says Professor Royce, “is a thorough-going empiricist;” “God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience,” says Professor Pringle-Pattison. If it is an experience we want to find out what happens to the mystic himself inside where he lives. According to those who have been there the experience which we call mystical is charged with the conviction of real, direct contact and commerce with God. It is the almost universal testimony of those who are mystics that they find God through their experience. John Tauler says that in his best moments of “devout prayer and the uplifting of the mind to God,” he experiences “the pure presence of God in his own soul,” but he adds that all he can tell others about the experience is “as poor and unlike it as the point of a needle is to the heavens above us.” “I have met with my God; I have met with my Savior. I have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under His wings,” says Isaac Penington in the joy of his first mystical experience. Without needlessly multiplying such testimonies for data, we can say with considerable assurance that mystical experience is consciousness of direct and immediate relationship with some transcendent reality which in the moment of experience is believed to be God. “This is He, this is He,” exclaims Isaac Penington, “there is no other: This is He whom I have waited for and sought after from my childhood.” Angela of Foligno says that she experienced God, and saw that the whole world was full of God.