II
There are many different degrees of intensity, concentration and conviction in the experiences of different individual mystics, and also in the various experiences of the same individual from time to time. There has been a tendency in most studies of mysticism to regard the state of ecstasy as par excellence mystical experience. That is, however, a grave mistake. The calmer, more meditative, less emotional, less ecstatic experiences of God are not less convincing and possess greater constructive value for life and character than do ecstatic experiences which presuppose a peculiar psychical frame and disposition. The seasoned Quaker in the corporate hush and stillness of a silent meeting is far removed from ecstasy, but he is not the less convinced that he is meeting with God. For the essentia of mysticism we do not need to insist upon a certain “sacred” mystic way nor upon ecstasy, nor upon any peculiar type of rare psychic upheavals. We do need to insist, however, upon a consciousness of commerce with God amounting to conviction of his presence.
“Where one heard noise
And one saw flame,
I only knew He named my name.”
Jacob Boehme calls the experience which came to him, “breaking through the gate,” into “a new birth or resurrection from the dead,” so that, he says, “I knew God.” “I am certain,” says Eckhart, “as certain as that I live, that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself.” One of these experiences—the first one—was an ecstasy, and the other, so far as we can tell, was not. It was the flooding in of a moment of God-consciousness in the act of preaching a sermon to the common people of Cologne. The experience of Penington, again, was not an ecstasy; it was the vital surge of fresh life on the first occasion of hearing George Fox preach after a long period of waiting silence. A simple normal case of a mild type is given in a little book of recent date, reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly: “After a long time of jangling conflict and inner misery, I one day, quite quietly and with no conscious effort, stopped doing the dis-ingenuous thing [I had been doing]. Then the marvel happened. It was as if a great rubber band which had been stretched almost to the breaking point were suddenly released and snapped back to its normal condition. Heaven and earth were changed for me. Everything was glorious because of its relation to some great central life—nothing seemed to matter but that life.” Brother Lawrence, a barefooted lay-brother of the seventeenth century, according to the testimony of the brotherhood, attained “an unbroken and undisturbed sense of the Presence of God.” He was not an ecstatic; he was a quiet, faithful man who did his ordinary daily tasks with what seemed to his friends “an unclouded vision, an illuminated love and an uninterrupted joy.” Simple and humble though he was, he nevertheless acquired, through his experience of God, “an extraordinary spaciousness of mind.”
The more normal, expansive mystical experiences come apparently when the personal self is at its best. Its powers and capacities are raised to an unusual unity and fused together. The whole being, with its accumulated submerged life, finds itself. The process of preparing for any high achievement is a severe and laborious one, but nothing seems easier in the moment of success than is the accomplishment for which the life has been prepared. There comes to be formed within the person what Aristotle called “a dexterity of soul,” so that the person does with ease what he has become skilled to do. Clement of Alexandria called a fully organized and spiritualized person “a harmonized man,” that is, adjusted, organized and ready to be a transmissive organ for the revelation of God. Brother Lawrence, who was thus “harmonized,” finely says, “The most excellent method which I found of going to God was that of doing my common business, purely for the love of God.” An earlier mystic of the fourteenth century stated the same principle in these words: “It is my aim to be to the Eternal God what a man’s hand is to a man.”
There are many human experiences which carry a man up to levels where he has not usually been before and where he finds himself possessed of insight and energies he had hardly suspected were his until that moment. One leaps to his full height when the right inner spring is reached. We are quite familiar with the way in which instinctive tendencies in us and emotions both egoistic and social, become organized under a group of ideas and ideals into a single system which we call a sentiment, such as love, or patriotism, or devotion to truth. It forms slowly and one hardly realizes that it has formed until some occasion unexpectedly brings it into full operation, and we find ourselves able with perfect ease to overcome the most powerful inhibitory and opposing instincts and habits, which, until then, had usually controlled us. We are familiar, too, with the way in which a well-trained and disciplined mind, confronted by a concrete situation, will sometimes—alas not always—in a sudden flash of imaginative insight, discover a universal law revealed there and then in the single phenomenon, as Sir Isaac Newton did and as, in a no less striking way, Sir William Rowan Hamilton did in his discovery of Quaternions. Literary and artistic geniuses supply us with many instances in which, in a sudden flash, the crude material at hand is shot through with vision, and the complicated plot of a drama, the full significance of a character, or the complete glory of a statue stands revealed, as though, to use R. L. Stevenson’s illustration, a genie had brought it on a golden tray as a gift from another world. Abraham Lincoln, striking off in a few intense minutes his Gettysburg address, as beautiful in style and perfect in form as anything in human literature, is as good an illustration as we need of the way in which a highly organized person, by a kindling flash, has at his hand all the moral and spiritual gains of a life time.
There is a famous account of the flash of inspiration given by Philo, which can hardly be improved. It is as follows: “I am not ashamed to recount my own experience. At times, when I have proposed to enter upon my wonted task of writing on philosophical doctrines, with an exact knowledge of the materials which were to be put together, I have had to leave off without any work accomplished, finding my mind barren and fruitless, and upbraiding it for its self-complacency, while startled at the might of the Existent One, in whose power it lies to open and close the wombs of the soul. But at other times, when I had come empty, all of a sudden I have been filled with thoughts, showered down and sown upon me unseen from above, so that by Divine possession I have fallen into a rapture and become ignorant of everything, the place, those present, myself, what was spoken or written. For I have received a stream of interpretation, a fruition of light, the most clear-cut sharpness of vision, the most vividly distinct view of the matter before me, such as might be received through the eyes from the most luminous presentation.”
The most important mystical experiences are something like that. They occur usually not at the beginning of the religious life but rather in the ripe and developed stage of it. They are the fruit of long-maturing processes. Clement’s “the harmonized man” is always a person who has brought his soul into parallelism with divine currents, has habitually practiced his religious insights and has finally formed a unified central self, subtly sensitive, acutely responsive to the Beyond within him. In such experiences which may come suddenly or may come as a more gradual process, the whole self operates and masses all the cumulations of a lifetime. They are no more emotional than they are rational and volitional. We have a total personality, awake, active, and “aware of his life’s flow.” Instead of seeing in a flash a law of gravitation, or the plot and character of Hamlet, or the uncarven form of Moses the Law-giver in a block of marble, one sees at such times the moral demonstrations of a lifetime and vividly feels the implications that are essentially involved in a spiritual life. In the high moment God is seen to be as sure as the soul is.
“I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
But the night’s black was burst through by a blaze—
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow.”
To some the truth of God never comes closer than a logical conclusion. He is held to be as a living item in a creed. To the mystic he becomes real in the same sense that experienced beauty is real, or the feel of spring is real, or that summer sunlight is real—he has been found, he has been met, he is present.
Before discussing the crucial question whether these experiences are evidential and are worthy of consideration as an addition to the world’s stock of truth and knowledge I must say a few words about the normality or abnormality of them. Nothing of any value can be said on this point of mystical experience in the abstract. One must first catch his concrete case. Some instances are normal and some are undoubtedly abnormal. Trance, ecstasy and rapture are unusual experiences and in that sense not normal occurrences. They usually indicate, furthermore, a pathological condition of personality and are thus abnormal in the more technical sense. There is, however, something more to be said on this point. It seems pretty well established that some persons—and they have often been creative leaders and religious geniuses—have succeeded in organizing their lives, in finding their trail, in charging their whole personality with power, in attaining a moral dynamic and in tapping vast reservoirs of energy by means of states which, if occurring in other persons, would no doubt be called pathological. The real test here is a pragmatic one. It seems hardly sound to call a state abnormal if it has raised the experiencer, as a mystic experience often does, into a hundred horse-power man and through his influence has turned multitudes of other men and women into more joyous, hopeful and efficient persons. This question of abnormality and reality is thus not one to be settled off-hand by a superficial diagnosis.
An experience which brings spaciousness of mind, new interior dimensions, ability to stand the universe—and the people in it—and capacity to work at human tasks with patience, endurance and wisdom may quite intelligently be called normal, though to an external beholder it may look like what he usually calls a trance of hysteria, a state of dissociation, or hypnosis by auto-suggestion. It should be added, however, as I have already said, that mystical experience is not confined to these extremer types. They may or may not be pathological. The calmer and more restrained stages of mysticism are more important and significant and are no more marked with the stigma of hysteria than is love-making, enjoyment of music, devotion to altruistic causes, risking one’s life for country, or any lofty experience of value.