IV
But granting that it is truth-telling and has objective reference, is the mystic justified in claiming that he has found and knows God? One does not need to be a very wide and extensive student of mystical experience to discover what a meager stock of knowledge the genuine mystic reports. William James’ remarkable experience in the Adirondack woods very well illustrates the type. It had, he says, “an intense significance of some sort, if one could only tell the significance.... In point of fact, I can’t find a single word for all that significance and don’t know what it was significant of, so that it remains a mere boulder of impression.”[7] At a later date James refers to that “extraordinary vivacity of man’s psychological commerce with something Ideal that feels as if it were also actual.”[8] The greatest of all the fourteenth century mystics, Meister Eckhart, could not put his impression into words or ideas. What he found was a “wilderness of the Godhead where no one is at home,” i.e., an Object with no particular differentiated, concrete characteristics. It was not an accident that so many of the mystics hit upon the via negativa, the way of negation, or that they called their discovery “the divine Dark.”
“Whatever your mind comes at
I tell you flat
God is not that.”
Mystical experience does not supply concrete information. It does not bring new finite facts, new items that can be used in a description of “the scenery and circumstance” of the realm beyond our sense horizons. It is the awareness of a Presence, the consciousness of a Beyond, the discovery, as James puts it, that “we are continuous with a More of the same quality, which is operative in us and in touch with us.”
The most striking effect of such experience is not new fact-knowledge, not new items of empirical information, but new moral energy, heightened conviction, increased caloric quality, enlarged spiritual vision, an unusual radiant power of life. In short, the whole personality, in the case of the constructive mystics, appears to be raised to a new level of life and to have gained from somewhere many calories of life-feeding, spiritual substance. We are quite familiar with the way in which adrenalin suddenly flushes into the physical system and adds a new and incalculable power to brain and muscle. Under its stimulus a man can carry out a piano when the house is on fire. May not, perhaps, some energy from some Source with which our spirits are allied flush our inner being with forces and powers by which we can be fortified to stand the universe and more than stand it! “We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us,” is the way one of the world’s greatest mystics felt.
Mystical experience—and we must remember as Santayana has said, that “experience is like a shrapnel shell and bursts into a thousand meanings”—does at least one thing. It makes God sure to the person who has had the experience. It raises faith and conviction to the nth power. “The God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shined into my heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God,” is St. Paul’s testimony. “I knew God by revelation,” declares George Fox. “I was as one who hath the key and doth open.” “The man who has attained this felicity,” Plotinus says, “meets some turn of fortune that he would not have chosen, but there is not the slightest lessening of his happiness for that” (En. I: iv. 7). But this experience, with its overwhelming conviction and its dynamic effect, can not be put into the common coin of speech. Frederic Myers has well expressed the difficulty:
“Oh could I tell ye surely would believe it!
Oh could I only say what I have seen!
How should I tell or how can ye receive it,
How, till He bringeth you where I have been?”
There is no concrete “information” which can be shared with others.
When Columbus found San Salvador he was able to describe it to those who did not sail with him in the Santa Maria, but when the mystic finds God he can not give us any “knowledge” in plain words of everyday speech. He can only refer to his boulder, or his Gibraltar, of impression That situation is what we should expect. We can not, either, describe any of our great emotions. We can not impart what flushes into our consciousness in moments of lofty intuition. We have a submerged life within us which is certainly no less real than our hand or foot. It influences all that we do or say, but we do not find it easy to utter it. In the presence of the sublime we have nothing to say—or if we do say anything it is a great mistake! Language is forged to deal with experiences which are common to many persons, i.e., to experiences which refer to objects in space. We have no vocabulary for the subtle, elusive flashes of vision which are unique, individual and unsharable, as for instance is our personal sense of “the tender grace of a day that is dead.” We are forced in all these matters to resort to symbolic suggestion and to artistic devices. Coventry Patmore said with much insight:
“In divinity and love
What’s best worth saying can’t be said.”
I believe that mystical experiences do in the long run expand our knowledge of God and do succeed in verifying themselves. Mysticism is a sort of spiritual protoplasm that underlies, as a basic substance, much that is best in religion, in ethics and in life itself. It has generally been the mystic, the prophet, the seer that has spotted out new ways forward in the jungle of our world, or lifted our race to new spiritual levels. Their experiences have in some way equipped them for unusual tasks, have given supplies of energy to them which their neighbors did not have, and have apparently brought them into vital correspondence with dimensions and regions of reality that others miss. The proof that they have found God, or at least a domain of spiritual reality, does not lie in some new stock of knowledge, not in some gnostic secret, which they bring back; it is to be seen rather in the moral and spiritual fruits which test out and verify the experience.
Consciousness of beauty or of truth or of goodness baffles analysis as much as consciousness of God does. These values have no objective standing ground in current psychology. They are not things in the world of space. They submit to no adequate casual explanation. They have their ground of being in some other kind of world than that of the mechanical order, a world composed of quantitative masses of matter in motion. These experiences of value, which are as real for consciousness as stone walls are, make very clear the fact that there are depths and capacities in the nature of the normal human mind which we do not usually recognize and of which we have scant and imperfect accounts in our text-books. Our minds taken in their full range, in other words, have some sort of contact and relationship with an eternal nature of things far deeper than atoms and molecules. Only very slowly and gradually has the race learned through finite symbols and temporal forms to interpret beauty and truth and goodness which in their essence are as ineffable and indescribable as the mystic’s experience of God is. Plato often speaks as though he had high moments of experience when he rose to the naked vision of beauty—beauty “alone, separate and eternal,” as he says, and his myths are very likely told, as J. A. Stewart believes, to assist others to experience this same vision—a beauty which “does not grow nor perish, is without increase or diminution and endures for everlasting.” But as a matter of fact, however exalted heavenly and enduring beauty may be in its essence we know what it is only as it appears in fair forms of objects, of body, of soul, of actions; in harmonious blending of sounds or colors; in well-ordered or happily-combined groupings of many aspects in one unity which is as it ought to be. Truth and moral goodness always transcend our attainments and we sometimes feel that the very end and goal of life is the pursuit of that truth or that goodness which eye hath not seen nor ear heard. But whatever truth we do attain or whatever goodness we do achieve is always concrete. Truth is just this one more added fact that resists all attempts to doubt it. Goodness is just this simple everyday deed that reveals a heroic spirit and a brave venture of faith in the midst of difficulties. So, too, the mystic knowledge of God is not some esoteric communication, supplied through trance or ecstasy; it is an intuitive personal touch with God, felt to be the essentially real, the bursting forth of an intense love for him which heightens all the capacities and activities of life, followed by the slow laboratory results which verify it. “All I could never be” now is. It seems possible to stand the universe—even to do something toward the transformation of it. The bans are read for that most difficult of all marriages, the marriage of the possible with the actual, the ideal with the real. And if the experience does not prove that the soul has found God, it at least does this: it makes the soul feel that proofs of God are wholly unnecessary.