Mysticism allures different men by different methods. It draws by various lines the passionate heart, the broken and humbled will, the heated fancy, the indignant spirit wroth at the hardness and evil of the world. It draws no less the reasoning and metaphysical mind, repelled by dogma and yet desirous of the Deity. For Mysticism is not only an affair of dreams, of miracles, and visions, it is not only a satisfaction to disordered imaginations, to diseased and stunted passions; it includes a system of philosophy so logical that who accepts the first easy thesis arrives without negation or amazement at the last. The Mystics have, in fact, made a science of the soul, an elaborate system of abstractions, quite logical in itself, although in contradiction to the truths of physical nature. No one, indeed, is readier to admit this contradiction than the Mystic himself, for the soul, he says, is exactly the contrary of the body. It is therefore natural that as bodily life rises in the scale from simple to complex, so the soul’s existence should be purest when least differentiate. For the soul and the body meet on one level for a moment, but they come from different positions. The human body is the highest evolution of the animate world; the human soul, the Mystics assure us, is the lowest and last descent of Infinite Being. In fact, the soul of man is to Divinity in the same relation as the zoophyte is to us. Only, unfortunately for the simile, in this strange supernatural cosmos the zoophyte is higher than the man. Let us rather say that man, having progressed from the zoophyte to humanity in body, must now in soul ascend from the man to the zoophyte. For the soul, we must remember, is divinest when most simple. It is the last descent of God, and God (the Mystics say) is absolute unity and simplicity. “God,” says Meister Eckhart, “is the simplest essence of existence; and who, thinking of God, sees any distinction from utter simplicity, be sure he seeth not God.”
II.
“But how” (we can imagine one of Eckhart’s audience exclaiming), “how can the absolutely simple be the manifold? God, you say, is the Simple and the One; and yet you say that every soul descends from God. If God is absolutely simple and single, He cannot divide Himself into many souls.” Eckhart here, we may be sure, would smile and praise the discretion of his assailant; for this objection brings us to the central theory of Speculative Mysticism, the dearest dogma of Plotinus, of Dionysius, of Scotus Erigena, as of Master Eckhart.
Spirit is everywhere one. Spirit is in the Godhead and indivisible. The Godhead exists, our Mystics tell us, above and beyond all Divine theophanies; the Godhead exists as a vast and unfathomable ocean, rolling its seas of emptiness and silence from pole to pole. But everywhere the ocean is bordered by the land; and its waters, in the circle of their tides, wash over a hundred shores, and fill a thousand bays and creeks and little rocky pools. Even as the deep sea sends its shallower waters over the sands, and then withdraws them into its eternal and unfathomable fulness, so the waters of God flow into every soul. And when the sea withdraws its tide, it withdraws not merely the contents of this pool and yonder creek, but the sea itself, eternally undivided, though for the space of a tide it filled the limits and the hollows of the shore.
But not all the strand, is washed by the sea; above a certain line the sands grow their rank, stiff grass, and grey-green thistles; the sands are almost land. And not the whole of the soul is visited by the Divine simplicity; only the water-line, the arid depth of the soul, is swept over and filled by the infinite being of God. “There is something in the soul,” taught Meister Eckhart, “uncreated and uncreatable; there is something in the soul which is beyond the soul, Divine, simple, an utter nothingness; there is a place in the soul where God inhabits, and this base of the soul is one with the base of God. And to reach this obscure retreat of the Eternal and Divine, where the unconscious Godhead dwells—this is the supreme and final goal of all created things.”
III.
And how shall the Mystic reach this obscure and inner depth, this silence where the soul is one with God? By sinking into himself. For the Mystic there exists no exterior world. Since God is within us, what value is there in the world without? “Omnes creaturæ sunt purum nihil,” formulates Master Eckhart. For the Mystic the body is only a prison, a distortion, a hindrance; its senses, its experience cannot teach him. “Being freed from the folly of the body,” said Plato, “we shall of ourselves know the whole real essence.” “Matter,” says Plotinus, “is the principle of individuation, and who would seek the one must quit the things of matter.” Without the body, then, we were no longer personal, no longer separate; we were all One and all God. It is the body which determines our character; there is no personality in the soul. We must conceive it as pure water poured into a coloured vase, which becomes red, or blue, or green, according to the colour of the vase. The colour is not a principle of the water, and does not affect the water. So the soul poured into the body appears to take a note and colour of its own, but, poured out again, is seen to be unaltered. The first aim of the true Mystic is to purify his spirit from this extraneous and earthly tint; to make the vase, if he can, as colourless, as simple and uniform as that infinite Being, of which, in Erigena’s phrase, the Soul is the last descent.
Since the soul is God the world is nothing. No more than the eye can taste or the ear handle, can the created comprehend the Divine. “If we are to know anything purely,” we read again in Plato, “we must be separate from the body.” And Plotinus adds that he who enters in quest of the One must ascend to the First Principle of his own nature. The First Principle of Plotinus is the same as Meister Eckhart’s Foundation of the Soul. It is the One. Intellect may be a means to reach it, but it is certainly not an end. The Mystic philosopher thinks himself into an ecstasy; and the ecstasy, not the thought, is his goal.
Our Mystic has therefore abandoned the world, and abandoned his own experience in the endeavour to attain to God. He must be quite still, passive, dumb; the mystic should be as a new-born child who has not yet smiled in his mother’s face. He must not even will to be made one with God. “He must have no seeking for himself more than has a corpse,” writes Eckhart. “Let him be as one dead,” counsels Suso. “He must not be satisfied with any deed or virtue,” adds the Flemish Ruysbroch, “but only in the Abyss.” And Tauler rises to a passionate eloquence: “Sink thou into thy Depth and thy Nothingness, and let the tower and all its bells fall down upon thee; yea, let all the devils in Hell storm out upon thee; let Heaven and Earth with all their creatures assail thee, yet shall they all but marvellously serve thee.... Sink thou only into thy Nothingness, and the better part is thine.”