Next, the demands made and restrictions imposed by the community on the individual are good for the mystic. Man is social right through; in spirit as well as in body and mind. His most sublime spiritual experiences are themselves social in type. Intercourse of a person with a Person, the merging of his narrow consciousness in a larger consciousness, the achievement of a divine sonship, a spiritual marriage: these are the highest things that he can say concerning his achievement of Divine Reality. And they all entail, not a narrow self-realization, but the breaking-down of barriers; the setting-up of wider relationships. It follows that self-mergence in the common life is an education for that self-mergence in the absolute life at which the mystic aims. Such self-mergence, and the training in humility, self-denial, obedience, suppleness, which is involved in it, is held by all ascetic teachers to be essential to the education of the human soul. Union with, and to a certain extent submission to, the church, to the family—to life, in fact—an attitude of self-giving surrender: this is the best of preparations for that total self-naughting of the soul which is involved in union with God; that utter doing-away of the I, the Me, and the Mine, till it becomes one will and one love with the divine will and love.
On these two counts alone—harmonious environment and salutary discipline—we shall expect, other things being equal, that the richest and most fruitful types of mystical experience will arise within religious institutions rather than outside them; and as a matter of fact this is what we do find. The Hindu ascetic has his recognized place in the Hindu system. He has but reached the summit of a pyramid which is firmly based on earth. The Sūfi is a good Moslem, and commonly the member of a religious confraternity which imposes a strict rule of life. The Christian mystic, too, grows up from the Christian society. His roots strike deep down into that favouring soil. Though his branches may shoot up to the heavens, and seem to draw thence all the light and heat by which he lives, yet he is really fed from below as well as from above. When he refuses to acknowledge this principle, when he abjures the discipline, the authority, the support of the corporate life, and regards himself as a separate individual, dependent on direct inspiration alone; how quickly he becomes unbalanced and eccentric, how difficult it is for him to avoid the disease of spiritual megalomania. Refusing the support and discipline of organized religion, he becomes like a poet who refuses to be controlled by the laws of prosody; which seem to limit, but really strengthen and beautify, his work.
It is true that right through the history of Christian mysticism there has been a line of insurgent mystics who have made this refusal; whose direct vision of spiritual perfection has brought with it so overwhelming a sense of the imperfection, formalism, unreality, the dreadfulness of religious institutions, that it has forced them into a position of more or less acute revolt from the official church. So clear has been their own consciousness of the spiritual world that the soul’s life and growth, its actual and individual rebirth, have shone out for them as the only things that matter. Hence the dramatization of these things in ceremonial religion, the effort to give spiritual values a concrete form, has seemed to them like a blasphemous parody. Unable to harmonize the inward and the outward—the all-penetrating reality of religion as they understand it, with its crude outward expression in the external cult, where formal acts and intellectual assents so often seem to take the place of inward changes—in the end they solve the problem by repudiating the external and visible church. This rebel-type, victims of exaggerated individualism, which would make the special experiences of a few the standard for the whole race, has persisted side by side with the law-abiding type; who have preserved, if not always a perfect balance between liberty and obedience, at any rate a more reasonable proportion between them. Often the corruption of the times in which he lived has seemed to the mystic to make such rebellion inevitable. This is particularly true in the case of George Fox, whose ragings were directed far less against organized religion than against unreal religion; and who might, had he lived in fourteenth-century Germany, have found a congenial career as one of the Friends of God. Yet, even so, the careers of these rebels have been on the whole unfruitful, compared with those who remained within the institutional framework and effected their reforms from inside. They seldom quite escape the taint of arrogance. There is apt to be a touch of self-consciousness in their sanctity. We have only to compare the influence exerted by the outstanding figures of the two groups, to realize which type of spiritual life has had the best and most enduring influence on the spiritual history of the race; which, in fact, best stands the pragmatic test.
On the rebel side we have, of course, the leaders of many dead heresies and sects. The Montanists of the second century, with their claim to direct inspiration, their cult of ecstatic phenomena and prophetic speech; the numerous mystical heretics and illuminati of the Middle Ages, often preaching the most extravagant doctrines and always claiming for them divine authority—for instance, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who claimed the possession of the Holy Ghost as an excuse not only for theological, but also for moral aberrations. Later, there are the Quietists, a particularly poisonous brand of unbalanced contemplatives; and, contemporary with their revolt against Catholic forms and authorities, innumerable mystical revolts against Protestant forms and authorities, the very names of whose originators are now almost forgotten. Amongst these two mighty figures stand up: Jacob Boehme and George Fox. But we must remember as regards Boehme that, although he certainly spoke with great violence against the error of confusing external acceptance of religion with internal adherence to God, “historical Christians” with “new men,” he never disowned the Lutheran Church within which he was born. On the contrary, it was that church which persecuted and finally disowned him. As to that great and strange genius, George Fox, who aimed at nothing less than a world religion of a mystical type, the free and conscious contact of every soul with the Spirit of God, I believe that any unbiassed student of his Journal must allow that, enormous as his achievement was, it might have been far greater had his violent sense of vocation, his remarkable spiritual gifts, been disciplined and controlled by the corporate consciousness as expressed in institutional religion. Then some of the energy which he expended in denunciations of steeple-houses might have been employed in healing the disharmony between the visible and invisible church; helping that vision of the Eternal by which he was possessed to find concrete expression within traditional forms. Here, as elsewhere, the Inner Light would have burned with a better and a truer flame had it submitted to the limitations of a lamp.
I do not suggest that these people, even the most extravagant of them, were not truly spiritual or truly mystical. The sort of criticism which divides mystics into two groups—the orthodox, who are inspired by God, and the heretical, who are inspired by Satan—of course belongs to the dark ages of theology. On the contrary, these rebel-mystics most often possessed—sometimes in a highly developed form—the sharp direct consciousness of the Divine Life which is the essential quality of the mystic. This was to them the central fact; by comparison with it they judged all other things. What they did not possess was the balancing, equivalent consciousness of, and reverence for, corporate human life; that group-personality which is the church, and its value and authority. They lacked the sense that the whole organism, the whole herd, with all its imperfections, is yet interdependent, and has got to move together, urged from within by its more vivid spirits, not stung from without, as if by some enthusiastic spiritual mosquito. To a greater or lesser extent they failed in effect because they tried to be mystical in a non-human instead of a human way; were “other-worldly” in the bad sense of the word. They have not always remembered that Christ Himself, the supreme pattern of all mystics, lived a balanced life of clear personal vision, unmediated intercourse with God on the one hand, and gentle and patient submission to the corporate consciousness on the other hand. Though severely critical of the unrealities and hypocrisy of current institutionalism, he yet sought to form the group, the “little flock,” in which His ideas should be incorporated within, and not over against, the official Jewish Church; and thus gradually to leaven the whole.
Put now against these vigorous individualists the names of the mystics who have never felt that their passionate correspondences with the Eternal Order—their clear vision of the adorable Perfection of God and the imperfection, languor, and corruption of man—need involve a break with the corporate religious life. Observe how these have continued for centuries to be fruitful personalities, often not merely within their own communion, but outside it too; how they have acted as salt, as leaven, permeating and transmuting the general consciousness of the Body of Christ. Often these, too, have been reformers—drastic, unrelenting disturbers of the established order of things. St. Bernard, St. Hildegarde, Mechthild, Jacopone da Todi, St. Catherine of Siena, Tauler, were passionate in their denunciations of slackness, corruption, and disorder. But they made their protests, and brought back the general consciousness to a closer contact with reality, from within, and not from without, the Christian church. Consider St. Bernard and Richard of St. Victor, whose writings influenced for centuries the whole of the religious literature of Europe; St. Hildegarde, St. Gertrude, Mechthild of Magdeburg, great mystics, good churchwomen, but severe denouncers of formalism and unreality; St. Francis of Assisi, who removed evangelical poverty from the sphere of notion to the sphere of fact; St. Catherine of Siena, who changed Italian politics; St. Joan of Arc, who altered European history; the soaring transcendentalism of Ruysbroeck, who was yet content to be a humble parish priest; the great mystical movement of the Friends of God, ardent Catholics and ardent reformers too. Even our own great mystical poets, Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert, Traherne, Coventry Patmore and Francis Thompson, were one and all convinced institutionalists. Finally, look at some of the great cloistered mystics, of whom St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross are types; and see how, though they seem in the eyes of the world to be “buried alive,” they are and remain the ardent centres of a spreading light, which perpetually stimulates and revivifies not only members of their own order or communion, but spiritually sensitive souls outside.
Perhaps it is in those contemplatives who lived within and were obedient to the rule of the great monastic orders, that we can see most easily the nature of the link between the individual soul and the religious group within which it does or should develop; the enormous value to it of tradition, that huge accumulation of tendencies, ideals, systems, wisdom both speculative and practical, which is preserved in the corporate consciousness. Here the influence of the religious family, the rule of life, the ideal held out, the severe education in self-control administered to every novice, can always be traced; conditioning, and, I believe, helping and bracing the character of that communion with the Transcendent which the individual mystic enjoys. As the baby at birth enters into a civilization prepared for him, and is at once supported, educated, even clothed by a tradition prepared by countless generations of the past; so the novice, whose spiritual childhood begins within a great monastic family, receives—supposing, of course, that the order is true to its ideals—the support and benefits of a tradition evolved during previous generations in response to the needs of other similar souls; and he is by so much the better off than he would be were he a solitary, or a deliberate rebel who refuses to accept the heritage of the past. He finds a life beautifully adjusted to his needs; yet which, being greater and older than his own, keeps his rampant individualism in check, nurtures and cultivates his growing spiritual consciousness, and opposes—by its perpetual demands on humility, obedience, and unselfishness—the vice of pride which the mystical individualist seldom escapes. Such a mystical consciousness would not necessarily die without the support of this corporate tradition, any more than the baby would necessarily die did it emerge into the conditions of the paleolithic cave instead of into those of the modern nursery. But in both cases the environment would be unfavourable, and the effort required to attain that position into which the child of tradition enters at birth would be an enormous drain upon the powers of the organism.
The instinct of many mystics for a certain measure of solitude is no contradiction of this. The hermits and the anchorites, even such rare and extreme types as St. Anthony of Egypt, who is said to have lived in perfect solitude for twenty years, did not withdraw from the Christian society; nor did they disown the validity of its external and institutional life. They sought to construct or find within the Christian church an environment within which their special tendencies could develop in a normal way; and this not merely for themselves, but also for the sake of other souls. Such a period of withdrawal was felt by them to be a necessary condition of their full effectiveness for life. So, too, the poet or the artist must retreat from his fellows if he is to commune with the eternal loveliness and interpret her to other men: for a total concentration upon reality is the condition under which it is revealed. The Catholic Church has always recognized, and does still in the continued existence of the cloistered orders, the reasonableness of this demand. We do not as a rule say bitter things when a person of artistic or speculative genius leaves the family group and goes to Paris or Oxford in order that his special powers may be educated and become effective for life; nor should we feel resentment because the mystical genius sometimes feels that the life of the home circle, or even the normal life of the community, cannot give the special training which he requires. In a few cases the mystics have felt a long period of complete isolation to be necessary to them; but most often they have been accessible to those who really needed them, and helped these all the more because of the long periods of silence in which they listened to the Voice of God, too often inaudible for them, as for us, in the general bustle of the world. Their point of view has been beautifully stated by a young French mystic, Elizabeth de la Trinité, who died a few years ago. “I want,” she says, “to be all silence, all adoration, that I may penetrate more and more deeply into God; and become so full of Him that I can give Him in my prayers to those poor souls still ignorant of His gift.” She wants to be a channel, a duct, by which the love and power of God, of which she is so strongly conscious, can flow out to other souls. It is not for herself that she is working; it is for the world. Do we not find expressed there both the individual longing and the corporate responsibility of the mystic? And do we not touch here the intimate connection which should exist between the separate life of the great mystic and the corporate life of the church? On the one hand, the highly organized society, making it possible for the contemplative to develop his special powers in a harmonious environment and preventing the frittering of his energies; on the other, that contemplative, like a special organ developed by the Body of Christ, gaining for the whole community contacts and certitudes, which it could not gain in any other way. News of God can only enter the temporal order through some human consciousness. Is it unreasonable that for so great an office certain individuals should be set apart—within the community, not over against it—and should live in a special way?
As a matter of fact, the church has gained a thousandfold by her acquiescence in the special vocation of the mystics; for the treasures they won were never kept for themselves, but always showered upon her. True, she has not hesitated to scrutinize and control them; sometimes her attitude has seemed to the enthusiasts for liberty to be deliberately obscurantist and tyrannical. Yet, even here—and although in many cases there has clearly been ignorance, injustice, and persecution—the mystic gains more than he loses by submission to the collective judgment. Even in their harshest form, discipline and tradition are still priceless for him. First, they school him in the virtue of humility, the very foundation of the Christian character; which is seldom possessed by the spiritual genius who always leads and never submits, and whose triumphant formula, “God and myself!” too often ends by becoming “Myself and God!”
“O caritate, vita, ch’ ogn’ altro amor è morto;