Finally, St. John of the Cross, great thinker, manly and heroic mystic, and true poet, effects a perfect synthesis of these positive and negative experiences—that apparent self-loss in empty spaces which is also, mysteriously, an encounter of love.
“The soul in dim contemplation (he says) is like a man who sees something for the first time, the like of which he has never seen before ... hence it feels like one who is placed in a wild and vast solitude where no human being can come; an immense wilderness without limits. But this wilderness is the more delicious, sweet and lovely, the more it is wide, vast and lonely; for where the soul seems most to be lost, there it is most raised up above all created things.”
All this language, as I have said, belongs to the oblique and paradoxical side of the mystic’s art; and comes to us from those who are temperamentally inclined to that pure contemplation which “has no image.” Psychologically speaking, these mystics are closer to the musician than to any other type of artist, though they avail themselves when they wish of material drawn from all the arts. But there is another kind of mystic, naturally inclined to visualization, who tends to translate his supersensual experience into concrete, pictorial images; into terms of colour and of form. He uses, in fact, the methods of the painter, the descriptive writer, sometimes of the dramatist, rather than those of the musician or the lyric poet. He is, I think, as a rule much less impressive than the artist of the illusive kind, and is seldom so successful in putting us into communion with reality. On the other hand—and partly because of his more concrete method—he is the more generally understood. For one person to whom Plotinus or Ruysbroeck communicates his sublime intuition of reality, a hundred accept at their face-value, as true “revelations,” the visions of St. Gertrude or St. Teresa.
The picture-making proceedings of this type of mystical artist are of two kinds. Sometimes they are involuntary, sometimes deliberate. Often we find both forms in the same individual; for instance, in Mechthild of Magdeburg and in Suso, where it is sometimes extremely difficult to find the dividing line between true visionary experience entirely outside the self’s control, and the intense meditation, or poetic apprehension of truth, which demands a symbolic and concrete form for its literary expression. In both cases an act of artistic creation has taken place; in one below, in the other above, the normal threshold of consciousness. In true visionaries, the translation of the supersensual into sensual terms is uncontrolled by the surface intellect; as it is indeed in many artists. Without the will or knowledge of the subject, intuitions are woven up into pictures, cadences, words; and, by that which psychologists call a psycho-sensorial automatism, the mystic seems to himself to receive the message of Reality in a pictorial, verbal, dramatic or sometimes a musical form—“coming in to his body by the windows of the wits,” as one old writer has it.
Thus the rhythmic phrases in which the Eternal Wisdom speaks to Suso, or the Divine Voice to St. Catherine of Siena, verge on poetic composition; but poetic composition of the automatic type, uncontrolled by the mystic’s surface-mind. Thus, too, the great fluid visions of the prophets, the sharply definite, often lovely, pictures which surge up before the mind of Suso, the Mechthilds, St. Gertrude, Angela of Foligno, of the great St. Teresa herself, are symbolic pictures which represent an actual interior experience, a real contact with the supersensual; exhibiting the interpretative power inherent in the mystical imagination. These pictures are seen by the mystic—sometimes, as he says, within the mind, sometimes as projections in space—always in sharp definition, lit by that strong light which is peculiar to visionary states. They are not produced by any voluntary process of composition, but loom up, as do the best creations of other artists, from his deeper mind, bringing with them an intense conviction of reality. Good instances are the visions which so often occur at conversion, or mark the transition from one stage of the mystic way to another: for example, the mystic marriage of St. Catherine of Siena, or that vision of the Upper School of True Resignation, which initiated Suso into the “dark night of the soul.” I believe that we may look on such visions as allied to dream-states; but in the case of the great mystics they are the richly significant waking-dreams of creative genius, not the confused and meaningless dreaming of normal men. Suso himself makes this comparison, and says that none but the mystic can distinguish vision from dream. In character they vary as widely as do the creations of the painter and the poet. The personal and intimate, the remote and metaphysical, sides of the spiritual life are richly represented in them. Sometimes the elements from which they are built up come from theology, sometimes from history, legend, nature, or human life. But in every case the “glory of the lighted mind” shines on them.
Often a particularly delicate and gay poetic feeling—a faëry touch—shows itself in the symbolic pictures by which these mystics try to represent their encounter with the spiritual world. Coventry Patmore once spoke of a “sphere of rapture and dalliance” to which the great contemplatives are raised; and it is from such a sphere that these seem to turn back to us, trying, by direct appeals to our sense of joy, the most stunted of our spiritual faculties, to communicate their exultant experience of that Kingdom of Reality which is neither “here” nor “there” but “everywhere.”
Music and dancing, birds and flowers, the freshness of a living, growing world, all simple joyous things, all airy beauties, are used in the effort to tell us of that vision which Clement called the privilege of love. When we read these declarations we feel that it is always spring-time in those gardens of the soul of which they tell. St. John of the Cross, who described those spiritual gardens, said that fragrant roses brought from strange islands grew there—those strange islands which are the romantic unexplored possibilities of God—and that water-lilies shine like stars in that roaring torrent of supernal glory which pours without ceasing through the transfigured soul. This is high poetry; but sometimes the mystic imagination shows itself under simpler, more endearing forms, as when St. Mechthild of Hackeborn saw the prayers of her sisters flying up like larks into the presence of God; some soaring as high as His countenance and some falling down to rest upon His heart. An angel carried the little, fluttering prayers which were not strong enough to rise of themselves. Imagery less charming than this has gone to the making of many a successful poem.
Between the sublime intensity of St. John and the crystalline simplicity of St. Mechthild, mystical literature provides us with examples of almost every type of romantic and symbolic language; deliberate or involuntary translation of the heavenly fact into the earthly image. True, the earthly image is transfused by a new light, radiant with a new colour, has been lifted into a new atmosphere; and thus has often a suggestive quality far in excess of its symbolic appropriateness. In their search for such images the mystics explore the resources of all the arts. In particular, music and dancing—joyous harmony, unceasing measured movement—have seemed to them specially significant media whereby to express their intuitions of Eternal Life. St. Francis, and after him Richard Rolle, heard celestial melodies; Kabir, the “Unstruck Music of the Infinite.” Dante saw the saints dancing in the sphere of the sun; Suso heard the music of the angels, and was invited to join in their song and dance. It was not, he says, like the dancing of this world, but was like a celestial ebb and flow within that incomprehensible Abyss which is the secret being of the Deity. There is no need to dwell upon the remarkable way in which mystics of all countries and periods, from Plotinus to Jacob Boehme, resort to the dance as an image of the glad harmonious movements of liberated souls. I will take two characteristic examples, from the East and from the West. The first is a poem by Kabir:
“Dance, my heart! dance to-day with joy.
The strains of love fill the days and the nights with music, and the world is listening to its melodies;