The essentials of mysticism, and other essays

by Evelyn Underhill

Now, as the artist’s passion for sensuous beauty finds expression in his work, and urges him to create beauty as well as he can, so too the soul’s passion for spiritual beauty should find expression in its work; that is to say, in its prayer. A work of art, says Hegel again, is as much the work of the Spirit of God as is the beauty of Nature; but in art the Holy Spirit works through human consciousness. Therefore man’s prayer ought to be as beautiful as he can make it; for thus it approaches more nearly to the mind of God. It should have dignity as well as intimacy, form as well as colour. More, all those little magic thoughts—those delicate winged fancies, which seem like birds rejoicing in God’s sight—these, too, should have their place in it. We find many specimens of them, as it were stuffed and preserved under glass shades, in books of devotion. It is true that their charm and radiance cannot survive this process; the colour now seems crude, the sheen of the plumage is gone. But once these were the living, personal, spontaneous expressions of the love and faith—the inborn poetry—of those from whom they came. Many a liturgic prayer, which now seems to us impersonal and official—foreign to us, perhaps, in its language and thought—will show us, if we have but a little imaginative sympathy, the ardent mood, the exquisite tact, the unforced dignity, of the mind which first composed it; and form a standard by which we may measure our own efforts in this kind.

But the beauty which we seek to incorporate into our spiritual intercourse should not be the dead ceremonious beauty which comes of mere dependence on tradition. It should be the freely upspringing lyric beauty which is rooted in intense personal feeling; the living beauty of a living thing. Nor need we fear the reproach that here we confuse religion with poetry. Poetry ever goes like the royal banners before ascending life; therefore man may safely follow its leadership in his prayer, which is—or should be—life in its intensest form. Consider the lilies: those perfect examples of a measured, harmonious, natural and creative life, under a form of utmost loveliness. I cannot help thinking that it is the duty of all Christians to impart something of that flower-like beauty to their prayer; and only feeling of a special kind will do it—that humble yet passionate love of the beautiful, which finds the perfect object of its adoration in God and something of His fairness in all created things. St. Francis had it strongly, and certain other of the mystics had it too. In one of his rapturous meditations, Suso, for whom faith and poetry were—as they should be—fused in one, calls the Eternal Wisdom a “sweet and beautiful wild flower.” He recognized that flowery charm which makes the Gospels fragrant, and is included in that pattern which Christians are called to imitate if they can. Now, if this quality is to be manifested in human life, it must first be sought and actualized, consciously or unconsciously, in prayer; because it is in the pure, sharp air of the spiritual order that it lives. It must spring up from within outwards, must be the reflection of the soul’s communion with “that Supreme Beauty which containeth in itself all goodness”; which was revealed to Angela of Foligno, but which “she could in no wise describe.” The intellect may, and should, conceive of this Absolute Beauty as well as it can; the will may—and must—be set on the attaining of it. But only by intuitive feeling can man hope to know it, and only by love can he make it his own. The springs of the truest prayer and of the deepest poetry—twin expressions of man’s outward-going passion for that Eternity which is his home—rise very near together in the heart.

THE MYSTICISM OF PLOTINUS

In spite of his enormous importance for the history of Christian philosophy, Plotinus is still one of the least known and least understood among the great thinkers of the ancient world. The extreme difficulty of his style, which Porphyry well described as “dense with thought, and more lavish of ideas than words,” together with the natural laziness of man, may perhaps account for this neglect. He was by choice a thinker, contemplative, and teacher, not a writer. Therefore the Enneads, which represent merely notes of lectures hastily and unwillingly written down during the last fifteen years of his life, offer few inducements to hurried readers. The fact that he was a “mystic” has been held a further excuse for failure to understand the more cryptic passages of his works; though as a matter of fact these are the precipitations of a singularly clear and logical intellect, and will yield all their secrets to a sympathetic and industrious attention. His few translators have often been content to leave difficult phrases unelucidated, or surrounded by a haze of suggestive words; and though his splendid and poetic rhapsodies are quoted again and again, even those later mystics who are most indebted to him show few signs of first-hand study and comprehension of his system as a whole. Thanks to this same obscurity, and the richness, intricacy, and suggestive quality of his thought, most of his interpreters have tended to do for him that which he did for his master Plato: they have re-handled him in the interests of their own religion or philosophy. Of this, the Cambridge Platonists are the most notorious example; but the same inclination is seen in modern scholars. Thus Baron von Hügel seeks to introduce a dualism between his mysticism and his metaphysics. Even the brilliant exposition of his philosophy in the Dean of St. Paul’s Gifford Lectures is not wholly exempt from this criticism. A comparison of his analysis with those of Baron von Hügel in Eternal Life, and of Mr. Whittaker in The Neoplatonists makes plain the part which temperament has played in each of these works.

Plotinus himself would probably have been astonished by this charge of obscurity. His teaching had by declaration two aims. The first was the definitely religious aim of bringing men to a knowledge of Divine reality; for he had the missionary ardour inseparable from the saintly type. The second was the faithful interpretation of Platonic philosophy, especially the doctrines of Plato, and of his own immediate master, the unknown Alexandrian Ammonius: for his academic teaching consisted wholly of a commentary on, and interpretation of, Plato’s works. His system, therefore, is a synthesis of practical spirituality and formal philosophy, and will only be grasped by those who keep this twofold character in mind. There must always seem to be a conflict between any closed and self-consistent metaphysical system and the freedom and richness of the spiritual life: but since few metaphysicians are mystics, and few mystics are able to take metaphysics more seriously than the soldier takes the lectures of the armchair strategist, these two readings of reality are seldom brought into direct opposition. In Plotinus we have an almost unique example of the philosopher who is also a practical mystic; and consequently of a mind that cannot be satisfied with anything less than an intellectual system which finds room for the most profound experiences of the spiritual life. In this peculiarity some scholars have found his principal merit; others a source of weakness. The position of his critics has been excellently stated by Baron von Hügel in Eternal Life. He finds in the Enneads a “ceaseless conflict” between “the formal principles of the philosopher” and “the experiences of a profoundly religious soul.” The philosophy issues in an utterly transcendent Godhead without qualities, activity, or being: the mysticism issues in ecstatic union, actual contact, with a God, “the atmosphere and home of souls” whose richness is the sum of all affirmations. Yet, as a matter of fact, this disharmony is only apparent; and is resolved when we understand the formal character of the Plotinian dialectic as a “way,” a stepping-stone, the reduction to terms of reason of some aspects of a reality beyond reason’s grasp. The discrepancy is like that which exists between map and landscape. Plotinus, constantly passing over from argument to vision, speaks sometimes the language of geography, sometimes that of adventure: yet both, within their spheres, are true. The Neoplatonic via negativa always implies an unexpressed because ineffable affirmation. Therefore its Absolute, of which reason can predicate no qualities, may yet be the “flower of all beauty” as apprehended by the contemplative soul.

Since the doctrine of Ammonius is unknown to us, we have no means of gauging the extent to which Plotinus depends on him: but probably we shall not be far wrong if we attribute to his influence the peculiar sense of reality, the deep spiritual inwardness, colour and life, with which his great pupil invests the dogmas of Platonism. The main elements of the Plotinian philosophy, however, are undoubtedly Platonic. The Divine Triad, the precession of spirit and its return to its origin, the unreal world of sense, the universal soul, the “real” or intelligible world of the Ideas—these and other ingredients of his system are a part of the common stock of Platonism. His originality and his attraction consist in the use which he makes of them, the colour and atmosphere with which they are endowed. That which is truly his own is the living vision which creates from these formulæ a vivid world both actual and poetic, answering with fresh revelations of reality the widening demands and apprehensions of the human soul. This spiritual world is not merely arrived at by a dialectic process. It is the world of his own intense experience from which he speaks to us; using his texts, as Christian mystics have often used the Bible, to support doctrines inspired by his personal vision of truth. In spite of his passion for exactitude, the sharpness and detail of his universe, he is thrown back, again and again, on the methods of symbol and poetry. We must always be ready to look past his formal words to the felt reality which he is struggling to impart; a reality which is beyond the grasp of reason, and can only be apprehended by the faculty which he calls spiritual intuition. To this we owe the richness and suppleness of his system, the absence of watertight compartments, the intimate relation with life. Whilst many philosophers have spent their powers on proving the necessary existence of an unglimpsed universe which shall satisfy the cravings of the mind, Plotinus spent his in making a map, based on his own adventures in “that country which is no mere vision, but a home;” and his apparently rigid contours and gradients are attempts to tell at least the characteristics of a living land.

Though the Enneads are a storehouse of profound and subtle thought, the main principles on which their philosophy is based are simple, and can be expressed briefly. All things, according to Plotinus, have come forth from the Absolute Godhead or One, and only fulfil their destiny when they return to their origin. The real life of the universe consists in this flux and reflux: the outflow and self-expression of spirit in matter, the “conversion” or return of spirit to the One. With the rest of the Neoplatonists, he conceives of the Universe as an emanation, eternally poured forth from this One, and diminishing in reality and splendour the further it is removed from its source. The general position is somewhat like that given by Dante in the opening of the Paradiso:

“La gloria di colui che tutto move

Per l’universo penetra, e resplende

In una parte più, e meno altrove,”