Here the reality behind appearance is still mediated to the mystic under symbols and forms. The variation of these symbols is great; his adoring gaze now finds new life and significance in the appearances of nature, the creations of music and of art, the imagery of religion and philosophy, and reality speaks to him through his own credal conceptions. But absolute value cannot be attributed to any of these, even the most sacred: they change, yet the experience remains. Thus an identical consciousness of close communion with God is obtained by the non-sacramental Quaker in his silence and by the sacramental Catholic in the Eucharist. The Christian contemplative’s sense of personal intercourse with the divine as manifest in the incarnate Christ is hard to distinguish from that of the Hindu Vaishnavite, when we have allowed for the different constituents of his apperceiving mass:
“Dark, dark the far Unknown and closed the way
To thought and speech; silent the Scriptures; yea,
No word the Vedas say.
“Not thus the Manifest. How fair! how near!
Gone is our thirst if only He appear—
He, to the heart so dear.”
So, too, the Sūfi mystic who has learned to say: “I never saw anything without seeing God therein;” Kabir exclaiming: “I have stilled my restless mind, and my heart is radiant; for in Thatness I have seen beyond Thatness, in company I have seen the Comrade Himself;” the Neoplatonist rapt in contemplation of the intelligible world “yonder”; Brother Lawrence doing his cooking in the presence of God, reveal under analysis an identical type of consciousness. This consciousness is the essential; the symbols under which the self apprehends it are not.
Among these symbols we must reckon a large number of the secondary phenomena of mysticism: divine visions and voices, and other dramatizations of the self’s apprehensions and desires. The best mystics have always recognized the doubtful nature of these so-called divine revelations and favours, and have tried again and again to set up tests for discerning those which really “come from God”—i. e. mediate a valid spiritual experience. Personally, I think very few of these phenomena are mystical in the true sense. Just as our normal consciousness is more or less at the mercy of invasions from the unconscious region, of impulses which we fail to trace to their true origin; so too the mystical consciousness is perpetually open to invasion from the lower centres. These invasions are not always understood by the mystic. Obvious examples are the erotic raptures of the Sūfi poets, and the emotional, even amorous relations in which many Christian ascetics believe themselves to stand to Christ or Our Lady. The Holy Ghost saying to Angela of Foligno, “I love you better than any other woman in the vale of Spoleto”; the human raptures of Mechthild of Magdeburg with her Bridegroom; St. Bernard’s attitude to the Virgin; the passionate love-songs of Jacopone da Todi; the mystical marriage of St. Catherine of Siena; St. Teresa’s “wound of love”; these, and many similar episodes, demand no supernatural explanation, and add nothing to our knowledge of the work of the Spirit in man’s soul. So, too, the infantile craving for a sheltering and protective love finds expression over and over again in mystical literature, and satisfaction in the states of consciousness which it has induced. The innate longing of the self for more life, more love, an ever greater and fuller experience, attains a complete realization in the lofty mystical state called union with God. But failing this full achievement, the self is capable of offering itself many disguised satisfactions; and among these disguised satisfactions we must reckon at least the majority of “divine favours” enjoyed by contemplatives of an emotional type. Whatever the essence of mysticism may turn out to be, it is well to recognize these lapses to lower levels as among the least fortunate of its accidents.
We come to the third stage, the true goal of mystic experience; the intuitive contact with that ultimate reality which theologians mean by the Godhead and philosophers by the Absolute, a contact in which, as Richard of St. Victor says “the soul gazes upon Truth without any veils of creatures—not in a mirror darkly, but in its pure simplicity.” The claim to this is the loftiest claim which can be made by human consciousness. There is little we can say of it, because there is little we know; save that the vision or experience is always the vision or experience of a Unity which reconciles all opposites, and fulfils all man’s highest intuitions of reality. “Be lost altogether in Brahma like an arrow that has completely penetrated its target,” say the Upanishads. This self-loss, says Dionysius the Areopagite, is the Divine Initiation: wherein we “pass beyond the topmost altitudes of the holy ascent, and leave behind all divine illumination and voices and heavenly utterances; and plunge into the darkness where truly dwells, as Scripture saith, that One Which is beyond all things.” Some recent theologians have tried to separate the conceptions of God and of the Absolute: but mystics never do this, though some of the most clear-sighted, such as Meister Eckhart, have separated that unconditioned Godhead known in ecstasy from the personal God who is the object of devotional religion, and who represents a humanization of reality. When the great mystic achieves the “still, glorious, and absolute Oneness” which finally satisfies his thirst for truth—the “point where all lines meet and show their meaning”—he generally confesses how symbolic was the object of his earlier devotion, how partial his supposed communion with the Divine. Thus Jacopone da Todi—exact and orthodox Catholic though he was—when he reached “the hidden heaven,” discovered and boldly declared the approximate character of all his previous conceptions of, and communion with God; the great extent to which subjective elements had entered into his experience. In the great ode which celebrates his ecstatic vision of Truth, when “ineffable love, imageless goodness, measureless light” at last shone in his heart, he says: “I thought I knew Thee, tasted Thee, saw Thee under image: believing I held Thee in Thy completeness I was filled with delight and unmeasured love. But now I see I was mistaken—Thou art not as I thought and firmly held.” So Tauler says that compared with the warm colour and multiplicity of devotional experience, the very Godhead is a “rich nought,” a “bare pure ground”; and Ruysbroeck that it is “an unwalled world,” “neither this nor that.” “This fruition of God,” he says again, “is a still and glorious and essential Oneness beyond the differentiation of the Persons, where there is neither an outpouring nor an indrawing of God, but the Persons are still and one in fruitful love, in calm and glorious unity.... There is God our fruition and His own, in an eternal and fathomless bliss.”