There is, however, a second, essentially different source and kind of suffering in some sorts and degrees of Mysticism, and indeed in other attraits of the spiritual life, which is deeply interesting, because based upon a profound Metaphysical apprehension. Although, at bottom, the opposite extreme to Pantheism, it readily expresses itself, for reasons that will presently appear, in terms that have a curiously Pantheistic colour.
(1) St. John of the Cross writes in 1578: “It is a principle of philosophy, that all means must … have a certain resemblance to the end, such as shall be sufficient for the object in view. If therefore the understanding is to be united to God, … it must make use of those means which can effect that union, that is, means which are most like unto God.… But there is no essential likeness or communion between creatures and Him, the distance between His divine nature and their nature is infinite. No creature therefore … nothing that the imagination may conceive or the understanding comprehend … in this life … can be a proximate means of union with God,” for “it is all most unlike God, and most disproportionate to Him.” “The understanding … must be pure and empty of all sensible objects, all clear intellectual perceptions, resting on faith: for faith is the sole proximate and proportionate means of the soul’s union with God.”[434]
Now it is certain, as we have already found, that the awakened human soul ever possesses a dim but real experience of the Infinite, and that, in proportion as it is called to the Mystical way, this sense will be deepened into various degrees of the Prayer of Quiet and of Union, and that here, more plainly than elsewhere, will appear the universal necessity of the soul’s own response, by acts and the habit of Faith, to all and every experience which otherwise remains but so much unused material for the soul’s advance. And it is equally certain that St. John of the Cross is one of the greatest of such contemplatives, and that neither his intuition and actual practice, nor even his sayings, (so long as any one saying belonging to one trend is set off against another belonging to the other trend), contravenes the Christian and Catholic positions.—Yet it cannot be denied that, were we to press his “negative way” into becoming the only one; and especially were we to take, without discount, such a virtual repudiation, as is furnished by any insistence upon the above words, of any essential, objective difference in value between our various apprehensions of Him and approaches to Him: the whole system and rationale of External, Sacramental and Historical Religion, indeed of the Incarnation, in any degree and form, would have to go, as so many stumbling-blocks to the soul’s advance. For the whole principle of all such Religion implies the profound importance of the Here and the Now, the Contingent and the Finite, and of the Immanence of God, in various degrees and ways, within them.
Indications of this incompatibility, as little systematically realized here as in the Areopagite, are afforded by various remarks of his, belonging in reality to another trend. Thus, immediately before his denial of any essential likeness or communion between any creature and God, he says: “It is true that all creatures bear a certain relation to God and are tokens of His being, some more, some less, according to the greater perfection of their nature.” And of Our Lord’s sacred Humanity he says: “What a perfect living image was Our Saviour upon earth: yet those who had no faith, though they were constantly about Him, and saw His wonderful works, were not benefited by His presence.”[435] But even here the immense importance, indeed downright necessity for Faith, of such external and historical stimuli, objects and materials,—in the latter instance all this at its very deepest,—remains unemphasized, through his engrossment in the necessity of Faith for the fructification of all these things.
In other places this Faith appears as though working so outside of all things imageable, as to have to turn rapidly away from all picturings, as, at best, only momentary starting-points for the advanced soul. “Let the faithful soul take care that, whilst contemplating an image, the senses be not absorbed in it, whether it be material or in the imagination, and whether the devotion it excites be spiritual or sensible. Let him … venerate the image as the Church commands and lift up his mind at once from the material image to those whom it represents. He who shall do this, will never be deluded.”[436] Here, again, along the line of argument absorbing the saint in this book, there is no fully logical ground left for the Incarnational, Historical, Sacramental scheme of the Infinite immanent in the finite, and of spirit stimulated in contact with matter, with everywhere the need of the condescensions of God and of our ascensions by means of careful attention to them.
Sören Kierkegaard, that deep solitary Dane, with so much about him like to Pascal the Frenchman, and Hurrell Froude the Englishman, and who, though Lutheran in all his bringing up, was so deeply attracted by Catholic Asceticism, has, in recent times (he died in 1855), pushed the doctrine of the qualitative, absolute difference between God and all that we ourselves can think, feel, will or be, to lengths beyond even the transcendental element,—we must admit this to be the greatly preponderant one,—in the great Spaniard’s formal teaching. And it is especially in this non-Mystical Ascetic that we get an impressive picture of the peculiar kind of suffering and asceticism, which results from such a conviction to a profoundly sensitive, absorbedly religious soul; and here too we can, I think, discover the precise excess and one-sidedness involved in this whole tendency. Professor Höffding, in his most interesting monograph on his friend, tells us how “for Kierkegaard, … the will gets monopolized by religious Ethics from the very first; there is no time for Contemplation or Mysticism.” “To tear the will away,” Kierkegaard himself says, “from all finite aims and conditions … requires a painful effort and this effort’s ceaseless repetition. And if, in addition to this, the soul has, in spite of all its striving, to be as though it simply were not, it becomes clear that the religious life signifies a dedication to suffering and to self-destruction. What wonder, then, that, for the Jew, death was the price of seeing God; or that, for the Gentile, the soul’s entering into closer relations with the Deity meant the beginning of madness?” For “the soul’s relation to God is a relation to a Being absolutely different from Man, who cannot confront him as his Superlative or Ideal, and who, nevertheless, is to rule in his inmost soul. Hence a necessary division, ever productive of new pains, is operative within man, as long as he perseveres in this spiritual endeavour.… A finite being, he is to live in the Infinite and Absolute: he is there like a fish upon dry land.”[437]
Now Prof. Höffding applies a double, most cogent criticism to this position.—The one is religious, and has already been quoted. “A God Who is not Ideal and Pattern is no God. Hence the contention that the Nature of the Godhead is, of necessity, qualitatively different from that of Man, has ever occasioned ethical and religious misgivings.”—And the other is psychological. “Tension can indeed be necessary for the truth and the force of life. But tension, taken by itself, cannot furnish the true measure of life. For the general nature of consciousness is a synthesis, a comprehensive unity: not only contrast, but also concentration, must make itself felt, as long as the life of consciousness endures.”[438]
It is deeply interesting to note how Catherine, and at bottom St. John of the Cross and the Exclusive Mystics generally, escape, through their practice and in some of their most emphatic teachings, from Kierkegaard’s excess, no doubt in part precisely because they are Mystics, since the exclusive Mystic’s contemplative habit is, at bottom, a Synthetic one. Yet we should realize the deep truth which underlies the very exaggerations of this one-sidedly Analytic and Ascetical view. For if God is the deepest ideal, the ultimate driving force and the true congenital element and environment of Man, such as Man cannot but secretly wish to will deliberately, and which, at his best, Man truly wills to hold and serve: yet God remains ever simply incompatible with that part of each man’s condition and volition which does not correspond to the best and deepest which that Man himself sees or could see to be the better, hic et nunc; and, again, He is ever, even as compared with any man’s potential best, infinitely more and nobler, and, though here not in simple contradiction, yet at a degree of perfection which enables Him, the Supreme Spirit, to penetrate, as Immanent Sustainer or Stimulator, and to confront, as Transcendent Ideal and End, the little human spirit, so great in precisely this its keen sense of experienced contrast.
Catherine exhibits well this double relation, of true contradiction, and of contrast, both based upon a certain genuine affinity between the human soul and God. On one side of herself she is indeed a veritable fish out of water; but, on the other side of her, she is a fish happily disporting itself in its very element, in the boundless ocean of God. On the one side, snapping after air, in that seemingly over-rarified atmosphere in which the animal man, the mere selfish individual, cannot live; on the other side, expanding her soul’s lungs and drinking in light, life, and love, in that same truly rich atmosphere, which, Itself Spirit, feeds and sustains her growing spiritual personality. And the Dialogo, in spite of its frequently painful abstractness and empty unity, has, upon the whole, a profound hold upon this great doctrine.