Yet apply impartially to both sets the test, not of form, but of content, of spiritual fruitfulness and of many-sided applicability—and this surface-similarity yields at once to a fundamental difference. Indeed all the great mystics, and this in precise proportion to their greatness, have ever taught that, the mystical capacities and habits being but means and not ends, only such ecstasies are valuable as leave the soul, and the very body as its instrument, strengthened and improved; and that visions and voices are to be accepted by the mind only in proportion as they convey some spiritual truth of importance to it or to others, and as they actually help it to become more humble, true, and loving.
And there can be no doubt that these things worked thus with such great ecstatic mystics as Ezekiel, the man of the great prophetic schemes and the permanently fruitful picturing of the Good Shepherd; as St. Paul, the greatest missionary and organizer ever given to the Christian Church; as St. Francis of Assisi, the salt and leaven and light of the Church and of society, in his day and more or less ever since; as St. Catherine of Siena, the free-spoken, docile reinspirer of the Papacy; as Jeanne d’Arc, the maiden deliverer of a Nation; as St. Teresa, reformer of a great Order. All these, and countless others, would, quite evidently, have achieved less, not more, of interior light and of far-reaching helpfulness of a kind readily recognized by all specifically religious souls, had they been without the rest, the bracing, the experience furnished to them by their ecstasies and allied states and apprehensions.
VII. Perennial Freshness of the Great Mystics’ Main Spiritual Test, in Contradistinction To Their Secondary, Psychological Contention. Two Special Difficulties.
1. A false and a true test of mystical experience.
Now it is deeply interesting to note how entirely unweakened, indeed how impressively strengthened, by the intervening severe test of whole centuries of further experience and of thought, has remained the main and direct, the spiritual test of the great Mystics, in contradistinction to their secondary psychological contention with respect to such experiences. The secondary, psychological contention is well reproduced by St. Teresa where she says: “When I speak, I go on with my understanding arranging what I am saying; but, if I am spoken to by others, I do nothing else but listen without any labour.” In the former case, “the soul,” if it be in good faith, “cannot possibly fail to see clearly that itself arranges the words and utters them to itself. How then can the understanding have time enough to arrange these locutions? They require time.”[46] Now this particular argument for their supernaturalness derived from the psychological form—from the suddenness, clearness, and apparent automatism of these locutions—has ceased to carry weight, owing to our present, curiously recent, knowledge concerning the subconscious region of the mind, and the occasionally sudden irruption of that region’s contents into the field of that same mind’s ordinary, full consciousness. In the Ven. Battista Vernazza’s case we have a particularly clear instance of such a long accumulation,—by means of much, in great part full, attention to certain spiritual ideas, words, and images,—in the subconscious regions of a particularly strong and deeply sincere and saintly mind; and the sudden irruption from those regions of certain clear and apparently quite spontaneous words and images into the field of her mind’s full consciousness.[47]
But the reference to the great Mystics’ chief and direct test, upon which they dwell with an assurance and self-consistency far surpassing that which accompanies their psychological argument,—the spiritual content and effects of such experiences,—this, retains all its cogency. St. Teresa tells us: “When Our Lord speaks, it is both word and work: His words are deeds.” “I found myself, through these words alone, tranquil and strong, courageous and confident, at rest and enlightened: I felt I could maintain against all the world that my prayer was the work of God.” “I could not believe that Satan, if he wished to deceive me, could have recourse to means so adverse to his purpose as this, of rooting out my faults, and implanting virtues and spiritual strength: for I saw clearly that I had become another person, by means of these visions.” “So efficacious was the vision, and such was the nature of the words spoken to me, that I could not possibly doubt that they came from Him.” “I was in a trance; and the effects of it were such, that I could have no doubt it came from God.” On another occasion she writes less positively even of the great test: “She never undertook anything merely because it came to her in prayer. For all that her Confessors told her that these things came from God, she never so thoroughly believed them that she could swear to it herself, though it did seem to her that they were spiritually safe, because of the effects thereof.”[48] This doctrine is still the last word of wisdom in these matters.
2. First special difficulty in testing ecstasies.
Yet it is only at this last stage that two special difficulties occur, the one philosophical, the other moral. The philosophical difficulty is as follows. As long as the earlier stages are in progress, it is not difficult to understand that the soul may be gradually building up for herself a world of spiritual apprehensions, and a corresponding spiritual and moral character, by a process which, looked at merely phenomenally and separately, appears as a simple case of mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, but which can and should be conceived, when studied in its ultimate cause and end, as due to the pressure and influence of God’s spirit working in and through the spirit of man,—the Creator causing His own little human creature freely to create for itself some copy of and approach to its own eternally subsisting, substantial Cause and Crown. There the operation of such an underlying Supreme Cause, and a consequent relation between the world thus conceived and built up by the human soul and the real world of the Divine Spirit, appears possible, because the things which the soul is thus made to suggest to itself are ideas, and because even these ideas are clearly recognized by the soul as only instruments and approaches to the realities for which they stand. But here, in this last stage, we get the suggestion, not of ideas, but of psycho-physical impressions, and these impressions are, apparently, not taken as but distantly illustrative, but as somehow one with the spiritual realities for which they stand. Is not, e.g., Catherine’s joy at this stage centred precisely in the downright feeling, smelling, seeing, of ocean waters, penetrating odours, all-enveloping light; and in the identification of those waters, odours, lights, with God Himself, so that God becomes at last an object of direct, passive, sensible perception? Have we not then here at last reached pure delusion?
Not so, in proportion as the mystic is great and spiritual, and as he here still clings to the principles common to all true religion. For, in proportion as he is and does this, will he find and regard the mind as deeper and more operative than sense, and God’s Spirit as penetrating and transcending both the one and the other. And hence he will (at least implicitly) regard those psycho-physical impressions as but sense-like and really mental; and he will consider this mental impression and projection as indeed produced by the presence and action of the Spirit within his mind or of the pressure of spiritual realities upon it, but will hold that this whole mental process, with these its spacial- and temporal-seeming embodiments, these sights and sounds, has only a relation and analogical likeness to, and is not and cannot be identical with, those realities of an intrinsically super-spacial, super-temporal order.—And thus here as everywhere, although here necessarily more than ever, we find again the conception of the Transcendent yet also Immanent Spirit, effecting in the human spirit the ever-increasing apprehension of Himself, accompanied in this spirit by an ever keener sense of His incomprehensibility for all but Himself. And here again the truth, and more especially the divine origin of these apprehensions, is tested and guaranteed on and on by the consequent deepening of that spiritual and ethical fruitfulness and death to self, which are the common aspirations of every deepest moment and every sincerest movement within the universal heart of man.
Thus, as regards the mentality of these experiences, Catherine constantly speaks of seeing “as though with the eyes of the body.” And St. Teresa tells us of her visions with “the eyes of the soul”; of how at first she “did not know that it was possible to see anything otherwise than with the eyes of the body”; of how, in reality “she never,” in her true visions and locutions, “saw anything with her bodily eyes, nor heard anything with her bodily ears”; and of how indeed she later on, on one occasion, “saw nothing with the eyes of the body, nothing with the eyes of the soul,”—she “simply felt Christ close by her,”—evidently again with the soul. Thus, too, Catherine tells us, that “as the intellect exceeds language, so does love exceed intellection”; and how vividly she feels that “all that can be said of God,” compared to the great Reality, “is but tiny crumbs from the great Master’s table.”[49]