And here the question is an individual one: would that particular temperament and psycho-physical organism congenial to Sister Lukardis, to Catherine Fiesca Adorna, to Marguerite Marie Alacocque, and to Isaac Hecker, have—taking the whole existence and output together—produced more useful work, and have apprehended and presented more of abiding truth, had their ecstatic states or tendencies been, if possible, absent or suppressed? Does not this type of apprehension, this, as it were, incubation, harmonization, and vivifying of their otherwise painfully fragmentary and heavy impressions, stand out,—in their central, creative periods,—as the one thoroughly appropriate means and form of their true self-development and self-expression, and of such an apprehension and showing forth of spiritual truth as to them,—to them and not to you and me,—was possible? And if we are bound to admit that, even in such cases, ecstasy appears, psycho-physically, as a kind of second state, and that these personalities find or regain their fullest joy and deepest strength only in and from such a state; yet we know too that such ecstasy is not, as in the trances of hysteria and of other functional disorders, simply discontinuous from the ordinary, primary state of such souls; and that,—again contrary to those maladif trances,—whenever the ecstasy answers to the tests insisted upon by the great mystics, viz. a true and valuable ethico-spiritual content and effect, it also, in the long run, leaves the very body strengthened and improved.
And if, after this, their productive period, some of these persons end by losing their psycho-physical health, it is far from unreasonable to suppose that the actual alternative to those ecstasies and this break-up, would, for them, have been a lifelong dreary languor and melancholy self-absorption, somewhat after the pattern of Catherine’s last ten pre-conversion years. Thus for her, and doubtless for most of the spiritually considerable ecstatics, life was, taken all in all, indefinitely happier, richer, and more fruitful in religious truth and holiness, with the help of those ecstatic states, than it would have been if these states had been absent or could have been suppressed.
And thirdly, here again, even from the point of view of psycho-physical health and its protection, it is precisely the actual practice and, as interpreted by it, the deepest sayings of the standard Christian mystics which are being most powerfully confirmed,—although necessarily by largely new reasons and with important modifications in the analysis and application of their doctrine,—by all that we have gained, during the last forty years, in definite knowledge of the psycho-physical regions and functions of human nature, and, during two centuries and more, in enlargement and precision of our religious-historical outlook.
If we consider the specific health-dangers of this way, we shall find, I think, that their roots are ever two. These dangers, and with them the probability of delusion or at least of spiritual barrenness, always become actual, and often acute, the minute that we allow ourselves to attach a primary and independent importance to the psycho-physical form and means of these things, as against their spiritual-ethical content, suggestions, and end; or that we take the whole man, or at least the whole of the religious man, to consist of the specifically mystical habits and life alone. Now the first of these dangers has been ceaselessly exposed and fought by all the great ethical and Christian mystics of the past, e.g. St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa; and the latter has been ever enforced by the actual practice, as social religionists, of these same mystics, even if and when some of their sayings, or the logical drift of their speculative system, left insufficient room or no intrinsic necessity and function for such things.
(5) And everything that has happened and is happening in the world of psychological and philosophical research, in the world of historico-critical investigation into the past history and modalities of religion, and in the world of our own present religious experience and requirements, has but brought to light fresh facts, forces, and connections, in proof both of the right and irreplaceableness of the Mystical element in life and religion, and of the reality and constant presence of these its two dangers. For, as to these dangers, we now know, with extraordinary clearness and certainty, how necessary, constant and far-reaching is, on its phenomenal surface, the auto-suggestive, mono-ideistic power and mechanism of the mind; yet how easily, in some states, too much can be made of such vivid apprehensions and quasi-sensible imagings of invisible reality,—things admirable as means, ruinous as ends. And we also know, with an astonishing universality of application, how great a multiplicity in unity is necessarily presented by every concrete object and by every mental act and emotional state of every sane human being throughout every moment of his waking life; and how this unity is actually constituted and measured by the multiplicity of the materials and by the degree of their harmonization.—Hence, not the absence of the Mystical element, but the presence both of it and of the other constituents of religion, will turn out to be the safeguard of our deepest life and of its sanity, a sanity which demands a balanced fulness of the soul’s three fundamental pairs of activities: sensible perception and picturing memory; reflection, speculative and analytic; and emotion and volition, all issuing in interior and exterior acts, and these latter, again, providing so much fresh material and occasions for renewed action and for a growing unification in an increasing variety, on and on.
The metaphysical and faith questions, necessarily raised by the phenomenal facts and mechanisms here considered, but which cannot be answered at this level, will be discussed in a later chapter. Here we can but once more point out, in conclusion, that no amount of admitted or demonstrated auto-suggestion or mono-ideism in the phenomenal reaches and mechanism of the mind decides, of itself, anything whatsoever about, and still less against, the objective truth and spiritual value of the ultimate causes, dominant ideas, and final results of the process; nor as to whether and how far the whole great movement is, at bottom, occasioned and directed by the Supreme Spirit, God, working, in and through man, towards man’s apprehension and manifestation of Himself.[60]