3. The warfare against Evil. Pseudo-Mysticism.
The third of the relations between Mysticism and the conception and experience of Evil requires a further elucidation of an important distinction, which we have already found at work all along, more or less consciously, between the higher and the lower Mysticism, and their respective, profoundly divergent, tempers, objects, and range.
(1) Prof. Münsterberg discriminates between these two Mysticisms with a brilliant excessiveness, and ends by reserving the word “Mysticism” for the rejected kind alone. “As soon as we speak of psychical objects,—of ideas, feelings, and volitions,—as subject-matters of our direct consciousness and experience, we have put before ourselves an artificial product, a transformation, to which the categories of real life no longer apply.” In this artificial product causal connections have taken the place of final ends. But “History, Practical Life, … Morality, Religion have nothing to do with these psychological constructions; the categories of Psychology,” treated by Münsterberg himself as a Natural, Determinist Science, “must not intrude into their teleological domains. But if,” on the other hand, “the categories belonging to Reality,” which is Spiritual and Libertarian, “are forced on to the psychological system, a system which was framed” by our mind “in the interest of causal explanation, we get a cheap mixture, which satisfies neither the one aim nor the other. Just this is the effect of Mysticism. It is the personal, emotional view applied, not to the world of Reality, where it fits, but to the Physical and Psychological worlds, which are constructed by the human logical will, with a view to gaining an impersonal, unemotional causal system.… The ideals of Ethics and Religion … have now been projected into the atomistic structure” (of the Causal System), “and have thus become dependent upon this system’s nature; they find their right of existence limited to the regions where ignorance of Nature leaves blanks in the Causal System, and have to tremble at every advance which Science makes.” It is to this projection alone that Münsterberg would apply the term “Mysticism,” which thus becomes exclusively “the doctrine that the processes in the world of physical and psychical objects are not always subject to natural laws, but are influenced, at times, in a manner fundamentally inexplicable from the standpoint of the causal conception of Nature.… Yet, the special interest of the Mystic stands and falls here with his conviction that, in these extra-causal combinations,” thus operative right within and at the level of this causal system, “we have a” direct, demonstrable “manifestation of a positive system of quite another kind, a System of Values, a system dominated, not by Mechanism, but by Significance.”[363]
(2) Now we have been given here a doubtless excessively antithetic and dualistic picture of what, in actual life, is a close-knit variety in unity,—that interaction between, and anticipation of the whole in, the parts, and that indication of the later stages in the earlier,—which is so strikingly operative in the order and organization of the various constituents and stages of the processes and growth of the human mind and character, and which appears again in the Reality apprehended, reproduced, and enriched by man’s powers.
Even in the humblest of our Sense-perceptions, there is already a mind perceiving and a Mind perceived; and, in the most abstract and artificial of our intellectual constructions, there is not only a logical requirement, but also, underlying this requirement as this cause’s deepest cause, an ever-growing if unarticulated experience and sense that only by the closest contact with the most impersonal-seeming, impersonally conceived forces of life and nature, and by the deepest recollection within its own interior world of mind and will, can man’s soul adequately develop and keep alive, within itself, a solid degree and consciousness of Spirit, Free-will, Personality, Eternity, and God. Thus, in proportion as he comes more deeply to advance in the true occasions of his spirit’s growth, does man still further emphasize and differentiate these two levels: the shallower, spacial-temporal, mathematico-physical, quantitative and determinist aspect of reality and level of apprehension; and the deeper, alone at all adequate, experience of all the fuller degrees of Reality and effectuations of the spirit’s life, with their overlapping, interpenetrating Succession, (their Duration), and their Libertarianism, Interiority, and Sense of the Infinite. He thus emphasizes both levels, because the determinist level is found to be, though never the source or direct cause, yet ever a necessary awakener and purifier of the Libertarian level.
Strictly within the temporal-spacial, quantitative method and level, indeed, we can nowhere find Teleology; but if we look back upon these quantitative superficialities from the qualitative, durational and personal, spiritual level and standpoint, (which alone constitute our direct experience), we find that the quantitative, causal level and method is everywhere inadequate to exhaust or rightly to picture Reality, in exact proportion to this reality’s degree of fulness and of worth. From the simplest Vegetable-Cell up to Orchids and Insectivorous Plants; from these on to Protozoans and up, through Insects, Reptiles, and Birds, to the most intelligent of Domestic Animals; from these on to Man, the Savage, and up to the most cultured or saintly of human personalities: we have everywhere, and increasingly, an inside, an organism, a subject as well as object,—a series which is, probably from the first, endowed with some kind of dim consciousness, and which increasingly possessed of a more and more definite consciousness, culminates in the full self-consciousness of the most fully human man. And everywhere here, though in indefinitely increasing measure, it is the individualizing and historical, the organic and soul-conceptions and experiences which constitute the most characteristic and important truths and reality about and in these beings. For the higher up we get in this scale of Reality, the more does the Interior determine and express itself in the Exterior, and the more does not only kind differ from kind of being, but even the single individual from the other individuals within each several kind. And yet nowhere, not even in free-willing, most individualized, personal Man do we find the quantitative, determinist envelope simply torn asunder and revealing the qualitative, libertarian spirit perfectly naked and directly testable by chronometer, measuring-rod, or crucible. The spirit is thus ever like unto a gloved hand, which, let it move ever so spontaneously, will ever, in the first instance, present the five senses with a glove which, to their exclusive tests, appears as but dead and motionless leather.
(3) Now we have already in Chapter IX studied the contrasting attitudes of Catherine and her attendants towards one class of such effects,—those attributed to the Divine Spirit,—and hence, in principle, towards this whole question. Yet it is in the matter of phenomena, taken to be directly Diabolic or Preternatural, that a Pseudo-Mysticism has been specially fruitful in strangely materialistic fantasies. As late as 1774 the Institutiones Theologiae Mysticae of Dom Schram, O.S.B., a book which even yet enjoys considerable authority, still solemnly described, as so many facts, cases of Diabolical Incubi and Succubae. Even in 1836-1842 the layman Joseph Görres could still devote a full half of his widely influential Mystik to “Diabolical Mysticism,”—witchcraft, etc.; a large space to “Natural Mysticism,”—divination, lycanthropy, vampires, etc.; and a considerable part of the “Divine Mysticism,” to various directly miraculous phenomenalisms. The Abbé Ribet could still, in his La Mystique Divine, distinguée de ses Contrefaçons Diaboliques, of 1895, give us a similarly uncritical mixture and transposition of tests and levels. But the terrible ravages of the belief in witchcraft in the later Middle Ages, and, only a few years back, the humiliating fraud and craze concerning “Diana Vaughan,” are alone abundantly sufficient to warn believers in the positive character of Evil away from all, solidly avoidable, approaches to such dangerous forms of this belief.[364]
(4) Yet the higher and highest Mystical attitude has never ceased to find its fullest, most penetrating expression in the life and teaching of devoted children of the Roman Church,—several of whom have been proclaimed Doctors and Models by that Church herself. And by a conjunction of four characteristics these great normative lives and teachers still point the way, out of and beyond all false or sickly Mysticism, on to the wholesome and the true.
(i) There is, first, the grand trust in and love of God’s beautiful, wide world, and in and of the manifold truth and goodness present throughout life,—realities which we have already found rightly to be dwelt on, in certain recollective movements and moments, to the momentary exclusion of their positively operative, yet ever weaker, opposites. “Well I wote,” says Mother Juliana, “that heaven and earth, and all that is made, is great, large, fair and good”; “the full-head of joy is to behold God in all,” and “truly to enjoy in Our Lord, is a full lovely thanking in His sight.”[365] This completely un-Manichaean attitude,—so Christian when held as the ultimate among the divers, sad and joyful, strenuous and contemplative moods of the soul,—is as strongly present in Clement of Alexandria, in the Sts. Catherine of Siena and of Genoa, in St. John of the Cross, and indeed in the recollective moments of all the great Mystics.
(ii) There is, next, a strong insistence upon the soul having to transcend all particular lights and impressions, in precise proportion to their apparently extraordinary character, if it would become strong and truly spiritual. “He that will rely on the letter of the divine locution, or on the intellectual form of the vision, will necessarily fall into delusion. ‘The letter killeth, the spirit quickeneth’; we must therefore reject the literal sense, and abide in the obscurity of faith.” “One desire only doth God allow in His presence, that of perfectly observing His law and carrying the Cross of Christ.… That soul, which has no other aim, will be a true ark containing the true Manna, which is God.” “One act of the will, wrought in charity, is more precious in the eyes of God, than that which all the visions and revelations of heaven might effect.” “Let men cease to regard these supernatural apprehensions … that they may be free.”[366] Here the essence of the doctrine lies in the importance attached to this transcendence, and not in the particular views of the Saint concerning the character of this or that miraculous-seeming phenomenon to be transcended.