‘Yes!’ exclaims some critic, ‘this Ground, of which we hear so much, which the mystics so labour to describe, what is it, after all?’ Let Tauler answer. He here calls it ‘the very centre of man’s being’—‘the unseen depths of his spirit, wherein lies the image of God.’ I believe that he means to indicate by these and other names that element in our nature by virtue whereof we are moral agents, wherein lies that idea of a right and a wrong which finds expression (though not always adequate) in the verdicts of conscience—that Synderesis (to use an Aristotelian word) of which the Syneidesis is the particular action and voice—that part of our finite nature which borders on the infinite—that gate through which God enters to dwell with man. Nor is the belief in such a principle by any means peculiar to the mystics; men at the farthest remove, by temperament and education, from mysticism, are yet generally found ready to admit that we can only approach a solution of our great difficulties concerning predestination and free will, by supposing that there is a depth in our nature where the divine and human are one. This is Tauler’s spark and potential divinity of man—that face of man’s soul wherein God shineth always, whether the man be aware thereof or not. This, to speak Platonically, is the ideal part of man—that part of him whereby, as a creature, he participates in the Word by whose thought and will all creatures exist. It is the unlost and inalienable nobleness of man—that from which, as Pascal says, his misery as well as his glory proceeds—that which, according to Tauler, must exist even in hell, and be converted into the sorrow there. The Christian Platonist expresses his conception of the consummated redemption of man by saying that he is restored to his original idea—becomes what he was designed to be before sin marred him—puts off the actual sinful self, and puts on the truer primal self which exists only in God. In this sense Eckart says, ‘I shall be sorry if I am not younger to-morrow than I am to-day—that is, a step nearer to the source whence I came’—away from this Eckart to the Divine Idea of man.
Such, then, is this Ground. Next, how is the lapse, or transit into it, effected? Tauler reminds us that many men live as though God were not in this way nearer to them than they are to themselves. They possess inevitably this image—this immediate receptivity of God, but they never think of their prerogative, never seek Him in whom they live and move. Such men live in the outside of themselves—in the sensuous or intellectual nature; but never lift the curtain behind which are the rays of the Shekinah. It will profit me nothing, says Tauler, to be a king, if I know it not. So the soul must break away from outward things, from passion and self, and in abandonment and nothingness seek God immediately. When God is truly found, then indeed the simplified, self-annihilated soul, is passive. But the way thereto, what action it demands, what strong crying and tears, what trampling out of subtle, seemly, darling sins!
First of all, the senses must be mastered by, and absorbed in, the powers of the soul. Then must these very powers themselves—all reasonings, willings, hopings, fearings, be absorbed in a simple sense of the Divine presence—a sense so still, so blissful, as to annihilate before and after, obliterate self, and sink the soul in a Love, whose height and depth, and length and breadth, passing knowledge, shall fill it with all the fulness of God.
‘What!’ it may be said, ‘and is this death—not of sin merely, but of nature—the demand of your mysticism? Is all peace hollow which is not an utter passivity—without knowledge, without will, without desire—a total blank?’
Not altogether so, the mystic will reply. These powers of the soul must cease to act, in as far as they belong to self; but they are not destroyed: their absorption in the higher part of our nature is in one sense a death; in another, their truest life. They die; but they live anew, animated by a principle of life that comes directly from the Father of lights, and from the Light who is the life of men. That in them which is fit to live, survives. Still are they of use in this lower world, and still to be employed in manifold service; but, shall I say it? they are no longer quite the same powers. They are, as it were, the glorified spirits of those powers. They are risen ones. They are in this world, but not of it. Their life has passed into the life which, by slaying, has preserved and exalted them. So have I heard of a nightingale, challenged by a musician with his lute; and when all nature’s skill was vain to rival the swift and doubling and redoubling mazes and harmonies of mortal science, the bird, heart-broken, dropt dead on the victorious lute;—and yet, not truly dead, for the spirit of music which throbbed in that melodious throat had now passed into the lute; and ever afterward breathed into its tones a wild sweetness such as never Thessalian valley heard before—the consummate blending of the woodland witchery with the finished height of art.
‘You see,’ our mystic continues—and let us hear him, for he has somewhat more to say, and to the purpose, as it seems—‘you see that we are no enemies to the symbol and the figure in their proper place, any more than we are to the arguments of reason. But there are three considerations which I and my brethren would entreat you to entertain. First of all, that logical distinctions, and all forms of imagery, must of necessity be transcended when we contemplate directly that Being who is above time and space, before and after,—the universal Presence,—the dweller in the everlasting Now. In the highest states of the soul, when she is concentrated on that part of her which links her with the infinite, when she clings most immediately to the Father of spirits, all the slow technicalities, and the processes and the imaginations of the lower powers, must inevitably be forgotten. Have you never known times when, quite apart from any particular religious means, your soul has been filled, past utterance, with a sense of the divine presence,—when emotion has overflowed all reasoning and all words, and a certain serene amazement—a silent gaze of wonder—has taken the place of all conclusions and conceptions? Some interruption came, or some reflex act dissolved the spell of glory and recalled you to yourself, but could not rob you of your blessing. There remained a divine tranquillity, in the strength whereof your heaviest trouble had grown lighter than the grasshopper, and your hardest duty seemed as a cloud before the winds of the morning. In that hour, your soul could find no language; but looking back upon it, you think if that unutterable longing and unutterable rest could have found speech, it would have been in words such as these—“Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.”
‘Then again, we would have you consider that the mere conclusions of the intellect, the handiwork of imagination, the effervescence of sentiment, yea, sensible delight in certain religious exercises—all these things, though religion’s hand-maidens, are not religion herself. Sometimes they are delusive; always are they dangerous, if they, rather than God, become in any way our dependence. If the heart—the central fount of life’s issues—be not God’s, what avail the admitted propositions, and touching pictures, and wafts of sweetness—the mere furniture, adornment, and incense, of the outer courts of thy nature? Christ in thy soul, and not the truth about Him in thy brain, is thy life’s life; and his agony of love must pierce thee somewhat deeper than the pathos of a tragedy. There are those who live complacently on the facilities and enjoyments they have in certain practices of devotion, when all the while it is rather they themselves, as thus devout, and not their Lord, whom they love. Some such are not yet Christians at all. Others, who are, have yet to learn that those emotions they set such store by, belong, most of them, to the earliest and lowest stages of the Christian life. The lotus-flowers are not the Nile. There are those who violently excite the imagination and the feeling by long gazing on the crucifix—by picturing the torments of martyrs—by performing repeated acts of Contrition,—by trying to wish to appropriate to themselves, for Christ’s sake, all the sufferings of all mankind—by praying for a love above that of all seraphim, and do often, in wrestling after such extraordinary gifts, and harrowing their souls with such sensuous horrors, work out a mere passion of the lower nature, followed by melancholy collapse, and found pitiably wanting in the hour of trial.[[128]] In these states does it oftenest happen that the phantoms of imagination are mistaken for celestial manifestations; and forms which belong to middle air, for shiny ones from the third heaven. I have been told that astronomers have sometimes seen in the field of their glass, floating globes of light—as it seemed, new planets swimming within their ken; and these were but flying specks of dust, hovering in the air; but magnified and made luminous by the lenses through which they looked, and by the reflection of the light. The eye of the mind may be visited by similar illusions. I counsel all, therefore, that they ask only for grace sufficient against present evil, and covet not great things, but be content with such measures of assurance and sensible delight as God shall think safe for them; and that, above all, they look not at His gifts in themselves, but out of themselves, to Him, the Giver.
‘The third consideration I have to urge, in justification of precepts which appear to you unnatural, is this:—there are certain trials and desolations of soul, to which the best are exposed, wherein all subordinate acts are impossible; and then happy is he who has never exalted such helps above their due place. I scarcely know how to make myself understood to any save those who have been at some time on the edge, at least, of those unfathomable abysses. Good men of prosperous and active life may scarcely know them. Few who have lived much in retirement, with temperament meditative, and perhaps melancholy, have altogether escaped. There are times when, it may be that some great sorrow has torn the mind away from its familiar supports, and laid level those defences which in prosperity seemed so stable—when the most rooted convictions of the reason seem rottenness, and the blossom of our heavenward imaginations goes up before that blast as dust—when our works and joys and hopes, with all their multitude and pomp and glory, seem to go down together into the pit, and the soul is left as a garden that hath no water, and as a wandering bird cast out of the nest—when, instead of our pleasant pictures, we have about us only doleful creatures among ruins—when a spirit of judgment and a spirit of burning seem to visit the city of the heart, and in that day of trouble and of treading down and of perplexity, the noise of viols, and the mirth of the tabret, and the joy of the harp, are silent as the grave. Now, I say, blessed is the man who, when cast into this utter wretchedness, far away from all creatures and from all comfort, can yet be willing, amidst all his tears and anguish, there to remain as long as God shall please—who seeks help from no creature—who utters his complaint to the ear of God alone—who still, with ever-strengthening trust, is ready to endure till self shall have been purged out by the fires of that fathomless annihilation—who, crying out of the depths, while the Spirit maketh intercession within him with groanings that cannot be uttered, shall presently be delivered when the right time hath come, and rejoice in that glorious liberty of the children of God, wherein they are nothing and He is all!’
Now, somewhat thus, I think, would that class of mystics whom Tauler represents, reply to the very natural objections urged by many in our times. Nor does such reply, so far, seem to me either unsatisfactory in itself, or in any way contrary to Scripture. It is with the aim, and under the qualifications, I have endeavoured to set forth, that these mystics would refuge the soul in a height above reasonings, outward means and methods, in a serenity and an abstraction wherein the subtlest distinctions and most delicate imaginations would seem too gross and sensuous—where (as in Endymion’s ecstasy)
‘Essences