IV
But granting that it is truth-telling and has objective reference, is the mystic justified in claiming that he has found and knows God? One does not need to be a very wide and extensive student of mystical experience to discover what a meager stock of knowledge the genuine mystic reports. William James’ remarkable experience in the Adirondack woods very well illustrates the type. It had, he says, “an intense significance of some sort, if one could only tell the significance.... In point of fact, I can’t find a single word for all that significance and don’t know what it was significant of, so that it remains a mere boulder of impression.”[7] At a later date James refers to that “extraordinary vivacity of man’s psychological commerce with something Ideal that feels as if it were also actual.”[8] The greatest of all the fourteenth century mystics, Meister Eckhart, could not put his impression into words or ideas. What he found was a “wilderness of the Godhead where no one is at home,” i.e., an Object with no particular differentiated, concrete characteristics. It was not an accident that so many of the mystics hit upon the via negativa, the way of negation, or that they called their discovery “the divine Dark.”
“Whatever your mind comes at
I tell you flat
God is not that.”
Mystical experience does not supply concrete information. It does not bring new finite facts, new items that can be used in a description of “the scenery and circumstance” of the realm beyond our sense horizons. It is the awareness of a Presence, the consciousness of a Beyond, the discovery, as James puts it, that “we are continuous with a More of the same quality, which is operative in us and in touch with us.”
The most striking effect of such experience is not new fact-knowledge, not new items of empirical information, but new moral energy, heightened conviction, increased caloric quality, enlarged spiritual vision, an unusual radiant power of life. In short, the whole personality, in the case of the constructive mystics, appears to be raised to a new level of life and to have gained from somewhere many calories of life-feeding, spiritual substance. We are quite familiar with the way in which adrenalin suddenly flushes into the physical system and adds a new and incalculable power to brain and muscle. Under its stimulus a man can carry out a piano when the house is on fire. May not, perhaps, some energy from some Source with which our spirits are allied flush our inner being with forces and powers by which we can be fortified to stand the universe and more than stand it! “We are more than conquerors through Him that loved us,” is the way one of the world’s greatest mystics felt.
Mystical experience—and we must remember as Santayana has said, that “experience is like a shrapnel shell and bursts into a thousand meanings”—does at least one thing. It makes God sure to the person who has had the experience. It raises faith and conviction to the nth power. “The God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shined into my heart to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God,” is St. Paul’s testimony. “I knew God by revelation,” declares George Fox. “I was as one who hath the key and doth open.” “The man who has attained this felicity,” Plotinus says, “meets some turn of fortune that he would not have chosen, but there is not the slightest lessening of his happiness for that” (En. I: iv. 7). But this experience, with its overwhelming conviction and its dynamic effect, can not be put into the common coin of speech. Frederic Myers has well expressed the difficulty:
“Oh could I tell ye surely would believe it!