The Essentials of Mysticism

The essays collected in this volume have been written during the past eight years. They deal with various aspects of the subject of mysticism: the first half-dozen with its general theory and practice, and special points arising within it; the rest with its application as seen in the lives and works of the mystics, from the pagan Plotinus to the Christian contemplatives of our own day. Most of them have already appeared elsewhere, though all have been revised and several completely re-written for the purposes of this book. “The Essentials of Mysticism” and “The Mystic as Creative Artist” were first printed in The Quest; “The Mystic and the Corporate Life,” “Mysticism and the Doctrine of Atonement,” and “The Place of Will, Intellect, and Feeling in Prayer” in The Interpreter; “The Education of the Spirit” in The Parents’ Review; “The Mysticism of Plotinus” in The Quarterly Review; “The Mirror of Simple Souls” and “Sœur Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus” (under the title of “A Modern Saint”) in The Fortnightly Review; “The Blessed Angela of Foligno” in Franciscan Essays; “Julian of Norwich” in The St. Martin’s Review; and “Charles Péguy” in The Contemporary Review. All these are now republished by kind permission of the editors concerned.

E. U.

August 1920.

THE ESSENTIALS OF MYSTICISM

What are the true essentials of mysticism? When we have stripped off those features which some mystics accept and some reject—all that is merely due to tradition, temperament or unconscious allegorism—what do we find as the necessary and abiding character of all true mystical experience? This question is really worth asking. For some time much attention has been given to the historical side of mysticism, and some—much less—to its practice. But there has been no clear understanding of the difference between its substance and its accidents: between traditional forms and methods, and the eternal experience which they have mediated. In mystical literature words are frequently confused with things, and symbols with realities; so that much of this literature seems to the reader to refer to some self-consistent and exclusive dream-world, and not to the achievement of universal truth. Thus the strong need for re-statement which is being felt by institutional religion, the necessity of re-translating its truths into symbolism which modern men can understand and accept, applies with at least equal force to mysticism. It has become important to disentangle the facts from ancient formulæ used to express them. These formulæ have value, because they are genuine attempts to express truth; but they are not themselves that truth, and failure to recognize this distinction has caused a good deal of misunderstanding. Thus, on its philosophic and theological side, the mysticism of western Europe is tightly entwined with the patristic and mediæval presentation of Christianity; and this presentation, though full of noble poetry, is now difficult if not impossible to adjust to our conceptions of the Universe. Again, on its personal side mysticism is a department of psychology. Now psychology is changing under our eyes; already we see our mental life in a new perspective, tend to describe it under new forms. Our ways of describing and interpreting spiritual experience must change with the rest, if we are to keep in touch with reality; though the experience itself be unchanged.

So we are forced to ask ourselves, what is the essential element in spiritual experience? Which of the many states and revelations described by the mystics are integral parts of it; and what do these states and degrees come to, when we describe them in the current phraseology and strip off the monastic robes in which they are usually dressed? What elements are due to the suggestions of tradition, to conscious or unconscious symbolism, to the misinterpretation of emotion, to the invasion of cravings from the lower centres, or the disguised fulfilment of an unconscious wish? And when all these channels of illusion have been blocked, what is left? This will be a difficult and often a painful enquiry. But it is an enquiry which ought to be faced by all who believe in the validity of man’s spiritual experience; in order that their faith may be established on a firm basis, and disentangled from those unreal and impermanent elements which are certainly destined to destruction, and with which it is at present too often confused. I am sure that at the present moment we serve best the highest interests of the soul by subjecting the whole mass of material which is called “mysticism” to an inexorable criticism. Only by inflicting the faithful wounds of a friend can we save the science of the inner life from mutilation at the hands of the psychologists.

We will begin, then, with the central fact of the mystic’s experience. This central fact, it seems to me, is an overwhelming consciousness of God and of his own soul: a consciousness which absorbs or eclipses all other centres of interest. It is said that St. Francis of Assisi, praying in the house of Bernard of Quintavalle, was heard to say again and again: “My God! my God! what art Thou? and what am I?” Though the words come from St. Augustine, they well represent his mental attitude. This was the only question which he thought worth asking; and it is the question which every mystic asks at the beginning and sometimes answers at the end of his quest. Hence we must put first among our essentials the clear conviction of a living God as the primary interest of consciousness, and of a personal self capable of communion with Him. Having said this, however, we may allow that the widest latitude is possible in the mystic’s conception of his Deity. At best this conception will be symbolic; his experience, if genuine, will far transcend the symbols he employs. “God,” says the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, “may well be loved but not thought.” Credal forms, therefore, can only be for the mystic a scaffold by which he ascends. We are even bound, I think, to confess that the overt recognition of that which orthodox Christians generally mean by a personal God is not essential. On the contrary, where it takes a crudely anthropomorphic form, the idea of personality may be a disadvantage; opening the way for the intrusion of disguised emotions and desires. In the highest experiences of the greatest mystics the personal category appears to be transcended. “The light in the soul which is increate,” says Eckhart, “is not satisfied with the three Persons, in so far as each subsists in its difference ... but it is determined to know whence this Being comes, to penetrate into the Simple Ground, into the Silent Desert within which never any difference has lain.” The all-inclusive One is beyond all partial apprehensions, though the true values which those apprehensions represent are conserved in it. However pantheistic the mystic may be on the one hand, however absolutist on the other, his communion with God is always personal in this sense: that it is communion with a living Reality, an object of love, capable of response, which demands and receives from him a total self-donation. This sense of a double movement, a self-giving on the divine side answering to the self-giving on the human side, is found in all great mysticism. It has, of course, lent itself to emotional exaggeration, but in its pure form seems an integral part of man’s apprehension of Reality. Even where it conflicts with the mystic’s philosophy—as in Hinduism and Neoplatonism—it is still present. It is curious to note, for instance, how Plotinus, after safeguarding his Absolute One from every qualification, excluding it from all categories, defining it only by the icy method of negation, suddenly breaks away into the language of ardent feeling when he comes to describe that ecstasy in which he touched the truth. Then he speaks of “the veritable love, the sharp desire” which possessed him, appealing to the experience of those fellow mystics who have “caught fire, and found the splendour there.” These, he says, have “felt burning within themselves the flame of love for what is there to know—the passion of the lover resting on the bosom of his love.”

So we may say that the particular mental image which the mystic forms of his objective, the traditional theology he accepts, is not essential. Since it is never adequate, the degree of its inadequacy is of secondary importance. Though some creeds have proved more helpful to the mystic than others, he is found fully developed in every great religion. We cannot honestly say that there is any wide difference between the Brahman, Sūfi, or Christian mystic at their best. They are far more like each other than they are like the average believer in their several creeds. What is essential is the way the mystic feels about his Deity, and about his own relation with it; for this adoring and all-possessing consciousness of the rich and complete divine life over against the self’s life, and of the possible achievement of a level of being, a sublimation of the self, wherein we are perfectly united with it, may fairly be written down as a necessary element of all mystical life. This is the common factor which unites those apparently incompatible views of the Universe which have been claimed at one time or another as mystical. Their mystical quality abides wholly in the temper of the self who adopts them. He may be a transcendentalist; but if so, it is because his intuition of the divine is so lofty that it cannot be expressed by means of any intellectual concept, and he is bound to say with Ruysbroeck, “He is neither This nor That.” He may be a unanimist; but if he is, it is because he finds in other men—more, in the whole web of life—that mysterious living essence which is a mode of God’s existence, and which he loves, seeks and recognizes everywhere. “How shall I find words for the beauty of my Beloved? For He is merged in all beauty,” says Kabir, “His colour is in all the pictures of the world, and it bewitches the body and the mind.” He may be—often is—a sacramentalist; but if so, only because the symbol or the sacrament help him to touch God. So St. Thomas:

“Adoro te devote, latens Deitas,

Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas.”

The moment the mystic suspects that any of these things are obstacles instead of means, he rejects them; to the scandal of those who habitually confuse the image with the reality.

Thus we get the temperamental symbolist, quietist, nature-mystic, or transcendentalist. We get Plotinus rapt to the “bare pure One”; St. Augustine’s impassioned communion with Perfect Beauty; Eckhart declaring his achievement of the “wilderness of God”; Jacopone da Todi prostrate in adoration before the “Love that gives all things form”; Ruysbroeck describing his achievement of “that wayless abyss of fathomless beatitude where the Trinity of divine persons possess their nature in the essential Unity;” Jacob Boehme gazing into the fire-world and there finding the living heart of the Universe; Kabir listening to the rhythmic music of Reality, and seeing the worlds told like beads within the Being of God. And at the opposite pole we find Mechthild of Madgeburg’s amorous conversations with her “heavenly Bridegroom,” the many mystical experiences connected with the Eucharist, the Sūfi’s enraptured description of God as the “Matchless Chalice and the Sovereign Wine,” the narrow intensity and emotional raptures of contemplatives of the type of Richard Rolle. We cannot refuse the title of mystic to any of these; because in every case their aim is union between God and the soul. This is the one essential of mysticism, and there are as many ways from one term to the other as there are variations in the spirit of man. But, on the other hand, when anybody speaking of mysticism proposes an object that is less than God—increase of knowledge, of health, of happiness, occultism, intercourse with spirits, supernormal experience in general—then we may begin to suspect that we are off the track.

Now we come to the next group of essentials: the necessary acts and dispositions of the mystic himself, the development which takes place in him—the psychological facts, that is to say, which are represented by the so-called “mystic way.” The mystic way is best understood as a process of sublimation, which carries the correspondences of the self with the Universe up to higher levels than those on which our normal consciousness works. Just as the normal consciousness stands over against the unconscious, which, with its buried impulses and its primitive and infantile cravings, represents a cruder reaction of the organism to the external world; so does the developed mystical life stand over against normal consciousness, with its preoccupations and its web of illusions encouraging the animal will-to-dominate and animal will-to-live. Normal consciousness sorts out some elements from the mass of experiences beating at our doors and constructs from them a certain order; but this order lacks any deep meaning or true cohesion, because normal consciousness is incapable of apprehending the underlying reality from which these scattered experiences proceed. The claim of the mystical consciousness is to a closer reading of truth; to an apprehension of the divine unifying principle behind appearance. “The One,” says Plotinus, “is present everywhere and absent only from those unable to perceive it”; and when we do perceive it we “have another life ... attaining the aim of our existence, and our rest.” To know this at first hand—not to guess, believe or accept, but to be certain—is the highest achievement of human consciousness, and the ultimate object of mysticism. How is it done?

There are two ways of attacking this problem which may conceivably help us. The first consists in a comparison of the declarations of different mystics, and a sorting out of those elements which they have in common: a careful watch being kept, of course, for the results of conscious or unconscious imitation, of tradition and of theological preconceptions. In this way we get some first-hand evidence of factors which are at any rate usually present, and may possibly be essential. The second line of enquiry consists in a re-translation into psychological terms of these mystical declarations; when many will reveal the relation in which they stand to the psychic life of man.

Reviewing the first-hand declarations of the mystics, we inevitably notice one prominent feature: the frequency with which they break up their experience into three phases. Sometimes they regard these objectively, and speak of three worlds or three aspects of God of which they become successively aware. Sometimes they regard them subjectively, and speak of three stages of growth through which they pass, such as those of Beginner, Proficient, and Perfect; or of phases of spiritual progress in which we first meditate upon reality, then contemplate reality, and at last are united with reality. But among the most widely separated mystics of the East and West this threefold experience can nearly always be traced. There are, of course, obvious dangers in attaching absolute value to number-schemes of this kind. Numbers have an uncanny power over the human mind; once let a symbolic character be attributed to them, and the temptation to make them fit the facts at all costs becomes overwhelming. We all know that the number “three” has a long religious history, and are therefore inclined to look with suspicion on its claim to interpret the mystic life. At the same time there are other significant numbers—such as “seven” and “ten”—which have never gained equal currency as the bases of mystical formulæ. We may agree that the mediæval mystics found the threefold division of spiritual experience in Neoplatonism; but we must also agree that a formula of this kind is not likely to survive for nearly 2000 years unless it agrees with the facts. Those who use it with the greatest conviction are not theorists. They are the practical mystics, who are intent on making maps of the regions into which they have penetrated.

Moreover, this is no mere question of handing on one single tradition. The mystics describe their movement from appearance to reality in many different ways, and use many incompatible religious symbols. The one constant factor is the discrimination of three phases of consciousness, no more, no less, in which we can recognize certain common characteristics. “There are,” says Philo, “three kinds of life: life as it concerns God, life as it concerns the creature, and a third intermediate life, a mixture of the former two.” Consistently with this, Plotinus speaks of three descending phases or principles of Divine Reality: the Godhead, or absolute and unconditioned One; its manifestation as Nous, the Divine Mind or Spirit which inspires the “intelligible” and eternal world; and Psyche, the Life or Soul of the physical Universe. Man, normally in correspondence with this physical world of succession and change, may by spiritual intuition achieve first consciousness of the eternal world of spiritual values, in which indeed the apex of his soul already dwells; and in brief moments of ecstatic vision may rise above this to communion with its source, the Absolute One. There you have the mystic’s vision of the Universe, and the mystic’s way of purification, enlightenment and ecstasy, bringing new and deeper knowledge of reality as the self’s interest, urged by its loving desire of the Ultimate, is shifted from sense to soul, from soul to spirit. There is here no harsh dualism, no turning from a bad material world to a good spiritual world. We are invited to one gradual undivided process of sublimation, penetrating ever more deeply into the reality of the Universe, to find at last “that One who is present everywhere and absent only from those who do not perceive Him.” What we behold, that we are: citizens, according to our own will and desire, of the surface world of the senses, the deeper world of life, or the ultimate world of Spiritual reality.

An almost identical doctrine appears in the Upanishads. At the heart of reality is Brahma, “other than the known, and above the unknown.” His manifestation is Ananda, that spiritual world which is the true object of æsthetic passion and religious contemplation. From its life and consciousness are born, in it they have their being, to it they must return. Finally, there is the world-process as we know it, which represents Ananda taking form. So too the mystic Kabir, who represents an opposition to the Vedantic philosophy, says: “From beyond the Infinite the Infinite comes, and from the Infinite the finite extends.” And again: “Some contemplate the formless and others meditate on form, but the wise man knows that Brahma is beyond both.” Here we have the finite world of becoming, the infinite world of being, and Brahma, the Unconditioned Absolute, exceeding and including all. Yet, as Kabir distinctly declares again and again, there are no fences between these aspects of the Universe. When we come to the root of reality we find that “Conditioned and Unconditioned are but one word”; the difference is in our own degree of awareness.

Compare with this three of the great mediæval Catholic mystics: that acute psychologist Richard of St. Victor, the ardent poet and contemplative Jacopone da Todi, and the profound Ruysbroeck. Richard of St. Victor says that there are three phases in the contemplative consciousness. The first is called dilation of mind, enlarging and deepening our vision of the world. The next is elevation of mind, in which we behold the realities which are above ourselves. The third is ecstasy, in which the mind is carried up to contact with truth in its pure simplicity. This is really the universe of Plotinus translated into subjective terms. So, too, Jacopone da Todi says in the symbolism of his day that three heavens are open to man. He must climb from one to the other; it is hard work, but love and longing press him on. First, when the mind has achieved self-conquest, the “starry heaven” of multiplicity is revealed to it. Its darkness is lit by scattered lights; points of reality pierce the sky. Next, it achieves the “crystalline heaven” of lucid contemplation, where the soul is conformed to the rhythm of the divine life, and by its loving intuition apprehends God under veils. Lastly, in ecstasy it may be lifted to that ineffable state which he calls the “hidden heaven,” where it enjoys a vision of imageless reality and “enters into possession of all that is God.” Ruysbroeck says that he has experienced three orders of reality: the natural world, theatre of our moral struggle; the essential world, where God and Eternity are indeed known, but by intermediaries; and the super-essential world, where without intermediary, and beyond all separation, “above reason and without reason,” the soul is united to “the glorious and absolute One.”

Take, again, a totally different mystic, Jacob Boehme. He says that he saw in the Divine Essence three principles or aspects. The first he calls “the deepest Deity, without and beyond Nature,” and the next its manifestation in the Eternal Light-world. The third is that outer world in which we dwell according to the body, which is a manifestation, image or similitude of the Eternal. “And we are thus,” he says, “to understand reality as a threefold being, or three worlds in one another.” We observe again the absence of water-tight compartments. The whole of reality is present in every part of it; and the power of correspondence with all these aspects of it is latent in man. “If one sees a right man,” says Boehme again, “he may say, I see here three worlds standing.”

We have now to distinguish the essential element in all this. How does it correspond with psychological facts? Some mystics, like Richard of St. Victor, have frankly exhibited its subjective side and so helped us to translate the statements of their fellows. Thus Dionysius the Areopagite says in a celebrated passage: “Threefold is the way to God. The first is the way of purification, in which the mind is inclined to learn true wisdom. The second is the way of illumination, in which the mind by contemplation is kindled to the burning of love. The third is the way of union, in which the mind by understanding, reason and spirit is led up by God alone.” This formula restates the Plotinian law; for the “contemplation” of Dionysius is the “spiritual intuition” of Plotinus, which inducts man into the intelligible world; his “union” is the Plotinian ecstatic vision of the One. It profoundly impressed the later Christian mystics, and has long been accepted as the classic description of spiritual growth, because it has been found again and again to answer to experience. It is therefore worth our while to examine it with some care.

First we notice how gentle, gradual and natural is the process of sublimation that Dionysius demands of us. According to him, the mystic life is a life centred on reality: the life that first seeks reality without flinching, then loves and adores the reality perceived, and at last, wholly surrendered to it, is “led by God alone.” First, the self is “inclined to learn true wisdom.” It awakes to new needs, is cured of its belief in sham values, and distinguishes between real and unreal objects of desire. That craving for more life and more love which lies at the very heart of our selfhood, here slips from the charmed circle of the senses into a wider air. When this happens abruptly it is called “conversion”; and may then have the character of a psychic convulsion and be accompanied by various secondary psychological phenomena. But often it comes without observation. Here the essentials are a desire and a disillusionment sufficiently strong to overcome our natural sloth, our primitive horror of change. “The first beginning of all things is a craving,” says Boehme; “we are creatures of will and desire.” The divine discontent, the hunger for reality, the unwillingness to be satisfied with the purely animal or the purely social level of consciousness, is the first essential stage in the development of the mystical consciousness.

So the self is either suddenly or gradually inclined to “true wisdom”; and this change of angle affects the whole character, not only or indeed specially the intellectual outlook, but the ethical outlook too. This is the meaning of “purgation.” False ways of feeling and thinking, established complexes which have acquired for us an almost sacred character, and governed though we knew it not all our reactions to life—these must be broken up. That mental and moral sloth which keeps us so comfortably wrapped in unrealities must go. This phase in the mystic’s growth has been specially emphasized and worked out by the Christian mystics, who have made considerable additions to the philosophy and natural history of the soul. The Christian sense of sin and conception of charity, the Christian notion of humility as a finding of our true level, an exchanging of the unreal standards of egoism for the disconcerting realities of life seen from the angle of Eternity; the steadfast refusal to tolerate any claim to spirituality which is not solidly based on moral values, or which is divorced from the spirit of tenderness and love—all this has immensely enriched the mysticism of the West, and filled up some of the gaps left by Neoplatonism. It is characteristic of Christianity that, addressing itself to all men—not, as Neoplatonism tended to do, to the superior person—and offering to all men participation in Eternal Life, it takes human nature as it is; and works from the bottom up, instead of beginning at a level which only a few of the race attain. Christianity perceived how deeply normal men are enslaved by the unconscious; how great a moral struggle is needed for their emancipation. Hence it concentrated on the first stage of purgation, and gave it new meaning and depth. The monastic rule of poverty, chastity and obedience—and we must remember that the original aim of monasticism was to provide a setting in which the mystical life could be lived—aims at the removal of those self-centred desires and attachments which chain consciousness to a personal instead of a universal life. He who no longer craves for personal possessions, pleasures or powers, is very near to perfect liberty. His attention is freed from its usual concentration on the self’s immediate interests, and at once he sees the Universe in a new, more valid, because disinterested light.

“Povertate è nulla avere

e nulla cosa poi volere

ed omne cosa possedere

en spirito de libertade.”

Yet this positive moral purity which Christians declared necessary to the spiritual life was not centred on a lofty aloofness from human failings, but on a self-giving and disinterested love, the complete abolition of egoism. This alone, it declared, could get rid of that inward disharmony—one aspect of the universal conflict between the instinctive and the rational life—which Boehme called the “powerful contrarium” warring with the soul.

Now this “perfect charity in life surrendered,” however attained, is an essential character of the true mystic; without it, contemplation is an impossibility or a sham. But when we come to the means by which it is to be attained, we re-enter the region of controversy; for here we are at once confronted by the problem of asceticism, and its connection with mysticism—perhaps the largest and most difficult of the questions now facing those who are concerned with the re-statement of the laws of the spiritual life. Originally regarded as a gymnastic of the soul, an education in those manly virtues of self-denial and endurance without which the spiritual life is merely an exquisite form of hedonism, asceticism was identified by Christian thought with the idea of mortification; the killing out of all those impulses which deflect the soul from the straight path to God. For the true mystic, it is never more than a means to an end; and is often thrown aside when that end is attained. Its necessity is therefore a purely practical question. Fasting and watching may help one to dominate unruly instincts, and so attain a sharper and purer concentration on God; but make another so hungry and sleepy that he can think of nothing else. Thus Jacopone da Todi said of his own early austerities that they resulted chiefly in indigestion, insomnia and colds in the head; whilst John Wesley found in fasting a positive spiritual good. Some ascetic practices again are almost certainly disguised indulgences of those very cravings which they are supposed to kill, but in fact merely repress. Others—such as hair shirts, chains, and so forth—depended for their meaning on a mediæval view of the body and of the virtues of physical pain which is practically extinct, and now seems to most of us utterly artificial. No one will deny that austerity is better than luxury for the spiritual life; but perfect detachment of the will and senses can be achieved without resort to merely physical expedients by those living normally in the world, and this is the essential thing.

The true asceticism is a gymnastic not of the body, but of the mind. It involves training in the art of recollection; the concentration of thought, will, and love upon the eternal realities which we commonly ignore. The embryo contemplative, if his spiritual vision is indeed to be enlarged, and his mind kindled, as Dionysius says, to “the burning of love,” must acquire and keep a special state of inward poise, an attitude of attention, which is best described as “the state of prayer”; that same condition which George Fox called “keeping in the Universal Spirit.” If we do not attend to reality, we are not likely to perceive it. The readjustments which shall make this attention natural and habitual are a phase in man’s inward conflict for the redemption of consciousness from its lower and partial attachments. This conflict is no dream. It means hard work; mental and moral discipline of the sternest kind. The downward drag is incessant, and can be combated only by those who are clearly aware of it, and are willing to sacrifice lower interests and joys to the demands of the spiritual life. In this sense mortification is an integral part of the “purgative way.” Unless the self’s “inclination to true wisdom” is strong enough to inspire these costing and heroic efforts, its spiritual cravings do not deserve the name of mysticism.

These, then, seem essential factors in the readjustment which the mystics call purgation. We go on to their next stage, the so-called “way of illumination.” Here, says Dionysius, the mind is kindled by contemplation to the burning of love. There is a mental and an emotional enhancement, whereby the self apprehends the reality it has sought; whether under the veils of religion, philosophy, or nature-mysticism. Many mystics have made clear statements about this phase in human transcendence. Thus the Upanishads invite us to “know everything in the Universe as enveloped in God.” “When the purified seeker,” says Plato, “comes to the end, he will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty.... Beauty absolute, separate, simple and everlasting.” His follower Plotinus says that by spiritual intuition man, “wrought into harmony with the Supreme,” enters into communion with Nous, the “intelligible world” of eternal realities—that splendour yonder which is his home: and further that this light, shining upon the soul, enlightens it, makes it a member of the spiritual order, and so “transforms the furnace of this world into a garden of flowers.” Ruysbroeck declares that this eternal world “is not God, but it is the light in which we see Him.” Jacopone da Todi says that the self, achieving the crystalline heaven, “feels itself to be a part of all things,” because it has annihilated its separate will and is conformed to the movement of the Divine Life. Kabir says: “The middle region of the sky, wherein the Spirit dwelleth, is radiant with the music of light.” Boehme calls it the “light-world proceeding from the fire-world”; and says it is the origin of that outward world in which we dwell. “This light,” he says, “shines through and through all, but is only apprehended by that which unites itself thereto.” It seems to me fairly clear that these, and many other descriptions I cannot now quote, refer to an identical state of consciousness, which might be called an experience of Eternity, but not of the Eternal One. I say “an experience,” not merely a mental perception. Contemplation, which is the traditional name for that concentrated attention in which this phase of reality is revealed, is an activity of all our powers: the heart, the will, the mind. Dionysius emphasizes the ardent love which this revelation of reality calls forth, and which is indeed a condition of our apprehension of it; for the cold gaze of the metaphysician cannot attain it, unless he be a lover and a mystic too. “By love He may be gotten and holden, by thought never,” says the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. It is only through the mood of humble and loving receptivity in which the artist perceives beauty, that the human spirit can apprehend a reality which is greater than itself. The many declarations about noughting, poverty and “holy nothingness” refer to this. The meek and poor of spirit really are the inheritors of Eternity.

So we may place the attitude of selfless adoration, the single-hearted passion of the soul, among the essentials of the mystic in the illuminated way. A very wide range of mystical experiences must be attributed to this second stage in man’s spiritual growth. Some at least of its secrets are known to all who are capable of æsthetic passion; who, in the presence of beauty, know themselves to stand upon the fringe of another plane of being, where the elements of common life are given new colour and value, and its apparent disharmonies are resolved. So, too, that deep sense of a divine companionship which many ardent souls achieve in prayer is a true if transitory experience of illumination. We shall probably be right in assuming that the enormous majority of mystics never get beyond this level of consciousness. Certainly a large number of religious writers on mysticism attribute to its higher and more personal manifestations the names of “divine union” and “unitive life”; thereby adding to the difficulty of classifying spiritual states, and showing themselves unaware of the great distinction which such full-grown mystics as Plotinus, Jacopone da Todi or Ruysbroeck describe as existing between this “middle heaven” and the ecstatic vision of the One which alone really satisfies their thirst for truth. Thus Jacopone at first uses the strongest unitive language to describe that rapturous and emotional intercourse with Divine Love which characterized his middle period; but when he at last achieves the vision of the Absolute, he confesses that he was in error in supposing that it was indeed the Truth Whom he thus saw and worshipped under veils.

“Or, parme, fo fallanza,

non se’ quel che credea,

tenendo non avea

vertá senza errore.”

Thus Ruysbroeck attributes to the contemplative life, “the inward and upward-going ways by which one may pass into the Presence of God,” but distinguishes these from that super-essential life wherein “we are swallowed up, beyond reason and above reason, in the deep quiet of the Godhead which is never moved.”

All the personal raptures of devotional mysticism, all the nature-mystic’s joyous consciousness of God in creation, Blake’s “world of imagination and vision,” the “coloured land” of Æ., the Sūfi’s “tavern on the way,” where he is refreshed by a draught of supersensual wine, belong to the way of illumination. For the Christian mystic the world into which it inducts him is, pre-eminently, the sphere of the divine Logos-Christ, fount of creation and source of all beauty; the hidden Steersman who guides and upholds the phenomenal world:

“Splendor che dona a tutto ’l mondo luce,

amor, Iesú, de li angeli belleza,

cielo e terra per te si conduce

e splende in tutte cose tua fattezza.”

Here the reality behind appearance is still mediated to the mystic under symbols and forms. The variation of these symbols is great; his adoring gaze now finds new life and significance in the appearances of nature, the creations of music and of art, the imagery of religion and philosophy, and reality speaks to him through his own credal conceptions. But absolute value cannot be attributed to any of these, even the most sacred: they change, yet the experience remains. Thus an identical consciousness of close communion with God is obtained by the non-sacramental Quaker in his silence and by the sacramental Catholic in the Eucharist. The Christian contemplative’s sense of personal intercourse with the divine as manifest in the incarnate Christ is hard to distinguish from that of the Hindu Vaishnavite, when we have allowed for the different constituents of his apperceiving mass:

“Dark, dark the far Unknown and closed the way

To thought and speech; silent the Scriptures; yea,

No word the Vedas say.

“Not thus the Manifest. How fair! how near!

Gone is our thirst if only He appear—

He, to the heart so dear.”

So, too, the Sūfi mystic who has learned to say: “I never saw anything without seeing God therein;” Kabir exclaiming: “I have stilled my restless mind, and my heart is radiant; for in Thatness I have seen beyond Thatness, in company I have seen the Comrade Himself;” the Neoplatonist rapt in contemplation of the intelligible world “yonder”; Brother Lawrence doing his cooking in the presence of God, reveal under analysis an identical type of consciousness. This consciousness is the essential; the symbols under which the self apprehends it are not.

Among these symbols we must reckon a large number of the secondary phenomena of mysticism: divine visions and voices, and other dramatizations of the self’s apprehensions and desires. The best mystics have always recognized the doubtful nature of these so-called divine revelations and favours, and have tried again and again to set up tests for discerning those which really “come from God”—i. e. mediate a valid spiritual experience. Personally, I think very few of these phenomena are mystical in the true sense. Just as our normal consciousness is more or less at the mercy of invasions from the unconscious region, of impulses which we fail to trace to their true origin; so too the mystical consciousness is perpetually open to invasion from the lower centres. These invasions are not always understood by the mystic. Obvious examples are the erotic raptures of the Sūfi poets, and the emotional, even amorous relations in which many Christian ascetics believe themselves to stand to Christ or Our Lady. The Holy Ghost saying to Angela of Foligno, “I love you better than any other woman in the vale of Spoleto”; the human raptures of Mechthild of Magdeburg with her Bridegroom; St. Bernard’s attitude to the Virgin; the passionate love-songs of Jacopone da Todi; the mystical marriage of St. Catherine of Siena; St. Teresa’s “wound of love”; these, and many similar episodes, demand no supernatural explanation, and add nothing to our knowledge of the work of the Spirit in man’s soul. So, too, the infantile craving for a sheltering and protective love finds expression over and over again in mystical literature, and satisfaction in the states of consciousness which it has induced. The innate longing of the self for more life, more love, an ever greater and fuller experience, attains a complete realization in the lofty mystical state called union with God. But failing this full achievement, the self is capable of offering itself many disguised satisfactions; and among these disguised satisfactions we must reckon at least the majority of “divine favours” enjoyed by contemplatives of an emotional type. Whatever the essence of mysticism may turn out to be, it is well to recognize these lapses to lower levels as among the least fortunate of its accidents.

We come to the third stage, the true goal of mystic experience; the intuitive contact with that ultimate reality which theologians mean by the Godhead and philosophers by the Absolute, a contact in which, as Richard of St. Victor says “the soul gazes upon Truth without any veils of creatures—not in a mirror darkly, but in its pure simplicity.” The claim to this is the loftiest claim which can be made by human consciousness. There is little we can say of it, because there is little we know; save that the vision or experience is always the vision or experience of a Unity which reconciles all opposites, and fulfils all man’s highest intuitions of reality. “Be lost altogether in Brahma like an arrow that has completely penetrated its target,” say the Upanishads. This self-loss, says Dionysius the Areopagite, is the Divine Initiation: wherein we “pass beyond the topmost altitudes of the holy ascent, and leave behind all divine illumination and voices and heavenly utterances; and plunge into the darkness where truly dwells, as Scripture saith, that One Which is beyond all things.” Some recent theologians have tried to separate the conceptions of God and of the Absolute: but mystics never do this, though some of the most clear-sighted, such as Meister Eckhart, have separated that unconditioned Godhead known in ecstasy from the personal God who is the object of devotional religion, and who represents a humanization of reality. When the great mystic achieves the “still, glorious, and absolute Oneness” which finally satisfies his thirst for truth—the “point where all lines meet and show their meaning”—he generally confesses how symbolic was the object of his earlier devotion, how partial his supposed communion with the Divine. Thus Jacopone da Todi—exact and orthodox Catholic though he was—when he reached “the hidden heaven,” discovered and boldly declared the approximate character of all his previous conceptions of, and communion with God; the great extent to which subjective elements had entered into his experience. In the great ode which celebrates his ecstatic vision of Truth, when “ineffable love, imageless goodness, measureless light” at last shone in his heart, he says: “I thought I knew Thee, tasted Thee, saw Thee under image: believing I held Thee in Thy completeness I was filled with delight and unmeasured love. But now I see I was mistaken—Thou art not as I thought and firmly held.” So Tauler says that compared with the warm colour and multiplicity of devotional experience, the very Godhead is a “rich nought,” a “bare pure ground”; and Ruysbroeck that it is “an unwalled world,” “neither this nor that.” “This fruition of God,” he says again, “is a still and glorious and essential Oneness beyond the differentiation of the Persons, where there is neither an outpouring nor an indrawing of God, but the Persons are still and one in fruitful love, in calm and glorious unity.... There is God our fruition and His own, in an eternal and fathomless bliss.”

“How, then, am I to love the Godhead?” says Eckhart. “Thou shalt love Him as He is: not as a God, not as a Spirit, not as a Person, not as an image, but as a sheer pure One. And in this One we are to sink from nothing to nothing, so help us God.” “This consciousness of the One,” says Plotinus, “comes not by knowledge, but by an actual Presence superior to any knowing. To have it, the soul must rise above knowledge, above all its wandering from its unity.” He goes on to explain that all partial objects of love and contemplation, even Beauty and Goodness themselves, are lower than this, springing from the One as light from the sun. To see the disc, we must put on smoked glasses, shut off the rays, and submit to the “radiant darkness” which enters so frequently into mystical descriptions of the Absolute.

It is an interesting question whether this consummation of the mystic way need involve that suppression of the surface-consciousness which is called ecstasy. The majority of mystics think that it must; and probably it is almost inevitable that so great a concentration and so lofty an intuition should for the time it lasts drive all other forms of awareness from the field. Even simple contemplation cannot be achieved without some deliberate stilling of the senses, a deliberate focusing of our vagrant attention, and abolishes self-consciousness while it lasts. This is the way that our mental machinery works; but this should not make us regard trance-states as any part of the essence of mysticism. The ecstatic condition is no guarantee of mystic vision. It is frequently pathological, and is often found along with other abnormal conditions in emotional visionaries whose revelations have no ultimate characteristics. It is, however, just as uncritical to assume that ecstasy is necessarily a pathological symptom, as it is to assume that it is necessarily a mystic state. We have a test which we can apply to the ecstatic; and which separates the results of nervous disorder from those of spiritual transcendence. “What fruit dost thou bring back from this thy vision?” is the final question which Jacopone da Todi addresses to the mystic’s soul. And the answer is: “An ordered life in every state.” The true mystic in his ecstasy has seen, however obscurely, the key of the Universe: “la forma universal di questo nodo.” Hence he has a clue by which to live. Reality has become real to him; and there are no others of whom we can fully say that. So, ordered correspondence with each level of existence, physical and spiritual, successive and eternal—a practical realization of the proportions of life—is the guarantee of the genuine character of that sublimation of consciousness which is called the mystic way; and this distinguishes it from the fantasies of psychic illness or the disguised self-indulgences of the dream-world. The real mystic is not a selfish visionary. He grows in vigour as he draws nearer and nearer the sources of true life, and his goal is only reached when he participates in the creative energies of the Divine Nature. The perfect man, says the Sūfi, must not only die into God in ecstasy (fana), but abide in and with Him (baqa), manifesting His truth in the world of time. He is called to a life more active, because more contemplative, than that of other men: to fulfil the monastic ideal of a balanced career of work and prayer. “Then only is our life a whole,” says Ruysbroeck, “when contemplation and work dwell in us side by side, and we are perfectly in both of them at once.”

Plotinus speaks in the same sense under another image in one of his most celebrated passages: “We always move round the One, but we do not always fix our gaze upon It. We are like a choir of singers standing round the conductor, who do not always sing in time, because their attention is diverted to some external object. When they look at the conductor, they sing well and are really with him. So we always move round the One. If we did not, we should dissolve and cease to exist. But we do not always look towards the One. When we do, we attain the end of our existence and our rest; and we no longer sing out of tune, but form in truth a divine choir about the One.” In this conception of man’s privilege and duty we have the indestructible essence of mysticism.

THE MYSTIC AND THE CORPORATE LIFE

One of the commonest of the criticisms which are brought against the mystics is that they represent an unsocial type of religion; that their spiritual enthusiasms are personal and individual, and that they do not share or value the corporate life and institutions of the church or community to which they belong. Yet, as a matter of fact, the relation that does and should exist between personal religion and the corporate life of the church frequently appears in them in a peculiarly intense, a peculiarly interesting form; and in their lives, perhaps, more easily than elsewhere, we may discern the principles which do or should govern the relation of the individual to the community.

In the true mystic, who is so often and so wrongly called a “religious individualist,” we see personal religion raised to its highest power. If we accept his experience as genuine, it involves an intercourse with the spiritual world, an awareness of it, which transcends the normal experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he belongs. The mystic speaks with God as a person with a Person, and not as a member of a group. He lives by an immediate knowledge far more than by belief; by a knowledge achieved in those hours of direct, unmediated intercourse with the Transcendent when, as he says, he was “in union with God.” The certitude then gained—a certitude which he cannot impart, and which is not generally diffused—governs all his reactions to the Universe. It even persists and upholds him in those terrible hours of darkness when all his sense of spiritual reality is taken away.

Such a personality as this seems at first sight to stand in little need of the support which the smaller nature, the more languid religious consciousness, receives from the corporate spirit. By the very term “mystic” we indicate a certain aloofness from the crowd, suggest that he is in possession of a secret which the community as a whole does not and cannot share; that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise. I think that much of the distrust with which he is often regarded comes from this sense of his independence of the herd; his apparent separation from the often clumsy and always symbolic methods of institutional religion, and the further fact that his own methods and results cannot be criticized or checked by those who have not shared them. “I spake as I saw,” said David; and those who did not see can only preserve a respectful or an exasperated silence.

Yet this common opinion that the mystic is a lonely soul wholly absorbed in his vertical relation with God, that his form of religious life represents an opposition to, and an implicit criticism of, the corporate and institutional form of religious life; this is decisively contradicted by history; which shows us, again and again, the great mystics as the loyal children of the great religious institutions, and forces us to admit that here as in other departments of human activity the corporate and the individual life are intimately plaited together. Even those who have broken away from the churches that reared them, have quickly drawn to themselves disciples, and become the centres of new groups. Surely, therefore, it is worth while to examine, if we can, the nature of the connection between these two factors: to ask, on the one hand, what it is that the corporate life and the group-consciousness which it develops give the mystic; on the other, what is the real value of the mystic to the corporate life of his church?

As to the first question: What is it that the corporate life does for the great spiritual genius?—for I think that we may allow the great mystic to be that. First, and most obviously, it gives him a favourable environment. He must have an environment: he must be affected by it. That is a certainty in the case of any living thing; a certainty so obvious that it would hardly be worth stating were it not that those who talk about the mystic craving for solitude—his complete aloofness from human life—seem often to ignore it. The idea of solitude in any complete sense is, of course, an illusion. We are bound, if we live at all, to accept the fact of a living world outside ourselves, to have social relations with something; and it only remains to decide what these relations shall be. The yogi or the hermit who retreats to the forest in order to concentrate his mind more utterly upon the quest of God, only exchanges the society of human beings for the society of other living things. Did he eliminate all else, the parasites of his own body, the bacterial populations of his alimentary system, would be there to remind him that man cannot live alone. He may shift his position in the web of life, but its strands will enmesh him still. So, too, the monk or nun “buried alive” in the cloister is still living a family life; only it is a family life that is governed by special ideals.

Now it is plainly better for the mystic, whose aim is the establishment of special relations with the spiritual order, that the social consciousness in which he is immersed, and from which he is taking colour all the time, should have a spiritual and religious tendency; that the social acts in which he takes part should harmonize rather than conflict with his own deep intuition of reality. The difference in degree between that deep intuition and the outward corporate acts—the cult—which he thus shares, may be enormous: for the cult is an expression of the crowd consciousness, and manifests its spiritual crudity, its innate conservatism, its primitive demands for safety and personal rewards. The inadequacy or unreality of the forms, the low level of the adoration which they evoke, may distress and even disgust him. Yet, even so, it is better for him that he should be within a church than outside it. Compared with this one fact—that he is a member of a social group which recognizes spiritual values, and therefore lives in an environment permeated by religious concepts—the accuracy in detail of the creed which that group professes, the adequacy of its liturgical acts, is unimportant.

Next, the demands made and restrictions imposed by the community on the individual are good for the mystic. Man is social right through; in spirit as well as in body and mind. His most sublime spiritual experiences are themselves social in type. Intercourse of a person with a Person, the merging of his narrow consciousness in a larger consciousness, the achievement of a divine sonship, a spiritual marriage: these are the highest things that he can say concerning his achievement of Divine Reality. And they all entail, not a narrow self-realization, but the breaking-down of barriers; the setting-up of wider relationships. It follows that self-mergence in the common life is an education for that self-mergence in the absolute life at which the mystic aims. Such self-mergence, and the training in humility, self-denial, obedience, suppleness, which is involved in it, is held by all ascetic teachers to be essential to the education of the human soul. Union with, and to a certain extent submission to, the church, to the family—to life, in fact—an attitude of self-giving surrender: this is the best of preparations for that total self-naughting of the soul which is involved in union with God; that utter doing-away of the I, the Me, and the Mine, till it becomes one will and one love with the divine will and love.

On these two counts alone—harmonious environment and salutary discipline—we shall expect, other things being equal, that the richest and most fruitful types of mystical experience will arise within religious institutions rather than outside them; and as a matter of fact this is what we do find. The Hindu ascetic has his recognized place in the Hindu system. He has but reached the summit of a pyramid which is firmly based on earth. The Sūfi is a good Moslem, and commonly the member of a religious confraternity which imposes a strict rule of life. The Christian mystic, too, grows up from the Christian society. His roots strike deep down into that favouring soil. Though his branches may shoot up to the heavens, and seem to draw thence all the light and heat by which he lives, yet he is really fed from below as well as from above. When he refuses to acknowledge this principle, when he abjures the discipline, the authority, the support of the corporate life, and regards himself as a separate individual, dependent on direct inspiration alone; how quickly he becomes unbalanced and eccentric, how difficult it is for him to avoid the disease of spiritual megalomania. Refusing the support and discipline of organized religion, he becomes like a poet who refuses to be controlled by the laws of prosody; which seem to limit, but really strengthen and beautify, his work.

It is true that right through the history of Christian mysticism there has been a line of insurgent mystics who have made this refusal; whose direct vision of spiritual perfection has brought with it so overwhelming a sense of the imperfection, formalism, unreality, the dreadfulness of religious institutions, that it has forced them into a position of more or less acute revolt from the official church. So clear has been their own consciousness of the spiritual world that the soul’s life and growth, its actual and individual rebirth, have shone out for them as the only things that matter. Hence the dramatization of these things in ceremonial religion, the effort to give spiritual values a concrete form, has seemed to them like a blasphemous parody. Unable to harmonize the inward and the outward—the all-penetrating reality of religion as they understand it, with its crude outward expression in the external cult, where formal acts and intellectual assents so often seem to take the place of inward changes—in the end they solve the problem by repudiating the external and visible church. This rebel-type, victims of exaggerated individualism, which would make the special experiences of a few the standard for the whole race, has persisted side by side with the law-abiding type; who have preserved, if not always a perfect balance between liberty and obedience, at any rate a more reasonable proportion between them. Often the corruption of the times in which he lived has seemed to the mystic to make such rebellion inevitable. This is particularly true in the case of George Fox, whose ragings were directed far less against organized religion than against unreal religion; and who might, had he lived in fourteenth-century Germany, have found a congenial career as one of the Friends of God. Yet, even so, the careers of these rebels have been on the whole unfruitful, compared with those who remained within the institutional framework and effected their reforms from inside. They seldom quite escape the taint of arrogance. There is apt to be a touch of self-consciousness in their sanctity. We have only to compare the influence exerted by the outstanding figures of the two groups, to realize which type of spiritual life has had the best and most enduring influence on the spiritual history of the race; which, in fact, best stands the pragmatic test.

On the rebel side we have, of course, the leaders of many dead heresies and sects. The Montanists of the second century, with their claim to direct inspiration, their cult of ecstatic phenomena and prophetic speech; the numerous mystical heretics and illuminati of the Middle Ages, often preaching the most extravagant doctrines and always claiming for them divine authority—for instance, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who claimed the possession of the Holy Ghost as an excuse not only for theological, but also for moral aberrations. Later, there are the Quietists, a particularly poisonous brand of unbalanced contemplatives; and, contemporary with their revolt against Catholic forms and authorities, innumerable mystical revolts against Protestant forms and authorities, the very names of whose originators are now almost forgotten. Amongst these two mighty figures stand up: Jacob Boehme and George Fox. But we must remember as regards Boehme that, although he certainly spoke with great violence against the error of confusing external acceptance of religion with internal adherence to God, “historical Christians” with “new men,” he never disowned the Lutheran Church within which he was born. On the contrary, it was that church which persecuted and finally disowned him. As to that great and strange genius, George Fox, who aimed at nothing less than a world religion of a mystical type, the free and conscious contact of every soul with the Spirit of God, I believe that any unbiassed student of his Journal must allow that, enormous as his achievement was, it might have been far greater had his violent sense of vocation, his remarkable spiritual gifts, been disciplined and controlled by the corporate consciousness as expressed in institutional religion. Then some of the energy which he expended in denunciations of steeple-houses might have been employed in healing the disharmony between the visible and invisible church; helping that vision of the Eternal by which he was possessed to find concrete expression within traditional forms. Here, as elsewhere, the Inner Light would have burned with a better and a truer flame had it submitted to the limitations of a lamp.

I do not suggest that these people, even the most extravagant of them, were not truly spiritual or truly mystical. The sort of criticism which divides mystics into two groups—the orthodox, who are inspired by God, and the heretical, who are inspired by Satan—of course belongs to the dark ages of theology. On the contrary, these rebel-mystics most often possessed—sometimes in a highly developed form—the sharp direct consciousness of the Divine Life which is the essential quality of the mystic. This was to them the central fact; by comparison with it they judged all other things. What they did not possess was the balancing, equivalent consciousness of, and reverence for, corporate human life; that group-personality which is the church, and its value and authority. They lacked the sense that the whole organism, the whole herd, with all its imperfections, is yet interdependent, and has got to move together, urged from within by its more vivid spirits, not stung from without, as if by some enthusiastic spiritual mosquito. To a greater or lesser extent they failed in effect because they tried to be mystical in a non-human instead of a human way; were “other-worldly” in the bad sense of the word. They have not always remembered that Christ Himself, the supreme pattern of all mystics, lived a balanced life of clear personal vision, unmediated intercourse with God on the one hand, and gentle and patient submission to the corporate consciousness on the other hand. Though severely critical of the unrealities and hypocrisy of current institutionalism, he yet sought to form the group, the “little flock,” in which His ideas should be incorporated within, and not over against, the official Jewish Church; and thus gradually to leaven the whole.

Put now against these vigorous individualists the names of the mystics who have never felt that their passionate correspondences with the Eternal Order—their clear vision of the adorable Perfection of God and the imperfection, languor, and corruption of man—need involve a break with the corporate religious life. Observe how these have continued for centuries to be fruitful personalities, often not merely within their own communion, but outside it too; how they have acted as salt, as leaven, permeating and transmuting the general consciousness of the Body of Christ. Often these, too, have been reformers—drastic, unrelenting disturbers of the established order of things. St. Bernard, St. Hildegarde, Mechthild, Jacopone da Todi, St. Catherine of Siena, Tauler, were passionate in their denunciations of slackness, corruption, and disorder. But they made their protests, and brought back the general consciousness to a closer contact with reality, from within, and not from without, the Christian church. Consider St. Bernard and Richard of St. Victor, whose writings influenced for centuries the whole of the religious literature of Europe; St. Hildegarde, St. Gertrude, Mechthild of Magdeburg, great mystics, good churchwomen, but severe denouncers of formalism and unreality; St. Francis of Assisi, who removed evangelical poverty from the sphere of notion to the sphere of fact; St. Catherine of Siena, who changed Italian politics; St. Joan of Arc, who altered European history; the soaring transcendentalism of Ruysbroeck, who was yet content to be a humble parish priest; the great mystical movement of the Friends of God, ardent Catholics and ardent reformers too. Even our own great mystical poets, Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert, Traherne, Coventry Patmore and Francis Thompson, were one and all convinced institutionalists. Finally, look at some of the great cloistered mystics, of whom St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross are types; and see how, though they seem in the eyes of the world to be “buried alive,” they are and remain the ardent centres of a spreading light, which perpetually stimulates and revivifies not only members of their own order or communion, but spiritually sensitive souls outside.

Perhaps it is in those contemplatives who lived within and were obedient to the rule of the great monastic orders, that we can see most easily the nature of the link between the individual soul and the religious group within which it does or should develop; the enormous value to it of tradition, that huge accumulation of tendencies, ideals, systems, wisdom both speculative and practical, which is preserved in the corporate consciousness. Here the influence of the religious family, the rule of life, the ideal held out, the severe education in self-control administered to every novice, can always be traced; conditioning, and, I believe, helping and bracing the character of that communion with the Transcendent which the individual mystic enjoys. As the baby at birth enters into a civilization prepared for him, and is at once supported, educated, even clothed by a tradition prepared by countless generations of the past; so the novice, whose spiritual childhood begins within a great monastic family, receives—supposing, of course, that the order is true to its ideals—the support and benefits of a tradition evolved during previous generations in response to the needs of other similar souls; and he is by so much the better off than he would be were he a solitary, or a deliberate rebel who refuses to accept the heritage of the past. He finds a life beautifully adjusted to his needs; yet which, being greater and older than his own, keeps his rampant individualism in check, nurtures and cultivates his growing spiritual consciousness, and opposes—by its perpetual demands on humility, obedience, and unselfishness—the vice of pride which the mystical individualist seldom escapes. Such a mystical consciousness would not necessarily die without the support of this corporate tradition, any more than the baby would necessarily die did it emerge into the conditions of the paleolithic cave instead of into those of the modern nursery. But in both cases the environment would be unfavourable, and the effort required to attain that position into which the child of tradition enters at birth would be an enormous drain upon the powers of the organism.

The instinct of many mystics for a certain measure of solitude is no contradiction of this. The hermits and the anchorites, even such rare and extreme types as St. Anthony of Egypt, who is said to have lived in perfect solitude for twenty years, did not withdraw from the Christian society; nor did they disown the validity of its external and institutional life. They sought to construct or find within the Christian church an environment within which their special tendencies could develop in a normal way; and this not merely for themselves, but also for the sake of other souls. Such a period of withdrawal was felt by them to be a necessary condition of their full effectiveness for life. So, too, the poet or the artist must retreat from his fellows if he is to commune with the eternal loveliness and interpret her to other men: for a total concentration upon reality is the condition under which it is revealed. The Catholic Church has always recognized, and does still in the continued existence of the cloistered orders, the reasonableness of this demand. We do not as a rule say bitter things when a person of artistic or speculative genius leaves the family group and goes to Paris or Oxford in order that his special powers may be educated and become effective for life; nor should we feel resentment because the mystical genius sometimes feels that the life of the home circle, or even the normal life of the community, cannot give the special training which he requires. In a few cases the mystics have felt a long period of complete isolation to be necessary to them; but most often they have been accessible to those who really needed them, and helped these all the more because of the long periods of silence in which they listened to the Voice of God, too often inaudible for them, as for us, in the general bustle of the world. Their point of view has been beautifully stated by a young French mystic, Elizabeth de la Trinité, who died a few years ago. “I want,” she says, “to be all silence, all adoration, that I may penetrate more and more deeply into God; and become so full of Him that I can give Him in my prayers to those poor souls still ignorant of His gift.” She wants to be a channel, a duct, by which the love and power of God, of which she is so strongly conscious, can flow out to other souls. It is not for herself that she is working; it is for the world. Do we not find expressed there both the individual longing and the corporate responsibility of the mystic? And do we not touch here the intimate connection which should exist between the separate life of the great mystic and the corporate life of the church? On the one hand, the highly organized society, making it possible for the contemplative to develop his special powers in a harmonious environment and preventing the frittering of his energies; on the other, that contemplative, like a special organ developed by the Body of Christ, gaining for the whole community contacts and certitudes, which it could not gain in any other way. News of God can only enter the temporal order through some human consciousness. Is it unreasonable that for so great an office certain individuals should be set apart—within the community, not over against it—and should live in a special way?

As a matter of fact, the church has gained a thousandfold by her acquiescence in the special vocation of the mystics; for the treasures they won were never kept for themselves, but always showered upon her. True, she has not hesitated to scrutinize and control them; sometimes her attitude has seemed to the enthusiasts for liberty to be deliberately obscurantist and tyrannical. Yet, even here—and although in many cases there has clearly been ignorance, injustice, and persecution—the mystic gains more than he loses by submission to the collective judgment. Even in their harshest form, discipline and tradition are still priceless for him. First, they school him in the virtue of humility, the very foundation of the Christian character; which is seldom possessed by the spiritual genius who always leads and never submits, and whose triumphant formula, “God and myself!” too often ends by becoming “Myself and God!”

“O caritate, vita, ch’ ogn’ altro amor è morto;

non vai rompendo legge; nante, l’observe tutto.”

said Jacopone da Todi; that natural rebel who deliberately submitted himself to an uncongenial religious authority, and there found perfect freedom.

Next, the solid sense of the community, the mere fact that it always lags behind the more vivid spirits, that the forward-moving shepherd who sees new pastures has got to take account of the slowest sheep—all this is a valuable safeguard against the notorious extravagances of a mysticism unfettered by authority. It is significant that the greatest mystics in all communions have ever raised up their voices most earnestly against spiritual license; have been most eager to submit their soaring intuitions to the witness of their Scriptures or the corporate feeling of their church. They realize the fact that they owe to this church the huge debt which every individual owes to the tradition of his art or of his trade. The church represents a complete spiritual civilization, a conserver of values; were it not for her, every new spiritual genius who arose would have to begin at the beginning, at the Stone Age of the soul. Instead of that, he finds himself placed within a social order enriched by all the contributions of his great predecessors. The bridges are built; the roads are made and named; his own experiences and discoveries are made more valid, less terrifying, more comprehensible to him, because others have been this way before. Compare the clarity, the sure-footedness as one may say, of Ruysbroeck, of St. Catherine of Siena, of St. Teresa, with the entanglements, the sense of wandering in beautiful but trackless places, which one feels when reading even Boehme, Fox, or Blake; and others are far less coherent than they. Man needs a convention, a tradition, a limitation, if he is not to waste his creative powers; and this convention the mystics find best and most easily in the forms of the church to which they belong.

So we see that the corporate life of his church gives the mystic a good deal. What does he, on his part, give to it?

Those who see in the mystic chiefly one who rebels against, or has no use for, the corporate religious life, and acknowledges no authority but that of his own spiritual intuitions, usually conceive of his experiences as having value for himself alone. He cannot, they say, communicate them or teach others to share them. Often, therefore, he is spoken of as useless, selfish, other-worldly: a “lonely soul.” These phrases suggest that those who use them have a very narrow view of usefulness, a very materialistic view of the Body of Christ, and a very unevangelical view of the relative positions of Mary and Martha. As a matter of fact, the mystic, instead of being useless, selfish, and other-worldly, is useful, unselfish, and this-worldly. He is a creative personality, consecrated to the great practical business of actualizing the eternal order within the temporal; and although the pursuit of this business brings him hours of exquisite joy, it brings him hours of great suffering too—suffering which is gladly and patiently endured. He does it, or tries to do it, not because he seeks the joy, but solely for love—love of God, love of his fellow-men—for he is perpetuating in a certain sense the work of Christ, mediating between his brethren and Divine Reality. Hence, where he is fully developed, he will, as Ruysbroeck tells us, swing like a pendulum between contemplation and action, between adoration of God and service of man. In him life has evolved her most powerful spiritual engine; and she uses it not for the next world, but for this world, for the eternalization of the here and now, the making of it more real and more divine, more fully charged with the grandeur of God. Often the mystic’s special work is done in a positive and obvious fashion which should satisfy the most practical mind, and which is yet wholly actuated by his central intention, that of raising up—as he sometimes says—new children of the Eternal Goodness, bringing back the corporate life to a closer contact with God. “My little children, of whom I travail,” says St. Paul to his converts. There is a typical mystic speaking of his life-work. Can we call St. Francis of Assisi, the most devoted and original of missionaries; St. Joan of Arc, re-making the consciousness of France by the most active of methods; St. Catherine of Siena, purifying the Italian Church; St. Teresa, regenerating the whole Carmelite Order, and leaving upon it a stamp it has never lost; “lazy contemplatives”? Or St. Catherine of Genoa, the devoted superintendent of a great hospital, who never permitted her hours of ecstatic communion with God to interfere with her duty to the sick?

Taken as a class, the Christian mystics are distinguished by nothing so much as by their heroic and unselfish activities; by their varied and innumerable services to the corporate life of the church. From their ranks have come missionaries, preachers, prophets, social reformers, poets, founders of institutions, servants of the poor and the sick, patient guides and instructors of souls. We sometimes forget that even those known chiefly by the writings they have left behind them have sacrificed to the difficult task of reducing their transcendent experience to words, hours in which—were the popular idea of the mystic a true one—they might have been idly basking in the Divine Light. But these practical activities, though often great, are only a part of the mystic’s contribution to the corporate life. If his special claim to communion with the Transcendent be true at all—and this argument is based on the assumption that there is at least some truth in it—then he does really tap a source of vitality higher than that with which other men have contact. In the language of theology, he has not merely “efficient” but also “extraordinary” grace; a larger dower of life, directly dependent on his larger, more generous love. This is a claim to which his strange triumphs over circumstance, his conquests over ill-fortune, ill-health, oppositions and deprivations of every kind, give weight. Not many strong and normal persons would willingly face, or indeed endure, the hardships which St. Paul, St. Francis, St. Joan of Arc, St. Teresa, gladly and successfully embraced.

This larger and intenser vitality the mystic does not and cannot keep to himself. He infects with it all with whom he comes in contact, kindles the latent fire in them: for the spiritual consciousness is caught, not taught. Under his influence—sometimes from the mere encounter with his personality—other men begin to live a more real, a more eternal life. Ruysbroeck says that the Spirit of God, when it is truly received into a soul, becomes a spreading light; and history confirms this. Corporate experience of God always begins in a personal experience of God. The rise of Christianity is the classic illustration of this truth; but Hindu and Moslem religious history also declare it. Round each of the great unitive mystics little groups of ardent disciples, of spiritual children, have grown up. This is true both of those who remained within and those who seceded from the official Church—for instance, St. Bernard, Eckhart, St. Francis, Tauler, Ruysbroeck, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Teresa, Boehme, Fox. Nor did their influence cease with death.

Further, in reckoning up the value of the mystics to the church as a whole, we sometimes forget the extent to which that church is indebted to mystic intuition for the actual data upon which her corporate life is based. Christianity, it is true, is fundamentally a historical religion; but it is also a religion of experience, and its very history deals quite as much with the events which attend human intercourse with the Transcendent and Eternal as with concrete and visible happenings in space and time. The New Testament is thick with reports of mystical experiences. The Fourth Gospel and the Epistles of St. Paul depend for their whole character on the soaring mystical genius their writers possessed. Had St. Paul never been caught up to the third heaven, he would have had a very different outlook on the world, and Christianity would have been a different religion in consequence. Had the Fourth Evangelist never known what it was to feel the sap of the Mystic Vine flow through him, his words would have lacked their overwhelming certitude. So, too, the liturgies bear the stamp of mystical feeling, and most of the great religious concepts which the church has gradually added to her store come from the same source. If we ask ourselves what the history of the church would be without the history of her mystics, then we begin to see how much of her light and colour emanates from them; how much of her doctrine represents their experience translated into dogmatic form. That communion with—that feeding on—the Divine Life which she offers to every believer in the Eucharist is the central fact of their existence. From Clement of Alexandria downwards, again and again they appeal to Eucharistic images in order to express what it is that really happens to the soul immersed in contemplative prayer. “I am the food of the full-grown,” said the voice of God to St. Augustine. “Every time we think with love of the Well-beloved, He is anew our meat and drink,” says Ruysbroeck. So, too, the church’s language concerning new birth, divine sonship, regeneration, union with Christ, and the whole concept of grace, regarded as a transcendent life and love perpetually pressing in on humanity—all this is of mystical origin, and represents not the speculations but the concrete experience of the great mystics. They are pushed out, as it were, by the visible church like tentacles, to explore the unseen world which surrounds her, and drawn back again to her bosom that they may impart to the whole body the more abundant life which they have found. Were it not for the unfailing family of the mystics, thus perpetually pushing out beyond the protective edges of the organism, and bringing back official Christianity into direct touch with the highest spiritual values, and so constantly reaffirming the fact—by them felt and experienced—of the intimate correspondence, the regenerating contact of God with the soul, the church would long ago have fallen victim to that tendency to relapse into the mechanical which dogs all organized groups. Then the resistance which she has sometimes offered to the freshness and novelty, the adventurous quality of the mystical impulse, where it has appeared without preparation and sought to correct by its own overwhelming certitude the spiritual conventions of the day, would have become that hopeless inertia which is the precursor of death.

So we may best look upon the great Christian mystic as a special organ developed within the Christian body for a special use. His peculiar sensibilities, like those which condition artistic genius, are the gates through which messages from the Transcendent come to man. He is finding and feeling the Infinite; not for himself, but for us. His achievement, bridging the gap which lies between the normal mind and the supersensuous world, makes more valid and more actual to us the assumptions upon which external religion is built; vindicating the church’s highest claim, and hence the soul’s highest claim—the claim that achievement of Eternal Life, communion with ultimate reality, is possible to the spirit of man. More, since all human lives interpenetrate, and isolation is impossible save in death, the more we, the social group, are willing to accept the claim of the mystic, and receive what he tells us in a spirit of humility instead of a spirit of criticism; the more completely he will be able to share his treasure with us, the more deeply we shall be able to enter into that consciousness which he represents, which he brings in his own person into the human scheme.

This, of course, the Christian church has said far more beautifully and exactly in her doctrine of the Communion of Saints; and that doctrine, rightly understood, is indeed the key to the connection between the great mystics and the corporate life within which they arise. Were the activities of these more vital spirits wholly hidden from us, wholly silent and supersensual—as they are not—it would be a grossly materialistic and violently un-Christian judgment which concluded from this that their lives were useless save to themselves. How can a life which aims at God be useless, if we believe that achievement of Him is the final destiny and only satisfaction of every soul? It would be an implicit denial of the efficacy of prayer, of the “prevailing merits” of sanctity, its value to the society which produces it—the power of a great and loving spirit to help, infect and reinforce more languid souls—did we agree that the life of the most strictly enclosed contemplative was wasted. Christians, who believe that the world was redeemed from within the narrow limits of Palestine, should not thus confuse space with power, or character with the manner of its self-expression. Without the ardent prayers of the mystics, the vivid spiritual life they lead, what would the sum of human spirituality be? How can we tell what we owe to the power which they liberate, the currents which they set up, the contacts which they make? The land they see, and of which they report to us, is the land towards which humanity is going. They are like the look-out men upon the cross-trees, assuring us from time to time that we are still upon our course. Tear asunder their peculiar power and office from the office of the whole, and you will have on one side a society deprived of the guides which God has raised up for it; on the other, an organ deprived of its real perfection and beauty, because severed from the organism which it was intended to serve.

MYSTICISM AND THE DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT

Amongst the problems which have to be met by those who incline to a mystical view of Christianity—that view which lays special emphasis on the growth and experience of the individual soul, its ascent to union with God, as the very aim and object of religion—one of the most pressing is that which centres on the doctrine of the Atonement. It is clear that many people feel that such a mystical and empirical view of religion leaves no room for this doctrine, or for the idea which it represents; that they are convinced that there is here a real conflict between two incompatible views of the Christian faith. On the one hand, they see orthodox Christianity still centred on the “atoning act” of Christ, with its implications of reconciliation and vicarious suffering, of the divine life humiliating itself, in order to do within the temporal order something for man which man cannot do for himself; a doctrine which retains its attraction and value, because so full of hope and mercy for the sinful and the weak. On the other hand, they see that demand of personal and individual growth, purification, life-enhancement, progressive union with God—helped doubtless by grace, but no less dependent on will—as the condition of attaining Eternal Life, which seems to be made by mystical theology. The opposition, in fact, is supposed to be between a concept of spiritual life in which each man must himself do and be, achieve and actualize in his own person, and not merely as the acceptor of a creed or the member of a Church—must not only accept the gift, but must set himself to be an imitator, so far as he may, of the Giver—and one in which a special manifestation in time and space of the divine power and love, for Christians the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, does something for the man accepting it, which he cannot do for himself. In the one case, we are saved one by one, by effort, response, growth; in the other, we are saved as members of a group. Here the individual and the corporate ideals in their most intense forms face one another.

It does, then, seem at first as though we had here an irreconcilable opposition. Yet before we discard either of these ideas, it is worth while to enquire whether they need really entail conflict, or can be regarded as two sides of a greater whole. It is true that there are certain extreme views of the Atonement which do appear to be hopelessly irreconcilable with the mystical view of religion: especially those which lay peculiar stress, not on the latent powers, but on the essential impotence of man; centring the soul’s salvation on “imputed righteousness,” and finding the whole meaning and reason of the Incarnation in the one historical “propitiatory act” of Calvary. There is real conflict between such a creed, centred on the idea of something done once for all to the soul—to the world—from outside, and that which is centred on the idea of a life perpetually welling up in the soul, on growth, movement, organic change. Yet, on the other hand, is there not a curious similarity between these two apparently opposite views of salvation? Is not the drama of the divine life incarnate, humbling and limiting itself to the human life to save it, essentially a dramatic representation of that other experience, of the divine life limiting itself and mysteriously emerging within each soul, to transmute, regenerate, infinitize it, which the mystics describe to us? Is not what theologians call “grace”—that essential factor of the mystic life-process—a making good by the addition of a new dower of transcendent vitality, of the shortcomings of the merely human creature regarded as an “inheritor of Eternal Life”; just as the historical surrender of Calvary is conceived by orthodox Christianity to make good the shortcomings of the whole race, regarded as heirs of the Kingdom? And if this be so, then can the opposition between these two ideas of salvation—the vital and the theological—be as real as it sometimes appears? Are they not both plans in which atonement plays a part?

After all, both these views of the Christian scheme have emerged and diverged from the same source. St. Paul, the greatest of all Christian mystics—soaked, too, in the idea of grace and of growth in grace, and deeply impressed with the fact of the soul’s individual responsibility—is also supremely the theologian of the Atonement. Though no doubt his teaching on the subject was first called forth by the practical need of finding some meaning in the tragedy of the crucifixion, it is yet a development of that profound conception of His own death as a filling up to the brim of the cup of sacrifice and surrender, which seems to have inspired Christ Himself. If there were indeed a fundamental inconsistency between these two ideas in their pure and original form, then St. Paul would be inconsistent; for he certainly held them both. We all know that the usual way of studying St. Paul’s “doctrines” for purposes of edification has been to isolate each of his ardent and poetic utterances, place it, as it were, in cold storage till it is no longer reminiscent of the living mobile body from which it came, and then subject it to analysis. We are also beginning to know that this method is not quite fair to a man who was a poet, an artist, a lover, as well as a constructive genius of unequalled power. The Pauline utterances are mostly impassioned efforts to express something which Paul knows in his own person; descriptions of the way in which the Christian revelation has met his own needs, regenerated his own nature. They are closely connected with the interior adventures which have attended on his new spiritual existence “in Christ.” To adopt a well-known phrase of St. Bonaventura, they come “of grace, not of doctrine; of desire, not of intellect; of the ardours of prayer, not of the teaching of the schools.” To put it in another way, they are the fruits of his mystical consciousness, which he is trying to express in artistic or intellectual terms. If we accept this statement then the fact of Paul’s mystical experience and all that it means to him must never be absent from our minds when we are trying to understand his declarations. He lives in that supernal atmosphere which he calls “Christ-Spirit”; he speaks to us from that sphere. Nothing outside of it is real to him. Whatever its other bearings may be, his doctrine of Atonement is solidly real on that plane—the mystic’s plane, the plane of union—or not at all. When he says he is “crucified with Christ,” “hid in God with Christ,” he means these things. They are not vaguely pious utterances, but desperate attempts towards the communication of a real state, really felt and known. Paul does feel himself welded together with that Transcendent Life, at once so intimate and personal, so infinite and universal, which he identifies with the glorified Jesus. Because of this union—and only because of it—the acts, powers, holiness, adventures of that life avail for him, Paul. He is a bit of its Body, in his own bold metaphor. So that the first great factor of salvation, as he sees it, is the essentially mystical factor of the “union” of the soul with Christ; the “doing away of the flame of separation.” The Atonement follows, as it were almost logically, from this.

The general content of his letters makes us feel that St. Paul had an extremely rich, deep view of life; so great, indeed, that it refuses to be hammered into a consistent system, and we can never manage to embrace it all at once. Always bits get left out, and hence there is apt to be a certain distortion in all our views of the Pauline universe. There was a wonderful wholeness, a strongly affirmative quality about his sense of existence; subtractions and negations were unnatural to him. Any paradoxes and inconsistencies which we find in his statements are the inevitable result of an effort to express the enormous sweep, the living multiplicity, and (to borrow a word from William James) the thickness of his vision of Reality. Hence it follows that he was able to see and treat the soul of man, both as intensely individual and responsible, and at the same time as a part of the body of all life; that “mystical body of many members” of which the head is Christ-Spirit, the Divine Humanity which appeared in Jesus—a corporation actualized in the Christian Church, but potentially co-extensive with the whole of mankind. These two—the separate and the corporate—are aspects of one whole. They seem to us to conflict, only because the totality to which they contribute is beyond the focus of the mind. Thus Paul could and did demand of the individual, on the one hand the self-mergence of faith, the corporate sense, the humble acknowledgment of personal impotence; and on the other hand, could demand of that same man the personal industry and self-dependence which “works out its own salvation,” “runs for an imperishable garland,” and “presses on towards the goal.”

All through those passages in the Epistle to the Romans on which the doctrine of the Atonement was afterwards built, Paul seems to be trying to express—often by the use of traditional images, which of course revenge themselves upon his free handling of them, as imagery so often revenges itself upon poets—his vision of something supreme, some enormous uplift to eternal levels, some fundamental change, achieved by, for, in the human race. He has this vision just because, and in so far as, this supreme thing has been achieved by, for, in him, the mystic Paul. Behind the formula, we feel the first-hand experience. What is this crucial change? Surely it is the fundamental mystical achievement, the fundamental religious fact; the human soul’s conscious attainment of God. At bottom, atonement is wanted simply and solely to help man to do that; to enable the spirit of life to reach its goal. If we did not want God, we should be very well satisfied as we are: but we are not satisfied—“Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts shall find no rest save in Thee.” No doubt Paul’s eschatological views, the whole tendency of his time, made him connect this achievement, which he knew at first hand, with the imminent coming of a Liberator. For him, it was part of the preparation, the new vitality already given to those who were destined to live the new life. Achieved in one, it permeated the whole “new race” of spiritual men; but this is only the interpretation which a complex of causes made him put upon the transcendent fact. The prominence given to Paul’s legal imagery, its isolation from the general trend of his life and thought, has made us inclined to forget all this. But if we try to see Reality from his angle, to catch the wild accents of his enthusiasm and his love, the theory that he seriously held anything approaching what would be called a “commercial” theory of atonement falls to the ground at once. That he should sometimes have argued in this sense when cornered by Judaizing opponents, is likely enough: and it is characteristic of the mystical temperament to ignore the discrepancy between such intellectual exercises and the fundamental intuition by which it lives. Life and love are as much the key-words of Paul’s system as they are of the Fourth Gospel itself. He was the noblest of souls; and we cannot imagine a soul with a spark of nobility wanting atonement as a buying-off of penalty incurred, as a paying by another of a debt which it owes, a mere saving of it from pain or any other retribution. The living, loving soul can only want atonement as a road-making act; a bridge thrown out to the infinite, on which man can travel to his home in God. Now, Paul had made that journey in the spirit. He knew already, at first hand, that Divine Reality was accessible to him, and that this contact was the greatest thing in life. But he knew and felt, too, that however much he, Paul, had really achieved this new state, this fruition of Eternity, by difficult growth from within; yet first, he could never have done it at all without the enormous uplift of enhancing grace, that new dower of energy which was poured in on him from beyond the confines of his own nature; and secondly, great though the change had been, yet it was nothing compared with the immeasurable human possibilities achieved in Christ.

For Paul, these two achievements—the victory of Christ and the victory of the Christian soul—are intimately connected. True, one is infinitely great, the other very little. Except Christ, “all have fallen short of the glory”; have failed to grow up to the “fullness of the stature,” to actualize the immense spiritual possibilities of man. Still, we are all in the same line; partakers of the same kind of life, “grace” or immanent Spirit, and aiming, consciously or unconsciously, at the same goal—union with God. Now, total dependence on God, the centring of our whole interest and attention on the Spiritual Order, is the very essence of union with Him. Everything short of that total dependence, that supreme rightness of relation, is trespass; a backing of the finite against the infinite. In the death of Jesus, that total dependence, that perfect relation, was completely achieved at last: the supreme mystic act, the self-donation of love, was done perfectly, and in this sense “once for all.” Aleph, it is enough. The spirit of man, in this “new man,” had overcome its limitations, the downward drag of instinct, and had leapt to the heights. This was the “redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” In this unique vindication of humanity, this exhibition of regnant spirit overcoming the world, Christ-Spirit crowned with splendour all the tentative efforts of man, and, because of the corporate nature of humanity, conferred that splendour on the race.

But there is far more in it than this. And first, the Christian’s achievement of God, such as it is—from that of the least of believers to that of the greatest of the mystical saints—is really and practically conditioned by the known fact and known character of the achievement of Christ. It is the addition of this fact, this distinct historic happening, to the racial consciousness, which makes possible the specially Christian apprehension of God; differentiates it, say, from that of a Hindu or a Neoplatonic saint. A reference to the phenomena of apperception will help us to understand this. As in the world of nature or art our perception of each new object is governed by the images and ideas already dominant within the mind, so, too, in the religious sphere. If Christians had not got the idea of Calvary in their consciousness—if the image of the surrender of Jesus, His sublime exhibition of love and faith, were not there first as a clue, something about which to group and arrange their spiritual intuitions—it would make a vital difference to their interpretation of the relation of the soul to God; and this means that the relation itself would be quite different for the conscious self, other elements would be stressed, and different results would flow from it. It is only because the sacrifice of Jesus is now part of the Christian’s “apperceiving mass”—because, coming to the contemplation of the spiritual world, he inevitably brings the Cross with him—that he is able to make the characteristically Christian contact with God. That Christian contact is a direct gift to him, from the historic Person and the historic act. We approach the Transcendent Order with that, or, as Paul tersely puts it, “in Christ”; and our fruition of Reality results, not, as some extreme mystics have liked to think, from any “naked apprehension”—for naked apprehension has no meaning, no content, for the mind—but from a fusion of that which we bring with us and that to which we ascend; tradition and experience, the past and the present. Through love of Christ the Christian comes to the Cross, and through the Cross he enters a spiritual region he could not reach in any other way. So we find that even for the most transcendental of Christian contemplatives, still “in the Cross all doth consist.” It has for him a terror and a rapture which the judicious philosopher can never know; and reveals to him strange secrets beyond the province of philosophy.

“Vocce legendo, en croce legendo

nel libro che c’è ensanguinato

Ca essa scrittura me fa en natura

ed en filosofia conventato;

O libro signato che dentro se’ aurato,

e tutto fiorito d’amore!”

That Cross gives the Infinite a colour which it did not have before. So, even from the point of view of the most hardened and thorough-going psychologist, Paul’s statement that “through one act of righteousness, the free gift came unto all men” is literally accurate. It is true—and that not in any conjuring-trick sense, but in a sense which fulfils on highest levels life’s basic laws—that “by the grace of one man” “the gift has abounded to the many,” entincturing and altering the whole universe, and hence the whole experience, of every receptive soul; atoning for the faulty attitude, the imperfect love, of average man.

But still this is not all. There are other laws of life gathered up in, and redistributed from, this great lens. Essentially the idea which the Christ of the Gospels seems to have had of His own death is the idea of a making good of some general falling-short on life’s part: a “filling-up of the cup” of sacrifice and surrender, to balance the other overflowing cup of error and sin. It is not only man’s unaccomplished aim, but God’s unaccomplished aim in life, which He is represented as fulfilling; and the fact that this conception owes a good deal to Old Testament prophecy need not invalidate its mystical truth. If we accept this idea, then, as well as showing individual man the way to perfect union with God—“building the bridge and reforming the road which leads to the Father’s heart,” as St. Catherine of Siena has it—Christ in His willing death is somehow performing the very object of life, in the name of the whole race. The true business of an atoner is a constructive one. He is called upon to heal a disharmony; bridge a gap between two things which, though separate, desire to be one. Even the sacrificed animal of primitive religions seems most often to be a reconciling victim, the medium of union between the worshipper and his deity. In religions of a mystical type, then, the Atoner or Redeemer will surely be one who makes patent those latent possibilities of man which are at once the earnests of his future blessedness and the causes of his present unrest. He will achieve the completion and sublimation of our vague instinct for sacrifice and love, and thus bridge the space between that which is most divine in humanity and that which is most human in divinity; filling up the measure of that “glory,” that real and divine life, of which we all fall short, yet without which we can never be content. Is not this again what St. Paul feels that Christ did? What he seems, at bottom, to see in the Passion—though the imagery by which he tries to communicate it often sounds harsh in our ears—is, the mysterious fulfilment of all cosmic meanings; the perfect surrender to infinite ideals of Man, the compound inhabitant of two possible orders of reality, who by this painful self-loss achieves perfect identification with the Divine will. This fulfilment was, as he distinctly says, the duty and destiny of the human soul. All creation looks for it “with outstretched neck.” But all have fallen short. Christ, the perfect man, does it, does what man was always meant to do; and because of the corporate character of humanity, in His utter transcendence of self-hood and of all finite categories He inevitably lifts up, to share His union with God, all who are in union with Him. The essence of the Atonement, then, would not lie so much in the sacrificial act as in the lift-up of the human spirit which that act guarantees; the new levels of life which it opens for the race. “Much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved in his life,” says Paul.

“In his life” a new summit has been conquered by humanity. But are we to stop there? Is not the attainment of that same summit, the achievement of that life-giving surrender to the Universal Spirit—“a life-giving life,” Ruysbroeck calls it—just what the great mystics, following as well as they can the curve of the life of Christ, try to do according to their measure? Theirs, after all, is the vision which sees that “there is no other way to life but the way of the Cross,” and that the human life of Christ is “the door by which all must come in.” Thus the spiritual victory of the Cross is for them not so much a unique, as a pioneer act. It is the first heroic cutting of a road on which they are to travel as far as they can; not merely the vicarious setting-right of the balance between God and man, upset by man’s wilful sin. In their ascent towards union with God, are not they road-makers, or at any rate road-menders, too? Are they not forging new links between two orders of reality, which are separate for the once-born consciousness? If so, then we may regard each one of them as a bit of the slowly achieved atonement of the race; that gradual pressing-on of humanity into the heart of the Transcendent Order. For Christians, this movement was initiated by Christ. But surely it is continued and helped by every soul in union with Him, even those who knew not His Name; and Julian of Norwich was right when she said that she knew she was “in the Cross with Him.”

Two things are perpetually emphasized in modern presentations of religion. First, the stress tends more and more to be upon experience. Nothing which authority tells us is done for us truly counts, unless we feel and realize it as done in us. In so far as this is so, the tendency is to a mystical concept of religion; and, speaking generally, to just the concept of religion which is supposed to conflict with the idea of atonement as usually understood. But, secondly, the social and corporate character of Christianity is strongly emphasized; and, where this corporate character is admired more than it is understood, mysticism is harshly criticized as the religion of the spiritual individualist, a “vertical relation,” the “flight of the alone to the Alone.” St. Paul’s “completing opposites,” in fact, are still in the foreground of our religious life; and so perhaps some re-statement of the solution by which he found room for both of them, and hence both for personal responsibility and atonement, may be possible and fruitful for us, too.

And first we notice that those enthusiasts for the corporate idea who condemn the mystics as religious egoists seem to forget that they are contradicting themselves; that if their vision of the Church of Christ as a mystical body be true, then the mystic’s ascent to God cannot be a flight of the Alone. The poisonous implication of that phrase—true in its context but always misunderstood—has stuck like mud to the white robes of the saints. But the mystic is not merely a self going out on a solitary quest of Reality. He can, must, and does go only as a member of the whole body, performing as it were the function of a specialized organ. What he does, he does for all. He is, in fact, an atoner pure and simple: something stretched out to bridge a gap, something which makes good in a particular direction the general falling-short. The special kind of light or life which he receives, he receives for the race; and, conversely, the special growth which he is able to achieve comes from the race. He depends on it for his past; it depends on him for its future. All are part of life’s great process of becoming; there are no breaks. Although there is perfect individualization, there is interpenetration too. His attainment is the attainment of the whole, pressing on behind him, supporting him. Thus—to take an obvious example—the achievement of peculiar sanctity by the member of a religious order is the achievement of that order in him; and this not in a fantastic and metaphorical sense. The support of the Rule, the conditions of the life, the weight of tradition, the special characters which each religious family inherits from its Patriarch, have all contributed something to make the achievement possible; and are factors governing the type which that achievement assumes. We recognize the Cistercian stamp upon St. Bernard, the Dominican on Suso and Tauler, the Carmelite on St. John of the Cross. Each such case vindicates once more the incarnational principle; it is the true spirit of the community, flowering in this representative of theirs, which we see. Thus, as we may regard Christ from one point of view as supremely ideal Man incarnate—the “heavenly man” as Paul calls Him—summing up, fulfilling, lifting to new heights all that came before, and therefore actualizing all that humanity was ever intended to do, and changing for ever more the character of its future achievements; so, in a small way, we may regard St. Teresa as Carmel, the ideal Carmel, incarnate. Each is a concrete fact which atones for the falling-short of a whole type, and yet is conditioned by that type. The thought of what the Carmelite life was meant to do, the pressure of that idea seeking manifestation, did condition Teresa’s achievement. Are we not also bound to say that the thought of the Jewish visions of an ideal humanity, of the Son of Man and the Suffering Servant, did condition the external accidents of the life and death of Christ?

So as to the past. Still more as to the future are the corporate and individual aspects of spiritual life inextricably twined together. As that done by one is an outbirth of the whole, so that done to one may avail for the whole. Only by staying within the circle of this thought—a thought which surely comes very close to the doctrine of Atonement—can we form a sane and broad idea of what the mystic, and the mystic’s experience, mean for the race. Consider again the case of Teresa. As, even in a time and place of considerable monastic corruption—for no one who has read her life and letters can regard the Convent of the Incarnation as a forcing-house of the spiritual life—still the idea of her order conditioned her great and Godward-tending soul, and her dedicated life filled up the measure of its glory; yet more has Teresa’s own, separate, unique achievement conditioned the spirit of her order ever since. All the saints which it has nourished have been salted with her salt. All that she won has flowed out from her in life-giving streams to others. She has been a regenerator of the religious life, has achieved the ideal of Richard Rolle, and become a “pipe of life” through which the living water can pass from God to man. Is not this, too, rather near the idea of Atonement, a curiously close and faithful imitation of Christ; especially when we consider the amount of unselfish suffering which such a career entails?

The objective of the Christian life, we say, is union with God: that paradoxical victory-in-surrender of love which translates us from finite to infinite levels. Most of us in this present life and in our own persons fall short of the glory of this. We are not all equally full of grace; we do not all grow up to the full stature of the Sons of God; and it is no use pretending that we do. But the mystical saint does achieve this, and by this act of mediation—this “vicarious” achievement, if you like to put it so—performed by a member of our social organism, the gift does really “abound unto the many.” For what other purpose, indeed, are these apparently elect souls bred up? What other social value can we attribute to them than that which we see them actually possessing in history—the value, that is, of special instruments put forth by the race, to do or suffer something which the average self cannot do, but which humanity as a whole, in its Godward ascent, must, can, and shall do; ducts, too, whereby fresh spiritual energy flows in to mankind; eyes, open to visions beyond the span of average sight; parents of new life. Carlyle said that a hero was “a man sent hither to make the divine mystery more impressively known to us”—to atone, in fact, for the inadequacy of our own perception of Reality, our perpetual relapses to lower levels of life; to make a bridge between us and the Transcendent Order. And when the hero as mystic does this, is he not in a special sense a close imitator of Christ?

We seem to have here the highest example of a principle which is operative through the whole of the seething complex of life, for there is a sense on which every great personality fulfils the function of an atoner. On the one hand he does something towards the making good of humanity’s “falling short” in one direction or another; on the other hand, he gives to his fellow-men—adds to their universe—something which they did not possess before. Burke, speaking of the social contract, has said that society is a partnership in all science, all art, every virtue, and all perfection; and, since the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained but in many generations, it is a partnership between the living, the dead, and the unborn. “Each contract of each particular state,” he says, “is but a clause in the great primæval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and the invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures each in their appointed place.” In such a partnership—linking higher and lower, visible and invisible worlds in one—the creative spirits in every department of life may properly be called “atoners,” for they have a corporate and racial value which is in exact proportion to their individual achievement of reality. Thus the great artist, or the great musician, really redeems his fellows from slavery to a lower level of colour, form, sound. He atones for their dullness towards that which has always been there, and endows them with new possibilities of vision and hearing; gives them, in fact, more abundant life; is the Door, the Way, to a wider universe. His creative acts open new gates to the whole race. The fact that he has lived and worked has effected a permanent change in the stream of life, which can never again be that which it was before. If we were more accustomed, on the one hand, to look at the achievements of religious genius from the artistic and creative point of view, and on the other hand, to discern the work of the Holy Spirit in the artistic as well as the religious field, I believe that we should find a close parallel between the work of supreme personality redeeming spirit, and the work of the great artist redeeming sense, from servitude to old imperfections and disharmonies.

We might almost make it the test of true greatness, this wonderful power of flinging out the filaments of life in all directions; this way in which noble and creative personalities of every type seem to be so much more than themselves—to count for so much more than themselves—to be, in their generous activities, the servants of all life. They appear to be the sum of tendencies which preceded them; and to gather those tendencies to a focus and distribute them again, enhanced and re-directed, to succeeding generations of souls. Such a personality has to the full the divine power of giving and of taking. Whilst he seems specially original, it is always true that the past, the race, nourishes him to an enormous extent. Christ Himself conformed to this law. The great man is rooted in history, plaited up in the life of his own time: absorbs from the human as well as from the spiritual. His feet are in Time, though his head is in Eternity. He is never isolated and ring-fenced. Where he seems so, that appearance is found on examination to be deceptive, as Dr. Rufus Jones has shown in the case of Jacob Boehme, and Baron von Hügel in that of George Fox. So, again, the special act, vision, or experience of the spiritual genius never ends with him. He is a centre of divine fecundity—it is the mystics’ own phrase. The touch of the divine life stimulates him to creation. He is a regenerator, a whirlpool of new forces, a parent of new things. It seems that life’s “tendency to lag behind,” its tendency not to do its best, receives its corrective in all such great spirits; and the Christian atonement becomes the supreme, the divine manifestation of a vital law which we find operative on every level of existence.

If we acknowledge the extent to which Grace, Spirit, God, works on man through personality, through specific men—as a communication of transcendent vitality to certain souls (“elect,” if you like) in order that they may bring forth new life, new vision, new goodness, may fertilize the race afresh—then shall we not expect to find that Christianity, being a vital, dynamic system, has exhibited and emphasized these facts throughout the whole of her great career? This outward thrust of great personalities from the social organism, these fresh unique saving contacts made by the individual in the name of the All, these sudden, incalculable, upward leaps of life, these changes in the national consciousness which the hero, poet, prophet can produce—we shall expect to find all this operative in the highest degree in the Christian Church. We shall expect to find her claiming for her greatest and most God-achieving spirits, not only special honour, but a special value, a special redeeming power in respect of the corporate body to which they belong; and this, of course, is exactly what we do find. The mystical saints, in fact, seem to provide us with a link between the doctrine of the Atonement—of the special racial value of the utterly surrendered life in God, which was once, and once only, perfectly achieved—and the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, or interpenetration and mutual help of all souls “in Christ.” From these two ideas there follows of necessity that further doctrine of the “prevailing merits” of the saints, their special “atoning” value for other men, the corporate social work done by heroic virtue flowering in individual souls, which the Catholic Church has always deduced from them. At the back of both ideas we find the same fact; that Life and Love, when supremely evoked within the temporal order, cannot keep themselves to themselves. Such life and such love have, in spite of their marked individuality, a profoundly social character; they are violently contagious; they spread, they interpenetrate, they transmute all selves that will receive them. They entincture the whole stream of duration, make good its shortcomings, make widening circles of splendour within the flux.

So, if we want to think of a Celestial Hierarchy, actual to us, founded in history, related with us by a thousand links, it is surely of the saints and the mystics that we ought to think; rising as it were in graduated orders, according to the strength and purity of their union with God, the fullness of their possession of Eternal Life, towards the Cross in which their tendencies are perfected and gathered up. These are amongst the highest values which life has given to us. The apostolic type; the men of action, dynamic manifestations of the Spirit. The prophetic type; men of supreme vision, enlarging the horizons of the world. The martyr-type; men of utter sacrifice and complete interior surrender. These are the three ways in which the mystical passion for God breaks out through humanity. These three types make good—atone for—our corporate spiritual shortcomings; redeem the dead level of that race which has thrust them forth towards the Infinite.

Perhaps it seems to us that their difference from us is too great; that they are cut off, divided by a chasm from the common experience of man to form an exclusive, “other-worldly” type. Their life rises up like a great mountain, full of beauty and strangeness; and ours is like the homely plain. But there is no break between the plain and the mountain. It is pushed out from us, it is part of us; its value is bound up with the value of the whole—with our value, as struggling, growing men. It, every inch of it, atones for our flatness and enhances the average level of the race. We have all seen in Catholic countries how a sudden hill with a Calvary on its summit can glorify and atone for the whole landscape—so poor without it, so noble with it—from which it is lifted up. Now the Cross is, and remains, the central feature in the Christian landscape too: but is it not the long slope of that hill, going from the common level to the heights, which makes it so homely to us, so accessible to us, so supremely a part of us, and completes its task of linking humanity and divinity?

These are some of the reasons why the doctrine of Atonement seems to be closely bound up with the mystical vision of life, and hard to understand—whether we mean by it a spiritual principle or a historic event—without that mystical vision. We have Christianity saying to us, on the one hand, that the utmost ideal of humanity, the ideal of perfect self-donation to the purposes of Spirit, perfect self-surrender to the interests of the All, was completely and transcendently achieved in Jesus. In Him man leapt to the heights; and this unique attainment counts for the whole race. But, on the other hand, it says that all who can are called to go as far as they are able on the same road; to “fill up the measure of the sufferings,” to “grow to the full stature,” to “press on to the high calling” of the human soul. Through these more vital personalities—the mystics, the twice-born, the saints—the radiance of the spiritual streams out on the race; God speaks to man through man. Such personalities act as receivers and transmitters; they really and practically distribute the flashes of the Uncreated Light. Their activities are vicarious; they do atone for the disabilities of other men. Therefore the social value of the mystics, their place in the organism, is intimately connected with the atoning idea. Were it not for the principle which the doctrine of Atonement expresses, the mystics would be spiritual individualists, whose life and experience would be meaningless except for themselves. And were it not for the continuance of the mystical life, the perpetual renewal of the mystical self-donation in love, its known value for the race, then the historic Atonement of Jesus would be an isolated act, unrelated to the great processes of the Spiritual World, of which it should form the crown.

THE MYSTIC AS CREATIVE ARTIST

Hostile criticism of the mystics almost invariably includes the charge that their great experiences are in the nature of merely personal satisfactions. It is said that they stand apart from the ruck of humanity, claiming a special knowledge of the supersensual, a special privilege of communion with it; yet do not pass on to others, in any real and genuine sense, the illumination, the intuition of Reality, which they declare that they have received. St. Bernard’s favourite mistranslation from Isaiah, “My secret to myself,” has again and again been used against them with damaging effect; linked sometimes with the notorious phrase in which Plotinus defined the soul’s fruition of Eternity as “a flight of the alone to the Alone.”

It is true that these hints concerning a solitary and ineffable encounter do tally with one side of the experience of the mystic; do describe one aspect of his richly various, many-angled spiritual universe, one way in which that divine union which is his high objective is apprehended by the surface-consciousness. But that which is here told, is only half the truth. There is another side, a “completing opposite,” to this admittedly indescribable union of hearts; a side which is often—and most ungraciously—forgotten by those who have received its benefits. The great mystic’s loneliness is a consecrated loneliness. When he ascends to that encounter with Divine Reality which is his peculiar privilege, he is not a spiritual individualist. He goes as the ambassador of the race. His spirit is not, so to speak, a “spark flying upwards” from this world into that world, flung out from the mass of humanity, cut off; a little, separate, brilliant thing. It is more like a feeler, a tentacle, which life as a whole stretches out into that supersensual world which envelops her. Life stretches that tentacle out, but she also draws it in again with the food that it has gathered, the news that it has to tell of the regions which its delicate tactile sense has enabled it to explore. This, it seems to me, is the function of the mystic consciousness in respect of the human race. For this purpose it is specialized. It receives, in order that it may give. As the prophet looks at the landscape of Eternity, the mystic finds and feels it: and both know that there is laid on them the obligation of exhibiting it if they can.

If this be so, then it becomes clear that the mystic’s personal encounter with Infinite Reality represents only one of the two movements which constitute his completed life. He must turn back to pass on the revelation he has received: must mediate between the transcendent and his fellow-men. He is, in fact, called to be a creative artist of the highest kind; and only when he is such an artist, does he fulfil his duty to the race.

It is coming to be realized more and more clearly that it is the business of the artist not only to delight us, but to enlighten us: in Blake’s words, to “Cleanse the doors of perception, so that everything may appear as it is—infinite.” Artists mediate between the truth and beauty which they know, and those who cannot without their help discern it. It is the function of art, says Hegel, to deliver to the domain of feeling and delight of vision all that the mind may possess of essential and transcendent Being. In this respect it ranks with religion and philosophy as “one of the three spheres of Absolute Spirit.” Bergson, again, declares that it is the peculiar business of art to brush aside everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with the real, the true. The artist is the man who sees things in their native purity.

“Could reality,” he observes in a celebrated passage, “come into direct contact with sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves—then, we should all be artists.... Deep in our souls we should hear the uninterrupted melody of our inner life: a music often gay, more often sad, always original. All this is around and within us: yet none of it is distinctly perceived by us. Between nature and ourselves—more, between ourselves and our own consciousness—hangs a veil: a veil dense and opaque for normal men, but thin, almost transparent, for the artist and poet.” He might have added, for the mystic too.

This veil, he says again, is woven of self-interest: we perceive things, not as they are, but as they affect ourselves. The artist, on the contrary, sees them for their own sakes, with the eyes of disinterested love. So, when the mystics declare to us that the first conditions of spiritual illumination are self-simplification, humility and detachment, they are demanding just those qualities which control the artist’s power of seeing things in their beauty and truth. The true mystic sees Reality in its infinite aspect; and tries, as other artists, to reveal it within the finite world. He not only ascends, but descends the ladder of contemplation; having heard “the uninterrupted music of the inner life,” he tries to weave it into melodies that other men can understand.

Bergson’s contemporary, Eucken, claims—and I think it is one of his most striking doctrines—that man is gradually but actually bringing into existence a spiritual world. This spiritual world springs up from within through humanity—that is, through man’s own consciousness—yet at the same time humanity is, as it were, growing up into it; finding it as an independent reality, waiting to be apprehended, waiting to be incorporated into our universe. In respect of man’s normal universe, this spiritual world is both immanent and transcendent: “Absent only from those unable to perceive it,” as Plotinus said of the Nous. We are reminded of the Voice which said to St. Augustine, “I am the Food of the Full-grown.”

This paradox of a wholly new order of experience thrusting itself up through the race which it yet transcends, is a permanent feature in the teachings of the higher religions and philosophies, and is closely connected with the phenomena of inspiration and of artistic creation. The artist, the prophet, the metaphysician, each builds up from material beyond the grasp of other souls, a world within which those other souls can live and dream: a world, moreover, which exhibits in new proportions and endows with new meanings the common world of daily life. When we ask what organ of the race—the whole body of humanity—it is, by and through which this supernal world thus receives expression, it becomes clear that this organ is the corporate spiritual consciousness, emerging in those whom we call, pre-eminently, mystics and seers. It is, actually and literally, through them that this new world is emerging and being built up; as it is through other forms of enhanced and clarified consciousness, in painters, musicians, philosophers, and the adepts of physical science, that other aspects of the universe are made known to men. In all of these, and in the mystic too, the twin powers of a steadfast, selective attention and of creative imagination are at work. Because of their wide, deep, attention to life they receive more news from the external world than others do; because of the creative cast of their minds, they are able to weave up the crude received material into a living whole, into an idea or image which can be communicated to other men. Ultimately, we owe to the mystics all the symbols, ideas and images of which our spiritual world, as it is thought of by the bulk of men, is constructed. We take its topography from them, at second-hand: and often forget the sublime adventures immortalized in those phrases which we take so lightly on our lips—the Divine Dark, the Beatific Vision, the Eternal Beauty, Ecstasy, Union, Spiritual Marriage, and the rest. The mystics have actually created, from that language which we have evolved to describe and deal with the time-world, another artistic world; a self-consistent and spiritually expressive world of imaginative concepts, like the world of music or the world of colour and form. They are always trying to give us the key to it, to induct us into its mysterious delights. It is by means of this world, and the symbols which furnish it, that human consciousness is enabled to actualize its most elusive experiences; and hence it is wholly due to the unselfish labours of those mystics who have struggled to body forth the realities by which they were possessed, that we are able, to some extent, to enter into the special experiences of the mystical saints; and that they are able to snatch us up to a brief sharing of their vision, to make us live for a moment “Eternal Life in the midst of Time.”

How, then, have they done this? What is the general method by which any man communicates the result of his personal contacts with the universe to other minds? Roughly speaking, he has two ways of doing this, by description and by suggestion; and his best successes are those in which these two methods are combined. His descriptions are addressed to the intellect, his suggestions are appeals to the imagination, of those with whom he is trying to communicate. The necessities which control these two ways of telling the news—oblique suggestion and symbolic image—practically govern the whole of mystical literature. The span of this literature is wide. It goes from the utterly formless, yet infinitely suggestive, language of certain great contemplatives, to the crisply formal pictorial descriptions of those whose own revelations of Reality crystallize into visions, voices, or other psycho-sensorial experiences. At one end of the scale is the vivid, prismatic imagery of the Christian apocalypse, at the other the fluid, ecstatic poetry of some of the Sūfi saints.

In his suggestive and allusive language the mystical artist often approaches the methods of music. When he does this, his statements do not give information. They operate a kind of enchantment which dilates the consciousness of the hearer to a point at which it is able to apprehend new aspects of the world. In his descriptive passages, on the other hand, he generally proceeds, as do nearly all our descriptive efforts, by way of comparison. Yet often these comparisons, like those employed by the great poet, are more valuable for their strange suggestive quality than for any exact parallels which they set up between the mystic’s universe and our own. Thus, when Clement of Alexandria compares the Logos to a “New Song,” when Suso calls the Eternal Wisdom a “sweet and beautiful wild flower,” when Dionysius the Areopagite speaks of the Divine Dark which is the Inaccessible Light, or Ruysbroeck of “the unwalled world,” we recognize a sudden flash of the creative imagination; evoking for us a truth far greater, deeper and more fruitful than the merely external parallel which it suggests. So too with many common metaphors of the mystics: the Fire of Love, the Game of Love, the Desert of God, the Marriage of the Soul. Such phrases succeed because of their interior and imaginative appeal.

We have numerous examples of this kind of artistic language—the highly charged imaginative phrase—in the Bible; especially in the prophetic books, and the Apocalypse.

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.

I will give thee treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places.

The Lord shall be a diadem of beauty.

He showed me a pure river of the water of life.

I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters.

I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

Whereas the original prophetic significance of these phrases is now meaningless for us, their suggestive quality—their appeal to the mystic consciousness—retains its full force. They are artistic creations; and have the enormous evocative power proper to all great art. Later mystics use such passages again and again, reading their own experiences into these traditional forms. The classic example of this close alliance between poetic readings of life and practical mysticism is of course the mystical interpretation of the Song of Songs, which appears in Christian mysticism at least as early as the fourth century. But there are many other instances. Thus St. Macarius finds in Ezekiel’s vision of the Cherubim a profoundly suggestive image of the state of the deified soul, “all eyes and all wings,” driven upon its course by the Heavenly Charioteer of the Spirit. Thus in The Mirror of Simple Souls, another of Ezekiel’s visions—that of the “great eagle, with great wings, long wings, full of feathers, which took the highest branch of the cedar”—becomes the vivid symbol of the contemplative mind, “the eagle that flies high, so right high and yet more high than does any other bird, for she is feathered with fine love, and beholds above other the beauty of the sun.”

When we pass to the mystical poets, we find that nearly all their best effects are due to their extraordinary genius for this kind of indirect, suggestive imagery. This is the method by which they proceed when they wish to communicate their vision of reality. Their works are full of magical phrases which baffle analysis, yet, as one of them has said:

“Lighten the wave-washed caverns of the mind

With a pale, starry grace.”

Many of these phrases are of course familiar to every one. Vaughan’s

“I saw Eternity the other night

Like a great ring of pure and endless light.”

Blake’s

“To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.”

Whitman’s

“Light rare, untellable, lighting the very light.”

Thompson’s

“Ever and anon a trumpet sounds

From the hid battlements of Eternity.”

These are artistic, sidelong representations of the mystic’s direct apprehension of the Infinite on, so to speak, its cosmic and impersonal side. Others reflect the personal and intimate contact with the Divine Life which forms the opposite side of his complete experience. Thus Francis Thompson:

“With his aureole

The tresses of my soul

Are blent

In wished content.”

So, too, St. John of the Cross:

“All things I then forgot,

My cheek on him who for my coming came;

All ceased, and I was not,

Leaving my cares and shame

Among the lilies, and forgetting them.”

Best of all, perhaps, Jalāluddin Rūmi:

“In a place beyond uttermost place, in a tract without shadow of trace,

Soul and body transcending I live, in the soul of my loved one anew.”

Sometimes the two aspects, personal and impersonal, are woven together by the poet: and then it is that we come nearest to an understanding of the full experience he is trying to express. A remarkable example of this occurs in Gerard Hopkins, perhaps the greatest mystical poet of the Victorian era:

“Thou mastering me

God! giver of breath and bread;

World’s strand, sway of the sea;

Lord of the living and dead;

Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,

And after it almost unmade, what with dread,

Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?

Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.”

“I kiss my hand

To the stars, lovely-asunder

Starlight, wafting him out of it; and

Glow, glory in thunder;

Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:

Since, though he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,

His mystery must be instressed, stressed;

For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.”

So much for the poets. In the prose writings of the mystics we find again the same characters, the same high imaginative qualities, the same passionate effort to give the ineffable some kind of artistic form. This effort includes in its span a wide range of literary artifices; some endeavouring to recapture and represent in concrete symbols the objective reality known; some, like one dominant art movement of the present day, trying to communicate it obliquely, by a representation of the subjective feeling-state induced in the mystic’s own consciousness. At one end of the scale, therefore, we have the so-called negative language of mysticism, which describes the supersensuous in paradox by refusing to describe it at all; by declaring that the entry of the soul upon spiritual experience is an entry into a Cloud of Unknowing, a nothing, a Divine Darkness, a fathomless abyss. The curious thing is, that though here, if anywhere, the mystic seems to keep his secret to himself, as a matter of fact it is just this sort of language which has been proved to possess the highest evocative power. For many types of mind, this really does fling magic casements wide; does give us a momentary glimpse of the perilous seas. I am inclined to think that, many and beautiful as are the symbolic and pictorial creations of mystical genius, it is here that this genius works most freely, produces its most magnificent results. When Ruysbroeck speaks of the boundless abyss of pure simplicity, that “dim silence where all lovers lose themselves”; when he assures us that, “stripped of its very life,” the soul is destined to “sail the wild billows of that Sea Divine,” surely he effects a true change in our universe. So, too, the wonderful series of formless visions—though “vision” is a poor word for intuitive experience of this sort—experienced by Angela of Foligno, far exceed in their suggestive power her vividly pictured conversations with Christ, when she declares that she beheld “those eyes and that face so gracious and so pleasing.”

“I beheld,” she says of her ultimate experience of the Absolute, “a Thing, as fixed and stable as it was indescribable; and more than this I cannot say, save what I have often said already, namely, that it was all good. And though my soul beheld not love, yet when it saw that ineffable Thing it was itself filled with unutterable joy, and it was taken out of the state it was in, and placed in this great and ineffable state.... But if thou seekest to know that which I beheld, I can tell thee nothing, save that I beheld a Fullness and a Clearness, and felt them within me so abundantly that I cannot describe it, nor give any image thereof: for what I beheld was not bodily, but as though it were in heaven. Thus I beheld a beauty so great that I can say nothing of it save that I saw the Supreme Beauty, which contains in itself all goodness.”

In the end, all that Angela has said here is, “Come and see!” but in saying this, she tells us far more than many do who go about to measure the City of Contemplation. Here words suggest, they do not tell; entice, but do not describe. Reminding us of the solemn declaration of Thomas à Kempis, that “there is a distance incomparable between those things that imperfect men think, and those that men illumined by high revelation behold,” they yet extend to other minds a musical invitation to intercourse with new orders of reality.

This sort of language, this form of paradoxical, suggestive, allusive art is a permanent feature in mystical literature. It is usually supposed to be derived through Dionysius the Areopagite from the Platonists, but is really far older than this. As it comes down the centuries, it develops in depth and richness. Each successive mystic takes up the imagery of negation where the last one leaves it—takes it, because he recognizes that it describes a country where he too has been—and adds to it the products of his own most secret and august experiences. As in the torch-race of the antique world, the illuminating symbol, once lit, is snatched from hand to hand, and burns ever brighter as it is passed on.

I take one example of this out of many. Nearly all the great mystics of the later Middle Ages speak of the Wilderness or Desert of Deity; suggesting thus that sense of great, swept spaces, “beyond the polar circle of the mind”—of a plane of experience destitute of all the homely furniture of thought—which seems to characterize a certain high type, or stage, of contemplation. It represents the emergence of the self into a real universe—a “place beyond uttermost place”—unrelated to the categories of thought, and is substantially the same experience which Dionysius the Areopagite and those mystics who follow him call the Divine Ignorance or the Dark, and which his English interpreter names the Cloud of Unknowing, where the soul feels itself to be lost. But each mystic who uses this traditional image of amazement—really the description of a psychological situation, not of an objective reality—gives to it a characteristic touch; each has passed it through the furnace of his own passionate imagination, and slightly modified its temper and its form. This place, or state, says Eckhart, is “a still wilderness where no one is at home.” It is “the quiet desert of the Godhead,” says Tauler; “So still, so mysterious, so desolate! The great wastes to be found in it have neither image, form, nor condition.” Yet, says Richard Rolle—suddenly bringing the positive experience of the contemplative heart to the rescue of the baffled contemplative mind—in this same wilderness consciousness does set up an ineffable correspondence with Reality.

“[There] speaks the loved to the heart of the lover; as it were a bashful lover, that his sweetheart before men entreats not, nor friendly-wise but commonly and as a stranger kisses ... and anon comes heavenly joy, marvellously making merry melody.”

Here the mystic, with an astonishing boldness, weaves together spatial, personal and musical imagery, positive and negative experience, in order to produce his full effect.

Finally, St. John of the Cross, great thinker, manly and heroic mystic, and true poet, effects a perfect synthesis of these positive and negative experiences—that apparent self-loss in empty spaces which is also, mysteriously, an encounter of love.

“The soul in dim contemplation (he says) is like a man who sees something for the first time, the like of which he has never seen before ... hence it feels like one who is placed in a wild and vast solitude where no human being can come; an immense wilderness without limits. But this wilderness is the more delicious, sweet and lovely, the more it is wide, vast and lonely; for where the soul seems most to be lost, there it is most raised up above all created things.”

All this language, as I have said, belongs to the oblique and paradoxical side of the mystic’s art; and comes to us from those who are temperamentally inclined to that pure contemplation which “has no image.” Psychologically speaking, these mystics are closer to the musician than to any other type of artist, though they avail themselves when they wish of material drawn from all the arts. But there is another kind of mystic, naturally inclined to visualization, who tends to translate his supersensual experience into concrete, pictorial images; into terms of colour and of form. He uses, in fact, the methods of the painter, the descriptive writer, sometimes of the dramatist, rather than those of the musician or the lyric poet. He is, I think, as a rule much less impressive than the artist of the illusive kind, and is seldom so successful in putting us into communion with reality. On the other hand—and partly because of his more concrete method—he is the more generally understood. For one person to whom Plotinus or Ruysbroeck communicates his sublime intuition of reality, a hundred accept at their face-value, as true “revelations,” the visions of St. Gertrude or St. Teresa.

The picture-making proceedings of this type of mystical artist are of two kinds. Sometimes they are involuntary, sometimes deliberate. Often we find both forms in the same individual; for instance, in Mechthild of Magdeburg and in Suso, where it is sometimes extremely difficult to find the dividing line between true visionary experience entirely outside the self’s control, and the intense meditation, or poetic apprehension of truth, which demands a symbolic and concrete form for its literary expression. In both cases an act of artistic creation has taken place; in one below, in the other above, the normal threshold of consciousness. In true visionaries, the translation of the supersensual into sensual terms is uncontrolled by the surface intellect; as it is indeed in many artists. Without the will or knowledge of the subject, intuitions are woven up into pictures, cadences, words; and, by that which psychologists call a psycho-sensorial automatism, the mystic seems to himself to receive the message of Reality in a pictorial, verbal, dramatic or sometimes a musical form—“coming in to his body by the windows of the wits,” as one old writer has it.

Thus the rhythmic phrases in which the Eternal Wisdom speaks to Suso, or the Divine Voice to St. Catherine of Siena, verge on poetic composition; but poetic composition of the automatic type, uncontrolled by the mystic’s surface-mind. Thus, too, the great fluid visions of the prophets, the sharply definite, often lovely, pictures which surge up before the mind of Suso, the Mechthilds, St. Gertrude, Angela of Foligno, of the great St. Teresa herself, are symbolic pictures which represent an actual interior experience, a real contact with the supersensual; exhibiting the interpretative power inherent in the mystical imagination. These pictures are seen by the mystic—sometimes, as he says, within the mind, sometimes as projections in space—always in sharp definition, lit by that strong light which is peculiar to visionary states. They are not produced by any voluntary process of composition, but loom up, as do the best creations of other artists, from his deeper mind, bringing with them an intense conviction of reality. Good instances are the visions which so often occur at conversion, or mark the transition from one stage of the mystic way to another: for example, the mystic marriage of St. Catherine of Siena, or that vision of the Upper School of True Resignation, which initiated Suso into the “dark night of the soul.” I believe that we may look on such visions as allied to dream-states; but in the case of the great mystics they are the richly significant waking-dreams of creative genius, not the confused and meaningless dreaming of normal men. Suso himself makes this comparison, and says that none but the mystic can distinguish vision from dream. In character they vary as widely as do the creations of the painter and the poet. The personal and intimate, the remote and metaphysical, sides of the spiritual life are richly represented in them. Sometimes the elements from which they are built up come from theology, sometimes from history, legend, nature, or human life. But in every case the “glory of the lighted mind” shines on them.

Often a particularly delicate and gay poetic feeling—a faëry touch—shows itself in the symbolic pictures by which these mystics try to represent their encounter with the spiritual world. Coventry Patmore once spoke of a “sphere of rapture and dalliance” to which the great contemplatives are raised; and it is from such a sphere that these seem to turn back to us, trying, by direct appeals to our sense of joy, the most stunted of our spiritual faculties, to communicate their exultant experience of that Kingdom of Reality which is neither “here” nor “there” but “everywhere.”

Music and dancing, birds and flowers, the freshness of a living, growing world, all simple joyous things, all airy beauties, are used in the effort to tell us of that vision which Clement called the privilege of love. When we read these declarations we feel that it is always spring-time in those gardens of the soul of which they tell. St. John of the Cross, who described those spiritual gardens, said that fragrant roses brought from strange islands grew there—those strange islands which are the romantic unexplored possibilities of God—and that water-lilies shine like stars in that roaring torrent of supernal glory which pours without ceasing through the transfigured soul. This is high poetry; but sometimes the mystic imagination shows itself under simpler, more endearing forms, as when St. Mechthild of Hackeborn saw the prayers of her sisters flying up like larks into the presence of God; some soaring as high as His countenance and some falling down to rest upon His heart. An angel carried the little, fluttering prayers which were not strong enough to rise of themselves. Imagery less charming than this has gone to the making of many a successful poem.

Between the sublime intensity of St. John and the crystalline simplicity of St. Mechthild, mystical literature provides us with examples of almost every type of romantic and symbolic language; deliberate or involuntary translation of the heavenly fact into the earthly image. True, the earthly image is transfused by a new light, radiant with a new colour, has been lifted into a new atmosphere; and thus has often a suggestive quality far in excess of its symbolic appropriateness. In their search for such images the mystics explore the resources of all the arts. In particular, music and dancing—joyous harmony, unceasing measured movement—have seemed to them specially significant media whereby to express their intuitions of Eternal Life. St. Francis, and after him Richard Rolle, heard celestial melodies; Kabir, the “Unstruck Music of the Infinite.” Dante saw the saints dancing in the sphere of the sun; Suso heard the music of the angels, and was invited to join in their song and dance. It was not, he says, like the dancing of this world, but was like a celestial ebb and flow within that incomprehensible Abyss which is the secret being of the Deity. There is no need to dwell upon the remarkable way in which mystics of all countries and periods, from Plotinus to Jacob Boehme, resort to the dance as an image of the glad harmonious movements of liberated souls. I will take two characteristic examples, from the East and from the West. The first is a poem by Kabir:

“Dance, my heart! dance to-day with joy.

The strains of love fill the days and the nights with music, and the world is listening to its melodies;

Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythm of this music. The hills and the sea and the earth dance. The world of man dances in laughter and tears....

Behold! my heart dances in the delight of a hundred arts, and the Creator is well pleased.”

The next is the German mystic and poetess, Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose writings are amongst the finest products of mystical genius of the romantic and emotional type. This Mechthild’s book, The Book of the Flowing Light of the Godhead, is a collection of visions, revelations, thoughts and letters, written in alternate prose and verse. The variety of its contents includes the most practical advice on daily conduct, the most sublime descriptions of high mystical experience. Mechthild was an artist, who was evidently familiar with the literary tradition and most of the literary expedients of her time. She uses many of them in the attempt to impart to others that vision of Life, Light and Love which she knew. I take, as an example of her genius, and a last specimen of the mystic’s creative art, the celebrated letter addressed to a fellow-pilgrim on that spiritual “Love-path” which she trod herself with so great a fortitude. It represents not only the rich variety of Mechthild’s literary resources, but also those several forms of artistic expression which the great mystics have employed. Here, concrete representation is perpetually reinforced by oblique suggestion; the imagery of the poet is double-edged, evoking moods as well as ideas. We observe that it opens with a spiritual love-scene, closely related in style to the secular and romantic literature of Mechthild’s time; that this develops to a dramatic dialogue between soul and senses—another common artifice of the mediæval author—and this again leads by a perfectly natural transition to the soul’s great acclamation of its destiny, and the crowning announcement of the union of lover and beloved.

The movement of this mystical romance, then, like the movement of ascending consciousness, goes from the concrete image to the mysterious and sidelong apprehension of imageless facts. First we have picture, then dialectic, then intuitive certitude. Here, too, we find both those aspects of experience which dominate mystical literature: the personal and intimate encounter of love, and the self-loss of the soul in an utterly transcendent Absolute. Surely the union of these “completing opposites” in one work of art must rank as a great imaginative achievement.

Mechthild tells her story of the soul’s adventure in snatches of freely-rhymed verse, linked together by prose narrative passages—a form which is not uncommon in the secular literature of the Middle Ages.[^[1]] We are further reminded of that secular literature by the imagery which she employs. The soul is described as a maiden, the Divine Lover is a fair youth whom she desires. The very setting of the story is just such a fairy landscape as we find in the lays and romances of chivalry; it has something of the spring-like charm that we feel in Aucassin and Nicolette—the dewy morning, the bird-haunted forest, the song and dance. It is, in fact, a love story of the period adapted with extraordinary boldness to the purposes of mystical experience.

When the virgin soul, says Mechthild at the opening of her tale, has endured all the trials of mystical purification, she is very weary, and cries to her Love, saying, “Oh, beautiful youth! I long for thee. Where shall I find thee?” Then the Divine Youth answers:

“A gentle voice I hear,

Something of love sounds there:

I have wooed her long and long,

Yet not till now have I heard that song.

It moveth me so,

Towards her I must go.

She is the soul who with pain is torn,

And love, that is one with the pain.

In the early dew of the morn,

In the hidden depths, which are far below,

The life of the soul is born.”

Then her vassals, which are the five senses, say to the soul, “Lady, adorn thyself.”

“We have heard the whisper clear;

The Prince is coming towards thee here,

In the morning dew, in the bird’s song.

Ah, fair Bride, tarry not long!”

So the soul adorns herself with the virtues, and goes out into the forest: and the forest, says Mechthild, is the company of the saints. Sweet nightingales sing there night and day of true union with God, and there in the thicket are heard the voices of the birds of holy wisdom. But the youth himself comes not to her. He sends messengers to the intent that she may dance: one by one he sends her the faith of Abraham, the aspirations of the Prophets, the pure humility of our Lady Saint Mary, all the virtues of Christ, and all the sanctity of His elect; and thus there is prepared a most noble dance. And then comes the youth and says to the soul, “Maiden, as gladly shouldst thou have danced, as mine elect have danced.” But she replies:

“Unless thou lead me, Lord, I cannot dance;

Would’st thou have me leap and spring,

Thou thyself, dear Lord, must sing,

So shall I spring into thy love,

From thy love to understanding,

From understanding to delight.

Then, soaring human thought far, far above,

There circling will I dwell, and taste encircling love.”

So sings the Bride; and so the youth must sing, that she may dance. Then says he:

“Maiden, thy dance of praise was well performed. Now thou shalt have thy will of the Virgin’s Son, for thou art weary. Come at midday to the shady fountain, to the resting-place of love: and with him thou shalt find refreshment.”

And the maiden replies:

“Oh Lord, it is too high, too great,

That she should be thy chosen mate,

Within whose heart no love can be

Till she is quickened, Lord, by thee.”

By this romantic, story-telling method Mechthild has appealed to the fancy and emotion of the reader, and has enticed him into the heart of the spiritual situation. Next, she passes to her intellectual appeal; the argument between the soul and the senses. From this she proceeds, by a transition which seems to be free and natural, yet is the outcome of consummate art, to the supreme declarations of the deified spirit “at home with the Lord,” as St. Paul said.

The dialogue moves by the process of reduction to a demonstration of God as the only satisfaction of the questing soul which has surrendered to the incantations of Reality. One after another, substitutes for the First and Only Fair are offered and rejected. The soul says to the senses, which are her vassals: “Now I am for a while weary of the dance. Give place! for I would go where I may refresh myself.” Then say the senses to the soul: “Lady, wilt thou refresh thyself in the tears of love of St. Mary Magdalene? This may well satisfy thee?” But the soul says: “Hush, sirs, you know not what I mean! Let me be, for I would drink a little of the unmingled wine.”

Then say the senses:

“Oh Bride, in virgin chastity,

Is the Love of God made ready for thee.”

And the soul says:

“Even so; yet though high and pure it be,

That path is not the highest for me.”

And the senses:

“In the blood of the martyred saints

May’st thou refresh thy soul that faints.”

And the soul:

“I have been martyred so many a day,

I cannot now tread in that way.”

And the senses:

“By the wise Confessors’ side,

The pure in heart love to abide.”

And the soul:

“And their counsel will I obey,

Both when I go and when I stay;

And yet I cannot walk their way.”

And the senses:

“In the Apostles’ wisdom pure,

May’st thou find a refuge sure.”

And the soul:

“I have their wisdom here in my heart,

And with it I choose the better part.”

And the senses:

“O Bride, the angels are fair and bright,

Full of God’s love, full of God’s light;

Would’st thou refresh thee, mount to their height.”

And the soul:

“The angel’s joy is but heartache to me,

If their Lord and my Bridegroom I do not see.”

And the senses:

“In holy penance refresh thee and save,

That God to St. John Baptist gave.”

And the soul:

“I am ready for pain, ready for grief,

Yet the combat of love is first and chief.”

And the senses:

“O Bride, would’st thou refreshèd be,

The Essentials of Mysticism

CONTENTS

PREFACE