as to Catherine’s spiritual life, or even as to her psycho-physical
condition, during these central twenty-two years of her life. It is
natural, for she had, at this time, neither Physician nor Confessor
busy with her, and the very richness and balanced fulness of this epoch
of her life may well have helped to produce but little that could have
been specially seized and registered by either. Yet it is regrettable,
since here we have what, at least for us human observers, constitutes
the culmination and the true measure of her life, the first period
looking but like the preparation, and the third period, like the price
paid for such a rich expansion.--Yet we know something about three
matters of considerable psycho-physical and temperamental interest,
which are specially characteristic of this time: her attitude towards
food; her ecstasies and visions; and certain peculiarities in her
conception and practice of the spiritual warfare.
1. _Her extraordinary fasts._
As to food, it is clear that, however much we may be able or bound to
deduct from the accounts, there remains a solid nucleus of remarkable
fact. During some twenty years she evidently went, for a fairly equal
number of days,--some thirty in Advent and some forty in Lent, seventy
in all annually,--with all but no food; and was, during these fasts,
at least as vigorous and active as when her nutrition was normal.
For it is not fairly possible to make these great fasts end much
before 1496, when she ceased to be Matron of the Hospital; and they
cannot have begun much after 1475 or 1476: so that practically the
whole of her devoted service and administration in and of that great
institution fell within these years, of which well-nigh one-fifth was
covered by these all but total abstentions from food. Yet here again
we are compelled to take these things, not separately, and as directly
supernatural, but in connection with everything else; and to consider
the resultant whole as the effect and evidence of a strong mind and
will operating upon and through an immensely responsive psycho-physical
organism.
For here again we easily find a significant system and delicate
selectiveness both in the constant approximate synchronisms--these
incapacities occurring about Advent and Lent; and in the foods
exempted--since there is no difficulty in connection with the daily
Holy Eucharist, with the unconsecrated wine given to her, as to all
Communicants in that age at Genoa, immediately after Communion, or with
water when seasoned penitentially with salt or vinegar. And if the
actual heightening of nervous energy and balance, recorded as having
generally accompanied these two fasts, is indeed a striking testimony
to the extraordinary powers of her mind and will, we must not forget
that these fruitful fasts were accompanied, and no doubt rendered
possible, by the second great psychical peculiarity of these middle
years, her ecstasies.
2. _Her ecstasies and visions._
It is indeed remarkable how these two conditions and functions, her
fasts and her ecstasies of a definite, lengthy and strength-bringing
kind, arise, persist and then fade out of her life together. And since,
in ecstasy, the respiration, the circulation, and the other physical
functions are all slackened and simplified; the mind is occupied with
fewer, simpler, larger ideas, harmonious amongst themselves; and
the emotions and the will are, for the time, saved the conflict and
confusion, the stress and strain, of the fully waking moments; and
considering that Catherine was peculiarly sensitive to all this flux
and friction, and that she was now often in a more or less ecstatic
trance from two up to eight hours: it follows that the amount of food
required to heal the breach made by life’s wear and tear would, by
these ecstasies, be considerably reduced. And indeed it will have been
these contemplative absorptions which directly mediated for her those
accessions of vigour: and that they did so, in such a soul and for the
uses to which she put this strength, is their fullest justification as
thoroughly wholesome, at least in their ultimate outcome, in and for
this particular life.
And the visions recorded have these two characteristics, that they all
deal with metaphysical realities and relations--God as source and end
of all things, as Light and food of the soul, and similar conceptions,
and never directly with historical persons, scenes, or institutions;
and that, whereas the non-ecstatic picturings of her last period
are grandly original, and demonstrably based upon her own spiritual
experience, these second-period ecstatic visions are readily traceable
to New Testament, Neo-Platonist, and Franciscan precursors, and have
little more originality than this special selection from amongst other
possible literary sources.
3. _Special character of her spiritual warfare._
Catherine’s ecstasies lead us easily on to the special method of her
spiritual warfare, which can, I think, be summed up in three maxims:
“One thing, and only one at a time”; “Ever fight self, and you
need not trouble about any other foe”; and “Fight self by an heroic
indirectness and by love, for love,--through a continuous self-donation
to Pure Love alone.”
Studying here these great convictions simply in their temperamental
occasions, colouring, and limitations, we can readily discover how the
“one thing at a time” maxim springs from the same disposition as that
which found such refreshment in ecstasy. For here too, partly from a
congenital incapacity to take things lightly, partly from an equally
characteristic sensitiveness to the conflict and confusion incident
to the introduction of any fresh multiplicity into the consciousness,
she requires, even in her non-ecstatic moments, to have her attention
specially concentrated upon one all-important idea, one point in the
field of consciousness. And, by a faithful wholeness of attention to
the successive spiritually significant circumstances and obligations,
interior impressions and lights, which her praying, thinking,
suffering, actively bring round to her notice, she manages, by such
single steps, gradually to go a very long way, and, by such severe
successiveness, to build up a rich simultaneity. For each of these
faithfully accepted and fully willed and utilized acts and states,
received into her one ever-growing and deepening personality, leave
memories and stimulations behind them, and mingle, as subconscious
elements, with the conscious acts which follow later on.
4. _Two remarkable consequences of this kind of warfare._
There were two specially remarkable consequences of this constant
watchful fixation of the one spiritually significant point in each
congeries of circumstances, and of the manner in which (partly perhaps
as the occasion, but probably in great part as the effect of this
attention) one interior condition of apparent fixity would suddenly
shift to another condition of a different kind but of a similar
apparent stability. There was the manner in which, during these years,
she appears to have escaped the committing of any at all definite
offences against the better and best lights of that particular moment;
and there was the way in which she would realize the faultiness and
subtle self-seeking of any one state, only at the moment of its
disappearing to make room for another.
I take the accounts of both these remarkable peculiarities to be
substantially accurate, since, if the first condition had not obtained,
we should have found her practising more or less frequent Confession,
as we find her doing in the first and third, but not in this period;
and if the second condition had not existed, we should have had, for
this period also, some such vivid account of painful scruples arising
from the impression of actually present unfaithfulnesses, such as has
been preserved for her last years. And indeed, as soon as we have
vividly conceived a state in which a soul (by a wise utilization of the
quite exceptional successiveness and simplification to which it has
been, in great part, driven by its temperamental requirements, and by
a constant heroic watchfulness) has managed to exclude from its life,
during a long series of years, all fully deliberate resistances to, or
lapses from, its contemporaneous better insight: one sees at once that
a consciousness of faultiness could come to her only at those moments
when, one state and level giving place to another, she could, for the
moment, see the former habits and their implicit defects in the clear
light of their contrast to her new, deeper insights and dispositions.
Now it is evident that here again we have in part (in the curious
quasi-fixity of each state, and then the sudden replacement of it
by another) something which, taken alone, is simply psychically
peculiar and spiritually indifferent. The persistent sense of gradual
or of rapid change in the midst of a certain continuity and indeed
abidingness, characteristic of the average moments of the average soul,
is, taken in itself, more true to life and to the normal reaction of
the human mind, and not less capable of spiritual utilization, than is
Catherine’s peculiarity. Her heroic utilization of her special psychic
life for purposes of self-fighting, and the degree in which, as we
shall find in a later chapter, she succeeded in moulding this life into
a shape representative of certain great spiritual truths: these things
it is which constitute here the spiritually significant element.
And her second peculiarity of religious practice was her great
simplification and intensification of the spiritual combat.
Simplification: for she does not fight directly either the Devil or the
World; she directly fights the “Flesh” alone, and recognizes but one
immediate opponent, her own lower self. Hence the references to the
world are always simply as to an extension or indefinite repetition
of that same self, or of similar lower selves; and those to the devil
are, except where she declares her own lower self “a very devil,”
extraordinarily rare, and, in their authentic forms, never directly and
formally connected with her own spiritual interests and struggles.
And Intensification: for she conceives this lower self, against which
all her fighting is turned, as capable of any enormity, as actually
cloaking itself successively in every kind of disguise, and as more or
less vitiating even the most spiritual-seeming of her states and acts.
And here again we can, I think, clearly trace the influence of her
special temperament and psycho-physical functioning, yet in a direction
opposite to that in which we would naturally expect it. For it is not
so much that this temperament led her to exaggerate the badness of her
false self, or to elaborate a myth concerning its (all but completely
separate) existence, as that, owing in large part to that temperament
and functioning, her false self _was_ both unusually distinct from her
true self and particularly clamorous and claimful. It would indeed be
well for hagiography if, in all cases, at least an attempt were made to
discover and present the precise and particular good and bad selves,
worked for and fought by the particular saint: for it is just this
double particularization of the common warfare in every individual soul
that gives the poignant interest and instructiveness, and a bracing
sense of reality to these lonely yet typical, unique yet universal
struggles, defeats, and victories.
And in Catherine’s case her special temperament; her particular
attitude during the ten years’ laxity, and again during the last years’
times of obscurity and scruple; even some of her sayings probably
still belonging to this middle period; but above all the precise point
and edge of her counter-ideal and _attrait_: all indicate clearly
enough what was her congenital defect. A great self-engrossment of
a downrightly selfish kind; a grouping of all things round such a
self-adoring _Ego_; a noiseless but determined elimination from
her life and memory of all that would not or could not, then and
there, be drawn and woven into the organism and functioning of this
immensely self-seeking, infinitely woundable and wounded, endlessly
self-doctoring “I” and “Me”: a self intensely, although not sexually,
jealous, envious and exacting, incapable of easy accommodation, of
pleasure in half successes, of humour and brightness, of joyous
“once-born” creatureliness: all this was certainly to be found, in
strong tendency at least, in the untrained parts and periods of her
character and life.
And then the same peculiarity and sensitiveness of her psycho-physical
organism which, in her last period, ended by mirroring her mental
spiritual apprehensions and picturings in her very body, and which,
even at this time, has been traced by us in the curious long fixities
and rapid changes of her fields of consciousness, clearly operates
also and already here, in separating off this false self from the good
one and in heightening the apprehension of that false self to almost a
perception in space, or to an all but physical sensation.
We thus get something of which the interesting cases of “doubleness
of personality,” so much studied of late years, are, as it were,
purely psychical, definitely _maladif_ caricatures; the great
difference consisting in Catherine herself possessing, at all times,
the consciousness and memory of both sides, of both “selves,” and of
each as both actual and potential, within the range of her one great
personality. Indeed it is this very multiplicity thus englobed and
utilized by that higher unity, which gives depth to her sanity and
sanctity.[37]
5. _Precise object and end of her striving._
And all this is confirmed and completed, as already hinted, by the
precise object of her ideal, the particular means and special end of
the struggle. Here, at the very culmination of her inner life and
aim, we find the deepest traces of her temperamental requirements;
and here, in what she seeks, there is again an immense concentration
and a significant choice. The distinctions between obligation and
supererogation, between merit and grace, are not utilized but
transcended; the conception of God having anger as well as love arouses
as keen a sense of intolerableness as that of God’s envy aroused in
Plato, and God appears to her as, in Himself, continuously loving.
This love of God, again, is seen to be present everywhere, and, of
Itself, everywhere to effect happiness. The dispositions of souls are
indeed held to vary within each soul and between soul and soul, and to
determine the differences in their reception, and consequently in the
effect upon them, of God’s one universal love: but the soul’s reward
and punishment are not something distinct from its state, they are but
that very state prolonged and articulated, since man can indeed go
against his deepest requirements but can never finally suppress them.
Heaven, Purgatory, Hell are thus not places as well as states, nor do
they begin only in the beyond: they are states alone, and begin already
here. And Grace and Love, and Love and Christ, and Christ and Spirit,
and hence Grace and Love and Christ and Spirit are, at bottom, one, and
this One is God. Hence God, loving Himself in and through us, is alone
our full true self. Here, in this constant stretching out and forward
of her whole being into and towards the ocean of light and love, of
God the All in All, it is not hard to recognize a soul which finds
happiness only when looking out and away from self, and turning, in
more or less ecstatic contemplation and action, towards that Infinite
Country, that great Over-Againstness, God.
And, in her sensitive shrinking from the idea of an angry God, we
find the instinctive reaction of a nature too naturally prone itself
to angry claimfulness, and which had been too much driven out of
its self-occupation by the painful sense of interior self-division
consequent upon that jealousy, not to find it intolerable to get out
of that little Scylla of her own hungry self only to fall into a great
Charybdis, an apparent mere enlargement and canonization of that same
self, in the angry God Himself.
And if her second peculiarity, the concentration of the fight upon an
unusually isolated and intense false self, had introduced an element of
at least relative Rigorism and contraction into her spirituality, this
third peculiarity brings a compensating movement of quasi-Pantheism,
of immense expansion. Here the crushed plant expands in boundless
air, light and warmth; the parched seaweed floats and unfolds itself
in an immense ocean of pure waters--the soul, as it were, breathes
and bathes in God’s peace and love. And it is evident that the great
super-sensible realities and relations adumbrated by such figures, did
not, with her, lead to mere dry or vague apprehensions. Even in this
period, although here with a peaceful, bracing orderliness and harmony,
the reality thus long and closely dwelt on and lived with was, as it
were, physically seen and felt in these its images by a ready response
of her immensely docile psycho-physical organism.
6. _Catherine possessed two out of the three conditions apparently
necessary for stigmatization._
And in this connection we should note how largely reasonable was
the expectation of some of her disciples of finding some permanent
physical effects upon her body; and yet why she not only had not the
stigmata of the Passion, but why she could not have them. For, of the
three apparently necessary conditions for such stigmatization, she had
indeed two--a long and intense absorption in religious ideas, and a
specially sensitive psycho-physical temperament and organization of
the ecstatic type; but the third condition, the concentration of that
absorption upon Our Lord’s Passion and wounds, was wholly wanting--at
least after those four actively penitential and during those twenty-two
ecstatic years. We can, however, say most truly that although, since
at all events 1477, her visions and contemplations were all concerning
purely metaphysical, eternal realities, or certain ceaselessly
repeated experiences of the human soul, or laws and types derived from
the greatest of Christian institutions, her daily solace, the Holy
Eucharist: yet that these verities ended by producing definite images
in her senses, and certain observable though passing impressions upon
her body, so that we can here talk of sensible shadows or “stigmata” of
things purely spiritual and eternal.
And if, in the cases of some ecstatic saints, mental pathologists of
a more or less materialistic type have, at times, shown excessive
suspicion as to some of the causes and effects of these saints’
devotion to Our Lord’s Humanity under the imagery and categories of
the Canticle of Canticles--all such suspicions, fair or unfair, have
absolutely no foothold in Catherine’s life, since not only is there
here no devotion to God or to Our Lord as Bridegroom of the Bridal
soul: there is no direct contemplative occupation with the historic
Christ and no figuring of Him or of God under human attributes
or relations at all. I think that her temperament and health had
something to do with her habitual dwelling upon Thing-symbols of God:
Ocean--Air--Fire--picturings which, conceived with her psycho-physical
vividness, must, in their expanse, have rested and purified her in a
way that historical contingencies and details would not have done. The
doctrinal and metaphysical side of the matter will be considered later
on.
VI. THREE RULES WHICH SEEM TO GOVERN THE RELATIONS BETWEEN
PSYCHO-PHYSICAL PECULIARITIES AND SANCTITY IN GENERAL.
If we next inquire how matters stand historically with regard to the
relations between ecstatic states and psycho-physical peculiarities
on the one hand, and sanctity in general on the other hand, we shall
find, I think, that the following three rules or laws really cover, in
a necessarily general, somewhat schematic way, all the chief points,
at all certain or practically important, in this complex and delicate
matter.
1. _Intense spiritual energising is accompanied by auto-suggestion and
mono-ideism._
It is clear, for one thing, that as simply all and every mental,
emotional, and volitional energizing is necessarily and always
accompanied by corresponding nerve-states, and that if we had
not some neural sensitiveness and neural adaptability, we could
not--whilst living our earthly life--think, or feel, or will in
regard to anything whatsoever: a certain special degree of at least
potential psycho-physical sensitiveness and adaptability must be
taken to be, not the productive cause, but a necessary condition for
the exercise, of any considerable range and depth of mind and will,
and hence of sanctity in general; and that the actual aiming at,
and gradual achievement of, sanctity in these, thus merely possible
cases, spiritualizes and further defines this sensitiveness, as the
instrument, material, and expression of the soul’s work.[38] And this
work of the heroic soul will necessarily consist, in great part, in
attending to, calling up, and, as far as may be, both fixing and ever
renovating certain few great dominant ideas, and in attempting by every
means to saturate the imagination with images and figures, historical
and symbolic, as so many incarnations of these great verities.
We get thus what, taken simply phenomenally and without as yet any
inquiry as to an ultimate reality pressing in upon the soul,--a divine
stimulation underlying all its sincere and fruitful action,--is a
spiritual mono-ideism and auto-suggestion, of a more or less general
kind. But, at this stage, these activities and their psycho-physical
concomitants and results will, though different in kind, be no
more abnormal than is the mono-ideism and auto-suggestion of the
mathematician, the tactician, and the constructive statesman. Newton,
Napoleon, and Richelieu: they were all dominated by some great
central idea, and they all for long years dwelt upon it and worked
for it within themselves, till it became alive and aflame in their
imaginations and their outward-moving wills, before, yet as the means
of, its taking external and visible shape. And, in all the cases
that we can test in detail, the psycho-physical accompaniments of
all this profound mental-volitional energy were most marked. In the
cases of Newton and Napoleon, for instance, a classification of their
energizings solely according to their neural accompaniments would
force us to class these great discoverers and organizers amongst
psycho-physical eccentrics. Yet the truth and value of their work and
character has, of course, to be measured, not by this its neural fringe
and cost, but by its central spiritual truth and fruitfulness.
2. _Such mechanisms specially marked in Philosophers, Musicians, Poets,
and Mystical Religionists._
The mystical and contemplative element in the religious life, and the
group of saints amongst whom this element is predominant, no doubt give
us a still larger amount of what, again taking the matter phenomenally
and not ultimately, is once more mono-ideism and auto-suggestion,
and entails a correspondingly larger amount of psycho-physical
impressionableness and reaction utilized by the mind. But here also,
from the simplest forms of the “prayer of quiet” to absorptions of an
approximately ecstatic type, we have something which, though different
in kind and value, is yet no more abnormal than are the highest flights
and absorptions of the Philosopher, the Musician, and the Poet. And
yet, in such cases as Kant and Beethoven, a classifier of humanity
according to its psycho-physical phenomena alone would put these great
discoverers and creators, without hesitation, amongst hopeless and
useless hypochondriacs. Yet here again the truth of their ideas and the
work of their lives have to be measured by quite other things than by
this their neural concomitance and cost.
3. _Ecstatics possess a peculiar psycho-physical organization._
The downright ecstatics and hearers of voices and seers of visions
have all, wherever we are able to trace their temperamental and neural
constitution and history, possessed and developed a definitely peculiar
psycho-physical organization. We have traced it in Catherine and
indicated it in St. Teresa. We find it again in St. Maria Magdalena
dei Pazzi and in St. Marguerite Marie Alacocque, in modern times,
and in St. Catherine of Siena and St. Francis of Assisi in mediaeval
times. For early Christian times we are too ignorant as regards the
psycho-physical organization of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Hermas,
and St. Cyprian, to be able to establish a connection between their
temperamental endowments and their hearing of voices and seeing of
visions--in the last two cases we get much that looks like more or less
of a mere conventional literary device.[39]
We are, however, in a fair position for judging, in the typical and
thoroughly original case of St. Paul. In 2 Cor. xiii, 7, 8, after
speaking of the abundant revelations accorded to him, he adds that
“lest I be lifted up, a thorn” (literally, a stake) “in the flesh was
given to me, an Angel of Satan to buffet me.” And though “I thrice
besought the Lord that it might depart from me, the Lord answered
me, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee; for grace is perfected in
infirmity.’” And he was consequently determined “rather” to “glory in
his infirmities, so that the power of Christ may dwell within” him.
And in Gal. iv, 14, 15, written about the same time, he reminds his
readers how he had “preached to them through the infirmity of the
flesh,” commending them because they “did not despise nor loathe their
temptation in his flesh” (this is no doubt the correct reading), “but
had received him as an Angel of God, as Christ Jesus.”
Now the most ancient interpretation of this “thorn” or “stake” is some
kind of bodily complaint,--violent headache or earache is mentioned by
Tertullian de Pudicitia, 13, and by St. Jerome, Comm. in Gal. _loc.
cit._ Indeed St. Paul’s own description of his “bodily presence” as
“weak,” and his “spoken word” as “contemptible” (2 Cor. x, 10), points
this way. It seems plain that it cannot have been carnal temptations
(only in the sixth century did this interpretation become firmly
established), for he could not have gloried in these, nor could they,
hidden as they would be within his heart, have exposed him to the
contempt of others. Indeed he expressly excludes such troubles from his
life, where, in advising those who were thus oppressed to marry, he
gives the preference to the single life, and declares, “I would that
all men were even as myself” (1 Cor. vii, 7).
The attacks of this trouble were evidently acutely painful: note the
metaphor of a stake driven into the live flesh and the Angel of Satan
who buffeted him. (And compare St. Teresa’s account: “An Angel of God
appeared to me to be thrusting at times a long spear into my heart and
to pierce my very entrails”; “the pain was so great that it made me
moan”; “it really seems to the soul as if an arrow were thrust through
the heart or through itself; the suffering is not one of sense, neither
is the wound physical”; and how, on another occasion, she heard Our
Lord answer her: “Serve thou Me, and meddle not with this.”)[40]
These attacks would come suddenly, even in the course of his public
ministry, rendering him, in so far, an object of derision and of
loathing. (Compare here St. Teresa’s declaration: “During the rapture,
the body is very often perfectly powerless; it continues in the
position it was in when the rapture came upon it: if sitting, sitting;
if the hands were open, or if they were shut, they will remain open or
shut”; “if the body” was “standing or kneeling, it remains so.”)[41]
Yet these attacks were evidently somehow connected, both in fact and
in his consciousness, with his Visions; and they were recurrent. The
vision of the Third Heaven and his apparently first attack seem to have
been practically coincident,--about A.D. 44. We find a second attack
hanging about him for some time, on his first preaching in Galatia,
about A.D. 51 or 52 (see 1 Thess. ii, 18; 1 Cor. ii, 3). And a third
attack appears to have come in A.D. 57 or 58, when the Second Epistle
to the Corinthians and that to the Galatians were written; note the
words (2 Cor. i, 9), “But” (in addition to his share in the public
persecution) “we ourselves had the sentence of death within ourselves,
in order that we might not trust in ourselves but in God who raiseth
the dead to life.” (And compare here St. Teresa: in July 1547 “for
about four days I remained insensible. They must have regarded me as
dead more than once. For a day and a half the grave was open in my
monastery, waiting for my body. But it pleased Our Lord I should come
to myself.”)[42] Dr. Lightfoot gives as a parallel the epileptiform
seizures of King Alfred, which, sudden, acutely painful, at times
death-like, and protracted, tended to render the royal power despicable
in the eyes of the world.[43] Yet, except for the difference of sex and
of relative privacy, St. Teresa’s states, which I have given here, are
more closely similar, in so much as they are intimately connected with
religious visions and voices.
And, amongst Old Testament figures, we can find a similar connection,
on a still larger scale, in the case of Ezekiel, the most definitely
ecstatic, though (upon the whole) the least original, of the literary
Prophets. For, as to the visionary element, we have his own records
of three visions of the glory of Jahve; of five other ecstasies,
three of which are accompanied by remarkable telepathic, second-sight
activities; and of twelve symbolic (better: representative) prophetic
actions, which are now all rightly coming to be considered as having
been externally carried out by him.[44] And we get psycho-physical
states, as marked as in any other ecstatic saint. For we hear how Jahve
on one occasion says to him: “But thou, son of man, lay thyself on
thy left side” (_i.e._ according to Jewish orientation, towards the
North) “and I shall lay the guilt of the house of Israel” (the Northern
Kingdom) “upon thee; the number of days that thou shalt lie upon it,
shalt thou bear their guilt. But I appoint unto thee the years of their
guilt, as a (corresponding) number of days, (namely) one hundred and
fifty days.… And, when thou hast done with them, thou shalt lay thyself
on thy right side” (_i.e._ towards the South), “and thou shalt bear the
guilt of the house of Judah” (the Southern Kingdom); “one day for each
year shall I appoint unto thee. And behold I shall lay cords upon thee,
that thou shalt be unable to turn from one side to the other, till thou
hast ended the days of thy boundness” (iv, 4-8). Krätzschmar, no doubt
rightly, finds here a case of hemiplegia and anaesthesia, functional
cataleptic paralysis lasting during five months on the left side, and
then shifting for about six weeks to the right side. And the _alalia_
(speechlessness), which no doubt accompanied this state, is referred
to on three other occasions: xxiv, 27; xxix, 31; xxxiii, 22. And note
how Jahve’s address to Ezekiel, “son of man,” which occurs in this book
over ninety times, and but once in the whole of the rest of the Old
Testament (Dan. viii, 17), evidently stands here for the sense of his
creaturely nothingness, so characteristic of the true ecstatic.[45]
Now, at this last stage, the analogy of the other non-religious
activities of the healthy mind and of their psycho-physical conditions
and effects forsakes us; but not the principle which has guided us
all along. For here, as from the very first, some such conditions
and effects are inevitable; and the simple fact of this occurrence,
apart from the question of their particular character, is something
thoroughly normal. And here again, and more than ever, the emphasis
and decision have to lie with, and to depend upon, the mental and
volitional work and the spiritual truth and reality achieved in and for
the recipient, and, through him, in and for others.
Even at the earlier stages, to cling to the form, as distinct from
the content and end, of these things was to be thoroughly unfair
to this their content and end, within the spacious economy of the
spirit’s life; at this stage such clinging becomes destructive of all
true religion. For if the mere psycho-physical forms and phenomena of
ecstasy, of vision, of hearing of voices is, in proportion to their
psycho-physical intensity and seeming automatism and quasi-physical
objectivity, to be taken as necessarily a means and mark of sanctity or
of insight, or, at least, as something presumably sent direct by God
or else as diabolical, something necessarily super- or preter-natural:
then the lunatic asylums contain more miracles, saints, and sages, or
their direct, strangely similar antipodes, than all the most fervent or
perverted churches, monasteries, and families upon God’s earth. For in
asylums we find ecstasies, visions, voices, all more, not less marked,
all more, not less irresistibly objective-seeming to the recipient,
than anything to be found outside.
Yet apply impartially to both sets the test, not of form, but of
content, of spiritual fruitfulness and of many-sided applicability--and
this surface-similarity yields at once to a fundamental difference.
Indeed all the great mystics, and this in precise proportion to their
greatness, have ever taught that, the mystical capacities and habits
being but means and not ends, only such ecstasies are valuable as
leave the soul, and the very body as its instrument, strengthened and
improved; and that visions and voices are to be accepted by the mind
only in proportion as they convey some spiritual truth of importance to
it or to others, and as they actually help it to become more humble,
true, and loving.
And there can be no doubt that these things worked thus with such
great ecstatic mystics as Ezekiel, the man of the great prophetic
schemes and the permanently fruitful picturing of the Good Shepherd;
as St. Paul, the greatest missionary and organizer ever given to the
Christian Church; as St. Francis of Assisi, the salt and leaven and
light of the Church and of society, in his day and more or less ever
since; as St. Catherine of Siena, the free-spoken, docile reinspirer
of the Papacy; as Jeanne d’Arc, the maiden deliverer of a Nation; as
St. Teresa, reformer of a great Order. All these, and countless others,
would, quite evidently, have achieved less, not more, of interior
light and of far-reaching helpfulness of a kind readily recognized by
all specifically religious souls, had they been without the rest, the
bracing, the experience furnished to them by their ecstasies and allied
states and apprehensions.
VII. PERENNIAL FRESHNESS OF THE GREAT MYSTICS’ MAIN SPIRITUAL TEST, IN
CONTRADISTINCTION TO THEIR SECONDARY, PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTENTION. TWO
SPECIAL DIFFICULTIES.
1. _A false and a true test of mystical experience._
Now it is deeply interesting to note how entirely unweakened, indeed
how impressively strengthened, by the intervening severe test of
whole centuries of further experience and of thought, has remained
the main and direct, the spiritual test of the great Mystics, in
contradistinction to their secondary psychological contention with
respect to such experiences. The secondary, psychological contention
is well reproduced by St. Teresa where she says: “When I speak, I go
on with my understanding arranging what I am saying; but, if I am
spoken to by others, I do nothing else but listen without any labour.”
In the former case, “the soul,” if it be in good faith, “cannot
possibly fail to see clearly that itself arranges the words and utters
them to itself. How then can the understanding have time enough to
arrange these locutions? They require time.”[46] Now this particular
argument for their supernaturalness derived from the psychological
form--from the suddenness, clearness, and apparent automatism of these
locutions--has ceased to carry weight, owing to our present, curiously
recent, knowledge concerning the subconscious region of the mind, and
the occasionally sudden irruption of that region’s contents into the
field of that same mind’s ordinary, full consciousness. In the Ven.
Battista Vernazza’s case we have a particularly clear instance of such
a long accumulation,--by means of much, in great part full, attention
to certain spiritual ideas, words, and images,--in the subconscious
regions of a particularly strong and deeply sincere and saintly mind;
and the sudden irruption from those regions of certain clear and
apparently quite spontaneous words and images into the field of her
mind’s full consciousness.[47]
But the reference to the great Mystics’ chief and direct test, upon
which they dwell with an assurance and self-consistency far surpassing
that which accompanies their psychological argument,--the spiritual
content and effects of such experiences,--this, retains all its
cogency. St. Teresa tells us: “When Our Lord speaks, it is both word
and work: His words are deeds.” “I found myself, through these words
alone, tranquil and strong, courageous and confident, at rest and
enlightened: I felt I could maintain against all the world that my
prayer was the work of God.” “I could not believe that Satan, if he
wished to deceive me, could have recourse to means so adverse to his
purpose as this, of rooting out my faults, and implanting virtues and
spiritual strength: for I saw clearly that I had become another person,
by means of these visions.” “So efficacious was the vision, and such
was the nature of the words spoken to me, that I could not possibly
doubt that they came from Him.” “I was in a trance; and the effects of
it were such, that I could have no doubt it came from God.” On another
occasion she writes less positively even of the great test: “She never
undertook anything merely because it came to her in prayer. For all
that her Confessors told her that these things came from God, she never
so thoroughly believed them that she could swear to it herself, though
it did seem to her that they were spiritually safe, because of the
effects thereof.”[48] This doctrine is still the last word of wisdom in
these matters.
2. _First special difficulty in testing ecstasies._
Yet it is only at this last stage that two special difficulties occur,
the one philosophical, the other moral. The philosophical difficulty
is as follows. As long as the earlier stages are in progress, it is
not difficult to understand that the soul may be gradually building up
for herself a world of spiritual apprehensions, and a corresponding
spiritual and moral character, by a process which, looked at merely
phenomenally and separately, appears as a simple case of mono-ideism
and auto-suggestion, but which can and should be conceived, when
studied in its ultimate cause and end, as due to the pressure and
influence of God’s spirit working in and through the spirit of
man,--the Creator causing His own little human creature freely to
create for itself some copy of and approach to its own eternally
subsisting, substantial Cause and Crown. There the operation of such an
underlying Supreme Cause, and a consequent relation between the world
thus conceived and built up by the human soul and the real world of the
Divine Spirit, appears possible, because the things which the soul is
thus made to suggest to itself are ideas, and because even these ideas
are clearly recognized by the soul as only instruments and approaches
to the realities for which they stand. But here, in this last stage, we
get the suggestion, not of ideas, but of psycho-physical impressions,
and these impressions are, apparently, not taken as but distantly
illustrative, but as somehow one with the spiritual realities for which
they stand. Is not, _e.g._, Catherine’s joy at this stage centred
precisely in the downright feeling, smelling, seeing, of ocean waters,
penetrating odours, all-enveloping light; and in the identification of
those waters, odours, lights, with God Himself, so that God becomes at
last an object of direct, passive, sensible perception? Have we not
then here at last reached pure delusion?
Not so, in proportion as the mystic is great and spiritual, and as
he here still clings to the principles common to all true religion.
For, in proportion as he is and does this, will he find and regard the
mind as deeper and more operative than sense, and God’s Spirit as
penetrating and transcending both the one and the other. And hence he
will (at least implicitly) regard those psycho-physical impressions
as but sense-like and really mental; and he will consider this mental
impression and projection as indeed produced by the presence and
action of the Spirit within his mind or of the pressure of spiritual
realities upon it, but will hold that this whole mental process, with
these its spacial- and temporal-seeming embodiments, these sights and
sounds, has only a relation and analogical likeness to, and is not
and cannot be identical with, those realities of an intrinsically
super-spacial, super-temporal order.--And thus here as everywhere,
although here necessarily more than ever, we find again the conception
of the Transcendent yet also Immanent Spirit, effecting in the human
spirit the ever-increasing apprehension of Himself, accompanied in
this spirit by an ever keener sense of His incomprehensibility for all
but Himself. And here again the truth, and more especially the divine
origin of these apprehensions, is tested and guaranteed on and on by
the consequent deepening of that spiritual and ethical fruitfulness and
death to self, which are the common aspirations of every deepest moment
and every sincerest movement within the universal heart of man.
Thus, as regards the mentality of these experiences, Catherine
constantly speaks of seeing “as though with the eyes of the body.” And
St. Teresa tells us of her visions with “the eyes of the soul”; of
how at first she “did not know that it was possible to see anything
otherwise than with the eyes of the body”; of how, in reality “she
never,” in her true visions and locutions, “saw anything with her
bodily eyes, nor heard anything with her bodily ears”; and of how
indeed she later on, on one occasion, “saw nothing with the eyes of
the body, nothing with the eyes of the soul,”--she “simply felt Christ
close by her,”--evidently again with the soul. Thus, too, Catherine
tells us, that “as the intellect exceeds language, so does love exceed
intellection”; and how vividly she feels that “all that can be said of
God,” compared to the great Reality, “is but tiny crumbs from the great
Master’s table.”[49]
And, as to the inadequacy of these impressions, the classical authority
on such things, St. John of the Cross, declares: “He that will rely on
the letter of the divine locutions or on the intelligible form of the
vision, will of necessity fall into delusion; for he does not yield to
the Spirit in detachment from sense.” “He who shall give attention to
these motes of the Spirit alone will, in the end, have no spirituality
at all.” “All visions, revelations, and heavenly feelings, and whatever
is greater than these, are not worth the least act of humility, bearing
the fruits of that charity which neither values nor seeks itself,
which thinketh well not of self but of all others.” Indeed “virtue
does not consist in these apprehensions. Let men then cease to regard,
and labour to forget them, that they may be free.” For “spiritual
supernatural knowledge is of two kinds, one distinct and special,”
which comprises “visions, revelations, locutions, and spiritual
impressions”; “the other confused, obscure, and general,” which “has
but one form, that of contemplation which is the work of faith. The
soul is to be led into this, by directing it thereto through all the
rest, beginning with the first, and detaching it from them.”
Hence “many souls, to whom visions have never come, are incomparably
more advanced in the way of perfection than others to whom many
have been given”; and “they who are already perfect, receive these
visitations of the Spirit of God in peace; ecstasies cease, for they
were only graces to prepare them for this greater grace.” Hence, too,
“one desire only doth God allow and suffer in His Presence: that of
perfectly observing His law and of carrying the Cross of Christ. In
the Ark of the Covenant there was but the Book of the Law, the Rod of
Aaron, and the Pot of Manna. Even so that soul, which has no other aim
than the perfect observance of the Law of God and the carrying of the
Cross of Christ, will be a true Ark containing the true Manna, which
is God.” And this perfected soul’s intellectual apprehensions will,
in their very mixture of light and conscious obscurity, more and more
approach and forestall the eternal condition of the beatified soul.
“One of the greatest favours, bestowed transiently on the soul in this
life, is to enable it to see so distinctly and to feel so profoundly,
that it cannot comprehend Him at all. These souls are herein, in
some degree, like the Saints in Heaven, where they who know Him most
perfectly perceive most clearly that He is infinitely incomprehensible;
for those who have the less clear vision do not perceive so distinctly
as the others how greatly He transcends their vision.”[50]
3. _Second special difficulty in testing ecstasies._
The second special difficulty is this. Have not at least some of the
saints of this definitely ecstatic type shown more psycho-physical
abnormality than spiritually fruitful origination or utilization of
such things, so that their whole life seems penetrated by a fantastic
spirit? And have not many others, who, at their best, may not have been
amenable to this charge, ended with shattered nerve- and will-power,
with an organism apparently incapable of any further growth or use,
even if we restrict our survey exclusively to strength-bringing ecstasy
and to a contemplative prayer of some traceable significance?
(1) As a good instance of the apparent predominance of psycho-physical
and even spiritual strangeness, we can take the Venerable Sister
Lukardis, Cistercian Nun of Ober-Weimar, born probably in 1276.
Her life is published from a unique Latin MS. by the Bollandists
(_Analecta_, Vol. XVIII, pp. 305-367, Bruxelles, 1899), and presents us
with a mediaevally naïve and strangely unanalytic, yet extraordinarily
vivid picture of things actually seen by the writer. “Although,” say
the most competent editors, “we know not the name nor profession of
the Author, whether he belonged to the Friars or to the Monks,[51] it
is certain that he was a contemporary of Lukardis, that he knew her
intimately, and that he learnt many details from her fellow-nuns. And
though we shall be slow to agree with him when he ascribes all the
strange things which she experienced in her soul and body to divine
influence, yet we should beware of considering him to be in bad faith.
For, though he erred perchance in ascribing to a divine operation
things which are simply the work of nature, such a vice is common
amongst those who transmit such things.”[52] I take the chief points in
the order of their narration by the _Vita_.
“Soon after Lukardis had, at twelve years of age, taken the Cistercian
habit, her mother died,” over twelve English miles away, at Erfurt, yet
Lukardis “saw the scene” in such detail “in the spirit,” that, when
her sister came to tell her, she, Lukardis, “anticipated her with an
account of the day, the place and hour of the death, of the clothes
then being worn by their mother, of the precise position of the bed and
of the hospital, and of the persons present at the time.”
She soon suffered from “stone” in the bladder; “quartan, tertian, and
continuous fevers,” and from fainting fits; also from contraction of
the muscles (_nervi_) of the hands, so that the latter were all but
useless and could not even hold the staff on which she had to lean in
walking, till they had been “tightly wrapped round in certain clothes.”
Yet “she would, at times, strike her hands so vehemently against each
other, that they resounded as though they had been wooden boards.”
“When lying in bed she would sometimes, as it were, plant her feet
beneath her, hang her head down” backwards, “and raise her abdomen and
chest, making thus, as it were, a highly curved arch of her person.”
Indeed sometimes “she would for a long while stand upon her head and
shoulders, with her feet up in air, but with her garments adhering to
her limbs, as though they had been sewn on to them.” “Often, too, by
day or night, she was wont to run with a most impetuous course;--she
understood that, by this her course, she was compensating Christ for
His earthly course of thirty-three years.”[53]
“On one occasion she had a vision of Christ, in which He said to her:
‘Join thy hands to My hands, and thy feet to My feet, and thy breast
to My breast, and thus shall I be aided by thee to suffer less.’ And
instantly she felt a most keen pain of wounds,” in all three regions,
“although wounds did not as yet appear to sight.” But “as she bore
the memory of the hammering of the nails into Christ upon the Cross
within her heart, so did she exercise herself in outward deed. For she
was frequently wont, with the middle finger of one hand, impetuously
to wound the other in the place appropriate to the stigmata; then to
withdraw her finger to the distance of a cubit, and straightway again
impetuously to wound herself. Those middle fingers felt hard like
metal. And about the sixth and ninth hour she would impetuously wound
herself with her finger in the breast, at the appropriate place for the
wound.”--After about two years “Christ appeared to her in the night of
Blessed Gregory, Pope” (St. Gregory VII, May 26?), “pressed her right
hand firmly in His, and declared, ‘I desire thee to suffer with Me.’
On her consenting, a wound instantly appeared in her right hand; about
ten days later a wound in the left hand; and thus successively the five
wounds were found in her body.” “The wounds of the scourging were also
found upon her, of a finger’s length, and having a certain hard skin
around them.”[54]
“At whiles she would lie like one dead throughout the day; yet her
countenance was very attractive, owing to a wondrous flushed look. And
even if a needle was pressed into her flesh, she felt no pain.”--“On
one occasion she was carried upon her couch by two sisters into the
Lady Chapel, to the very spot where her body now reposes. After having
been left there alone for about an hour, the Blessed Virgin appeared
to her, with her beloved Infant, Jesus, in her arms, and suckling Him.
And Lukardis, contrary to the law of her strength”--she had, by now,
been long confined to a reclining posture--“arose from her couch and
began to stand upright. And at this juncture one of the Sisters opened
the Chapel door a little, and, on looking in, marvelled at Lukardis
being able to stand, but withdrew and forbade the other Sisters from
approaching thither, since she feared that, if they saw her standing
thus, they might declare her to be quite able, if she but chose, to
arise and stand at any time. Upon the Blessed Virgin twice insisting
upon being asked for some special favour, and Lukardis declaring, ‘I
desire that thou slake my thirst with that same milk with which I now
see thee suckling thy beloved Son,’ the Blessed Virgin came up to her,
and gave her to drink of her milk.” And when later on Lukardis was
fetched by the Sisters, she was “found reclining on her couch. And for
three days and nights she took neither food nor drink, and could not
see the light of day. And as a precaution, since her death was feared,
Extreme Unction was administered to her. And, later on, the Sister who
had seen her standing in the Chapel, gradually drew the whole story
from her.”[55]
“After she had lain, very weak, and, as it were, in a state of
contracture, for eleven years, it happened that, about the ninth hour
of one Good Friday, the natural bodily heat and colour forsook her;
she seemed nowise to breathe; her wounds bled more than usual; she
appeared to be dead. And her fellow-Sisters wept greatly. Yet about
Vesper-time she opened her eyes and began to move; and her companions
were wondrously consoled. And then in the Easter night, about the hour
of Christ’s Resurrection, as, with the other sick Sisters, she lay in
her bed placed so as to be able to hear the Divine Office, she felt
all her limbs to be as it were suffused with a most refreshing dew.
And straightway she saw stretched down to her from Heaven a hand, as
it were of the Blessed Virgin, which stroked her wounds and all the
painful places, the ligaments and joints of her members, gently and
compassionately. After which she straightway felt how that all her
members, which before had for so long been severely contracted, and how
the knots, formed by the ligaments (_nervi_), were being efficaciously
resolved and equally distended, so that she considered herself freed
from her hard bondage. She arose unaided from her couch, proceeded to
the near-by entrance to the Choir, and prostrated herself there, in
fervent orison, with her arms outstretched in cross-form, for a very
long hour. And then, commanded by the Abbess to rise, she readily arose
without help, stood with pleasure, and walked whithersoever she would.”
“At all times she ever suffered more from the cold than any of her
companions.”[56]
“As, during those eleven years that she lay like one paralyzed, she was
wont, on every Friday, to lie with her arms expanded as though on the
Cross, and her feet one on the top of the other; so, after the Lord had
so wonderfully raised her on that Paschal day, she, on every Friday
and every Lenten day, would stand erect with her arms outstretched,
crosswise, and, without any support, on one foot only, with the
other foot planted upon its fellow, from the hour of noon to that of
Vespers.”--“Whilst she was still uncured, and required some delicate
refection which the Convent could not afford, there came to her,” one
day, “the most loving Infant, bearing in His Hand the leg of a chicken,
newly roasted, and begging her to eat it for His sake.” She did so,
and was wonderfully strengthened. Apparently late on in her life “they
procured, with much labour and diligence, all kinds of drinkables from
different and even from distant places for her. But she, having tasted
any one of them, would straightway shake her head, close her lips, and
then declare that she could not drink it up.” “However delicious in
itself, it seemed to be so much gall and wormwood when applied to her
mouth.”[57]
And if we look, not at seemingly childish fantasticalness in certain
mystical lives, but at the later state of shattered health and
apparently weakened nerve- and will-power which appears so frequently
to be the price paid for the definitely ecstatic type of religion, even
where it has been spiritually fruitful, our anxiety is readily renewed.
Look at the nine, possibly thirteen, last years of Catherine’s, or at
the last period of St. Margaret Mary’s life; note the similar cases
of SS. Maria Magdalena de Pazzi and Juliana Falconieri. And we have
a figure of all but pure suffering and passivity in St. Lidwina of
Schiedam (1380-1433), over which M. Huysmans has managed to be so
thoroughly morbid.
(2) And if such lives strike us as too exceptional to be taken, with
whatever deductions, as a case in point, we can find a thoroughly fair
instance in the life of Father Isaac Hecker. Here we have a man of
extraordinary breadth, solidity, and activity of mind and character,
and whose mysticism is of the most sober and harmonious kind. Yet his
close companion and most faithful chronicler, Father Walter Elliott,
tells us: “From severe colds, acute headaches, and weakness of the
digestive organs, Father Hecker was at all times a frequent sufferer.
But, towards the end of the year 1871, his headaches became much more
painful, his appetite forsook him, and sleeplessness and excitability
of the nervous system were added to his other ailments. Remedies of
every kind were tried, but without permanent relief. By the summer
of 1872 he was wholly incapacitated.” “The physical sufferings of
those last sixteen” (out of the sixty-nine) “years of his life were
never such as to impair his mental soundness … though his organs of
speech were sometimes too slow for his thoughts.” His digestion and
nervous system had been impaired by excessive abstinence in early
manhood, and by excessive work in later life, “till at last the body
struck work altogether. During the sixteen years of his illness every
symptom of bodily illness was aggravated by the least attention to
community affairs or business matters, and also by interior trials,”
although he still managed, by heroic efforts, at times directly to
serve his congregation and to write some remarkable papers. Yet this
state continued, practically unbroken, up to the end, on December 22,
1888.[58] And although the various proximate causes, indicated by
Father Elliott, had no doubt been operative here, there can, in view of
the numerous similar cases, be no question that the most fundamental
of the reasons of this general condition of health was his strongly
mystical type and habit of mind and his corresponding psycho-physical
organization.
(3) In view of those fantasticalnesses and of these exhaustions, we
cannot but ask whether these things are not a terrible price to pay
for such states? whether such states should not be disallowed by
all solid morality, and should not prompt men of sense to try and
stamp them out? And, above all, we seem placed once more, with added
anxiety, before the question whether what is liable to end in such sad
general incapacitation was not, from the first, directly productive
of, and indeed simply produced by, some merely subjective, simply
psycho-physical abnormality and morbidness?
(4) Three points here call for consideration. Let us, for one thing,
never forget that physical health is not the true end of human life,
but only one of its most important means and conditions. The ideal man
is not, primarily and directly, a physical machine, perfect as such
in its development and function, to which would be tacked on, as a
sort of concomitant or means, the mental, moral, and spiritual life
and character. But the ideal man is precisely this latter life and
character, with the psycho-physical organism sustained and developed in
such, and only such, a degree, direction, and combination, as may make
it the best possible substratum, stimulus, instrument, material, and
expression for and of that spiritual personality.[59] Hence, the true
question here is not whether such a type of life as we are considering
exacts a serious physical tribute or not, but whether the specifically
human effects and fruits of that life are worth that cost.
No one denies that mining, or warfare, or hospital work, both spiritual
and medical, involve grave risks to life, nor that the preparation
of many chemicals is directly and inevitably injurious to health.
Yet no one thinks of abolishing such occupations or of blaming those
who follow them, and rightly so; for instant death may and should be
risked, the slow but certain undermining of the physical health may be
laudably embarked on, if only the mind and character are not damaged,
and if the end to be attained is found to be necessary or seriously
helpful, and unattainable by other means.
The simple fact, then, of frequent and subsequent, or even of universal
and concomitant ill-health in such mystical cases, or even the proof
of this ill-health being a direct consequence or necessary condition
of that mystical life, can but push back the debate, and simply raises
the question as to the serious value of that habit and activity. Only
a decision adverse to that serious value would constitute those facts
into a condemnation of that activity itself.
And, next, it must be plain to any one endowed with an appreciable dose
of the mystical sense, and with a sufficiently large knowledge of human
nature and of religious apprehension in the past and present,--that, if
it is doubtless possible quite erroneously to treat all men as having
a considerable element of mysticism in them, and hence to strain and
spoil souls belonging to one of the other types: it is equally possible
to starve those that possess this element in an operative degree.
Atrophy is as truly a malady as plethora.
And here the question is an individual one: would that particular
temperament and psycho-physical organism congenial to Sister Lukardis,
to Catherine Fiesca Adorna, to Marguerite Marie Alacocque, and to Isaac
Hecker, have--taking the whole existence and output together--produced
more useful work, and have apprehended and presented more of abiding
truth, had their ecstatic states or tendencies been, if possible,
absent or suppressed? Does not this type of apprehension, this, as
it were, incubation, harmonization, and vivifying of their otherwise
painfully fragmentary and heavy impressions, stand out,--in their
central, creative periods,--as the one thoroughly appropriate means and
form of their true self-development and self-expression, and of such
an apprehension and showing forth of spiritual truth as to them,--to
them and not to you and me,--was possible? And if we are bound to admit
that, even in such cases, ecstasy appears, psycho-physically, as a kind
of second state, and that these personalities find or regain their
fullest joy and deepest strength only in and from such a state; yet we
know too that such ecstasy is not, as in the trances of hysteria and
of other functional disorders, simply discontinuous from the ordinary,
primary state of such souls; and that,--again contrary to those
_maladif_ trances,--whenever the ecstasy answers to the tests insisted
upon by the great mystics, viz. a true and valuable ethico-spiritual
content and effect, it also, in the long run, leaves the very body
strengthened and improved.
And if, after this, their productive period, some of these persons end
by losing their psycho-physical health, it is far from unreasonable
to suppose that the actual alternative to those ecstasies and this
break-up, would, _for them_, have been a lifelong dreary languor and
melancholy self-absorption, somewhat after the pattern of Catherine’s
last ten pre-conversion years. Thus for her, and doubtless for most of
the spiritually considerable ecstatics, life was, taken all in all,
indefinitely happier, richer, and more fruitful in religious truth and
holiness, with the help of those ecstatic states, than it would have
been if these states had been absent or could have been suppressed.
And thirdly, here again, even from the point of view of psycho-physical
health and its protection, it is precisely the actual practice and,
as interpreted by it, the deepest sayings of the standard Christian
mystics which are being most powerfully confirmed,--although
necessarily by largely new reasons and with important modifications
in the analysis and application of their doctrine,--by all that we
have gained, during the last forty years, in definite knowledge of
the psycho-physical regions and functions of human nature, and,
during two centuries and more, in enlargement and precision of our
religious-historical outlook.
If we consider the specific health-dangers of this way, we shall find,
I think, that their roots are ever two. These dangers, and with them
the probability of delusion or at least of spiritual barrenness, always
become actual, and often acute, the minute that we allow ourselves to
attach a primary and independent importance to the psycho-physical
form and means of these things, as against their spiritual-ethical
content, suggestions, and end; or that we take the whole man, or at
least the whole of the religious man, to consist of the specifically
mystical habits and life alone. Now the first of these dangers has
been ceaselessly exposed and fought by all the great ethical and
Christian mystics of the past, _e.g._ St. John of the Cross and St.
Teresa; and the latter has been ever enforced by the actual practice,
as social religionists, of these same mystics, even if and when some
of their sayings, or the logical drift of their speculative system,
left insufficient room or no intrinsic necessity and function for such
things.
(5) And everything that has happened and is happening in the world
of psychological and philosophical research, in the world of
historico-critical investigation into the past history and modalities
of religion, and in the world of our own present religious experience
and requirements, has but brought to light fresh facts, forces,
and connections, in proof both of the right and irreplaceableness
of the Mystical element in life and religion, and of the reality
and constant presence of these its two dangers. For, as to these
dangers, we now know, with extraordinary clearness and certainty, how
necessary, constant and far-reaching is, on its phenomenal surface,
the auto-suggestive, mono-ideistic power and mechanism of the mind;
yet how easily, in some states, too much can be made of such vivid
apprehensions and quasi-sensible imagings of invisible reality,--things
admirable as means, ruinous as ends. And we also know, with an
astonishing universality of application, how great a multiplicity in
unity is necessarily presented by every concrete object and by every
mental act and emotional state of every sane human being throughout
every moment of his waking life; and how this unity is actually
constituted and measured by the multiplicity of the materials and
by the degree of their harmonization.--Hence, not the absence of
the Mystical element, but the presence both of it and of the other
constituents of religion, will turn out to be the safeguard of our
deepest life and of its sanity, a sanity which demands a balanced
fulness of the soul’s three fundamental pairs of activities: sensible
perception and picturing memory; reflection, speculative and analytic;
and emotion and volition, all issuing in interior and exterior acts,
and these latter, again, providing so much fresh material and occasions
for renewed action and for a growing unification in an increasing
variety, on and on.
The metaphysical and faith questions, necessarily raised by the
phenomenal facts and mechanisms here considered, but which cannot
be answered at this level, will be discussed in a later chapter.
Here we can but once more point out, in conclusion, that no amount
of admitted or demonstrated auto-suggestion or mono-ideism in the
phenomenal reaches and mechanism of the mind decides, of itself,
anything whatsoever about, and still less against, the objective truth
and spiritual value of the ultimate causes, dominant ideas, and final
results of the process; nor as to whether and how far the whole great
movement is, at bottom, occasioned and directed by the Supreme Spirit,
God, working, in and through man, towards man’s apprehension and
manifestation of Himself.[60]