nature of prophetism nothing but the name. He may meanwhile be
sure of its existence, both by experience and by what he hears the
Sufis say. As there are men endowed only with the sensitive
faculty who reject what is offered them in the way of objects of
the pure understanding, so there are intellectual men who reject
and avoid the things perceived by the prophetic faculty. A blind
man can understand nothing of colors save what he has learned by
narration and hearsay. Yet God has brought prophetism near to men
in giving them all a state analogous to it in its principal
characters. This state is sleep. If you were to tell a man who was
himself without experience of such a phenomenon that there are
people who at times swoon away so as to resemble dead men, and who
[in dreams] yet perceive things that are hidden, he would deny it
[and give his reasons]. Nevertheless, his arguments would be
refuted by actual experience. Wherefore, just as the understanding
is a stage of human life in which an eye opens to discern various
intellectual objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the
prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden
things and objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief
properties of prophetism are perceptible only during the
transport, by those who embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is
endowed with qualities to which you possess nothing analogous, and
which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How should you
know their true nature, since one knows only what one can
comprehend? But the transport which one attains by the method of
the Sufis is like an immediate perception, as if one touched the
objects with one’s hand.”(247)
This incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism.
Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no
one else. In this, as I have said, it resembles the knowledge given to us
in sensations more than that given by conceptual thought. Thought, with
its remoteness and abstractness, has often enough in the history of
philosophy been contrasted unfavorably with sensation. It is a commonplace
of metaphysics that God’s knowledge cannot be discursive but must be
intuitive, that is, must be constructed more after the pattern of what in
ourselves is called immediate feeling, than after that of proposition and
judgment. But _our_ immediate feelings have no content but what the five
senses supply; and we have seen and shall see again that mystics may
emphatically deny that the senses play any part in the very highest type
of knowledge which their transports yield.
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In the Christian church there have always been mystics. Although many of
them have been viewed with suspicion, some have gained favor in the eyes
of the authorities. The experiences of these have been treated as
precedents, and a codified system of mystical theology has been based upon
them, in which everything legitimate finds its place.(248) The basis of
the system is “orison” or meditation, the methodical elevation of the soul
towards God. Through the practice of orison the higher levels of mystical
experience may be attained. It is odd that Protestantism, especially
evangelical Protestantism, should seemingly have abandoned everything
methodical in this line. Apart from what prayer may lead to, Protestant
mystical experience appears to have been almost exclusively sporadic. It
has been left to our mind‐curers to reintroduce methodical meditation into
our religious life.
The first thing to be aimed at in orison is the mind’s detachment from
outer sensations, for these interfere with its concentration upon ideal
things. Such manuals as Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises recommend the
disciple to expel sensation by a graduated series of efforts to imagine
holy scenes. The acme of this kind of discipline would be a semi‐
hallucinatory mono‐ideism—an imaginary figure of Christ, for example,
coming fully to occupy the mind. Sensorial images of this sort, whether
literal or symbolic, play an enormous part in mysticism.(249) But in
certain cases imagery may fall away entirely, and in the very highest
raptures it tends to do so. The state of consciousness becomes then
insusceptible of any verbal description. Mystical teachers are unanimous
as to this. Saint John of the Cross, for instance, one of the best of
them, thus describes the condition called the “union of love,” which, he
says, is reached by “dark contemplation.” In this the Deity compenetrates
the soul, but in such a hidden way that the soul—
“finds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the
sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling
with which she is filled.... We receive this mystical knowledge of
God clothed in none of the kinds of images, in none of the
sensible representations, which our mind makes use of in other
circumstances. Accordingly in this knowledge, since the senses and
the imagination are not employed, we get neither form nor
impression, nor can we give any account or furnish any likeness,
although the mysterious and sweet‐tasting wisdom comes home so
clearly to the inmost parts of our soul. Fancy a man seeing a
certain kind of thing for the first time in his life. He can
understand it, use and enjoy it, but he cannot apply a name to it,
nor communicate any idea of it, even though all the while it be a
mere thing of sense. How much greater will be his powerlessness
when it goes beyond the senses! This is the peculiarity of the
divine language. The more infused, intimate, spiritual, and
supersensible it is, the more does it exceed the senses, both
inner and outer, and impose silence upon them.... The soul then
feels as if placed in a vast and profound solitude, to which no
created thing has access, in an immense and boundless desert,
desert the more delicious the more solitary it is. There, in this
abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in from the
well‐springs of the comprehension of love, ... and recognizes,
however sublime and learned may be the terms we employ, how
utterly vile, insignificant, and improper they are, when we seek
to discourse of divine things by their means.”(250)
I cannot pretend to detail to you the sundry stages of the Christian
mystical life.(251) Our time would not suffice, for one thing; and
moreover, I confess that the subdivisions and names which we find in the
Catholic books seem to me to represent nothing objectively distinct. So
many men, so many minds: I imagine that these experiences can be as
infinitely varied as are the idiosyncrasies of individuals.
The cognitive aspects of them, their value in the way of revelation, is
what we are directly concerned with, and it is easy to show by citation
how strong an impression they leave of being revelations of new depths of
truth. Saint Teresa is the expert of experts in describing such
conditions, so I will turn immediately to what she says of one of the
highest of them, the “orison of union.”
“In the orison of union,” says Saint Teresa, “the soul is fully
awake as regards God, but wholly asleep as regards things of this
world and in respect of herself. During the short time the union
lasts, she is as it were deprived of every feeling, and even if
she would, she could not think of any single thing. Thus she needs
to employ no artifice in order to arrest the use of her
understanding: it remains so stricken with inactivity that she
neither knows what she loves, nor in what manner she loves, nor
what she wills. In short, she is utterly dead to the things of the
world and lives solely in God.... I do not even know whether in
this state she has enough life left to breathe. It seems to me she
has not; or at least that if she does breathe, she is unaware of
it. Her intellect would fain understand something of what is going
on within her, but it has so little force now that it can act in
no way whatsoever. So a person who falls into a deep faint appears
as if dead....
“Thus does God, when he raises a soul to union with himself,
suspend the natural action of all her faculties. She neither sees,
hears, nor understands, so long as she is united with God. But
this time is always short, and it seems even shorter than it is.
God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a
way, that when she returns to herself, it is wholly impossible for
her to doubt that she has been in God, and God in her. This truth
remains so strongly impressed on her that, even though many years
should pass without the condition returning, she can neither
forget the favor she received, nor doubt of its reality. If you,
nevertheless, ask how it is possible that the soul can see and
understand that she has been in God, since during the union she
has neither sight nor understanding, I reply that she does not see
it then, but that she sees it clearly later, after she has
returned to herself, not by any vision, but by a certitude which
abides with her and which God alone can give her. I knew a person
who was ignorant of the truth that God’s mode of being in
everything must be either by presence, by power, or by essence,
but who, after having received the grace of which I am speaking,
believed this truth in the most unshakable manner. So much so
that, having consulted a half‐learned man who was as ignorant on
this point as she had been before she was enlightened, when he
replied that God is in us only by ‘grace,’ she disbelieved his
reply, so sure she was of the true answer; and when she came to
ask wiser doctors, they confirmed her in her belief, which much
consoled her....
“But how, you will repeat, _can_ one have such certainty in
respect to what one does not see? This question, I am powerless to
answer. These are secrets of God’s omnipotence which it does not
appertain to me to penetrate. All that I know is that I tell the
truth; and I shall never believe that any soul who does not
possess this certainty has ever been really united to God.”(252)
The kinds of truth communicable in mystical ways, whether these be
sensible or supersensible, are various. Some of them relate to this
world,—visions of the future, the reading of hearts, the sudden
understanding of texts, the knowledge of distant events, for example; but
the most important revelations are theological or metaphysical.
“Saint Ignatius confessed one day to Father Laynez that a single
hour of meditation at Manresa had taught him more truths about
heavenly things than all the teachings of all the doctors put
together could have taught him.... One day in orison, on the steps
of the choir of the Dominican church, he saw in a distinct manner
the plan of divine wisdom in the creation of the world. On another
occasion, during a procession, his spirit was ravished in God, and
it was given him to contemplate, in a form and images fitted to
the weak understanding of a dweller on the earth, the deep mystery
of the holy Trinity. This last vision flooded his heart with such
sweetness, that the mere memory of it in after times made him shed
abundant tears.”(253)
Similarly with Saint Teresa. “One day, being in orison,” she
writes, “it was granted me to perceive in one instant how all
things are seen and contained in God. I did not perceive them in
their proper form, and nevertheless the view I had of them was of
a sovereign clearness, and has remained vividly impressed upon my
soul. It is one of the most signal of all the graces which the
Lord has granted me.... The view was so subtile and delicate that
the understanding cannot grasp it.”(254)
She goes on to tell how it was as if the Deity were an enormous and
sovereignly limpid diamond, in which all our actions were contained in
such a way that their full sinfulness appeared evident as never before. On
another day, she relates, while she was reciting the Athanasian Creed,—
“Our Lord made me comprehend in what way it is that one God can be
in three Persons. He made me see it so clearly that I remained as
extremely surprised as I was comforted, ... and now, when I think
of the holy Trinity, or hear It spoken of, I understand how the
three adorable Persons form only one God and I experience an
unspeakable happiness.”
On still another occasion, it was given to Saint Teresa to see and
understand in what wise the Mother of God had been assumed into her place
in Heaven.(255)
The deliciousness of some of these states seems to be beyond anything
known in ordinary consciousness. It evidently involves organic
sensibilities, for it is spoken of as something too extreme to be borne,
and as verging on bodily pain.(256) But it is too subtle and piercing a
delight for ordinary words to denote. God’s touches, the wounds of his
spear, references to ebriety and to nuptial union have to figure in the
phraseology by which it is shadowed forth. Intellect and senses both swoon
away in these highest states of ecstasy. “If our understanding
comprehends,” says Saint Teresa, “it is in a mode which remains unknown to
it, and it can understand nothing of what it comprehends. For my own part,
I do not believe that it does comprehend, because, as I said, it does not
understand itself to do so. I confess that it is all a mystery in which I
am lost.”(257) In the condition called _raptus_ or ravishment by
theologians, breathing and circulation are so depressed that it is a
question among the doctors whether the soul be or be not temporarily
dissevered from the body. One must read Saint Teresa’s descriptions and
the very exact distinctions which she makes, to persuade one’s self that
one is dealing, not with imaginary experiences, but with phenomena which,
however rare, follow perfectly definite psychological types.
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To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and
imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a
corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological
conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that
fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness
which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must
not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but inquire into
their fruits for life.
Their fruits appear to have been various. Stupefaction, for one thing,
seems not to have been altogether absent as a result. You may remember the
helplessness in the kitchen and schoolroom of poor Margaret Mary Alacoque.
Many other ecstatics would have perished but for the care taken of them by
admiring followers. The “other‐worldliness” encouraged by the mystical
consciousness makes this over‐abstraction from practical life peculiarly
liable to befall mystics in whom the character is naturally passive and
the intellect feeble; but in natively strong minds and characters we find
quite opposite results. The great Spanish mystics, who carried the habit
of ecstasy as far as it has often been carried, appear for the most part
to have shown indomitable spirit and energy, and all the more so for the
trances in which they indulged.
Saint Ignatius was a mystic, but his mysticism made him assuredly one of
the most powerfully practical human engines that ever lived. Saint John of
the Cross, writing of the intuitions and “touches” by which God reaches
the substance of the soul, tells us that—
“They enrich it marvelously. A single one of them may be
sufficient to abolish at a stroke certain imperfections of which
the soul during its whole life had vainly tried to rid itself, and
to leave it adorned with virtues and loaded with supernatural
gifts. A single one of these intoxicating consolations may reward
it for all the labors undergone in its life—even were they
numberless. Invested with an invincible courage, filled with an
impassioned desire to suffer for its God, the soul then is seized
with a strange torment—that of not being allowed to suffer
enough.”(258)
Saint Teresa is as emphatic, and much more detailed. You may perhaps
remember a passage I quoted from her in my first lecture.(259) There are
many similar pages in her autobiography. Where in literature is a more
evidently veracious account of the formation of a new centre of spiritual
energy, than is given in her description of the effects of certain
ecstasies which in departing leave the soul upon a higher level of
emotional excitement?
“Often, infirm and wrought upon with dreadful pains before the
ecstasy, the soul emerges from it full of health and admirably
disposed for action ... as if God had willed that the body itself,
already obedient to the soul’s desires, should share in the soul’s
happiness.... The soul after such a favor is animated with a
degree of courage so great that if at that moment its body should
be torn to pieces for the cause of God, it would feel nothing but
the liveliest comfort. Then it is that promises and heroic
resolutions spring up in profusion in us, soaring desires, horror
of the world, and the clear perception of our proper
nothingness.... What empire is comparable to that of a soul who,
from this sublime summit to which God has raised her, sees all the
things of earth beneath her feet, and is captivated by no one of
them? How ashamed she is of her former attachments! How amazed at
her blindness! What lively pity she feels for those whom she
recognizes still shrouded in the darkness!... She groans at having
ever been sensitive to points of honor, at the illusion that made
her ever see as honor what the world calls by that name. Now she
sees in this name nothing more than an immense lie of which the
world remains a victim. She discovers, in the new light from
above, that in genuine honor there is nothing spurious, that to be
faithful to this honor is to give our respect to what deserves to
be respected really, and to consider as nothing, or as less than
nothing, whatsoever perishes and is not agreeable to God.... She
laughs when she sees grave persons, persons of orison, caring for
points of honor for which she now feels profoundest contempt. It
is suitable to the dignity of their rank to act thus, they
pretend, and it makes them more useful to others. But she knows
that in despising the dignity of their rank for the pure love of
God they would do more good in a single day than they would effect
in ten years by preserving it.... She laughs at herself that there
should ever have been a time in her life when she made any case of
money, when she ever desired it.... Oh! if human beings might only
agree together to regard it as so much useless mud, what harmony
would then reign in the world! With what friendship we would all
treat each other if our interest in honor and in money could but
disappear from earth! For my own part, I feel as if it would be a
remedy for all our ills.”(260)
Mystical conditions may, therefore, render the soul more energetic in the
lines which their inspiration favors. But this could be reckoned an
advantage only in case the inspiration were a true one. If the inspiration
were erroneous, the energy would be all the more mistaken and misbegotten.
So we stand once more before that problem of truth which confronted us at
the end of the lectures on saintliness. You will remember that we turned
to mysticism precisely to get some light on truth. Do mystical states
establish the truth of those theological affections in which the saintly
life has its root?
In spite of their repudiation of articulate self‐description, mystical
states in general assert a pretty distinct theoretic drift. It is possible
to give the outcome of the majority of them in terms that point in
definite philosophical directions. One of these directions is optimism,
and the other is monism. We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary
consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a
vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel them
as reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes‐function more than
to the no‐function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and
peacefully closes the account. Their very denial of every adjective you
may propose as applicable to the ultimate truth,—He, the Self, the Atman,
is to be described by “No! no!” only, say the Upanishads,(261)—though it
seems on the surface to be a no‐function, is a denial made on behalf of a
deeper yes. Whoso calls the Absolute anything in particular, or says that
it is _this_, seems implicitly to shut it off from being _that_—it is as
if he lessened it. So we deny the “this,” negating the negation which it
seems to us to imply, in the interests of the higher affirmative attitude
by which we are possessed. The fountain‐head of Christian mysticism is
Dionysius the Areopagite. He describes the absolute truth by negatives
exclusively.
“The cause of all things is neither soul nor intellect; nor has it
imagination, opinion, or reason, or intelligence; nor is it reason
or intelligence; nor is it spoken or thought. It is neither
number, nor order, nor magnitude, nor littleness, nor equality,
nor inequality, nor similarity, nor dissimilarity. It neither
stands, nor moves, nor rests.... It is neither essence, nor
eternity, nor time. Even intellectual contact does not belong to
it. It is neither science nor truth. It is not even royalty or
wisdom; not one; not unity; not divinity or goodness; nor even
spirit as we know it,” etc., _ad libitum_.(262)
But these qualifications are denied by Dionysius, not because the truth
falls short of them, but because it so infinitely excels them. It is above
them. It is _super_‐lucent, _super_‐splendent, _super_‐essential,
_super_‐sublime, _super_ everything that can be named. Like Hegel in his
logic, mystics journey towards the positive pole of truth only by the
“Methode der Absoluten Negativität.”(263)
Thus come the paradoxical expressions that so abound in mystical writings.
As when Eckhart tells of the still desert of the Godhead, “where never was
seen difference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where there is no
one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than in
itself.”(264) As when Boehme writes of the Primal Love, that “it may fitly
be compared to Nothing, for it is deeper than any Thing, and is as nothing
with respect to all things, forasmuch as it is not comprehensible by any
of them. And because it is nothing respectively, it is therefore free from
all things, and is that only good, which a man cannot express or utter
what it is, there being nothing to which it may be compared, to express it
by.”(265) Or as when Angelus Silesius sings:—
“Gott ist ein lauter Nichts, ihn rührt kein Nun noch Hier;
Je mehr du nach ihm greiffst, je mehr entwind er dir.”(266)
To this dialectical use, by the intellect, of negation as a mode of
passage towards a higher kind of affirmation, there is correlated the
subtlest of moral counterparts in the sphere of the personal will. Since
denial of the finite self and its wants, since asceticism of some sort, is
found in religious experience to be the only doorway to the larger and
more blessed life, this moral mystery intertwines and combines with the
intellectual mystery in all mystical writings.
“Love,” continues Behmen, is Nothing, for “when thou art gone
forth wholly from the Creature and from that which is visible, and
art become Nothing to all that is Nature and Creature, then thou
art in that eternal One, which is God himself, and then thou shalt
feel within thee the highest virtue of Love.... The treasure of
treasures for the soul is where she goeth out of the Somewhat into
that Nothing out of which all things may be made. The soul here
saith, _I have nothing_, for I am utterly stripped and naked; _I
can do nothing_, for I have no manner of power, but am as water
poured out; _I am nothing_, for all that I am is no more than an
image of Being, and only God is to me I AM; and so, sitting down
in my own Nothingness, I give glory to the eternal Being, and
_will nothing_ of myself, that so God may will all in me, being
unto me my God and all things.”(267)
In Paul’s language, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. Only when
I become as nothing can God enter in and no difference between his life
and mine remain outstanding.(268)