The Essentials of Mysticism
THE ESSENTIALS of MYSTICISM
AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY
EVELYN UNDERHILL
1920
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
LONDON & TORONTO
J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
Preface . . . v
The Essentials of Mysticism . . . 1
The Mystic and the Corporate Life . . . 25
Mysticism and the Doctrine of Atonement . . . 44
The Mystic as Creative Artist . . . 64
The Education of the Spirit . . . 86
The Place of Will, Intellect, and Feeling in Prayer . . . 99
The Mysticism of Plotinus . . . 116
Three Mediæval Mystics . . . 141
I. “THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS” . . . 141
II. THE BLESSED ANGELA OF FOLIGNO . . . 160
III. JULIAN OF NORWICH . . . 183
Mysticism in Modern France . . . 199
I. SŒUR THÉRÈSE DE L’ENFANT-JÉSUS . . . 199
II. LUCIE-CHRISTINE . . . 215
III. CHARLES PÉGUY . . . 228
PREFACE
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.”