celebrated passages: “We always move round the One, but we do not always
fix our gaze upon It. We are like a choir of singers standing round the
conductor, who do not always sing in time, because their attention is
diverted to some external object. When they look at the conductor, they
sing well and are really with him. So we always move round the One. If
we did not, we should dissolve and cease to exist. But we do not always
look towards the One. When we do, we attain the end of our existence and
our rest; and we no longer sing out of tune, but form in truth a divine
choir about the One.” In this conception of man’s privilege and duty we
have the indestructible essence of mysticism.
THE MYSTIC AND THE CORPORATE LIFE
One of the commonest of the criticisms which are brought against the
mystics is that they represent an unsocial type of religion; that their
spiritual enthusiasms are personal and individual, and that they do not
share or value the corporate life and institutions of the church or
community to which they belong. Yet, as a matter of fact, the relation
that does and should exist between personal religion and the corporate
life of the church frequently appears in them in a peculiarly intense, a
peculiarly interesting form; and in their lives, perhaps, more easily
than elsewhere, we may discern the principles which do or should govern
the relation of the individual to the community.
In the true mystic, who is so often and so wrongly called a “religious
individualist,” we see personal religion raised to its highest power. If
we accept his experience as genuine, it involves an intercourse with the
spiritual world, an awareness of it, which transcends the normal
experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious
consciousness of the community to which he belongs. The mystic speaks
with God as a person with a Person, and not as a member of a group. He
lives by an immediate knowledge far more than by belief; by a knowledge
achieved in those hours of direct, unmediated intercourse with the
Transcendent when, as he says, he was “in union with God.” The certitude
then gained—a certitude which he cannot impart, and which is not
generally diffused—governs all his reactions to the Universe. It even
persists and upholds him in those terrible hours of darkness when all
his sense of spiritual reality is taken away.
Such a personality as this seems at first sight to stand in little need
of the support which the smaller nature, the more languid religious
consciousness, receives from the corporate spirit. By the very term
“mystic” we indicate a certain aloofness from the crowd, suggest that he
is in possession of a secret which the community as a whole does not and
cannot share; that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise. I think
that much of the distrust with which he is often regarded comes from
this sense of his independence of the herd; his apparent separation from
the often clumsy and always symbolic methods of institutional religion,
and the further fact that his own methods and results cannot be
criticized or checked by those who have not shared them. “I spake as I
saw,” said David; and those who did not see can only preserve a
respectful or an exasperated silence.
Yet this common opinion that the mystic is a lonely soul wholly absorbed
in his vertical relation with God, that his form of religious life
represents an opposition to, and an implicit criticism of, the corporate
and institutional form of religious life; this is decisively
contradicted by history; which shows us, again and again, the great
mystics as the loyal children of the great religious institutions, and
forces us to admit that here as in other departments of human activity
the corporate and the individual life are intimately plaited together.
Even those who have broken away from the churches that reared them, have
quickly drawn to themselves disciples, and become the centres of new
groups. Surely, therefore, it is worth while to examine, if we can, the
nature of the connection between these two factors: to ask, on the one
hand, what it is that the corporate life and the group-consciousness
which it develops give the mystic; on the other, what is the real value
of the mystic to the corporate life of his church?
As to the first question: What is it that the corporate life does for
the great spiritual genius?—for I think that we may allow the great
mystic to be that. First, and most obviously, it gives him a favourable
environment. He must have an environment: he must be affected by it.
That is a certainty in the case of any living thing; a certainty so
obvious that it would hardly be worth stating were it not that those who
talk about the mystic craving for solitude—his complete aloofness from
human life—seem often to ignore it. The idea of solitude in any complete
sense is, of course, an illusion. We are bound, if we live at all, to
accept the fact of a living world outside ourselves, to have social
relations with something; and it only remains to decide what these
relations shall be. The _yogi_ or the hermit who retreats to the forest
in order to concentrate his mind more utterly upon the quest of God,
only exchanges the society of human beings for the society of other
living things. Did he eliminate all else, the parasites of his own body,
the bacterial populations of his alimentary system, would be there to
remind him that man cannot live alone. He may shift his position in the
web of life, but its strands will enmesh him still. So, too, the monk or
nun “buried alive” in the cloister is still living a family life; only
it is a family life that is governed by special ideals.
Now it is plainly better for the mystic, whose aim is the establishment
of special relations with the spiritual order, that the social
consciousness in which he is immersed, and from which he is taking
colour all the time, should have a spiritual and religious tendency;
that the social acts in which he takes part should harmonize rather than
conflict with his own deep intuition of reality. The difference in
degree between that deep intuition and the outward corporate acts—the
cult—which he thus shares, may be enormous: for the cult is an
expression of the crowd consciousness, and manifests its spiritual
crudity, its innate conservatism, its primitive demands for safety and
personal rewards. The inadequacy or unreality of the forms, the low
level of the adoration which they evoke, may distress and even disgust
him. Yet, even so, it is better for him that he should be within a
church than outside it. Compared with this one fact—that he is a member
of a social group which recognizes spiritual values, and therefore lives
in an environment permeated by religious concepts—the accuracy in detail
of the creed which that group professes, the adequacy of its liturgical
acts, is unimportant.
Next, the demands made and restrictions imposed by the community on the
individual are good for the mystic. Man is social right through; in
spirit as well as in body and mind. His most sublime spiritual
experiences are themselves social in type. Intercourse of a person with
a Person, the merging of his narrow consciousness in a larger
consciousness, the achievement of a divine sonship, a spiritual
marriage: these are the highest things that he can say concerning his
achievement of Divine Reality. And they all entail, not a narrow
self-realization, but the breaking-down of barriers; the setting-up of
wider relationships. It follows that self-mergence in the common life is
an education for that self-mergence in the absolute life at which the
mystic aims. Such self-mergence, and the training in humility,
self-denial, obedience, suppleness, which is involved in it, is held by
all ascetic teachers to be essential to the education of the human soul.
Union with, and to a certain extent submission to, the church, to the
family—to life, in fact—an attitude of self-giving surrender: this is
the best of preparations for that total self-naughting of the soul which
is involved in union with God; that utter doing-away of the I, the Me,
and the Mine, till it becomes one will and one love with the divine will
and love.
On these two counts alone—harmonious environment and salutary
discipline—we shall expect, other things being equal, that the richest
and most fruitful types of mystical experience will arise within
religious institutions rather than outside them; and as a matter of fact
this is what we do find. The Hindu ascetic has his recognized place in
the Hindu system. He has but reached the summit of a pyramid which is
firmly based on earth. The Sūfi is a good Moslem, and commonly the
member of a religious confraternity which imposes a strict rule of life.
The Christian mystic, too, grows up from the Christian society. His
roots strike deep down into that favouring soil. Though his branches may
shoot up to the heavens, and seem to draw thence all the light and heat
by which he lives, yet he is really fed from below as well as from
above. When he refuses to acknowledge this principle, when he abjures
the discipline, the authority, the support of the corporate life, and
regards himself as a separate individual, dependent on direct
inspiration alone; how quickly he becomes unbalanced and eccentric, how
difficult it is for him to avoid the disease of spiritual megalomania.
Refusing the support and discipline of organized religion, he becomes
like a poet who refuses to be controlled by the laws of prosody; which
seem to limit, but really strengthen and beautify, his work.
It is true that right through the history of Christian mysticism there
has been a line of insurgent mystics who have made this refusal; whose
direct vision of spiritual perfection has brought with it so
overwhelming a sense of the imperfection, formalism, unreality, the
dreadfulness of religious institutions, that it has forced them into a
position of more or less acute revolt from the official church. So clear
has been their own consciousness of the spiritual world that the soul’s
life and growth, its actual and individual rebirth, have shone out for
them as the only things that matter. Hence the dramatization of these
things in ceremonial religion, the effort to give spiritual values a
concrete form, has seemed to them like a blasphemous parody. Unable to
harmonize the inward and the outward—the all-penetrating reality of
religion as they understand it, with its crude outward expression in the
external cult, where formal acts and intellectual assents so often seem
to take the place of inward changes—in the end they solve the problem by
repudiating the external and visible church. This rebel-type, victims of
exaggerated individualism, which would make the special experiences of a
few the standard for the whole race, has persisted side by side with the
law-abiding type; who have preserved, if not always a perfect balance
between liberty and obedience, at any rate a more reasonable proportion
between them. Often the corruption of the times in which he lived has
seemed to the mystic to make such rebellion inevitable. This is
particularly true in the case of George Fox, whose ragings were directed
far less against organized religion than against unreal religion; and
who might, had he lived in fourteenth-century Germany, have found a
congenial career as one of the Friends of God. Yet, even so, the careers
of these rebels have been on the whole unfruitful, compared with those
who remained within the institutional framework and effected their
reforms from inside. They seldom quite escape the taint of arrogance.
There is apt to be a touch of self-consciousness in their sanctity. We
have only to compare the influence exerted by the outstanding figures of
the two groups, to realize which type of spiritual life has had the best
and most enduring influence on the spiritual history of the race; which,
in fact, best stands the pragmatic test.
On the rebel side we have, of course, the leaders of many dead heresies
and sects. The Montanists of the second century, with their claim to
direct inspiration, their cult of ecstatic phenomena and prophetic
speech; the numerous mystical heretics and illuminati of the Middle
Ages, often preaching the most extravagant doctrines and always claiming
for them divine authority—for instance, the Brethren of the Free Spirit,
who claimed the possession of the Holy Ghost as an excuse not only for
theological, but also for moral aberrations. Later, there are the
Quietists, a particularly poisonous brand of unbalanced contemplatives;
and, contemporary with their revolt against Catholic forms and
authorities, innumerable mystical revolts against Protestant forms and
authorities, the very names of whose originators are now almost
forgotten. Amongst these two mighty figures stand up: Jacob Boehme and
George Fox. But we must remember as regards Boehme that, although he
certainly spoke with great violence against the error of confusing
external acceptance of religion with internal adherence to God,
“historical Christians” with “new men,” he never disowned the Lutheran
Church within which he was born. On the contrary, it was that church
which persecuted and finally disowned him. As to that great and strange
genius, George Fox, who aimed at nothing less than a world religion of a
mystical type, the free and conscious contact of every soul with the
Spirit of God, I believe that any unbiassed student of his Journal must
allow that, enormous as his achievement was, it might have been far
greater had his violent sense of vocation, his remarkable spiritual
gifts, been disciplined and controlled by the corporate consciousness as
expressed in institutional religion. Then some of the energy which he
expended in denunciations of steeple-houses might have been employed in
healing the disharmony between the visible and invisible church; helping
that vision of the Eternal by which he was possessed to find concrete
expression within traditional forms. Here, as elsewhere, the Inner Light
would have burned with a better and a truer flame had it submitted to
the limitations of a lamp.
I do not suggest that these people, even the most extravagant of them,
were not truly spiritual or truly mystical. The sort of criticism which
divides mystics into two groups—the orthodox, who are inspired by God,
and the heretical, who are inspired by Satan—of course belongs to the
dark ages of theology. On the contrary, these rebel-mystics most often
possessed—sometimes in a highly developed form—the sharp direct
consciousness of the Divine Life which is the essential quality of the
mystic. This was to them the central fact; by comparison with it they
judged all other things. What they did _not_ possess was the balancing,
equivalent consciousness of, and reverence for, corporate human life;
that group-personality which is the church, and its value and authority.
They lacked the sense that the whole organism, the whole herd, with all
its imperfections, is yet interdependent, and has got to move together,
urged from within by its more vivid spirits, not stung from without, as
if by some enthusiastic spiritual mosquito. To a greater or lesser
extent they failed in effect because they tried to be mystical in a
non-human instead of a human way; were “other-worldly” in the bad sense
of the word. They have not always remembered that Christ Himself, the
supreme pattern of all mystics, lived a balanced life of clear personal
vision, unmediated intercourse with God on the one hand, and gentle and
patient submission to the corporate consciousness on the other hand.
Though severely critical of the unrealities and hypocrisy of current
institutionalism, he yet sought to form the group, the “little flock,”
in which His ideas should be incorporated within, and not over against,
the official Jewish Church; and thus gradually to leaven the whole.
Put now against these vigorous individualists the names of the mystics
who have never felt that their passionate correspondences with the
Eternal Order—their clear vision of the adorable Perfection of God and
the imperfection, languor, and corruption of man—need involve a break
with the corporate religious life. Observe how these have continued for
centuries to be fruitful personalities, often not merely within their
own communion, but outside it too; how they have acted as salt, as
leaven, permeating and transmuting the general consciousness of the Body
of Christ. Often these, too, have been reformers—drastic, unrelenting
disturbers of the established order of things. St. Bernard, St.
Hildegarde, Mechthild, Jacopone da Todi, St. Catherine of Siena, Tauler,
were passionate in their denunciations of slackness, corruption, and
disorder. But they made their protests, and brought back the general
consciousness to a closer contact with reality, from within, and not
from without, the Christian church. Consider St. Bernard and Richard of
St. Victor, whose writings influenced for centuries the whole of the
religious literature of Europe; St. Hildegarde, St. Gertrude, Mechthild
of Magdeburg, great mystics, good churchwomen, but severe denouncers of
formalism and unreality; St. Francis of Assisi, who removed evangelical
poverty from the sphere of notion to the sphere of fact; St. Catherine
of Siena, who changed Italian politics; St. Joan of Arc, who altered
European history; the soaring transcendentalism of Ruysbroeck, who was
yet content to be a humble parish priest; the great mystical movement of
the Friends of God, ardent Catholics and ardent reformers too. Even our
own great mystical poets, Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert, Traherne,
Coventry Patmore and Francis Thompson, were one and all convinced
institutionalists. Finally, look at some of the great cloistered
mystics, of whom St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross are types; and see
how, though they seem in the eyes of the world to be “buried alive,”
they are and remain the ardent centres of a spreading light, which
perpetually stimulates and revivifies not only members of their own
order or communion, but spiritually sensitive souls outside.
Perhaps it is in those contemplatives who lived within and were obedient
to the rule of the great monastic orders, that we can see most easily
the nature of the link between the individual soul and the religious
group within which it does or should develop; the enormous value to it
of tradition, that huge accumulation of tendencies, ideals, systems,
wisdom both speculative and practical, which is preserved in the
corporate consciousness. Here the influence of the religious family, the
rule of life, the ideal held out, the severe education in self-control
administered to every novice, can always be traced; conditioning, and, I
believe, helping and bracing the character of that communion with the
Transcendent which the individual mystic enjoys. As the baby at birth
enters into a civilization prepared for him, and is at once supported,
educated, even clothed by a tradition prepared by countless generations
of the past; so the novice, whose spiritual childhood begins within a
great monastic family, receives—supposing, of course, that the order is
true to its ideals—the support and benefits of a tradition evolved
during previous generations in response to the needs of other similar
souls; and he is by so much the better off than he would be were he a
solitary, or a deliberate rebel who refuses to accept the heritage of
the past. He finds a life beautifully adjusted to his needs; yet which,
being greater and older than his own, keeps his rampant individualism in
check, nurtures and cultivates his growing spiritual consciousness, and
opposes—by its perpetual demands on humility, obedience, and
unselfishness—the vice of pride which the mystical individualist seldom
escapes. Such a mystical consciousness would not necessarily die without
the support of this corporate tradition, any more than the baby would
necessarily die did it emerge into the conditions of the paleolithic
cave instead of into those of the modern nursery. But in both cases the
environment would be unfavourable, and the effort required to attain
that position into which the child of tradition enters at birth would be
an enormous drain upon the powers of the organism.
The instinct of many mystics for a certain measure of solitude is no
contradiction of this. The hermits and the anchorites, even such rare
and extreme types as St. Anthony of Egypt, who is said to have lived in
perfect solitude for twenty years, did not withdraw from the Christian
society; nor did they disown the validity of its external and
institutional life. They sought to construct or find within the
Christian church an environment within which their special tendencies
could develop in a normal way; and this not merely for themselves, but
also for the sake of other souls. Such a period of withdrawal was felt
by them to be a necessary condition of their full effectiveness for
life. So, too, the poet or the artist must retreat from his fellows if
he is to commune with the eternal loveliness and interpret her to other
men: for a total concentration upon reality is the condition under which
it is revealed. The Catholic Church has always recognized, and does
still in the continued existence of the cloistered orders, the
reasonableness of this demand. We do not as a rule say bitter things
when a person of artistic or speculative genius leaves the family group
and goes to Paris or Oxford in order that his special powers may be
educated and become effective for life; nor should we feel resentment
because the mystical genius sometimes feels that the life of the home
circle, or even the normal life of the community, cannot give the
special training which he requires. In a few cases the mystics have felt
a long period of complete isolation to be necessary to them; but most
often they have been accessible to those who really needed them, and
helped these all the more because of the long periods of silence in
which they listened to the Voice of God, too often inaudible for them,
as for us, in the general bustle of the world. Their point of view has
been beautifully stated by a young French mystic, Elizabeth de la
Trinité, who died a few years ago. “I want,” she says, “to be all
silence, all adoration, that I may penetrate more and more deeply into
God; and become so full of Him that I can give Him in my prayers to
those poor souls still ignorant of His gift.” She wants to be a channel,
a duct, by which the love and power of God, of which she is so strongly
conscious, can flow out to other souls. It is not for herself that she
is working; it is for the world. Do we not find expressed there both the
individual longing and the corporate responsibility of the mystic? And
do we not touch here the intimate connection which should exist between
the separate life of the great mystic and the corporate life of the
church? On the one hand, the highly organized society, making it
possible for the contemplative to develop his special powers in a
harmonious environment and preventing the frittering of his energies; on
the other, that contemplative, like a special organ developed by the
Body of Christ, gaining for the whole community contacts and certitudes,
which it could not gain in any other way. News of God can only enter the
temporal order through some human consciousness. Is it unreasonable that
for so great an office certain individuals should be set apart—within
the community, not over against it—and should live in a special way?