acquiescence in the special vocation of the mystics; for the treasures
they won were never kept for themselves, but always showered upon her.
True, she has not hesitated to scrutinize and control them; sometimes
her attitude has seemed to the enthusiasts for liberty to be
deliberately obscurantist and tyrannical. Yet, even here—and although in
many cases there has clearly been ignorance, injustice, and
persecution—the mystic gains more than he loses by submission to the
collective judgment. Even in their harshest form, discipline and
tradition are still priceless for him. First, they school him in the
virtue of humility, the very foundation of the Christian character;
which is seldom possessed by the spiritual genius who always leads and
never submits, and whose triumphant formula, “God and myself!” too often
ends by becoming “Myself and God!”
“O caritate, vita, ch’ ogn’ altro amor è morto;
non vai rompendo legge; nante, l’observe tutto.”
said Jacopone da Todi; that natural rebel who deliberately submitted
himself to an uncongenial religious authority, and there found perfect
freedom.
Next, the solid sense of the community, the mere fact that it always
lags behind the more vivid spirits, that the forward-moving shepherd who
sees new pastures has got to take account of the slowest sheep—all this
is a valuable safeguard against the notorious extravagances of a
mysticism unfettered by authority. It is significant that the greatest
mystics in all communions have ever raised up their voices most
earnestly against spiritual license; have been most eager to submit
their soaring intuitions to the witness of their Scriptures or the
corporate feeling of their church. They realize the fact that they owe
to this church the huge debt which every individual owes to the
tradition of his art or of his trade. The church represents a complete
spiritual civilization, a conserver of values; were it not for her,
every new spiritual genius who arose would have to begin at the
beginning, at the Stone Age of the soul. Instead of that, he finds
himself placed within a social order enriched by all the contributions
of his great predecessors. The bridges are built; the roads are made and
named; his own experiences and discoveries are made more valid, less
terrifying, more comprehensible to him, because others have been this
way before. Compare the clarity, the sure-footedness as one may say, of
Ruysbroeck, of St. Catherine of Siena, of St. Teresa, with the
entanglements, the sense of wandering in beautiful but trackless places,
which one feels when reading even Boehme, Fox, or Blake; and others are
far less coherent than they. Man needs a convention, a tradition, a
limitation, if he is not to waste his creative powers; and this
convention the mystics find best and most easily in the forms of the
church to which they belong.
So we see that the corporate life of his church gives the mystic a good
deal. What does he, on his part, give to it?
Those who see in the mystic chiefly one who rebels against, or has no
use for, the corporate religious life, and acknowledges no authority but
that of his own spiritual intuitions, usually conceive of his
experiences as having value for himself alone. He cannot, they say,
communicate them or teach others to share them. Often, therefore, he is
spoken of as useless, selfish, other-worldly: a “lonely soul.” These
phrases suggest that those who use them have a very narrow view of
usefulness, a very materialistic view of the Body of Christ, and a very
unevangelical view of the relative positions of Mary and Martha. As a
matter of fact, the mystic, instead of being useless, selfish, and
other-worldly, is useful, unselfish, and this-worldly. He is a creative
personality, consecrated to the great practical business of actualizing
the eternal order within the temporal; and although the pursuit of this
business brings him hours of exquisite joy, it brings him hours of great
suffering too—suffering which is gladly and patiently endured. He does
it, or tries to do it, not because he seeks the joy, but solely for
love—love of God, love of his fellow-men—for he is perpetuating in a
certain sense the work of Christ, mediating between his brethren and
Divine Reality. Hence, where he is fully developed, he will, as
Ruysbroeck tells us, swing like a pendulum between contemplation and
action, between adoration of God and service of man. In him life has
evolved her most powerful spiritual engine; and she uses it not for the
next world, but for this world, for the eternalization of the here and
now, the making of it more real and more divine, more fully charged with
the grandeur of God. Often the mystic’s special work is done in a
positive and obvious fashion which should satisfy the most practical
mind, and which is yet wholly actuated by his central intention, that of
raising up—as he sometimes says—new children of the Eternal Goodness,
bringing back the corporate life to a closer contact with God. “My
little children, of whom I travail,” says St. Paul to his converts.
There is a typical mystic speaking of his life-work. Can we call St.
Francis of Assisi, the most devoted and original of missionaries; St.
Joan of Arc, re-making the consciousness of France by the most active of
methods; St. Catherine of Siena, purifying the Italian Church; St.
Teresa, regenerating the whole Carmelite Order, and leaving upon it a
stamp it has never lost; “lazy contemplatives”? Or St. Catherine of
Genoa, the devoted superintendent of a great hospital, who never
permitted her hours of ecstatic communion with God to interfere with her
duty to the sick?
Taken as a class, the Christian mystics are distinguished by nothing so
much as by their heroic and unselfish activities; by their varied and
innumerable services to the corporate life of the church. From their
ranks have come missionaries, preachers, prophets, social reformers,
poets, founders of institutions, servants of the poor and the sick,
patient guides and instructors of souls. We sometimes forget that even
those known chiefly by the writings they have left behind them have
sacrificed to the difficult task of reducing their transcendent
experience to words, hours in which—were the popular idea of the mystic
a true one—they might have been idly basking in the Divine Light. But
these practical activities, though often great, are only a part of the
mystic’s contribution to the corporate life. If his special claim to
communion with the Transcendent be true at all—and this argument is
based on the assumption that there is at least some truth in it—then he
does really tap a source of vitality higher than that with which other
men have contact. In the language of theology, he has not merely
“efficient” but also “extraordinary” grace; a larger dower of life,
directly dependent on his larger, more generous love. This is a claim to
which his strange triumphs over circumstance, his conquests over
ill-fortune, ill-health, oppositions and deprivations of every kind,
give weight. Not many strong and normal persons would willingly face, or
indeed endure, the hardships which St. Paul, St. Francis, St. Joan of
Arc, St. Teresa, gladly and successfully embraced.
This larger and intenser vitality the mystic does not and cannot keep to
himself. He infects with it all with whom he comes in contact, kindles
the latent fire in them: for the spiritual consciousness is caught, not
taught. Under his influence—sometimes from the mere encounter with his
personality—other men begin to live a more real, a more eternal life.
Ruysbroeck says that the Spirit of God, when it is truly received into a
soul, becomes a spreading light; and history confirms this. Corporate
experience of God always begins in a personal experience of God. The
rise of Christianity is the classic illustration of this truth; but
Hindu and Moslem religious history also declare it. Round each of the
great unitive mystics little groups of ardent disciples, of spiritual
children, have grown up. This is true both of those who remained within
and those who seceded from the official Church—for instance, St.
Bernard, Eckhart, St. Francis, Tauler, Ruysbroeck, St. Catherine of
Siena, St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Teresa, Boehme, Fox. Nor did their
influence cease with death.
Further, in reckoning up the value of the mystics to the church as a
whole, we sometimes forget the extent to which that church is indebted
to mystic intuition for the actual data upon which her corporate life is
based. Christianity, it is true, is fundamentally a historical religion;
but it is also a religion of experience, and its very history deals
quite as much with the events which attend human intercourse with the
Transcendent and Eternal as with concrete and visible happenings in
space and time. The New Testament is thick with reports of mystical
experiences. The Fourth Gospel and the Epistles of St. Paul depend for
their whole character on the soaring mystical genius their writers
possessed. Had St. Paul never been caught up to the third heaven, he
would have had a very different outlook on the world, and Christianity
would have been a different religion in consequence. Had the Fourth
Evangelist never known what it was to feel the sap of the Mystic Vine
flow through him, his words would have lacked their overwhelming
certitude. So, too, the liturgies bear the stamp of mystical feeling,
and most of the great religious concepts which the church has gradually
added to her store come from the same source. If we ask ourselves what
the history of the church would be without the history of her mystics,
then we begin to see how much of her light and colour emanates from
them; how much of her doctrine represents their experience translated
into dogmatic form. That communion with—that feeding on—the Divine Life
which she offers to every believer in the Eucharist is the central fact
of their existence. From Clement of Alexandria downwards, again and
again they appeal to Eucharistic images in order to express what it is
that really happens to the soul immersed in contemplative prayer. “I am
the food of the full-grown,” said the voice of God to St. Augustine.
“Every time we think with love of the Well-beloved, He is anew our meat
and drink,” says Ruysbroeck. So, too, the church’s language concerning
new birth, divine sonship, regeneration, union with Christ, and the
whole concept of grace, regarded as a transcendent life and love
perpetually pressing in on humanity—all this is of mystical origin, and
represents not the speculations but the concrete experience of the great
mystics. They are pushed out, as it were, by the visible church like
tentacles, to explore the unseen world which surrounds her, and drawn
back again to her bosom that they may impart to the whole body the more
abundant life which they have found. Were it not for the unfailing
family of the mystics, thus perpetually pushing out beyond the
protective edges of the organism, and bringing back official
Christianity into direct touch with the highest spiritual values, and so
constantly reaffirming the fact—by them felt and experienced—of the
intimate correspondence, the regenerating contact of God with the soul,
the church would long ago have fallen victim to that tendency to relapse
into the mechanical which dogs all organized groups. Then the resistance
which she has sometimes offered to the freshness and novelty, the
adventurous quality of the mystical impulse, where it has appeared
without preparation and sought to correct by its own overwhelming
certitude the spiritual conventions of the day, would have become that
hopeless inertia which is the precursor of death.
So we may best look upon the great Christian mystic as a special organ
developed within the Christian body for a special use. His peculiar
sensibilities, like those which condition artistic genius, are the gates
through which messages from the Transcendent come to man. He is finding
and feeling the Infinite; not for himself, but for us. His achievement,
bridging the gap which lies between the normal mind and the
supersensuous world, makes more valid and more actual to us the
assumptions upon which external religion is built; vindicating the
church’s highest claim, and hence the soul’s highest claim—the claim
that achievement of Eternal Life, communion with ultimate reality, is
possible to the spirit of man. More, since all human lives
interpenetrate, and isolation is impossible save in death, the more we,
the social group, are willing to accept the claim of the mystic, and
receive what he tells us in a spirit of humility instead of a spirit of
criticism; the more completely he will be able to share his treasure
with us, the more deeply we shall be able to enter into that
consciousness which he represents, which he brings in his own person
into the human scheme.
This, of course, the Christian church has said far more beautifully and
exactly in her doctrine of the Communion of Saints; and that doctrine,
rightly understood, is indeed the key to the connection between the
great mystics and the corporate life within which they arise. Were the
activities of these more vital spirits wholly hidden from us, wholly
silent and supersensual—as they are not—it would be a grossly
materialistic and violently un-Christian judgment which concluded from
this that their lives were useless save to themselves. How can a life
which aims at God be useless, if we believe that achievement of Him is
the final destiny and only satisfaction of every soul? It would be an
implicit denial of the efficacy of prayer, of the “prevailing merits” of
sanctity, its value to the society which produces it—the power of a
great and loving spirit to help, infect and reinforce more languid
souls—did we agree that the life of the most strictly enclosed
contemplative was wasted. Christians, who believe that the world was
redeemed from within the narrow limits of Palestine, should not thus
confuse space with power, or character with the manner of its
self-expression. Without the ardent prayers of the mystics, the vivid
spiritual life they lead, what would the sum of human spirituality be?
How can we tell what we owe to the power which they liberate, the
currents which they set up, the contacts which they make? The land they
see, and of which they report to us, is the land towards which humanity
is going. They are like the look-out men upon the cross-trees, assuring
us from time to time that we are still upon our course. Tear asunder
their peculiar power and office from the office of the whole, and you
will have on one side a society deprived of the guides which God has
raised up for it; on the other, an organ deprived of its real perfection
and beauty, because severed from the organism which it was intended to
serve.
MYSTICISM AND THE DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT
Amongst the problems which have to be met by those who incline to a
mystical view of Christianity—that view which lays special emphasis on
the growth and experience of the individual soul, its ascent to union
with God, as the very aim and object of religion—one of the most
pressing is that which centres on the doctrine of the Atonement. It is
clear that many people feel that such a mystical and empirical view of
religion leaves no room for this doctrine, or for the idea which it
represents; that they are convinced that there is here a real conflict
between two incompatible views of the Christian faith. On the one hand,
they see orthodox Christianity still centred on the “atoning act” of
Christ, with its implications of reconciliation and vicarious suffering,
of the divine life humiliating itself, in order to do within the
temporal order something for man which man cannot do for himself; a
doctrine which retains its attraction and value, because so full of hope
and mercy for the sinful and the weak. On the other hand, they see that
demand of personal and individual growth, purification,
life-enhancement, progressive union with God—helped doubtless by grace,
but no less dependent on will—as the condition of attaining Eternal
Life, which seems to be made by mystical theology. The opposition, in
fact, is supposed to be between a concept of spiritual life in which
each man must himself do and be, achieve and actualize in his own
person, and not merely as the acceptor of a creed or the member of a
Church—must not only accept the gift, but must set himself to be an
imitator, so far as he may, of the Giver—and one in which a special
manifestation in time and space of the divine power and love, for
Christians the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, does something for the
man accepting it, which he cannot do for himself. In the one case, we
are saved one by one, by effort, response, growth; in the other, we are
saved as members of a group. Here the individual and the corporate
ideals in their most intense forms face one another.
It does, then, seem at first as though we had here an irreconcilable
opposition. Yet before we discard either of these ideas, it is worth
while to enquire whether they need really entail conflict, or can be
regarded as two sides of a greater whole. It is true that there are
certain extreme views of the Atonement which do appear to be hopelessly
irreconcilable with the mystical view of religion: especially those
which lay peculiar stress, not on the latent powers, but on the
essential impotence of man; centring the soul’s salvation on “imputed
righteousness,” and finding the whole meaning and reason of the
Incarnation in the one historical “propitiatory act” of Calvary. There
is real conflict between such a creed, centred on the idea of something
done once for all _to_ the soul—to the world—from outside, and that
which is centred on the idea of a life perpetually welling up _in_ the
soul, on growth, movement, organic change. Yet, on the other hand, is
there not a curious similarity between these two apparently opposite
views of salvation? Is not the drama of the divine life incarnate,
humbling and limiting itself to the human life to save it, essentially a
dramatic representation of that other experience, of the divine life
limiting itself and mysteriously emerging within each soul, to
transmute, regenerate, infinitize it, which the mystics describe to us?
Is not what theologians call “grace”—that essential factor of the mystic
life-process—a making good by the addition of a new dower of
transcendent vitality, of the shortcomings of the merely human creature
regarded as an “inheritor of Eternal Life”; just as the historical
surrender of Calvary is conceived by orthodox Christianity to make good
the shortcomings of the whole race, regarded as heirs of the Kingdom?
And if this be so, then can the opposition between these two ideas of
salvation—the vital and the theological—be as real as it sometimes
appears? Are they not both plans in which atonement plays a part?
After all, both these views of the Christian scheme have emerged and
diverged from the same source. St. Paul, the greatest of all Christian
mystics—soaked, too, in the idea of grace and of growth in grace, and
deeply impressed with the fact of the soul’s individual
responsibility—is also supremely the theologian of the Atonement. Though
no doubt his teaching on the subject was first called forth by the
practical need of finding some meaning in the tragedy of the
crucifixion, it is yet a development of that profound conception of His
own death as a filling up to the brim of the cup of sacrifice and
surrender, which seems to have inspired Christ Himself. If there were
indeed a fundamental inconsistency between these two ideas in their pure
and original form, then St. Paul would be inconsistent; for he certainly
held them both. We all know that the usual way of studying St. Paul’s
“doctrines” for purposes of edification has been to isolate each of his
ardent and poetic utterances, place it, as it were, in cold storage till
it is no longer reminiscent of the living mobile body from which it
came, and then subject it to analysis. We are also beginning to know
that this method is not quite fair to a man who was a poet, an artist, a
lover, as well as a constructive genius of unequalled power. The Pauline
utterances are mostly impassioned efforts to express something which
Paul knows in his own person; descriptions of the way in which the
Christian revelation has met his own needs, regenerated his own nature.
They are closely connected with the interior adventures which have
attended on his new spiritual existence “in Christ.” To adopt a
well-known phrase of St. Bonaventura, they come “of grace, not of
doctrine; of desire, not of intellect; of the ardours of prayer, not of
the teaching of the schools.” To put it in another way, they are the
fruits of his mystical consciousness, which he is trying to express in
artistic or intellectual terms. If we accept this statement then the
fact of Paul’s mystical experience and all that it means to him must
never be absent from our minds when we are trying to understand his
declarations. He lives in that supernal atmosphere which he calls
“Christ-Spirit”; he speaks to us from that sphere. Nothing outside of it
is real to him. Whatever its other bearings may be, his doctrine of
Atonement is solidly real on that plane—the mystic’s plane, the plane of
union—or not at all. When he says he is “crucified _with_ Christ,” “hid
in God _with_ Christ,” he means these things. They are not vaguely pious
utterances, but desperate attempts towards the communication of a real
state, really felt and known. Paul does feel himself welded together
with that Transcendent Life, at once so intimate and personal, so
infinite and universal, which he identifies with the glorified Jesus.
Because of this union—and only because of it—the acts, powers, holiness,
adventures of that life avail for him, Paul. He is a bit of its Body, in
his own bold metaphor. So that the first great factor of salvation, as
he sees it, is the essentially mystical factor of the “union” of the
soul with Christ; the “doing away of the flame of separation.” The
Atonement follows, as it were almost logically, from this.
The general content of his letters makes us feel that St. Paul had an
extremely rich, deep view of life; so great, indeed, that it refuses to
be hammered into a consistent system, and we can never manage to embrace
it all at once. Always bits get left out, and hence there is apt to be a
certain distortion in all our views of the Pauline universe. There was a
wonderful wholeness, a strongly affirmative quality about his sense of
existence; subtractions and negations were unnatural to him. Any
paradoxes and inconsistencies which we find in his statements are the
inevitable result of an effort to express the enormous sweep, the living
multiplicity, and (to borrow a word from William James) the thickness of
his vision of Reality. Hence it follows that he was able to see and
treat the soul of man, both as intensely individual and responsible, and
at the same time as a part of the body of all life; that “mystical body
of many members” of which the head is Christ-Spirit, the Divine Humanity
which appeared in Jesus—a corporation actualized in the Christian
Church, but potentially co-extensive with the whole of mankind. These
two—the separate and the corporate—are aspects of one whole. They seem
to us to conflict, only because the totality to which they contribute is
beyond the focus of the mind. Thus Paul could and did demand of the
individual, on the one hand the self-mergence of faith, the corporate
sense, the humble acknowledgment of personal impotence; and on the other
hand, could demand of that same man the personal industry and
self-dependence which “works out its _own_ salvation,” “runs for an
imperishable garland,” and “presses on towards the goal.”