through personality, through specific men—as a communication of
transcendent vitality to certain souls (“elect,” if you like) in order
that they may bring forth new life, new vision, new goodness, may
fertilize the race afresh—then shall we not expect to find that
Christianity, being a vital, dynamic system, has exhibited and
emphasized these facts throughout the whole of her great career? This
outward thrust of great personalities from the social organism, these
fresh unique saving contacts made by the individual in the name of the
All, these sudden, incalculable, upward leaps of life, these changes in
the national consciousness which the hero, poet, prophet can produce—we
shall expect to find all this operative in the highest degree in the
Christian Church. We shall expect to find her claiming for her greatest
and most God-achieving spirits, not only special honour, but a special
value, a special redeeming power in respect of the corporate body to
which they belong; and this, of course, is exactly what we do find. The
mystical saints, in fact, seem to provide us with a link between the
doctrine of the Atonement—of the special racial value of the utterly
surrendered life in God, which was once, and once only, perfectly
achieved—and the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, or
interpenetration and mutual help of all souls “in Christ.” From these
two ideas there follows of necessity that further doctrine of the
“prevailing merits” of the saints, their special “atoning” value for
other men, the corporate social work done by heroic virtue flowering in
individual souls, which the Catholic Church has always deduced from
them. At the back of both ideas we find the same fact; that Life and
Love, when supremely evoked within the temporal order, cannot keep
themselves to themselves. Such life and such love have, in spite of
their marked individuality, a profoundly social character; they are
violently contagious; they spread, they interpenetrate, they transmute
all selves that will receive them. They entincture the whole stream of
duration, make good its shortcomings, make widening circles of splendour
within the flux.
So, if we want to think of a Celestial Hierarchy, actual to us, founded
in history, related with us by a thousand links, it is surely of the
saints and the mystics that we ought to think; rising as it were in
graduated orders, according to the strength and purity of their union
with God, the fullness of their possession of Eternal Life, towards the
Cross in which their tendencies are perfected and gathered up. These are
amongst the highest values which life has given to us. The apostolic
type; the men of action, dynamic manifestations of the Spirit. The
prophetic type; men of supreme vision, enlarging the horizons of the
world. The martyr-type; men of utter sacrifice and complete interior
surrender. These are the three ways in which the mystical passion for
God breaks out through humanity. These three types make good—atone
for—our corporate spiritual shortcomings; redeem the dead level of that
race which has thrust them forth towards the Infinite.
Perhaps it seems to us that their difference from us is too great; that
they are cut off, divided by a chasm from the common experience of man
to form an exclusive, “other-worldly” type. Their life rises up like a
great mountain, full of beauty and strangeness; and ours is like the
homely plain. But there is no break between the plain and the mountain.
It is pushed out from us, it is part of us; its value is bound up with
the value of the whole—with our value, as struggling, growing men. It,
every inch of it, atones for our flatness and enhances the average level
of the race. We have all seen in Catholic countries how a sudden hill
with a Calvary on its summit can glorify and atone for the whole
landscape—so poor without it, so noble with it—from which it is lifted
up. Now the Cross is, and remains, the central feature in the Christian
landscape too: but is it not the long slope of that hill, going from the
common level to the heights, which makes it so homely to us, so
accessible to us, so supremely a part of us, and completes its task of
linking humanity and divinity?
These are some of the reasons why the doctrine of Atonement seems to be
closely bound up with the mystical vision of life, and hard to
understand—whether we mean by it a spiritual principle or a historic
event—without that mystical vision. We have Christianity saying to us,
on the one hand, that the utmost ideal of humanity, the ideal of perfect
self-donation to the purposes of Spirit, perfect self-surrender to the
interests of the All, was completely and transcendently achieved in
Jesus. In Him man leapt to the heights; and this unique attainment
counts for the whole race. But, on the other hand, it says that all who
can are called to go as far as they are able on the same road; to “fill
up the measure of the sufferings,” to “grow to the full stature,” to
“press on to the high calling” of the human soul. Through these more
vital personalities—the mystics, the twice-born, the saints—the radiance
of the spiritual streams out on the race; God speaks to man through man.
Such personalities act as receivers and transmitters; they really and
practically distribute the flashes of the Uncreated Light. Their
activities are vicarious; they do atone for the disabilities of other
men. Therefore the social value of the mystics, their place in the
organism, is intimately connected with the atoning idea. Were it not for
the principle which the doctrine of Atonement expresses, the mystics
would be spiritual individualists, whose life and experience would be
meaningless except for themselves. And were it not for the continuance
of the mystical life, the perpetual renewal of the mystical
self-donation in love, its known value for the race, then the historic
Atonement of Jesus would be an isolated act, unrelated to the great
processes of the Spiritual World, of which it should form the crown.
THE MYSTIC AS CREATIVE ARTIST
Hostile criticism of the mystics almost invariably includes the charge
that their great experiences are in the nature of merely personal
satisfactions. It is said that they stand apart from the ruck of
humanity, claiming a special knowledge of the supersensual, a special
privilege of communion with it; yet do not pass on to others, in any
real and genuine sense, the illumination, the intuition of Reality,
which they declare that they have received. St. Bernard’s favourite
mistranslation from Isaiah, “My secret to myself,” has again and again
been used against them with damaging effect; linked sometimes with the
notorious phrase in which Plotinus defined the soul’s fruition of
Eternity as “a flight of the alone to the Alone.”
It is true that these hints concerning a solitary and ineffable
encounter do tally with one side of the experience of the mystic; do
describe one aspect of his richly various, many-angled spiritual
universe, one way in which that divine union which is his high objective
is apprehended by the surface-consciousness. But that which is here
told, is only half the truth. There is another side, a “completing
opposite,” to this admittedly indescribable union of hearts; a side
which is often—and most ungraciously—forgotten by those who have
received its benefits. The great mystic’s loneliness is a consecrated
loneliness. When he ascends to that encounter with Divine Reality which
is his peculiar privilege, he is not a spiritual individualist. He goes
as the ambassador of the race. His spirit is not, so to speak, a “spark
flying upwards” from this world into that world, flung out from the mass
of humanity, cut off; a little, separate, brilliant thing. It is more
like a feeler, a tentacle, which life as a whole stretches out into that
supersensual world which envelops her. Life stretches that tentacle out,
but she also draws it in again with the food that it has gathered, the
news that it has to tell of the regions which its delicate tactile sense
has enabled it to explore. This, it seems to me, is the function of the
mystic consciousness in respect of the human race. For this purpose it
is specialized. It receives, in order that it may give. As the prophet
looks at the landscape of Eternity, the mystic finds and feels it: and
both know that there is laid on them the obligation of exhibiting it if
they can.
If this be so, then it becomes clear that the mystic’s personal
encounter with Infinite Reality represents only one of the two movements
which constitute his completed life. He must turn back to pass on the
revelation he has received: must mediate between the transcendent and
his fellow-men. He is, in fact, called to be a creative artist of the
highest kind; and only when he is such an artist, does he fulfil his
duty to the race.
It is coming to be realized more and more clearly that it is the
business of the artist not only to delight us, but to enlighten us: in
Blake’s words, to “Cleanse the doors of perception, so that everything
may appear as it is—infinite.” Artists mediate between the truth and
beauty which they know, and those who cannot without their help discern
it. It is the function of art, says Hegel, to deliver to the domain of
feeling and delight of vision all that the mind may possess of essential
and transcendent Being. In this respect it ranks with religion and
philosophy as “one of the three spheres of Absolute Spirit.” Bergson,
again, declares that it is the peculiar business of art to brush aside
everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face
with the real, the true. The artist is the man who sees things in their
native purity.
“Could reality,” he observes in a celebrated passage, “come into direct
contact with sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate
communion with things and with ourselves—then, we should all be
artists.... Deep in our souls we should hear the uninterrupted melody of
our inner life: a music often gay, more often sad, always original. All
this is around and within us: yet none of it is distinctly perceived by
us. Between nature and ourselves—more, between ourselves and our own
consciousness—hangs a veil: a veil dense and opaque for normal men, but
thin, almost transparent, for the artist and poet.” He might have added,
for the mystic too.
This veil, he says again, is woven of self-interest: we perceive things,
not as they are, but as they affect ourselves. The artist, on the
contrary, sees them for their own sakes, with the eyes of disinterested
love. So, when the mystics declare to us that the first conditions of
spiritual illumination are self-simplification, humility and detachment,
they are demanding just those qualities which control the artist’s power
of seeing things in their beauty and truth. The true mystic sees Reality
in its infinite aspect; and tries, as other artists, to reveal it within
the finite world. He not only ascends, but descends the ladder of
contemplation; having heard “the uninterrupted music of the inner life,”
he tries to weave it into melodies that other men can understand.
Bergson’s contemporary, Eucken, claims—and I think it is one of his most
striking doctrines—that man is gradually but actually bringing into
existence a spiritual world. This spiritual world springs up from within
through humanity—that is, through man’s own consciousness—yet at the
same time humanity is, as it were, growing up into it; finding it as an
independent reality, waiting to be apprehended, waiting to be
incorporated into our universe. In respect of man’s normal universe,
this spiritual world is both immanent and transcendent: “Absent only
from those unable to perceive it,” as Plotinus said of the _Nous_. We
are reminded of the Voice which said to St. Augustine, “I am the Food of
the Full-grown.”
This paradox of a wholly new order of experience thrusting itself up
through the race which it yet transcends, is a permanent feature in the
teachings of the higher religions and philosophies, and is closely
connected with the phenomena of inspiration and of artistic creation.
The artist, the prophet, the metaphysician, each builds up from material
beyond the grasp of other souls, a world within which those other souls
can live and dream: a world, moreover, which exhibits in new proportions
and endows with new meanings the common world of daily life. When we ask
what organ of the race—the whole body of humanity—it is, by and through
which this supernal world thus receives expression, it becomes clear
that this organ is the corporate spiritual consciousness, emerging in
those whom we call, pre-eminently, mystics and seers. It is, actually
and literally, through them that this new world is emerging and being
built up; as it is through other forms of enhanced and clarified
consciousness, in painters, musicians, philosophers, and the adepts of
physical science, that other aspects of the universe are made known to
men. In all of these, and in the mystic too, the twin powers of a
steadfast, selective attention and of creative imagination are at work.
Because of their wide, deep, attention to life they receive more news
from the external world than others do; because of the creative cast of
their minds, they are able to weave up the crude received material into
a living whole, into an idea or image which can be communicated to other
men. Ultimately, we owe to the mystics all the symbols, ideas and images
of which our spiritual world, as it is thought of by the bulk of men, is
constructed. We take its topography from them, at second-hand: and often
forget the sublime adventures immortalized in those phrases which we
take so lightly on our lips—the Divine Dark, the Beatific Vision, the
Eternal Beauty, Ecstasy, Union, Spiritual Marriage, and the rest. The
mystics have actually created, from that language which we have evolved
to describe and deal with the time-world, another artistic world; a
self-consistent and spiritually expressive world of imaginative
concepts, like the world of music or the world of colour and form. They
are always trying to give us the key to it, to induct us into its
mysterious delights. It is by means of this world, and the symbols which
furnish it, that human consciousness is enabled to actualize its most
elusive experiences; and hence it is wholly due to the unselfish labours
of those mystics who have struggled to body forth the realities by which
they were possessed, that we are able, to some extent, to enter into the
special experiences of the mystical saints; and that they are able to
snatch us up to a brief sharing of their vision, to make us live for a
moment “Eternal Life in the midst of Time.”
How, then, have they done this? What is the general method by which any
man communicates the result of his personal contacts with the universe
to other minds? Roughly speaking, he has two ways of doing this, by
description and by suggestion; and his best successes are those in which
these two methods are combined. His descriptions are addressed to the
intellect, his suggestions are appeals to the imagination, of those with
whom he is trying to communicate. The necessities which control these
two ways of telling the news—oblique suggestion and symbolic
image—practically govern the whole of mystical literature. The span of
this literature is wide. It goes from the utterly formless, yet
infinitely suggestive, language of certain great contemplatives, to the
crisply formal pictorial descriptions of those whose own revelations of
Reality crystallize into visions, voices, or other psycho-sensorial
experiences. At one end of the scale is the vivid, prismatic imagery of
the Christian apocalypse, at the other the fluid, ecstatic poetry of
some of the Sūfi saints.
In his suggestive and allusive language the mystical artist often
approaches the methods of music. When he does this, his statements do
not give information. They operate a kind of enchantment which dilates
the consciousness of the hearer to a point at which it is able to
apprehend new aspects of the world. In his descriptive passages, on the
other hand, he generally proceeds, as do nearly all our descriptive
efforts, by way of comparison. Yet often these comparisons, like those
employed by the great poet, are more valuable for their strange
suggestive quality than for any exact parallels which they set up
between the mystic’s universe and our own. Thus, when Clement of
Alexandria compares the Logos to a “New Song,” when Suso calls the
Eternal Wisdom a “sweet and beautiful wild flower,” when Dionysius the
Areopagite speaks of the Divine Dark which _is_ the Inaccessible Light,
or Ruysbroeck of “the unwalled world,” we recognize a sudden flash of
the creative imagination; evoking for us a truth far greater, deeper and
more fruitful than the merely external parallel which it suggests. So
too with many common metaphors of the mystics: the Fire of Love, the
Game of Love, the Desert of God, the Marriage of the Soul. Such phrases
succeed because of their interior and imaginative appeal.
We have numerous examples of this kind of artistic language—the highly
charged imaginative phrase—in the Bible; especially in the prophetic
books, and the Apocalypse.
Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.
I will give thee treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret
places.
The Lord shall be a diadem of beauty.
He showed me a pure river of the water of life.
I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters.
I saw a new heaven and a new earth.
Whereas the original prophetic significance of these phrases is now
meaningless for us, their suggestive quality—their appeal to the mystic
consciousness—retains its full force. They are artistic creations; and
have the enormous evocative power proper to all great art. Later mystics
use such passages again and again, reading their own experiences into
these traditional forms. The classic example of this close alliance
between poetic readings of life and practical mysticism is of course the
mystical interpretation of the _Song of Songs_, which appears in
Christian mysticism at least as early as the fourth century. But there
are many other instances. Thus St. Macarius finds in Ezekiel’s vision of
the Cherubim a profoundly suggestive image of the state of the deified
soul, “all eyes and all wings,” driven upon its course by the Heavenly
Charioteer of the Spirit. Thus in _The Mirror of Simple Souls_, another
of Ezekiel’s visions—that of the “great eagle, with great wings, long
wings, full of feathers, which took the highest branch of the
cedar”—becomes the vivid symbol of the contemplative mind, “the eagle
that flies high, so right high and yet more high than does any other
bird, for she is feathered with fine love, and beholds above other the
beauty of the sun.”
When we pass to the mystical poets, we find that nearly all their best
effects are due to their extraordinary genius for this kind of indirect,
suggestive imagery. This is the method by which they proceed when they
wish to communicate their vision of reality. Their works are full of
magical phrases which baffle analysis, yet, as one of them has said:
“Lighten the wave-washed caverns of the mind
With a pale, starry grace.”
Many of these phrases are of course familiar to every one. Vaughan’s
“I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light.”
Blake’s
“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.”
Whitman’s
“Light rare, untellable, lighting the very light.”
Thompson’s
“Ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity.”
These are artistic, sidelong representations of the mystic’s direct
apprehension of the Infinite on, so to speak, its cosmic and impersonal
side. Others reflect the personal and intimate contact with the Divine
Life which forms the opposite side of his complete experience. Thus
Francis Thompson:
“With his aureole
The tresses of my soul
Are blent
In wished content.”
So, too, St. John of the Cross:
“All things I then forgot,
My cheek on him who for my coming came;
All ceased, and I was not,
Leaving my cares and shame
Among the lilies, and forgetting them.”
Best of all, perhaps, Jalāluddin Rūmi:
“In a place beyond uttermost place, in a tract without shadow of
trace,
Soul and body transcending I live, in the soul of my loved one
anew.”
Sometimes the two aspects, personal and impersonal, are woven together
by the poet: and then it is that we come nearest to an understanding of
the full experience he is trying to express. A remarkable example of
this occurs in Gerard Hopkins, perhaps the greatest mystical poet of the
Victorian era:
“Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World’s strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of the living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.”
“I kiss my hand
To the stars, lovely-asunder
Starlight, wafting him out of it; and
Glow, glory in thunder;
Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:
Since, though he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,
His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.”
So much for the poets. In the prose writings of the mystics we find
again the same characters, the same high imaginative qualities, the same
passionate effort to give the ineffable some kind of artistic form. This
effort includes in its span a wide range of literary artifices; some
endeavouring to recapture and represent in concrete symbols the
objective reality known; some, like one dominant art movement of the
present day, trying to communicate it obliquely, by a representation of
the subjective feeling-state induced in the mystic’s own consciousness.
At one end of the scale, therefore, we have the so-called negative
language of mysticism, which describes the supersensuous in paradox by
refusing to describe it at all; by declaring that the entry of the soul
upon spiritual experience is an entry into a Cloud of Unknowing, a
nothing, a Divine Darkness, a fathomless abyss. The curious thing is,
that though here, if anywhere, the mystic seems to keep his secret to
himself, as a matter of fact it is just this sort of language which has
been proved to possess the highest evocative power. For many types of
mind, this really does fling magic casements wide; does give us a
momentary glimpse of the perilous seas. I am inclined to think that,
many and beautiful as are the symbolic and pictorial creations of
mystical genius, it is here that this genius works most freely, produces
its most magnificent results. When Ruysbroeck speaks of the boundless
abyss of pure simplicity, that “dim silence where all lovers lose
themselves”; when he assures us that, “stripped of its very life,” the
soul is destined to “sail the wild billows of that Sea Divine,” surely
he effects a true change in our universe. So, too, the wonderful series
of formless visions—though “vision” is a poor word for intuitive
experience of this sort—experienced by Angela of Foligno, far exceed in
their suggestive power her vividly pictured conversations with Christ,
when she declares that she beheld “those eyes and that face so gracious
and so pleasing.”
“I beheld,” she says of her ultimate experience of the Absolute, “a
Thing, as fixed and stable as it was indescribable; and more than this I
cannot say, save what I have often said already, namely, that it was all
good. And though my soul beheld not love, yet when it saw that ineffable
Thing it was itself filled with unutterable joy, and it was taken out of
the state it was in, and placed in this great and ineffable state....
But if thou seekest to know that which I beheld, I can tell thee
nothing, save that I beheld a Fullness and a Clearness, and felt them
within me so abundantly that I cannot describe it, nor give any image
thereof: for what I beheld was not bodily, but as though it were in
heaven. Thus I beheld a beauty so great that I can say nothing of it
save that I saw the Supreme Beauty, which contains in itself all
goodness.”
In the end, all that Angela has said here is, “Come and see!” but in
saying this, she tells us far more than many do who go about to measure
the City of Contemplation. Here words suggest, they do not tell; entice,
but do not describe. Reminding us of the solemn declaration of Thomas à
Kempis, that “there is a distance incomparable between those things that
imperfect men think, and those that men illumined by high revelation
behold,” they yet extend to other minds a musical invitation to
intercourse with new orders of reality.
This sort of language, this form of paradoxical, suggestive, allusive
art is a permanent feature in mystical literature. It is usually
supposed to be derived through Dionysius the Areopagite from the
Platonists, but is really far older than this. As it comes down the
centuries, it develops in depth and richness. Each successive mystic
takes up the imagery of negation where the last one leaves it—takes it,
because he recognizes that it describes a country where he too has
been—and adds to it the products of his own most secret and august
experiences. As in the torch-race of the antique world, the illuminating
symbol, once lit, is snatched from hand to hand, and burns ever brighter
as it is passed on.