the later Middle Ages speak of the Wilderness or Desert of Deity;
suggesting thus that sense of great, swept spaces, “beyond the polar
circle of the mind”—of a plane of experience destitute of all the homely
furniture of thought—which seems to characterize a certain high type, or
stage, of contemplation. It represents the emergence of the self into a
real universe—a “place beyond uttermost place”—unrelated to the
categories of thought, and is substantially the same experience which
Dionysius the Areopagite and those mystics who follow him call the
Divine Ignorance or the Dark, and which his English interpreter names
the Cloud of Unknowing, where the soul feels itself to be lost. But each
mystic who uses this traditional image of amazement—really the
description of a psychological situation, not of an objective
reality—gives to it a characteristic touch; each has passed it through
the furnace of his own passionate imagination, and slightly modified its
temper and its form. This place, or state, says Eckhart, is “a still
wilderness where no one is at home.” It is “the quiet desert of the
Godhead,” says Tauler; “So still, so mysterious, so desolate! The great
wastes to be found in it have neither image, form, nor condition.” Yet,
says Richard Rolle—suddenly bringing the positive experience of the
contemplative heart to the rescue of the baffled contemplative mind—in
this same wilderness consciousness _does_ set up an ineffable
correspondence with Reality.
“[There] speaks the loved to the heart of the lover; as it were a
bashful lover, that his sweetheart before men entreats not, nor
friendly-wise but commonly and as a stranger kisses ... and anon comes
heavenly joy, marvellously making merry melody.”
Here the mystic, with an astonishing boldness, weaves together spatial,
personal and musical imagery, positive and negative experience, in order
to produce his full effect.
Finally, St. John of the Cross, great thinker, manly and heroic mystic,
and true poet, effects a perfect synthesis of these positive and
negative experiences—that apparent self-loss in empty spaces which is
also, mysteriously, an encounter of love.
“The soul in dim contemplation (he says) is like a man who sees
something for the first time, the like of which he has never seen before
... hence it feels like one who is placed in a wild and vast solitude
where no human being can come; an immense wilderness without limits. But
this wilderness is the more delicious, sweet and lovely, the more it is
wide, vast and lonely; for where the soul seems most to be lost, there
it is most raised up above all created things.”
All this language, as I have said, belongs to the oblique and
paradoxical side of the mystic’s art; and comes to us from those who are
temperamentally inclined to that pure contemplation which “has no
image.” Psychologically speaking, these mystics are closer to the
musician than to any other type of artist, though they avail themselves
when they wish of material drawn from all the arts. But there is another
kind of mystic, naturally inclined to visualization, who tends to
translate his supersensual experience into concrete, pictorial images;
into terms of colour and of form. He uses, in fact, the methods of the
painter, the descriptive writer, sometimes of the dramatist, rather than
those of the musician or the lyric poet. He is, I think, as a rule much
less impressive than the artist of the illusive kind, and is seldom so
successful in putting us into communion with reality. On the other
hand—and partly because of his more concrete method—he is the more
generally understood. For one person to whom Plotinus or Ruysbroeck
communicates his sublime intuition of reality, a hundred accept at their
face-value, as true “revelations,” the visions of St. Gertrude or St.
Teresa.
The picture-making proceedings of this type of mystical artist are of
two kinds. Sometimes they are involuntary, sometimes deliberate. Often
we find both forms in the same individual; for instance, in Mechthild of
Magdeburg and in Suso, where it is sometimes extremely difficult to find
the dividing line between true visionary experience entirely outside the
self’s control, and the intense meditation, or poetic apprehension of
truth, which demands a symbolic and concrete form for its literary
expression. In both cases an act of artistic creation has taken place;
in one below, in the other above, the normal threshold of consciousness.
In true visionaries, the translation of the supersensual into sensual
terms is uncontrolled by the surface intellect; as it is indeed in many
artists. Without the will or knowledge of the subject, intuitions are
woven up into pictures, cadences, words; and, by that which
psychologists call a psycho-sensorial automatism, the mystic seems to
himself to receive the message of Reality in a pictorial, verbal,
dramatic or sometimes a musical form—“coming in to his body by the
windows of the wits,” as one old writer has it.
Thus the rhythmic phrases in which the Eternal Wisdom speaks to Suso, or
the Divine Voice to St. Catherine of Siena, verge on poetic composition;
but poetic composition of the automatic type, uncontrolled by the
mystic’s surface-mind. Thus, too, the great fluid visions of the
prophets, the sharply definite, often lovely, pictures which surge up
before the mind of Suso, the Mechthilds, St. Gertrude, Angela of
Foligno, of the great St. Teresa herself, are symbolic pictures which
represent an actual interior experience, a real contact with the
supersensual; exhibiting the interpretative power inherent in the
mystical imagination. These pictures are seen by the mystic—sometimes,
as he says, within the mind, sometimes as projections in space—always in
sharp definition, lit by that strong light which is peculiar to
visionary states. They are not produced by any voluntary process of
composition, but loom up, as do the best creations of other artists,
from his deeper mind, bringing with them an intense conviction of
reality. Good instances are the visions which so often occur at
conversion, or mark the transition from one stage of the mystic way to
another: for example, the mystic marriage of St. Catherine of Siena, or
that vision of the Upper School of True Resignation, which initiated
Suso into the “dark night of the soul.” I believe that we may look on
such visions as allied to dream-states; but in the case of the great
mystics they are the richly significant waking-dreams of creative
genius, not the confused and meaningless dreaming of normal men. Suso
himself makes this comparison, and says that none but the mystic can
distinguish vision from dream. In character they vary as widely as do
the creations of the painter and the poet. The personal and intimate,
the remote and metaphysical, sides of the spiritual life are richly
represented in them. Sometimes the elements from which they are built up
come from theology, sometimes from history, legend, nature, or human
life. But in every case the “glory of the lighted mind” shines on them.
Often a particularly delicate and gay poetic feeling—a faëry touch—shows
itself in the symbolic pictures by which these mystics try to represent
their encounter with the spiritual world. Coventry Patmore once spoke of
a “sphere of rapture and dalliance” to which the great contemplatives
are raised; and it is from such a sphere that these seem to turn back to
us, trying, by direct appeals to our sense of joy, the most stunted of
our spiritual faculties, to communicate their exultant experience of
that Kingdom of Reality which is neither “here” nor “there” but
“everywhere.”
Music and dancing, birds and flowers, the freshness of a living, growing
world, all simple joyous things, all airy beauties, are used in the
effort to tell us of that vision which Clement called the privilege of
love. When we read these declarations we feel that it is always
spring-time in those gardens of the soul of which they tell. St. John of
the Cross, who described those spiritual gardens, said that fragrant
roses brought from strange islands grew there—those strange islands
which are the romantic unexplored possibilities of God—and that
water-lilies shine like stars in that roaring torrent of supernal glory
which pours without ceasing through the transfigured soul. This is high
poetry; but sometimes the mystic imagination shows itself under simpler,
more endearing forms, as when St. Mechthild of Hackeborn saw the prayers
of her sisters flying up like larks into the presence of God; some
soaring as high as His countenance and some falling down to rest upon
His heart. An angel carried the little, fluttering prayers which were
not strong enough to rise of themselves. Imagery less charming than this
has gone to the making of many a successful poem.
Between the sublime intensity of St. John and the crystalline simplicity
of St. Mechthild, mystical literature provides us with examples of
almost every type of romantic and symbolic language; deliberate or
involuntary translation of the heavenly fact into the earthly image.
True, the earthly image is transfused by a new light, radiant with a new
colour, has been lifted into a new atmosphere; and thus has often a
suggestive quality far in excess of its symbolic appropriateness. In
their search for such images the mystics explore the resources of all
the arts. In particular, music and dancing—joyous harmony, unceasing
measured movement—have seemed to them specially significant _media_
whereby to express their intuitions of Eternal Life. St. Francis, and
after him Richard Rolle, heard celestial melodies; Kabir, the “Unstruck
Music of the Infinite.” Dante saw the saints dancing in the sphere of
the sun; Suso heard the music of the angels, and was invited to join in
their song and dance. It was not, he says, like the dancing of this
world, but was like a celestial ebb and flow within that
incomprehensible Abyss which is the secret being of the Deity. There is
no need to dwell upon the remarkable way in which mystics of all
countries and periods, from Plotinus to Jacob Boehme, resort to the
dance as an image of the glad harmonious movements of liberated souls. I
will take two characteristic examples, from the East and from the West.
The first is a poem by Kabir:
“Dance, my heart! dance to-day with joy.
The strains of love fill the days and the nights with music, and the
world is listening to its melodies;
Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythm of this music. The
hills and the sea and the earth dance. The world of man dances in
laughter and tears....
Behold! my heart dances in the delight of a hundred arts, and the
Creator is well pleased.”
The next is the German mystic and poetess, Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose
writings are amongst the finest products of mystical genius of the
romantic and emotional type. This Mechthild’s book, _The Book of the
Flowing Light of the Godhead_, is a collection of visions, revelations,
thoughts and letters, written in alternate prose and verse. The variety
of its contents includes the most practical advice on daily conduct, the
most sublime descriptions of high mystical experience. Mechthild was an
artist, who was evidently familiar with the literary tradition and most
of the literary expedients of her time. She uses many of them in the
attempt to impart to others that vision of Life, Light and Love which
she knew. I take, as an example of her genius, and a last specimen of
the mystic’s creative art, the celebrated letter addressed to a
fellow-pilgrim on that spiritual “Love-path” which she trod herself with
so great a fortitude. It represents not only the rich variety of
Mechthild’s literary resources, but also those several forms of artistic
expression which the great mystics have employed. Here, concrete
representation is perpetually reinforced by oblique suggestion; the
imagery of the poet is double-edged, evoking moods as well as ideas. We
observe that it opens with a spiritual love-scene, closely related in
style to the secular and romantic literature of Mechthild’s time; that
this develops to a dramatic dialogue between soul and senses—another
common artifice of the mediæval author—and this again leads by a
perfectly natural transition to the soul’s great acclamation of its
destiny, and the crowning announcement of the union of lover and
beloved.
The movement of this mystical romance, then, like the movement of
ascending consciousness, goes from the concrete image to the mysterious
and sidelong apprehension of imageless facts. First we have picture,
then dialectic, then intuitive certitude. Here, too, we find both those
aspects of experience which dominate mystical literature: the personal
and intimate encounter of love, and the self-loss of the soul in an
utterly transcendent Absolute. Surely the union of these “completing
opposites” in one work of art must rank as a great imaginative
achievement.
Mechthild tells her story of the soul’s adventure in snatches of
freely-rhymed verse, linked together by prose narrative passages—a form
which is not uncommon in the secular literature of the Middle Ages.[1]
We are further reminded of that secular literature by the imagery which
she employs. The soul is described as a maiden, the Divine Lover is a
fair youth whom she desires. The very setting of the story is just such
a fairy landscape as we find in the lays and romances of chivalry; it
has something of the spring-like charm that we feel in _Aucassin and
Nicolette_—the dewy morning, the bird-haunted forest, the song and
dance. It is, in fact, a love story of the period adapted with
extraordinary boldness to the purposes of mystical experience.
When the virgin soul, says Mechthild at the opening of her tale, has
endured all the trials of mystical purification, she is very weary, and
cries to her Love, saying, “Oh, beautiful youth! I long for thee. Where
shall I find thee?” Then the Divine Youth answers:
“A gentle voice I hear,
Something of love sounds there:
I have wooed her long and long,
Yet not till now have I heard that song.
It moveth me so,
Towards her I must go.
She is the soul who with pain is torn,
And love, that is one with the pain.
In the early dew of the morn,
In the hidden depths, which are far below,
The life of the soul is born.”
Then her vassals, which are the five senses, say to the soul, “Lady,
adorn thyself.”
“We have heard the whisper clear;
The Prince is coming towards thee here,
In the morning dew, in the bird’s song.
Ah, fair Bride, tarry not long!”
So the soul adorns herself with the virtues, and goes out into the
forest: and the forest, says Mechthild, is the company of the saints.
Sweet nightingales sing there night and day of true union with God, and
there in the thicket are heard the voices of the birds of holy wisdom.
But the youth himself comes not to her. He sends messengers to the
intent that she may dance: one by one he sends her the faith of Abraham,
the aspirations of the Prophets, the pure humility of our Lady Saint
Mary, all the virtues of Christ, and all the sanctity of His elect; and
thus there is prepared a most noble dance. And then comes the youth and
says to the soul, “Maiden, as gladly shouldst thou have danced, as mine
elect have danced.” But she replies:
“Unless thou lead me, Lord, I cannot dance;
Would’st thou have me leap and spring,
Thou thyself, dear Lord, must sing,
So shall I spring into thy love,
From thy love to understanding,
From understanding to delight.
Then, soaring human thought far, far above,
There circling will I dwell, and taste encircling love.”
So sings the Bride; and so the youth must sing, that she may dance. Then
says he:
“Maiden, thy dance of praise was well performed. Now thou shalt have thy
will of the Virgin’s Son, for thou art weary. Come at midday to the
shady fountain, to the resting-place of love: and with him thou shalt
find refreshment.”
And the maiden replies:
“Oh Lord, it is too high, too great,
That she should be thy chosen mate,
Within whose heart no love can be
Till she is quickened, Lord, by thee.”
By this romantic, story-telling method Mechthild has appealed to the
fancy and emotion of the reader, and has enticed him into the heart of
the spiritual situation. Next, she passes to her intellectual appeal;
the argument between the soul and the senses. From this she proceeds, by
a transition which seems to be free and natural, yet is the outcome of
consummate art, to the supreme declarations of the deified spirit “at
home with the Lord,” as St. Paul said.
The dialogue moves by the process of reduction to a demonstration of God
as the only satisfaction of the questing soul which has surrendered to
the incantations of Reality. One after another, substitutes for the
First and Only Fair are offered and rejected. The soul says to the
senses, which are her vassals: “Now I am for a while weary of the dance.
Give place! for I would go where I may refresh myself.” Then say the
senses to the soul: “Lady, wilt thou refresh thyself in the tears of
love of St. Mary Magdalene? This may well satisfy thee?” But the soul
says: “Hush, sirs, you know not what I mean! Let me be, for I would
drink a little of the unmingled wine.”
Then say the senses:
“Oh Bride, in virgin chastity,
Is the Love of God made ready for thee.”
And the soul says:
“Even so; yet though high and pure it be,
That path is not the highest for me.”
And the senses:
“In the blood of the martyred saints
May’st thou refresh thy soul that faints.”
And the soul:
“I have been martyred so many a day,
I cannot now tread in that way.”
And the senses:
“By the wise Confessors’ side,
The pure in heart love to abide.”
And the soul:
“And their counsel will I obey,
Both when I go and when I stay;
And yet I cannot walk their way.”
And the senses:
“In the Apostles’ wisdom pure,
May’st thou find a refuge sure.”
And the soul:
“I have their wisdom here in my heart,
And with it I choose the better part.”
And the senses:
“O Bride, the angels are fair and bright,
Full of God’s love, full of God’s light;
Would’st thou refresh thee, mount to their height.”
And the soul:
“The angel’s joy is but heartache to me,
If their Lord and my Bridegroom I do not see.”
And the senses:
“In holy penance refresh thee and save,
That God to St. John Baptist gave.”
And the soul:
“I am ready for pain, ready for grief,
Yet the combat of love is first and chief.”
And the senses:
“O Bride, would’st thou refreshèd be,
So bend thee to the Virgin’s knee,
To the little Babe, and taste and see
The milk of joy from the Maid’s breast,
That the angels drink, in unearthly rest.”
And the soul:
“It is but a childish love indeed,
Babes to cradle, babes to feed;
I am a fair, a full-grown bride,
I must haste to my Lover’s side.”
And the senses:
“O bride, if thou goest thou shalt find,
That we are utterly dazzled and blind.
Such fiery heat in God doth dwell—
Thou thyself knowest it well—
That all the flame and all the glow
Which in Heaven above and the Saints below
Burneth and shineth—all doth flow
From God Himself. His divine breath
Sighed by the Spirit’s wisdom and power,
Through His human lips, born to death,
—Who may abide it, e’en for an hour?”
And the soul says:
“The fish in the water cannot drown,
The bird in the air cannot sink down,
Gold in the fire cannot decay,
But shineth fairer and clearer alway.
To all creatures God doth give,
After their own natures to live.
How can I bind my nature’s wings?
I must haste to my God before all things;
My God, by His nature my Father above,
My Brother in His humanity,
My Bridegroom in His ardent love,
And I His from Eternity.
Think ye, that Fire must utterly slay my soul?
Nay—fierce He can scorch—then tenderly cool and console.”
“And so did the utterly loved go in to the utterly lovely; into the
secret chamber of the Pure Divinity. And there she found the resting
place of love, and the home of love, and the Divine Humanity that
awaited her.”
And the soul said:
“Lord, God, I am now a naked soul
And Thou art arrayed all gloriously:
We are Two in One, we have reached the goal,
Immortal rapture that cannot die.
Now, a blessed silence doth o’er us flow,
Both wills together would have it so.
He is given to her, she is given to Him,—
What now shall befall her, the soul doth know—
And therefore am I consoled.”
This is the end of all mysticism. It is the term to which all the
artistic efforts of the mystics have striven to lead the hearts of other
men.
Footnote 1:
For the verse-translations in the following extracts I am indebted to
the great skill and kindness of Mrs. Theodore Beck, who, possessing a
special talent for this difficult art, has most generously made for me
these versions of Mechthild’s poetry.
THE EDUCATION OF THE SPIRIT
The old mystics were fond of saying that “Man is a made trinity, like to
the unmade Blessed Trinity.” That particular form of words comes to us
from Julian of Norwich; but it expresses a thought which we often meet
in the spiritual writers of the Middle Ages. Further, these writers were
disposed to find in man’s nature a reflection of the three special
characters which theology attributes to the Christian Godhead. They
thought that the power of the Father had its image in the physical
nature of man: the wisdom of the Son in his reason: the creative vigour
of the Holy Spirit in his soul. Some taught also that each of these
three aspects of humanity corresponded with one aspect of the triune
reality of the universe: the physical world of nature, the mental world
of idea, the ultimate world of spirit. The sceptic of course would
express this differently, and see in it but one more illustration of the
fact that man always makes God in his own image. But without scepticism
I think we may explain it thus: that those who have pondered most deeply
on the Divine Nature have most easily found in its richness, and have
best understood, just those attributes which are most clearly marked in
human nature. Man has inevitably been for them a key to God.
These speculations seem at first sight to have little bearing upon the
problems of education. But they are in reality intimately connected with
it: for their consideration leads us back to the central fact out of
which they have arisen—namely, the abiding truth that man’s deepest
exploration of his own nature gives again and again this threefold
result, that he feels that his real self-hood and real possibilities are
not wholly exhausted by the terms “body” and “mind.” He knows in his
best moments another vivid aspect of his being, as strong as these,
though often kept below the threshold of his consciousness: the spirit,
which informs, yet is distinct from both his body and his mind.
Now the question which all serious educationalists are called upon to
ask themselves is this: To what extent does that three-fold analysis of
human personality influence our educational schemes? The object of
education is to bring out the best and highest powers of the thing
educated. Do we, in our education, even attempt to bring out the best
and highest powers of the spirit, as we seek to develop those of the
body and the mind?
The child as he comes to us is a bundle of physical, mental, and
spiritual possibilities. He is related to three distinct yet
interpenetrating worlds; all accessible to him, since he is human, and
all offering endless opportunities of adventure to him.
“Heaven lies about us in our infancy,
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
About the growing boy.”
Why should they close; whose fault is it that they do? Does not the
fault lie with the poor and grovelling outlook of those to whom this
sensitive, plastic thing is confided? Who so badly select and manipulate
the bundle of possibilities offered to them, that they often contrive to
manufacture a creature ruled by its own physical needs and appetites,
its mental and emotional limitations; instead of a free, immortal being,
master of its own body and mind. Here is this child, the germ of the
future. To a great extent, we can control the way that germ develops;
the special characters of the past which it shall transmit. We can have
a hand in the shaping of the history that is to be when we have gone:
for who can doubt that the controlling factor of history is the
physical, mental, or spiritual character of those races that dominate
the world? It is in the interplay, tension, and strife of these three
universes that history in the last resort consists.