CHAPTER II

MYSTICISM AND VITALISM
Another philosophic scheme— Vitalism, the ‘‘new philosophy ’? — Driesch, Bergson, Eucken—The vital principle as the essence of reality—Freedom—Spon- taneity — Nietzsche — The inclusive character of vitalistic philosophy: physical, psychological, spiritual—Vitalism and the mystics—Heracleitus, the father of the new philosophy—its other connections—its central idea—The World of Becoming —Reality as dynamic—Life as incessant change—Bergson’s theory of the intellect —of perception—TIts relation to mysticism— Reality known by communion— Intuition—its partial nature— Rudolph Eucken’s teaching—a spiritual vitalisih— Reality as an ‘‘independent spiritual world ””—Man’s possible attainment of it—he is ‘‘the meeting-point of various stages of reality ”—Rebirth—Denial of the sense world—Eucken’s teaching and mysticism—Mystics the heroic examples of ‘* indepen- dent spiritual life ’’—Vitalism. criticized—its central idea only half a truth—The mystic consciousness of reality two-fold—Being and Becoming—Transcendence and Immanence—both true—St. Augustine on the Nature of God—Man’s instinct for the Absolute—Mysticism justifies it—reconciles it with a dynamic universe— Boehme—Revelation by strife—Mystic union—its two forms—its agent, the absolute element in man—Total mystic experience only expressible in terms of personality— How is this experience attained ?
E glanced, at the beginning of this inquiry, at the
\ V) universes which result from the various forms of
credulity practised by the materialist, the idealist,
and the sceptic. We saw the mystic denying by word and
act the validity of the foundations on which those universes
are built: substituting his living experience for their conceptual schemes.
But there is another and wholly distinct way of seeing reality—or, more correctly, one aspect of reality—old as to its central idea, new as to its applications of that idea. This scheme of things—this new system, method or attitude— possesses the merit of accepting and harmonizing many different forms of experience ; even those supreme experiences and intuitions peculiar to the mystics. It is the first great
30
MYSTICISM AND VITALISM 31
contribution of the twentieth century to the history of man’s quest of reality. A true “child of its time,” it is everywhere in the air. Many who hardly know its name have been affected by its spirit, and by the vague luminous shadow which is always cast before a coming system of thought. Almost insensibly, it has already penetrated and modified our attitude, not only to philosophy, but to religion, science, art, and practical life. Like the breath of spring, impossible to grasp and difficult to define, it is instinct with fresh life and fertilizes where it goes. It has come upon us from different directions: already possesses representatives on each of the three great planes of thought. Driesch*! and other biologists have applied it in the sphere of organic life. Bergson,? starting from psychology, has taken its intellectual and metaphysical aspects in hand. Rudolph Eucken3 has developed from, or beside it, a living Philosophy of the Spirit, of man’s relations to the Real: the nearest approach, perhaps, which any modern thinker has made to a constructive mysticism.
At the bottom of these three very different philosophies the same principle may be discerned; the principle, that is to say, of Vitalism, of a free spontaneous and creative life as the very essence of the Real. Not law but aliveness, incalculable and indomitable, is their motto: not human logic, but actual living experience, is their text. The Vitalists, whether the sphere of their explorations be biology, psychology or ethics, see the whole Cosmos, the physical and spiritual worlds, as instinct with initiative and spontaneity: as above all things free. _For them, nature is “on the dance”: one cannot calculate her acts by the nice processes of dialectic. Though she be con- ditioned by the matter with which she works, her freedom is stronger than her chains. Pushing out from within, seeking expression, she buds and breaks forth into original creation.4
t ** The Science and Philosophy of Organism,” Gifford Lectures, 1907-8.
2 “Les Données Immédiates de la Conscience ” (1889), ‘‘ Matiere et Mémoire”’ (1896), ‘* L’Evolution Créatrice ’’ (1907).
3 **Der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt” (1896), ‘* Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens” (1908), &c. See Bibliography.
4 The researches of Driesch (of. cz#.) and of de Vries (*‘ The Mutation Theory,” 1910) have done much to establish the truth of this contention upon the scientific plane. Note particularly Driesch’s account of the spontaneous responsive changes in the embryo
sea-urchin, and de Vries’ extraordinary description of the escaped stock of Evening Primrose, varying now this way, now that, ‘‘ as if swayed by a restless internal tide.”
32 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
The iron laws of the determinists are merely her habits, not her fetters: and man, in seeing nature in the terms of “cause and effect,” has been the dupe of his own limitations and prejudices.
Bergson, Nietzsche, Eucken, though they differ in their opinion as to life’s meaning, are alike in this vision: in the stress which they lay on the supreme importance and value of life—a great Cosmic life transcending and including our own. This is materialism inside out: for here what we call the universe is presented to us as an expression of life, not life as an expression or by-product of the universe. The strange passionate philosophy of Nietzsche, that unbalanced John the Baptist of the modern world, is really built upon an intense belief in this supernal nature and value of Life, Action and Strength: and spoilt by the one-sided individualism which pre- vented him from holding a just balance between the great and significant life of the Ego and the greater and more significant life of the All.
Obviously, the peculiar merit of the vitalistic philosophy lies in its ability to satisfy so many different thinkers, starting from such diverse points in our common experience. On the phenomenal side it seems able to accept and transfigure the statements of physical science. In its metaphysical aspect it leaves place for those ontological speculations which take their rise in psychology. It is friendly to those who demand an important place for moral and spiritual activity in the universe. Finally—though here we must be content with deduction rather than declaration—it leaves in the hands of the mystics that unique power of attaining to Absolute Reality which they have always claimed: shows them as the true possessors of freedom, the torch-bearers of the race.
Did it acknowledge its ancestors with that reverence which is their due, Vitalism would identify itself with the great name of Heracleitus; the mystic philosopher, who, in the fifth cen- tury B.C., introduced its central idea to the European world. It is—though this statement might annoy some of its inter- preters—both a Hellenic anda Christian system of thought : and represents the reappearance of intuitions which have too long been kept in the hiddenness by the leaders of the race. A living
* The debt to Heracleitus is acknowledged by Professor Schiller. See ‘* Studies in Humanism,” pp. 39, 40.
MYSTICISM AND VITALISM 33
theologian has said, that as in hats so in heresies, the very latest creation is generally a revival of forgotten fashions of the past. This law applies with peculiar force to systems of philosophy, which generally owe more to the judicious resuscita- tion of that which sleeps, than to the birth of that which has been newly conceived.
I have said that, so far as its ontology is concerned, this “new ” way of seeing the Real goes back to Heracleitus, whose “Logos” or Energizing Fire is but another symbol for that free and living Spirit of Becoming, that indwelling creative power, which Vitalism acknowledges as the very soul or immanent reality of things. This eternal and substantial truth the Vitalists have picked up, retranslated into modern terms and made available for modern men, In its view of the proper function of the intellect it has some unexpected affinities with Aristotle, and after him with St. Thomas Aquinas ; regarding it as a departmental affair, not—with the Platonists—as the organ of ultimate knowledge. Its theory of knowledge is close to that of the mystics: or would be, if those wide-eyed gazers on reality had interested themselves in any psychological theory of their own experiences.
A philosophy which can harmonize such diverse elements as these, is likely to be useful in our present attempt towards an understanding of mysticism: for it clearly illustrates certain aspects of perceived reality which other systems ignore. It has - the further recommendation of involving not a mere diagram of metaphysical possibilities, but a genuine theory of knowledge. That is to say, its scope includes psychology as well as philosophy : the consideration, not only of the nature of Reality but also of the self’s power of knowing it; the machinery of contact between the mind and the flux of things. Hence there is about it a wholeness, an inclusive quality very different from the tidy ring-fenced systems of other schools of thought. It has no edges, and if it be true to itself should have no negations, It is a vision, not a map.
Now the primary difference between Vitalism and the philosophies which we have already considered is this. Its Word of Power, its central idea, is not Being but Becoming.!
* See, for the substance of this and the following pages, the works of Henri Bergson already mentioned. I am here also enormously indebted to the personal
Db
34 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
Translated into the language of Platonic theology, not the changeless One, the Absolute, but His energizing Thought—the Son, the Creative Logos—is at once the touchstone of truth, the end of knowledge, the supreme reality which it proposes as accessible to human consciousness. “ All things,” said Heracleitus, “are in a state of flux.” Everything happens through strife.” “Reality is a condition of unrest.” Such is also the opinion of Bergson and his disciples ; who, agreeing in this with the champions of physical science, look upon the Real as dynamic rather than static, as becoming rather than dezng perfect, and invite us to see in Time —the precession or flux of things—the very stuff of reality—
‘*From the fixed lull of Heaven she saw Time like a pulse shake fierce Through all the worlds ’’—*
said Rossetti of the Blessed Damozel. Bergson, seeing from another standpoint, ignores, if he does not deny, the existence of the “ fixed lull,” the still Eternity, the point of rest ; and finds everywhere the pulse of Time, the vast unending storm of life and love. Reality, says Bergson, is pure creative Life; a definition which excludes those ideas of perfection and finality involved in the idealist’s concept of Pure Being as the Absolute and Un- changing One. This life, as he sees it, is fed from within rather than upheld from without. Its evolves by means of its own inherent and spontaneous creative power. The biologist’s Nature “so careful of the type”; the theologian’s Creator external to His universe, and “holding all things in the hollow of His hand”: these are gone, and in their place we have a universe teeming with free individuals, each self-creative, each evolving eternally, yet towards no term.
The first feeling of the philosopher initiated into this setter is that of the bewildered traveller who “could not see the wood for trees.” The deep instinct of the human mind that there
help of my friend Mr. William Scott Palmer, whose lucid interpretations have done so much towards familiarizing English readers with Bergson’s philosophy ; and to Mr. Willdon Carr’s paper on ‘‘ Bergson’s Theory of Knowledge,” read before the Aristotelian Society, December, 1908.
* Heracleitus, Fragments, 46, 84. * First edition, canto x.
MYSTICISM AND VITALISM 35
must be a unity, an orderly plan in the universe, that the strung- along beads of experience do really form a rosary, though it be one which we cannot repeat, is here deliberately thwarted. Creation, Activity, Movement; this, says Vitalism, rather than any merely apparent law and order, any wholeness, is the essential quality of the Real—zs the Real: and life is an eternal Becoming, a ceaseless changefulness. Boldly adopting that Hermetic principle of analogy “Quod inferius sicut quod superius,’* which occult and mystical thinkers have always loved, it invites us to see in that uninterrupted change which is the condition of our normal consciousness, a true image, a microcosm of the living universe as a part of which that con- sciousness has been evolved.
If we accept this theory, we must then impute to life in its fullness—the huge, many levelled, many coloured life, the innumerable worlds which escape the rhythm of our senses; not merely that patch of physical life which those senses perceive—a divinity, a greatness and splendour of destiny far beyond that with which it is credited by those who hold to a physico-chemical theory of the universe. We must perceive in it, as the mystics have done, “the beating of the Heart of God”; and agree with Heracleitus that “there is but one wisdom, to understand the knowledge by which all things are steered through the All.” 2
Union with reality—apprehension of it—will then upon this hypothesis be union with life at its most intense point: in its most dynamic aspect. It will be a deliberate harmony set up with the Logos which that same far-seeing philosopher described as “man’s most constant companion.” Ergo, says the mystic, union with a Personal and Conscious spiritual existence, immanent in the world—one form, one half of the union which I have always sought: since this is clearly life in its highest manifestation. Beauty, Goodness, Splendour, Love, all those words of glamour which exhilarate the soul, are but the man- made names of aspects or qualities picked out by human intuition as characteristic of this intense and eternal Life in which is the life of men.
How, then, may we know this Life, this creative and Original soul of things, in which we are bathed ; in which, asin a
* See below, Pt. I. Cap, VII. 2 Heracleitus, of. ct.
56 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
river, swept along? Not, says Bergson bluntly, by any intel- lectual means. The mind which thinks it knows Reality because it has made a diagram of Reality, is merely the dupe of its own categories. The intellect is a specialized aspect of the self, a form of consciousness: but specialized for very different
purposes than those of metaphysical speculation. Life has — evolved it in the interests of life ; has made it capable of dealing ~
with “ solids,” with concrete things. With these it is at home. Outside of them it becomes dazed, uncertain of itself; for it is
~~
no longer doing its natural work, which is to ef life, not to know it. Inthe interests of experience, and in order to grasp | perceptions, the intellect breaks up experience, which is in |
reality a continuous stream, an incessant process of change and
response with no separate parts, into purely conventional |
“moments,” “periods,’ or psychic “states.” It picks out
from the flow of reality those bits which are significant for © human life; which “interest” it, catch its attention. From ©
these it makes up a mechanical world in which it dwells, and which seems quite real until it is subjected to criticism. It does, says Bergson, in an apt and already celebrated simile, the work of a cinematograph: takes snapshots of something which is always moving, and by means of these successive static repre-
¥, & * ie
t , + i
i,
on
sentations—none of which are real, because Life, the object
photographed, never was at rest—it recreates a picture of life, of © motion. This picture, this rather jerky representation of divine — harmony, from which innumerable moments are left out, is very —
useful for practical purposes: but it is not reality, because it is
not alive. This “real world,” then, is the result of your selective activity,
and the nature of your selection is largely outside your control.
Your cinematograph machine goes at a certain pace, takes its —
snapshots at certain intervals. Anything which goes too quickly for these intervals, it either fails to catch, or merges with pre- ceding and succeeding movements to form a picture with which
it can deal. Thus we treat, for instance, the storm of vibra-_
tions which we convert into “sound” and “light.” Slacken or
* On the complete and undivided nature of our experience in its ‘‘ Wholeness,” and the sad work our analytic brains make of it when they come to pull it to pieces, Bradley has some valuable contributory remarks in his ‘‘ Oxford Lectures on Poetry,’’ p. 15¢ }
ees fe ——— . _— ee Se oe SE oe ee ie ae ts Oe
MYSTICISM AND VITALISM 87
accelerate its clock-time, change its rhythmic activity, and at once you take a different series of snapshots, and have as a result a different picture of the world. Thanks to the time at which the normal human machine is set, it registers for us what we call, in our simple way, “the natural world.” A slight accession of humility or common sense might teach us that a better title would be “ ow natural world.”
Now let human consciousness change or transcend its rhythm, and any other aspect of any other world may be ours as a result. Hence the mystics’ claim that in their ecstasies they change the conditions of consciousness, and apprehend a deeper reality which is unrelated to human speech, cannot be dismissed as unreasonable. Do not then confuse that intellect, that surface-consciousness which man has trained to be an organ of utility and nothing more, and which therefore can only deal adequately with the “given” world of sense, with that mysterious something in you—inarticulate but inextinguishable —by which you are aware that a greater truth exists. This truth, whose neighbourhood you feel, and for which you long, is Life. You are in it all the while, “like a fish in the sea, like a bird in the air,’ as St. Mechthild of Hackborn said many centuries ago,?
Give yourself, then, to this divine and infinite life, this mysterious Cosmic activity in which you are immersed, of which you are born. Trust it. Let it surge in on you. Cast off, as the mystics are always begging you to do, the fetters of the senses, the “remora of desire”; and making your interests identical with those of the All, rise to freedom, to that spon- taneous, creative, artistic life which, inherent in every individual self, is our share of the life of the Universe. You are yourself vital—a free centre of energy—did you but know it. You can move to higher levels, to greater reality, truer self-fulfilment, if you will. Though you be, as Plato said, like an oyster in your shell, you can open that shell to the living waters without, draw from the “ Immortal Vitality.” Thus only—by contact with the real—shall you know reality. Cor ad cor loquitur.
The Indian mystics declare substantially the same truth when they say that the illusion of finitude is only to be escaped by relapsing into the substantial and universal life, abolishing
* “Liber Specialis Gratiae,” 1. ii. cap. xxvi.
*
38 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
individuality. So too, by a deliberate self-abandonment to that which Plato calls the “saving madness” of ecstasy, did the initiates of Dionysus “draw near to God.” So their Christian cousins assert that “ self-surrender” is the only way: that they must die to live, must lose to find: that knowing implies being: that the method and secret which they have always practised consists merely in a meek and loving union—the synthesis of passion and self-sacrifice—with that divine and unseparated life, that larger consciousness in which the soul is grounded, and which they hold to be conterminous with God. In their hours of contemplation, they deliberately empty themselves of the false images of the intellect, neglect the cinematograph of sense. Then only are they capable of transcending the merely intellectual levels of consciousness and perceiving that Reality which “hath no image.” |
“ Pilgrimage to the place of the wise,” said Jalalu ’d Din, “is to find escape from the flame of separation.” It is the mystics’ secret in a nutshell. “When I stand empty zz God’s will and empty of God’s will and of all His works and of God Himself,’ cries Eckhart with his usual violence of language, “then am I above all creatures and am neither God nor creature, but I am what I was and evermore shall be.” He attains, that is to say, by this escape from a narrow selfhood, not to identity with God—that were only conceivable upon a basis of pantheism—but to an identity with his own sub- stantial life, and through it with the life of a real and living universe; in symbolic language, with “the thought of the Divine Mind” whereby union with that Mind in the essence or ground of the soul becomes possible.
The first great message of this Vitalistic philosophy, this majestic dream of Time and Motion, is then seen to be—Cease to identify your intellect and your self: a primary lesson which none who purpose the study of mysticism may neglect. Become at least aware of, if you cannot “know,” the larger, truer self: that free creative self which constitutes your life, as distinguished from the scrap of consciousness which is its servant.
How then, asks the small consciously-seeking personality of the normal man, am I to become aware of this, my
* Meister Eckhart, Pred. Ixxxvii.
MYSTICISM AND VITALISM 39
larger self, and of the free, eternal, spiritual life which it lives ?
Here philosophy, emerging from the water-tight compart- ment in which metaphysics have lived too long retired, calls in psychology ; and tells us that in intuition, in a bold reliance on contact between the totality of the self and the external ' world—perhaps too in those strange states of lucidity which accompany great emotion and defy analysis—lies the normal man’s best chance of attaining, as it were, a swift and sidelong knowledge of this real. Smothered in daily life by the fretful activities of our surface-mind, reality emerges in our great moments ; and, seeing ourselves in its radiance, we know, for good or evil, what we are. “We are not pure intellects... around our conceptional and logical thought there remains a vague, nebulous Somewhat, the substance at whose expense the luminous nucleus we call the intellect is formed.”? In this aura, this diffused sensitiveness, we are asked to find man’s medium of communication with the Universal Life.
Such partial, dim and fragmentary perceptions of the Real, however, such “excursions into the Absolute,” cannot be looked upon as a Satisfaction of man’s hunger for Truth. He does not want to peep, but to live. Hence he cannot be satisfied with anything less than a total and permanent adjustment of his being to the greater life of reality. This alone, as Rudolph Eucken has well pointed out, can resolve the dishar- monies between the self and the world, and give meaning and value to human life.2
The possibility of this adjustment—of union between man’s life and that “independent spiritual life” which is the stuff of reality—is the theme alike of mysticism and of Eucken’s spiritual vitalism ; or, as he prefers to call it, his Activistic
* Willdon Carr, of. ctt.
2 “Tt seems as if man could never escape from himself, and yet, when shut in to the monotony of his own sphere, he is overwhelmed with a sense of emptiness. The only remedy here is radically to alter the conception of man himself, to distinguish within him the narrower and the larger life, the life that is straitened and finite and can never transcend itself, and an infinite life through which he enjoys com- munion with the immensity and the truth of the universe. Can man rise to this spiritual level? On the possibility of his doing so rests all our hope of supplying any meaning or value to life” (‘‘ Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens,”’ p. 81).
*»
40 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
Philosophy. Reality, says Eucken, is an independent spiritual world, unconditioned by the apparent world of sense. To know it and to live in it is man’s true destiny. His point of contact with it is personality: the inward fount of his being: his heart, not his head. Man is real, and in the deepest sense alive, in virtue of this free personal life-principle within him: but he is bound and blinded by the ties set up between his surface- intelligence and the sense-world. The struggle for reality must be a struggle on man’s part to transcend the sense-world, escape its bondage. He must renounce it, and be “re-born” to a higher level of consciousness; shifting his centre of interest from the natural to the spiritual plane. According to the thoroughness with which he does this, will be the amount of real life he enjoys. The initial break with the “world,” the refusal to spend one’s life communing with one’s own cinemato- graph picture, is essential if the freedom of the infinite is to be attained. Our life, says Eucken, does not move upon a single level, but upon two levels at once—the natural and the spiritual. The key to the puzzle of man lies in the fact that he is “the meeting point of various stages of Reality.” 2 All his difficulties and triumphs are grounded in this. The whole question for him is, which world shall be central for him—the real, vital, all-embracing life we call Spirit, or the lower life of sense? Shall “Existence,” the superficial obvious thing, or “ Substance,” the underlying verity, be his home? Shall he remain the slave of the senses with: their habits and customs, or rise to a plane of consciousness, of heroic endeavour, in which—participating in the life of spirit— he knows reality because he is real?
The mystics, one and all, have answered this question in the same sense: and, centuries before the birth of activistic philosophy, they have proved in their own experience that its premises are true. This philosophic diagram, this appli-. cation of the vitalistic idea to the transcendental world, does in fact fit the observed facts of mysticism far more closely
_ * The essentials of Professor Eucken’s teaching are present in all his chief works : but will be found conveniently summarized in ‘‘ Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens.” I am also greatly indebted to Mr. Boyce Gibson’s brilliant exposition ‘ Rudolph Eucken’s Philosophy.”
2 ‘¢Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens,”’ p. 121.
MYSTICISM AND VITALISM 41
even than it fits the observed facts of man’s ordinary mental life.
(1) The primary break with the sense-world. (2) The “new” birth and development of the spiritual consciousness on high levels—in Eucken’s eyes an essential factor in the attainment of reality. (3) That ever closer and deeper depend- ence on and appropriation of the fullness of the Divine Life; the conscious participation in, and active union with the infinite and eternal. These three imperatives of Eucken’s system, as we shall see later, form an exact description of the psychological process through which the mystics pass. If then Eucken be right in pointing to this transcendence as the highest destiny of the race, mysticism becomes the crown of man’s ascent towards Reality; the orderly completion of the universal plan.
The mystics show us this independent spiritual life, this fruition of the Absolute, enjoyed with a fullness to which others cannot attain. They are the heroic examples of the life of spirit; just as the great artists, the great discoverers, are the heroic examples of the life of beauty and the life of truth. Directly participating, like all artists, in the Divine Life, they are always persons of exuberant vitality : but this vitality expresses itself in unusual forms, hard of understanding for ordinary men. When we see a picture or a poem, hear a musical composition, we accept it as an expression of life, an earnest of the power which brought it forth. But the deep contemplations of the great mystic, his visionary reconstructions of reality, and the frag- ments of them which he is able to report, do not seem to us—as they are—the equivalents, or more often the superiors of the artistic and scientific achievements of other great men. |
Mysticism, then, offers us the history, as old as civilization, of a race of adventurers who have carried to its term the process of a deliberate and active return to the divine fount of things, have surrendered themselves indeed to the life-movement of the universe: hence have lived with an intenser life than other men can ever know. They have transcended the “sense-world ” and lived on high levels the spiritual life. Therefore they are types of all that our latent spiritual consciousness, which shows itself in the “hunger for the Absolute,” can be made to mean to
42 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM | us if we develop it ; and have in this respect a unique import- | ance for the race. |
It is the mystics, too, who have perfected that method of intuition, that knowledge by union, the existence of which philosophy has been driven to acknowledge. But where the metaphysician obtains at best a sidelong glance at that Being “unchanging yet elusive,” whom he has so often defined but never discovered, the artist a brief and dazzling vision of the Beauty which is Truth, they gaze with confidence into the very eyes of the Beloved.
The mystics, again, declare themselves to know the divinely real, free, and active “ World of Becoming” which Vitalistic philosophy expounds to us. They are, by their very constitu- tion, acutely conscious of the Divine Immanence and its unrest- ing travail: it is in them and they are in it: or, as they put it in their blunt theological way, “the spirit of God is within you.” But they are not satisfied with this statement and this know- ledge ; and here it is that they part company with the Vitalists. It is, they think, but half a truth. To know Reality in this way, to know it in its dynamic aspect, enter into “the great life of the All”: this is indeed, in the last resort, to know it supremely from the point of view of man—to liberate from selfhood the human consciousness—but it is not to know it from the point of view of God. There are planes of being beyond this ; countries dark to the intellect, deeps in which only the very greatest contemplatives have looked. These, coming forth, have declared with Ruysbroeck that “God accord- ing to the Persons is Eternal Work, but according to the Essence and Its perpetual stillness He is Eternal Rest.”?
The full spiritual consciousness of the true mystic is developed not in one, but in two apparently opposite but really complementary directions :—
AS ion 80 oils Ambo le corte del ciel manifeste.’’ 2
On the one hand he is intensely aware of, and knows himself to be at one with that active World of Becoming, that deep and primal life of the All, from which his own
* De Septem Gradibus Amoris,”’ cap. xiv. * Par. xxx. 95.
MYSTICISM AND VITALISM 43
life takes its rise. Hence, though he has broken for ever with the bondage of the senses, he perceives in every mani- festation of life a sacramental meaning; a loveliness, a wonder, a heightened significance, which is hidden from other men. He may, with St. Francis, call the Sun and the Moon, Water and Fire, his brothers and his sisters : or receive, with Blake, the message of the trees, Because of his cultivation of disinterested love, because his outlook is not conditioned by “the exclusive action of the will-to-live,” he has attained the power of communion with the living reality of the universe ; and in this respect can truly say that he finds “God in all and
_allin God.” Thus, the skilled spiritual vision of Lady Julian,
transcending the limitations of human perception, entering into harmony with a larger world whose rhythms cannot be received by common men, saw the all-enfolding Divine Life, the mesh of reality. “For as the body is clad in the cloth,” she said, “ and the flesh in the skin and the bones in the flesh and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God and enclosed. Yea, and more homely : for all these may waste and wear away, but the Goodness of God is ever whole.” ! Many mystical poets and pantheistic mystics never pass beyond this degree of lucidity.
On the other hand, the full mystic consciousness also attains to what is, I think, its really characteristic quality. It develops the power of apprehending the Absolute, Pure Being, the utterly Transcendent : or, as its possessor would say, can rise to “passive union with God.” This all-round expansion of consciousness, with its dual power of knowing by communion the temporal and eternal, immanent and transcendent aspects of reality—the life of the All, vivid, flowing and changing, and the changeless, conditionless life of the One—is the peculiar mark, the u/timo sigillo of the great mystic, and must never be forgotten in studying his life and work.
As the ordinary man is the meeting-place between two stages of reality—the sense-world and the world of spiritual life —so the mystic, standing head and shoulders above ordinary men, is again the meeting-place between two orders. Or, if you like it better, he is able to perceive and react to reality under two modes, On the one hand he knows, and rests in, the
* §* Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. vi.
44 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
eternal world of Pure Being, the “ Sea Pacific” of the Godhead, indubitably present to him in his ecstasies, attained by him in the union of love. On the other, he knows—and works in— that “stormy sea,” the vital World of Becoming which is the expression of Its will. “Illuminated men,” says Ruysbroeck, ‘are caught up, above the reason, into naked vision. There the Divine Unity dwells and calls them. Hence their bare vision, cleansed and free, penetrates the activity of all created things, and pursues it to search it out even to its height.” * Though philosophy has striven since thought began—and striven in vain—to resolve the paradox of Being and Becoming, of Eternity and Time, she has failed strangely enough to perceive that a certain type of personality has substituted experience for her guesses at truth, and achieved its solution, not by the dubious processes of thought, but by direct percep- tion. To the great mystic the “problem of the Absolute” presents itself in terms of life, not in terms of dialectic. He solves it in terms of life: by a change or growth of conscious- ness which—thanks to his peculiar genius—enables him to apprehend that two-fold Vision of Reality which eludes the perceptive powers of other men. It is extraordinary that this fact of experience—a central fact for the understanding of the contemplative type—has hitherto received no attention from writers upon mysticism. As we proceed with our inquiry, its importance, its far-reaching applications in the domains of psychology, of theology, of action, will become more and more evident. It provides the reason why the mystics could never accept the diagram of the Vitalists as a complete statement of the nature of Reality. “Whatever be the limits of your know- ledge, we know”—they would say—“that the world has another aspect than this: the aspect which is present to the Mind of God.” “Tranquillity according to His essence, activity accord- ing to His nature: perfect stillness, perfect fecundity,” 2 says Ruysbroeck again, this is the two-fold character of the Absolute. That which to us is action, to Him, they declare, is rest, “ His very peace and stillness coming from the brimming fullness of His infinite life.’”3 That which to us is Many, to that Transcen-
* Ruysbroeck, ‘‘ Samuel” (Hello, p. 201). 2 Ibid., ‘* De Vera Contemplatione”’ (Hello, p. 175). 3 Von Hiigel, ‘‘ The Mystical Element of Religion,” vol. ii. p. 132.
MYSTICISM AND VITALISM © | 45
dent Knower is One. Our World of Becoming rests on the bosom of that Pure Being which has ever been the final Object of man’s quest : the “river in which we cannot bathe twice” is the stormy flood of life flowing toward that divine sea. “How glorious,” says the Voice of the Eternal to St. Catherine of Siena, “is that soul which has indeed been able to pass from the stormy ocean to Me, the Sea Pacific, and in that Sea, which . is Myself, to fill the pitcher of her heart.” ?
The evolution of the mystic consciousness, then, brings its possessors to this transcendent point of view: their secret is this unity in diversity, this stillness in strife. Here they are in harmony with Heracleitus rather than with his new interpreters. That most mystical of philosophers discerned a hidden unity beneath the battle, transcending all created opposites ; and, in the true mystical spirit, taught his disciples that “ Having hearkened not unto me but unto the Logos, it is wise to confess that all things are ome.”’2 This is the secret at which, the idealists’ arid concept of Pure Being has tried, so timidly, to hint: and which the Vitalists’ more intimate, more actual concept of Becoming has tried, so unnecessarily, to destroy. We shall see the glorious raiment in which the Christian mystics deck it when we come to consider their theological map of the quest.
If it be objected—and this objection has been made by advocates of each school of thought—that the existence of the idealists’ and mystics’ “ Absolute” is utterly inconsistent with the deeply alive, striving spiritual life which the Vitalists identify with reality, I reply that both these concepts at bottom are but symbols of realities which the human mind can never reach ; and that the idea of stillness, unity and peace is and - has ever been humanity’s best translation of its final intuitive : perception of God. “‘ In the midst of silence a hidden. word was spoken to me.’ Where is this Silence, and where is the place in which this word is spoken? It isin the purest that the soul can produce, in her noblest part, in the Ground, even the Being of the Soul.”3 So Eckhart: and here he does but subscribe toa universal tradition. The mystics have always insisted that “ Be
t St. Catherine of Siena, Dialogo, cap. Ixxxix, 2 Heracleitus, of. czz. 3 Meister Eckhart, Pred. i.
at
46 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
still, be still, and Axow” is the condition of man’s purest and most direct apprehensions of reality : that somehow quiet is the truest and deepest activity : and Christianity when she formu- lated her philosophy made haste to adopt and express this paradox.
“Quid es ergo, Deus meus?” said St. Augustine, and gave an answer in which the vision of the mystic, the genius of the philosopher combined to hint something at least of the flaming heart of reality, the paradox of the intimacy and majesty of that all-embracing, all-transcending One. ‘“Summe, optime, poten- tissime, omnipotentissime, misericordissime, et justissime, secre- tissime et presentissime, pulcherrime et fortissime; stabilis et incomprehensibilis; immutabilis, mutans omnia: Numquam novus, nunquam vetus.... Semper agens, semper quietus: colligens et non egens: portans et implens et protegens; creans et nutriens et perficiens: quaerens cum nihil desit tibi.... Quid dicimus, Deus meus, vita mea, dulcedo mea sancta? Aut quid dicit aliquis, cum de te dicit?”? |
It has been said that “Whatever we may do, our hunger for the Absolute will never cease.” The hunger—that innate craving for, and intuition of, a final Unity, a changeless good— will go on, however heartily we may feed on those fashionable systems which offer us a pluralistic or empirical universe. If, now, we admit in all living creatures—as Vitalists must do—an instinct of self-preservation, a free directive force which may be trusted and which makes for life; is it just to deny such an instinct to the human soul? The “entelechy” of the Vitalists, the “hidden steersman,” drives the phenomenal world on and up. What about that other sure instinct embedded in the race, breaking out again and again, which drives the spirit on and up; spurs it eternally towards an end which it feels to be definite
* Aug. Conf., bk. i. cap. iv. ‘*What art Thou, then, my God? ... Highest, best, most potent [z.¢e., dynamic], most omnipotent [7.¢., transcendent], most merciful and most just, most deeply hid and yet most near. Fairest, yet strongest : steadfast, yet unseizable ; unchangeable yet changing all things; never new, yet never old. . . Ever busy, yet ever at rest; gathering yet needing not: bearing, filling, guarding ; creating, nourishing and perfecting; seeking though Thou hast no wants. . . What can I say, my God, my life, my holy joy? or what can any say who speaks ar Thee?’ Compare the strikingly similar Sifi definition of the Nature of God, as given in Palmer’s ‘‘ Oriental Mysticism,” pp. 22, 23. ‘* First and last, End and Limit of all things, incomparable and unchangeable, always near yet always far,” &c.
MYSTICISM AND VITALISM 47
yet cannot define? Shall we distrust this instinct for the Absolute, as living and ineradicable as any other of our powers, merely because the new philosophy finds it difficult to accom- modate and to describe?
“We must,” says Plato in the “ Timzus,” “ make a distinction
Jof the two great forms of being, and ask, ‘What is that which Is and has no Becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never Is?’”* Without necessarily subscribing to the Platonic answer to this question, I think we may at any rate acknowledge that the question itself is sound and worth asking ; that it expresses a perennial demand of human nature: and that the analogy of man’s other instincts and cravings assures us that these his fundamental demands always indicate the existence of asupply.2. The great defect of Vitalism, considered as a system, is that it only professes to answer half of it; the half which Absolute Idealism disdained to answer at all.
We have seen that the mystical experience, the fullest all- round experience in regard to the transcendental world which is attainable by humanity, declares to us that there are two aspects, two planes of discoverable Reality. We have seen also that hints of these two planes—often clear statements concern- ing them—abound in mystical literature of the personal first- hand type.3 Pure Being, says Boutroux in the course of his exposition of Boehme,4 has two characteristic manifestations, It shows itself to us as Power, by means of strife, of the struggle and opposition of its own qualities. But it shows itself to us as Reality, in harmonizing and reconciling within itself these discordant opposites.
Its manifestation as Power, then, is for us in the dynamic World of Becoming, amidst the thud and surge of that life which is compounded of paradox, of good and evil, joy and sorrow, life and death. Here, Boehme declares that the Absolute God is voluntarily self-revealing. But each revelation has as its
* Timaeus, § 27.
2 ‘A natural craving,” said Aquinas, ‘‘cannot be in vain”; and the newest philosophy is creeping back to this ‘‘ mediaeval” point of view. Compare ‘‘Summa Contra Gentiles,” 1. ii. cap. Ixxix.
3 Compare Dante’s vision in Par. xxx., where he sees Reality first as the streaming River of Light, the flux of things; and then, when his sight has been purged, as achieved Perfection, the Sempiternal Rose.
4 E. Boutroux, ‘‘ Le Philosophe Allemand, Jacob Boehme,” p. 18,
48 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
condition the appearance of its opposite: light can only be recognized at the price of knowing darkness, life needs death: love needs wrath. Hence if Pure Being—the Good, Beautiful and True—is to reveal itself, it must do so by evoking and opposing its contrary: as in the Hegelian dialectic no idea is ) complete without its negative. Such a revelation by strife, — however, is rightly felt by man to be incomplete. Absolute Reality, the Player whose sublime music is expressed at the cost of this everlasting friction between bow and lyre, is present, it is true, in His music. But He is best known in that “light, behind,” that unity where all these opposites are lifted up into’ harmony, into a higher synthesis: amd the melody is perceived, not as a difficult progress of sound, but as a whole.
We have, then, (2) The Absolute Reality which the Greeks, and every one after them, meant by that seemingly chill abstraction which they called Pure Being: that Absolute One, unconditioned and undiscoverable, in Whom all is resumed. Changeless, yet changer of all, this One is the undifferentiated Godhead of Eckhart, the Transcendent Father of ordinary Christian theology. It is the great contribution of the mystics to humanity’s knowledge of the real that they find in this Absolute, in defiance of the metaphysicians, a personal object of love, the goal of their quest, the “Country of the Soul.”
(6) But, contradicting the nihilism of Eastern contempla- tives, they see also a reality in the dynamic side of things: in | the seething pot of appearance. They are aware of an eternal © Becoming, a striving, free, evolving life, not merely as a _ shadow-show, but as an implicit of their Cosmos: God’s mani- — _ festation or showing, in which He is immanent, in which His Spirit truly works and strives. It is in ¢hzs plane of reality ~ that all individual life is immersed: this is the stream which set out from the Heart of God and “turns again home.”
The mystic knows his task to be the attainment of Being, union with the One, the “return to the Father’s heart”: for the parable of the Prodigal Son is to him the history of the universe. This union is to be attained, first by co-operation in that Life which bears him up, in which he is immersed. He must become conscious of this “great life of the All,” merge himself in it, if he would find his way back whence he came. Vae sol, ence there are really two separate acts of “divine
MYSTICISM AND VITALISM 49
union,” two separate kinds of illumination involved in the Mystic Way: the dual character of the spiritual consciousness ‘brings a dual responsibility in its train. First, there is the vnion with Life, with the World of Becoming: and parallel with the illumination by which the mystic “gazes upon a more veritable world.” Secondly, there is the union with Being, with e One: and that final, ineffable illumination of pure love ‘vhich is called the “knowledge of God.” It is by means of the ‘¢bnormal development of the third factor, the free, creative ‘{Spirit,” the scrap of Absolute Life which is the ground of his ‘oul, that the mystic can (@) conceive and (4) accomplish these lranscendent acts. Only Being can know Being: we “ behold ‘that which we are, and are that which we behold.” But there ‘saspark in man’s soul, say the mystics, which is real—which ‘In fact zs—and by its cultivation we may know reality. ‘| Over and over again—as Being and Becoming, as Eternity nd Time, as Transcendence and Immanence, Reality and Appearance, the One and the Many—these two dominant \deas, demands, imperious instincts of man’s self will reappear ; he warp and woof of his completed universe. On the one and is his ineradicable intuition of a remote, unchanging Somewhat calling him: on the other there is his longing for and as clear intuition of an intimate, adorable Somewhat, companion- ing him. Man’s true Real, his only adequate God, must be great enough to embrace this sublime paradox, to take up these apparent negations into a higher synthesis. Neither the utter transcendence of extreme Absolutism, nor the utter immanence of the Vitalists will do. Both these, taken alone, are declared by the mystics to be incomplete. They conceive that Absolute Being who is the goal of their quest as manifesting Himself in a World of Becoming: agonizing in it, at one with it, yet though semper agens, also semper quietus. The Divine spirit which they know to be immanent in the heart and in the universe comes forth from and returns to the Transcendent One; and this division of persons in unity of substance completes the “Eternal Circle, from Goodness, through Goodness, to Goodness.” Absolute Being and Becoming, the All and the One, are found to be alike inadequate to their definition of this discovered Real; the “triple star of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.” Speak-
ing always from experience—the most complete experience E
b )
50 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
that is possible to man—they describe to us an Absolute whiclh overpasses and includes the Absolute of philosophy, far transcends that Cosmic life which it fills and sustains, and is best defined in terms of Transcendent Personality ; which because of its richness and of the poverty of human speech they have sometimes been driven to define only by negations - At once static and dynamic, above life and in it, “all love ye’ ‘all law,” eternal in essence though working in time, this vision resolves the contraries which tease those who study it fron! : without, and swallows up whilst it kindles to life all the partia interpretations of metaphysics and of science.
Here then stands the mystic. By the help of two philo- sophies, eked out by the resources of symbolic expression, he has contrived to tell us something of his vision and his claim, Confronted by that vision—that sublime reconstruction of eternity—we may surely ask, indeed, are bound to ask, Wha is the machinery by which this self, akin to the aes and sense-fed self of our daily experience, has contrived to slif its fetters and rise to those levels of spiritual perception on which alone such vision can be possible to man? How has i!) brought within the field of consciousness those deep intuitions which fringe upon Absolute Life; how developed powers by which it is enabled to arrive at this amazing, this superhuman concept of the nature of Reality? Psychology will do some- thing, perhaps, to help us to an answer to this question ; and it is her evidence which we must examine next. But its final solution is the secret of the mystics; and they reply to our questioning, when we ask them, in the direct and uncom- promising terms of action, not in the refined and elusive periods of speculative thought. |
“Come with us,” they say to the bewildered and entangled self, craving for finality and peace, “and we will show you a way out that shall not only be an issue from your prison but also a
pathway to your Home. True, you are immersed, fold upon - fold, in the World of Becoming ; worse, you are besieged on all sides by the persistent illusions of sense. But you too are a child of the Absolute. You bear within you the earnest of your inheritance. At the apex of your spirit there is a little door, so high up that only by hard climbing can you reach it. There the Object of your craving stands and knocks; thence came
MYSTICISM AND VITALISM 51 those persistent messages—faint echoes from the Truth eternally hammering at your gates—which disturbed the comfortable life of sense. Come up then by this pathway, to those higher levels of reality to which, in virtue of the eternal spark in you, you Hielong. Leave your ignoble ease: your clever prattle: your bsurd attempts to solve the apparent contradictions of a Whole oo great for your useful little mind to grasp. Trust your deep nstincts: use your latent powers. Appropriate that divine, treative life which is the very substance of your being. Remake ourself in its interest, if you would know its beauty and its ruth. You can only behold that which you ave. Only the Real an know Reality.”
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