CHAPTER V

MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY
Mystic diagrams—-Theology as used by the Mystics—Their conception ot God— Emanatio and Immanence—Emanation discussed—Dante—the Kabalists—Aquinas —Its psychological aspect—Immanence discussed—the basis of introversion—The *‘ground” of soul and universe—Emanation and Immanence compared —both accepted by the Mystics—Objections to this answered—Emanation and the Mystic Way—lIts reconciliation with Immanence—Both describe experience—are expressions of temperament—Mystical theology must include both—Theology is the Mystic’s map—Sometimes but not always adequate—Christianity the best of such Maps— It combines the metaphysical and personal aspects of the Divine — reconciles Emanation and Immanence—provides a congenial atmosphere for the Mystic— explains his adventures—All Western mystics implicitly Christian—Blake—The dogma of the Trinity—Division of Persons essential to the description of God—The indwelling and transcendent aspects of the Divine—St. Teresa—her vision of the ' Trinity—Father, Word, Holy Spirit—Threefold division of Reality—Neoplatonic trinities—Lady Julian on the Trinity—Its psychological justification—Goodness, Truth, and Beauty—Trinitarian doctrine and the Mystics—Light, Life, Love—The Incarnation—its mystic aspeci— The Repairer—The Drama of Faith—The Eternal Birth of the Son—The New Birth in Man—Regeneration—-Conclusion
the mystic who tastes supreme experience and the mystical
philosopher who cogitates upon the data so obtained. We have now, however, to take account of the fact that the true mystic is also very often a mystical philosopher; though there” are plenty of mystical philosophers who are not and could never be mystics.
Because it is characteristic of the human self to ee upon its experience, to use its percepts as material for the construction of a concept, most mystics have made or accepted a theory of their own adventures. Thus we have a mystical philosophy or theology—the comment of the intellect on the proceedings of spiritual intuition—running side by side with true or empirical mysticism : classifying its data, criticizing it, explaining it, and
11g
[ the last chapter we tried to establish a distinction between
+
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 115
translating its vision of the supersensible into symbols which are amenable to dialectic.
Such a philosophy is most usually founded upon the formal creed which the individual mystic accepts. It is characteristic of him that in so far as his transcendental activities are healthy he is generally an acceptor and not a rejector of such creeds. The view which regards the mystic as a spiritual anarchist receives little support from history ; which shows us, over and over again, the great mystics as faithful sons of the great religions. Almost any religious system which fosters un- earthly love is potentially a nursery for mystics: and Chris- tianity, Islam, Brahmanism, and Buddhism each receives its most sublime interpretation at their hands. }
Thus St. Teresa interprets her ecstatic apprehension of the Godhead in strictly Catholic terms. Thus Boehme believed to the last that his explorations of eternity were consistent with the teaching of the Lutheran Church. Thus the Siifis were good Mohammedans, Philo and the Kabalists were orthodox Jews. Thus Plotinus even adapted—though with what difficulty! —the relics of paganism to his doctrine of the Real.
Attempts, however, to limit mystical truth—the direct apprehension of the Divine Substance—to the formule of any one religion, are as futile as the attempt to identify a precious metal with the die which converts it into current coin. The dies which the mystics have used are many. Their peculiarities and excrescences are always interesting and sometimes highly significant. Some give a far sharper, more coherent, impression than others. But the gold from which this diverse coinage is struck is always the same precious metal: always the same Beatific Vision of a Goodness, Truth, and Beauty which is one. Hence its substance must always be distinguished from the accidents under which we perceive it : for this substance has a cosmic, and not a denominational, importance.
If, however, we are to understand the language of the mystics, it is evident that we must know a little of accident as well as of substance: that is to say, of the principal philo- -sophies or religions which they have used in describing their adventures to the world. This being so, before we venture to
* Ti. Rufus Jones (‘‘ Studies in Mystical Religion”) is at present the most eminent upholder of this opinion.
116 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
apply ourselves to the exploration of theology proper, it will be well to consider the two extreme forms under which both mystics and theologians have been accustomed to conceive Divine Reality: that is to say, the so-called “emanation-theory” and “immanence-theory ” of the transcendental world.
Emanation and Immanence are formidable words; which, though perpetually tossed to and fro by amateurs of religious philosophy, have probably, as they stand, little actuality for practical modern men. They are, however, root-ideas for the ' maker of mystical diagrams: and his best systems are but attempts towards their reconciliation. Since the aim of every mystic is union with God, it is obvious that the vital question in his philosophy must be the place which this God, the Absolute of his quest, occupies in the scheme. Briefly, He has been conceived—or, it were better to say, presented—by the great mystics under two apparently contradictory modes.
(1) The opinion which is represented in its most extreme form by the above-mentioned Theory of Emanations, declares His utter transcendence. This view appears early in the history of Greek philosophy. It is developed by Dionysius, by the Kabalists, by Dante: and is implied in the language of Rulman Merswin and many other Christian ecstatics.
The solar system is an almost perfect symbol of this concept of the universe; which finds at once its most rigid and most beautiful expression in Dante’s “Paradiso.”! The Absolute Godhead is conceived as removed by a vast distance from the material world of sense; the last or lowest of that system of dependent worlds or states which, generated by or emanating from the Unity or Central Sun, become less in spirituality and — splendour, greater in multiplicity. the further they recede from their source. That Source—the Great Countenance of the Absolute—can never, say the Kabalists, be discerned by man. It is the Unplumbed Abyss of later mysticism: the Cloud of Unknowing wraps it from our sight. Only by its “emana- tions” or manifested attributes can we attain knowledge of it.
* «*La gloria di colui che tutto move per Vuniverso penetra, e resplende in una parte pili e meno altrove ” (Par. i. 1-3).
The theological ground-plan of the Cantica is epitomized in this introductory verse
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 117
By the outflow of these same manifested attributes and powers the created universe exists, depending in the last resort on the datens dettas : Who is therefore conceived as external to the world which He illuminates and vivifies.
St. Thomas Aquinas virtually accepts the doctrine of Emanations when he writes: “As all the perfections of Creatures descend in order from God, who is the height of perfection, man should begin from the lower creatures and ascend by degrees, and so advance to the knowledge of God. . . . And because in that roof and crown of all things, God, we find the most perfect unity; and everything is stronger and more excellent the more thoroughly it is one ; it follows that diversity and variety increase in things, the further they are removed from Him who is the first principle of all.” Suso, whose mystical system, like that of most Dominicans, is entirely consistent with Thomist philosophy, is really glossing Aquinas when he writes : “The supreme and superessential Spirit has ennobled man by illuminating him with a ray from the Eternal Godhead... . Hence from out the great ring which represents the Eternal Godhead there flow forth . . . little rings, which may be taken to signify the high nobility of natural creatures.” 2
Obviously if this theory of the Absolute be accepted the path of the soul’s ascent to union with the divine must be literally a transcendence: a journey “upward and outward,” through a long series of intermediate states or worlds till, having traversed the “ Thirty-two paths of the Tree of Life,” she at last arrives, in Kabalistic language, at the Crown: fruitive knowledge of God, the Abyss or Divine Dark of the Dionysian school,
the Neoplatonic One. Such a series of worlds is symbo- ,
lized by the Ten Heavens of Dante, the hierarchies of Dionysius, the Tree of Life or Sephiroth of the Kabalah: and receives its countersign in the inward experience, in the long journey of the self through Purgation and Illumination to
Union, “We ascend,” says St. Augustine, “thy ways that be -
in our heart, and sing a song of degrees; we glow inwardly
with thy fire, with thy good fire, and we go, because we go
upwards to the peace of Jerusalem.” 3 This theory postulates, under normal and non-mystical con-
* ‘Summa Contra Gentiles,” 1. iv. cap. i. (Rickaby’s translation). * Leben, cap. lvi. 3 Aug. Conf., bk. xiii. cap. xi.
118 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
ditions, the complete separation of the human and the divine ; the temporal and the eternal worlds. Hence the language of pilgrimage, of exile, of a world which has fallen from perfection into illusion and must make a long and painful return, comes naturally to the mystic who apprehends reality under these terms. To him the mystical adventure is essentially a “going forth” from his normal self and from his normal universe. Like the Psalmist “in his heart he hath disposed to ascend by steps in this vale of tears” from the less to the more divine. He, and with him the Cosmos—for we must never forget that to mystical philosophy the soul of the individual subject is the microcosm of the soul of the werld—has got to retrace the long road to the Perfection from which it originally came forth ; as the fish in Rulman Merswin’s Vision of Nine Rocks must struggle upwards from pool to pool until they reach their Origin.
Such a way of conceiving Reality accords with the type of mind which William James has denominated the “sick soul.” # It is the mood of the contrite, of the penitent, of the utter
humility which, appalled by the sharp contrast between itself :
and the Perfect which it contemplates, can only cry “ out of the depths.” It comes naturally to the kind of temperament which leans to pessimism, which sees a “great gulf fixed” between itself and its desire, and is above all things sensitive to the elements of evil and imperfection in its own character and in the normal experience of man. Permitting these elements to _dominate its field of consciousness, wholly ignoring the divine aspect of the World of Becoming, such a temperament con- structs from its perceptions and prejudices the concept of a material world and a normal self which is very far from God. (2) [mmanence. At the opposite pole from this way ot sketching Reality is the extreme theory of Immanence, so fashionable amongst liberal theologians at the present time. To the holders of this theory, who belong of necessity to Pro- fessor James’s “healthy minded” or optimistic class, the quest of the Absolute is no long journey, but a realization of something which is implicit in the self and in the universe : an opening of the eyes of the soul upon the Reality in which it is bathed. For them earth is literally “crammed with heaven.” “Thou
* “Varieties of Religious Experience,” Lecture vi.
Sa eee
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 119
wert I, but dark was my heart, I knew not the secret tran- scendent,” says Téwekkul Bég, a Moslem mystic of the seven- teenth century. This is always the cry of the temperament which leans to a theology of immanence, once its eyes are opened on the light. “God,” says Plotinus, “is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that He is so.”2. In other and older words, “ The spirit of God is within you.” The Absolute Whom all seek does not hold Himself aloof from an imperfect material universe, but dwells within the flux of things: stands as it were at the very thres- hold of consciousness and knocks, awaiting the self’s slow dis- covery of her treasures. “He is not far from any one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being,” is the pure doctrine of Immanence: a doctrine whose teachers are drawn from amongst the souls which react more easily to the touch of the Divine than to the sense of alienation and of sin, and are naturally inclined to love rather than to awe. The truth that “God and man initially meet where man is most inward ” 3—z.e., in the spark or ground of the soul—is the cardinal fact in their experience of the transcendental world.
Unless safeguarded by limiting dogmas, the theory of Immanence, taken alone, is notoriously apt to degenerate into pantheism; and into those extravagant perversions of the doctrine of “deification” in which the mystic holds his trans- figured self to be identical with the Indwelling God. It is the philosophical basis of that practice of introversion, the turning inwards of the soul’s faculties in contemplation, which has been the “method” uf the great practical mystics of all creeds. That God, since He is in all—in a sense, zs all—may most easily be found within ourselves, is the doctrine of these adventurers ;4 who, denying or ignoring the existence of those intervening “worlds” or “planes” between the material world and the Absolute, which are postulated by the theory of Emanations, claim with Ruysbroeck that “by a simple introspection in
* Quoted by W. L. Lilly, ‘‘ Many Mansions,” p. 140.
? Ennead vi. 9. .
3 Boyce Gibson, ‘‘ Rudolph Eucken’s Philosophy,” p. 104.
4 Thus Aquinas says, ‘‘ Since God is the universal cause of all Being, in whatever region Being can be found, there must be the Divine Presence ’’ (‘‘ Summa Contra Gentiles,” 1. iii. cap. Ixvili.). And we have seen that the whole claim of the mystics ultimately depends on man’s possession of pure being in ‘‘ the spark of the soul.”
120 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
fruitive love” they “meet God without intermediary.” They hear the Father of Lights “saying eternally, without inter- mediary or interruption, in the most secret part of the spirit, the one unique, and abysmal Word.” 2 This “divine” essence, or substance, which the introversive mystic finds dwelling, as Ruysbroeck says, at the apex of man’s spirit, is the “spark of the soul” of Eckhart, the “ ground” of Tauler, the Inward Light of the Quakers, the “ Divine Principle” of some modern transcendentalists ; the fount and source of all true life. At this point words and definitions fail mystic and theologian alike. A tangle of metaphors takes their place, He is face to face with the “ wonder of wonders”—that most real of all experiences, the union of human and divine, in a nameless something which is “great enough to be God, small enough to be me.” Hence at one moment the spark of the soul is presented to us as the divine to which the self attains: at another, as that transcendental aspect of the self which is in contact with God. On either hypothesis it is that in which the mystic encounters Absolute Being: and constitutes his guarantee of God’s immediate presence in the human heart; and, if in the human heart, then in that universe of which man’s soul resumes in miniature the essential characteristics, According to the doctrine of Immanence, creation, the universe, could we see it as it is, would be perceived as the self- development, the self-unfolding of this indwelling Deity. The world is not projected from the Absolute, but rather enshrines It. “I understood,” says St. Teresa, “how our Lord was in all things, and how He was in the soul: and the illustration of a sponge filled with water was suggested to me.”3 The world- process then, is the slow coming to fruition of that Divine Spark which is latent alike in the Cosmos and in man, “If,” says Boehme, “thou conceivest a small minute circle, as small asa grain of mustard seed, yet the Heart of God is wholly and per- fectly therein: and if thou art born in God, then there is in thy-
* « T,’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,” 1. ii. cap. Ixxi.
2 Op. cit., 1. iii. cap. 1.
3 Relaccion, ix. 10. But this image of a sponge, which also suggested itsel. to St. Augustine, proved an occasion of stumbling to his more metaphysical mind : tend- ing to confuse his idea of the nature of God with the category of space. Vide Aug. Conf., bk, vii. cap. v,
=
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 121
self (in the circle of thy life) the whole Heart of God undivided.” : The idea of Immanence has seldom been more beautifully expressed,
It is worth noticing that both the theological theories of reality which have been acceptable to the mystics implicitly declare, as modern science does, that the universe is not static but dynamic: a World of Becoming. According to the doctrine of Immanence this universe is free, self-creative. The Divine nests within it : no part is more removed from the Godhead than any other part. “God,” says Eckhart, “is nearer to me than I am to myself; He is just as near to wood and stone, but they do not know it.”2
These two apparently contradictory explanations of the Invisible have both been held, and that in their extreme form, by the mystics: who have found in both adequate and indeed necessary diagrams by which to demonstrate their experience of Reality.3 Some of the least lettered and most inspired amongst them—for instance, St. Catherine of Siena, Lady Julian of Norwich—and some of the most learned, as Dionysius the Areopagite and Meister Eckhart, have actually used in their rhapsodies language appropriate to both the theories of Emana- tion and of Immanence. It would seem, then, that both these theories must veil the truth ; and thatit is the business of a sound mystical philosophy to reconcile them, It is too often forgotten by quarrelsome partisans of a concrete turn of mind that at best all these transcendental theories are only symbols, methods, diagrams ; feebly attempting the representation of an experience which is always the same, and whose dominant characteristic is itsineffability. Hence they insist with tiresome monotony that Dionysius must be wrong if Tauler be right: that it is absurd to call yourself the Friend of God if unknowableness be that God’s first attribute: that Plato’s Perfect Beauty and Catherine of Siena’s Accepter of Sacrifices cannot be the same: that the “courteous and dear-worthy Lord” who said to Lady Julian, “ My darling, lam glad that thou art come to Me, in all thy wo I have ever been with thee,”4 rules out the formless and
* ©The Threefold Life of Man,” cap. vi. § 71.
2 Eckhart, Pred. Ixix. So too we read in the Oxyrhyncus Papyri, ‘‘ Raise the stone and there thou shalt find Me. Cleave the wood and there am I.”’
3 Compare above, cap. ii, 4 ** Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. xl.
122 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
impersonal One of Plotinus, the “triple circle” of Suso and Dante. Finally, that if God be truly immanent in the material world, it is either sin or folly to refuse that world in order that we may find Him; and if introversion be right, a plan of the universe which postulates intervening planes between Absolute Being and the phenomenal world must be wrong.
Now as regards the mystics, of whom we hold both these doctrines, these ways of seeing truth—for what else is a doctrine but that ?—it is well to remind ourselves that their teaching about the relation of the Absolute to the finite, of God to the phenomenal world, must be founded in the first instance on what they know by experience of the relation between that Absolute and the individual self. This experience is the valid part of mysticism, the thing which gives to it its unique import- ance amongst systems of thought, the only source of its knowledge. Everything else is really guessing aided by analogy. When therefore the mystic, applying to the universe what he knows to be true in respect of his own soul, describes Divine Perfection as very far removed from the material world, yet linked with it by a graduated series of “emanations ”—states or qualities which have each of them something of the godlike though they be not God—he is trying to describe the necessary life-process which he has himself passed through in the course of his purgation and spiritual ascent from the state of the “ natural man ” to that other state of harmony with the spiritual universe, sometimes called “ deification,” in which he is able to contemplate, and unite with, the divine. We have in the “ Divina Commedia” a classic example of such a two-fold vision of the inner and the outer worlds: for Dante’s journey up and out to the Empyrean Heaven is really an inward alchemy, an ordering and trans- muting of his nature, a purging of his spiritual sight till— transcending all derived beatitude—it can look for an instant on the Being of God,
The mystic assumes—because he always assumes an orderly basis for things—that there is a relation, an analogy, between this microcosm of man’s self and the macrocosm of the world-self. Hence his experience, the geography of the individual quest, appears to him good evidence of the geography of the Invisible. Since he must transcend his natural life in order to attain con- ©
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 123
sciousness of God, he conceives of God as essentially transcendent tothe natural world. His description of that geography, however —of his path in a land where there is no time and space, no inner and no outer, up or down—will be conditioned by his tempera- ment, by his powers of observation, by the metaphor which comes most readily to his hand, above all by his theological education. The so-called journey itself is a psychological experience: the purging and preparation of the self, its movement to higher levels of consciousness, its unification with that more spiritual but normally subconscious self which is in touch with the transcendental order, and its gradual or abrupt entrance into union with the Real. Sometimes it seems to the self that this performance is a retreat inwards to that “ground of the soul” where, as St. Teresa says, “His Majesty awaits us”: sometimes a going forth from the Conditioned to the Unconditioned, the “supernatural flight ” of Plotinus and Dionysius the Areopagite. Both are but images under which the self conceives the process of attaining con- scious union with that God who is “at once immanent and transcendent in relation-to the soul which shares His Life.”
He has got to find God. The quest is long; the end amazing. Sometimes his temperament causes him to lay most stress on the length of the search; sometimes the abrupt rapture which brings it to a close makes him forget that preliminary pilgrimage in which the souljis “not outward bound, but rather on a journey to its centryg@ii™ The Habitations of the Interior Castle through which isa conducts the ardent disciple to that hidden chambe is the sanctuary of the indwelling God: the hierarchies of “Dionysius, ascending from the selfless service of the angels, past the seraphs’ burning love to the God enthroned above time and space: the mystical paths of the Kabalistic Tree of Life, which lead from the material world of Malkuth through the universes of action and thought, by Mercy, Justice and Beauty to the Supernal Crown ;2 all these are different ways of seeing this same pilgrimage.
As every one is born a disciple of either Plato or Aristotle, so every human soul leans to one of these two
ibson, ‘* God with Us,” p. 24. 2. Waite, ‘‘ The Doctrine and Literature of the Kabalah,’’ pp. 36-53.
* Boyc 2 See
124 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
ways of apprehending reality. The artist, the poet, every one who looks with awe and rapture on created things, acknowledges in this act the Immanent God. The ascetic, and that intellectual ascetic the metaphysician, turning from the created, denying the senses in order to find afar off the Uncreated, Unconditioned Source, is really—though often he knows it not—obeying that psychological law which produced the doctrine of Emanations.
A good map then, a good mystical philosophy, will leave room for both these ways of interpreting experience. It will mark the routes by which many different temperaments claim to have found their way to the same end. It will acknowledge both the aspects under which the patria splendida Truth has appeared to its lovers: the aspects which have called forth the theories of emanation and immanence and are enshrined in the Greek and Latin names of God. Deus, whose root means day, shining, the Transcendent Light ; and Zeos, whose true meaning is supreme desire or prayer—the Inward Love—do not contradict, but complete each other. They form, when taken together, an almost perfect definition of that Absolute which is the object of the mystic’s desire: the Divine Love which, heing born in the soul, spurs on that soul to union with the transcendent and Absolute Light which is at once the source, the goal, the life of created things.
The true mysty—the person with a genius for God—hardly needs a map hi , He steers a compass course across the “vast and stormy M&he divine.” It is characteristic of his intellectual humi wever, that he is always willing to use the map of the community in which he finds himself, when it comes to showing other people the route which he has pursued. Sometimes these maps have been adequate. More, they have elucidated the obscure wanderings of the explorer ; helped him ; given him landmarks; worked out right. Time after time he puts his finger on some spot—some great hill of vision, some city of the soul—and says with conviction, “ Heve have I been.” At other times the maps have embarrassed him, have refused to fit in with his description. Then he has tried, as Boehme did and after him Blake, to make new ones Such maps are often wild in drawing, because good draughtsmanship does (ot neces- sarily go with a talent for exploration, Departing Yom the
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 125
usual convention, they are hard—sometimes impossible—to understand. As a result, the orthodox have been forced to regard their makers as madmen or heretics: when they were really only practical men struggling to disclose great matters by imperfect means,
Now, without prejudice to individual beliefs and without offering an opinion as to the exclusive truth of any one religious system or revelation—for here we are concerned neither with controversy nor with apologetics—we are bound to allow as a historical fact that mysticism, so far, has found its best map in Christianity. Christian philosophy, especially that Neo- platonic theology which, taking up and harmonizing all that was best in the spiritual intuitions of Greece, India and Egypt, was developed by the great doctors of the early and mediaeval Church, supports and elucidates the revelations of the indi- vidual mystic as no other system of thought has been able to do.
We owe to the great fathers of the first five centuries—to Clement of Alexandria and Irenzus, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine; above all to Dionysius the Areopagite, the great Christian contemporary of Proclus—the preservation of that mighty system of scaffolding which enabled the Catholic mystics to build up the towers and bulwarks of the City of God. The peculiar virtue of this Christian philosophy, that which marks its superiority to the more coldly self-consistent systems of Greece, is the fact that it re-states the truths of metaphysics in terms of personality: thus offering a third term, a “living mediator” between the Unknowable God, the unconditioned Absolute, and the conditioned self. This was the priceless gift which the Wise Men received in return for their gold, frankin- cense, and myrrh. This solves the puzzle which all explorers of the supersensible have sooner or later to face: come sz convenne Limago al cerchio,s the reconciliation of Infinite and intimate, both known and felt, but neither understood. Such a third term, such a stepping-stone, was essential if mysticism were ever to attain that active union, that fullness of life which is its object, and develop from a blind and egoistic rapture into fruitful and self-forgetting love.
Where non-Christian mystics, as a rule, have made a forced choice between the two great dogmatic expressions of their
* Par. xxxiii. 137. , 4
126 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
experience, (a) the long pilgrimage towards a transcendent and unconditioned Absolute, (4) the discovery of that Absolute in the “ ground ” or spiritual principle of the self; it has been possible to Christianity, by means of her central doctrine of the Trinity, to find room for both of them and to exhibit them as that which they are in fact—the complementary parts of a whole. Even Dionysius, the godfather of the emanation doctrine, com- bines with his scheme of descending hierarchies the dogma of an indwelling God: and no writer is more constantly quoted by Meister Eckhart, who is generally considered to have preached Immanence in its most extreme and pantheistic form.
Further, the Christian atmosphere is the one in which the individual mystic has most often been able to develop his genius in a sane and fruitful way; and an overwhelming majority of the great European contemplatives have been Christians of a strong, impassioned and personal type. This alone would justify us in regarding it as representing, at any rate in the West, the formal side of the true tradition: the “path of least resistance” through which that tradition flows. In many cases the very heretics of Christianity have owed their greatness almost wholly to their mystical qualities. The Gnostics, the Fraticelli, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Quietists, the Quakers, are instances of this. In others, it was to an excessive reliance on reason when dealing with the supra- rational, and a corresponding absence of trust in mystical intuition that heresy was due. Arius and Pelagius are heretics of this type.
The greatest mystics, however, have not been heretics but Catholic saints. In Christianity the “natural mysticism” which, like “natural religion,” is latent in humanity, and at a certain voint of development breaks out in every race, came to itself; and attributing for the first time true and distinct personality to its Object, brought into focus the confused and unconditioned God which Neoplatonism had constructed from the abstract concepts of philosophy blended with the intuitions of Indian ecstatics, and made the basis of its meditations on the Real. It is a truism that the real claim of Christian philosophy on our respect does not lie in its exclusiveness but in its Catho- licity: in the fact that it finds truth in a hundred different systems, accepts and elucidates Greek, Jewish and Indian
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 127
thought, fuses them in a coherent theology, and says to speculative thinkers of every time and place, “Whom there- fore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.”
The voice of Truth, which spoke once for all on Calvary and there declared the ground plan of the universe, was heard more or less perfectly by all the great seers, the intuitive leaders of men, the possessors of genius for the Real. There are few of the Christian names of God which were not known to the teachers of antiquity. To the Egyptians He was the Saviour, to the Platonists the Good, Beautiful and True, to the Stoics the Father and Companion. The very words of the Fourth Gospel are anticipated by Cleanthes. Heracleitus knew the Energizing Fire of which St. Bonaventura and Mechthild of Magdeburg speak. Countless mystics, from St. Augustine to St. John of the Cross, echo again and again the language of Plotinus. It is true that the differentia which mark off Christianity from all other religions are strange and poignant: but these very differentia make of it the most perfect of settings for the mystic life. Its note of close intimacy, of direct and personal contact with a spiritual reality given here and now— its astonishing combination of splendour and simplicity, of the sacramental and transcendent—all these things minister to the needs of the mystical type.
Hence the Christian system, or some colourable imitation of it, has been found essential by almost all the great mystics of the West. They adopt its nomenclature, explain their adven- tures by the help of its creed, identify their Absolute with the Christian God. Amongst European mystics the most usually quoted exception to this rule is Blake; yet it is curious to notice that the more inspired his utterance, the more pas- sionately and dogmatically Christian even this hater of the Churches becomes :—
**We behold Where Death eternal is put off eternally. O Lamb Assume the dark satanic body in the Virgin’s womb! O Lamb divine! it cannot thee annoy! O pitying One, Thy pity is from the foundation of the world, and thy Redemption Begins already in Eternity.” *
This is the doctrine of the Incarnation in a nutshell: here
* 6 Vala,” vill. 237-
128 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
St. Thomas himself would find little to correct. Of the two. following extracts from “Jerusalem,” the first is but a poet’s gloss on the Catholic’s cry, “ O felix culpa!” the second is an almost perfect epitome of Christian theology and ethics :—
‘*If I were pure, never could I taste the sweets Of the forgiveness of sins. If I were holy, I never could behold the tears Of Love... O Mercy! O divine Humanity ! O Forgiveness, O Pity and Compassion! If I were pure I should never Have known Thee.”
** Wouldst thou love one who never died For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee? And if God dieth not for man, and giveth not Himself Eternally for Man, Man could not exist, for Man is Love As God is Love. Every kindness to another is a little death In the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by brotherhood.’ *?
What needs to be emphasized is this: that whether the dogmas of Christianity be or be not accepted on the scientific and historical plane, they are necessary to an adequate descrip-
_— —~
i ee
adel
4 a
tion of mystical experience—at least, of the fully developed q
dynamic mysticism of the West. We must therefore be pre- pared in reading the works of the contemplatives for much strictly denominational language; and shall be wise if we preface the encounter by some consideration of this language, and of its real meaning for those who use and believe it. No one needs, I suppose, to be told that the two chief features of Christian schematic theology are the dogmas of
the Trinity and the Incarnation. They correlate and explain ©
each other: forming together, for the Christian, the “final key” to the riddle of the world. The history of practical Chris- tianity is the history of the attempt to exhibit their meaning in space and time. The history of mystical philosophy is the history—still incomplete—of the demonstration of their meaning in eternity.
Some form of Trinitarian dogma is found to be essential,
as a method of describing observed facts, the moment that —
mysticism begins either (2) to analyse its own psychological conditions, or (4) to philosophize upon its intuitions of the Absolute. It must, that is to say, divide the aspects under
* © Terusalem,” lxi. 44 and xcv. 23.

ee oe
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 129
which it knows the Godhead, if it is to deal with them in a fruitful or comprehensible way. The Unconditioned One, which is, for Neoplatonist and Catholic alike, the final object of the mystic quest, cannot of itself satisfy the deepest instincts of humanity: for man is aware that diversity in unity is a necessary condition if perfection of character is to be expressed. Though the idea of unity alone may serve to define the End—and though the mystics return to it again and again as a relief from that “heresy of multiplicity” by which they are oppressed—it cannot by itself be adequate to the description of the All.
The first question, then, must be—How many of such aspects are necessary to the complete presentment of the mystic’s position? How many faces of Reality does he see? At the very least, as we have already seen, he must be aware of two aspects: (a) that Holy Spirit within, that Divine Life by which his own life is transfused and upheld, and of which he becomes increasingly conscious as his education proceeds ; (4) that Transcendent Spirit without, the “ Absolute,” towards union with which the indwelling and increasingly dominant spirit of love pushes the developing soul. It is the function of ecstasy to fuse these two aspects of God—to bring back, in mystical language, the Lover to the Beloved—but it is no less the function of mystical philosophy to separate them. Over and over again the mystics and their critics acknowledge, . explicitly or implicitly, the necessity of this act.
Thus even the rigid monotheism of Israel and Islam cannot, in the hands of the Kabalists and the Sifis, get away from an essential dualism in the mystical experience. According to the Zohar, says Mr. A. E. Waite, its best modern student, “God is considered as immanent in all that has been created or eman- ated, and yet is transcendent to all.”! So too the Sifis. God, they say, is to be contemplated (a) outwardly in the imperfect beauties of the earth; (6) inwardly, by meditation. Further, since He is One, and in all things, “to conceive one’s self as separate from God is an error: yet only when one sees oneself as separate from God, can one reach out to God. 2
Thus Delacroix, speaking purely as a psychologist, and
* A. E. Waite, ‘‘ The Doctrine and Literature of the Kabalah,” p. 35. * Palmer, “ Oriental Mysticism,” pt. i. cap. i. K
130 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
denying to the mystical revelation—which he attributes ex- clusively to the normal content of the subliminal mind—any transcendental value, writes with entire approval of St. Teresa, that she “set up externally to herself the definite God of the Bible, at the same time as she set up within her soul the confused God of the Pseudo-Areopagite: the One of Neo- platonism. The first is her guarantee of the orthodoxy of the second, and prevents her from losing herself in an indistinction which is non-Christian. The confused God within is highly dangerous. ... St. Teresa knew how to avoid this peril, and, served by her rich subconscious life, by the exaltation of her mental images, by her faculty of self-division on the one hand, on the other by her vare powers of unification, she realized simultaneously a double state in which the two Gods [z.2., the two ways of apprehending God, transcendence and immanence] were guarantees of each other, mutually consolidating and enriching one another: such is the intellectual vision of the Trinity in the Seventh Habitation.” =?
It is probable that St. Teresa, confronted by this astonishing analysis, would have objected that her Trinity, unlike that of her eulogist, consisted of three and not two Persons. - His language concerning confused interior and orthodox exterior Gods would certainly have appeared to her delicate and honest mind both clumsy and untrue: nor could she have allowed that the Unconditioned One of the Neoplatonists was an adequate description of the strictly personal Divine Majesty Whom she found enthroned in the inmost sanctuary of the Castle of the Soul. | What St. Teresa really did was to actualize in her own experience, apprehend in the “ground of her soul” by means of her extraordinarily developed transcendental perceptions, the three distinct and personal Aspects of the Godhead which are acknowledged by the Christian religion. (
First, the Father, pure transcendent Being, creative Source and Origin of all that Is: the Unconditioned and Unknowable One of the Neoplatonist: Who is to be conceived, pace M. Delacroix, as utterly transcendent to the subject rather than “set up within the soul.” |
® Delacroix, ‘‘ Etudes sur le Mysticisme,” p. 75. The reference in the last sentence is to St. Teresa’s ‘‘ Castillo Interior,”
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 131
Secondly, in the Person of Christ, Teresa isolated and distinguished the Logos or Creative Word, the expression, outbirth, or manifestation of the Father’s thought. Here is the point at which the Divine Substance first becomes appre- hensible by the spirit of man; here that mediating principle “raised up between heaven and earth” which is at once the Mirror of Pure Being and the Light of a finite world. The Second Person of the Christian Trinity is for the believer not only the brightness or manifestation of Deity, but also the personal, inexhaustible, and responsive Fount of all life and Object of all love: Who, because of His taking up (in the Incarnation) of humanity into the Godhead, is of necessity the one and only Bridge between the finite and _ infinite, between the individual and the Absolute Life, and hence in mystic language the “true Bridegroom” of every human soul.
Thirdly, she recognized within herself the germ of that Absolute Life, the indwelling Spirit which is the source of man’s transcendental consciousness and his link with the Being of God. That is to say, the Holy Spirit of Divine Love, the Real Desirous seeking for the Real Desired, without Whose presence any knowledge of or communion with God on man’s part would be inconceivable.
In the supreme Vision of the Trinity which was vouchsafed to St. Teresa in the Seventh Habitation of the soul, these three aspects became fused in One, In the deepest recesses of her spirit, in that unplumbed abyss where selfhood ceases to have meaning, and the individual soul touches the life of the All, distinction vanished and she “saw God in a point.” Such an experience, such an intuition of simple and undifferenti- ated Godhead—the Unity—beyond those three centres of Divine Consciousness which we call the Trinity of Persons, is highly characteristic of mysticism. The German mystics—tempera- mentally miles asunder from Teresa—described it as the attainment of the “ still wilderness” or “lonely desert of Deity ”: the limitless Divine Abyss, impersonal, indescribable, for ever hid in the Cloud of Unknowing, and yet the true Country of the Soul.? |
* See Tauler, Sermon on St. John Baptist, and Third Instruction (‘* The Inner Way,” pp. 97 and 321) ; Suso, ‘‘ Buchlein von der Wahrheit,” cap. v. ; Ruysbroeck, “«T’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,”’ 1. iii, caps. ii. and vi.
132 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
These propositions, which appear when thus laid down to be hopelessly academic, violently divorced from life, were not for St. Teresa or any other Christian mystic propositions at all; but attempts towards the description of first-hand experience. “How this vision comes to pass,” she says, “I know not; but it does come to pass, and the three Persons of the Holy Trinity then show themselves to the soul with a radiance as of fire,
which, like a shining cloud, first invades the mind and admirably . illuminates it. Then she sees those three distinct Persons, and
she knows with a sovereign truth that these three are One in substance, One in Power, One in wisdom, One God: so that those things which we know in this world by faith, the soul, in this light, understands by a sort of vision which is neither the vision of the body nor that of the soul; for it is not a sensible vision. There those three Persons communicate Themselves to the soul, and speak to her and .. . it seems to her that these three divine Persons have never left her: she sees clearly, in the manner which I have described, that they are within her soul, in its most inward part, as it were within a deep abyss. This person, a stranger to learning, knows not how to tell what is this deep abyss, but it is there that she feels within herself this divine companionship.” !
Mystical writers remind us over and over again, that life as perceived by the human mind shows an inveterate tendency to arrange itself in triads: that if they proclaim the number Three in the heavens, they can also point to it as dominating every- where upon the earth. Here Christianity did but give form to the deepest instinct of the human mind: an instinct which
made Pythagoras call Three the number of God because © beginning, middle, and end were contained therein. Thus to ~ Hindu thought the Absolute Godhead was unknowable, but — He disclosed three faces to man—Brahma the Creator, © Shiva the Destroyer, Krishna the Repairer—and these three — were One. So too the Neoplatonists, touched by the spirit —
of the East, distinguished three worlds; the Sensible or
Phenomenal, the Rational or Intellectual, the Intelligible or |
Spiritual; and three aspects of God—the Unconditioned
Absolute, the Logos or Artificer, and the divine Essence or — Spirit which is both absolute and created. We have here, as
* St. Teresa, ‘‘ El Castillo Interior,” Moradas Sétimas, cap. i.
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 133
it were, the first sketch of the Christian Trinity; the dry bones awaiting the breath of more abundant life. Correspond- ing with this diagram of God’s nature, they see also three grades of beauty; the Corporeal, the Spiritual, and the Divine.
Man, that “thing of threes,” of body, soul and spirit, follows in his path towards unity the Threefold Way: for “our soul,” says Lady Julian, “is made-trinity like to the unmade blissful Trinity, known and loved from without beginning, and in the making oned to the Maker.” So too we have seen that the psychic self is most easily understood by a division into Emotion, Intellect, and Will. Even the separation of things into Subject and Object implies a third term, the relation between them, without which no thought can be complete. Therefore the very principle of analogy imposes upon man a Trinitarian definition of Reality as the one with which his mind is best able to cope.?__ It is easy for the hurried rationalist to demonstrate the absurdity of this circumstance, but he will find it a very different matter when it comes to disproving it.
“T could wish,” says St. Augustine, “that men would con- sider these three things that are in themselves ... To Be, To Know, and to Will. For I am, and I know, and I will; I am knowing and willing, and I know myself to be and to will; and I will to be and to know. In these three therefore let him who can, see how inseparable a life there is—even one life, one mind one essence: finally, how inseparable is the distinction, and yet a distinction. Surely a man hath it before him: let him look into himself and see and tell me. But when he discovers and can see anything of these, let him not think that he has dis- covered that which is above these Unchangeable: which Is unchangeably and Knows unchangeably and Wills’ un- changeably.” 3
In one of the best recorded instances of pure mystical
vision, Julian of Norwich saw the Trinity of the Divine Nature
shining in the phenomenal as well as in the spiritual world.
t Julian of Norwich, ‘‘ Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. lv. So St. Thomas says (**Summa Contra Gentiles,” 1. iv. cap. xxvi), ‘A likeness of the Divine Trinity is observable in the human mind.”
2 ‘¢The three Persons of the Trinity,” said John Scotus Erigena, ‘‘ are less modes of the Divine Substance than modes under which our mind conceives the Divine Substance’’—a stimulating statement ot dubious orthodoxy.
3 Aug. Conf., bk. xiii. cap. xi.
134 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
“He showed me,” she says, “a little thing, the quantity of an hazel nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought, What may this be? And it was.answered gener- ally thus: J¢ zs all that 1s made. . . . In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover, | cannot tell.” #
Julian the anchoress, a simple and deeply human English- woman of middle age dwelling alone in her churchyard cell with only a tiny window by which to see and hear the outer world, might well be called the poet of the Trinity: that austere and subtle dogma of which the mystics of the fourteenth century write with a passion which will be little understood by those who look upon it as “orthodoxy reduced to mathematics.”
That most lovable and poetic of visionaries, who seems in her Revelations of Love to dream before a Crucifix set up in flowery fields, treats this highly metaphysical doctrine with a homely intimacy and a vigorous originality which carry with them at any rate a conviction of her own direct and personal apprehension of the truth which she struggles to describe. “I beheld,” she says of a vision which is closely parallel to that of St. Teresa in the “Seventh Habitation of the Soul,” and far more lucidly if less splendidly expressed, “the working of all the blessed Trinity: in which beholding, I saw and understood these three properties: the property of the Fatherhood, the property of the Motherhood, and the property of the Lordhood, in one God. In our Father Almighty we have our keeping and our bliss as anent our natural Substance,? which is to us by our making, without beginning. And in the Second Person in wit and wisdom we have our keeping as anent our Sense-soul: our restoring and our saving ; for He is our Mother, Brother, and | Saviour. And in our good Lord, the Holy Ghost, we have our. rewarding and our meed-giving for our living and our travail, and endless overpassing of all that we desire, in His marvellous courtesy, of His high plenteous grace. For all our life is in
* Of. cit., cap. v. : 2 Sub iades is here, of course, to be understood in the scholastic sense, as the reality which underlies merely phenomenal existence.
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three: in the first we have our Being, in the second we have our Increasing, and in the third we have our Fulfilling ; the first is Nature, the second is Mercy, and the third is Grace... The high Might of the Trinity is our Father, and the deep Wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, and the great Love of the Trinity is our Lord: and all this we have in Nature and in our Substantial Making.”2
Again, in a passage of exquisite tenderness, which comes after the fire and dark of Teresa like cooling waters to the soul: “As verily as God is our Father, so verily God is our Mother ; and that shewed He in all [her revelations] and especially in these sweet words where He saith: J z# am. That is to say, I tt am, the Might and the Goodness of the Fatherhood ; I it am, the Wisdom of the Motherhood; I tt am, the Light and the Grace that 1s all blessed Love; I tt am, the Trinity, I tt am, the Unity: lam the sovereign Goodness of all manner of things. I am that maketh thee to love: Tam that maketh thee to long: I tt am, the endless fulfilling of all true desires.” 3
So Christopher Hervey—
**The whole world round is not enough to fill The heart’s three corners, but it craveth still. Only the Trinity that made it can Suffice the vast triangled heart of Man.” 4
It is a fact that any attempt towards a definition of God which does not account for and acknowledge these three aspects is found in experience to be incomplete. They provide objec- tives for the heart, the intellect, and the will: for they offer to the Self material for its highest love, its deepest thought, its act of supreme volition. Under the familiar Platonic terms of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, they represent the divine source and end of Ethics, Science, and Art, the three supreme activities
* J.e., the Second Person or the Christian Trinity is the redemptive ‘‘ fount ot mercy,” the medium by which Grace, the free gift of transcendental life, reaches and vivifies human nature: ‘‘ permeates it,” in Eucken’s words, ‘‘ with the Infinite and Eternal” (‘‘ Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens,” p. 181).
2 ‘ Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. Iviii.
3 Op. cit., cap. lix.
4 “The School of the Heart,’ Epigram x. This book, which is a free transla- tion of the ‘‘ Scola Cordis” of Benedict Haeften (1635), is often, but wrongly, attributed to Francis Quarles.
136 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
of man. Thus the ideals of artist, student, and philanthropist, who all seek under different modes the same reality, are gathered up in the mystic’s One; as the pilgrimage of the three kings ended in the finding of one Star.
“What is God?” says St. Bernard. “Length, breadth, height, and depth, ‘What,’ you say, ‘you do after all profess to believe in the fourfold Godhead which was an abomination to your’ Not in the least. . . . God is designated One to suit our comprehension, not to describe His character. A7s character ts capable of division, He Himself ts not. The words are different, the paths are many, but one thing is signified; the paths lead to one Person.” !
All possible ways of conceiving this One Person are found in the end to range themselves under three heads. He is “above all and through all and in you all,”2 said St. Paul, anticipating the Councils in a flash of mystic intuition, and giving to the infant Church the shortest and most perfect definition of its Triune God. Being, which is above all, manifests itself as Becoming; as the dynamic, omnipresent Word of Life. The Divine Love immanent in the heart and in the world comes forth from, and returns to, the Absolute One. Thus is com- pleted “the Eternal Circle from Goodness, through Goodness, to Goodness.” 3 It is true that to these fundamental aspects of the perceived Godhead—that Being, Becoming, and Desire whereto the worlds keep time—the mystics have given many and various names; for they have something of the freedom of true intimates in treating of the Reality which they love. In particular, those symbols of the Absolute which are drawn from the great and formless forces of the universe, rather than from the orthodox but necessarily anthropomorphic imagery of human relationship, have always appealed to them. Their intense apprehension of Spirit seems to find freer and more adequate expression in such terms, than in those in which the notion of space is involved or which are capable of suggesting a concrete picture to the mind. Though they know as well as the philosophers that “there must always be something symbolic in our way of expressing the spiritual life,” since “that unfathomable infinite whose spiritual character is first recognized in our human experience, can never reveal itself fully and freely under the limitation of our earthly
* «De Consideratione,” bk. v. cap. viii. * Ephesiansiv.6. 3 Compare p. 49.
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 137
existence”!; yet they ever seek, like the artists they are, some new and vital image which is not yet part of the debased currency of popular religion, and conserves its original power of stinging the imagination to more vivid life.
Thus “the Kingdom of Heaven,” says Law, “stands in this threefold life, where three are one, because it is a manifestation of the Deity, which is Three and One; the Father has His dis- tinct manifestation in the Fire, which is always generating the Light ; the Son has His distinct manifestation in the Light, which is always generated from the Fire; the Holy Ghost has His manifestation in the Spirit, that always proceeds from both, and is always united with them. It is this eternal unbeginning Trinity in Unity of Fire, Light, and Spirit, that constitutes Eternal Nature, the Kingdom of Heaven, the heavenly Jeru- salem, the Divine Life, the Beatific Visibility, the majestic Glory and Presence of God. Through this Kingdom of Heaven, or Eternal Nature, is the invisible God, the incomprehensible Trinity, eternally breaking forth and manifesting itself in a boundless height and depth of blissful wonders, opening and displaying itself to all its creatures as in an infinite variation and endless multiplicity of its powers, beauties, joys, and glories.” 2
Perhaps an easier, better, more beautiful example of these abstract symbols of the Trinity than Law’s Fire, Light, and Spirit is that of Light, Life, and Love: a threefold picture of the Real which is constantly dwelt upon and elaborated by the Christian mystics. Transcendent Light, intangible but un- escapeable, ever emanating Its splendour through the Universe: indwelling, unresting, and energizing Life: desirous and direc- tive Love—these are cardinal aspects of Reality to which they return again and again in their efforts to find words which will express the inexpressible truth.
(2) LIGHT, ineffable and uncreated, the perfect symbol of pure undifferentiated Being: above the intellect, as St. Augus- tine reminds us, but known to him who loves.3 This Uncreated
* Eucken, ‘* Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens,” p. 131.
2 **An Appeal to All who Doubt” (‘‘ Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law,” p. 54). Law’s symbols are here borrowed from the system of his master, Jacob Boehme. (See the ‘‘De Signatura Rerum” of Boehme, cap. xiv.)
3 Aug. Conf., bk. vii. cap. x.
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Light is the “deep yet dazzling darkness” of the Dionysian school, “dark from its surpassing brightness . . . as the shining of the sun on his course is as darkness to weak eyes.”! It is Hildegarde’s lux vivens, Dante’s somma luce, wherein he saw multiplicity in unity, the ingathered leaves of all the universe ?: the Eternal Father, or Fount of Things. “For well we know,” says Ruysbroeck, “that the bosom of the Father is our ground and origin, wherein our life and being is begun.” 3
(6) LIFE, the Son, hidden Steersman of the Universe, the Logos, Fire, or Cosmic soul of things. This out-birth or Con- cept of the Father’s Mind, which He possesses within Himself, as Battista Vernazza was told in her ecstasy,4 is that Word of Creation which, since It is alive and infinite, no formula can contain: the Word eternally “spoken” or generated by the Transcendent Light. “This is why,” says Ruysbroeck again, “all that lives in the hidden unity of the Father lives also in the Son.”5 This life, then, is the flawless expression or character of the Father, Sapzentza Patris. It is at once the personal and adorable Object of the mystic’s adventure—his closest comrade and his beckoning star—and the inmost prin- ciple, the sustaining power, of a dynamic universe; for that which intellect defines as the Logos or Cosmic Spirit, contem- plative love Anows as Wonderful, Counsellor, and Prince of Peace.
Since Christ, for the Christian philosopher, zs Divine Life Itself—the drama of Christianity but expressing this fact and its implications “in a point ”—it follows that His active spirit is to be discerned, not symbolically, but in the most veritable sense, in the ecstatic and abounding life of the world. In the rapturous vitality of the birds, in their splendid glancing flight : in the swelling of buds and the sacrificial beauty of the flowers : in the great and solemn rhythms of the sea—there is somewhat of Bethlehem in all these things, somewhat too of Calvary in their self-giving pains. It was this re-discovery of Nature’s Christliness which Blake desired so passionately when he sang—
* Tauler, 3rd Instruction (‘* The Inner Way,” p. 324).
? Par. xxxili. 67, 85.
3 “*T’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,” |. iii. cap. v.
4 Von Hiigel, ‘‘ The Mystical Element of Religion,” vol. i. p. 357. 5 Ruysbroeck, of. ctt., doc. cit.
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 139
**T will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant land.”
Here then it is, on this remote and airy pinnacle of faith, at the utmost boundaries of human speech, that mystical theology suddenly shows herself—not as the puzzle-headed constructor of impossible creeds, but as accepting and transmuting to a more radiant life those two profound but apparently contra- dictory metaphysical definitions of Reality which we have already discussed.t Eternal Becoming, God immanent and dynamic, striving with and in His world: the unresting “ flux of things” of Heracleitus, the crying aloud of that Word “which is through all things everlastingly "—the evolutionary world-process beloved of modern philosophers—is here placed once for all in true relation with pure transcendent and un- moved Being; the Absolute One of Xenophanes and the Platonists. This Absolute is discerned by mystic intuition as the “End of Unity” in whom all diversities must cease ;2 the Ocean to which that ceaseless and painful Becoming, that unresting river of life, in which we are immersed, tends to return: the Son going to the Father.
(c) LOVE, the principle of attraction, which seems to partake at once of the transcendental and the created worlds. If we consider the Father as Supreme Subject—“ origin,’ as Aquinas says, “of the entire procession of Deity”3—and the Son or generated Logos as the Object of His thought, in whom, says Ruysbroeck, “He contemplates Himself and all things in an eternal Now” ;4 then this personal Spirit of Love, z/ desivo e il velle, represents the relation between the two, and constitutes the very character of the whole. “They breathe forth a spirit,’ says Ruysbroeck, of the First and Second Persons “which is their will and love.”5 Proceeding, according to Christian doctrine, from Light and Life, the Father and Son— implicit, that is, in both the Absolute Source and dynamic flux of things—this divine and unresting spirit of desire is found
* Supra, Cap. II. 2 Tauler, of. cit., loc. cit. 3 ** Summa Contra Gentiles,” 1. iv. cap. xxvi. x 4 “* TOrnement des Noces Spirituelles,” ]. iii. cap. v.
5 Op. cit., 1. il. cap. Xxxvii
140 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
enshrined in our very selfhood; and is the agent by which that selfhood is merged in the Absolute Self. ‘“ My love is my weight,” said St. Augustine It is the spiritual equivalent of that gravitation which draws all things to their place. Thus Bernard Holland says in his Introduction to Boehme’s “ Dia- logues,” “In a deep sense, the desire of the Spark of Life in the Soul to return to its Original Source is part of the longing desire of the universal Life for its own heart or centre. Of this longing, the universal attraction, striving against resistance, towards a universal centre, proved to govern the phenomenal or physical world, is but the outer sheath and visible working.” Again, “ Desire is everything in Nature; does everything. Heaven is Nature filled with divine Life attracted by Desire.” 2
“The best masters say,” says Eckhart, “that the love. wherewith we love is the Holy Spirit.3 Some deny it. But this is always true: all those motives by which we are moved to love, in these is nothing else than the Holy Spirit.” 4
“God wills,” says Ruysbroeck, gathering these scattered symbols to unity again, “that we should come forth from our- selves in this Eternal Light ; that we should pursue in a super- natural manner that image which is our true Life, and that we should possess it with Him actively and fruitively in eternal blessedness ... this going forth of the contemplative is also in Love: for by fruitive love he overpasses his created essence and finds and tastes the riches and delights of God, which He causes to flow without ceasing in the most secret chamber of the soul, at that place where it is most like unto the sublimity of God.” 5
Here only, in the innermost sanctuary of being, the soul’s “last habitation,’ as St. Teresa said, is the truth which these symbols express truly known: for “as to how the Trinity is
* Aug. Conf,, bk. xiii. cap. ix.
? Introduction to ‘‘ Three Dialogues of the Supersensual Life,” p. xxx.
3 Probably St. Thomas Aquinas, the usual source of Eckhart’s more orthodox utterances. Compare ‘‘Summa Contra Gentiles,” 1. iv. cap. xxiii: ‘‘Since the Holy Ghost proceeds as the love wherewith God loves Himself, and since God loves with the same love Himself and other beings for the sake of His own goodness, it is clear that the love wherewith God loves us belongs to the Holy Ghost. In like manner also the love wherewith we love God.”
4 Pred. xii.
5 * T’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,” 1. iii. cap. v.
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one and the Trinityin the unity of the nature is one, whilst nevertheless the Trinity comes forth from the unity, this cannot be expressed in words,” says Suso, “owing to the simplicity of that deep abyss. Hither it is, into this intelligible where that the spirit, spiritualizing itself, soars up; now flying in the measureless heights, now swimming in the soundless deeps, of the sublime marvels of the Godhead!”
Mystical philosophy, then, has availed itself gladly of the doctrine of the Trinity in expressing its vision of the nature of that Absolute which is found, by those who attain the deep Abyss of the Godhead, to be essentially One. But it is by the complementary Christian dogma of the Incarnation that it has best been able to describe and explain the nature of the inward and personal mystic experience. “ Man in the course of his attainment,” says a living authority on mysticism, “is at first three—body, soul, and spirit—that is, when he sets out on the Great Quest; he is two at a certain stage—when the soul has conceived Christ, for the spirit has then descended and the body is for the time being outside the Divine Alliance ; but he is in fine one—that is to say, when the whole man has died in Christ—which is the term of his evolution.” 2
The Incarnation, which is for popular Christianity synony- mous with the historical birth and earthly life of Christ, is for the mystic not only this but also a perpetual Cosmic and personal process. It is an everlasting bringing forth, in the universe and also in the individual ascending soul, of the divine and perfect Life, the pure character of God, of which the one his- torical life dramatized the essential constituents. Hence the soul, like the physical embryo, resumes in its upward progress , the spiritual life-history of the race. “The one secret, the : greatest of all,” says Patmore, is “the doctrine of the Incarna- tion, regarded not as an historical event which occurred two thousand years ago, but as an event which is renewed in the body of every one who is in the way to the fulfilment of his original destiny.” 3
We have seen that for mystical theology the Second Person
* Suso, Leben, cap. lvi.
2 A. E. Waite, ‘‘ The Hidden Church of the Holy Grail,” p. 539. 3 ‘* The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” ‘‘ Homo,” xix,
142 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
of the Trinity is the Wisdom of the Father, the Word of Life. The fullness of this Word could therefore only be communicated to the human consciousness by a Life. In the Incarnation this Logos, this divine character of Reality, penetrated the illusions of the sensual world—in other words, the illusions of all the selves whose ideas compose that world—and “saved ” it by this infusion of truth. A divine, suffering, self-sacrificing Person- ality was then shown as the sacred heart of a living, striving universe: and for once the Absolute was exhibited in the terms of finite existence. Some such event as this breaking through of the divine and archetypal life into the temporal world is perceived by the mystical philosopher to bea necessity if man was ever to see in terms of life that greatness of life to which he belongs: learn to transcend the world of sense, and rebuild his life upon the levels of reality. Thus it is that the Catholic priest in the Christmas Mass gives thanks, not for the setting in hand of any commercial process of redemption, but for a revelation of reality, “Quia per incarnati Verbi mysterium, nova mentis nostrae oculis lux tuae claritatis infulsit: ut dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur.” The very essence of mystical Christianity seems to be summed up in these lovely words.!
“The Son of God, the Eternal Word in the Father, who is the glance, or brightness, and the power of the light eternity,” says Boehme, “must become man and be born in you, if you will know God: otherwise you are in the dark stable and go about groping.” 2 “The Word,” says Ruysbroeck finely, “is no other than See. And this is the coming forth and the birth of the Son of the Eternal Light, in Whom all blessedness is seen and known.” 3
Once at any rate, they say in effect, the measure of that which it was possible for the Spirit of Life to do and for living creatures to be, was filled to the brim. By this event, all were assured that the ladder of Creation was made whole; in
* ‘© Because by the mystery of the Incarnate Word the new light of Thy brightness hath shone upon the eyes of our mind: that we, knowing God seen of the eyes, by Him may be snatched up into the love of that which eye hath not seen” (Missale Romanum. Praefatio Solemnis de Nativitate).
2 «¢ The Threefold Life of Man,” cap. ill, § 31.
3 Ruysbroeck, op, céé., 1, iii. cap. i.
et ee a ee tes mi)
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 143
this hypostatic union, the breach between appearance and reality, between God and man, was healed. The Bridge so made—to use St. Catherine of Siena’s allegory again—is eternal, since it was “laid before the foundation of the world ” ‘in the “Eternal Now.” Thus the voice of the Father says to her in that vision, “I also wish thee to look at the Bridge of My only-begotten Son, and see the greatness thereof, for it reaches from Heaven to earth; that is, that the earth of your humanity is joined to the greatness of the Deity thereby. I say, then, that this Bridge reaches from Heaven to earth, and constitutes the union which I have made with man.... So the height of the Divinity, humbled to the earth, and joined with your humanity, made the Bridge and reformed the road. Why was this done? In order that man might come to his true happiness with the angels. And observe that it is not enough, in order that you should have life, that My Son should have made you this Bridge, unless you walk there- on.” “Our high Father God Almighty, which is Being,” says Lady Julian, “He knew and loved us from afore any time. Of which knowing, in His marvellous deep charity, and the foreseeing counsel of all the blessed Trinity, He willed that the Second Person should become our Mother.” 2
It is of course this quickening communication of grace to nature, of God to man—this claim to an influx of ultimate reality, possible of assimilation by all—which constitutes the strength of the Christian religion. Instead of the stony diet of the philosophers, it offers to the self hungry for the Absolute that Panis Angelorum, the vivifying principle of the world. That is to say, it gives positive and experimental knowledge of and union with a supreme Personality—absorption into His mystical body—instead of the artificial conviction produced by concentration on an idea. It knits up the universe; shows the phenomenal pierced in all directions by the real, and made one with it. It provides a solid basis for mysticism: a basis which is at once metaphysical and psychological: and shows that state towards which the world’s deepest minds have always instinctively aspired, as a part of the Cosmic return through Christ to God.
* Dialogo, cap. xxii. # “Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. lix,
144 © AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
**Quivi é la sapienza e la possanza . ch’ apri le strade intra il cielo e la terra onde fu gia si lunga disianza.”?
This is what the Christian mystics mean to express when — they declare over and over again that the return to the Divine Substance, the Absolute, which is the end of the soul’s ascent, can only be made through the humanity of Christ. The Son, the Word, is the character of the Father: that in which the Ineffable Godhead knows Himself, as we only know ourselves in our own characters. He is thus a double link : the means of God’s self-consciousness, the means of man’s consciousness of God. How then, asks mystic theology, could such a link complete its attachments without some such process as that which the Incarnation dramatized in time and space? The Principle of Life is also the Principle of Restitution; by which the imperfect and broken life of sense is mended and transformed into the perfect life of spirit. Hence the title of Repairer applied by Boehme and Saint-Martin to the Second Person of the Trinity.
In the last resort, the doctrine of the Incarnation is the © only safeguard of the mystics against the pantheism to which they always tend. The Unconditioned Absolute, so soon as it alone becomes the object of their contemplation, is apt to be conceived merely as Divine Essence; the idea of Personality evaporates and loving communion is at an end. This is probably the reason why so many of the greatest contem- platives—Suso and St. Teresa are cases in point—have found that deliberate meditation upon the humanity of Christ, - difficult and uncongenial as is: this concrete devotion to the . mystical temperament, was a necessity if they were to retain a healthy and well-balanced inner life.
Further, these mystics see in the historic life of Christ an epitome—or if you will, an exhibition—of the essentials of all spiritual life. There they see dramatized not only the ~ Cosmic process of the Divine Wisdom, but also the inward experience of every soul on her way to union with that Absolute “to which the whole Creation moves.” This is why
* Par. xxxiii. 37. ‘‘ Here is the Wisdom and the Power which opened the ways betwixt heaven and earth, for which there erst had been so long a yearning.”
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 145
the expressions which they use to describe the evolution of the mystical consciousness from the birth of the divine in the spark of the soul to its final unification with the Absolute Life are so constantly chosen from the Drama of Faith. In this drama they see described under veils the supreme and necessary adventures of the spirit. Its obscure and humble birth, its education in poverty, its temptation, mortification, and solitude, its “illuminated life” of service and contemplation, the desolation of that “dark night of the soul” in which it seems abandoned by the Divine: the painful death of the self, its resurrection to the glorified existence of the Unitive Way, its final reabsorption in its Source—all these, they say, were lived once in a supreme degree in the flesh. Moreover, the degree
of closeness with which the individual experience adheres — to this Pattern is always taken by them as a standard of the healthiness, ardour, and success of its transcendental — activities,
** Apparve in questa forma Per dare a noi la norma.”
sang Jacopone da Todi. “And he who vainly thinketh other- wise,’ says the “Theologia Germanica” with uncompromising vigour, “is deceived. And he who saith otherwise, lieth.” 1 Those to whom such a parallel seems artificial to the last degree should remember that according to the doctrine of mysticism that drama of the self-limitation and self-sacrifice. of the Absolute Life, which was orice played out in the pheno- © menal world—forced, as it were, upon the consciousness of dim-eyed men—is eternally going forward upon the plane of - reality. To them the Cross of Calvary is implicit in the Rose of the World. The law of this Infinite Life, which was in the Incarnation expressing Its own nature to a supreme degree, ° must then also be the law of the finite life ; in so far as that life aspires to transcend individual limitations, rise to freedom,
and attain union with Infinity. It is this governing idea which
justifies the apparently fanciful allegorizations of Christian
history which swarm in the works of the mystics.
To exhibit these allegorizations in any detail would be tedious. All that is necessary is that the principle underlying
* Theologia Germanica,”’ cap. xviii. L
{
146 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
them should be understood, when anyone can make without difficulty the specific attributions. I give, then, but one example: that which is referred by mystical writers to the Nativity, and concerns the eternal Birth or Generation of the Son or Divine Word.
This Birth is in its first, or Cosmic sense, the welling forth of the Spirit of Life from the Divine Abyss of the unconditioned Godhead. “From our proper Source, that is to say, from the
Father and all that which lives in Him, there shines,” says Ruys- |
_broeck, “an eternal Ray, the which is the Birth of the Son.”! It is of this perpetual generation of the Word that Meister Eckhart speaks, when he says in his Christmas sermon, “ We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and ever ceases to bear in all Eternity: ‘whilst this birth also comes to pass in Time and in human nature. Saint Augustine says this Birth is ever taking place.’ At this point, with that strong practical instinct which is characteristic of the mystics, Eckhart turns abruptly from speculation to immediate experience, and continues, “ But if it takes not place in me, what avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me.” 2
Here in a few words the two-fold character of this Mystic Birth is exhibited. The interest is suddenly deflected from its Cosmic to its personal aspect; and the individual is reminded that in him, no less than in the Archetypal Universe, real life
must be born if real life is to be lived. “When the soul brings”
forth the Son,” he says in another place, “it is happier than Mary.” 3 Since the soul, according to mystic principles, can only
perceive Reality in proportion as she is real, know God by becoming God-like, it is clear that this birth is the initial
* “T’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,” 1. iii. cap. v. The extreme antiquity of this idea is illustrated by the Catholic practice, dating from Patristic times, of ~ celebrating three Masses on Christmas Day. Of these the first, at midnight, com- — memorates the Eternal Generation of the Son; the second, at dawn, His incarnation — upon earth; the third His birth in the heart of man. See Kellner, ‘‘ Heortology” —
(English translation, London, 1908), p. 156.
2 Eckhart, Pred. i., ‘‘ Mystische Schriften,” p. 13. Compare Tauler, Sermon —
on the Nativity of Our Lady (‘‘ The Inner Way,” p. 167).
4
3 This idea of re-birth is probably of Oriental origin. It can be traced back om
Egypt, being found in the Hermetic writings of the third century B.c. See Petrie, —
‘** Personal Religion in Egypt before Christianity,” p. 167.
ad
MYSTICISM AND THEOLOGY 147
necessity. The true and definitely directed mystical life does and must open with that most actual and stupendous, though indescribable phenomenon, the coming forth into consciousness of man’s deeper, spiritual self, which ascetical and mystical writers of all ages have agreed to call Regeneration or Re-birth.
We have already considered! the New Birth in its purely psychological aspect, as the emergence of the transcendental sense. Hereits more profound and mystical side is exhibited, its divine character revealed. By a process which may indifferently be described as the birth of something new or the coming forth of something which has slept—since both these phrases are but metaphors for another and more secret thing—the eye is opened on Eternity; the self, abruptly made aware of Reality, comes forth from the cave of illusion like a child from the womb
and begins to live upon the supersensual plane. Then she
feels in her inmost part a new presence, a new consciousness— it were hardly an exaggeration to say a new Person—weak, demanding nurture, clearly destined to pass through many phases of development before its maturity is reached ; yet of so strange a nature, that in comparison with its environment she may well regard it as Divine.
“This change, this upsetting, is called re-birth. Zo be born simply means to enter into a world in which the senses dominate,
\
in which wisdom and love languish in the bonds of individuality. .
To be ve-Gorn means to return to a world where the spirit of wisdom and love governs and animal-man obeys.”? So Eckartshausen. It means, says Jane Lead, “the bringing forth of a new-created Godlike similitude in the soul.”3 This “God- like similitude,’ or New Man, is described by Saint-Martin as “born in the midst of humiliations, his whole history being that of God suffering within us.’4 He is brought forth, says
~ Eckartshausen again, in the stable previously inhabited by the
ox of passion and the ass of prejudice.5 His mother, says Boehme, is the Virgin Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, or Mirror of the Being of God. With the emergence of this new and sublime factor into the conscious field—this spiritual birth
* Supra, p. 63. 2 “The Cloud upon the Sanctuary,” p. 77, 3 The Enochian Walks with God,” p. 3.
4 A. E. Waite, ‘* Louis Claude de Saint-Martin,” p. 263.
5 Op. ctt., p. 81.
148 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
—the mystic life begins: as the Christian epoch began with the emergence of Divine Spirit in the flesh. Paradise, says Boehme, is still in the world, but man is notin Paradise unless he be born again. In that case, he stands therein in the New Birth: He has been lifted, as Eucken would say, to the “spiritual level,” and there finds Paradise, the Independent Spiritual Life “not alien but his own.” 2
Here then are one or two characteristics of the map which
_we shall find the Christian mystics most inclined to use.
There are, of course, other great landmarks upon it: and these we shall meet as we follow in detail the voyages of the questing soul. One warning, however, must be given to amateur geographers before we go on. Like all other maps, this one at its best can but represent by harsh outline and conventional colour the living earth which those travellers have trod. It isa deliberately schematic representation of Reality, a flat and sometimes arid symbol of great landscapes, rushing rivers, awful peaks: dangerous unless these its limitations be always kept in mind. The boy who defined Canada as “very pink” was not much further off the track than those who would limit the Adorable Trinity to the definitions of the “ Athanasian ” Creed ; however useful that chart may be, and is, within the boundaries imposed by its form.
Further, all such maps, and we who treat of them, can but set down in cold blood and with a dreadful pretence of precision, matters which the true explorers of Eternity were only able to apprehend in the ardours of such a passion, in the transports of such a union as we, poor finite slaves of our frittered emotions, could hardly look upon and live. “If you would truly know how these things come to pass,” says St. Bonaventura, in a passage which all students of theology should ever keep in mind, “ask it of grace, not of doctrine; of desire, not of intellect ; of the ardours of prayer, not of the teachings of the schools ; of the Bridegroom, not of the Master; of God, not of man ; of the darkness, not of the day ; not of illumination, but of that Fire which enflames all and wraps us in God with great sweetness and most ardent love. The which Fire most truly is God, and the hearth thereof is in Jerusalem.” 3
* “De Signatura Rerum,” viii. 47. ? ‘‘ Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens,” p. go. 3 “ De Itinerario Mentis in Deo,”’ cap. vii.