CHAPTER VI

MYSTICISM AND SYMBOLISM
Mystical Symbols—Their use and necessity—Their immense variety—Three groups of Symbols—(1) Divine Transcendence and the idea of pilgrimage—(2) Mutual Desire and symbols of love—(3) Divine Immanence, and Symbols of transmutation— (r) Symbols of Pilgrimage—The Siifi Pilgrim—The Seven Valleys of ’Attar—Dante —(z) Mutual Desire—‘‘ The Hymn of Jesus”—‘‘ The Hound of Heaven ”’—The ‘*Following Love”—Symbols of Love—the ‘‘ Spiritual Marriage ’’—St. Bernard— St. Teresa—Richard of St. Victor’s Four Degrees of Ardent Love—(3) Symbols of Transmutation—The Spiritual Alchemists—The Philosopher’s Stone—The material o1 Alchemy—Jacob Boehme—‘“‘ Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury ’”’—the Mystical transmuta- tion—the Maguum Opus—‘* Hunting the Greene Lyon ”—The Red Dragon
adopting, as chart and pilot book of his voyages and
adventures, the scheme of faith, and diagram of the spiritual world, which is adopted by ordinary Christian men. We saw that he found in ita depth and richness of content which the conventional believer in that theology, the “good church- man,” seldom suspects: and that which is here true of the Christian mystic, is true, as regards their respective theologies, of the Pagan, the Mahommedan and the Buddhist as well.
But, since the spiritual adventures of the mystic are not those of ordinary men, it will follow that this map, though ~ always true for him, is not complete. He can press forward to countries which unmystical piety must mark as unexplored. Pushing out from harbour to “the vast and _ stormy sea of the divine,’ he can take soundings, and mark dangers the existence of which such piety never needs to prove. |
Hence it is not strange that certain maps, artistic representa- , tions or symbolic schemes, should have come into being which ° describe or suggest the special experiences of the mystical consciousness, and the doctrines to which these experiences
have given birth. Many of these maps have an uncouth, even 149 |
T our study of theology we saw the Christian mystic
150 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
an impious appearance in the eyes of those unacquainted with the facts which they attempt to translate: as the charts of the deep-sea sailor seem ugly and unintelligible things to those who have never been out of sight of land. Others—and these the most pleasing, most easily understood—have already been made familiar, perhaps tiresomely familiar, to us by the poets; who, intuitively recognizing their suggestive qualities, their links with truth, have borrowed and adapted them to their own business of translating Reality into terms of rhythm and_ speech. Ultimately, however, they owe their origin to the mystics, or to that mystical sense which is innate in all true poets: and in the last resort it is the mystic’s kingdom, and the mystic’s experience, which they affect to describe.
Now these special mystical diagrams, these symbolic and artistic descriptions of man’s inward history—his secret adven- tures with God—are almost endless in their variety: since in each we have a picture of the country of the soul seen through a different temperament. To describe all would be to analyse the whole field of mystical literature, and indeed much other literature as well; to epitomize in fact all that has been dreamed and written concerning the so-called “ inner life”—a dreary and a lengthy task. But the majority of them, I think, tend to express a comparatively small number of essential doctrines or fundamental ways of seeing things; and as regards their imagery, these fall into three great classes; representative of the three principal ways in which man’s spiritual consciousness reacts to the touch of Reality, the three primary if paradoxical facts of which that consciousness must be aware. Hence a consideration of mystic symbols drawn from each of these
groups may give us a key with which to unlock some at |
least of the verbal riddles of the individual adventurer. Thanks to the spatial imagery inseparable from human thinking and human expression, no direct description of spiritual experience is or can be possible to man. It must always be symbolic, allusive, oblique: always suggest, but never tell, the truth: and in this respect there is not much to choose between the fluid and artistic language of vision and the arid technicalities of philosophy. In another respect, however, there is a great deal to choose between them: and here the visionary, not the philosopher, receives the palm.
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The greater the suggestive quality of the symbol used, the more answering emotion it evokes in those to whom it is addressed, the more truth it will convey. A good symbolism, therefore, will be more than mere diagram or mere allegory: it will use to the utmost the resources of beauty and of passion, will bring with it hints of mystery and wonder, bewitch with dreamy periods the mind to which it is addressed. Its appeal will not be to the clever brain, but to the desirous heart,
the intuitive sense, of man. The three great classes of symbols which I propose to
consider, play upon three deep cravings of the self, three great expressions of man’s restlessness, which only mystic truth can fully satisfy. The first is the craving which make him a pilgrim and wanderer. It is the longing to go out from his normal world in search of a lost home, a “better country”; an Eldorado, a Sarras, a Heavenly Syon. The next is that craving of heart for heart, of the soul for its perfect mate, which makes him a lover. The third is the craving for inward purity and perfection, which makes him an ascetic, and in the last resort a saint.
These three cravings, I think, answer to three ways in which mystics of different temperaments attack the problem of the Absolute: three different formulz under which their transcen- dence of the sense-world can be described. In describing this transcendence, and the special adventures involved in it, they are describing a change from the state of ordinary men, in touch with the sense-world, responding to its rhythms, to the state of spiritual consciousness in which, as they say, they are “in union” with Divine Reality, with God. Whatever be the theological creed of the mystic, he never varies in declaring this close, definite, and actual intimacy to be the end of his quest. ‘“ Mark me like the tulip with Thine own streaks,” says the Sifi.t “I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man,” says the German contemplative? “My me is God, nor do I know my selfhood save in Him,” says the Italian saint. 3
But, since this Absolute God is for him substance, ground or
* Jdmi, ‘‘ Joseph and Zulaikha. The Poet’s Prayer.” 2 ** Theologia Germanica,” cap. x. 3 St. Catherine of Genoa, Vita e Dottrina, cap. xiv,
152 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
underlying Reality of all that zs: present yet absent, near yet far: He is as truly immanent in the human Soul as in the Universe. The seeker for the Real may therefore ob- jectify his quest in two apparently contradictory, yet really mutually explanatory ways. First he may see it as an out- going journey from the world of illusion to the real or transcendental world: a leaving of the visible for the invisible. Secondly, it may appear to him as an inward alteration, re- making or regeneration, by which his personality or character is so changed as to be able to enter into communion with that Fontal Being which he loves and desires; is united with and dominated by the indwelling God who is the fount of its spiritual life. In the first case, the objective idea “ God” is the pivot of his symbolism: the Blazing Star, or Magnet of the Universe which he has seen far off: and seeing, has worshipped and desired. In the second case, this is replaced by the subjective idea “Sanctity,’ with its accompanying consciousness of a disharmony to be abolished. The Mystic Way will then be described, not as a journey, but as an alteration of personality, the transmuting of “earthly” into “heavenly” man. Plainly these two aspects are obverse and reverse of one whole. They represent that mighty pair of opposites, Infinite and Finite, God and Self, which it is the business of mysticism to carry up into a higher synthesis.
Whether the process be considered as outward search or inward change, its object and its end are the same. Man enters into the order of Reality: his desire is met by the Divine Desire, his “separated will” or life becomes one with the great Life of the All.
From what has been said in the last chapter, it will be clear that the two opposing types of symbolism which we have discussed—the outward search and inward change—will be adopted by the two groups of selves whose experience of “union with the Divine” leans (1) to the Transcendent or ex- ternal, (2) to the Immanent or internal way of apprehending Reality: and that a third or intermediate group of images will be necessary to express the experience of those to whom mystic feeling—the satisfaction of love—is the supreme factor inthe mystic life. According, then, to whether man’s instinct prompts him to describe the Absolute Reality which he knows
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as a Place, a Person, or a State—all three of course but partial and human symbols of the one Indescribable Truth—so will he tend to adopt a symbolism of one or other of these three types.
A. Those who conceive the Perfect as a beatific vision exterior to them and very far off, who find in the doctrine of Emanations something which answers to their inward ex- perience, will feel the process of their entrance into reality to be a quest, an arduous journey from the material to the spiritual world. They move away from, rather than transmute to another form, the life of sense. The ecstasies of such mystics will answer to the root-meaning of that much perverted word, as a “standing out” from themselves; a flight to happier countries far away. For them, the soul is outward bound towards its home.
B. Those for whom mysticism is above all things an in- timate and personal relation, the satisfaction of a deep desire— who can say with Gertrude More, “ never was there or can there be imagined such a love, as is between an humble soul and Thee ”—will fall back upon imagery drawn largely from the language of earthly passion. Since the Christian religion insists upon the personal aspect of the Godhead, and provides in Christ an object of such intimacy, devotion and desire, an enormous number of Christian mystics necessarily use symbols of this kind.