CHAPTER III

THE PURIFICATION OF THE SELF
Purification the necessary corollary of conversion—The Self’s adjustment to Reality—Cleansing of the powers of perception—Acquirement of ‘‘ goodness ”— Self-knowledge—Contrition—St. Catherine of Genoa on Purgatory—Love the agent of purification—Purgation accompanies the whole mystic life ; but the Purgative Way is the completiog. of conversion—Self-simplification—Cleansing and stripping— Detachment—Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience: the fundamental mystic virtues— Spiritual Poverty: the essence of liberty—Jacopone da Todi on Poverty—St. Francis of Assisi—The “ Sacrum Commercium ”’—Eckhart on Detachment—An attitude not an act—Its various forms—St. Teresa—Antoinette Bourignan—St. Douceline—Per- verted detachment—Mortification—The positive aspect of Purgation—The remaking of character—Death of the lower nature—Once the new life is established, mortifica- tion ends—‘‘ The Mirror of Simple Souls ”—St. Catherine of Genoa—The psycho- logical aspect of mortification—Active suffering—The heroic side of purification— Tauler—The conquest of fastidiousness—St. Francis of Assisi—Margery Kempe—St. Catherine of Genoa—Madame Guyon—Purgation essential to all mysticism—lIts last stages—The Game of Love—The fluctuating transcendental consciousness—Rulman Merswin—The Passage from Purgation to Illumination—The three factors of the Purgative Way—Conclusion
the first time, of reality, responding to that reality by
deep movements of love and of awe. She sees herself, however, not merely to be thrust into a new world, but set at the beginning of a new road. Activity is now to be her watch- word, pilgrimage the business of her life. “That a quest there is, and an end, is the single secret spoken.” Under one symbol or another, that long slow process of transcendence, of character building, whereby she is to attain freedom, become capable of living upon high levels of reality, is present in her consciousness. Those to whom this secret is not imparted are no mystics, in the exact sense in which that word is here used ; however great
their temporary illumination may have been. | 239
Hie then, stands the newly awakened self: aware, for
240 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
What must be the first step of the self upon this road to perfect union with the Absolute? Clearly, a getting rid of all those elements of normal experience which are not in harmony with reality : of illusion, evil, imperfection of every kind. By false desires and false thoughts man has built up for himself a false universe: as a mollusc, by the deliberate and persistent absorption of lime and rejection of all else, can build up for itself a hard shell which shuts it from the external world, and only represents in a distorted and unrecognisable form the ocean from which it was obtained. This hard and wholly unnutritious shell, this one-sided secretion of the surface- consciousness, makes as it were a little cave of illusion for each separate soul. A literal and deliberate getting out of the cave must be for every mystic, as it was for Plato’s prisoners, the first step in the individual hunt for reality.
In the plain language of old-fashioned theology “man’s sin is stamped upon man’s universe.” We see a sham _ world because we live a sham life. We do not know ourselves ; hence do not know the true character of our senses; hence attribute wrong values to their suggestions and declarations concerning our relation to the external world. That world, which we have distorted by identifying it with our own self-regarding arrange- ment of its elements, has got to reassume for us the character of Reality, of God. In the purified sight of the great mystics it did reassume this character: their shells were opened wide, they knew the tides of the Eternal Sea. This lucid apprehen- sion of the True is what we mean when we speak of the Illumination which results from a faithful acceptance of the trials of the Purgative Way. | The normal self as it exists in the normal world—the “old
Adam ” of St. Paul—is wholly incapable of supersensual adven- ture. All its activities are grouped about a centre of consciousness whose correspondences are with the material world. In the moment of its awakening, it is abruptly made aware of this disability. It knows itself finite. It now inspires to the infinite. It is encased in the hard crust of individuality: it aspires to union with a larger self. It is fettered: it longs for freedom. Its every sense is attuned to illusion: it craves for harmony with the Absolute Truth. “God is the only Reality,” says Patmore, “and we are real only as far as we are in His
THE PURIFICATION OF THE SELF 241
order and He is in us.”* Whatever form, then, the mystical
venture may take, it must be preceded by a change in the
meade of the subject ; a change which will introduce it into the order of Reality, and enable it to set up permanent relations with an Object which is not normally part of its universe. Therefore, though the end of mysticism is not goodness, it entails the acquirement of goodness. The virtues are the “ornaments of the spiritual marriage” because that marriage is union with the Good no less than with the Beautiful and the True.
Primarily, then, the self must be purged of all that stands between it and goodness: putting on the character of reality instead of the character of illusion or “sin.” It longs ardently to do this from the first moment in which it sees itself in the — all-revealing radiance of the Uncreated Light. “When once love openeth the inner eye of the soul for to see this truth,” says Hilton, “with other circumstances that attend it, then — beginneth the soul to be really humble; for then through the sight of God it feeleth and ‘seeth itself as it is, and then doth the soul forsake the beholding and leaning upon itself.” 2
So, with Dante, the first terrace of the Mount of Purgatory is devoted to the cleansing of pride and the production of humility. Such a process is the inevitable—one might almost say mechanical—result of a vision, however fleeting, of Reality ; an undistorted sight of the earthbound self. All its life it has been measuring its candlelight by other candles. Now for the first time it is out in the open air and sees the sun. “ This is the way,” said the voice of God to St. Catherine of Siena in ecstasy. “If thou wilt arrive at a perfect knowledge and enjoy- . ment of Me, the Eternal Truth, thou shouldst never go outside the knowledge of thyself; and by humbling thyself in the valley of humility thou wilt know Me and thyself, from which - ‘knowledge thou wilt draw all that is necessary. ... In self knowledge, then, thou wilt humble thyself; seeing that, in thyself, thou dost not even exist.” 3
The first thing that the self observes, when it turns back upon itself in that moment of lucidity—enters, as St. Catherine says, into “the cell of self-knowledge,’—is the
* “The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” ‘‘ Magna Moralia,”’ xxii. 2 “ The Scale of Perfection,” bk. iii. cap. vii. 3 Dialogo, cap. iv.
R
242 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
horrible contrast between its clouded contours and the pure sharp radiance of the Real; between its muddled faulty li its perverse self-centred drifting, and the clear onward
- of that Becoming in which it is immersed. It is then that
the outlook of rapture and awe receives the countersign of humility. The harbinger of that new self which must be born appears under the aspect of a desire: a passionate longing to escape from the suddenly perceived hatefulness of selfhood, and to conform to Reality, the Perfect which it has seen under its aspect of Goodness, of Beauty, or of Love —-to be worthy of it, in fact to be veal. “This showing,” says Gerlac Petersen of that experience, “is so vehement and so strong that the whole of the interior man, not only of his heart but of his body, is marvellously moved and shaken, and faints within itself, unable to endure it. And by this means, his interior aspect is made clear without any cloud, and conformable in its own measure to Him whom he seeks,” !
The lives of the mystics abound in instances of the “vehemence of this showing”: of the deep-seated sense of necessity which urges the newly awakened self to a life of discomfort and conflict, often to intense poverty and pain, as the only way of replacing false experience by true. Here the transcendental consciousness, exalted by a clear intuition of its goal, and not merely “counting” but percezving the world to be obviously well lost for such a prize, takes the reins. It forces on the unwilling surface mind a sharp vision of its own disabilities: its ugly and imperfect life.
The love of Ideal Beauty which is closely bound up with the — mystic temperament makes instant response. “No more sins!”
was the first cry of St. Catherine of Genoa in that crucial hour in which she saw by the light of love the ugly and distorted nature of her past. She entered forthwith upon the Purgative
|
Way, in which for four years she suffered under a profound —
sense of imperfection, endured fasting, solitude, and mortification, and imposed upon herself the most repulsive duties in her efforts towards that self-conquest which should make her “con- formable in her own measure” to the dictates of that Pure Love which was the aspect of reality that she had seen. It is the
* “Tgnitum cum Deo Soliloquium,” cap. xi.
THE PURIFICATION OF THE SELF 243
inner conviction that this conformity—this transcendence of the unreal—is possible and indeed normal, which upholds the mystic during the terrible years of Purgation: so that “not only without heaviness, but with a joy unmeasured he casts back all thing that may him let.”
To the true lover of the Absolute, Purgation no less than Illumination is a privilege, a dreadful joy. It is an earnest of increasing life. “Let me suffer or die!” said St. Teresa: a strange alternative in the ears of common sense, but a forced option in the spiritual sphere. However harsh its form, however painful the activities to which it spurs him, the mystic recognizes in this break-up of his old universe an essential part -of the Great Work: and the act in which he turns to it is an act of love no less than an act of will. “ Burning of love intoa soul truly taken all vices purgeth: . . . for whilst the true lover with strong and fervent desire into God is borne, all things him displease that from the sight of God withdraw.”2 His eyes once opened, he is eager for that ordering of his disordered loves which alone can establish his correspondences with Tran- scendental Life. “Teach me my only joy,” cries Suso, “the way in which I may bear upon my body the marks of Thy Love.” “Come, my soul, depart from outward things and gather thyself together into a true interior silence, that thou mayst set out with all thy courage and bury and lose thyself in the desert of a deep contrition.” 3
It is in this torment of contrition, this acute consciousness of unworthiness, that we have the first swing-back of the oscil- lating self from the initial state of mystic pleasure to the complementary state of pain. It is, so to speak, on its tran- scendental side, the reflex action which follows the first touch of God. Thus, we read that Rulman Merswin, “swept away by the transports of Divine Love,” did not surrender himself to the passive enjoyment of this first taste of Absolute Being, but was impelled by it to diligent and instant self-criticism. He was ‘seized with a hatred of his body, and inflicted on himself such hard mortifications that he feil ill.” 4
* Richard Rolle, ‘* The Mending of Life,” cap. i. 2 Tbid., ‘‘ The Fire of Love,” bk. i. cap xxiii.
3 ** Buchlein von der ewigen Weisheit,”’ cap. v.
4 Jundt, ‘‘ Rulman Merswin,” p. 19.
244 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
It is useless for lovers of healthy-mindedness to resent this and similar examples of self-examination and penance: to label them morbid or mediaeval. The fact remains that only such
bitter knowledge of wrongness of relation, seen by the light of.
ardent love, can spur the will of man to the hard task of readjustment.
“TI saw full surely,” says Julian of Norwich, “that it behoveth _ needs to be that we should be in longing and in penance until
the time that we be led so deep into God that we verily and truly know our own soul.” !
Dante’s whole journey up the Mount of Purgation is the dramatic presentation of this one truth. So, too, the celebrated description of Purgatory attributed to St. Catherine of Genoa ? is obviously founded upon its author’s inward experience of this Purgative Way. In it, she applies to the souls of the dead her
personal consciousness of the necessity of purification ; its place.
in the organic process of spiritual growth. It is, as she acknowledges at the beginning, the projection of her own psychological adventures upon the background of the spiritual world : its substance being simply the repetition after death of that eager and heroic acceptance of suffering, those drastic acts of purification which she has herself been compelled to under- take under the whip of the same psychic necessity—that of removing the rust of illusion, cleansing the mirror in order that it may receive the divine light. “It is,’ she says, “as with a covered object, the object cannot respond to the rays of the sun, not because the sun ceases to shine—for it shines without intermission—but because the covering intervenes. Let the covering be destroyed, and again the object will be exposed to the sun, and will answer to the rays which beat against it in proportion as the work of destruction advances. Thus the souls are covered by a rust—that is, by sin—which is gradually consumed away by the fire of purgatory. The more it is con- sumed, the more they respond to Ged their true Sun. Their happiness increases as the rust falls off and lays them open to
** Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. lvi.
? I offer no opinion upon this question of authorship. Those interested may con- sult Von Hiigel, ‘‘The Mystical Element of Religion,” vol. i., Appendix. Whoever may be responsible for its present form, the Treatise is clearly founded upon first-hand mystic experience : which is all that our present purpose requires.
ee
THE PURIFICATION OF THE SELF 245
the divine ray ... the instinctive tendency to seek happiness in God develops itself, and goes on increasing through the fire of love, which draws it to its end with such impetuosity and vehemence that any obstacle seems intolerable ; and the more clear its vision, the more extreme its pain.” !
“ Mostratene la via di gire al monte!” cry the souls of the
newly-dead in Dante’s vision,2 pushed by that “instinctive tendency” towards the purifying flames. Such a tendency, such a passionate desire, the aspiring self must have. No cool, well-balanced knowledge of the need of new adjustments will avail to set it on the Purgative Way. This is a heroic act, and demands heroic passions in the soul.
“In order to overcome our desires and to deny ourselves in all things,” says St. John of the Cross, who is the classic authority upon this portion of the mystic quest, “our love and inclination for which are wont so to inflame the will that it delights therein, we require another and greater fire of another and nobler love—that of the Bridegroom—so that having all our joy in Him, and deriving from Him all our strength, we may gain such resolution and courage as shall enable us easily to abandon and deny all besides. It was necessary, in order to subdue our sensual desires, not only to have this love for the
Bridegroom, but also to be on fire therewith, and that with |
anxiety ... if our spiritual nature were not on fire with other and nobler anxieties—anxieties for that which is spiritual—we should never overcome our natural and sensible satisfactions, nor be able to enter on the night of sense, neither should we have the courage to remain in the darkness, in the denial of every desire.” 3
“It is necessary to be on fire with love, and that with
anxiety.” Only this deep and ardent passion for a perceived Object of Love can persuade the mystic to those unnatural acts of abnegation on which he kills his lesser love of the world of
sense, frees himself from the “remora of desire,” unifies all his -
energies about the new and higher centre of his life. His business, | have said, is transcendence: a mounting up, an attainment of a higher order of reality. Once his eyes have been opened on Eternity, his instinct for the Absolute roused
* «© Trattato di Purgatorio,” caps. ii. and iii. ? Purg. ii. 60. 3 ‘¢ Subida del Monte Carmelo,” 1. i. cap. xiv.
-_*
246 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
from its sleep, he sees union with that Reality as his duty no less than his joy: sees too that this union can only be con- summated on a plane where illusion and selfhood have no place.
The inward voice says to him perpetually at the least season- able moments, “ Dimitte omnia transitoria, quaere aeterna.” *
Hence the purgation of the senses and of the character which they have helped to build is always placed first in -
order in the Mystic Way; though sporadic flashes of illumina- tion and ecstasy may, and often do, precede and accompany it. Since spiritual no less than physical existence is, as we know it, an endless Becoming, it too has no end. In a sense the whole of the mystical experience in this life consists in a series of purifications, whereby the Finite slowly approaches the nature of its Infinite Source: climbing up the cleansing mountain pool by pool, like the industrious fish in Rulman Merswin’s vision, until it reaches its Origin. The greatest of the contemplative saints, far from leaving purgation behind them in their progress, were increasingly aware of their own inadequateness, the nearer they approached to the unitive state: for the true lover of the Absolute, like every other lover, is alternately abased and exalted by his unworthiness and _ his good fortune. There are moments of high rapture when he knows only that the banner over him is Love: but there are others in which he remains bitterly conscious that in spite of his uttermost surrender there is within him an ineradicable residuum of selfhood which “stains the white radiance of eternity.”
In this sense, then, purification is a perpetual process. That
which mystical writers mean, however, when they speak of the —
Way of Purgation, is rather the slow and painful completion of Conversion. It is the drastic turning of the self from the unreal to the real life: a setting of her house in order, an orientation of the mind to Truth. Its business is the getting rid, first of self- love; and secondly of all those foolish interests in which the surface-consciousness is steeped.
“The essence of purgation,” says Richard of St. Victor, “is self-simplification.” Nothing can happen until this has pro- ceeded a certain distance: till the involved interests and
* “ De Imitatione Christi,” 1, iti. cap. i,
Se te ee
THE PURIFICATION OF THE SELF 247
tangled motives of the self are simplified, and the false compli- cations of temporal life are recognized and cast away.
“No one,” says another authority in this matter, “can be enlightened unless he be first cleansed or purified and stripped.” 2 Purgation, which is the remaking of character in conformity with perceived reality, consists in these two essential acts: the cleansing of that which is to remain, the stripping of that which is to be done away. It may best be studied, therefore, in two parts: and I think that it will be in the reader’s interest if we reverse the order which the “ Theologia Germanica” adopts, and first consider Negative Purification, or self-stripping, and next Positive Purification, or character-adjustment. These, then, are the branches into which this subject will here be split. (1) The Negative aspect, the stripping or purging away of those superfluous, unreal, and harmful things which dissipate the precious energies of the self. This is the business of Poverty, or Detachment. (2) The Positive aspect: a raising to their highest term, their purest state, of all that remains—the per- manent elements of character. This is brought about by Mortification: the gymnastic of the soul: a deliberate recourse to painful experiences and difficult tasks.
1. DETACHMENT
Apart from the plain necessity of casting out imperfec- tion and sin, what is the type of “good character” which will best serve the self in its journey towards union with the Absolute ?
The mystics of all ages and all faiths agree in their answer. Those three virtues which the instinct of the Catholic Church fixed upon as the necessities of the cloistered life—the great Evangelical counsel of voluntary Poverty with its departments: Chastity, the poverty of the senses, and Obedience, the poverty of the will—are also, when raised to their highest term and trans- muted by the Fire of Love, the essential virtues of the mystical quest.
By Poverty the mystic means an utter self-stripping, the casting off of immaterial as well as material wealth, a complete detachment from all finite things. By Chastity he means an
* * Theologia Germanica,”’ cap. xiv,
248 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
extreme and limpid’ purity of soul, virgin to all but God: by Obedience, that abnegation of selfhood, that mortifica- tion of the will which results in a complete humility, a “holy indifference” to the accidents of life. These three aspects of perfection are really one: linked together as irrevocably as the three aspects of the self. Their common characteristic is this: they tend to make the subject | regard itself, not as an isolated and interesting individual, possessing desires and rights, but as a scrap of the Cosmos, an ordinary bit of the Universal Life, only important as a part of the All, an expression of the Will Divine. Detachment and purity go hand in hand, for purity is but detachment of the heart ; and where these are present they bring with them that humble spirit of obedience which expresses detachment of will. We may therefore treat them as three manifestations of one thing : which thing is Inward Poverty. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven,” is the motto of all pilgrims on this road.
“ God is pure Good in Himself,” says Eckhart, “therefore will He dwell nowhere but in a pure soul. There He can pour Himself out: into that He can wholly flow. What is Purity ? It is that a man should have turned himself away from all creatures and have set his heart so entirely on the Pure Good that no creature is to him a comfort, that he has no desire for aught creaturely, save so far as he may apprehend therein the Pure Good, which is God. And as little as the bright eye can endure aught foreign in it, so little can the pure soul bear anything in it, any stain on it, that comes between it and God. To it all creatures are pure to enjoy ; for it enjoyeth all creatures in God, — and God in all creatures,” !
“To it all creatures are pure to enjoy!” This is hardly the popular concept of the mystic ; which credits him, in the teeth of such examples as St. Francis, St. Mechthild of Magdeburg, Rolle, Suso, and countless others, with a hearty dread of natural things. Too many mistaken ascetics of the type of the Curé d’Ars, who would not smell a rose for fear of sin, have supported in this respect the vulgar belief; for it is generally forgotten that though most mystics have practised asceticism as a means to an end, all ascetics are not mystics. Whatever may
* Meister Eckhart, quoted by Wackernagel, ‘ Altdeutsches Lesebuch,” p. 891.
THE PURIFICATION OF THE SELF 249
be the case with other deniers of the senses, it is true that the pure soul of the mystic, dwelling on high levels of reality, his eyes set on the Transcendental World, is capable of combining with the perfection of detachment that intense and innocent joy in natural things, as veils and vessels of the divine, which results from seeing “all creatures in God and God in all creatures.” ‘Whoso knows and loves the nobleness of My Freedom,” said the voice of God to Mechthild of Magdeburg, “cannot bear to love Me alone, he must also love Me in the creatures.”! Such a power is characteristic of the illumination which results from a faithful endurance of the Purgative Way; for the corollary of ‘blessed are the pure in heart” is not merely a poetic state- ‘ment. The annals of mysticism prove it to be a psycho- logical law.
How then is this contradiction to be resolved: that the mystic who has declared the fundamental necessity of “ leaving all creatures” yet finds them pure to enjoy? The answer to the riddle lies in the ancient paradox of Poverty: that we only enjoy true liberty in respect of such things as we neither possess nor desire. “That thou mayest have pleasure in everything, seek pleasure in nothing. That thou mayest know everything, seek to know nothing. That thou mayest possess all things, seek to possess nothing. ... In detachment the spirit finds quiet and repose, for coveting nothing, nothing wearies it by elation ,; and nothing oppresses it by dejection, because it stands in the centre of its own humility. For as soon as it covets any- thing it is immediately fatigued thereby.” 2
It is not love but lust—the possessive case, the very food of selfhood—which poisons the relation between the self and the external world and “immediately fatigues” the soul. Divide the world into “ mine ” and “ not mine,” and unreal standards are set up, claims and cravings begin to fret the mind. We are the slaves of our own property. We drag with us not a treasure, but achain. “Behold,” says the “ Theologia Germanica,’ “ on this sort must we cast all things from us and strip ourselves of them: we must refrain from claiming anything for our own. When we do this, we shall have the best, fullest, clearest, and noblest knowledge that a man can have, and also the
t «¢ Tas Fliessende Licht der Gottheit,” pt. vi., cap. 4. 2 St. John of the Cross, *‘ Subida del Monte Carmelo, ’ bk. i. cap. xiii.
250 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
noblest and purest love and desire.”! “He will not behold the Light who attempts to ascend to the vision of the Supreme whilst he is drawn downwards by those things that are an obstacle to the vision,” says Plotinus, “for he does not ascend alone, but brings with him that which separates him from the One: in a word, he is not made one.’2 Accept Poverty, how- ever, demolish ownership, the verb “to have” in every mood and tense, and this downward drag is at an end. At once the Cosmos belongs to you and you to it. You escape the heresy of separateness, are “made one,” and merged in “the greater life of the All.” Then, a free spirit in a free world, the self moves upon its true orbit undistracted by the largely self- imposed responsibilities of ordinary earthly existence.
This was the truth which St. Francis of Assisi grasped, and applied with the energy of a reformer and the delicate originality of a poet to every circumstance of the inner and the outer life. This noble liberty it is which is extolled by his spiritual descendant, Jacopone da Todi, in one of his most magnificent odes :—
‘* Poverta alto sapere a nulla cosa sojacere en desprezo possedere tutte le cose create. ...
Dio non alberga en core strecto tant’e grande quantai affecto povertate ha si gran pecto che ci alberga deitate. ...
Povertate e nulla havere et nulla cosa poi volere et omne cosa possedere en spirito de libertate.” 3
; “‘ Theologia Germanica,’’ cap. v. 2 Ennead vi. 9.
3 ‘Oh Poverty, high wisdom! to be subject to nothing, and by despising all to —
possess all created things. eee
God will not lodge in a narrow heart ; and it is as great as thy love. Poverty ‘
has so ample a bosom that Deity Itself may lodge therein. .. .
Poverty is naught to have and nothing to desire: but all things to possess in
the spirit of liberty.”—/acopone da Todi. Lauda lix,
THE PURIFICATION OF THE SELF 251
“My little sisters the birds,” said St. Francis, greatest adept of that high wisdom, “Brother Sun, Sister Water, Mother Earth.” Not my servants, but my kindred and _fellow- citizens; who may safely be loved’so long as they are not desired. So, in almost identical terms, the dying Hindu ascetic :—
‘*Oh Mother Earth, Father Sky, Brother Wind, Friend Light, Sweetheart Water, Here take my last salutation with folded hands! For to-day I am melting away into the Supreme Because my heart became pure, And all delusion vanished, Through the power of your good company.”
é
It is the business of Lady Poverty to confer on her lovers this freedom of the Universe, to eradicate delusion, purify the heart, and initiate them into the “great life of the All.” Well might St. Francis desire marriage with that enchantress, who gives back ten-fold all that she takes away. “Holy poverty,” he said, “is a treasure so high excelling and so divine that we be not worthy to lay it up in our vile vessels ; since this is that celestial virtue whereby all earthly things and fleeting are trodden underfoot, and whereby all hind- rances are lifted from the soul so that freely she may join herself to God Eternal.” 2
Poverty is the matchmaker between God and the spirit of man. Never will the union to which that spirit tends take place without her good offices, her drastic separation of the unreal from the real. She strips off the clothing which man so often mistakes for himself, transvaluates all his values, and shows him things as they are. Thus, in that beautiful chapter of the “Sacrum Commercium,” which describes how the friars, climbing “the steeps of the hill,” find Lady Poverty at the summit “enthroned only in her nakedness,” we are told that she “preventing them with the blessings of sweetness,” said, “Why hasten ye so from the vale of tears to the mount of light? If, peradventure, it is me that ye seek, lo, I am but as you behold, a little poor one, stricken with storms and far
* ‘ Fioretti,” cap. xvi., and ‘‘ Speculum,” cap. cxx, ? Jbid., cap. xiii. (Arnold’s translation),
252 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
from any consolation.” Whereto the brothers answer, “ Only admit us to thy peace; and we shall be saved.” *
The same truth: theffsaving peace of utter detachment from everything but Divine Reality—a detachment which makes those who have it the citizens of the world, and enabled the friars to say to Lady Poverty as they showed her from the hill of Assisi the whole countryside at her feet, “ Hoc est claustrum nostrum, Domina,”? is taught by Meister Eckhart in a more homely parable.
There was a learned man who, eight years long, desired that God would show him a man who would teach him the truth. And once when he felt a very great longing a voice from God came to him and said, “Go to the church and there shalt thou find a man who shalt show thee the way to blessed- ness.” And he went thence, and found a poor man whose feet were torn and covered with dust and dirt: and all his clothes were hardly worth three farthings. And he greeted him, saying :—
“God give you good day
He answered: “I have never had a bad day.”
“God give you good luck.”
“T have never had ill luck.”
“May you be happy ! but why do you answer me thus ?”
“T have never been unhappy.”
“ Pray explain this to me, for I cannot understand it.”
The poor man answered, “Willingly. You wished me good day. I never had a bad day; for if I am hungry I praise God; if it freezes, hails, snows, rains, if the weather is fair or foul, still I praise God; am I wretched and despised, I praise God, and so I have never had an evil day. You wished that God would send me luck. But I never had ill luck, for I know how to live with God, and I know that what He does is best; and what God gives me or ordains for me, be
» !
it good or ill, I take it cheerfully from God as the best that
can be, and so I have never had ill luck. You wished that
God would make me happy. I was never unhappy; for my >
only desire is to live in God’s will, and I have so entirely
yielded my will to God’s, that what God wills, I will.”
|
* “Sacrum Commercium Beati Francisci cum Domina Paupertate,” caps. iv.
and v. (Rawnsley’s translation). * Op. cit., cap. xxii.
THH PURIFICATION OF THE SELF 253
“But if God should will to cast you into hell,’ said the learned man, “what would you do then? ”
“Cast me into hell? His goodness forbids! But if He did cast me into hell, I should have two arms to embrace Him. One arm is true humility, that I should lay beneath Him, and be thereby united to His holy humanity. And with the right arm of love, which is united with His holy divinity, I should so embrace Him that He would have to go to hell with me. And I would rather be in hell and have God, than in heaven and not have God.”
Then the Master understood that true abandonment with
utter humility is the nearest way to God.
uC
The Master asked further: “ Whence are you come?”
“From God.”
“ Where did you find God?”
“When I forsook all creatures.”
“ Where have you left God?”
“In pure hearts, and in men of good will.”
The Master asked: “ What sort of man are you?”
“T am a king.”
“Where is your kingdom ?”
“ My soul is my kingdom, for I can so rule my senses inward and outward that all the desires and powers of my soul are in subjection, and this kingdom is greater than a kingdom on earth.” !
“What brought you to this perfection ? ”
“My silence, my high thoughts, and my union with God. For I could not rest in anything that was less than God. Now I have found God ; and in God have eternal rest and peace.”
Poverty, then, consists in a breaking down of man’s invete- rate habit of trying to rest in, or take seriously, things which are “less than God”: ze., which do not possess the character of reality. Such a habit is the most fertile of all causes of “world-weariness”’ and disillusion: faults, or rather spiritual diseases, which the mystics never exhibit, but which few who are without all mystic feeling can hope to escape. Hence the
* So Ruysbroeck, ‘‘ Freewill is the king of the soul, he inhabits the highest city ot that kingdom: that is to say, the desirous forces of the soul” (‘‘ L’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,” 1. i. cap. xxiv.). .
? Meister Eckhart. Quoted in Martensen’s monograph, p. 107.
254 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
sharpened perceptions of the contemplatives have always seen poverty as a counsel of prudence, a higher form of common sense. It is not with St. Francis, or any other great mystic, a first principle, an end in itself. It ‘was rather a logical de- duction from the first principle of their science—the paramount importance to the soul of a clear view of reality.
Here East and West are in agreement: “Their science,” says Al Ghazzali of the Siifis, who practised, like the early Franciscans, a complete renunciation of worldly goods, “has for its object the uprooting from the soul of all violent passions, the extirpation from it of vicious desires, and evil qualities ; so that the heart may become detached from all that is not God, and give itself for its only occupation meditation upon the Divine Being.” !
All those who have felt themselves urged towards the attain- ment of this transcendental vision, have found that possessions interrupt the view, are centres of conflicting interest in the mind. They assume a false air of importance, force them- selves upon the attention, and complicate life. Hence, in the interest of self-simplification, they must be cleared away: a removal which involves for the real enthusiast little more sacri- fice than the weekly visit of the dustman. “ Having entirely surrendered my own free-will,” says Al Ghazzali of his personal experience, “my heart no longer felt any distress in renouncing fame, wealth, or the society of my children.”2
Others have contrived to reconcile self-surrender with a more moderate abandonment of outward things. Possessions take different rank for almost every human soul; and the true rule of poverty consists in giving up those things which enchain the spirit, divide its interests, and deflect it on its road to the Absolute—whether these things be riches, habits, religious observances, friends, interests, distastes, or desires—not in mere outward destitution for its own sake. It is attitude, not act, that really matters; self-denudation would not be necessary were it not for our ineradicable tendency to attribute false value to things the moment they become our own. “ What is poverty of spirit but meekness of mind, by which a man knows his own infirmity ?” says Rolle, “seeing that to perfect stable-
* Schmilders, ‘‘ Essai sur les Ecoles Philosophiques chez les Arabes,” p. 54. * Lbid., op. cit., p. 58.
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THE PURIFICATION OF THE SELF 255
ness he may not come but by the grace of God, all thing that him might let from that grace he forsakes, and only in joy of his Maker he sets his desire. And as of one root spring many branches, so of wilful poverty on this wise taken proceed virtues and marvels untrowed. Not as some that change their clothes and not their souls; riches soothly it seems these forsake, and vices innumerable they cease not to gather... . If thou truly all thing for God forsake, see more what thou despiseth than what thou forsaketh.” *
From such passages as this it follows that the Poverty ot the mystics is a mental rather than a material state. Detach- ment is the inner reality, of which Franciscan poverty is a ‘sacrament to the world. It is the poor in spirit, not the poor in substance, who are to be spiritually blessed. “ Let all things be forsaken of me,” says Gerlac Petersen, “so that being poor I may be able in great inward spaciousness, and without any hurt, to suffer want of all those things which the mind of man can desire; out of or excepting God Himself.”
“JT am not speaking here of the absence of ¢hzngs,” says St. John of the Cross, “for absence is not detachment if the desire remains—but of that detachment which consists in suppressing desire and avoiding pleasure. It is this that sets the soul free, even though possession may be still retained.” 3
Every person in whom the mystical instinct awakes soon discovers in himself certain tastes or qualities which interrupt the development of that instinct. Often these tastes and qualities are legitimate enough upon their own plane; but they are a drain upon the energy of the self, preventing her from attaining that intenser life for which she was made and which demands all her interest and energy. They distract her attention, they fill the field of perception: making of the surface-consciousness so active a thing that it can hardly be put to sleep. ‘“ Where can he have that pure and naked vision of unchangeable Truth whereby he see into all things,” says Petersen again, “who is so busied in other things, not perhaps evil, which operate . . . upon his thoughts and imagination and
t Richard Rolle, ‘* The Mending of Life,”’ cap. iii. 2 “ Tonitum cum Deo Soliloquium,” cap. i. 3 ‘* Subida del Monte Carmelo,” I. i. cap.
| 256 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
confuse and enchain his mind . . . that his sight of that unique One in Whom all things are is over-clouded ?”!
Now the nature of these distracting factors which “confuse and enchain the mind” will vary with almost every individual. It is impossible to predict in any one case what the things will be which the self must give up in order that the transcendental consciousness may grow. “ Does it make any difference whether a bird be held by a slender thread or by a rope, while the bird is bound and cannot fly until the cord that holds it is broken? It is true that a slender thread is more easily broken; still notwithstanding, if it is not broken the bird cannot fly. This is the state of a soul with particular attachments: it never can attain to the liberty of the divine union, whatever virtues it may possess. Desires and attachments affect the soul as the remora is said to affect a ship; that is but a little fish, yet when it clings to the vessel it effectually hinders its progress.”
“One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” is a statement that is peculiarly true in regard to questions of detachment. Here each adventurer must—and does—judge for - himself; extirpating all those interests which nourish selfhood, however innocent or even useful they may seem in the eyes of the world. The only rule is the remorseless abandonment of everything which is in the way. “When any man God per- fectly desires to love, all things as well inward as outward that to God’s love are contrary and from His love do let, he studies to do away.”3 This may mean the utter self-stripping of St. Francis of Assisi, who cast off his actual clothing in his relentless determination to have nothing of his own:4 or the scarcely less drastic proceedings of Antoinette Bourignan, who found that a penny was enough to keep her from God.
“Being one night in a most profound Penitence,” says the biographer of this extraordinary woman, “she said from the bottom of her Heart, ‘O my Lord! what must I do to please Thee? For I have nobody: to teach me. Speak to my soul and it will hear Thee’” At that instant she heard, as if another had spoken within her, “ Forsake all
® Gerlac Petersen, of. czt., cap. xi.
? St. John of the Cross, of. cé#., 1. i. cap. xi.
3 Richard Rolle, “ The Fire of Love,” bk. i. cap. xix. 4 Thomas of Celano, Legenda Prima; cap. vi.
THE PURIFICATION OF THE SELF 257
earthly things. Separate thyself from the love of the creatures. Deny thyself.’ From this time the more she entered into herself the more she was inclined to abandon all. But she had not the courage necessary for the com- plete renunciation towards which her transcendental conscious- ness was pressing her. She struggled to adjust herself to the ' inner and the outer life, but without success. For such a character as hers, compromise was impossible. “She asked always earnestly, When shall I be perfectly thine, O my God? and she thought He still answered her, When thou shalt no longer possess anything, and shalt die to thyself. And where shall I do that, Lord? He answered, /u the Desert.’ At last - the discord between her deeper and her superficial self became intolerable. Reinforced by the miseries of an unsympathetic home, still more by a threat of approaching marriage, the in- exorable inner powers got their way. She submitted; and having disguised herself in a hermit’s dress—she was only eighteen and had no one to help or advise her—‘“ she went out of her chamber about Four in the Morning, taking nothing but one Penny to buy Bread for that Day; and it being said to her in the going out, Where zs thy Fatth? Ina Penny? she threw it away. . .. Thus she went away wholly delivered from the heavy burthen of the Cares and Good Things of this World.”!
An admirable example of the mystic’s attitude towards the soul-destroying division of interests, the natural but hopeless - human struggle to make the best of both worlds, which sucks at its transcendental vitality, occurs in St. Teresa’s purga- tive period. In her case this state of purification, the war between the real and the superficial self, extended over a long ‘ term of years. It ran side by side with the state of Illumina- tion, co-existing with a fully developed contemplative life ; and was only brought to an end by that “Second Conversion” which at last unified her scattered interests and set her firmly and for ever on the Unitive Way. The almost virile strength of Teresa’s character, which afterwards contributed to the great- ness of her achievement in the unitive state, opposed itself to the invading transcendental consciousness ; disputed every inch of territory, resisted every demand made upon it by the grow- ing spiritual self. Bit by bit it was conquered, the sphere of
* « An Apology for Mrs. Antoinette Bourignan,” pp. 269-70, s
258 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM |
her deeper life enlarged ; until the moment came in which she surrendered, once for all, to her true destiny.
During the years of inward stress, of penance and growing knowledge of the Infinite which she spent in the Convent of the Incarnation, and which accompanied this slow remaking of character, Teresa’s only self-indulzence—as it seems, a suffi- ciently innocent one—was talking to the friends who came down from Avila to the convent-parlour, and spoke to her through the gvz//e. Her confessors, unaccustomed to the educa- tion of mystical genius, saw nothing incompatible between this practice and the pursuit of a high contemplative life. But as her transcendental consciousness, her states of orison grew stronger, Teresa felt more and more the distracting influence of these glimpses of the outer world. They were a drain upon the energy which ought to be wholly given to that new, deep, more real life which she felt stirring within her, and which could only hope to achieve its mighty destiny by complete concentration upon the business in hand. No genius can afford to dissipate his energies : the mystic genius least of all. Teresa knew that so long as she retained these personal satisfactions, her life had more than one focus; she was not whole-hearted in her sur- render to the Absolute. But thougn her inward voices, her deepest instincts, urged her to give them up, for years she felt herself incapable of such a sacrifice. It was round the question of their retention or surrender that the decisive battle of her life was fought.
“ The devil,” says her great Augustinian eulogist, Fray Luis de Leon, in his vivid account of these long interior struggles, “ put before her those persons most sympathetic by nature; and God came, and in the midst of the conversation discovered Himself aggrieved and sorrowful. The devil delighted in the conversa- tion and pastime, but when she turned her back on them and _ betook herself to prayer, God redoubled the delight and favours, as if to show her how false was the lure which charmed her at the grating, and that His sweetness was the veritable sweetness. ...+ Sothat these two inclinations warred with each other in
* St. Teresa’s mystic states are particularly difficult to classify. From one point of view these struggles might be regarded as he preliminaries of conversion. She was, however, proficient in contemplation when they occurred, and I therefore think that my arrangement is the right one,
~
THE PURIFICATION OF THE SELF 259
the breast of this blessed woman, and the authors who inspired them each did his utmost to inflame her most, and the oratory blotted out what the grating wrote, and at times the grating vanquished and diminished the good fruit produced by prayer, causing agony and grief which disquieted and perplexed her soul: for though she was resolved to belong entirely to God, _ she knew not how to shake herself free from the world: and at times she persuaded herself that she could enjoy both, which ended mostly, as she says, in complete enjoyment of neither. For the amusements of the locutorio were embittered and turned into wormwood by the memory of the secret and sweet intimacy with God; and in the same way when she retired to be with God, and commenced to speak with Him, the affections and thoughts which she carried with her from the grating took possession of her.” 3
Compare with these violent oscillations between the super- ficial and mystical consciousness—characteristic of Teresa’s strong volitional nature, which only came to rest after psychic convulsions which left no corner of its being unexplored—the symbolic act of renunciation under which Antoinette Bourignan’s “interior self” vanquished the surface.intelligence and asserted its supremacy. Teresa must give up her passionate interest in human life. Antoinette, never much tempted in that direction, must give up her last penny. What society was to Teresa’s generous, energetic nature, prudence was to the temperamentally shrewd and narrow Antoinette: a distraction, a check on the development of the all-demanding transcendental genius, an -unconquered relic of the “lower life.”
Many a mystic, however, has found the perfection of detach- ment to be consistent with a far less drastic renunciation of external things than that which these women felt to be essential to their peace. The test, as we have seen, does not lie in the nature of the things which are retained, but in the reaction which they stimulate in the self. “Absolute poverty is thine,” says Tauler, “when thou canst not remember whether anybody has ever owed thee or been indebted to thee for anything; just as all things will be forgotten by thee in the last journey of death.” Poverty, in this sense, may be consistent with the
* Quoted by G. Cunninghame Graham, “ Santa Teresa,” vol. i. P- 139: 2 Sermon on St, Paul (‘‘ The Inner Way,” p. 113).
260 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM |
habitual and automatic use of luxuries which the abstracted self never even perceives. Thus we are told that St. Bernard was reproached by his enemies with the inconsistency of preach- ing evangelical poverty whilst making his journeys from place to place on a magnificently caparisoned mule, which had been lent to him by the Cluniac monks. He expressed great contri- tion: but said that he had never noticed what it was that he rode upon.!
Sometimes, the very activity which one self has rejected as an impediment becomes for another the channel of spiritual perception. I have mentioned the case of the Curé d’Ars, who, among other inhibitions, refused to allow himself to smell a rose. Sharply opposed to this is the case of St. Francis, who preached to the flowers,2 and ordered a plot to be set aside for their cultivation when the convent garden was made, “in order that all who saw them might remember the Eternal Sweetness.” 3 So, too, we are told of his spiritual daughter, St. Douceline, that “out of doors one day with her sisters, she heard a bird’s note. ‘What a lovely song!’ she said: and the song drew her straight- way to God. Did they bring her a flower, z¢s beauty had a like effect.”4 Here we are reminded of Plato. “The true order of going is to use the beauties of Earth as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty.” This, too, is the true order of Holy Poverty: the selfless use, not the selfish abuse of lovely and natural things.
To say that so difficult a counsel of perfection should some- times have been practised in excess, is but to say that asceticism is a human, not an inhuman art. Such excesses, however, are found most often amongst those saintly types who have not exhibited true mystic intuition. This intuition, entailing as it does communion with intensest Life, gives to its possessorsa - sweet sanity, a delicate balance, which guards them, as a rule, from such conceptions of chastity as that of the youthful saint who shut himself in a cupboard for fear he should see his mother pass by: from obedience of the type which identifies the voice of the director with the voice of God; from detach-
* Cotter Morison, ‘‘ Life and Times of St. Bernard,” p. 68. * Thomas of Celano, Legenda Prima, cap. xxix.
3 Jbid., Legenda Secunda, cap. cxxiv.
4 Anne Macdonell, ‘‘St. Douceline,” p. 30.
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ment such as that exhibited by the Blessed Angela of Foligno, who, though a true mystic, viewed with murderous delight the deaths of relatives who were “impediments.”! The detach- ment of the mystic is just a restoration to the liberty in which the soul was made: it is a state of joyous humility in which he cries, “ Nought I am, nought I have, nought I lack.” To have arrived at this is to have escaped from external illusion: to be initiated into the purer air of that universe which knows but one rule of action—that which was laid down once for all by St. Augustine when he said, in the most memorable and misquoted of epigrams : “ Love, and do what you like.”
2. MORTIFICATION
By mortification, I have said, is to be understood the positive aspect of purification: the remaking in relation to reality of the permanent elements of character. These elements, so far, have subserved the interests of the old self, worked for it in the world of sense. Now they must be adjusted to the needs of the new self and to the transcendent world in which it moves. Their focal point is the old self, the lower centre of consciousness ; and the object of mortification is to kill that old self, remove that lower centre, in order that the higher centre, the “new man,” may live and breathe. As St. Teresa discovered when she tried to reconcile the claims of friendship and contempla- tion, one or other must go: a house divided against itself cannot stand. “Who hinders thee more,” says Thomas a Kempis, “than the unmortified affections of thy own heart?
. if we were perfectly dead unto ourselves and not entangled within our own breasts, then should we be able to taste Divine things, and to have some experience of heavenly contempla- tion.” 2
In psychological language, the process of mortification is the process of setting up “new paths of neural discharge.” That is
* “Tn that time and by God’s will there died my mother, who was a great hindrance unto me in following the way of God: my husband died likewise, and in a short time there also died all my children. And because I had commenced to follow the aforesaid Way, and had prayed God that He would rid me of them, I had great consolation of their deaths, albeit -I did also feel some grief’? (Beatae Angelae de Fulginio, ‘‘ Visionum et Instructionum Liber,” cap. ix., English translation, p. 5).
2 ** De Imitatione Christi,” 1. i. caps. iii. and xi.
262 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
to say, the mystic life has got to express itself in action : and for this new paths must be cut and new habits formed—all, in spite of the new self’s enthusiasm, “against the grain.” The energy which wells up incessantly in every living being must abandon the old road of least resistance and discharge itself in a new and more difficult way. The old paths, left to them- selves, must fade and at last die. When they are dead, and the new life has triumphed, Mortification is at an end. The mystics always know when this moment comes. An inner voice then warns them to lay their active penances aside.
Since the greater and stronger the mystic, the stronger and more stubborn his character tends to be, this change of life and turning of energy from the old and easy channels to the new is often a stormy matter. It is a period of actual battle between the inharmonious elements of the self, its lower and higher springs of action: of toil, fatigue, bitter suffering, and many disappointments. Nevertheless, in spite of its etymo- logical associations, the object of mortification is not death but life: the production of health and strength, the health and strength of the human consciousness viewed sub specie aeter- nitatis. “In the truest death of all created things, the sweetest and most natural life is hidden.” !
“ This dying,” says Tauler again, “has many degrees, and so has this life. A man might die a thousand deaths in one day, and find at once a joyful life corresponding to each of them. This is as it must be: God cannot deny or refuse this to death. The stronger the death the more powerful and thorough is the corresponding life; the more intimate the death, the more inward is the life. Each life brings strength, and strengthens to a harder death. When aman dies to a scornful word, bear- ing it in God’s name, or to sonie inclination inward or outward, acting or not acting against his own will, be it in love or grief, in word or act, in going or staying; or if he denies his desires of taste or sight, or makes no excuse when wrongfully accused ; or anything else whatever it may be to which he has not yet died, it is harder at first to one who is unaccustomed to it and un- mortified than to him who is mortified. ... A -great life makes reply to him who dies in earnest even in the least things, a life which strengthens him immediately to die a greater death; a
* Tauler, Sermon on St. Paul (‘* The Inner Way,”’ p. 114).
a
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death so long and strong, that it seems to him hereafter more joyful, good and pleasant to die than to live, for he finds life in death and light shining in darkness,” 1
No more than detachment, then, is mortification an end in itself. It is a means to the production of a definite kind of efficiency, a definite kind of vitality: like its physical parallel, the exercises of the gymnasium. Once this efficiency, this vitality, is produced, this training accomplished, mortification ends: often with startling abruptness. After a martyrdom which lasted sixteen years, says Suso—speaking as usual in the third person—of his own experience, “On a certain Whitsun Day a heavenly messenger appeared to him, and ordered him in God’s name to continue it no more. He at once ceased, and threw all the instruments of his sufferings [irons, nails, hair- shirt, &c.] into a river.” 2 From this time onward, austerities of this sort had no part in Suso’s life.
The unknown French ecstatic who wrote, and the English contemplative who translated, “The Mirror of Simple Souls,” 3 have between them described and explained in bold and accurate language the conditions under which the soul is enabled to abandon that “hard service of the virtues” which has absorbed it during the Purgative Way. The statement of the “French Book” is direct and uncompromising: well calcu- . lated to startle timid piety. ‘“ Virtues, I take leave of you for evermore!” exclaims the Soul. “Now shall my heart be more free and more in peace than it has been. Forsooth, I wot well your service is too travaillous. Some time I laid my heart in you without any dissevering: ye wot well this. I was in all things to you obedient. O then I was your servant: but now | am delivered out of your thraldom.”
To this astounding utterance the English translator has added a singularly illuminating gloss. “I am stirred here,” he says, “to say more of the matter, as thus: First when a soul
gives her to perfection, she labours busily day and night to get
virtues by counsel of reason, and strives with vices at every thought, at every word and deed that she perceives comes of them, and busily ensearches vices, them to destroy. Thus the
* Tauler, Second Sermon for Easter Day. (This is not included in either of the English collections.) 2 Suso, Leben, cap. xvil. 3 B.M. Add. 37790.
264 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM —
virtues be mistresses, and every virtue makes her to war with its contrary, the which be vices. Many sharp pains and bitter- ness of conscience feels the soul in this war. ... But so long one may bite on the bitter bark of the nut, that at last he shall come to the sweet kernel: right so, shortly to understand, it fares by these souls that be come to peace. They have so long striven with vices and wrought by virtues that they be come to the nut’s kernel, that is to say to the love of God, which is sweetness. And when the soul has deeply tasted this love . . . then the soul is wondrous light and gladsome. Then is she mistress and lady over the virtues, for she has them all within herself. . . . And then this soul takes leave of virtues, as of the thraldom and painful travail of them that she had before. And now she is lady and sovereign and they be subjects.” Jacopone da Todi speaks to the same effect :—
‘La guerra e terminata de le virtu battaglia de la mente travaglia cosa nulla contende.” *
So too in the case of St. Catherine of Genoa, after a penitential period of four years, during which she was haunted by a con- stant sense of sin, and occupied by incessant mortifications, “all thought of such mortifications was zm an instant taken from her mind: in such a manner that, had she even wished to continue such mortifications, she would have been unable todo so... the sight of her sins was now taken from her mind, so that henceforth she did not catch a glimpse of them: it was as though they had all been cast into the depths of the sea.”2. In other words, the new and higher centre of conscious- ness, finally established, asserted itself and annihilated the old. “La guerra e terminata,” all the energy of a strong nature flows freely in the new channels, and mortification ceases, mechanically, to be possible to the now unified or “ regenerated ” self.
Mortification takes its name from the reiterated statement of all ascetic writers that the senses, or body of desire, with the cravings which are excited by different aspects of the pheno-
* “©The war is at an end: in the battle of virtues, in travail of mind, there is no more striving” (Lauda xci.). 2 Vita e Dottrina, cap. v.
+ THE PURIFICATION OF THE SELF 265
menal world, must be mortified or killed; which is, of course, but the statement of psychological necessities from another point of view. All those self-regarding instincts—so ingrained that they have become automatic—which impel the self to choose the more comfortable part, are seen by the awakened intuition of the embryo mystic as gross infringements of the law of love. “This then must be the travail and labour of a man, to draw his heart and mind from the fleshly love and liking of all earthly creatures, from vain thoughts and from fleshly imaginations and from the love and vicious feeling of himself, so that the soul shall or may find or take no rest in any fleshly thoughts or worldly affections.”! The rule of Poverty must be applied to all the circumstances of normal conscious- ness as well as to the tastes and possessions of the self. Under this tonic influence real life will thrive, unreal life will wither and die.
This mortifying process is rendered necessary, not because the legitimate exercise of the senses is opposed to Divine Reality, but because those senses have usurped a place beyond their station; become the focus of energy, steadily drained the vitality of the self. “The dogs have taken the children’s meat.” The senses have grown stronger than their masters, monopolized the field of perception, dominated an organism which was made for greater activities, and built up those barriers of individuality which must one and all be done away before the subject can fulfil its destiny and pass over into the boundless life of the One. It is thanks to this wrong distribution of energy, this sedu- lous feeding of the cuckoo in the nest, that “in order to approach the Absolute, mystics must withdraw from everything, even themselves.”2 “Itis therefore supreme ignorance for any one to think that he can ever attain to the high estate of union with God before he casts away from him the desire of natural things,” says St. John of the Cross,3 “and of supernatural also so far as it concerns self-love, because the distance between them and that which takes place in the state of pure transformation
in God is the very greatest.” Again, “until the desires be
lulled to sleep by the mortification of sensuality, and sensuality
* Walter Hilton, ‘‘ The Scale of Perfection,” bk. i. pt. iii. cap. 2 Récéjac, ‘‘ Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique,” p. 78. 3 * Subida del Monte Carmelo,” 1. i. cap. v.
266 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
itself be mortified in them, so that it shall be contrary to the spirit no more, the soul cannot go forth in perfect liberty to the fruition of the union with the Beloved.” !
The death of selfhood in its narrow obvious sense is, then, the primary object of mortification. Allthe twisted elements of character which minister to the existence of this unreal yet complex creature are to be pruned away. Then as with the trees of the forest, so with the spirit of man, strong new branches will spring into being, grow towards air and light. “TI live, yet not I” is to be the confession of the mystic who has endured this “bodily death.” The self-that-is-to-be will live upon a plane where her own prejudices and preferences are so uninteresting as to be imperceptible. She must be weaned from these nursery toys: and weaning is a disagreeable process. The mystic, however, undertakes it as a rule without reluctance: pushed by his vivid consciousness of imperfection, his intuition of a more perfect state necessary to the fulfilment of his love. Often his entrance upon the torments of the Purgative Way, his taking up of the spiritual or material instruments of mortifica- tion, resembles in ardour and abruptness that “heroic plunge into Purgatory” of the newly dead when it perceives itself in the light of Love Divine, which is described in the Treatise of St. Catherine of Genoa as its nearest equivalent. “As she, plunged in the divine furnace of purifying love, was united to the Object of her love, and satisfied with all he wrought in her, so she understood it to be with the souls in Purgatory.” 2
This “divine furnace of purifying love” demands from the ardent soul, not only a complete self-surrender and voluntary turning from all impurity, a humility of the most far-reaching kind: but also a deliberate active suffering, a self- discipline in dreadful tasks. As gold in the refiner’s fire, so “burning of love into a soul truly taken all vices purgeth.” Where detachment may be a counsel of prudence, a practical result of seeing the true values of things, the pain of mortification is seized as a splendid opportunity, a love token, timidly offered by the awakened spirit to that all-demanding Lover from) Whom St. Catherine of Siena heard the terrible words “I, Fire, the Acceptor of sacrifices, ravishing away from them their
™ Op. cét., bk. i. cap. xv. 2 S. Caterina di Genova, ‘‘ Trattato di Purgatorio,” cap. i.
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darkness, give the light.’! “Suffering is the ancient law of love,’ says the Eternal Wisdom to Suso, “there is no quest without pain, there is no lover who is not also a martyr. Hence it is inevitable that he who would love so high a thing as Wisdom should sometimes suffer hindrances and griefs.” 2
The mystics have a profound conviction that Creation, Becoming, Transcendence, is a painful process at the best. Those amongst them who are Christians point to the Passion of Christ as a proof that the cosmic journey to perfection, the path of the Eternal Wisdom, follows of necessity the Way of the Cross. That old dreadful law of the inner life, which sounds so fantastic and yet is so bitterly true—‘“ No progress without pain ”—asserts itself. It declares that birth pangs must be endured in the ‘spiritual as well as in the material world: that adequate training must always hurt the athlete. Hence it is that the mystics’ quest of the Absolute drives them to an eager and heroic union with the reality of suffering, as well as with the reality of joy.3
This divine necessity of pain, this necessary sharing in the travail of a World of Becoming, is beautifully described by Tauler in one of those “internal conversations ” between the contem- plative soul and its God, which abound in the works of the mystics and are familiar to all readers of “The Imitation of Christ.” “A man once thought,” says Tauler, “that God drew some men even by pleasant paths, while others were drawn by the path of pain. Our Lord answered him thus, ‘ What think ye can be pleasanter or nobler than to be made most like unto Me? that is by suffering. Mark, to whom was ever offered such a troubled life as to Me? And in whom can I better work in accordance with My true nobility than in those who are most
* Dialogo, cap. Ixxxv. 2 Leben, cap. iv.
3 **This truth, of which she was the living example,” says Huysmans of St. Lydwine, ‘‘ has been and will be true for every period. Since the death of Lydwine, there is not a saint who has not confirmed it. Hear them formulate their desires. Always to suffer, and to die! cries St. Teresa ; always to suffer, yet not to die, corrects St. Magdalena dei Pazzi; yet more, oh Lord, yet more ! exclaims St. Francis Xavier, dying in anguish on the coast of China; I wish to be broken with suffering in order that I may prove my love to God, declares a seventeenth century Carmelite, the Ven. Mary of the Trinity. The desire for suffering is itself an agony, adds a great servant of God of our own day, Mother Mary Du Bourg; and she confided to her daughters in religion that ‘if they sold pain in the market she would hurry to buy it there’ ” (J. K. Huysmans, ‘‘ Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam,’’ 3rd edition, p. 225).
968 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
like Me? They are the men who suffer. ... Learn that My divine nature never worked so nobly in human nature as by suffering ; and because suffering is so efficacious, it is sent out of great love. I understand the weakness of human nature at all times, and out of love and righteousness I lay no heavier load on man than he can bear. The crown must be firmly pressed down that is to bud and blossom in the Eternal Presence of My Heavenly Father. He who desires to be wholly immersed in the fathomless sea of My Godhead must also be deeply im- mersed in the deep sea of bitter sorrow. I am exalted far above all things, and work supernatural and wonderful works in Myself: the deeper and more supernaturally a man crushes himself beneath all things, the more supernaturally will he be drawn far above all things.’” =
Pain, therefore, the mystics often court: sometimes in the crudely physical form which Suso describes so vividly and horribly in the sixteenth chapter of his Life, more frequently in those refinements of torture which a sensitive spirit can extract from loneliness, injustice, misunderstanding—above all, from deliberate contact with the repulsive accidents of life.
It would seem from a collation of the evidence that the typical mystical temperament is by nature a highly fastidious one. Its passionate apprehension of spiritual beauty, its intuitive perception of divine harmony, is counterbalanced by an instinctive loathing of ugliness, a shrinking from the disharmonies of squalor and disease. Often its ideal of re- finement is far beyond the contemporary standards of decency: a circumstance which is alone enough to provide ample oppor- tunity of wretchedness. This extreme sensitiveness, which appears to form part of the normal psycho-physical make-up of the mystic, as it often does of the equally highly-strung artistic type, is one of the first things to be seized upon by the awakened self as a disciplinary instrument. Then humi- lity’s axiom, “ Naught is too low for love” is forced to bear the less lovely gloss, “ Naught must be too disgusting.”
Two reasons at once appear for this. One is the innate contempt for phenomena, nasty as well as nice—the longing to | be free from all the fetters of sense—which goes with the
* Tauler, Sermon on St. Paul (“The Inner Way,’’ p. 114).
THE PURIFICATION OF THE SELF 269
passion for invisible things, Those to whom the attractions of earth are only illusion, are inconsistent if they attribute a greater reality to the revolting and squalid incidents of life. St. Francis did but carry his own principles to their logical conclusion, when he insisted that the vermin were as much his brothers as the birds. Real detachment means the death of preferences of all kinds: even of those which seem to other men the very proofs of virtue and fine taste.
The second reason is a nobler one, It is bound up with that principle of self-surrender which is the mainspring of the mystic life. To the contemplative mind, which is keenly conscious of unity in multiplicity—of God in the world—all disinterested service is service of the Absolute which he loves: and the harder it is, the more opposed to his self-regarding and zesthetic instincts, the more nearly it approaches his ideal. The point to which he aspires—though he does not always know it—is that in which all disharmony, all appearance of vileness, is resolved in the concrete reality which he calls the Love of God. Then, he feels dimly, everything will be seen under the aspect of a cosmic and charitable beauty ; exhibiting through the woof of corruption the web of eternal life.
It is told of St. Francis of Assisi, in whom the love of lovely things was always paramount, how he forced himself to visit the lepers whose sight and smell disgusted him: how he served them and even kissed them. “Then as he departed, in very truth that which had aforetime been bitter unto him, to wit, the sight and touch of lepers, now changed into sweet- ness, For, as he confessed, the sight of lepers had been so grievous unto him that he had been minded to avoid not only ‘seeing them, but even going nigh their dwelling. And if at any © time he chanced to pass their abodes, or to see them, albeit he - were moved by compassion to do them an alms through another person, yet alway would he turn aside his face, stopping his nostrils with his hand. But through the grace of God he became so intimate a friend of the lepers that, even as he recorded in his will, he did sojourn with them and did humbly serve them.”
Also, after his great renunciation of all property, he, once a prosperous young man who had been “dainty in his father’s
* Thomas of Celano, Legenda Prima, cap. vii. ; 3 Soc. cap. iv,
270 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
home,” accustomed himself to take a bowl and beg scraps of food from door to door: and here too, as in the case of the. lepers, that which at first seemed revolting became to him sweet. “And when he would have eaten that medley of various meats,” says the legend, “at first he shrank back, for that he had never been used willingly even to see, much less to eat, such scraps. At length, conquering himself, he began to eat; and it seemed to him that in eating no rich syrup had he ever tasted aught so delightsome.” !
The object, then, of this self-discipline is, like the object of all purgation, freedom: freedom from the fetters of the senses, the ‘“‘remora of desire,” from the results of environment ‘and worldly education, from pride and prejudice, preferences and distaste: from selfhood in every form. Its effect is a sharp reaction to the joy of self-conquest. The very act that had once caused in the enchained self a movement of loathing becomes not merely indifferent, but an occasion of happiness. So Margery Kempe “had great mourning and sorrowing if she might not kiss a leper when she met them in the way for the love of our Lord, whzch was all contrary to her disposition in the years of her youth and prosperity, for then she abhorred them most.” 2
I will spare the sensitive reader a detailed account of the loathsome ordeals by which St. Catherine of Genoa and Madame Guyon strove to cure themselves of squeamishness 3 and acquire this liberty of spirit. They, like St. Francis, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and countless other seekers for the Real, sought out and served with humility and love the sick and the unclean: associated themselves at all costs with life in its meanest forms: compelled themselves to contact with the most revolting substances: and tried to suppress the surface-con- sciousness by the traditional ascetic expedient of deliberately opposing all—even its most natural and harmless—inclinations, “In the first four years after she received the sweet wound from her Lord,” says the Life of Catherine of Genoa, she “ made great
« 3 Soc. cap. vii. 2 « A Short Treatise of Contemplation taken out of the boke of Margery Kempe | ancresse of Lynne.” London, 1521. This has been reprinted by Mr. E. Gardner | in “The Cell of Self-Knowledge,”’ 1910, p. 49. 3 3 The curious are referred to the original authorities. For St. Catherine, |