CHAPTER VII

INTROVERSION. Part II: CONTEMPLATION
Contemplation, a state of attainment—Its principal forms—Difference between contemplation and ecstasy—Contemplation defined—Its psychology—Delacroix—It is a brief act—St. Augustine—It is ‘‘ ineffable” and ‘‘ noetic’’—Contemplation in- cludes a large group of states—Its two marks; totality and self-mergence—Dionysius the Areopagite—It is a unitive act—Ruysbroeck—Hilton—What do mystics tell us of the contemplative act ?—Two things: loving communion and divine ignorance— Both represent temperamental reaction—The mystic usually describes his own feeling state—Richard Rolle—Two forms of contemplation: transcendental and immanental —Contemplation of Transcendence—The Via Negativa—The Divine Dark—The Desert of God—Tauler—Maeterlinck—Vision of Transcendence—Dante—Angela of Foligno—Contemplation of Immanence—An experience of Personality—Divine Love —These two forms really one—Both necessary—Ruysbroeck combines them—The process of Contemplation—Dionysius—The Cloud of Unknowing—Boehme—Divine Ignorance—Angelo of Foligno—Loving contemplation—St. John of the Cross— Rolle—The orison of union—Necessary to a description of the contemplative act— Deep orison—St. Teresa
7 must now consider under the general name of Contemplation all those more advanced states of introversion in which the mystic attains somewhat: the results and rewards of the discipline of Recollection and Quiet. If this course of spiritual athletics has done its work, he has now brought to the surface, trained and made efficient for life, a form of consciousness—a medium of communication with reality—which remains un iMawitse in ordinary men. Thanks to this faculty, he is now) able to perform the charac- teristic mystic act: to obtain a/temporary union with “that spiritual fount closed to all reactions from the world of sense, where, without witnesses of any kind, God and our Freedom meet.” !
In the degrees of Recollection, the self trained itself in spiritual attention: and at the same time lifted itself to a new
t Récéjac, ‘‘ Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique,” p. 176. ? ysuque, p. 17 392
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level of perception where, by means of the symbol which formed the gathering-point of its powers, it received a new inflow of life. In the degrees of Quiet it passed on toa state characterized by a tense stillness, in which it rested in that Reality at which, as yet, it dared not look. Now, in Contem- plation, it is to transcend alike the stages of symbol and of silence: and “energize enthusiastically” on those high levels which are dark to the intellect but radiant to the heart. We must expect this contemplative activity to show itself in many . different ways and take many different names, since its type will be largely governed by individual temperament. It appears under the forms which ascetic writers call “ordinary” and “extraordinary,” “infused” or “passive” Contemplation; and as that “orison of union” which we have already discussed.t Sometimes, too, it shows itself under those abnormal psycho- physical conditions in which the intense concentration of the self upon its overpowering transcendental perceptions results in the narrowing of the field of consciousness to a point at which all knowledge of the external world is lost, all the messages of the senses are utterly ignored. The subject then appears to be in a state of trance, characterized by physical rigidity and more or less complete anesthesia. These are the conditions of Rap- ture or Ecstasy: conditions of which the physical resemblances to certain symptoms of hysteria have so greatly reassured the enemies of mysticism.
Rapture and Ecstasy differ from Contemplation proper in being wholly involuntary states. Rapture, says St. Teresa, who frequently experienced it, is absolutely irresistible; we cannot hinder it. Whereas the orison of union, which is one of the forms in which pure Contemplation appears at its highest point of development, is still controlled to a large extent by the will of the subject, and “may be hindered, although that resistance be painful and violent.”2 There is thus a sharp natural division—a division both physical and psychical— established between the contemplative and the ecstatic states: and we shall do well to avail ourselves of it in our examination of their character.
First, then, as to Contemplation proper: whatis it? Itisa supreme manifestation of that indivisible “power of knowing”
* Supra, p. 294. * St. Teresa, Vida, cap. xx. §§ 1 and 3.
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which lies at the root of all our artistic and spiritual satisfac- tions. In it, man’s “made Trinity” of thought, love, and will, becomes a Unity: and feeling and perception are fused, as they are in all our apprehensions of beauty, and best contacts with life. It is an act, not of the Reason, but of the whole personality working under the stimulus of mystic love. Hence, its results feed every aspect of that personality: minister to its instinct for the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Psychologically it is an induced state, in which the field of consciousness is greatly contracted: the whole of the self, its conative powers, being sharply focused, concentrated upon one thing. We pour our- selves out or, as it sometimes seems to us, zz towards this over- powering interest: seem to ourselves to reach it and be merged with it. Whatever the thing may be, in this act we kuow it, as we cannot know it by the mere ordinary devices of thought.
The turning of our attention from that crisp and definite world of multiplicity, that cinematograph-show, with which intelli- gence is accustomed and able to deal, has loosed new powers of perception which we never knew that we possessed. Instead of sharply perceiving the fragment, we feel the solemn presence of the whole. Deeper levels of personality are opened up, and go gladly to the encounter of the universe. That universe, or some Reality hid between it and ourselves, responds to “the true lovely will of our heart.” Our ingoing concentration is balanced by a great outgoing sense of expansion, of new worlds made ours, as we receive the inflow of its life.
Delacroix has described with great subtlety the psycho- logical character of pure contemplation.
“When contemplation appears,” he says: “(a) It produces a general condition of indifference, liberty, and peace, an elevation above the world, a sense of beatitude. The Subject ceases to perceive himself in the multiplicity and division of his general consciousness, He is raised above himself. A deeper and a purer soul substitutes itself for the normal self. (4) In this state, in which consciousness of I-hood and con- sciousness of the world disappear, the mystic is conscious of being in immediate relation with God Himself; of participating in Divinity. Contemplation installs a method of being and of knowing. Moreover, these two things tend at bottom to become one. The mystic has more and more the impression
INTROVERSION: CONTEMPLATION 395
of being that which he knows, and of knowing that which he is.”t Temporally rising, in fact, to levels of freedom, he knows himself real, and therefore knows Reality.
Now, the object of the mystic’s contemplation is le twas some aspect of the Infinite Life: of “God, the one Reality.” Hence, the enhancement of vitality which artists or other unself- conscious observers may receive from their communion with scattered manifestations of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, is in his case infinitely increased. His uniformly rapturous language is alone enough to prove this. In the contemplative act, his whole personality, directed by love and will, transcends the sense-world, casts off its fetters, and rises to freedom: becoming operative on those high levels where, says Tauler, “reason cannot come.” There it apprehends the supra-sensible by immediate contact, and knows itself to be in the presence of the “Supplier of true Life.” Such Contemplation—such attain- ment of the Absolute—is the who/e act of which the visions of poets, the intuition of philosophers, give us hints.
It is a brief act. The very greatest of the contemplatives have been unable to sustain the brilliance of this awful vision for more than a very little while. “A flash,” “an instant,’ “the space of an Ave Maria,” they say.
“My mind,” says St. Augustine, in his account of his first purely contemplative glimpse of the One Reality, “withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradic- tory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed. ... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of 7That Which fs. And then at last I saw Thy invisible things understood by means of the things that are made, but I could not sustain my gaze: my weakness was dashed back, and I was relegated to my ordinary experience, bearing with me only a loving memory, and as it were the fragrance of those desirable meats on the which as yet I was not able to feed.” 2
This fragrance, as St. Augustine calls it, remains for ever with those who have thus been initiated, if only for a moment, into the atmosphere of the Real: and this—the immortal and indescribable memory of their communion with That Which Is—gives to their work the perfume of the “ Inviolate
t «Etudes sur le Mysticisme,” p. 370. 2 Aug. Conf., bk. vii. cap. xvii.
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Rose,” and is the secret of its magic power. But they can never tell us in exact and human language what it was that they attained in their ecstatic flights towards the thought of God: their momentary mergence in the Absolute Life.
“That Which Is,” says Augustine; “The One,” “the Sup- plier of true Life,” says Plotinus ; “the energetic Word,” says St, Bernard ; “ Eternal Light,” says Dante ; “the Abyss,” says Ruys- broeck ; “Pure Love,” says St. Catherine of Genoa—poor symbols of Perfection at the best. But, through and by these oblique utterances, they give us the far more valuable assurance that the Object of their discovery is one with the object of our quest.
William James has well observed that ‘‘ineffability ”. and “noetic quality” are the constant characteristics of the con- templative experience. Those who have seen are quite con- vinced: those who have not seen, can never be told. There is no certitude to equal the mystic’s certitude: no impotence more complete than that which falls on those who try to communicate it. “Of these most excellent and divine workings in the soul, whereby God doth manifest Himself,” says Angela of Foligno, “ Man can in no wise speak or even stammer.”2 Over and over again, however, he has tried to speak : and the greater part of mys- tical literature is concerned with these attempts. Under a variety of images, by a deliberate exploitation of the musical and sug- gestive qualities of words—often, too, by the help of desperate paradoxes, those unfailing stimulants of man’s intuitive power —he tries to tell others somewhat of that veritable country which “eye hath not seen.” His success—partial though it be —can only be accounted for upon the supposition that some- where within us lurks a faculty which has known this country from its birth; which dwells in it, partakes of Pure Being, and can under certain conditions be stung to consciousness. Then “transcendental feeling,” waking from its sleep, acknowledges that these explorers of the Infinite have really gazed upon the secret plan.
Now Contemplation is not, like meditation, one simple state, governed by one set of psychic conditions, It is a name for a large group of states, partly governed—like all other forms of
t “Varieties of Religious Experience,” p. 380. ? B. Angelae de Fulginio, ‘* Visionim et Instructionum Liber,’’ cap. xxvii. (English translation, p. 189).
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mystical activity—by the temperament ot the subject, and accompanied by feeling-states which vary from the extreme of quietude or “peace in life naughted” to the rapturous and active love in which “thought into song is turned.” Some kinds of Contemplation are inextricably entwined with the phenomena of “intellectual vision” and “inward voices.” In others we find what seems to be a development of the “ Quiet”: a state which the subject describes as a blank absorption, a darkness, or “contemplation 2 caligine.’ Sometimes the con- templative tells us that he passes through this darkness to the light :? sometimes it seems to him that he stays for ever in the “beneficent dark.”3 In some cases the soul says that even in the depths of her absorption, she “ knows her own bliss”: in others she only becomes aware of it when contemplation is over and the surface-intelligence reassumes the reins.
In this welter of personal experiences, it becomes necessary to adopt some basis of classification, some rule by which to distinguish true Contemplation from other introversive states, Such a basis is not easy to find. I think, however, that there are two marks of the real condition: (A) Totality, and (B) Self-Mergence: and these we may safely use in our attempt to determine its character.
(A) Whatever terms he may employ to describe it, and however faint or confused his perceptions may be, the mystic’s experience in Contemplation is the experience of the All. It is the Absolute which he has attained: not, as in meditation or vision, some partial symbol or aspect thereof.
(B) This attainment is brought about, this knowledge gained, by way of participation, not by way of observation. The passive receptivity of the Quiet is here developed into an active, _ outgoing self-donation. A “give and take”—a divine osmosis — —is set up between the finite and the infinite life. Not only does the Absolute pour in on the self, but that self rushes out willingly to lose itself in it. That dreadful consciousness of a narrow and limiting I-hood which dogs our search for freedom and full life, is done away. For a moment, at least, the indepen- dent spiritual life is achieved. The contemplative is merged
* Compare Baker, ‘* Holy Wisdom,” Treatise iii. § iv. cap. iv, 2 See Hilton, ‘*‘ The Scale of Perfection,” bk. ii. cap. vi, 3 Vide infra, p. 414.
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in it “like a bird in the air, like a fish in the sea”: loses to find and dies to live.
“We must,” says Dionysius the Areopagite, “contemplate things divine by our whole selves standing out of our whole selves ; becoming wholly of God.”! This is the “passive union” of Contemplation : a temporary condition in which the subject receives a double conviction of ineffable happiness and ultimate reality. He may try to translate this conviction into “ something said” or “something seen”: but in the end he will be found to confess that he can tell nothing, save by implication. The essential fact is that he was there: as the essential fact for the returning exile is neither landscape nor language, but the homely spirit of place.
“ To see and to have seen that Vision,” says Plotinus in one of his finest passages, “is reason no longer. It is more than reason, before reason, and after reason, as also is the vision which is seen. And perhaps we should not here speak of szghi : for that which is seen—if we must needs speak of seer and seen as two and not one—is not discerned by the seer, nor perceived by him as a second thing. . .. Therefore this vision is hard to tell of : for how can a man describe as other than himself that which, when he discerned it, seemed not other, but one with himself indeed ?” 2
Ruysbroeck, who continued in the mediaeval world the best traditions of Neoplatonic Mysticism, also describes a condition of supreme insight, a vision of Truth, obviously the same as that at which Plotinus hints. “Contemplation,” he says, “ places us in a purity and a radiance which is far above our under- standing ... and none can attain to it by knowledge, by subtlety, or by any exercise : but he whom God chooses to unite to Himself, and to illuminate by Himself, he and no other can contemplate God. ... But few men attain to this divine con- templation, because of our incapacity and of the hiddenness of that light wherein alone we can contemplate. And this is why none by his own knowledge, or by subtle examination, will ever really understand these things, For all words and all that one can learn or understand according to the mode of the creatures, are foreign to the truth that I have seen and far below it. But
* “De Divinis Nominibus,” vii. 1. * Ennead vi. 9, 10.
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he who is united to God, and illumined by this truth—he can understand Truth by Truth.t
This final, satisfying knowledge of reality—this under- standing of Truth by Truth—is, at bottom, that which all men desire. The saint’s thirst for God, the philosopher’s passion for the Absolute, is nothing else than this crying need of the spirit, variously expressed by the intellect and by the heart. The guesses of science, the diagrams of metaphysics, the intuitions - of artists; all are pressing towards this. Yet it is to be found of all in the kingdom of the contemplatives: that “little city set on an hill” which looks so small to those outside its gates.
Man’s soul, says Hilton, “perceiveth full well that there is somewhat above itself that it knoweth not, nor hath not yet, but would have it, and burningly yearneth after it; and that is nought else than the sight of Jerusalem outwardly, which is like to a city which the Prophet Ezechiel saw in his visions. He saith that he saw a city upon a hill towards the south, that to his sight when it was measured was no more in length and breadth than a reed, that is six cubits and a palm of length. But as soon as he was brought into the city, and looked about him, then he saw that it was wondrous great, for he saw many halls, and chambers both open and secret; he saw gates and porches without and within, and many more buildings than I now speak of, and it was in length and breadth many hundred cubits, that it seemed a wonder to him that this city was so long and so large within, that seemed so little to his sight when he was without. This city betokeneth the perfect love of God set upon the hill of Contemplation, which to the sight of a soul that without the feeling of it travelleth in desire towards it seemeth somewhat, but it seemeth but a little thing, no more than a rood, that is six cubits and a palm in length. By six cubits are understood the perfection of man’s work; and by the palm, a little touch of Contemplation. He seeth well that there s such a thing that passeth the deservings of all the workings of man, like as a palm is surpassed by six cubits, but he seeth ‘not within what it is; yet if he can come within the city of Contemplation, then seeth he much more than at first.” 2
As in the case of vision, so here all that we who “ with-
* Ruysbroeck, ‘* L’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,” 1. iii. cap. i. 2 -** Tne Seale of Perfection,” bk. ii. cap. vi.
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out the feeling travel in desire” can really know concerning Contemplation—its value for life, the knowledge it confers— must come from those who have “come within the city”: have, in the metaphor of Plotinus, “taken flight towards the Thought of God.” What, in effect, can they tell us about the knowledge of reality which they attained in that brief communion with the Absolute ?
They tell us chiefly, when we come to collate their evidence, two apparently contradictory things. They speak, almost in the same breath, of an exceeding joy, a Beatific Vision, an intense communion, and a “loving sight” : and of an exceeding emptiness, a barren desert, an unfathomable Abyss, a nescience, a Divine Dark.
Over and over again these two pairs of opposites occur in all first-hand descriptions of pure contemplation: Remoteness and Intimacy, Darkness and Light. Bearing in mind that these four groups of symbols all describe the same process seen “through a temperament,” and represent the reaction of that temperament upon Absolute Reality, we may perhaps by their comparison obtain some faint idea of the indescribable Somewhat at which they hint.
Note first that the emotional accompaniments of his per- ceptions will always and necessarily be the stuff from which the mystic draws suggestive language by which to hint at his experience of supernal things. His descriptions will always lean to the impressionistic rather than to the scientific side. The “deep yet dazzling darkness,” the “ unfathomable abyss,” the Cloud of Unknowing, the “embrace of the Beloved,” all represent, not the Transcendent but his relation with the Tran- - scendent: not an object observed but an overwhelming impres- ' sion felt, by the totality of his being during his communion with a Reality which is One.
It is not fair, however, to regard Contemplation on this account as pre-eminently a “feeling state,” and hence attribute to it, as many modern writers do, a merely subjective validity. It is, of course, accompanied, as all humanity’s supreme and vital acts are accompanied, by feelings of an exalted kind: and since such emotions are the least abnormal part of it, they are the part which the subject finds easiest to describe. These elusive combinations of Fear, Amazement, Desire, and Joy are
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more or less familiar to him. The accidents of sensual life have developed them. His language contains words which are capable of suggesting them to other men. But his total experience transcends mere feeling, just as it transcends mere intellect. It is a complete act of perception, inexpressible by these departmental words: and its agent is the whole man, the indivisible personality whose powers and nature are only partially hinted at in such words as Love, Thought, or Will.
The plane of consciousness, however—the objective some- _ what—of which this personality becomes aware in contempla- tion, is not familiar to it; neither is it related to its systems of thought. Man, accustomed to dwell amongst spatial images adapted to the needs of daily life, has no language that will fit . it at all. So, a person hearing for the first time some master- piece of classical music, would have no language in which to describe it objectively ; but could only tell us how it made him | feel. This is one reason why feeling-states seem to preponderate in all descriptions of the mystic act. Earthly emotions provide a parallel which enables the subject to tell us by implication something of that which he felt: but he cannot tell us—for want of standards of comparison—what it was that induced him thus to feel. His best efforts to fit words to this elusive some- what generally result in the evaporation alike of its fragrance and of its truth. As St. Augustine said of Time, he knows what > it is until he is asked to define it.
How symbolic and temperamental is all verbal description of mystical activity, may be seen by the aspect which contempla- tion takes in the music-loving soul of Richard Rolle; who always found his closest parallels with Reality, not in the concepts of intimate union, or of self-loss in the Divine Abyss, but in the idea of the soul’s participation in a supernal harmony . —that sweet minstrelsy of God in which “thought into song is turned.”
“To me,” he says, “it seems that contemplation is joyful song of God’s love taken in mind, with sweetness of angels’ — loving. This is jubilation, that is the end of perfect prayer and high devotion in this life. This is that mirth in mind, had ghostily by the lover everlastingly, with great voice out- breaking. . . . Contemplative sweetness not without full great labour is gotten, and with joy untold it is possessed. Forsooth,
DD
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it is not man’s merit but God’s gift ; and yet from the beginning to this day never might man be ravished in contemplation of Love Everlasting, but if he before parfitely all the world’s vanity had forsaken.” !
We must, then, be prepared to accept, sift, and use many different descriptions of evoked emotion in the course of our enquiry into the nature of the contemplative’s perceptions of the - Absolute. We find on analysis that these evoked emotions separate themselves easily into two groups. Further, these two groups answer to the two directions in which the mystic consciousness of Reality is extended, and to the pairs of descriptions of the Godhead which we have found throughout to be characteristic of mystical literature: z.¢., the personal and spatial, immanental and transcendental, indwelling Life and Unconditioned Source; (@) the strange, dark, unfathomable Abyss of Pure Being always dwelt upon by mystics of the metaphysical type, and (4) the divine and loved Companion of the soul whose presence is so sharply felt by those selves which lean to the concept of Divine Personality.
A. The Contemplation of Transcendence—The first group of feeling-states, allied to those which emphasize the theological idea of Divine Transcendence, is born of the mystic’s sense of his own littleness, unworthiness, and in- curable ignorance in comparison with the ineffable greatness of the Absolute Godhead which he has perceived, and in which he desires to lose himself: of the total and incom- municable difference zz £znd between the Divine and everything else. Awe and self-abasement and the paradoxical passion for self-loss in the All, here govern his emotional state. All affirmative statements seem to him blasphemous, so far are they from an ineffable truth which is “more than reason, before reason, and after reason.” To this group of feelings, which usually go with an instinctive taste for Neoplatonism, an icono- clastic distrust of personal imagery, we owe all negative descriptions of supreme Reality. For this type of self God is the Unconditioned, for whom we have no words, and whom all our poor symbols insult. To see Him is to enter the Dark- ness, the “ Cloud of Unknowing,” and “ know only that we know nought.” Nothing else can satisfy this exaggerated spiritual
* Richard Rolle, ‘‘ The Mending of Life,” cap. xii.
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humility, which easily degenerates into that subtle form of pride which refuses to acquiesce in its own limitations.
“There is none other God but He that none may know, which may not be known,” says this contemplative soul. “No, soothly, no! Without fail, No, says she. He only is my God that none can one word of say, nor all they of Paradise one only point attain nor understand, for all the knowing that they have of Him.” + |
When they tried very hard to be geographically exact, to define and describe their apprehension of and contact with the Unconditioned One, who is the only Country of the Soul, contemplatives of this type became, like their great master the Areopagite, impersonal and remote. They seem to have been_ caught up to some measureless height, where the air is too rarefied for the lungs of common men. When we ask them the_ nature of the life on these summits, they are compelled as a rule to adopt the Dionysian concept of Divine Darkness, or the parallel idea of the fathomless Abyss, the Desert of the Godhead, the Eckhartian “still wilderness where no one is at home.”
Oddly enough, it is in their language concerning this place or plane of reality, in which union with the Super-essential God- head takes place—this “lightsome darkness and rich nought ”— that they come nearer to distinct affirmation, and consequently offer more surprises to sentimental and popular piety, than in any other department of their work. Unquestionably this language, these amazing tidings of a “ still desert,” a “ vast sea,” an “unplumbed abyss” in which the “emptiness,” the “nothing,” the “ Dark” on which the self entered in the Orison of Quiet is infinitely increased, yet positive satisfaction is at last attained, does correspond with a definite psychological experience. It is not merely the convention of a school. These descriptions, - incoherent as they are, have a strange note of certainty, a stranger note of passion, an odd realism of their own: which mean, wherever we meet them, that experience not tradition is their source.
_ Driven of necessity to a negation of all that their surface- minds have ever known—with language, strained to the uttermost, failing them at every turn—these contemplatives are still able to communicate to us a definite somewhat, news as to
* “The Mirror of Simple Souls,” cap. iii.
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a given and actual Reality, an unchanging Absolute; and a beatific union with it, most veritably attained. They agree in their accounts of it, in a way which makes it obvious that all these reporters have sojourned in the same land, and experienced the same spiritual state. Moreover, our own inmost minds bear witness for them. We meet them half-way. We know in- stinctively and irrefutably that they tell true; and they rouse in us a passionate nostalgia, a bitter sense of exile and of loss.
One and all, these explorers of the Infinite fly to language expressive of great and boundless spaces. In their withdrawal from the busy, fretful sense-world they have sunk down to the “round” of the soul and of the universe: Being, the Substance of all that Is. Multiplicity is resolved into Unity: a unity with which the perceiving self is merged. Thus the mystic, for the time of this “union with the Divine,” does find himself, in Tauler’s words, to be “ simply in God.”
“ The great wastes to be found in this divine ground,” says that great master, “ have neither image nor form nor condition, for they are neither here nor there. They are like unto a fathomless Abyss, bottomless and floating in itself. Even as water ebbs and flows, up and down, now sinking into a hollow, so that it looks as if there were no water there, and then again in a little while rushing forth as if it would engulf everything, so does it come to pass in this Abyss. This, truly, is much more God’s Dwelling-place than heaven or man. A man who verily desires to enter will surely find God here, and himself simply in God; for God never separates Himself from this ground. God will be present with him, and he will find and enjoy Eternity here. There is no past nor present here, and no created light can reach unto or shine into this divine Ground; for here only is the dwelling-place of God and His sanctuary.
“ Now this Divine Abyss can be fathomed by no creatures ; it can be filled by none, and it satisfies none; God only can fill it in His Infinity. For this abyss belongs only to the Divine Abyss, of which it is written: Adyssus abyssum invocat. He who is truly conscious of this ground, which shone into the powers of his soul, and lighted and inclined its lowest and highest powers to turn to their pure Source and true Origin, must diligently examine himself, and remain alone, listening to
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the voice which cries in the wilderness of this ground. This ground is so desert and bare, that no thought has-ever entered there. None of all the thoughts of man which, with the help of _ reason, have been devoted to meditation on the Holy Trinity (and some men have occupied themselves much with these . thoughts) have ever entered this ground. For it is so close and yet so far off, and so far beyond all things, that it has neither time nor place. It is a simple and unchanging condition. A man who really and truly enters, feels as though he had been here throughout eternity, and as though he were one therewith.” !
Many other mystics have written to the same effect: have described with splendour the ineffable joys and terrors of the Abyss of Being “where man existed in God from all Eternity,” the soul’s adventures when, “stripped of its very life,” it “sails the wild billows of the sea divine.” But their words merely amaze the outsider and give him little information. The con- templative self who has attained this strange country can only tell an astonished and incredulous world that here his greatest deprivation is also his greatest joy; that here the extremes of possession and surrender are the same, that ignorance and knowledge, light and dark, are One. Love has led him into that timeless, spaceless world of Being which is the peaceful ground, - not only of the individual striving spirit, but also of the striving universe ; and he can but cry with Philip, “/# zs enough.” |
“Here,” says Maeterlinck, “we stand suddenly at the con- fines of human thought, and far beyond the Polar circle of the mind. It is intensely cold here; it is intensely dark; and yet you will find nothing but flames and light, But to those who , come without having trained their souls to these new per- - ceptions, this light and these flames are as dark and as cold as if they were painted. Here we are concerned with the most exact of sciences: with the exploration of the harshest and most uninhabitable headlands of the divine ‘Know thyself’: and the midnight sun reigns over that rolling sea where the © psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God.” 2
On one hand “ flames and light”—the flame of living love
* Tauler, Sermon on St. John the Baptist (‘* The Inner Way,” pp. 97-99). * Maeterlinck, Introduction to MRuysbroeck’s ‘‘ L’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,”’ p. v,
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which fills the universe—on the other the “quiet desert of Godhead,” the Divine Dark. Under these two types, one affirmative, one negative, resumed in his most daring paradox, nearly the whole of man’s contemplative experience of the Absolute can be and is expressed. We have considered his negative description of Utmost Transcendence: that confession of “divine ignorance” which is a higher form of knowledge. | But this is balanced, in a few elect spirits, by a positive contem- plation of truth, an ecstatic apprehension of the “secret plan.”
Certain rare mystics seem able to describe to us a Beatific Vision experienced here and now: a knowledge by contact of the Flaming Heart of Reality which includes in one great whole the planes of Being and Becoming, the “fixed point of Deity,” the Eternal Father, and His manifestation in the “energetic Word.” We saw something of this power, which is characteristic of mystical genius of a high order, when we studied the characteristics of Illumination. Its finest literary expression is found in that passage of the “ Paradiso” where Dante tells us how he pierced, for an instant, the secret of the Empyrean. Already he had enjoyed a symbolic vision of two-fold Reality, as the moving River of Light and the still white Rose.t Now these two aspects vanished, and he saw the One.
‘*. , . la mia vista, venendo sincera, e pil e pill entrava per lo raggio dell’ alta luce, che da sé é vera. Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio che il parlar nostro ch’ a tal vista cede, e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio. Qual é colui che somniando vede, ché dopo il sogno la passione impressa rimane, e I altro alla mente non riede ; Cotal son io, ché quasi tutta cessa mia visione, ed ancor mi distilla nel cor lo dolce che nacque da essa.
* * w *
Io credo, per I’ acume ch’ io soffersi del vivo raggio, ch’ io sarei smarrito, se gli occhi miei da lui fossero aversi. E mi ricorda ch’ io fui pit ardito per questo a sostener tanto ch’ io giunsi P aspetto mio col Valor infinito. » » = *
* Par. xxx. 61-128. Compare p. 343.
INTROVERSION: CONTEMPLATION 407
Cosi la mente mia, tutta sospesa, mirava fissa, immobile ed attenta, e sempre del mirar faceasi accesa.
A quella luce cotal si diventa, che volgersi da lei per altro aspetto é impossibil che mai si consenta.
x
Pero che il Ben, ch’ é del volere obbietto, tutto s’accoglie in lei, e fuor di quella é difettevo cid che li’ é perfetto.” ?
Intermediate between the Dantesque apprehension of Eter- nal Reality and the contemplative communion with Divine Personality, is the type of mystic whose perceptions of the supra-sensible are neither wholly personal nor wholly cosmic and transcendental] in type. To him, God is pre-eminently the Perfect—Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, Light, Life, and Love— discovered in a moment of lucidity at the very door of the seeking self. Here the symbols under which He is perceived are still the abstractions of philosophy : but in the hands of the mystic these terms cease to be abstract, are stung to life. Such contemplatives preserve the imageless and ineffable char- acter of the Absolute, but are moved by its contemplation toa joyous and personal love.
Thus “ upon a certain time,” says Angela of Foligno, “ when I was at prayer and my spirit was exalted, God spake unto me many gracious words full of love. And when I looked I beheld God who spake with me. But if thou seekest to know that which I beheld, I can tell thee nothing, save that I beheld a fullness and a clearness, and felt them within me so abundantly that I can in no wise describe it, nor give any likeness thereof.
* Par. xxxiil. 52-63, 76-81, 97-105. ‘‘ My vision, becoming purified, entered deeper and deeper into the ray o. that Supernal Light which in itself is true. Thenceforth my vision was greater than our language, which fails such a sight ; and memory too fails before such excess. As he who sees in a dream, and after the dream is gone the impression or emotion remains, but the rest returns not to the mind, such am I: for nearly the whole of my vision fades, and yet there still wells within my heart the sweetness born therefrom. . . . I think that by the keenness or the living ray which I endured I had been lost, had I once turned my eyes aside. And I remember that for this I was the bolder so long to sustain my!gaze, as to unite it with the Power Infinite. . . . Thus did my mind, wholly in suspense, gaze fixedly, immovable and intent, ever enkindled by its gazing. In the presence of that Light one becomes such, that never could one consent to turn from it to any other sight. Because the Good, which is the object of the will, is therein wholly gathered ; and outside of this, that is defective which therein is perfect.”
408 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
For what I beheld was not corporal but as though it were in heaven. Thus I beheld a beauty so great that I can say nought concerning it, save that I saw the supreme Beauty which con- taineth within itself all of Good.” Again, “I beheld the in- effable fullness of God: but I can relate nothing of it, save that I have seen the plenitude of Divine Wisdom wherein is all Goodness,” ?
B. The Contemplation of Immanence.—The second group of contemplatives is governed by that “Love which casteth out fear”: by a predominating sense of the nearness, intimacy, and sweetness, rather than the strangeness and unattainable transcendence of that same Infinite Life at whose being the first group could only hint by amazing images which seem to be borrowed from the poetry of metaphysics. They are, says Hilton, in a lovely image, “ Feelingly fed with the savour of His invisible blessed Face.”2 All the feelings which flow from joy, confidence, and affection, rather than those which are grouped about rapture and awe—though awe is always present in some measure, as it is always present in all perfect love—here contribute towards a description of the Truth.
These contemplatives tell us of their attainment of That which Is, as the closest and most joyous of all communions; a coming of the Bridegroom; a rapturous immersion in the Uncreated Light. “Nothing more profitable, nothing merrier than grace of contemplation!” cries Rolle, “that lifts us from this low and offers to God. What is grace of contemplation but beginning of joy? what is parfiteness of joy but grace con- firmed ?” 3
In such “bright contemplation ” as this, says the “ Mirror of Simple Souls,” “ the soul is full gladsome and jolly.” Utter peace and wild delight: every pleasure-state known to man’s normal consciousness, is inadequate to the description of her joy. She has participated for an instant in the Divine Life: knows. all, and knows nought. She has learnt the world’s secret, not by knowing, but by being: the only way of really knowing anything.
’ B. Angelae de Fulginio, ‘‘ Visionum et Instructionum Liber,” caps. xxi. and xxiii. (English translation, pp. 169, 174).
® ** The Scale of Perfection,” bk. iii. cap. xi,
3 ‘©The Mending of Life,” cap. xii,
INTROVERSION: CONTEMPLATION 409
Where the dominant emotion is that of intimate affection : and where the training or disposition of the mystic inclines him to emphasize the personal and Incarnational rather than the abstract and Trinitarian side of Christianity, the contemplative of this type will always tend to describe his secret to us as above all things an experience of adorable Friendship. Reality is for him a Person, not a State. In the “orison of union” it seems to him that an absolute communion, a merging of his self with this other and strictly personal Self takes place. “God,” he says, then “meets the soul in her Ground”: ze, in that world of Pure Being to which, by divine right, she belongs, Clearly, the “degree of contemplation,” the psychological state, is here the same as that in which the mystic of the impersonal type attained the “Abyss.” But from the point of view of the subject this joyful and personal encounter of Lover and Beloved will be a very different experience from the soul’s immersion in that “desert of Deity,” as described by Eckhart and his school. “In this oning,” says Hilton, “consisteth the marriage which passeth betwixt God and the soul, that shall never be dissolved or broken.” !
St. Teresa is the classic example of this intimate and affective type of contemplation: but St. Gertrude, Suso, Julian, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and countless others, provide instances of its operation. We owe to it all the most beauti- ful and touching expressions of mystic love,
Julian’s “I saw Him and sought Him: and I had Him, I wanted Him” expresses in epigram its combination of rap- turous attainment and insatiable desire: its apprehension of a Presence at once friendly and divine. So too does her description of the Tenth Revelation of Love when “ with this sweet enjoying He showed unto mine understanding in part the blessed Godhead, stirring then the poor soul to understand, as it may be said, that is, to think on the endless Love that was without beginning, and is, and shall be ever. And with this our good Lord said full blissfully, Zo, how that I loved thee, as if He had said, My darling, behold and see thy Lord, thy God that ts thy Maker, and thine endless joy.” 2
“The eyes of my soul were opened,’ says Angela of
* «©The Scale of Perfection,” bk. i. pt. i. cap. viii. * ** Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. xxiv,
410 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
Foligno, “and I beheld love advancing gently towards me, and I beheld the beginning but not the end. Unto me there seemed only a continuation and eternity thereof, so that I can describe neither likeness nor colour, but immediately that this love reached me, I did behold all these things more clearly with the eyes of the soul then I could do with the eyes of the body. This love came towards me after the manner of a sickle. Not that there was any actual and measurable likeness, but when first it appeared unto me it did not give itself unto me in such abundance as I expected, but part of it was withdrawn. Therefore do I say after the manner of a sickle. Then was I filled with love and inestimable satiety.” ?
It is to Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose contemplation was emphatically of the intimate type, that we owe the most perfect definition of this communion of the mystic with his Friend. “Orison,” she says, “draws the great God down into the small heart: it drives the hungry soul out to the full God. It brings together the two lovers, God and the soul, into a joyful room where they speak much of love.” 2
We have already seen that the doctrine of the Trinity makes it possible for Christian mystics, and, still more, for Christian mysticism as a whole, to reconcile this way of apprehending reality with the “negative” and impersonal perception of the ineffable One, the Absolute which “hath no image.” Though they seem in their extreme forms to be so sharply opposed as to justify Eckhart’s celebrated dis- tinction between the unknowable totality of the Godhead and the knowable personality of God, the “image” and the “circle” are yet aspects of one thing. Instinctive monists as they are, all the mystics feel—and the German school in particular have expressed—Dante’s conviction that these two aspects of reality, these two’ planes of being, however widely they seem to differ, are Oxe3 Both are ways of describing that Absolute Truth, “present yet absent, near, yet far,” that Triune Fact, az tre colort e ad una continenza, which is God. Both are necessary if we are to form any idea of that com-
‘ B. Angelae de Fulginio, of. cét., cap. xxv. (English translation, p. 178). 2 “Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit,” pt. v. cap. 13. 3 Par. xxxiii. 137.
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plete Reality: as, when two men go together to some undiscovered country, one will bring home news of its great spaces, its beauty of landscape, another of its geological formation, or the flora and fauna that express its life; and both must be taken into account before any just estimate of the real country can be made.
Since it is of the essence of the Christian religion to combine personal and metaphysical truth, a transcendent and an immanent God, it is not surprising that we should find in Christianity a philosophic and theological basis for this paradox of the contemplative experience. Most often, though not always, the Christian mystic identifies the personal and intimate Lover of the soul, of whose elusive presence he is so sharply aware, with the person of Christ; the un- knowable and transcendent Godhead with that eterna luce, the Undifferentiated One in Whom the Trinity of Persons is resumed.
Temperamentally, most practical contemplatives lean to either one or other of these apprehensions of Reality: to a personal and immanental meeting in the “ground of the soul,” or to the austere joys of the “naughted soul” abased before an impersonal Transcendence which no language but that of negation can define. In some, however, both types of perception seem to exist together: and they speak alter- natively of light and darkness, of the rapturous encounter with Love and of supreme self-loss in the naked Abyss; the desert of the essence of God. MRuysbroeck is the perfect example of this type of contemplative; and his works con- tain numerous and valuable passages descriptive of that synthetic experience which resumes the personal and tran- scendental aspects of the mystic fact.
“When we have become Voyant,’ he says—that is to say, when we have attained to spiritual lucidity—“ we are able to contemplate in joy the eternal coming of the Bridegroom ; and this is the second point on which I would speak. What, then, is this eternal coming of our Bridegroom? It is a perpetual new birth and a perpetual new illumination: for the ground whence the Light shines and which is Itself. the Light, is living and fruitful: and hence the manifestation of the Eternal Light
* Compare supra, Pt. I. Cap V,
412 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
is renewed without interruption in the most secret part of our souls, Behold! all human works and active virtues are here transcended ; for God discloses Himself only at the apex of the soul. Here there is nought else but an eternal contemplation of, and dwelling upon the Light, by the Light and in the Light. And the coming of the Bridegroom is so swift, that He comes perpetually, and He dwells within us with His abysmal riches, and He returns to us as it were anew in His Person, with such new radiance, that He seems never to have come to us before, For His coming consists, outside all Time, in an Aternal Now, always welcomed with new desires and with new Joys. Behold! the delights and the joys which this Bridegroom brings in His coming are fathomless and limitless, for they are Himself: and this is why the eyes of the soul, by which the lover contemplates the Bridegroom, are opened so widely that they can never close again. ... Now this active meeting, and this loving embrace, are in their essence fruitive and unconditioned; for the infinite Undifferentiation of the Godhead is so dark and so naked of all image, that it conceals within itself all the divine qualities and works, all the properties of the Persons, in the all-enfolding richness of the Essential Unity, and forms a divine fruition in
the Abyss of the Ineffable One. And here there is an over-
passing fruition of, and an outflowing immersion in, the nudity of Pure Being; where all the Names of God, and all manifesta- tions, and all divine knowledge, which are reflected in the mirror of divine truth, are absorbed into the Ineffable Simplicity, the
Absence of image and of knowledge. For in this limitless
Abyss of Simplicity, all things are embraced in the bliss of _ fruition; but the Abyss itself remains uncomprehended, except by the Essential Unity. The Persons and all that which lives
in God, must give place to this. For there is nought else here but an eternal rest, enwrapped as it were in the fruition of the immersion of love: and this is the Being, without image, that all
interior souls have chosen above all other thing. This is the dim silence where all lovers lose-themselves,” *
Here Ruysbroeck, beginning with a symbol of the Divine Personality as Bridegroom of the Soul, which would have been congenial to the mind of St. Catherine of Siena, ends upon the
summits of Christian metaphysics ; with a description of the —
* Ruysbroeck, ‘‘ L’Ornement des noces Spirituelles,” bk. iii. caps. iii. and vi.
INTROVERSION: CONTEMPLATION 413
loving immersion of the self in that Unconditioned One who transcends the Persons of theology and beggars human speech. We seem to see him desperately clutching at words and similes which may, he hopes, give some hint of the soul’s fruition of Reality : its immeasurable difference in kind from the dreams and diagrams of anthropomorphic religion. His strange state-
' ments in respect of this Divine Abyss are on a par with those which I have already quoted from the works of those other
contemplatives, who, refusing to be led away by the emotional aspect. of their experience, have striven to tell us—as they thought—not merely what they felt but what they beheld. Ruysbroeck’s great mystical genius, however, the depth and wholeness of his intuition of Reality, does not allow him to be satisfied with a merely spatial or metaphysical description of
‘the Godhead. The “active meeting” and the “ loving embrace”
are, he sees, an integral part of the true contemplative act. In “the dim silence where lovers lose themselves,” a Person meets a person: and ¢hzs it is, not the philosophic Absolute, which “all interior souls have chosen above all other thing.”
We must now look more closely at the method by which the contemplative attains to his unique communion with the Absolute Life: the kind of activity which seems to him to characterize his mergence with Reality. As we might expect, that activity, like its result, is of two kinds: personal and affirmative, impersonal and negative. It is obvious that where Divine Perfection is conceived as the soul’s companion, the Bridegroom, the Beloved, the method of approach will be very different from that which ends in the self’s immersion in the paradoxical splendour of the Abyss, the “ still wilderness where no one is at home.” It is all the difference between the prepa- rations for a wedding and for an expedition to the Arctic Seas. Hence we find, at one end of the scale, that extreme form of personal and intimate communion—the going forth of lover to beloved—which the mystics call “the orison of union”: and at the other end, the “dark contemplation,” by which alone selves of the transcendent and impersonal type claim that they draw near to the Unconditioned One.
- Of the dim and ineffable contemplation of Unnameable Transcendence, the imageless absorption in the Absolute,
Dionysius the Areopagite of course provides the classic , ‘ 4
414 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
example. It was he who gave to it the name of Divine Darkness: and all later mystics of this type borrow their language from him. His directions upon the subject are singularly explicit : his descriptions, like those of St. Augustine, glow with an exultant sense of a Reality attained, and which others may attain if they will but follow where he leads.
“ As for thee, oh well beloved Timothy,” he says, “exercise thyself ceaselessly in mystical contemplation. Leave on one side the senses and the operations of the understanding, all that which is material and intellectual, all things which ave, and all things which ave not; and, with a supernatural flight, go and unite thyself as closely as possible with That which is above all essence and all idea. For it is only by means of this sincere, spontaneous, and entire surrender of thyself and all things, that thou shalt be able to precipitate thyself, free and unfettered, into the mysterious radiance of the Divine Dark.”! Again, “The Divine Dark is nought else but that inaccessible light wherein the Lord is said to dwell. Although it is invisible because of its dazzling splendours and unsearchable because of the abundance of its supernatural brightness, nevertheless, who- soever deserves to see and know God rests therein ; and, by the very fact that he neither sees nor knows, is truly z# that which surpasses all truth and all knowledge.” 2
It has become a commonplace with writers on mysticism to say, that all subsequent contemplatives took from Dionysius this idea of “ Divine Darkness,” and entrance therein as the soul’s highest privilege: took it, so to speak, ready-made and on faith, and incorporated it in their tradition. But to argue thus is to forget that mystics are above all things practical people. They do not write for the purpose of handing on a philosophical scheme, but in order to describe something which they have themselves experienced ; something which they feel to be of
* Dionysius the Areopagite, ‘‘ De Mystica Theologia,” i. 1. ? Jbid., Letter to Dorothy the Deacon. This passage seems to be the source of Vaughan’s celebrated verse in ‘‘ The Night ”’—
** There is in God, some say, A deep but dazzling darkness, as men here Say it is late and dusky because they See not all clear. O for that Night ! where I in Him Might live invisible and dim.”
INTROVERSION: CONTEMPLATION 415
transcendent importance for humanity. If, therefore, they persist—and they do persist—in using this simile of “darkness” in describing their adventures in contemplation, it can only be because it fits the facts. No Hegelian needs to be told that we shall need the addition cf its opposite before we can hope to approach the truth: and it is exactly the opposite of this “dim ignorance” which is offered us by mystics of the “joyous” or “intimate” type, who find their supreme satisfaction in the positive experience of “union,” the “mystical marriage of the soul.”
What, then, do those who use this image of the “dark” really mean by it? They mean this: that God in His abso- lute Reality is unknowable—is dark—to man’s intellect: which is, as Bergson has reminded us, adapted to very different pur- poses than those of divine intuition. When, under the spur of mystic love, the whole personality of man comes into contact with that Reality, it enters a plane of experience to which none of the categories of the intellect apply. Reason finds itself, in a very actual sense, “in the dark ”—immersed in the Cloud of Unknowing. This dimness and lostness of the mind, then, is a necessary part of the mystic’s ascent to the Absolute. That Absolute will not be “known of the heart” until we acknow- ledge that It is “unknown of the intellect”; and obey the Dionysian injunction to “leave the operations of the under- standing on one side.” The movement of the contemplative must be a movement of the whole man: he is to “ precipitate himself, free and unfettered,” into the bosom of Reality. Only when he has thus transcended sight and knowledge, can he be sure that he has also transcended the world with which they are competent to deal, and is zm that which surpasses all essence and all idea.
‘*This is Love: to fly heavenward, To rend, every instant, a hundred veils. The first moment, to renounce life ; The last step, to fare without feet. To regard this world as invisible, Not to see what appears to oneself.” *
This acknowledgment of our intellectual ignorance, this humble surrender is the entrance into the “Cloud of Unknow- ng”: the first step towards mystical knowledge of the Absolute.
For Truth and Humility are full true sisters,” says Hilton,
* Jalalu ’d Din, ‘‘ Selected Poems from the Divan,’’ p. 137.
416 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
“fastened together in love and charity, and there is no distance of counsel betwixt them two.” !
“Thou askest me and sayest,” says the author of the “ Cloud of Unknowing,” “ How shall I think upon Himself and what is He? To this I cannot make thee other answer but thus: I wot not.
“For thou hast brought me, with thy question, into that same darkness and cloud of unknowing that I would thou wert in thyself. For of all other creatures and their works and of God Himself a man may have fulhead of knowledge, and well of them think; but of God Himself can no man think, and there- fore I will leave all that I can think upon, and choose to my love that thing that I cannot think. And why? Because He may well be loved, but not thought on. By love he may be gotten and holden, but by thought never. ... Go up to- wards that thick Cloud of Unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and go not thence for anything that befall.”2
So long, therefore, as the object of the mystic’s contem- plation is amenable to thought, is something which he can “know,” he may be quite sure that it is not the Absolute; but only a partial image or symbol of the Absolute.
To find that final Reality, he must enter. into the “Cloud of Unknowing ”—must pass beyond the plane on which the intellect can work.
“When I say darkness,’ says this same great mystic, “I mean thereby a lack of knowing. And therefore it is not called a cloud of the air, but a Cloud of Unknowing, that . is between thee and thy God.” 3
The business of the contemplative, then, is to enter this cloud: the “good dark,” as Hilton calls it. The deliberate inhibition of thought which takes place in the “orison of quiet” is one of the ways in which this entrance is effected: intellectual surrender, or “self-naughting,” is another. He who, by dint of detachment and introversion, enters the “nothingness” or “ground of the soul,” enters also into the “Dark”: a statement which seems simple enough until we try to realize what it means.
= « The Scale of Perfection,” bk. iii. cap, xiii. 2 “The Cloud of Unknowing,” cap. vi. (B:M. Harl. 674.) 3 Jbid., cap. iv. .
ta ‘
INTROVERSION: CONTEMPLATION 417
“Oj where,” says the bewildered disciple in one of Boehme’s dialogues, “is this naked Ground of the Soul void of all Self? And how shall I come at the hidden centre, where God dwelleth and not man? Tell me plainly, loving Sir, where it is; and how it is to be found of me, and entered into?
“ Master. There where the soul hath slain its own Will and willeth no more any Thing as from itself. ...
“ Disceple. But how shall I comprehend it ?
“ Master. If thou goest about to comprehend it, then it will fly away from thee; but if thou dost surrender thyself wholly up to it, then it will abide with thee, and become the Life of thy Life, and be natural to thee.” 4
The author of the “Cloud of Unknowing” is particularly explicit as to the sense of dimness and confusion which over- whelms the self when it first enters this Dark; a proceeding which is analogous with that annihilation of thought in the inte- rests of passive receptivity which we have studied in the “ Quiet.”
“The first time thou dost it,” he says of the neophyte’s first vague steps in contemplation, “thou findest but a dark- ness, and as it were a cloud of unknowing—to wit, a dark mist, which seemeth to be between thee and the light that thou aspirest to—and thou knowest naught saving that thou feelest in thy will a certain naked intent unto God, that is, a certain imperfect and bare intent (as it showeth at the first sight) to come to a thing, without convenient means to come to — the thing intended. This cloud (howsoever thou work) is evermore between thee and thy God, and letteth to thee, that thou mayest not see Him clearly by light of understanding in thy reason, nor feel Him by sweetness of love in thine affection. And therefore shape thyself to abide in this dark- ness so long as thou mayest, evermore crying after Him whom thou lovest, for if ever thou shalt feel Him or see Him (in such sort as He may be seen or felt in this life), it behoveth always to be in this cloud and darkness.” 2
From the same century, but from a very different country and temperament, comes another testimony as to the supreme value of this dark contemplation of the Divine: this absorption,
t Boehme, ‘‘ Three Dialogues of the Supersensual Life,” p 71. * “ The Cloud of Unknowing,” cap. iii. I have inserted the missing phrases from Collins’s text. EE
418 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
beyond the span of thought or emotion, in the “substance of all that Is.” It is one of the most vivid and detailed accounts of this strange form of consciousness which we possess; and deserves to be compared carefully with the statements of “ The Cloud of Unknowing,” and of St. John of the Cross. We owe it to that remarkable personality, the Blessed Angela of Foligno, who was converted from a life of worldliness to become not only a Christian and a Franciscan, but also a Platonist. In it we seem to hear the voice of Plotinus speaking from the Vale of Spoleto.
“There was a time,” she says, “when my soul was exalted to behold God with so much clearness that never before had I beheld Him so distinctly. But love did I not see here so fully, rather did I lose that which I had before and was left without love. Afterward did I see Him darkly, and this darkness was the greatest blessing that could be imagined, and no thought could conceive aught that would equal this. ... And by that blessing (most certain, and including also that darkness) have I attained unto all my hope, and inasmuch as now I see clearly, I have all that I desired to have or to know. Here likewise do I see all Good; and seeing it, the soul cannot think that it will depart from it, or it from the Good, or that in future it must ever leave the Good. The sou! delighteth unspeakably therein, yet it beholdeth naught which can be related by the tongue or imagined in the heart. It seeth nothing, yet seeth all things, because it beholdeth this Good darkly—and the more darkly and secretly the Good is seen, the more certain is it, and excellent above all things. Wherefore is all other good which can be seen or imagined doubtless less than this, because all the rest is darkness. And even when the soul seeth the divine power, wisdom, and will of God (which I have seen most marvellously at other times), it is all less than this most certain Good. Because this is the whole, and those other things are but part of the whole. Another difference is, that albeit those other things are unspeakable yet they do bring great joy which is felt even in the body. But seen thus darkly, the Good bringeth no smile upon the lips, no fervour or devotion or love into the heart, for the body doth not tremble or become moved or distressed as it doth at other times. And the cause
INTROVERSION : CONTEMPLATION 419
thereof is, that the soul seeth, and not the body, which reposeth and sleepeth, and the tongue is made dumb and cannot speak. ... Unto this most high power of beholding God ineffably through such great darkness was my spirit uplifted but three times and no more; and although I beheld Him countless times, and always darkly, yet never in such an high manner - and through such great darkness. . . . And tome it seemeth that I am fixed in the midst of It and that It draweth me unto Itself more than anything else the which I ever beheld, or any blessing I ever yet received, so there is nothing which can be compared unto It.” !
These words, and indeed the whole idea which lies at the bottom of “dark contemplation,” will perhaps be better under- stood in the light of Baron von Hiigel’s deeply significant saying: “ Souls loving God in His Infinite Individuality will necessarily love Him beyond their intellectual comprehension of Him; the element of devoted trust, of free self-donation to One fully known only through and in such an act, will thus remain to man for ever.”’2 Hence, the contemplative act, which is an act of loving and self-forgetting concentration upon the Divine—the outpouring of man’s little and finite personality towards the Absolute Personality of God—will, in so far as it transcends thought, mean darkness for the intellect; but it may mean radiance for the heart. Psychologically, it will mean the necessary depletion of the surface-consciousness, the stilling of the mechanism of thought, in the interests of another centre of consciousness. Since this new centre makes enormous demands on the self’s stock of vitality its establishment means, during the time that it is active, the withdrawal of energy from other centres. Thus the “night of thought” becomes the strictly logical corollary of the “light of perception.”
No one has expressed this double character of the Divine Dark—its “nothingness” for the dissecting knife of reason, its supreme fruitfulness for expansive, active love—with so delicate an insight as St. John of the Cross. In his work the _Christian touch of personal rapture vivifies the exact and sometimes arid descriptions of the Neoplatonic mystics. A
* B. Angelae de Fulginio, ‘‘ Visionum et Instructionum Liber’’ (English transla- _ tion, p. 181). 2 “©The Mystical Element of Religion,’’ vol. ii. p. 257.
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great poet as well as a great mystic, in his poem on the “Obscure Night,” he brings to bear on this actual and ineffable experience of the introverted soul all the highest powers of artistic expression, all the resources of musical rhythm, the suggestive qualities of metaphor.
‘‘ Upon an obscure night Fevered with Love’s anxiety (O hapless, happy plight !) I went, none seeing me, Forth from my house, where all things quiet be.
By night, secure from sight And by a secret stair, disguisedly, (O hapless, happy plight !) By night, and privily Forth from my house, where all things quiet be.
Blest night of wandering In secret, when by none might I be spied, Nor I see anything ; Without a light to guide Save that which in my heart burnt in my side.
That light did lead me on, More surely than the shining of noontide Where well I knew that One Did for my coming bide ; Where He abode might none but He abide.
O night that didst lead thus, O night more lovely than the dawn of light ; O night that broughtest us, - Lover to lover’s sight, Lover to loved, in marriage of delight !
Upon my flowery breast Wholly for Him and save Himself for none, There did I give sweet rest To my beloved one: The fanning of the cedars breathed thereon,’’?
Observe in these verses the amazing fusion of personal and metaphysical imagery ; each contributing by its suggestive qualities to a total effect which conveys to us, we hardly know how, the obscure yet flaming rapture of the mystic,
* “En una Noche Escura.” This translation, by Mr. Arthur Symons, will be found in vol. ii. of his Collected Poems.
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the affirmation of his burning love and the accompanying negation of his mental darkness and quiet—that “ hapless, happy plight.” All is here: the secrecy of the contemplative’s true life unseen of other men, his deliberate and active abandon- ment of the comfortable house of the senses, the dim, unknown plane of being into which his ardent spirit must plunge—a “night more lovely than the dawn of light”—the Inward Light, the fire of mystic love, which guides his footsteps “more surely than the shining of noon-tide: the self-giving ecstasy of the consummation “wholly for Him, and save Himself for none,” in which lover attains communion with Beloved “in marriage of delight.”
In his book, “The Dark Night of the Soul,” St. John has commented upon the opening lines of this poem: and the passages in which he does this are amongst the finest and most subtle descriptions of the psychology of contemplation which we possess.
“The soul,” he says, “calls the dim contemplation, by which it goes forth to the union of love, a secret stair; and that because of two properties of it which I am going to explain. First, this dark contemplation is called secret, because it is, as I have said before, the mystical theology which theologians call secret wisdom, and which according to St. Thomas is infused into the soul more especially by love. This happens in a secret hidden way, in which the natural operations of the understanding have no share. . . . Moreover, the soul has no wish to speak of it ; and beside, it can discover no way or proper similitude to describe it by, so as to make known a knowledge so high, a spzretual tmpression so delicate and infused. Yea, and if it could have a wish to speak of it, and find terms to describe it, it would always remain secret still. Because this interior wisdom is so simple, general, and spiritual, that it enters not into the understanding under any form or image subject to sense, as is sometimes the case ; the imagination, therefore, and the senses—as it has not entered in by them, nor is modified by them—cannot account for it, nor form any conception of it, so as to speak in any degree correctly about it, though the soul be distinctly conscious that it feels and tastes this strange wisdom. The soul is like a man who sees an object for the first time, the like of which he has never seen before; he
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handles it and feels it, yet he cannot say what it is, nor tell its name, do what he can, though it be at the same time an object cognisable by the senses. How much less, then, can that be described, which does not enter in by the senses... . This is not the only reason why it is called secret and why it is so. There is another, namely, the mystical wisdom has the property of hiding the soul within itself. For beside its ordinary operation, it sometimes so absorbs the soul and plunges it in this secret abyss that the soul sees itself distinctly as far away from, and abandoned by, all created things ; it looks upon itself as one that is placed in a wild and vast solitude whither no human being can come, as in an immense wilderness without limits ; a wilderness the more delicious, sweet, and lovely, the more it is wide, vast, and lonely, where the soul is the more hidden, the more it is raised up above all created things.
“This abyss of wisdom now so exalts and elevates the soul— orderly disposing it for the science of love—that it makes it not only understand how mean are all created things in relation to the supreme wisdom and divine knowledge, but also how low, defective, and, in a certain sense, improper, are all the words and phrases by which in this life we discuss divine things; and how utterly impossible it is by any natural means, however profoundly and learnedly we may speak, to under- stand and see them as they are, except in the light of mystical theology. And so the soul in the light thereof discerning this truth, namely, that it cannot reach it, and still less explain it, by the terms of ordinary speech, justly calls it Secret.” !
In this important passage we have a reconciliation of the four chief images under which contemplation has _ been described: the darkness and the light, the wilderness and the union of love. That is to say, the selfs paradoxical feeling of an ignorance which is supreme knowledge, and of solitude which is intimate companionship. On the last of these anti- theses, the “ wilderness that is more delicious, sweet, and lovely,
™ St. John of the Cross, ‘‘Noche Escura del Alma,” lI. ii. cap. xvii. (Lewis's translation). It is perhaps advisable to warn the reader that in this work St. John applies the image of ‘‘darkness” to three absolutely different things: 2.¢., to a form of purgation, which he calls the ‘‘ night of sense”; to dim contemplation, or the Dionysian ‘‘ Divine Dark ” ; and to the true ‘‘ dark night of the soul,” which he calls the “night of the spirit.” The result has been a good deal of confusion, in modern writers on mysticism, upon the subject of the ‘‘ Dark Night.”
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the more it is wide, vast, and lonely,” I cannot resist quoting, as a gloss upon the dignified language of the Spanish mystic, the quaint and simple words of Richard Rolle.
“In the wilderness . . . speaks the loved to the heart of the lover ; as it were a bashful lover, that his sweetheart before men entreats not, nor friendly-wise but commonly and as a stranger he’ kisses. A devout soul safely from worldly business in mind and body departed. ..anon comes heavenly joy, and it marvellously making merry melody, to it springs whose token it takes, that now forward worldly sound gladly it suffers not. This is ghostly music, that is unknown to all that with worldly business lawful or unlawful are occupied. No man there is that this has nl but he that has studied to God only to take heed.” !
Doubtless the “dark transcendence” reported and dwelt upon by all mystics of the Dionysian type, is nearest the truth of all our apprehensions of God :? though it can be true only in the paradoxical sense that it uses the suggestive qualities of negation—the Dark whose very existence involves that of Light—to hint at the infinite Affirmation of All that Is. But the nearer this language is to the Absolute, the further it is from ourselves. Unless care be taken in the use of it, the absence of falsehood may easily involve for us the absence of . everything else. Man is not yet pure spirit, has not attained the Eternal. He is zz vza, and will never arrive if impatient amateurs of Reality insist on cutting the ground from under — his feet. Like Dante, he needs a ladder to the stars, a ladder © which goes the whole way from the human to the divine. Therefore the philosophic exactitude of these descriptions — of the dark must be balanced, as they are in St. John of the © Cross, by the personal, human, and symbolic affirmations of Love, if we would avoid a distorted notion of the Reality which . the contemplative attains in his supreme “ flights towards God.” Consciousness has got to be helped across the gap which separates it from its Home.
The “ wilderness,” the dread Abyss, must be made homely by the voice of “the lover that His sweetheart before men entreats not.” Approximate as we know such an image of our
* ** The Fire of Love,” bk. ii. cap. vii. 2 Compare Baker, ‘‘ Holy Wisdom,” Treatise iii. § iv. cap. iv.
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communion with the Absolute to be, it represents a real aspect of the contemplative experience which eludes the rule and compass of metaphysical thought. Blake, with true mystic insight, summed up the situation as between the two extreme forms of contemplation when he wrote :—?
*€God appears, and God is Light To those poor souls who dwell in night: But doth a human form display To those who dwell in realms of day.”
In the “orison of union” and the “Spiritual Marriage,” those contemplatives whose temperament inclines them to “dwell in realms of day” receive just such a revelation of the “human form”—a revelation which the Christian dogma of the Incarnation brings to a point. They apprehend the per- sonal and passionate aspect of the Infinite Life ; and the love, at once intimate and expansive, all-demanding and all-renouncing, which plays like lightning between it and the desirous soul. “Thou saidst to me, my only Love, that Thou didst will to make me Thyself; and that Thou wast all mine, with all that Thou hadst and with all Paradise, and that I was all Thine. That I should leave all, or rather the nothing ; and that (then) Thou wouldst give me the all. And that Thou hadst given me this name—at which words I heard within me ‘dedi te in lucem gentium’—not without good reason. And it seemed then, as though I had an inclination for nothing except the purest Union, without any means, in accordance with that detailed sight which Thou hadst given me. So then I said to Thee: These other things, give them to whom Thou wilt ; give me but this most pure Union with Thee, free from every means.” 2
“Our work is the love of God,” cries Ruysbroeck. “Our satisfaction lies in submission to the Divine Embrace.” This utter and abrupt submission to the Divine Embrace is the essence of that form of contemplation which is called the Orison of Union. “Surrender” is its secret: a personal sur- render, not only of finite to Infinite, but of bride to Bride-
t “€ Auguries of Innocence.” ? Colloquies of Battista Vernazza: quoted by Von Hligel, ‘‘The Mystical Element of Religion,” vol. i. p. 350.
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groom, heart to Heart. This surrender, in contemplatives of an appropriate temperament, is of so complete and ecstatic a type that it involves a more or less complete suspension of normal consciousness, an entrancement; and often crosses the boundary which separates contemplation from true ecstasy, producing in its subject physical as well as psychical effects. In this state, says St. Teresa, “ There is no sense of anything: only fruition, without understanding what that may be the fruition
of which is granted. It is understood that the fruition is of _acertain good, containing in itself all good together at once ; _ but this good is not comprehended. The senses are all occu-
pied in this fruition in such a way, that not one of them is at liberty so as to be able to attend to anything else, whether outward or inward. ... But this state of complete absorption, together with the utter rest of the imagination—for I believe that the imagination is then wholly at rest—lasts only for a short time; though the faculties do not so completely recover themselves as not to be for some hours afterwards as if in disorder. .. . He who has had experience of this will under- stand it in some measure, for it cannot be more clearly described, because what then takes place is so obscure. All I am able to say is, that the soul is represented as being close to God; and that there abides a conviction thereof so certain and strong that it cannot possibly help believing so. All the faculties fail now, and are suspended in such a way that, as I said before, their operations cannot be traced. ... The wil’ must be fully occupied in loving, but it understands not how it loves ; the understanding, if it understands, does not under- stand how it understands. It does not understand, as it seems to me, because, as I said just now, this is a matter which cannot be understood.”! Clearly, the psychological situation here is the same as that in which mystics of the impersonal type feel themselves to be involved in the Cloud of Unknowing, or Divine Dark.
“Do not imagine,” says Teresa in another place, “that this orison, like that which went before [z.e, the quiet] is a sort of drowsiness: I say drowsiness, because in the orison of divine savours or of quiet it seemed that the soul was neither thoroughly asleep, nor thoroughly awake, but that it dozed.
* Vida, cap. xviii. §§ 2, 17, 19.
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Here, on the contrary, the soul is asleep; entirely asleep as regards herself and earthly things. During the short time that union lasts she is, as it were, deprived of all feeling, and though she wishes it, she can think of nothing. Thus she needs no effort in order to suspend the action of her intellect or even the action of love ... she is, as it were, absolutely dead to things of the world, the better to live in God.”
It may be asked, in what way does such contemplation as this differ from unconsciousness. The difference, according to St. Teresa, consists in the definite somewhat which takes place during this inhibition of the surface-consciousness: a
somewhat” of which that surface-consciousness becomes aware when it awakes. Work has been done during this period of apparent passivity. The deeper self has escaped, has risen to freedom, and brings back tidings of the place to which it has been. We must remember that Teresa is here speaking from experience, and that her temperamental peculiarities will modify the form which this experience takes. “The soul,” she says, “neither sees, hears, nor understands whilst she is united to God; but this time is usually very short, and seems to be even shorter than it is. God establishes Himself in the interior of this soul in such a way that, when she comes to herself, 2¢ 2s zmtposszble for her to doubt that she has been in Goa and God in her, and this truth has left in her so deep an impression that, though she passed several years without being again raised to this state, she could neither forget the favour she received nor doubt its reality... . But you will say, how can the soul see and comprehend that she is in God and God in her, if during this union she is not able either to see or understand? I reply, that then she does not see it, but that afterwards she sees it clearly: not by a vision, but by a certi- tude which rests with her, and which God alone can give.” !
* €¢ FI Castillo Interior,” Moradas Quintas, cap. i.