CHAPTER VIII

ECSTASY AND RAPTURE
Ecstasy is the last term of Contemplation—Mystics regard it as a very favourable state—Its physical aspect—The trance—an abnormal bodily state—Healthy and unhealthy trances—their characteristics—St. Catherine of Genoa—Psychological aspect of ecstasy—Complete mono-ideism—A temporary unification of consciousness —Often helped by symbols—St. Catherine of Siena—Description of healthy ecstasy— It entails a new perception of Reality—Mystical aspect of Ecstasy—a state of ‘‘ Pure Apprehension ’’—the completion of the Orison of Union—Sometimes hard to dis- tinguish from it—The real distinction is in entrancement—St. Teresa on union and ecstasy—-Results of ecstasy confirm those of contemplation—no sharp line possible between the two—Many cases cannot be classified—Rolle on two forms of Rapture— The mystic in ecstasy claims that he attains the Absolute—The nature of his con- sciousness—a concentration of his whole being on one act—A perception of Eternity —Suso—the Neoplatonists—Plotinus—Self-mergence—Jacopone da Todi—Ecstatic vision—Rapture—its distinction from Ecstasy—it indicates psycho-physical dis- harmony—St. Teresa on Rapture—Levitation—Rapture always entails bodily immobility—generally mental disorder—Its final result good for life—Ecstatic states contribute to the organic development of the self
duction of that state of intimate communion in which the
mystics declare that the self is “in God and God is in her,” it might be supposed that the orison of union repre- sented the end of mystical activity, in so far as it is concerned with the attainment of a transitory but exalted consciousness of “oneness with the Absolute.’ Nearly all the great con- templatives, however, describe as a distinct, and regard as a more advanced phase of the spiritual consciousness, the group of definitely ecstatic states in which the concentration of in- terest on the Transcendent is so complete, the gathering up and pouring out of life on this one point so intense, that the subject is entranced, and becomes, for the time of the ecstasy, wholly unconscious of the external world. In pure contempla-
tion he refused to attend to that external world: it was there, 427
G sci the primal object of all contemplation is the pro-
428 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
a blurred image, at the fringe of his conscious field, but he deliberately left it on one side. In ecstasy he cannot attend to it. None of its messages reach him: not even those most insistent of all messages which are translated into the terms of bodily pain.
Mystics of all ages have agreed in regarding such ecstasy as. an exceptionally favourable state; the one in which man’s spirit is caught up to its most immediate vision of the divine. The word has become a synonym for joyous exaltation, for the inebriation of the Infinite. The induced ecstasies of the Dionysian mysteries, the metaphysical raptures of the Neo- platonists, the voluntary or involuntary trance of Indian mystics and Christian saints—all these, however widely they may differ in transcendental value, agree in claiming such value, in declaring that this change in the quality of their consciousness brought with it an expansive and unforgettable apprehension of the Real.
Clearly, this apprehension will vary with the place of the subject in the spiritual scale. The ecstasy is simply the psycho-physical agent by which it is obtained. “It is hardly a paradox to say,” says Myers, “that the evidence for ecstasy is stronger than the evidence for any other religious belief. Of all the subjective experiences of religion, ecstasy is that which has been most urgently, perhaps to the psychologist most con- vincingly asserted ; and it is not confined to any one religion, From the medicine man of the lowest savages up to St. John, St. Peter, and St. Paul, with Buddha and Mahomet on the way, we find records which, though morally and in- tellectually much differing, are in psychological essence the same.” !
There are three distinct aspects under which the ecstatic state may be studied: (a) the physical, (0) the psychological, (c) the mystical. Many of the deplorable misunderstandings and still more deplorable mutual recriminations which surround its discussion come from the refusal of experts in one of these three branches to consider the results arrived at by the other two.
A. Physically considered, Ecstasy is a trance; more or less deep, more or less prolonged. The subject may slide into it
*
ECSTASY AND RAPTURE 429
gradually from a period of absorption in, or contemplation of, some idea which has filled the field of consciousness : or, it may come on suddenly, the appearance of the idea—or even some word or symbol suggesting the idea—abruptly throwing the subject into an entranced condition. This is the state which mystical writers call Rapture. The distinction, however, is a conventional one: and the works of the mystics describe many intermediate forms.
During the trance, breathing and circulation are depressed. The body is more or less cold and rigid, remaining in the exact position which it occupied at the oncoming of the ecstasy, however difficult and unnatural this pose may be. Sometimes entrancement is so deep that there is complete anzsthesia, as in the case which I quote from the life of St. Catherine of Siena.' Credible witnesses report that Bernadette, the visionary of Lourdes, held the flaming end of a candle in her hand for fifteen minutes during one of her ecstasies. She felt no pain, neither did the flesh show any marks of burning. Similar in- stances of ecstatic anesthesia abound in the lives of the saints.?
The trance includes, according to the testimony of the ecstatics, two distinct phases—(a) the short period of lucidity and (4) a longer period of complete unconsciousness, which may pass into a death-like catalepsy, lasting for hours; or, as once with St. Teresa, for days. “The difference between union and trance,” says Teresa, “is this: that the latter lasts longer and is more visible outwardly, because the breathing gradually diminishes, so that it becomes impossible to speak or to open the eyes. And though this very thing occurs when the soul is in union, there is more violence in a trance; for the natural warmth vanishes, I know not how, when the rapture is deep, and in all these kinds of orison there is more or less of this. When it is deep, as I was saying, the hands become cold and sometimes stiff and straight as pieces of wood; as to the body, if the rapture comes on when it is standing or kneeling it remains so; and the soul is so full of the joy of that which Our Lord is setting before it, that it seems to forget to animate the body and abandons it. If the rapture lasts, the nerves are made to feel it.” 3
t Vide infra, p. 435-
2 An interesting modern case is reported in the Zance?, 18 March, 1911. 3 Relaccion viii. 8.
430 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
Such ecstasy as this, so far as its merely physical symptoms go, is not of course the peculiar privilege of the mystics. It is an abnormal bodily state, caused by a psychic state: and this causal psychic state may be healthy or unhealthy, the result of genius or disease. It is common in the strange and little understood type of personality called “sensitive” or medium- istic: it is a well-known symptom of certain mental and nervous illnesses. A feeble mind concentrated on one idea—like a hypnotic subject gazing at one spot—easily becomes entranced ; however trivial the idea which gained possession of his con- sciousness. Taken alone then, and apart from its content, ecstasy carries no guarantee of spiritual value. It merely indicates the presence of certain abnormal psycho-physical conditions: an alteration of the normal equilibrium, a shifting of the threshold of consciousness, which leaves the body, and the whole usual “external world” outside instead of inside the conscious field, and even affects those physical functions—such as breathing—which are almost entirely automatic. Thus ecstasy, physically considered, may occur in any person in whom (1) the threshold of consciousness is exceptionally mobile and (2) there is a tendency to dwell upon one governing idea or intuition. Its worth depends entirely on the objective worth of that idea or intuition.
In the hysterical patient, thanks to an unhealthy condition of the centres of consciousness, any trivial or irrational idea, any one of the odds and ends stored up in the subliminal region, may thus become fixed, dominate the mind, and produce entrancement. Such ecstasy is an illness: the emphasis is on the pathological state which makes it possible. In the mystic, the idea which fills his life is so great a one—the idea of God—that, in proportion as it is vivid, real, and intimate, it inevitably tends to monopolize the field of consciousness. His ecstasy is an expression of this fact: and here the emphasis is on the overpowering strength of spirit, not on the feeble and unhealthy state of body or mind.t This true ecstasy, says
™ St. Thomas proves ecstasies to be inevitable on just this psychological ground. | ‘The higher our mind is’ raised to the contemplation of spiritual things,” he says, ‘‘the more it is abstracted from sensible things. But the final term to which contem- plation can possibly arrive is the divine substance. Therefore the mind that sees the
divine substance must be totally divorced from the bodily senses, either by death or dy some rapture” (‘Summa Contra Gentiles,’’ ]. iii. cap. xlvii., Rickaby’s translation).
ECSTASY AND RAPTURE 431
Godfernaux, is not a malady, but “the extreme form of a state which must be classed amongst the ordinary accidents of con- scious life.” 1
The mystics themselves are fully aware of the import- ance of this distinction... Ecstasies, no less than visions and voices, must, they declare, be subjected to unsparing criticism before they are recognized as divine: whereas some are undoubtedly “of God,” others are no less clearly “of the devil.”
“The great doctors of the mystic life,’ says Malaval, “teach that there are two sorts of rapture which must be care- fully distinguished. The first are produced in persons but little advanced in the Way, and still full of selfhood; either by the force of a heated imagination which vividly apprehends a sensible object, or by the artifice of the Devil. These are the raptures which St. Teresa calls, in various parts of her works, Raptures of Feminine Weakness. The other sort of Rapture is, on the contrary, the effect of pure intellectual vision in those who have a great and generous love for God. To generous souls who have utterly renounced themselves, God never fails in these raptures to communicate high things.” 2
All the mystics agree with Malaval in finding the test of a true ecstasy, not in its outward sign, but in its inward grace, its after-value: and here psychological science would be well advised to follow their example. The ecstatic states, which are supreme instances of the close connexion between body and soul, have bodily as well as mental results: and those results are as different and as characteristic as those observed in healthy and in morbid organic processes. If the concentration has been upon the highest centre of consciousness, the organ of spiritual perception—if a door has really been opened by which the self has escaped for an instant to the vision of That Which Is—the ecstasy will be good for life. The en- trancement of disease, on the contrary, is always bad for life. Its concentration being upon the lower instead of the higher levels of mentality, it depresses rather than enhances the vitality, the fervour, or the intelligence of its subject: and leaves behind it an enfeebled will, and often moral and
t ¢¢ Sur la Psychologie du Mysticisme” (Revue Phzlosophique, February, 1902), ? Malaval, ‘ La Pratique de la Vraye Theéologie Mystique,” vol. i. p. 89.
432 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
intellectual chaos:! “ Ecstasies that do not produce consider- able profit either to the persons themselves or others, deserve to be suspected,” says Augustine Baker, “and when any marks of their approaching are perceived the persons ought to divert their minds some other way.’2 It is all the difference be- tween a healthy appetite for nourishing food and a morbid craving for garbage. The same organs of digestion are used in satisfying both: yet he would be a hardy physiologist who undertook to discredit all nutrition by a reference to its degenerate forms.
Sometimes both kinds of ecstasy, the healthy and the psychopathic, are seen in the same person. Thus in the cases of St. Catherine of Genoa and St. Catherine of Siena it would seem that as their health became feebler and the nervous instability always found in persons of genius increased, their ecstasies became more frequent; but these were not healthy ecstasies, such as those which they experienced in the earlier stages of their careers, and which brought with them an access
of vitality. They were the results of the increasing weakness — of the body, not of the overpowering strength of the spirit: —
and there is evidence that Catherine of Genoa, that acute
self-critic, was conscious of this fact. ‘“ Those who attended on — her did not know how to distinguish one state from the other. . And hence on coming to, she would sometimes say, “ Why did © you let me remain in this quietude, from which I have almost
died ?’3
Her earlier ecstasies were very different from this. They —
had in a high degree the positive character of exaltation and
life-enhancement consequent upon extreme concentration on —
the Absolute; as well as the merely negative character of - annihilation of the surface-consciousness. She came from them with renewed health and strength, as from a resting in heavenly places and a feeding on heavenly food: and side by side with this ecstatic life fulfilled the innumerable duties of her active profession as hospital matron and spiritual mother of a large group of disciples. “Many times,” says her legend,
* Pierre Janet (‘‘ The Major Symptoms of Hysteria,” p. 316) says that a lowering of the mental level is an invariable symptom or ‘‘ stigma "’ of hysteria.
2 ** Holy Wisdom,” Treatise iii. § iv. cap, iil.
3 Von Hiigel, ‘‘ The Mystical Element of Religion,” vol. i. p. 206.
\ ‘ a
ECSTASY AND RAPTURE 433
“she would hide herself in some secret place and there stay: and being sought she was found upon the ground, her face hidden in her hands,. altogether beyond herself, in such a state of joy as is beyond thought or speech: and being called —yea, even in a loud voice—she heard not. And at other times she would go up and down: ... as if beyond herself, drawn by the impulse of love, she did this. And certain other times she remained for the space of six hours as if dead: but hearing herself called, suddenly she got up, and answering she would at once go about all that needed to be done, even the humblest things.t And in thus leaving the All, she went without any grief, because she fled all selfhood [la proprieta] as if it were the devil. And when she came forth from her hiding-place, her face was rosy as it might be a cherub’s; and © it seemed as if she might have said,‘ Who shall separate me from the love of God?’”? “Very often,’ says St. Teresa, describing the results of such rapturous communion with © Pure Love as that from which St. Catherine came joyous and rosy-faced, “‘ he who was before sickly and full of pain comes forth healthy and even with new strength: for it is something great that is given to the soul in rapture.” 3
B. Psychologically considered, all ecstasy is a form—the most perfect form—of the state which is technically called “complete mono-ideism.” That withdrawal of consciousness from circumference to ceritre, that deliberate attention to one thing, which we discussed in Recollection, is here pushed— voluntarily or involuntarily—to its logical conclusion. It is ~ (1) always paid for by psycho-physical disturbances ; (2) re- warded in healthy cases by an enormous lucidity, a supreme intuition in regard to the one thing on which the self’s interest has been set.
Such ecstasy, then, is an extremely exalted form of con- templation, and might be expected to develop naturally from that state. “A simple difference of degree,’ says Maury, “separates ecstasy from the action of forcibly fixing an idea
* This power of detecting and hearing the call of duty though she was deaf to everything else is evidently related to the peculiarity noticed by Ribot; who says that an ecstatic hears no scunds, save, in some cases, the voice of one specific person, which is always able to penetrate the trance. (‘‘ Les Maladies de la Volonté,” p. 125.)
* Vita e Dottrina, cap. v. 3 Vida, cap. xx. § 29.
FF
434 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
in the mind. Contemplation implies exercise of will and the power of interrupting the extreme tension of the mind. In ecstasy, which is contemplation carried to its highest pitch, the will, although in the strictest sense able to provoke the state, is nevertheless unable to suspend it.’’!
In “complete mono-ideism ” then, the attention to one thing, and the inattention to all else, is so entire, that the subject is - entranced. Consciousness has been withdrawn from those ~ centres which receive and respond to the messages of the - external world: he neither sees, feels, nor hears. The go dormio et cor meum vigilat of the contemplative ceases to be a metaphor, and becomes a realistic description. It must be remembered that the whole trend of mystical education has been towards the production of this fixity of attention. Re- collection and Quiet lead up to it. Contemplation cannot take place without it. All the mystics assure us that a unifi- cation of consciousness, in which all outward things are forgot, is the necessary prelude of union with the Divine: for con- sciousness of the Many and consciousness of the One are mutually exclusive states.
Ecstasy, for the psychologist, is just such a unification in its most extreme form. The absorption of the self in the one idea, the one desire, is so profound—and in the case of the great mystics so impassioned—that everything else is blotted out. The tide of life is withdrawn, not only from those higher centres which are the seats of perception and of thought, but also from those lower centres which govern the physical life. The whole vitality of the subject is so concentrated on the transcendental world—or, in the case of a morbid ecstatic, on the idea which dominates his mind—that body and brain alike are depleted of their energy in the interests of this supreme act.
Since mystics have, as a rule, the extreme susceptibility to suggestions and impressions which is characteristic of all artistic and creative types, it is not surprising to find that their ecstasies are often evoked, abruptly, by the exhibition of, or concentration upon, some loved and special symbol of the divine. Such symbols form the rallying-points about which are gathered a whole group of ideas and intuitions. Their presence—sometimes the sudden thought of them—will
t A. Maury, “ Le Sommeil et les Réves,” p. 235.
ECSTASY AND RAPTURE 435
be enough, in psychological language, to provoke a discharge of energy along some particular path: that is to say, to stir to life all those ideas and intuitions which belong to the self’s consciousness of the Absolute, to concentrate vitality on them, to shift the field of consciousness and initiate the self into that world of perception of which they are, as it were, the material keys. Hence the profound significance of symbols _ for some mystics: their paradoxical clinging to outward forms whilst declaring that the spiritual and intangible alone is real.
For the Christian mystics, the sacraments and mysteries of faith have always provided such a pozmt d’appuz; and these symbols often play a large part in the production of their - ecstasies. In the case of St. Catherine of Siena, and also very often in that of her namesake of Genoa, the reception of Holy Communion was the prelude to ecstasy. Julian of Nor- wich: and St. Francis of Assisi? became entranced whilst gazing on the crucifix. We are told of Denis the Carthusian that towards the end of his life, hearing the Venz Creator or certain verses of the psalms, he was at once rapt in God and lifted up from the earth.3
Of St. Catherine of Siena, her biographer says that “she used to communicate with such fervour that immediately after- wards she would pass into the state of ecstasy, in which for hours she would be totally unconscious. On one occasion, finding her in this condition, they (the Dominican friars) forcibly threw her out of the church at midday, and left her ~ in the heat of the sun watched over by some of her companions till she came to her senses.” Another, “catching sight of her in the church when she was in ecstasy, came down and pricked her in many places with a needle. Catherine was not aroused in the least from her trance, but afterwards, when she came back to her senses, she felt the pain in her body and perceived that she had thus been wounded.” 4 It is interesting to compare with this objective description, the subjective account of ecstatic union which Catherine gives
* § Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. iii.
® Vide supra, p. 218.
3D. A. Mougel, “‘ Denys le Chartreux,’’ p. 32. 4 E. Gardner, ‘‘ St. Catherine of Siena,” p. 50.
436 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
in her Divine Dialogue. Here, for once, we have the deeper self of the mystic giving in a dramatic form its own account of its inward experiences: hence we here see the inward side of that outward state of entrancement which was all that onlookers were able to perceive. As usual in the Dialogue, the intuitive perceptions of the deeper self are attributed by Catherine to the Divine Voice speaking in her soul.
“ Oftentimes, through the perfect union which the soul has made with Me, she is raised from the earth almost as if the heavy body became light. But this does not mean that the heaviness of the body is taken away, but that the union of the soul with Me is more perfect than the union of the body with the soul; wherefore the strength of the spirit, united with Me, raises the weight of the body from the earth, leaving it as if immoveable and all pulled to pieces in the affection of the soul. Thou rememberest to have heard it said of some creatures, that were it not for My Goodness, in seeking strength for them, they would not be able to live; and I would tell thee that, in the fact that the souls of some do not leave their bodies, is to be seen a greater miracle than in the fact that some have arisen from the dead, so great is the union which they have with Me. I, therefore, sometimes for a space withdraw from the union, making the soul return to the vessel of her body ... from which she was separated by the affection of love. From the body she did not depart, because that cannot be except in death; the bodily powers alone de- parted, becoming united to Me through affection of love. The memory is full of nothing but Me, the intellect, elevated, gazes
upon the object of My Truth; the affection, which follows the —
intellect, loves and becomes united with that which the intellect sees. These powers, being united and gathered together and immersed and inflamed in Me, the body loses its feeling, so that the seeing eye sees not, and the hearing ear hears not, and the tongue does not speak ; except as the abundance of the heart will sometimes permit it for the alleviation of the heart and the praise and glory of My Name. The hand does not touch and the feet walk not, because the members are bound with the sentiment of Love,” ?
A healthy ecstasy so deep as this seems to be the exclusive
* Dialogo, cap. Ixxix.
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ECSTASY AND RAPTURE 437
prerogative of the mystics: perhaps because so great a passion, so profound a concentration, can be produced by nothing smaller than their flaming love of God. But as the machinery of contemplation is employed more or less consciously by all types of creative genius: by inventors and philosophers, by ~ poets, prophets, and musicians, by all the followers of the “Triple Star,” no less than by the mystic saints: so too, this apotheosis of contemplation, the ecstatic state, does appear in a less violent form, acting healthily and normally, wherever we have the artistic and creative personality in a complete state of development. It accompanies the prophetic intuitions of the seer, the lucidity of the great metaphysician, the artist’s supreme perception of beauty or truth. As the saint is “ caught up to God,” so these are “caught up” to their vision: their partial apprehensions of the Absolute Life. Those joyous, expansive outgoing sensations, characteristic of the ecstatic consciousness, are theirs also. Their great creations are trans- lations to us, not of something they have thought, but of something they have known, in a moment of ecstatic union with the “great life of the All.”
We begin, then, to think that the “pure mono-ideism,” which the psychologist identifies with ecstasy, though doubtless a part, is far from being the whole content of this state. True, the ecstatic is absorbed in his one idea, his one love: he is in it and with it: it fills his universe. But this unified state of consciousness does not merely pore upon something already possessed. When it only does this, it is diseased. Its true busi- ness is pure perception. It is outgoing, expansive: its goal is something beyond itself. The rearrangement of the psychic | self which occurs in ecstasy is not merely concerned with the normal elements of consciousness. It is a temporary unifica- tion of consciousness around that centre of transcendental perception which mystics call the “spark of the soul.” Those deeper layers of personality which normal life keeps below the threshold are active in it: and these are fused with the surface personality by the governing passion, the transcendent love which lies at the basis of all sane ecstatic states.
The result is not merely a mind concentrated on one idea, nor a heart fixed on one desire, nor even a mind and a heart united in the interests of a beloved thought: but a whole being
438 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
welded into one, all its faculties, neglecting their normal uni- verse, grouped about a new centre, serving a new life, and piercing like a single flame the barriers of the sensual world. Ecstasy is the psycho-physical state which generally accom- panies and expresses this brief synthetic act.