CHAPTER X

THE UNITIVE LIFE
What is the Unitive Life?—-Only the Mystics know—It is a state of transcendent vitality—Its importance for the race—The Mystics describe it under two forms: metaphysical and personal—Deification and Spiritual Marriage—Self-surrender— Freedom—Heroic activity—The psychological explanation—Delacroix and Eucken— Unification of personality on high levels—The Mystic’s explanation—Immersion in God—Transmutation—The doctrine of Deification—in philosophy—in religion—Its justification—It is not identification with God—it is the achievement of reality—Fire symbolism—Boehme—Richard of St. Victor—St. Catherine—Ruysbroeck—The Beatific Vision—Suso—Self-loss—The union of love—Jelalu ’d Din—The divine © companionship—The Epistle of Prayer—Spiritual Marriage—Divine Fecundity —Enhanced vitality—St. Teresa—The ‘‘ great actives’—Madame Guyon—The Mystics as parents of new spiritual life—The dual character of the Unitive Life— Being and Becoming—Fruition and work—Ruysbroeck the supreme demonstrator of this law—Its exhibition in the lives of the Mystics—The Unitive Life satisfies the three aspects of the Self—Knowledge, Will, Love—Mystic joy—an implicit of the deified life—Dante—Rolle—the Song of Love—St. Francis—St. Teresa—St. Catherine of Genoa—Conclusion
HAT is the Unitive Life? We have referred to it
V V often enough in the course of this inquiry. At last we are face to face with the necessity of defining its
nature if we can. Since the normal man knows little about his own true personality, and nothing at all about that of Deity, the orthodox description of it as “the life in which man’s will is united with God,” does but echo the question in an ampler form ; and conveys no real meaning to the student’s mind. That we should know, by instinct, its character from within—
as we know, if we cannot express, the character of our own normally human lives—is of course impossible. We deal here with the final triumph of the spirit, the flower of mysticism, humanity’s top note: the consummation towards which the contemplative life, with its long slow growth and psychic
storms, has moved from the first. We look at a small but 494
THE UNITIVE LIFE 495
ever-growing group of heroic figures, living at transcendent levels of reality which we, immersed in the poor life of illusion, cannot attain : breathing an atmosphere whose true quality we cannot even conceive. Here, then, as at so many other points in our study of the spiritual consciousness, we must rely for the greater part of our knowledge upon the direct testimony of the mystics ; who alone can tell the character of that “more abun- dant life” which they enjoy.
Yet we are not wholly dependent on this source of infor- mation. It is the peculiarity of the Unitive Life that it is often lived, in its highest and most perfect forms, in the world; and exhibits its works before the eyes of men. As the law of our bodies is “earth to earth” so, strangely enough, is the law of our souls. Man, having at last come to full consciousness of reality, completes the circle of Being; and returns to fertilize those levels of existence from which he sprang. Hence, the -enemies of mysticism, who have easily drawn a congenial moral from the “morbid and solitary” lives of contemplatives in the earlier and educative stages of the Mystic Way, are here con- fronted very often by the disagreeable spectacle of the mystic as a pioneer of humanity, a sharply intuitive and painfully practical person: an artist, a discoverer, a religious or social reformer, a national hero, a “ great active” amongst the saints. By the superhuman nature of that which these persons accom- plish, we can gauge something of the supernormal vitality of which they partake. The things done, the victories gained over circumstance by the Blessed Joan of Arc or by St. Bernard, by St. Catherine of Siena, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Teresa, George Fox, are hardly to be explained unless these great spirits had indeed a closer, more intimate, more bracing contact than their fellows with that Life “which is the light of men.”
We have, then, these two lines of investigation open to us: first, the comparison and elucidation of that which the mystics tell us concerning their transcendent experience, secondly, the testimony which is borne by their lives to the existence within them of supernal springs of action, contact set up with deep levels of vital power. In the third place, we have also such critical machinery as psychology has placed at our disposal ; but this, in dealing with these giants of the spirit, must be used with caution and humility.
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The Unitive Life, though so often lived in the world, is never of it. It belongs to another plane of being, moves securely upon levels unrelated to our speech ; and hence eludes the measuring powers of humanity. We, from the valley, can only catch a glimpse of the true life of these elect spirits, transfigured upon the mountain. They are far away, breathing another air: we cannot reach them. Yet it is impossible to over-estimate their importance for the race. They are our ambassadors to the Absolute. They vindicate humanity’s claim to the possible and permanent attainment of Reality; bear witness to the practical qualities of the transcendental life. In Eucken’s words, they testify to “the advent of a triumphing Spiritual Power, as distinguished from a spirituality which merely lays the foundations of life or struggles to main- tain them” :! to the actually life-enhancing power of the Love of God, once the human soul is freely opened to receive it.
Coming first to the evidence of the mystics themselves, we find that in their attempts towards describing the Unitive Life they have recourse to two main forms of symbolic expression: both very dangerous, very liable to be misunder- | stood: both offering ample opportunity for harsh criticism to hostile investigators of the mystic type. We find also, as we might expect from our previous encounters with the symbols used by contemplatives and ecstatics, that these two forms of expression belong respectively to mystics of the transcendent- metaphysical and of the intimate-personal type: and that their formule, if taken alone, appear to contradict one another.
(1) The metaphysical mystic, for whom the Absolute is impersonal and transcendent, describes his final attainment of that Absolute as dezfication, or the utter transmutation of the self in God. (2) The mystic for whom intimate and personal communion has been the mode under which he best appre- hended Reality, speaks of the consummation of this com- munion, its perfect and permanent form, as the Spiritual Marriage of his soul with God. Obviously, both these terms are but the self’s guesses concerning the intrinsic character of a state which it has felt in its wholeness rather than analyzed: and bear the same relation to the ineffable realities of that state, as our clever theories concerning the nature
* «Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens,” p. 140,
THE UNITIVE LIFE 497
and meaning of life bear to the vital processes of men. It is worth while to examine them; but we shall not understand them till we have also examined the life which they profess to explain.
The language of “deification” and of “spiritual marriage,” then, is temperamental language: and is related to subjective experience rather than to objective fact. It describes on the one hand the mystic’s sudden, astonished awareness of a profound change effected in his own personality’—the transmutation of his salt, sulphur, and mercury into Spiritual Gold—on the other, the rapturous consummation of his love. Hence by a comparison of these symbolic reconstructions, by the discovery and isolation of the common factor latent in each, we may perhaps learn something of the fundamental fact which each © is trying to portray.
Again, the mystics describe certain symptoms either as the necessary preliminaries or as the marks and _ fruits © of the Unitive State: and these too may help us to fix its character.
The chief, in fact the one essential, preliminary is that pure surrender of selfhood, or “self-naughting,’ which the trials of the Dark Night tended to produce. Only the thoroughly detached, “naughted soul” is “free,” says the “Mirror of Simple Souls,” and the Unitive State is essentially a state of free and filial participation in Eternal Life. The chief marks of the state itself are (1) a complete absorption in the interests of the Infinite, under whatever mode It happens to be apprehended by the self, (2) a consciousness of sharing Its strength, acting by Its authority, which results in a complete sense of freedom, an invulnerable serenity, and usually urges the self to some form of heroic effort or creative activity : (3) the establishment of the self as a “power for life,” a centre of energy, an actual parent of spiritual vitality in other
* Compare Dante’s sense of a transmuted personality when he first breathed the air of Paradise :— s*S’ io era sol di me quel che creasti
novellamente, Amor che il ciel governi tu il sai, che col tuo lume mi levasti’’ (Par. i. 73).
‘© Tf I were only that of me which thou didst new create, oh Love who rulest heaven, thou knowest who with thy light didst lift me up.” KK
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men. By collecting together these symptoms and examining them, and the lives of those who exhibit them, in the light of psychology, we can surely get some news—however fragmen- tary—concerning the transcendent condition of being which involves these characteristic states and acts. Beyond this even Dante himself could not go :—
‘Trasumanar significar per verba non si poria.” *
We will then consider the Unitive Life (1) As it appears from the standpoint of the psychologist. (2) As it is described to us by those mystics who use (a) the language of Deification, (6) that of Spiritual Marriage. (3) Finally, we will turn to the lives of its initiates; and try, if we can, to perceive it as an organic whole.
(1) From the point of view of the pure psychologist, what do the varied phenomena of the Unitive Life, taken together, seem to represent? He would probably say that they indicate the final and successful establishment of that higher form of © consciousness which has been struggling for supremacy during the whole of the Mystic Way. The deepest, richest levels of human personality have now attained to light and freedom. The self is remade, transformed, has at last unified itseif; and with the cessation of stress, power has been liberated for new purposes.
“The beginning of the mystic life,” says Delacroix, “intro- duced into the personal life of the subject a group of states which are distinguished by certain characteristics, and which form, so to speak, a special psychological system. At its term, it has, as it were, suppressed the ordinary self, and by the development of this system has established a new personality, with a new method of feeling and of action. its growth results in the transformation of personality: it abolishes the primitive consciousness of selfhood, and substitutes for it a wider consciousness: the total dis- appearance of selfhood in the divine, the substitution of a Divine Self for the primitive self.”2 If he be a psychological philosopher of Eucken’s school, the psychologist will say further
B Pars 1.70, ? Delacroix, ‘“ Etudes sur le Mysticisme,” p. 197.
THE UNITIVE LIFE 499
that man, in this Unitive State, by this substitution of the divine for the “ primitive” self, has at last risen to true freedom, “entered on the fruition of reality.” Hence he has opened up new paths for the inflow of that Triumphing Power which is the very substance of the Real; has wholly remade his consciousness, and in virtue of this total regeneration is “transplanted into that Universal Life, which is yet not alien but our own.”* From contact set up with this Universal Life, this “Energetic Word of God, which nothing can contain”—from those deep levels of Being to which his shifting, growing personality is fully adapted at last—he draws that amazing strength, that immovable peace, that power of dealing with circumstance, which is one of the most marked characteristics of the Unitive Life. “That secret and permanent personality of a superior type”3 which gave . to the surface-self constant and ever more insistent intimations of its existence at every stage of the mystic’s growth—his real, eternal self—has now consciously realized its destiny: and begins at last fully to de. In the travail of the Dark Night it has conquered and invaded the last recalcitrant elements of character. It is no more limited to acts of profound perception, overpowering intuitions of the Absolute: no more dependent for its emergence on the psychic states of contem- plation and ecstasy. The mystic has at last resolved the Stevensonian paradox; and is not truly two, but truly one. (2) The mystic, I think, would acquiesce in these descrip- tions, so far as they go: but he would probably translate them into his own words and gloss them with an explanation which is beyond the power and province of psychology. He would say that his long-sought correspondence with Tran- scendental Reality, his union with God, has now been finally established: that his self, though intact, is wholly penetrated— as a sponge by the sea—by the Ocean of Life and Love to which he has attained. “I live, yet not I but God in me.” He is conscious that he is now at length cleansed of the last stains
of separation, and has become, in a mysterious manner, “that which he beholds.”
* “ Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens,” p. 12. * Jbid., p. 96. 3 Delacroix, of. ctt., p. 114 (vide supra, p. 327).
500 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
In the words of the Siifi poet, the mystic journey is now prosecuted not only zo God but zz God. He has entered the Eternal Order; attained here and now the state to which the Magnet of the Universe draws every living thing. Moving through periods of alternate joy and anguish, as his spiritual self woke, stretched, and was tested in the complementary fires of love and pain, he was inwardly conscious that he moved towards a definite objective. In so far as he was a great mystic, he was also conscious that this objective was no mere act of knowing, however intense, exultant, and sublime, but a con- dition of being, fulfilment of that love which impelled him, steadily and inexorably, to his own place. In the image of the alchemists, the Fire of Love has done its work: the mystic Mercury of the Wise—that little hidden treasure, that scrap of Reality within him—has utterly transmuted the salt and sul- phur of his mind and his sense. Even the white stone of illumi- nation, once so dearly cherished, he has resigned to the crucible. Now, the great work is accomplished, the last imperfection is gone, and he finds within himself the “ Noble Tincture ”—the gold of spiritual humanity.
(A) We have said that the mystic of the impersonal type— the seeker of a Transcendent Absolute—tends to describe the consummation of his quest in the language of dezficatzon.
The Unitive Life necessarily means for him, as for all who attain it, something which infinitely transcends the sum total of its symptoms: something which normal men cannot hope to understand. In it he declares that he “partakes directly of the Divine Nature,’ enjoys the fruition of reality. Since we “only behold that which we are,” the doctrine of deification results naturally and logically from this claim.
“Some may ask,” says the author of the “Theologia Germanica,”’ “what is it to be a partaker of the Divine Nature, or a Godlike [vergotzed, literally deified] man? Answer: he who is imbued with or illuminated by the Eternal or Divine Light and inflamed or consumed with Eternal or Divine Love, he is a deified man and a partaker ofthe Divine Nature.” !
Such a word as “ deification” is not, of course, a scientific term. It is a metaphor, an artistic expression which tries to hint at a transcendent fact utterly beyond the powers of human
* “Theologia Germanica,” cap. xli
THE UNITIVE LIFE 501
understanding, and therefore without equivalent in human speech: that fact of which Dante perceived the “shadowy preface” when he saw the saints as petals of the Sempiternal Rose.t Since we know not the being of God, the mere statement that a soul is transformed in Him may convey to us an ecstatic suggestion, but will never give exact informa- tion: except of course to those rare selves who have experi- enced these supernal states. Such selves, however—or a large proportion of them—accept this statement as approximately true. Whilst the more clear-sighted amongst them are careful to qualify it in a sense which excludes pantheistic interpre- tations, and rebuts the accusation that extreme mystics preach the annihilation of the self and regard themselves as co-equal with the Deity, they leave us in no doubt that it answers to a definite and normal experience of many souls who attain high levels of spiritual vitality. Its terms are chiefly used by those mystics by whom Reality is apprehended as a state or place rather than a Person:? and who have adopted, in describing the earlier stages of their journey to God, such symbols as those of rebirth or transmutation.
The blunt and positive language of these contemplatives concerning deification has aroused more enmity amongst the unmystical than any other of their doctrines or practices. it is of course easy, by confining oneself to its surface sense, to call such language blasphemous: and the temptation to do so has seldom been resisted. Yet, rightly understood, this doc- trine lies at the heart, not only of all mysticism, but also of much philosophy and most religion. It pushes their first prin- ciples toa logical end. “The wonder of wonders,” says Eucken, .
_~whom no one can accuse of a conscious leaning towards mystic
doctrine, “is the human made divine.”3 Christian mysticism, says Delacroix with justice, springs from “that spontaneous and half-savage longing for deification which all religion contains.” 4 Eastern Christianity has always accepted it and expressed it in her rites. “The Body of God deifies me and feeds me,” says
1 Par. xxx. I15-130 and xxxi. I-12.
2 Compare p. 153.
3 ** Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion,” p. 433.
4 Of. cit., ix. But it is difficult to see why we need stigmatize as ‘‘half- savage ’ man’s primordial instinct for his destiny.
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Simeon Metaphrastes, “it deifies my spirit and it feeds my soul in an incomprehensible manner.” !
The Christian mystics justify this dogma of the deifying of man, by exhibiting it as the necessary corollary of the Incar- nation—the humanizing of God. They can quote the authority of the Fathers in support of this argument. “ He became man
that we might be made God,” says St. Athanasius.2 “I heard,’ . says St. Augustine, speaking of his pre-converted period, “ Thy -
voice from on high crying unto me,‘I am the Food of the full- grown: grow, and then thou shalt feed on Me. Nor shalt thou change Me into thy substance as thou changest the food of thy flesh, but thou shalt be changed into Mine’”3 Eckhart there-
fore did no more than expand the patristic view when he wrote, |
“Our Lord says to every living soul, ‘I became man for you. If you do not become God for me, you do me wrong.’ 4
If we are to allow that the mystics have ever attained the object of their quest, I think we must also allow that such attain- ment involves the transmutation of the self to that state which they call, for want of exact language, “deified.” The necessity of such transmutation is an implicit of their. first position: the law that “we behold that which we are, and are that which we behold.” Eckhart, in whom the language of deification assumes its most extreme form, justifies it upon this necessity. “If,” he says, “I am to know God directly, 1 must become completely He and He I: so that this He and this 1 become and are one kins
God, said St. Augustine, is the country of the soul: its Home,
says Ruysbroeck. The mystic in the unitive state is living in and of his native land ; no exploring alien, but a returned exile, ©
now wholly identified with it, part of it, yet retaining his personal- ity intact. As none know the spirit of England but the English ; and they know it by intuitive participation, by mergence, not by thought; so none but the “ deified ” know the secret life of God.
This, too, is a knowledge conferred only by participation: by —
living a life, breathing an atmosphere : by “union with that same Light by which they see, and which they see.”© It is one of those
* Divine Liturgy of the Orthodox Eastern Church. Prayers before Communion. 2 Athanasius, De Incarn. Verbi, i. 108. 3 Aug. Conf., bk. vii. cap. x.
4 Pred. lvii. 5 Pred. xcix. (‘‘ Mystische Schriften,” p. 122).
* Ruysbroeck, ‘‘ L’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,” 1. iii. cap. v.
THE UNITIVE LIFE 503
rights of citizenship which cannot be artificially conferred. Thus it becomes important to ask the mystics what they have to tell us of their life lived upon the bosom of Reality: and to receive their reports without prejudice, however hard be the sayings they contain.
The first thing which emerges from these reports, and from the choice of symbols which we find in them, is that the great mystics are anxious above all things to establish and force on us the truth that by dezfication they intend no arrogant claim to identification with God, but as it were a transfusion of their selves by His Self: an entrance upon a new order of life, so high and so harmonious with Reality that it can only be called divine. Over and over again they assure us that person- ality is not lost, but made more real. “When,” says St. Augustine, “I shall cleave to Thee with all my being, then shall I in nothing have pain and labour; and my lzfe shall bea real life, being wholly full of Thee.”! “ My life shall be a reali life” because it is “ full of Thee.” The achievement of reality, and deification, are then one and the same thing: necessarily so, since we know that only the divine is the real.?
Mechthild of Magdeburg, and after her Dante, saw Deity as a flame or river of fire that filled the Universe ; and the “ deified ” souls of the saints as ardent sparks therein, ablaze with that fire, one thing with it, yet distinct.3 Ruysbroeck, too, saw “ Every soul like a live coal, burned up by God on the hearth of His Infinite Love.’4 Such fire imagery has seemed to many of the mystics a peculiarly exact and suggestive symbol of the tran- scendent state which they are struggling to describe. No longer confused by the dim Cloud of Unknowing, they have pierced to its heart, and there found their goal: that uncreated and energizing Fire which guided the children of Israel through the night.
By a deliberate appeal to the parallel of such great impersonal forces—to Fire and Heat, Light, Water, Air—mystic writers seem able to bring out a perceived aspect of the Godhead, and of the transfgured soul’s participation therein, which no
Aug. Conf., bk. x. cap. xxviii. ? Cf. Coventry Patmore, ‘The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” ‘* Magna Moralia,” xxii. 3 Par. xxx. 64. * “*De Septem Gradibus Amoris,” cap. xiv.
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merely personal language, taken alone, can touch. Thus Boehme, trying to describe the union between the Word and the soul, says, “I give you an earthly similitude of this. Behold a bright flaming piece of iron, which of itself is dark and black, and the fire so penetrateth and shineth through the iron, that it giveth light. Now, the iron doth not cease to de; it is iron still: and the source (or property) of the fire retaineth its own propriety: it doth not take the iron into it, but it penetra- . teth (and shineth) through the iron; and it is iron then as well as before, free in itself: and so also is the source or property of the jive. In sucha manner is the soul set in the Deity; the Deity penetrateth through the soul, and dwelleth in the soul, yet the soul doth not comprehend the Deity, but the Deity com- prehendeth the soul, but doth not alter it (from being a soul) but only giveth it the divine source (or property) of the Majesty.” !
Almost exactly the same image of deification was used, five hundred years before Boehme’s day, by Richard of St. Victor; a mystic whom he is hardly likely to have read. “When the soul is plunged in the fire of divine love,” he says, “like iron, it first loses its blackness, and then, growing to white heat, it becomes like unto the fire itself. And lastly, it grows liquid, and losing its nature is transmuted into an utterly different quality of being.” “As the difference between iron that is cold and iron that is hot,” he says again, “so is the difference between soul and soul: between the tepid soul and the soul made incandescent by divine love.”2 Other contemplatives say that the deified soul is transfigured by the inundations of the Uncreated Light: that it is like a brand blazing in the furnace, transformed to the likeness of the fire. ‘“ These souls,” says the Divine voice to St. Catherine of Siena, “thrown into the furnace of My charity, no part of their will remaining outside but the whole of them being inflamed in Me, are like a brand, wholly consumed in the furnace, so that no one can take hold of it to extinguish it, because it has become fire. In the same way no one can seize these souls, or draw them outside of Me, because they are made one thing with Me through grace, and I never withdraw Myself from them by
t “© The Threefold Life of Man,’ cap. vi. 88. * “De Quatuor Gradibus Violentae Charitatis” (Migne, Patrologia Latina cxcvi.).
THE UNITIVE LIFE 505
sentiment, as in the case of those whom I am leading on to perfection.” t
For the most subtle and delicate descriptions of the Unitive or Deified State, understood as self-loss in the “ Ocean Pacific” of God, we must go to the great genius of Ruysbroeck. He alone, whilst avoiding all its pitfalls, has conveyed the sugges- tion of its ineffable joys in a measure which seems, as we read, to be beyond all that we had supposed possible to human utterance. Awe and rapture, theological profundity, keen psychological insight, are here tempered by a touching sim- plicity. We listen to the report of one who has indeed heard “the invitation of love” which “draws interior souls towards the One” and says “Come home.” A humble receptivity, a meek self-naughting is with Ruysbroeck, as with all great mystics, the gate of the City of God. “Because they have given themselves to God in every action, omission or sub- mission,” he says of the deified souls, “ they possess a peace and a joy, a consolation and a savour, that none can com- prehend; neither the world, nor the creature adorned for himself, nor whosoever prefers himself before God. These interior souls, these men of lucid vision, have before their eyes whensoever they will the invitation of love, which draws them towards the One, and which says, Come home... Thus the spirit is caught by a simple rapture to the Trinity and by a threefold rapture to the Unity, and yet never does the creature become God: never is she confounded with Him. The union is brought about by Love; but the creature sees and feels between God and herself an eternal and invincible dis- tinction. However close the union may be, yet heaven and earth, which have come forth from the hands of God, still hide impenetrable secrets from the spirit of the contemplative. When God gives Himself to a soul, the chasm between herself and Him appears immense: but the powers of the soul, re- duced to simplicity, suffer a divine transformation. ... The spirit feels the truth and splendour of the divine union, yet still feels in itself an essential propensity towards its ancient state ; and this propensity safeguards in it the sense of the gap which is between God and itself. There is nothing more sublime then the sense of this distance: for the Unity is a force which draws
* Dialogo, cap. Ixxviii.
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towards Itself all that which it has put into the world, both natural and supernatural. Further, illuminated men are caught up, above the reason, into the domain of naked vision. There the Divine Unity dwells and calls. Hence their bare vision, cleansed and free, penetrates the activity of all created things, and pursues it to search it out even to its heights. And this bare vision is penetrated and impregnated by the Eternal Light, as the air is penetrated and impregnated by the sun. The naked will is transformed by the Eternal Love, as fire by fire. The naked spirit stands erect, it feels itself to be wrapped round, affirmed and fixed by the formless immensity of God. Thus, far above reason, the created image is united by a threefold bond with its eternal type, the Source and Principle of its life.” *
“When love has carried us above all things,” he says in another place, “above the light, into the Divine Dark, there we are transformed by the Eternal Word Who is the image of the Father; and as the air is penetrated by the sun, thus we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us and penetrating us. What is this light, if it be not a contemplation of the Infinite and an intuition of Eternity? We behold that which we are, and we are that which we behold, because our being, without losing anything of its own personality, is united with the Divine Truth which respects all diversity.” 2
Here the personal aspect of the Absolute seems to be reduced to a minimum: yet all that we value in personality—love, action, will—remains unimpaired. We seem caught up to a plane of vision beyond the categories of the human mind: to the contem- plation of a Something Other—our home, our hope, and our passion, the completion of our personality, and the Substance of all that Is. Such an endless contemplation, such a dwelling within the substance of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, is the essence of that Beatific Vision, that “ participation of Eternity,” “of all things most delightful and desired, of all things; most loved by them who have it,’3 which theology presents to us as the objective of the soul.
Those mystics of the metaphysical type who tend to use
* Ruysbroeck, * Samuel’’ (Hello, pp. 199-201). * Jbid., ‘*‘ De Contemplatione ’’ (Hello, p. 145). 8 St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘‘ Summa Contra Gentiles,” bk. iii. cap. Isii.
LH UNITIVE LIFE 507
these impersonal symbols of Place and Thing often see in the Unitive Life a foretaste of the Beatific Vision : an entrance here and now into that absolute life within the Divine Being, which shall be lived by all perfect spirits when they have cast oft the limitations of the flesh and re-entered the eternal order for which they were made. For them, in fact, the “ deified man,” in virtue of his genius for transcendental reality, has run ahead of human history: and attained a form of con- sciousness which other men will only know when earthly life is past.
In the “ Book of Truth” Suso has a beautiful and poetic comparison between the life of the blessed spirits dwelling within the Ocean of Divine Love, and that approximate life which is lived on earth by the mystic who has renounced all selfhood and merged his will in that of the Eternal Truth. Here we find one of the best of many answers to the ancient but apparently immortal accusation that the mystics teach the total annihilation of personality as the end and object of their quest. “Lord, tell me,’ says the Servitor, “what remains to a blessed soul which has wholly renounced itself.” Truth says, “ When the good and faithful servant enters into the joy of his Lord, he is inebriated by the riches of the house of God ; for he feels, in an ineffable degree, that which is felt by an inebriated man. He forgets himself, he is no longer conscious of his selfhood; he disappears and loses himself in God, and becomes one spirit with Him, as a drop of water which is drowned in a great quantity of wine. For even as such a drop disappears, taking the colour and the taste of wine, so it is with those who are in full possession of blessedness. All human desires are taken from them in an indescribable manner, they are rapt from themselves, and are immersed in the Divine Will. If it were otherwise, if there remained in the man some human thing that was not absorbed, those words of Scripture which say that God must be all in all would be false. Hes being remains, but in another form, in another glory, and in another power. And all this is the result of entire and complete renunciation. ... Herein thou shalt_ find an answer to thy question ; for the true renunciation and veritable abandonment of a man to the Divine Will in the temporal world is an imitation and reduction of that self-
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abandonment of the blessed, of which Scripture speaks: and this imitation approaches its model more or less according as men are more or less united with God and become more or less one with God. Remark well that which is said of the blessed: they are stripped of their personal initiative, and changed into another form, another glory, another power. What © then is this other form, if it be not the Divine Nature and the Divine Being whereinto they pour themselves, and which pours Itself into them, and becomes one thing with them? And what is that other glory, if it be not to be illuminated and made shining in the Inaccessible Light? What is that other power, if it be not that by means of his union with the Divine Person- ality, there is given to man a divine strength and a divine power that he may accomplish all which pertains to his blessedness and omit all which is contrary thereto? And thus it is that, as has been said, a man comes forth from his selfhood.” !
All the mystics agree that the stripping off of personal initiative, the I, the Me, the Mine, utter renouncement, or “ self- naughting ”—self-abandonment to the direction of a larger Will —is an imperative condition of the attainment of the unitive life. The temporary denudation of the mind, whereby the contemplative made space for the vision of God, must now be applied to the whole life. Here, they say, there is a final swallowing up of that wilful I-hood which we ordinarily recognize as ourselves. It goes for ever, and something new is established in its room. The self is made part of the mystical Body of God; and, humbly taking its place in the corporate life of Reality, would “fain be to the Eternal Good- ness what his own hand is toa man.”2 That strange “hunger and thirst of God for the soul,” “at once avid and generous,” of which they speak in their most profound passages, here makes its final demand and receives its satisfaction. “ All that He has, all that He is, He gives: all that we have, all that we are, He takes,” 3 ;
The self, they declare, is devoured, immersed in the Abyss ; “sinks into God Who is the deep of deeps.” In their efforts
* Suso, ‘‘ Buchlein von der Wahrheit,” cap. iv. 2 “‘Theologia Germanica,” cap. x. 3 Ruysbroeck, ‘‘ De Contemplatione ” (Hello, p. 151).
THE UNITIVE LIFE 509
towards describing to us this, the supreme mystic act, and the new life to which it gives birth, they are often driven to the use of images which must seem to us grotesque, were it not for the flame which burns behind: as when Ruysbroeck cries, “To eat and be eaten! this is Union! ... Since His desire is immensity itself, to be wholly devoured of Him does not greatly amaze me.”!
(B) At this point we begin to see that the language of deification, taken alone, will not suffice to describe the soul’s final experience of Reality. The personal and emotional aspect of man’s relation with his Source is also needed if that which he means by “union with God” is to be even partially expressed. Hence, even the most “transcendental” mystic is constantly compelled to fall back on the language of love in the endeavour to express the content of his metaphysical raptures: and forced ‘in the end to acknowledge that the perfect union of Lover and Beloved cannot be suggested in the arid though doubtless accurate terms of religious philosophy. Such arid language eludes the most dangerous aspects of “divine union,” the pantheistic on one hand, the “amoristic” on the other; but it also fails to express the most splendid side of that amazing vision of truth. It needs some other more personal and intimate vision to complete it: and we shall find in the reports of those mystics of the “intimate” type to whom the Unitive Life has meant not self-loss in an Essence, but self- fulfilment in the union of heart and will, just that completing touch.
The extreme form of this kind of apprehension of course finds expression in the well-known and heartily abused sym- bolism of the Spiritual Marriage between God and the Soul : a symbolism which goes back to the Orphic Mysteries, and thence descended vza the Neoplatonists unto the stream of Christian tradition. But there are other and less concrete forms of it, wholly free from the dangers which are supposed to lurk in “erotic” imagery of this kind. Thus Jalalu ’d Din, by the use of metaphors which are hardly human yet charged with passionate feeling, tells, no less successfully than the writer of the Song of Solomon, the secret of this union in which “heart speaks to heart.”
* Hello, p. 223.
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‘““With Thy Sweet Soul, this soul of mine H[ath mixed as Water doth with Wine. Who can the Wine and Water part, Or me and Thee when we combine? Thou art become my greater self; Small bounds no more can me confine. Thou hast my being taken on, And shall not I now take on Thine? Me Thou for ever hast affirmed, That I may ever know Thee mine. Thy Love has pierced me through and through, Its thrill with Bone and Nerve entwine. I rest a Flute laid on Thy lips; A lute, I on Thy breast recline. Breathe deep in me that I may sigh ; Yet strike my strings, and tears shall shine.” *
What the mystic here desires to tell us is, that his new life is not only a free and conscious participation in the life of Eternity—a fully-established existence on real and transcen- dental levels—but also the conscious sharing of an inflowing personal life greater than his own; a tightening of the bonds of that companionship which has been growing in intimacy and splendour during the course of the Mystic Way. This companionship, at once the most actual and most elusive fact of human experience, is utterly beyond the resources of speech. So too are those mysteries of the communion of love, whereby the soul’s humble, active, and ever-renewed self-donation becomes the medium of her glory: and “by her love she is made the equal of Love”—the beggar maid sharing Cophetua’s throne.
Thus the anonymous author of the “ Mirror” writes, in one of his most daring passages, “‘I am God, says Love, ‘ For Love is God, and God is Love. And this soul is God by her condition of love: but I am God by my Nature Divine. And this [state] is hers by the justice of love. So that this precious one loved of Me, is taught, and is led of Me out of herself. . . . This [soul] is the eagle that flies high, so right high and yet more high than does any other bird ; for she is feathered with fine love.’” 2 ,
The simplest expression of the Unitive Life, the simplest
* Jalalu ’d Din, *‘ The Festival of Spring” (Hastie’s translation, p. 10). 2 “*The Mirror of Simple Souls,” f. 157, b.
THE UNITIVE LIFE 511
interpretation which we can put on its declarations, is that it is the complete and conscious fulfilment here and now of this Perfect Love. In it certain elect spirits, still in the flesh, “ fly high and yet more high,” till “ taught and led out of themselves ” they become, in the exaggerated language of the “ Mirror,” “God by condition of love.” Home-grown English mysticism tried as a rule to express the inexpressible in homelier, more temperate terms than this. “I would that thou knew,” says the unknown author of the “ Epistle of Prayer,” “ what manner of working it is that knitteth man’s soul to God, and that maketh it one with Him in love and accordance of will after the word of St. Paul, saying thus: ‘Qu adhaeret Deo, unus spiritus est cum tllo’ ; that is to say: ‘Whoso draweth near to God as it is by such a reverent affection touched before, he is one spirit with God.’ That is, though all that God and he be two and sere in kind, never- theless yet in grace they are so knit together that they are but one in spirit ; and all this is one for onehead of love and accord- ance of will; and in this onehead is the marriage made between God and the soul the which shall never be broken, though all that the heat and the fervour of this work cease for a time, but by a deadly sin. In the ghostly feeling of this onehead maya loving soul both say and sing (if it list) this holy word that is written ijn the Book of Songs in the Bible, ‘Dzlectus meus mthi et ego ili, that is, My loved unto me, and I unto Him; under- standing that God shall be knitted with the ghostly glue of grace on His party, and the lovely consent in gladness of spirit on thy party.”?
I think no one can deny that the comparison of the bond between the soul and the Absolute to “ ghostly glue,” though crude, is wholly innocent. Its appearance in this passage as an alternative to the symbol of wedlock may well check the un- critical enthusiasm of those who hurry to condemn at sight all “sexual” imagery. That it has seemed to the mystics appro- priate and exact is proved by its reappearance in the next cen- tury in the work ofa greater contemplative. “Thou givest me,” says Petersen, “ Thy whole Self to be mine whole and un- divided, if at least I shall be Thine whole and undivided. And when I shall be thus all Thine, even as from everlasting
™ “The Epistle of Prayer.’’ Printed from Pepwell’s edition in ‘‘ The Cell of Self- knowledge,” edited by Edmund Gardner, p. 88.
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Thou hast loved Thyself, so from everlasting Thou hast loved me: for this means nothing more than that Thou enjoyest Thyself in me, and that I by Thy -grace enjoy Thee in myself and myself in Thee. And when in Thee I shall love myself, nothing else but Thee do I love, because Zhou art in me and I in Thee, glued together as one and the selfsame thing, which hence- forth and forever cannot be divided.”
From this kind of language to that of the Spiritual Marriage, as understood by the pure minds of the mystics, is but a step.? They mean by it no rapturous satisfactions, no dubious spiritualizing of earthly ecstasies, but a life-long bond “ that shall never be lost or broken,” a close personal union of will and of heart between the free self and that “ Fairest in Beauty” Whom it has known in the act of contemplation.
The Mystic Way has been a progress, a growth, in love: a deliberate fostering -of the inward tendency of the soul towards its source, an eradication of its disorderly tendencies to “temporal goods.” But the only proper end of love is union: “a perfect uniting and coupling together of the lover and the loved into one.” 3 It is “a unifying principle,” the philosophers say ;4 life’s mightiest agent upon every plane. Moreover, just as earthly marriage is understood by the moral sense less as a satisfaction of personal desires, than as a part of the great pro- cess of life—the fusion of two powers for new purposes—so such spiritual marriage brings with it duties and obligations. With the attainment of a new order, the new infusion of vitality, comes a new responsibility, the call to effort and
endurance on a new and mighty scale. It is not an act but a —
state. Fresh life is imparted by which our lives are made complete: new creative powers are conferred. The self, lifted
to the divine order, is to be an agent of the divine fecundity: © an energizing centre, a parent of transcendental life. “The —
last perfection,” says Aquinas, to “supervene upon a thing, is its becoming the cause of other things. While then a creature
* Gerlac Petersen, ‘“‘Ignitum cum Deo Soliloquium,” cap. xv.
2 Compare Pt. I. Cap. VI. It seems needless to repeat here the examples there ©
given. 3 Hilton, ‘‘ The Treatise written to a Devout Man,” cap. viii. 4 Cf. Ormond, ‘‘ Foundations of Knowledge,” p. 442. ‘*When we love any
being, we desire either the unification of its life with our own, or our own unification —
with its life. Love in its innermost motive is a unifying principle.”
oe ae a ies ae
THE UNITIVE LIFE 513
tends by many ways to the likeness of God, the last way left open to it is to seek the divine likeness by being the cause of other things, according to what the Apostle says, Dez enim sumus adjutores.” *
We find as a matter of fact, when we come to study the history of the mystics, that the permanent Unitive State, or spiritual marriage, does mean for those who attain to it, first and above all else such an access of creative vitality. It means man’s little life invaded and enhanced by the Absolute Life: the appearance in human history of personalities and careers which seem superhuman when judged by the surface mind. Such activity, such a bringing forth of “the fruits of the Spirit,” may take many forms: but where it is absent, where we meet with personal satisfactions, personal visions or raptures—how- ever sublime and spiritualized—presented as marks of the Unitive Way, ends or objects of the quest of Reality, we may be sure that we have wandered from the “straight and narrow road” which leads, not to eternal rest, but to Eternal Life, “The fourth degree of love is spiritually fruitful,” 2 said Richard of St. Victor. Wherever we find a sterile love, a “holy passivity,’ we are in the presence of quietistic heresy ; not of the Unitive Life. “I hold it for a certain truth,” says St. Teresa, “that in giving these graces our Lord intends, as I have already said in this treatise, to fortify our weakness, that we may be made capable of following His example in the endurance of great pains.... Whence did St. Paul draw strength to support his excessive labours? We see clearly in him the effects of visions and contemplations which came indeed from God; not of a delirious fancy, nor the arts of the spirit of darkness. After the reception of such great favours, did he go and hide himself in order to enjoy in peace the ecstasy which overwhelmed his soul, without occupying himself with other things? You know that on the contrary he passed his whole days in apostolic labours, working at night in order to earn his bread. ... Oh my sisters! who can describe the point to which a soul where our Lord dwells in so special a manner neglects her own ease? How little honours affect her! How
* «¢ Summa Contra Gentiles,” bk. iii. cap. xxi. 2 «De Quatuor Gradibus Violent Charitatis”” (Migne, Patrologia Latina cxcvi, col. 1216 D). LL
914 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
far she is from wishing to be esteemed in the least thing! When she possesses the ceaseless companionship of her Bridegroom, how could she think of herself? Her only thought is to please Him, and to seek out ways in which she may show Him her love. It is to this point, my daughters, that orison tends ; and, in the design of God, this spiritual marriage is destined to no other purpose but the zucessant production of work, work! And this, as I have already told you, is the best proof that the favours which we receive have come from God.”! “To give to our Lord a perfect hospitality ” she says in the same chapter, “Mary and Martha must combine.”
When we look at the lives of the great theopathetic mystics, the true initiates of Eternity—inarticulate as these mystics often are—we find ourselves in the presence of an amazing, a superabundant vitality: of a “triumphing force” over which circumstance has no power. “The incessant production of work, work” seems indeed to be the object of that Spirit, by Whose presence their interior castle is now filled.
We see St. Paul, abruptly enslaved by the First and Only Fair, not hiding himself to enjoy the vision of Reality, but going out single-handed to organize the Catholic Church. We ask how it was possible for an obscure Roman citizen, without money, influence, or good health, to lay these colossal foundations: and he answers, “ Not I, but Christ in me.”
We see Joan of Arc, a child of the peasant class, leaving the sheepfold to lead the armies of France. We ask how this incredible thing can be: and are told “ Her Voices bade her.” A message, an overpowering impulse, came from the supra- sensible: vitality flowed in on her, she knew not how or why. She was united with the Infinite Life, and became Its agent, the medium of Its strength, “ what his own hand is to a man.”
We see St. Francis, “ God’s troubadour,” marked with His wounds, inflamed with His joy—obverse and reverse of the earnest-money of eternity—St. Ignatius Loyola, our Lady’s knight—incurably romantic figures both of them—go out to change the spiritual history of Europe. Where did they find— born and bred to the most ordinary of careers, in the least spiri- tual of atmospheres—that superabundant energy, that genius for success which triumphed best in the most hopeless situations ?
t ‘Fl Castillo Interior,” Moradas Sétimas, cap. iv.
THE UNITIVE LIFE 515
Ignatius found it in the long contemplations and hard discipline of the cave of Manresa, after the act of surrender in which he dedicated his knighthood to the service of the Mother of God. Francis found it before the crucifix in St. Damiano, and re- newed it in the ineffable experience of La Verna; when “by mental possession and rapture he was transfigured of God.”
We see St. Teresa, another born romantic, pass to the Unitive State after long and bitter struggles between her lower and higher personality. A chronic invalid over fifty years of age, weakened by long ill-health and by the terrible mortifica- tions of the Purgative Way, she deliberately breaks with her old career, leaves her convent, and starts a new life: coursing through Spain, and reforming a great religious order in the teeth of the ecclesiastical world. Yet more amazing, St. Catherine of Siena, an illiterate daughter of the people, after a three years’ retreat, consummates the mystic marriage, and emerges from the cell of self-knowledge to dominate the politics of Italy. How came it that these apparently unsuitable men and women, checked on every side by inimical environment, ill-health, custom, or poverty, achieved these stupendous destinies? The explanation can only lie in the fact that all these persons were great mystics, living upon high levels the theopathetic life. In each a character of the heroic type, of great vitality, deep enthusiasms, unconquerable will, was raised to the spiritual plane, remade on higher levels of consciousness, Each by sur- render of selfhood, by acquiescence in the large destinies of life, had so furthered that self’s natural genius for the Infinite that their human limitations were overpassed. Iience they rose to freedom and attained to the one ambition of the “naughted soul,” “I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.”
Even Madame Guyon’s natural tendency to passive states breaks down with her entrance on the Unitive Way. Though she cannot be classed amongst the greatest of its initiates, she too felt its fertilizing power, was stung from her “holy indiffer- ence” to become, as it were, involuntarily true to type.
“The soul,” she says of the self entering upon Union—and we cannot doubt that as usual she is describing her own care- fully docketed “states”—“feels a secret vigour taking more and more strongly possession of all her being: and little by
516 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
little she receives a new life, never again to be lost, at least so far as one can be assured of anything in this life. . . . This new life is not like that which she had before. It is a life in God. It is a perfect life. She no longer lives or works of herself: but God lives, acts and works in her, and this grows little by little till she becomes perfect with God’s perfection, rich with His riches, and loves with His love. ... She lives only with the life of God, Who being the Principle of Life, this : soul cannot lack anything. How greatly has she gained by her losses! She has lost the created for the Increate, the nothing for the All. All is given her: but not in herself but in God, not to be possessed of herself but to be possessed of God. Her riches are immense; for they are nothing less than God Himself.
“TI confess,” she says again, “that I do not understand the risen and deified state of certain persons who remain, in spite of it, all their lives long in a state of impotence and deprivation : for here the soul resumes a veritable life. The acts of a risen man are vital acts: and if the soul after her resurrection remains without life, | say that she is dead or buried, but not risen. To be vzsez, the soul should be capable of all the acts which she performed before the time of her losses; and per- form them without difficulty, since she performs them in God.” 2
This new, intense, and veritable life has other and even more vital characteristics than those which lead to “the per- formance of acts” or “the incessant production of work, work.” It is, in an actual sense, as Richard of St. Victor reminded us, fertile, creative, as well as merely active. In the fourth degree of love, the soul brings forth its children. It is the agent of a fresh outbirth of spiritual vitality into the world ; the helpmate of the Transcendent Order, the mother of a spiritual progeny. The great unitive mystics are each of them the founders of spiritual families, centres wherefrom radiates new transcendental life. The “flowing light of the Godhead” is focused in them, as in a lens, only that it may pass through them to spread out on every side. So, too, the great creative seers and artists are the parents, not merely of their own immediate works, but also of whole schools of art; whole groups of persons who acquire or inherit their
* “Les Torrents,” pt. i. cap. ix. ? OD. cét., pt. ii. cap. i.
THE UNITIVE LIFE 517
vision of beauty or truth. Thus within the area of influence of a Paul,a Francis, an Ignatius, a Teresa, an atmosphere of reality is created; and new and vital spiritual personalities gradually appear, meet for the work which these great founders set in hand. The real witness to St. Paul’s ecstatic life in God is the train of Christian churches by which his journey- ings are marked. Wherever Francis passed, he left Franciscans, “fragrant with a wondrous aspect,’ where none had _ been before: The Friends of God spring up, individual mystics, here and there through the Rhineland and Bavaria. Each becomes the centre of an ever-widening circle of transcendent life, the parent of a spiritual family. They are come, like their Master, that men may have life more abundantly: from them new mystic energy is actually born into the world. Again, Ignatius leaves Manresa a solitary : maimed, ignorant, and poor. He comes to Rome with his company already formed, and ablaze with his spirit; veritably his children, begotten of him, part and parcel of his life.
Teresa finds the order of Mount Carmel hopelessly corrupt : all its friars and nuns blind to reality, indifferent to the obliga- tions of the cloistered life. She is moved by the Spirit to leave her convent and begin, in abject poverty, the foundation of new houses, where the most austere and exalted life of contempla- tion shall be led. She enters upon this task to the accompani- ment of an almost universal mockery. Mysteriously, as she proceeds, novices of the spiritual life appear and cluster around her. They come into existence, one knows not how, in the least favourable of atmospheres: but one and all are salted with the Teresian salt. They receive the infection of her abundant vitality: embrace eagerly and joyously the heroic life of the Reform. In the end, every city in Spain has within it Teresa’s ' spiritual children: a whole order of contemplatives, as truly born of her as if they were indeed her sons and daughters in the flesh.
Well might the Spiritual Alchemists say that the true “Lapis Philosophorum” is a ténging stone ; which imparts its goldness to the base metals brought within its sphere of influence.
This reproductive power is one of the greatest marks of the theopathetic life ; the true “ mystic marriage” of the individual
* Thomas of Celano, Legenda Secunda, cap. xii.
518 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
soul with its Source. Those rare personalities in whom it is found are the medza through which that Triumphing Spiritual Life which is the essence of reality forces an entrance into the temporal order and begets children; heirs of the superabundant vitality of the transcendental universe.
~“ But the Unitive Life is more than the sum total of its symptoms: more than the heroic and apostolic life of the “great active”: more than the divine motherhood of new “sons of the Absolute.’ These are only its outward signs, its expression in time and space. I have first laid stress upon that expression, because it is the side which all critics and some friends of the mystics persistently ignore. The contemplative’s power of living this intense and crea- tive life within the temporal order, however, is tightly bound up with that other life in which he attains to complete com- munion with the Absolute Order, and submits to the inflow of its supernal vitality.
In discussing the contributions of the mystical experience to the theories of Absolutism and Vitalism,? we saw that the com- plete mystic consciousness, and therefore, of course, the complete mystic world, had a twofold character. It embraced, we per- ceived, a Reality which seems from the human standpoint at once static and dynamic, transcendent and immanent, eternal and temporal: accepted both the absolute World of Pure Being and the unresting World of Becoming as integral parts of its vision of Truth, demanding on its side a dual response. All through the Mystic Way we caught glimpses of the growth and exercise of this dual intuition of the Real. Now, the mature mystic, having come to his full stature, passed through the purifications of sense and of will and entered on his heritage, must and does take up as a part of that heritage not merely (a) a fruition of the Divine Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, his place within the Sempiternal Rose, nor (2) the creative activity of an agent of the Eternal Wisdom still immersed in the River of Life: but both together—the twofold destiny of the spiritual world. To use the old scholastic language, he is at once patient and agent: patient as regards God, agent as regards man.
In a deep sense it may be said of him that he now partici- pates according to his measure in that divine-human life which
* Supra, Pt. I. Cap. II.
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mediates between man and the Eternal, and constitutes the “salvation of the world.” Therefore, though his outward heroic life of action, his divine fecundity, may seem to us the best evidence of his state, it is the inner knowledge of his mystical sonship, “the mysterious peace dwelling in activity,” says Ruysbroeck,! which is for him the guarantee of absolute life. He has many ways of describing this central fact ; this peculiar consciousness of his own transcendence, which coexists with, and depends on, a complete humility. Sometimes he says that whereas in the best moments of his natural life he was but the “faithful servant” of the eternal order, and in the illuminated way became its “secret friend,” he is now advanced to the final, most mysterious state of “hidden child.” “How great,” says Ruysbroeck, “is the difference between the secret friend and the hidden child! The first makes lively, impassioned, but measured ascents towards God. But the second presses on to lose his own life upon the summits, in that simplicity which knoweth not itself. ... It is then that, caught up above all things by the sublime ardours of a stripped and naked spirit, we feel within ourselves the certitude and the perfection of the children of God; and obtain the immediate contact of the Divine because we are immersed in the Nothingness.” 2
Though the outer career of the great mystic, then, be one of - superhuman industry, a long fight with evil and adversity, his real and inner life dwells securely upon the heights; in the perfect fruition which he can only suggest to us by the para- © doxical symbols of ignorance and emptiness. He dominates — existence because he thus transcends it: is a son of God, a member of the eternal order, shares its substantial life. “Tran- — quillity according to His essence, activity according to His Nature: absolute repose, absolute fecundity ”: this, says Ruysbroeck again, is the twofold property of Godhead: and the | secret child of the Absolute participates in this dual character of Reality—“ for this dignity has man been made.” 3
Those two aspects of truth which he has so clumsily classi- fied as static and dynamic, as Being and Becoming, now find their final reconciliation within his own nature: for that nature
* “‘De Contemplatione” (Hello, p. 167). 2 Of. cit., loc. ctt. 3 [bid., p. 175. Vide supra, p. 42.
520 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM —
has become conscious in all its parts, has unified itself about its highest elements. That strange, tormenting vision of a perfect peace, a joyous self-loss, annihilation in some mighty Life that overpassed his own, which haunts man throughout the whole course of his history, and finds a more or less distorted expres- sion in all his creeds, a justification in all his ecstasies, is now traced to its source: and found to be the inevitable expression of an instinct by which he recognized, though he could not attain, the noblest part of his inheritance. This recognition of his has of necessity been imperfect and oblique. It has taken in many temperaments an exaggerated form, and has been further disguised by the symbolic language used to describe it. The tendency of Indian mysticism to regard the Unitive Life wholly in its passive aspect, as a total self-annihilation, a dis- appearance into the substance of the Godhead, results, I believe, from such a one-sided distortion of truth. The Oriental mystic “ presses on to lose his life upon the heights”; but he does not come back from the grave and bring to his fellow-men the life- giving news that he has transcended mortality in the interests of the race. The temperamental bias of Western mystics towards activity has saved them as a rule from such one-sided achievement as this; and hence it is in them that the Unitive Life, with its “dual character of activity and rest,” has assumed its richest and its noblest forms.
Of all these Western mystics none has expressed more lucidly or more splendidly than Ruysbroeck the double nature of man’s reaction to Reality. It is the heart of his vision of truth. In all his books he returns to it again and again: speaking, as none familiar with his writings can doubt, the ardent, joyous, vital language of first-hand experience, not the _ platitudes of philosophy. He might say with Dante, his fore- runner into the Empyrean :—
“‘La forma. universal di questo nodo credo ch’ io vidi, perché pit di largo dicendo questo, mi sento ch’ io godo.”?
It is then from Ruysbroeck that I shall make my quota- tions : and if they be found somewhat long and difficult of com-
* Par. xxxill. gt. ‘*I believe that I beheld the universal form of this knot : because in saying this I feel my joy increased.”
THE UNITIVE LIFE 521
prehension, their unique importance for the study of man’s spiritual abilities must be my excuse.
First, his vision of God :—
“The Divine Persons,” he says, “Who form one sole God, are in the fecundity of their nature ever active: and in the simplicity of their essence they form the Godhead and eternal blessedness. Thus God according to the Persons is Eternal Work: but according to the essence and Its perpetual stillness, He is Eternal Rest. Now love and fruition live between this activity and this rest. Love would work without ceasing: for its nature is eternal work with God. Fruition is ever at rest, for it dwells higher than the will and the longing /or the well- beloved, zz the well-beloved ; in the divine nescience and that simple love where the Father, together with the Son, enfolds His well-beloved in the abundant unity of His Spirit, above the fecundity of nature. And that same Father says to each soul in His infinite lovingkindness, ‘Thou art Mine and I am thine: I am thine and thou art Mine, for I have chosen thee from all eternity.’ ”?
Next, the vision of the selfs destiny: “Our duty is to love God: our fruition is to endure God and be penetrated by His love. There is the same difference between love and fruition as there is between God and His Grace. When we unite our- selves to God by love, then we spiritualize ourselves: but when He Himself draws us in a flight of the spirit, and transforms us in His spirit, then, so to speak, we are fruition. And the spirit of God Himself pushes us out from Himself by His breath, in order that we may love, and may do good works ; and again He draws us to Himself, in order that we may repose in peace and in fruition. And this is Eternal Life ; even as our bodily life subsists in the indrawing and outgoing of our breath.” 2
“ Understand,” he says again, “God comes to us incessantly, both with and without intermediary; and He demands of us both action and fruition, in sucha way that the action shall not hinder the fruition, nor the fruition the action, but they shall reinforce one another reciprocally. And this is why the interior man [2.e, the contemplative] possesses his life according to these two manners; that is to say, in rest and in work. And in each of
* © De Septem Gradibus Amoris,” cap. xiv. ? Lbid., loc. cit.
522 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
them he is wholly and undividedly ; for he dwells altogether in God in virtue of his restful fruition and altogether in himself in virtue of his active love. And God, in His communications, incessantly compels him to renew both this rest and this work. And because the soul is just, it desires to pay at every instant that which God demands of it; and this is why each time it is irradiated of Him, the soul is introverted in a manner that is both active and fruitive, and thus that man is strengthened in all virtues and ever more profoundly immersed in fruitive love. . . » He is active in all loving work, for he sees his rest. He is a pilgrim, for he sees his country. For love’s sake he strives for victory, for he sees his crown. Consolation, peace, joy, beauty and riches, all that can give delight, all this is shown to the mind illuminated in God, in spiritual similitudes and without measure. And through this vision, in the contact of God, love continues active. For such a just man has built up in his own soul, in rest and in work, a veritable life which shall endure for ever; but which shall be transformed after this present life to a state still more sublime. Thus this man is just, and he goes zowards God by inward love, in eternal work, and he goes zw God by his fruitive inclination in eternal rest. And he dwells in God ; and yet he goes out towards created things, in a spirit of love towards all things, in the virtues and in works of righteousness. And this ts the supreme summit of the inner life.” *
Compare this description with the careers of the theopathetic mystics; in whom, indeed, “ action has not injured fruition, nor fruition action,” who have, by some secret adjustment—some strange magic, as it seems to other men—contrived to “ possess their lives in rest and in work” without detriment to inward joy or outward industry.
Bear in mind as you read these words—Ruysbroeck’s last supreme effort to tell the true relation between man’s free spirit and his God—the great public ministry of St. Catherine of Siena, which ranged from the tending of the plague-stricken to the reforming of the Papacy; and was accompanied by the inward fruitive consciousness of the companionship of Christ. Remember the humbler but not less beautiful and significant achievement of her Genoese namesake: the strenuous lives of
* Ruysbroeck, ‘‘ L’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,” 1. ii. cap. Ixxiii.
THE UNITIVE LIFE 523
St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius, St. Teresa, outwardly cumbered with much serving, observant of an infinitude of tiresome details, composing rules, setting up foundations, neg- lecting no aspect of their business which could conduce to its practical success, yet “altogether dwelling in God in restful fruition.” Are not all these supreme examples of the state in which the self, at last fully conscious, knowing Reality because she is wholly real, pays her debt? Unable torest entirely either in work or in fruition, she seizes on this twofold expression of the superabundant life by which she is possessed: and, on the double wings of eagerness and effort, takes flight towards her Home.
In dwelling, as we have done, on the ways in which the great mystic makes actual to himself the circumstances of the Unitive State, we must not forget that this state is, in essence, a fulfilment of love; the attainment of a “heart’s desire.” By this attainment, this lifting of the self to free union with the Real—as by the earthly marriage which dimly prefigures it—a new life is entered upon, new powers, new responsibilities are conferred. But this is not all. The. three prime activities of the normal self, feeling, intellect, and will, though they seem to be fused, are really carried up to a higher term. They are unified, it is true, but still present in their integrity ; and each demands and receives full satisfaction in the attainment of this final “honour for which man has been made.” The intellect is immersed in that mighty vision of truth, known now not as a vision but as a home; where St. Paul saw things which might not be uttered, St. Teresa found the “ perpetual companionship of the Blessed Trinity,’ and Dante, caught to its heart for one brief moment, his mind smitten by the blinding flash of the Uncreated Light, knew that he had resolved Reality’s last para- dox: the unity of “cerchio” and “zmago”—the infinite and personal aspects of God.t_ The enhanced will, made over to the interests of the Transcendent, receives new worlds to conquer, new strength to match its exalted destiny. But the heart too here enters on a new order, begins to live upon. high levels of joy. “This soul, says Love, swims in the sea of joy: that is, in the sea of delight, the stream of divine influences.” 2
Par. xxxili. 137. * « The Mirror of Simple Souls,” f. 161.
524 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
“ Amans volat, currit et laetatur: liber est et non tenetur,”’ * said A Kempis: classic words, which put before us once and for ever the inward joyousness and liberty of the saints. They “fly, run and rejoice”-—those great, laborious souls, often spent with amazing mortifications, vowed to hard and — never-ending tasks. They are “free, and nothing can hold them,” though they seem to the world fenced in by absurd renunciations and restrictions, deprived of that cheap licence which it knows as liberty.
That fruition of joy of which Ruysbroeck speaks in majestic phrases, describes as constituting the interior life of mystic souls immersed in the Absolute—the translation of the Beatific Vision into the terms of a supernal feeling-state—is o*ten realized in the secret experience of those same mystics, as the perennial possession of a childlike gaiety, an inextinguish- able gladness of heart. The transfigured souls move to the measures of a “love dance” which persists in mirth without comparison, through every outward hardship and tribulation, — They enjoy the high spirits peculiar to high spirituality: and shock the world by a delicate playfulness, instead of exhibiting the morose resignation which it feels to be proper to the “spiritual life.” Thus St. Catherine of Siena, though constantly suffering, “was always jocund and of a happy spirit.” When prostrate with illness she overflowed with gaiety and gladness, and “was full of laughter in the Lord, exultant and rejoicing.” 2 |
Moreover, the most clear-sighted amongst the mystics declare such joy to be an implicit of Reality. Thus Dante, initiated into Paradise, sees the whole Universe laugh with delight as it glorifies God:3 and the awful countenance of Perfect Love adorned with smiles. Thus the souls of the great theologians dance to music and laughter in the Heaven of the Sun;5 the loving seraphs, in their ecstatic joy, whirl about the Being of God.6 “O luce eterna che ... amt ed arridz,” exclaims the pilgrim, as the Divine Essence is at last revealed to him,? and he perceives love and joy as the final attributes
** De Imitatione Christi,” 1. iii. cap. v.
? Contestatio Fr. Thomae Caffarina, Processus, col. 1258 (E. Gardner, ‘** St.) Catherine of Siena,’’ p. 48).
3 Par. xxvii. 4. 4 Tbid., xx. 13. 5 Jbid., x. 76, 118.
© Jbid., xxviii. 100. 7 Lbid., xxxiii. 124-26.
THE UNITIVE LIFE 525
of the Triune God. Thus Beatrice with “ szoz occht ridents”— so different from the world’s idea of a suitable demeanour for the soul’s supreme instructress—laughs as she mounts with him the ladder to the stars. So, if the deified soul has indeed run ahead of humanity and “according to his fruition dwells in heaven,” he too, like Francis, will run, rejoice and make merry: join the eager dance of the Universe about the One. “If,’ say Patmore, “we may credit certain hints | contained in the lives of the saints, love raises the spirit above the sphere of reverence and worship into one of laughter and dalliance; a sphere in which the soul says :—
¢¢Shall I, a gnat which dances in Thy ray, Dare to be reverent?’ ’’?
Richard Rolle has expressed this exultant “spirit of dalliance” with peculiar insight and delicacy. ‘“ Among the delights which he tastes in so sweet love burning,” he says of the true lover who “in the bond of lovers’ wills stably is confirmed,” “a heavenly privity inshed he feels, that no man can know but he that has received it, and in himself buries the electuary: that anoints and makes happy all joyful lovers in Jesu ; so that they cease not to hie in heavenly seats to sit, joy of their Maker endlessly to use. Hereto truly they yearn in heavenly sights abiding; and inwardly set afire, all their inward parts are glad with pleasant shining in light. And themselves they feel gladdened with merriest love, and in joyful song wonderfully melted.... But this grace generally and to all is not given, but to the holiest of holy souls is taught; in whom the excellence of love shines, and songs of lovely - loving, Christ inspiring, commonly burst up, and now made as it were a pipe of life, in sight of God more goodly than can be said, joying sounds. The which (soul) the mystery of love knowing, with great cry to its Love ascends, in wit sharpest, and in knowledge and in feeling subtle; not spread in things of this world but into God all gathered and set, that in clean- ness of conscience and shining of soul to Him it may serve Whom it has purposed to love, and itself to Him to give.
4 Coventry Patmore, ‘‘ The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” ‘‘ Aurea Dicta,” xxxix.
526 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
Surely the clearer the love of the lover is, the nearer to him ~ and the more present God is. And thereby more clearly in~ God he joys, and of the sweet Goodness the more he feels, that © to lovers is wont Itself to inshed, and to mirth without com-
parison the hearts of the meek to turn.” !
x "
4 m
’ ‘ 3
a
‘
The last state of burning love, said Rolle, than which he” could conceive no closer reaction to Reality, was the state of
Sweetness and Song: the welling up of glad music in the
simple soul, man’s natural expression of a joy which overpasses — the descriptive powers of our untuneful speech. In the gay — rhythms of that primordial art he may say something of the
secret which the more decorous periods of religion and phil- osophy will never let him tell: something, too, which in its
a
very childishness, its freedom from the taint of solemnity and — self-importance, expresses the quality of that inward life, that” perpetual youth, which the “secret child” of the Transcendent Order enjoys. “As it were a pipe of life” in the sight of God~
he “joying sounds.” The music of the spheres is all about him: he is a part of the great melody of the Divine. “Sweetest forsooth,” says Rolle again, “is the rest which the spirit takes
whilst sweet goodly sound comes down in which it is delighted: and in most sweet song and playful the mind is ravished, —
to sing likings of love everlasting.” 2
When we come to look at the lives of the mystics, we find —
it literally true that such “songs of lovely loving commonly
b
burst up” whenever we can catch them unawares; see behind — the formidable and heroic activities of reformer, teacher, or | leader of men, the vze zutzme which is lived at the hearth of — Love. “What are the servants of the Lord but His minstrels?” said St. Francis; who saw nothing inconsistent between the ~ Celestial Melodies and the Stigmata of Christ. Moreover the” songs of such troubadours, as the hermit of Hampole learned : in his wilderness, are not only sweet but playful. Dwelling ~ always in a light of which we hardly dare to think, save in the ©
extreme terms of reverence and awe, they are not afraid with ~
any amazement: they are at home. The whole life of St. Francis of Assisi, that spirit trans-
* Richard Rolle, ‘‘The Fire of Love,” bk. ii. cap. vii. 2 Op. cit., bk. i. cap. xii. 3 “* Speculum Perfectionis,” cap. c. (Steele’s translation).
4
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THE UNITIVE LIFE | 527
figured in God, who “ loved above all other birds a certain little bird which is called the lark,’! was one long march to music through the world. To sing seemed to him a primary spiritual function: he taught his friars in their preaching to urge all men to this.2 It appeared to him appropriate and just to use the love language of the troubadours in praise of the more perfect Love which had marked him as Its own. “ Drunken with the love and compassion of Christ, blessed Francis ona time did things such as these. For the most sweet melody of spirit boiling up within him, frequently broke out in French speech, and the veins of murmuring which he heard secretly with his ears broke forth into French-like rejoicing. And sometimes he picked up a branch from the earth, and laying it on his left arm, he drew in his right hand another stick like a bow over it, as if on a viol or other instrument, and, making fitting gestures, sang with it in French unto the Lord Jesus Christ.”3
Many a time has the romantic quality of the Unitive Life— its gaiety, freedom, assurance, and joy—broken out in “ French- like rejoicings”; which have a terribly frivolous sound for worldly ears, and seem the more preposterous as coming from people whose outward circumstances are of the most uncomfort- able kind. St. John of the Cross wrote love songs to his Love. St. Rose of Lima sang duets with the birds. St. Teresa, in the austere and poverty-stricken seclusion of her first foundation, did not disdain to make rustic hymns and carols for her daughters’ use in the dialect of Old Castile. Like St. Francis, she had a horror of solemnity. It was only fit for hypocrites, thought these rejuvenators of the Church. The hard life of prayer and penance on Mount Carmel was undertaken in a joyous spirit to the sound of many songs. Its great Reformer was quick to snub the too-spiritual sister who “thought it better to contemplate than to sing”: and was herself heard, as she swept the convent corridor, to sing a little ditty about the most exalted of her own mystical experiences: that ineffable transverberation, in which the fiery arrow of the seraph pierced her heart.4
+ “ Speculum,”’? cap. cxiii. 2 Jbid., cap. c. 8 [bid., cap. xciii., also Thomas of Celano, Vita Secunda, cap. xc. 4 Cf. G. Cunninghame Graham, ‘‘ Santa Teresa,” vol. i. pp. 180, 300, 304.
528 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
But the most lovely and real, most human and most near to us, of all these descriptions of the celestial exhilaration which mystic surrender brings in its train, is the artless, unin- tentional self-revelation of St. Catherine of Genoa, whose inner and outer lives in their balanced wholeness provide us with one of our best standards by which to judge the right proportions of the Mystic Way. Here the whole essence of the Unitive Life is ' summed up and presented to us by one who lived it upon heroic levels: and who was, in fruition and activity, in rest and in work, not only a great active and a great ecstatic, but one of the deepest gazers into the secrets of Eternal Love which the history of Christian mysticism contains. Yet perhaps there is — no passage in the works of these same mystics which comes to so unexpected, so startling a conclusion as this; in which St. — Catherine, with a fearless simplicity, shows to her fellow-men the nature of the path that she has trodden and the place that she has reached.
“When,” she says, in one of her reported dialogues—and though the tone be impersonal it is clearly personal experience which speaks—“ the lovingkindness of God calls a soul from the world, He finds it full of vices and sins; and first He gives it an instinct for virtue, and then urges it to perfection, and then by infused grace leads it to true self-naughting, and at last to true transformation. And this noteworthy order serves God to lead the soul along the Way: but when the soul is naughted and transformed, then of herself she neither works nor speaks nor wills, nor feels nor hears nor understands, neither has she of © herself the feeling of outward or inward, where she may move. And in all things it is God Who rules and guides her without the mediation of any creature. And the state of this soul is then a feeling of such utter peace and tranquillity that it seems to her that her heart, and her bodily being, and all both — within and without is immersed in an ocean of utmost peace ; from whence she shall never come forth for anything that can — befall her in this life. And she stays immovable imper- turbable, impassible. So much so, that it seems to her in her human and her spiritual nature, both within and without, she can feel no other thing than sweetest peace. And she is so full of peace that though she press her flesh, her nerves, her bones, no other thing comes forth from them than peace —
THE UNITIVE LIFE 529
Then says she all day for joy such rhymes as these, making them according to her manner :—
*¢¢Vuoi tu che tu mostr’io Presto che cosa e Dio? Pace non trova chi da lui si partid.’” ?
“Then says she all day for joy such rhymes as these ”— nursery rhymes, one might almost call them: so infantile, so naive is their rhythm. Who would have suspected this to be the secret manner of communion between the exalted soul of Catherine and her Love? How many of those who actually saw that great and able woman tirelessly labouring in the administration of her hospital—who heard that profound and instinctive Christian Platonist instructing her disciples, and declaring the law of universal and heroic love—how many of these divined that “questa santa benedetta” who seemed to them already something more than earthly, a matter of solemn congratulation and reverential approach, went about her work with a heart engaged in no lofty speculations on Eternity; no outpourings of mystic passion for the Absolute, but “ saying all day for joy,” in a spirit of childlike happiness, gay and foolish little songs about her Love?
Standing at the highest point of the mystic ladder which can be reached by human spirits in this world of time and space, looking back upon the course of that slow interior alchemy, that “ noteworthy order ” of organic transformation, by which her selfhood had been purged of imperfection, raised to higher levels, compelled at last to surrender itself to the all- embracing, all-demanding life of the Real; this is St. Catherine’s deliberate judgment on the relative and absolute aspects of the mystic life. The “ noteworthy order” which we have patiently
followed, the psychic growth and rearrangement of character * ** Dost thou wish that I should show All God's Being thou mayst know?
Peace is not found of those who do not with Him go.” (Vita e Dottrina, cap. xviii.)
Here, in spite of the many revisions to which the Vita has been subjected, I can- not but see an authentic report of St. Catherine’s inner mind ; highly characteristic of the personality which ‘‘ came joyous and rosy-faced”’ from its ecstatic encounters with Love. The very unexpectedness of its conclusion, so unlike the expressions _supposed to be proper to the saints, is a guarantee of its authenticity. On the text of the Vita see Von Hiigel, ‘‘ The Mystical Element of Religion,’’ vol. i., Appendix.
MM é
530 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
the visions and ecstasies, the joyous illumination and bitter pain —these but “served to lead the soul along the way.” In the mighty transvaluation of values which takes place when that way has at last been trod, these “abnormal events” sink to insig- nificance. For us, looking out wistfully along the pathway to reality, they stand out, it is true, as supreme landmarks, by which we may trace the homeward course of pilgrim man. The - importance of their study cannot be overrated for those who would study the way to that world from this. But the mystic, — safe in that silence where lovers lose themselves, “his cheek on Him Who for his coming came,” remembers them no more. In the midst of his active work, his incessant spiritual creation, joy and peace enfold him. He needs no stretched and sharpened intuition now: for he dwells in that “ most perfect form of con- templation” which “consists in simple and perceived contact of the substance of the soul with that of the divine.” 1
The wheel of life has made its circle. Here, at the last point of its revolution, the extremes of sublimity and simplicity are seen to meet. It has swept the soul of the mystic through periods of alternate stress and glory; tending ever to greater transcendence, greater freedom, closer contact with “the Supplier of true life.” He emerges from that long and wondrous journey to find himself, in rest and in work, a little child upon the bosom of the Father. In that most dear relation all feeling, will, and thought attain their end. Here all the teasing complications of our separated selfhood are transcended. Hence the eager striving, the sharp vision, are not wanted any more. In that mysterious death of selfhood on the summits which is the medium of Eternal Life, heights meet the deeps: supreme achievement and complete humility are one.
In a last brief vision, a glimpse as overpowering to our common minds as Dante’s final intuition of reality to his exalted and courageous soul, we see the triumphing spirit, sent out before us, the best that earth can offer, stoop and strip herself of the insignia of wisdom and power. Achieving the highest, she takes the lowest place. Initiated into the atmo- sphere of Eternity, united with the Absolute, possessed at last of the fullness of Its life, the soul, self-naughted, becomes as a little child: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.
* Coventry Patmore, ‘‘ The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” ‘* Magna Moralia,” xv.
CONCLUSION
E have traced, as well as our limitations allow us, the V V Mystic Way from its beginning to its end. We have seen the ever-changing, ever-growing human spirit emerging from the cave of illusion, enter into consciousness of the transcendental world: the “pilgrim set towards Jerusalem” pass through its gates and attain his home in the bosom of - Reality. For him, as we have learned from his words and actions, this journey and this End are all: their overwhelming - importance and significance swallow up, of necessity, every other aspect of life. Now, at the end of our inquiry, we are face to face with the question—What do these things mean for us; for ordinary unmystical men? What are their links with that concrete world of appearance in which we are held fast: with that mysterious, ever-changing life which we are forced to lead? What do these great and strange adventures of the spirit tell us as to the goal of that lesser adventure of life on which we are set: as to our significance, our chances of freedom, our relation with the Absolute? Do they merely represent the eccentric performances of a rare psychic type? Are the match- less declarations of the contemplatives only the fruits of unbridled imaginative genius, as unrelated to reality as music to the fluctuations of the Stock Exchange? Or are they the supreme manifestation of a power which is inherent in our life: reports of observations made upon an actual plane of being, which transcends and dominates our normal world of sense? The question is vital: for unless the history of the mystics can touch and light up some part of this normal experience, take its place in the general history of man, con- tribute something towards our understanding of his nature and destiny, its interest for us can never be more than remote, academic, and unreal.
Far from being academic or unreal, that history, I think, is 531
532 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
vital for the deeper understanding of the history of humanity. It shows us, upon high levels, the psychological process to which every self which desires to rise to the perception of Reality must submit: the formula under which man’s spiritual con- sciousness, be it strong or weak, must necessarily unfold. In
the great mystics we see the highest and widest development of that consciousness to which the human race has yet attained.
_. We see its growth exhibited to us on a grand scale, perceptible _ of all men: the stages of its slow transcendence of the sense-
ee eal
world marked by episodes of splendour and of terror which are hard for common men to accept or understand as a part of the organic process of life. But the germ of that same transcen- dent life, the spring of the amazing energy which enables the great mystic to rise to freedom and dominate his world, is latent in all of us; an integral part of our humanity. Where the mystic has a genius for the Absolute, we have each a little buried talent, some greater, some less; and the growth of this talent, this spark of the soul, once we permit its emergence, will conform in little, and according to its measure, to those laws of organic growth, those inexorable conditions of transcendence which we found to govern the Mystic Way.
Every person, then, who awakens to consciousness of a Reality which transcends the normal world of sense—however small, weak, imperfect that consciousness may be—is put of necessity upon a road which follows at low levels the path which the mystic treads at high levels. The success with which he follows this way to freedom and full life will depend on the intensity of his_love and will; his capacity for self-discipline, his steadfastness and courage.) It will depend on the generosity and completeness of his outgoing passion for absolute beauty, absolute goodness, or absolute truth.) But if he move at all, he will move through a series of states which are, in their own small way, strictly analogous to those experienced by the greatest contemplative on his journey towards that union with God which is the term of the spirit’s ascent towards its home.
As the embryo of physical man, be he saint or savage, passes through the same stages of initial growth, so too with spiritual man. When the “new birth” takes place in him, the new life-process of his deeper self begins, the normal indi- vidual, no less than the mystic, will know that spiral ascent
CONCLUSION 533
towards higher levels, those violent oscillations of consciousness between light and darkness, those odd mental distfrbances, abrupt invasions from the subliminal region, and disconcerting glimpses of truth, which accompany the growth of the transcen- dental powers; though he may well interpret them in other than . the mystic sense. He too will be impelled to drastic self- discipline, to a deliberate purging of his eyes that he may see: and, receiving a new vision of the world, will be spurred by it to a total self-dedication, an active surrender of his whole being, to that aspect of the Infinite which he has perceived. He too will endure in little the psychic upheavals of the spiritual adolescence: will be forced to those sacrifices which every form of genius demands. He will know according to his measure the dreadful moments of lucid self-knowledge, the counter- balancing ecstasy of an intuition of the Real. More and more, as we study and collate all the available evidence, this fact— this law—is borne in on us: that the movement of human consciousness, when it obeys its innate tendency to transcen- dence, is always the same. There is only one road from Appearance to. Reality. “Men pass on, but the States are permanent for ever.”
I do not care whether the consciousness be that of artist Or musician, striving to catch and fix some aspect of the heavenly light or music, and denying all other aspects of the world in order to devote themselves to this: or of the humble ° servant of Science, purging his intellect that he may look upon her secrets with innocence of eye: whether the higher reality be perceived in the terms of religion, beauty, suffering; of human love, of goodness, or of truth. However widely these , forms of transcendence may seem to differ, the mystic experi- - ence is the key to them all. All in their different ways are exhibitions here and now of the Eternal; extensions of man’s consciousness which involve calls to heroic endeavour, incentives to the remaking of character about new and higher centres of life: Through each, man may rise to freedom and take his place in the great movement of the universe’: may “ understand by dancing that which is done.” Each brings the self who receives its revelation in good faith, does not check it by self- regarding limitations, to a humble acceptance of the universal law of knowledge: the law that “we behold that which we
534 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
are”; and hence that “only the Real can know Reality.” Awakening, Discipline, Enlightenment, Self-surrender, and Union, are the essential processes of life’s response to this fundamental fact: the conditions of our attainment of Being, the necessary formule under which alone our consciousness of any of these fringes of Eternity—any of these aspects of the Transcendent—can unfold, develop, attain to freedom and full life.
We are, then, one and all the kindred of the mystics ; and it is by dwelling upon this kinship, by interpreting—so far as we may—their great declarations in the light of our own little experience, that we shall learn to understand them _ best. Strange and far away though they seem, they are not cut off from us by some impassable abyss. They belong tous. They are our brethren; the giants, the heroes of our race. As the achievement of genius belongs not to itself only, but also to the society that brought it forth; as theology declares that the merits of the saints avail for all; so, because of the solidarity of the human family, the supernal accomplishment of the mystics is ours also. Their attainment is the earnest-money of our eternal life.
To be a mystic is simply to participate here and now in that real and. eternal life’; in the fullest, deepest sense which is possible to man.” It is to share, as a free and conscious agent— _ not a servant, but as a son—in the joyous travail of the Uni- verse : its mighty onward sweep through pain and glory towards its home in God. {This gift of “ sonship,” this power of free co- operation in the world- -process, is man’s greatest honour.) The ordered sequence of states, the organic development, “whereby his consciousness is detached from illusion and rises to the mystic freedom which conditions, instead of being conditioned by, its normal world, is the way he must tread if that sonship is to be attained. Only by this deliberate fostering of his deeper self, this transmutation of the elements of character, can he reach those levels of consciousness upon which he hears, and responds to, the measure “ whereto the worlds keep time” on their great pilgrimage towards the Father’s heart. The mystic act of union, that joyous loss of the transfigured self in God, which is the crown of man’s conscious ascent towards the Absolute, is the contribution of the individual to this, the destiny of the Cosmos,
—@ 1
CONCLUSION 535
The mystic knows that destiny. It is laid bare to his lucid vision, as plain to him as our puzzling world of form and colour is to normal sight. He is the “hidden child” of the eternal order, an initiate of the secret plan. Hence, whilst “all creation groaneth and travaileth,” slowly moving under the spur of blind desire towards that consummation in which alone it can have rest, he runs eagerly along the pathway to reality. He is the pioneer of Life on its age-long voyage to the One: and shows us, in his attainment, the meaning and value of that life.
This meaning, this secret plan of Creation, flames out, had we eyes to see, from every department of existence. Its exult- ant declarations come to us in all great music; its wild magic is the life of all romance. Its law—-the law of love—is the sub- stance of the beautiful, the energizing cause of the heroic. It lights the altar of every creed. It runs like ichor in the arteries of the universe. All man’s dreams and diagrams concerning a transcendent Perfection near him yet intangible, a tran- scendent vitality to which he can attain—whether he call these objects of desire, God, grace, being, spirit, beauty, “ pure idea”— are but translations of his deeper self’s intuition of its destiny ; clumsy fragmentary hints at the all-inclusive, living Absolute which that deeper self knows to be real. This supernal Thing, the adorable Substance of all that Is—the synthesis of Wisdom, Power, and Love—and man’s apprehension of it, his slow remaking in its interests, his union with it at last; this is the theme of mysticism. That twofold extension of consciousness which allows him communion with its transcendent and im- manent aspects is, in all its gradual processes, the Mystic Way. It is also the crown of human evolution; the fulfilment of life, the liberation of personality from the world of appearance, its entrance into the free, creative life of the Real.
Further, Christians may well remark that the psychology of Christ, as presented to us in the Gospels, is of a piece with that of the mystics. In its pains and splendours, its dual character of action and fruition, it reflects their experience upon the supernal plane of more abundant life. Thanks to this fact, for them the Ladder of Contemplation—that ladder which mediaeval thought counted as an instrument of the Passion, discerning it as essential to the true salvation of man—stretches without a break from earth to the Empyrean. It leans against
536 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
the Cross; it leads to the Secret Rose. By it the ministers of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty go up and down between the transcendent and the apparent world. Seen, then, from whatever standpoint we may choose to adopt—whether of psychology, philosophy, or religion—the adventure of the great mystics inti- mately concerns us. It is a master-key to man’s puzzle: by its help hemay explain much in his mental make-up, in his religious constructions, in his experience of life. In all these departments he perceives himself to be climbing slowly and clumsily upward toward some attainment yet unseen. The mystics, expert mountaineers, go before him: and show him, if he cares to learn, the way to freedom, to reality, to peace. He cannot rise in this, his earthly existence, to the awful and solitary peak, veiled in the Cloud of Unknowing, where they meet that “death of the summit,” which is declared by them to be the gate of Perfect Life: but if he choose to profit by their explorations, he may find his level, his place within the Eternal Order. He may rise to freedom, live the “independent spiritual life,” Consider once more the Mystic Way as we have traced it from its beginning. To what does it tend if not to this? It began by the awakening within the self of a new and “enfibryonic consciousness: a consciousness of divine reality, as opposed to the illusory sense-world in which she was immersed. Humbled, awed by the august possibilities then revealed to her, that self retreated into the “cell of self-knowledge” and there laboured to adjust herself to the Eternal Order which she had perceived, stripped herself of all that opposed it, disciplined her energies, purified the organs of sense. Remade in accordance with her intuitions of reality, the “eternal hearing and seeing were revealed in her.” She opened her eyes upon a world still natural, but no longer illusory ; since it was perceived to be illuminated by the Uncreated Light. She knew then the beauty, the majesty, the divinity of the living World of Becoming which holds in its meshes every living thing. She had transcended the narrow rhythm by which common men perceive but one of its many aspects, escaped the machine- made universe presented by the cinematograph of sense, and participated in the “great life of the All.” Reality came forth to her, since her eyes were cleansed to see It, not from some strange far-off and spiritual country, but gently, from the very
a
CONCLUSION 537
heart of things. Thus lifted to a new level, she began again her ceaseless work of growth: and because by the cleansing of the senses she had learned to see the reality which is shadowed by the sense-world, she now, by the cleansing of her will, sought to draw nearer to that Eternal Will, that Being which life, the World.of Becoming, manifests and serves. Thus, by the com- plete surrender of her selfhood in its wholeness, by the perfect- ing of her love, she slid from Becoming to Being, and found her true life hidden in God.
Yet the course of this transcendence, this amazing inward journey, was closely linked, first and last, with the processes of human life. It sprang from that life,as man springs from the sod. We were even able to describe it under those symbolic formulze which we are accustomed to call the “laws” of the natural world. By an extension of these formule, their logical application, we discovered a path which led us without a break from the sensible to the supra-sensible; from apparent to absolute life. There is nothing unnatural about the Absolute of the mystics: He sets the rhythm of His own universe, and conforms to the harmonies which He has made. We, deliber- ately seeking for that which we suppose to be spiritual, too often overlook that which alone is Real. The true mysteries of | life accomplish themselves so softly, with so easy and assured a grace, so frank an acceptance of our breeding, striving, dying, and unresting world, that the unimaginative natural man—all agog for the marvellous—is hardly startled by their daily and radiant revelation of infinite wisdom and love. Yet this revela- tion presses incessantly upon us. Only the hard crust of sur- face-consciousness conceals it from our normal sight. In some least expected moment, the common activities of life in pro- gress, that Reality in Whom the mystics dwell slips through our closed doors, and suddenly we see It at our side.
It was said of the disciples at Emmaus, “ Mensam igitur ponunt, panes cibosque offerunt, et Deum, quem in Scripturae sacrae expositione non cognoverant, in panis_ fractione cognoscunt.” So too for us the Transcendent Life for which we crave is revealed, and our living within it, not on some remote and arid plane of being, in the cunning explanations of philosophy ; but in the normal acts of our diurnal experience suddenly made significant for us. Not in the backwaters of
538 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
existence, not amongst subtle arguments and occult doctrines, but in all those places where the direct and simple life of earth goes on. It is found in the soul of man so long as that soul is alive and growing: it is not found in any sterile place. |
This fact of experience is our link with the mystics, our guarantee of the truthfulness of their statements, the supreme importance of their adventure, their closer contact with Reality. The mystics on their part are our guarantee of the end towards which the Immanent Love, the hidden steersman which dwells in our midst, is moving: our “lovely forerunners” on the path towards the Real. They come back to us from an encounter with life’s most august secret, as Mary came running from the tomb; filled with amazing tidings which they can hardly tell. We, longing for some assurance, and seeing their radiant faces, urge them to pass on their revelation if they can. It is the old demand of the dim-sighted and incredulous :—
‘Dic nobis Maria Quid vidisti in via?’
But they cannot say: can only report fragments of the symbolic vision :— ‘* Angelicos testes, sudarium, et vestes”—
not the inner content, the final divine certainty. We must ourselves follow in their footsteps if we would have that. Like the story of the Cross, so too the story of man’s spirit ends in a garden: in a place of birth and fruitfulness, of beautiful and natural things. Divine Fecundity is its secret: "existence, not for its own sake, but for the sake of a more abundant life. It ends with the coming forth of divine humanity, never again to leave us: living in us and with us, a pilgrim, a worker, a guest at our table, a sharer at all hazards in life. The mystics witness to this story: waking very early they have run on before us, urged by the greatness of their love. We, incapable as yet of this sublime encounter, looking in their magic mirror, listening to their stammered tidings, may see far off the consummation of the race. According to the measure of their strength and of their passion, these, the true lovers of the Absolute, have conformed
CONCLUSION 539
here and now to the utmost tests of divine sonship, the final demands of life. They have not shrunk from the sufferings of the cross. They have faced the darkness of the tomb. Beauty and agony alike have called them: alike have awakened a heroic response. For them the winter is over: the time of the singing of birds is come. From the deeps of the dewy garden, Life—new, unquenchable, and ever lovely—comes to meet them with the dawn.
Et boc intellegere, quis bominum Dabit homini ? Muis angelus angelo ? Muis angeius homini ? @ te petatur, Qn te quaeratur, Ap te pulsetur, @ic, sic accipietur, sic inbenietur, sic aperietur,
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APPENDIX
A HISTORICAL SKETCH OF EUROPEAN MYSTICISM FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA TO THE DEATH OF BLAKE
F we try to represent the course of Mysticism in Europe during the Christian period by the common device of a chronological curve, showing, by its rises and falls as it passes across the centuries, the
absence or preponderance in any given epoch of mystics and mystical thought; we shall find that the great periods of mystical activity correspond with a curious exactness with the great periods of artistic, material, and intellectual civilization. Rather, they come immediately after, and seem to complete such periods: those stupendous outbursts of vitality in which man makes fresh conquests over his universe, apparently producing as their last stage a type of heroic character which extends these victories to the spiritual sphere. When science, politics, literature, and the arts—the domination of nature and the ordering of life—have risen to their height and produced their greatest works, the mystic comes to the front ; snatches the torch, and carries it on. It is almost as if he were humanity’s finest flower; the product at which each great creative period of the race had aimed.
Thus the thirteenth century expressed to perfection the mediaeval ideal in religion, art, philosophy, and public life. It built the Gothic cathedrals, put the finishing touch to the system of chivalry, and nourished the scholastic philosophers. It has many saints, but not very many mystics ; though they increase in number as the century draws on. ‘The fourteenth century is filled by great contemplatives ; who lifted this wave of activity to spiritual levels, and brought all the romance and passion of the mediaeval temperament to bear upon the deepest mysteries of the transcendental life. Again, the sixteenth century, blazing with an intellectual vitality which left no corner of existence unexplored, which produced the Renaissance and the Humanists and remade the mediaeval world, had hardly reached its
full development before the great procession of the post-Renaissance 544
‘
542 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
mystics, with St. Teresa at their head, began. If Life, then—the great and restless life of the race—be described under the trite metaphor of a billowy sea, each great wave as it rises from the deep bears the mystic type upon its crest.
Our curve, then, will follow close behind that other curve which represents the intellectual life of humanity. Its course will be studded and defined for us by the names of the great mystics ; the possessors of spiritual genius, the pathfinders to the country of the soul. These starry names are significant not only in themselves, but also as links in the chain of man’s growing spiritual history. They are not isolated phenomena, but are related to one another. Each receives something from the past: each by his personal adventures enriches it, and hands it on to the future. As we go on, we notice more and more this cumu- lative power of the past. Each mystic, original though he be, yet owes much to the inherited acquirement of his spiritual ancestors. These ancestors form his tradition, are the classic examples on which his education is based ; and from them he takes the language which they have sought out and constructed as a means of telling their adventures to the world. It is by their help too, very often, that he elucidates for himself the meaning of the dim perceptions of his amazed soul. From his own experiences he adds to this store; and hands on an enriched tradition of the transcendental life to the next spiritual genius evolved bythe race. Hence the names of the great mystics are connected by a thread ; and it becomes possible to treat them as subjects of history rather than of biography.
I have said that this thread forms a curve, following the fluctuations of the intellectual life of the race. At its highest points, the names of the mystics are clustered most thickly, at its descents they become fewer and fewer, at the lowest points they die away. Between the first century A.D. and the nineteenth, this curve exhibits three great waves of mystical activity ; besides many minor fluctuations. They corre- spond with the close of the Classical, the Mediaeval and the Renaissance periods in history : reaching their highest points in the third, fourteenth, and seventeenth centuries. In one respect, however, the mystic curve diverges from the historical one. It rises to its highest point in the fourteenth century, and does not again approach the level it there attains ; for the mediaeval period was more favourable to the develop- ment of mysticism than any subsequent epoch has been. The four- teenth century is as much the classic moment for the spiritual history of our race as the thirteenth is for the history of Gothic, or the fifteenth for that of Italian art.
The names upon our curve, especially during the first ten centuries
APPENDIX 543
of the Christian era, are often separated by long periods of time. This, of course, does not necessarily mean that these centuries produced few mystics : merely that few documents relating to them have survived. We have now no means of knowing, for instance, the amount of the true mysticism which undoubtedly existed amongst the initiates of the Greek or Egyptian Mysteries; how many inarticulate contemplatives of the first rank there were amongst the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, amongst the pre-Christian communities of contemplatives described by Philo, the deeply mystical Alexandrian Jew (B.c. 20-A.D. 40), the innumer- able Gnostic sects which replaced in the early Christian world the Orphic and Dionysiac mystery-cults of Greece and Italy, or later, the thousands of monks and hermits who peopled the Egyptian Thebaid in the sixth and seventh centuries. Much real mystical inspiration there must have been, for we know that from these centres of life came many of the doctrines best loved by later mystics: that the Neo- _ platonists gave them the concepts of Pure Being and the One, that the New Birth and the Spiritual Marriage were foreshadowed in the Mysteries, that Philo anticipates the theology of the Fourth Gospel. As we stand at the beginning of the Christian period we see three great sources whence its mystical tradition might have been derived. These sources are Greek, Oriental, and Christian—z.e., primitive Apostolic—doctrine or thought. As a matter of fact all contributed their share: but where Christianity gave the new vital impulse to transcendence, Greek and Oriental thought provided the principal forms in which it was expressed. The Christian religion, by its very nature, had a profoundly mystical side. Putting the personality of its Founder outside the limits of the present discussion, St. Paul and the author of the Fourth Gospel are obvious instances of mystics of the first rank amongst its earliest missionaries. The inner history of primitive Christianity is still in confusion; but in what has been already made out we find numerous, if scattered, indications that the mystic life was indigenous in the Church and the natural mystic had little need to look for inspiration outside the limits of his creed. Not only the epistles of St Paul and the Johannine writings, but also the earliest liturgic fragments which we possess, and such primitive religious poetry as the “ Odes of Solomon” and the “ Hymn of Jesus,” show how congenial was mystical expression to the mind of the Church; how eagerly that Church absorbed and transmuted the mystic element of Essene, Orphic, and Neoplatonic thought. Towards the end of the second century this tendency received brilliant literary expression at the hands of Clement of Alexandria (c. 160-220), who first adapted the language of the pagan Mysteries to the Christian theory of the spiritual life. Nevertheless, the first person
544 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
after St. Paul of whom it can now be decisively stated that he was a practical mystic of the first rank, and in whose writings the central mystic doctrine of union with God is found, is a pagan. That person is Plotinus, the great Neoplatonic philosopher of Alexandria (A.D. 205-¢. 270). His mysticism owes nothing to the Christian religion, which is never mentioned in his works. Intellectually it contains elements drawn from Platonic philosophy, from the Mysteries, and probably from the Oriental cults and philosophies which ran riot in Alexandria in the third century. These things, however, merely served Plotinus on his mystical side as a means of expressing as much of his own sublime experience as he chose to tell the world. Ostensibly a metaphysician, he possessed transcendental genius of a high order, and was consumed by a burning passion for the Absolute. His dis- ciple Porphyry has left it on record that on four occasions he saw his master rapt to ecstatic union with ‘‘ the One.”
The Neoplatonism of which Plotinus was the greatest exponent became the vehicle in which most of the mysticism—both Christian and pagan—of the first six centuries was expressed. But, since the emergence of mysticism always means the emergence of a certain type of character or genius, not the emergence of a certain type of philosophy, Neoplatonism as a whole, and the mysticism which used its language, must not be identified with one another: though Porphyry (203-304), favourite pupil of Plotinus, seems to have in- herited something of his master’s mysticism. Neoplatonism as a whole was a confused, semi-religious philosophy, containing many inconsistent elements. Appearing at the moment in which the wreck of paganism was complete, but before Christianity had conquered the educated world, it made a strong appeal to the spiritually minded ; and also to those who hankered after the mysterious and the occult. It taught the illusory nature of all temporal things, and in the violence of its idealism outdid its master Plato. It also taught the existence of an Absolute God, the “ Unconditioned One,” who might be known in ecstasy and contemplation ; and here it made a direct appeal to the mystical instincts of men. Those natural mystics who lived in the time of its greatest popularity found in it therefore a ready means of expressing their own intuitions of reality. Hence it is that the early mysticism of Europe, both Christian and pagan, has come down to us in a Neo- platonic dress; and speaks the tongue of Alexandria rather than that of Jerusalem, Athens, or Rome.
The influence of Plotinus upon later Christian mysticism was enormous though indirect. During the patristic period all that was best in the spirit of Neoplatonism flowed into the veins of the Church.
APPENDIX 545
St. Augustine (a.p. 354-430) and Dionysius the Areopagite (writing between 475 and 525) are amongst his spiritual children. So too is Proclus (412-c. 490), the last of the pagan philosophers. Through these there is hardly one in the long tale of the European contemplatives whom his powerful spirit has failed to reach.
The mysticism of St. Augustine is partly obscured for us by the wealth of his intellectual and practical life: yet no one can read the ** Confessions ” without being struck by the intensity and actuality of his spiritual experience, and the characteristically mystical formule under which he apprehended Reality. In the period in which he composed this work it is clear that he was already an advanced contemplative. The marvellous intellectual act vities by which he is best remembered were fed by the solitary adventures of his soul. No merely literary genius could have produced the wonderful chapters in the seventh and eighth books, or the innumerable detached passages in which his passion for the Absolute breaks out: and later mystics, recognizing this fact, will be found to appeal again and again to his authority.
The influence of St. Augustine on the later history of mysticism, though very great, was nothing in comparison with that exercised by the writings of the strange and nameless character who chose to ascribe his works to Dionysius the Areopagite, the friend of St. Paul, and to address his letters upon mysticism to Paul’s fellow-worker, Timothy. The pseudo-Dionysius. was probably a Syrian monk. The patristic quotations detected in his work prove that he cannot have written before A.D. 475; it is most likely that he flourished in the early part of the sixth century. His chief works are the treatises on the Angelic Hierarchies and on the Names of God, and a short but priceless tract on mystical theology. Few persons now look at the works of Diony- sius: but from the ninth century to the seventeenth they nourished the most spiritual intuitions of men, and possessed an authority which it is now hard to realize. In studying medieval mysticism one has always to reckon with him. Particularly in the fourteenth century, the golden age of mystical literature, the phrase ‘‘ Dionysius saith” is of continual recurrence: and has jor those who use it much the same weight as quotations from the Bible or the great fathers of the Church.
The importance of Dionysius lies in the fact that he was the first, and for a long time the only Christian writer who attempted to describe frankly and accurately the workings of the mystical consciousness, and the nature of its ecstatic attainment of God. So well did he do his work that later contemplatives, reading him, found their most sublime and amazing experiences reflected and partly explained. Hence in
NN
546 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
describing those experiences, they adopted in their turn his language and metaphors ; which afterwards became the classic terms of contem- plative science. To him Christian literature owes the paradoxical concept of the Absolute Godhead as the ‘Divine Dark,” the Uncon- ditioned, “the negation of all that #s”—+.e., of all that the surface consciousness perceives—and of the soul’s attainment of the Absolute as a “divine ignorance,” a way of negation. This idea is common to Greek and Indian philosophy. With Dionysius it enters the Catholic fold.
The Patristic period, running from the second century to the seventh, has amongst its great names several deeply mystical spirits who have left their mark upon religious history: especially the profound thinker and contemplative Origen (c. 185-253) and the Coptic hermit St. Maca- rius of Egypt (c. 295-386), the disciple of St. Anthony and friend of St. Basil—a forgotten genius in whose writings the pure ideal of Christian mysticism attains perfect expression. The period terminates with the life of the saintly Pope Gregory the Great (540-604). In his works, influenced though they were by the Greek fathers, there first emerges that sober and orderly mystical doctrine destined to be characteristic of the Roman Church. He was much read by succeeding contemplatives ; his practical counsels counterbalancing the intense Neoplatonism of Dionysius, whose works were translated from Greek into Latin about a.p. 850 by the great Irish philo- sopher and theologian, John Scotus Erigena, one of the scholars assembled at the court of Charlemagne. From this event we must date the beginning of a full tradition of mysticism in Western Europe. John the Scot, many of whose own writings exhibit a strong mystical bias, is the only name in this period which the history of mysticism can claim. We are on the descending line of the “ Dark Ages”: and here the curve of mysticism runs parallel with the curves of intellectual and artistic activity.
During the eleventh century the arts revived: and by the beginning of the twelfth the wave of new life had reached the mystic level. France now made the first of her many contributions to the history of mysticism in the person of St. Bernard (1091-1153), the great Abbot of Clairvaux: and was the adopted country of another mystic almost as great, though now less famous: the Scotch or Irish Richard of St. Victor (02. c. 1173), whom Dante held to be “in contemplation more than man.” Richard’s master and contemporary, the scholastic philosopher Hugh (1097-1141) of the same Abbey of St. Victor at Paris, is also generally reckoned amongst the mystics of this period, but with less reason ; since contemplation occupies a small place in his theological
APPENDIX 547
writings. In spite of the deep respect which is shown towards him by Aquinas and other theologians, Hugh’s influence on later mystical: literature was slight. The spirit of Richard and of St. Bernard, on the contrary, was destined to dominate it for the next two hundred years. With them the literature of mediaeval mysticism, properly so called, begins.
This literature falls into two classes: the autobiographical and the didactic. Sometimes, as happens in a celebrated sermon of St. Ber- nard, the two are combined ; the teacher appealing to his own experi- ence in illustration of his theme.
In the works of the Victorines, the attitude is purely didactic: one might almost say scientific. In them, mysticism—that is to say, the degrees of contemplation, the training and exercise of the spiritual sense—takes its place as a recognized department of theology. It is, in Richard’s favourite symbolism, ‘ Benjamin,” the beloved child of Rachel, emblem of the Contemplative Life: and in his two chief works, “ Benjamin Major” and ‘“ Benjamin Minor,” it is classified and described in all its branches, with a wealth of allegorical detail which too often obscures the real beauties and ardours beneath. Richard of St. Victor was one of the chief channels through whom the antique mystical tradition, which flowed through Plotinus and the Areopagite, was transmitted to the mediaeval world. In his hands. that tradition was codified. Like his master, Hugh, he had the mediaeval passion for elaborate allegory, neat arrangement, rigid classification and signifi- cant numbers in things. As Dante parcelled out Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell with mathematical precision, and proved that Beatrice was herself a Nine; so these writers divide and subdivide the stages of contemplation, the states of the soul, the degrees of Divine Love: and perform terrible /ours de force in the course of compelling all the living spontaneous and ever-variable expressions of man’s spiritual vitality to fall into orderly and parallel series, conformable to the mystic numbers of Seven, Four, and Three.
The same baneful passion obscures for modern readers the real merits of St. Bernard, though it did but enhance his reputation with those for whom he wrote. His writings, and those of Richard of St. Victor, quickly took their place amongst the living forces which conditioned the development of later mystics. Both have a special interest for us in the fact that they influenced the formation of our national school of mysticism in the fourteenth century. Translations and paraphrases of the “ Benjamin Major,” “ Benjamin Minor,” and other works of Richard of St. Victor, and of various tracts and epistles of St. Bernard, are constantly met with in the MS. collections of mys-
548 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
tical and theological literature written in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. An early paraphrase of the ‘‘ Benjamin Minor,” sometimes attributed to the “ father of English mysticism,” Richard Rolle, was probably made by the anonymous author of the ‘Cloud of Unknowing,” who was also responsible for the first appearance of the Areopagite in English dress.
The curve of mystical life, then, travelling through the centuries, has moved, like all waves of spiritual vitality, from east to west. By the | twelfth century it has reached France: and shown, in the persons of Richard of St. Victor and St. Bernard, at once the intellectual and political strength of the mystic type. At the same time there appear in Germany the first of the long line of women mystics: the first, at any rate, whose literary works and authentic records have survived.
With St. Hildegarde (1098-1179) and St. Elizabeth of Schoenau (1138-1165) the history of German mysticism begins. ‘These remark- able women, visionaries, prophetesses, and political reformers, are the early representatives of a typeof mysticism of which St. Catherine of Siena is the most familiar and perhaps the greatest example. Exalted by the strength of their spiritual intuitions, they emerged from an obscure life to impose their wills, and their reading of events, upon the world. From the point of view of Eternity, in whose light they lived, they attacked the corruption of their generation. Already in the inspired letters which St. Hildegarde sent like firebrands over Europe, we see German idealism and German practicality struggling together; the unflinching description of abuses, the vast poetic vision by which they are condemned. These qualities are seen again in the South German mystics of the next century: the four Benedic- tine women of genius, who had their home in the convent of Helfde. These are the Nun Gertrude (Abbess 1251-1291) and her sister St. Mechthild of Haskborn (04. 1310), with her sublime symbolic visions: then, the poet of the group, the exquisite Mechthild of Magdeburg (1212-1299), who, first a déyuine at Magdeburg, where she wrote the greater part of “The Flowing Light of the Godhead,” came to Helfde in 1268; lastly the celebrated St. Gertrude the Great (1256-1311). In these contemplatives the political spirit is less marked thanin St. Hildegarde: but religious and ethical activity takes its place. St. Gertrude the Great is a characteristic Catholic visionary of the feminine type: absorbed in her subjective experiences, her often beautiful and significant dreams, her loving conversations with Christ and the Blessed Virgin. Close to her in temperament is St. Mech- thild of Hackborn; but her attitude as a whole is more impersonal, more truly mystic. The great symbolic visions in which her most
APPENDIX 549
spiritual perceptions are expressed are artistic creations rather than psycho-sensorial hallucinations, and dwell little upon the humanity of Christ, with which St. Gertrude is constantly occupied. The terms in which Mechthild of Magdeburg—an educated and well-born woman, half poet, half seer—describes her union with God, are intensely individual, and apparently owe little to earlier religious writers. The works of this Mechthild, early translated into Latin, were read by Dante. Their influence is traceable in the “‘ Paradiso” ; and by some scholars she is believed to be the Matilda of his Earthly Paradise, though others give this position to her sister-mystic, St. Mechthild of Hackborn.
Another precursor of Dante begins for us the history of Italian mysticism: St. Francis of Assisi, poet and mystic (1182-1226), one of the greatest figures of the mediaeval world. It might truly be said of St. Francis, as was untruly said of his disciple St. Bonaventura, that all his learning was comprised in the crucifix. His mysticism owed much to nature, nothing to tradition; was untouched by the formative influence of monastic discipline, the writings of Dionysius and St. Ber- nard. It was the spontaneous and original expression of his person- ality, the rare personality of a poet of the Infinite, a “ troubadour of God.” It showed itself in his few poems, his sayings, above all in his life : the material in which his genius expressed itself best. He walked, literally, in an enchanted world ; where every living thing was a theo- phany, and all values were transvaluated by love.
None of those who came after him succeeded in recapturing his secret, which was the secret of spiritual genius of the rarest type: but he left his mark upon the history of Europe and the influence of his spirit has never wholly died. Italian mysticism descends from St. Francis, and in its first period seems indeed to be the prerogative of his friars. In the thirteenth century we see it, in all its detachment, freshness, and spontaneity, in four very different temperaments. First in St. Bonaventura (1221-1274), biographer of St. Francis, a theo- logian and doctor of the Church. Perhaps the least mystical of the four, he has had the greatest influence on later mystics. He combined a contemplative nature with considerable intellectual powers. student of Dionysius, whose influence pervades his writings, it was he who brought the new spirit into line with the tradition of the past. Next, in the beautiful figure of St. Douceline (. 1214), the lady of Genoa turned déguzme, we find a spirit which, like that of its master, could find its way to the Divine through flowers and birds and simple natural things. The third of these Franciscan contemplatives, Jaco- pone da Todi (02. 1306), the converted lawyer turned mystical
550 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
poet, lifts Franciscan mysticism to the heights of ecstatic rapture and of literary. expression. Jacopone’s work has been shown by Von Hiigel to have had a formative influence on St. Catherine of Genoa ; and has probably affected many other Italian mystics.
The Blessed Angela of Foligno (1248-1309), last of the four in time though not in importance, was converted from a sinful life to become a tertiary hermit of the Franciscan order ; and has left in her “ Divine Consolations ” the record of a series of profoundly significant visions and intuitions of truth. By the sixteenth century her works, translated into the vernacular, had taken their place amongst the classics of mysticism. In the seventeenth they were largely used by St. Ftancis de Sales, Madame Guyon, and other Catholic contempla- tives. Seventeen years older than Dante, whose great genius properly closes this line of spiritual descent, she is a link between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Italian mysticism. |
We now approach the Golden Age of Mysticism: and at the opening of that epoch, dominating it by their genius, stand that astonishing pair of friends, St. Bonaventura, the Franciscan, and St. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican (1226-1274). As with St. Augustine, the intellectual greatness of St. Thomas has obscured his mystical side. Hence it is commonly stated that fourteenth-century mysticism derives from St. Bonaventura, and represents an opposition to scholastic theology ; but as a matter of fact its greatest personalities —in particular Dante and the German Dominican school—are soaked in te spirit of Aquinas, and quote his authority at every turn.
Most of the mystical literature of the late thirteenth and early four- teenth centuries is stillin MS., and much probably remains unidentified. An interesting example has lately come to light in “ The Mirror of Simple Souls”; a long treatise, translated and edited by an unknown English contemplative in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century from a lost French original, which was probably written under Franciscan influence between the years 1280-1309. The Mirror, which its prologue declares to be full of “high ghostly cunning” dangerous for common men, is certainly a piece of mystical literature of an advanced kind. Strongly influenced by Dionysius, by Richard of St. Victor, and by St. Bonaventura, it probably influenced in its turn the English writers who produced in the next century “ The Cloud of Unknowing” and other profound treatises upon the inner life: and these are in fact the works which most nearly resemble it in substance, though its manner is its own.
With “The Mirror of Simple Souls” we bridge not only the gap between the mysticism of England and of France, but also that be-
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tween the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In Europe the mystic curve is now approaching its highest point. In the East, that point has already been passed. Siifi, or Mahommedan mysticism, appearing in the ninth century, attains literary expression in the twelfth in the Confessions of Al Ghazzali, and has its classic period in the thirteenth in the works of the mystic poets "Attar (c. 1140-1234), Sadi (1184- 1263), and the saintly Jalalu ’d Din (1207-1273). Its tradition is continued in the fourteenth century by the rather erotic mysticism of Hafiz (c. 1300-1388) and his successors: and in the fifteenth by the poet Jami (1414-1492).
Whilst Hafiz already strikes a note of decadence for the mysticism of Islam, the year 1300 is for Europe a vital year in the history of the spiritual life. In Italy, England, Germany, and Flanders mystics of the first rank are appearing, or about to appear. In Italy Dante (1265-1321) is forcing human language to express one of the most sublime visions of the Absolute which has ever been crystallized into speech. He inherits and fuses into one that loving and artistic read- ing of reality which was the heart of Franciscan mysticism, and that other ordered vision of the transcendental world which the Dominicans through Aquinas poured into the stream of European thought. For the one the spiritual world was alllove: forthe other alllaw. For Dante it was both. In the “ Paradiso” his stupendous genius apprehends and shows to us a Beatific Vision in which the symbolic systems of all great mystics, and many whom the world does not call mystics—of Dionysius, Richard, St. Bernard, Mechthild, Aquinas, and countless others—are included and explained.
In Germany at the moment when the “Commedia” was being written, another mighty personality, the great Dominican scholar Meister Eckhart (1260-1329), who resembles Dante in his combina- tion of mystical insight with intense intellectual power, was laying the foundations at once of German philosophy and German mysticism. | These two giants stand side by side at the opening of the century, perfect representatives of the Teutonic and Latin instinct for tran- scendental reality. ,
Eckhart, though only a few years younger than St. Gertrude the Great, seems to belong to a different world. His commanding per- sonality, his strange genius for the supra-sensible, moulded and - inspired all whom it came near. The German and Flemish mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, differing enormously in tempera- ment from their master and from each other, have yet something in common: something which is shared by no other school. This something is derived from Eckhart ; for one and all have passed under
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his hand, being either his immediate disciples, or the friends or pupils of his disciples. Towards the end of his life he fell into disgrace. A number of propositions extracted from his writings, and representing his more extreme views, were condemned by the Church as savouring of pantheism and other heresies: and certainly the violence and daring of his language easily laid him open to miscon- struction. In his efforts to speak of the unspeakable he was con- stantly betrayed into expressions which, though doubtless as near as he could get to his sublime intuitions of the Absolute, were bound to seem paradoxical and exaggerated to other men. Eckhart’s influence, however, was little hurt by ecclesiastical condemnation. His pupils, though they remained loyal Catholics, contrived also to be loyal dis- ciples, and to the end of their lives their teaching was coloured—often inspired—by the doctrines of the great, if heretical, scholar.
The contrast in type between Eckhart and his two most famous disciples is an interesting one. All three were Dominican friars, all were devout followers of St. Augustine, the Areopagite, St. Bernard, and Aquinas: all lived and worked in the valley of the Rhine. The — mysticism of Eckhart, so far as he allows us to see it in his sermons— the only literary works he has left—is objective ; one might almost say dogmatic. He describes with an air of almost terrible certainty and intimacy, not that which he has felt, but the place or plane of being he has known—“‘ the desert of the Godhead where no one is at home.” He is a learned mystic. A great scholar, a natural metaphysician, he had taught in the schools at Paris and: Cologne: and his sermons, though addressed to the people and delivered in German, give evidence of his culture at every turn.
Of his two pupils, John Tauler (c. 1300-1361), friar-preacher of Strassburg, was a born missionary: a man who combined with great theological learning and mystical genius of a high order an overwhelming zeal for souls. He laboured incessantly to awaken men to a sense of their transcendental heritage. Without the hard intellectualism occa- sionally noticeable in Eckhart, or the tendency to introspection and the excessive artistic sensibility of Suso, Tauler is the most virile of the German mystics. The breadth of his humanity is only equalled by the depth of his spirituality. His sermons—and these are his only authentic works—are trumpet-calls to heroic action upon spiritual levels. They influenced many later mystics, especially St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. Tauler is not a subjective writer: only by implication can we assure ourselves that he speaks from personal experience. He has sometimes, and most unfairly, been d2s- cribed as a precursor of the Reformation. Such a claim could
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only be made by those who look upon all! pure Christianity as a form of Protestant heresy. He attacked, like St. Catherine of Siena and many other mediaeval mystics, the ecclesiastical corruption of his period: but in the matter of belief his writings, if read in unex- purgated editions, prove him to have been a fervent and orthodox Catholic.
Tauler was one of the leading spirits in the great informal society of the Friends of God, which sprang into being in Strassburg, spread through the Rhenish province, and worked in this moment of religious decadence for the spiritual regeneration of the people. Ina spirit of fierce enthusiasm and whole-hearted devotion, the Friends of God set themselves to the mystic life, as the only life worthy of the name. A tremendous outburst of transcendental activity took place: many visions and ecstasies were reported: amazing conversions occurred. The movement had many features in common with that of the Quakers, excepting that it took place within, instead of without, the official Church. With it was connected the third of the trio of great German Dominican mystics, the Blessed Henry Suso (¢. 1300-1365), a natural recluse and ascetic, and a visionary of the most exuberant Catholic type.
To Suso, subjective, romantic, deeply interested in his own soul and his personal relation with God, mysticism was not so much a doctrine to be imparted to other men, as an intimate personal ad- venture. In his autobiography—a human document far more detailed and ingenuous than St. Teresa’s more celebrated Life—he has left us the record of all his griefs and joys, his pains, visions, ecstasies, and miseries. ven his mystical treatises are in dialogue form, as if he could hardly get away from the personal and dramatic aspect of the spiritual life.
Around these three—Eckhart, Tauler, Suso—are gathered other and more shadowy personalities: members of this mystical society of the Friends of God, bound to the heroic attempt to bring life—the terribly corrupt and disordered religious life of the fourteenth century —hback into relation with spiritual reality, to initiate their neighbours into the atmosphere of God. From one of these nameless members comes the literary jewel of the movement: the beautiful little treatise called the ‘“ Theologia Germanica,” one of the most successful of many attempts to make mystic principles available for common men. Others are known to us only as the authors of letters, descriptions of conver- sions, visions, and spiritual adventures—literature which the Friends of God produced in enormous quantities. No part of the history of mysticism has been more changed by recent research than that of the
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Rhenish school: and the work is still but partly done. At present we can only record the principal names which we find connected with the mystical propaganda of the Friends of God. These are first the nuns Margaret Ebner (1291-1351) and her sister Christina, important personages in the movement, upon whose historicity no doubts have been cast. Margaret appears to have been a psychic as well as a mystic: and to have possessed, like Madame Guyon, telepathic and clairvoyant powers. Next the rather shadowy pair of laymen, Henry of Nordlingen and Nicholas of Basle. Lastly the puzzling and fascinating figure of Rulman Merswin (c. 1310-1382), whose story of his conversion and mystic life, whether it be regarded as fact or ‘tendency literature,” is a psychological document of the first rank.
In immediate dependence on the German school, and like it drawing its intellectual vigour from the genius of Eckhart, is the mysticism of Flanders: best known to us—though not so well as it should be—in the work of its most sublime representative, the Blessed John Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), one of the very greatest mystics whom the world has yet known. In his early years a priest in Brussels, in old age a recluse in the forest of Soignes, Ruysbroeck’s influence on his own generation was great In that mystic age great mystics were recognized, and their help was eagerly sought. Through his disciple Gerard Groot (1340-1384), founder of the Brotherhood of the Common Life, his spirit touched in the next generation the very different character of Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471). In the fifteenth century Denis the Carthusian was a close student of his works, and calls him “another Dionysius,” but “clear where the Areopagite is obscure”—the highest praise he knew how to bestow. His works, with those of Suso, appear in English MSS. early in the fifteenth century, taking their place by the side of St. Bernard, St. Bonaventura, and the great English mystic Richard Rolle. The influence of his genius has even been detected in the mystical literature of Spain. In Ruysbroeck’s works the metaphysical and personal aspects of mystical truth are fused and attain their highest expression. Intellectually indebted to Augustine, Richard of St. Victor, and Eckhart, his value lies in the fact that the Eckhartian philosophy is merely the medium by which he expresses the results of profound experience. He was both saint and seer: truly a ‘* God-intoxi- cated man.”
England, so closely akin to Flanders in religious thought and art, first appears in the history of mysticism at the end of the thirteenth century, with the shadowy figure of Margery Kempe (probably writing ¢. 1290), the anchoress of Lynn. We know nothing of this woman’s
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ulfe; and only a fragment of her ‘‘Contemplations” has survived. With the next name, however, Richard Rolle of Hampole (c. 129 o— 1349), the short but brilliant procession of English mystics begins. Rolle, educated at Oxford and widely read in mystical theology, became a hermit in order to live in perfection that mystic life of “ Heat, Sweetness, and Song,” to which he felt himself to be called. Richard of St. Victor, St. Bernard, and St. Bonaventura are the authors who have influenced him most; but he remains, in spite of this, one of the most individual of all writers on mysticism. Rolle already shows the practical temper destined to be characteristic of the English school. His interest is not philosophy, but spiritual life. There is a touch of Franciscan poetry in his descriptions of his communion with Divine Love, and the “heavenly song” in which it was expressed ; of Franciscan ardour in his zeal for souls. His works greatly influenced succeeding mystics.
He was followed in the second half of the fourteenth century by the unknown author—or possibly group of authors—of “The Cloud of Unknowing” and its companion treatises, and by the gracious spirit of Walter Hilton (04. 1396). With “The Cloud of Unknowing” the spirit of Dionysius first appears in English literature. It is the work of an advanced contemplative, deeply influenced by the Areopagite and the Victorines, who was also an acute psychologist. From the hand that wrote it came the first English translation of the Theologia Mystica, “ Dionise Hid Divinite”: a work which, says an old writer, ‘‘ran across England like deere,” so ready was the national conscious- ness for the reception of mystical truth.
Hilton, though also influenced by Dionysius and Richard of St. Victor, addresses a wider audience. He is pre-eminently a lover, . not a metaphysician : a devout and gentle spirit anxious to share his certitudes with other men. The moment of his death coincides with the completion of the most beautiful of all English mystical works, the Revelations of Love of Julian of Norwich (1343—died after 1413), ‘‘theodidacta, profunda, ecstatica,” whose unique personality closes and crowns the history of mediaeval mysticism. In her the best gifts of Rolle and Hilton are transmuted by a “‘ genius for the infinite” of a peculiarly beautiful and individual type. She was a seer, a lover, and a poet. Her mysticism, owing little to her predecessors, results from a direct and personal vision of singular intensity.
Julian’s life takes us on into the fifteenth century. It was probably before her death that this century produced two mystical works of the first rank: the exquisite “Imitation of Christ” (written 1400-1425) and the more amazing, less celebrated ‘ Fiery Soliloquy
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with God” of A Kempis’s contemporary Gerlac Peterson (c. 1411)— last gleams from the setting sun of the mediaeval world. Her later life saw the birth of Blessed Joan of Arc (1412-1431), and the appearance of a Flemish mystic of a type less congenial to the modern mind, the suffering visionary St. Lydwine of Schiedam (1380-1432).
Already before the completion of Julian’s revelations another woman of supreme genius, §t. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), had lived and died. The true successor of Dante as a revealer of Reality, and next to St. Francis the greatest of Italian mystics, Catherine exhibits the Unitive Life in its richest, most perfect form. She was a great active and a great ecstatic: at once politician, teacher, and contemplative, holding a steady balance between the inner and the outer life. With little education she yet contrived, in a short career dogged by persistent ill-health, to change the course of history, rejuvenate religion, and com- pose, in her Divine Dialogue, one of the jewels of Italian religious literature.
With the first half of the fifteenth century it is plain that the mystic curve droops downwards. The great period is over: the new life of the Renaissance, already striving in other spheres of activity, has hardly touched the spiritual plane. France gives us two names only: Joan of Arc, the last gift of the Middle Ages, and Denis the Carthusian (1402-1471), a theologian and contemplative deeply read in mystical science. He was a close student and passionate admirer of the Areopagite and of Ruysbroeck; and his works, now forgotten but very popular during the three succeeding centuries, helped to carry over into the modern world the best traditions of Christian mysticism.
With the second half of the century the scene shifts to Italy, where a spiritual genius of the first rank appeared in St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510). She, like her namesake of Siena, was at once an. eager lover and an indomitable doer. More, she was a constructive mystic, a profound thinker, as well as an ecstatic: an original teacher, a busy and practical philanthropist. Her influence lived on, and is seen in the next generation in the fine, well-balanced nature of another contemplative: the Venerable Battista Yernazza (1497-1587), her goddaughter and the child of one of her most loyal friends.
Catherine of Genoa stands alone in her day as an example of the sane and vigorous mystic life. Her contemporaries were for the most