C. From this same point of view the existence of music

2and poetry, the qualities of beauty and of rhythm, the evoked sensations of awe, reverence, and rapture, are almost as ddfficult to account for. The question wy an apparent corru- Suation of the Earth’s surface, called for convenience’ sake an Alp, coated with congealed water, and perceived by us as a snowy peak, should produce in certain natures acute sensations of ecstasy and adoration, why the skylark’s song should catch us up to heaven, and wonder and mystery speak to us alike in “the little speedwell’s darling blue” and in the cadence of the wind, is a problem that seems.to be merely absurd, until it is seen to be insoluble. Here Madam How and Lady Why alike are silent. With all our busy seeking, we have not found the sorting house where loveliness is extracted from the flux of things. We know not why “great” poetry should move us to unspeakable emotion, or a stream of notes, arranged in a
* ** De Imitatione Christi,” 1. ii. cap. vi.
# ** Such as these, I say, as if enamoured of My honour and famished for the food of souls, run to the table of the Most holy Cross, willing to suffer pain. . . . To these, My most dear sons, trouble is a pleasure, and pleasure and every consolation that the
world would offer them are a toil’’ (St. Catherine of Siena, Dialogo, cap. xxviii.) Here and throughout I have used Thorold’s translation.
\ NV
/
24 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
peculiar sequence, catch us up to heightened levels of vitality: nor can we guess how a passionate admiration of that which we call “best” in art or letters can possibly contribute to the physical evolution of the race. In spite of many lengthy dis- quisitions on esthetics, Beauty’s secret is still her own. A shadowy companion, half seen, half guessed at, she keeps step with the upward march of life: and we receive her message and respond to it, not because we understand it but because we must.
Here it is that we approach that attitude of the self, that point of view, which is loosely and generally called mysttec . Here, instead of those broad blind alleys which philosope showed us, a certain type of mind has always discerned three strait and narrow ways going out towards the Absolute. In religion, in pain, in beauty, and the ecstasy of artistic satisfac- tion—and not only in these, but in many other apparently useless peculiarities of the empirical world and of the perceiving consciousness—these persons insist that they recognize at any rate the fringe of the real. Down these three paths, as well as by many another secret way, they claim that news comes to the self concerning levels of reality which in their wholeness ar inaccessible to the senses: worlds wondrous and immorta. whose existence is not conditioned by the “given” world whis® those senses report. “ Beauty,” said Hegel, who, though he wy ” no mystic, had a touch of that mystical intuition which no philosopher can afford to be without, “is merely the Spiritual making itself known sensuously.”! “In the good, the beautiful, the true,” says Rudolph Eucken, “we see Reality revealing its personal character. They are parts of a coherent and sub- stantial spiritual world.”2 Here, some of the veils of that substantial world are stripped off: Reality peeps through, and is recognized dimly, or acutely, by the imprisoned self. |
Récéjac only develops this idea when he says,3 “ If the mind
/ penetrates deeply into the facts of esthetics, it will find more
/
and. more, that these facts are based upon an ideal identity between the mind itself and things. At a certain point the harmony becomes so complete, and the finality So close that it
Lees 1 *€ Philosophy of Religion,’’ vol. ii. p. 8,
v ‘AS 2 « Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens,” p. 148. | 3 ‘* Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique,” p. 74.
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 25
gives us actual emotion. The Beautiful then becomes the | sublime; brief apparition, by which the soul is caught up into the true mystic state, and touches the Absolute. It is scarcely possible to persist in this esthetic perception without feeling lifted up by it above things and above ourselves, in an ontological vision which closely resembles the Absolute of the Mystics.” oe
It was of this underlying reality—this truth of things—that St. Augustine cried in a moment of lucid vision, “Oh, Beauty so old and so new, too-late_have-—I-loved thee!”! It is in this sense also that «beauty i is truth, truth beauty” » and as regards the knowledge of ultimate things which is possible to ordinary men, it may well be that
‘* That is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
“Of Beauty,” says Plato in an immortal passage, “I repeat again that we saw her there shining in company with the celestial forms; ‘and coming to earth we find her here too shining in clearness through the clearest aperture of sense. For sight is the most piercing of our bodily senses: though not by that is wisdom seen; her loveliness would have been trans- porting if there had been a visible image of her, and the other ideas, if they had visible counterparts, would be equally lovely. But this is the privilege of Beauty, that being the loveliest she is also the most palpable to sight. Now he who is not newly initiated, or who has been corrupted, does not easily rise out of this world to the sight of true beauty in the other. ... But he whose initiation is recent, and who has been the spectator of many glories in the other world, is amazed when he sees any- one having a godlike face or form, which is the expression of Divine Beauty ; and at first a shudder runs through him, and again the old awe steals over him. . . .”2 7
v
* Aug. Conf., bk. x. cap. xxvii. ik E
2 Phaedrus, § 250 (Jowett’s translation). The reference in the phrase ‘‘ he whose initiation is recent”’ is to the rite of admission into the Greek Mysteries. It is believed by some authorities that the neophyte was then cast into an hypnotic sleep by his ‘‘initiator,” and whilst in this condition a vision of the ‘‘ glories of the other world ”’ was suggested to him. The main phenomena of ‘‘ conversion” were thus artificially produced: but the point of attack being the mind rather than the heart, the results, as would appear from the context, were usually transient. See for matter bearing on this point, Rudolf Steiner, ‘‘ Das Christenthum als mystiche Thatsache.”
26 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
Most men in the course of their lives have known such Platonic hours of initiation, when the sense of beauty has risen from a pleasant feeling to a passion, and an element of strange- ness and terror has been mingled with their joy. In those hours the world has seemed charged with a new vitality ; with a splendour which does not belong to it but is poured through it, as light through a coloured window, grace through a sacra- ment, from that Perfect Beauty which “shines in company with the celestial forms” beyond the pale of appearance. In such moods of heightened consciousness each blade of grass seems fierce with meaning, and becomes a well of wondrous light: a “little emerald set in the City of God.” The seeing self is indeed an initiate thrust suddenly into the sanctuary of the mysteries: and feels the “old awe and amazement” with which man encounters the Real. In such experiences as these, a new factor of the eternal calculus appears to be thrust in on us, a factor which no honest seeker for truth can afford to neglect ; since, if it be dangerous to say that any two systems of know- ledge are mutually exclusive, it is still more dangerous to give uncritical priority to any one system. We are bound, then, to examine this path to reality as closely and seriously as we should investigate the most neatly finished safety-ladder of solid ash which offered a salzta alle stelle.
Why, after all, take as our standard a material world whose existence is affirmed by nothing more trustworthy than the sense-impressions of “normal men”; those imperfect and easily cheated channels of communication? The mystics, those adventurers of whom we spoke upon the first page of this book, have always declared, implicitly or explicitly, their ‘ distrust in these channels of communication. They have never for an instant been deceived by phenomena, nor by the careful logic of the industrious intellect. One after another, with extraordinary unanimity, they have rejected that appeal to the unreal world of appearance which is the standard of all sensible men: affirming that there is another way, another secret, by which the conscious self may reach the actuality which it seeks. More complete in their grasp of experience than the votaries of intellect or of sense, they accept as central for life those spiritual messages which are mediated to the self by religion, by beauty, and by pain. More reasonable than the
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 27
rationalists, they find in that very hunger for reality which is ! the mother of all metaphysics, an implicit proof that such reality exists; that there is something else, some final satisfaction, beyond the ceaseless stream of sensation which besieges con- sciousness. “In that thou hast sought me, thou hast already found me,”y says the voice of Absolute Truth in their ears. This is the first doctrine of mysticism. Its next is that only in so far as the self is real can it hope to know Reality: like to like: Cor ad cor loquitur. Upon the propositions implicit in these two laws the whole claim and practice of the mystic life depends.
“Finite as we are,” they say—and here they speak not for themselves, but for the race—“lost though we seem to be in the woods or in the wide air’s wilderness, in this world of time and of chance, we have still, like the strayed animals or like the migrating birds, our homing instinct. ... We seek. That is a fact. We seek a city still out of sight. In the con- trast with this goal, we live. But if this be so, then already we possess something of Being even in our finite seeking. For the readiness to seek is already something of an attainment, even if a poor one.”?
Further, in this our finite seeking we are not wholly de- pendent on that homing instinct. For some, who have climbed to the hill-tops, that city is not really out of sight The mystics see it clearly. They report to us concerning it. Science and metaphysics may do their best and their worst: but these path- finders of the spirit never falter in their statements concerning that independent spiritual world which is the only goal of
“pilgrim man.” They say that messages come to him from that spiritual world, that complete reality which we call Absolute: that we are not, after all, hermetically sealed from it. To all selves who will receive it, news comes every hour of the day of a world of Absolute Life, Absolute Beauty, Absolute Truth, beyond the bourne of time and place: news that most of us translate—and inevitably distort in the process —into the language of religion, of beauty, of love, or of pain.
- Ofall those forms of life and thought with which humanity has fed its craving for truth, mysticism alone postulates, and in the persons of its great initiates proves, not only the existence
* Royce, “ The World and the Individual,” vol. i. p. 181.
28 AN INTRODUCTION TO MYSTICISM
of the Absolute, but also this link: this possibility first of knowing, finally of attaining it. It denies that possible. know-_ .ledge.is..to. be limited (a) to sense impressions, (0) to any __ process of intellectation, (c) to the unfolding of. the content of - normal consciousness. Such” diagrams of experience, it says, ave hopelessly” ‘incomplete. The mystics find the basis of their method not in logic but in life: in the existence of a discover- able “real,” a Ost of true being, within the seeking subject which can, in that ineffable experience which they call the “act of union,” fuse itself with and thus apprehend the reality of the sought Object. In theological language, their theory of _knowledge is that the spirit of man, itself essentially divine, is- capable of immediate communion onl God, the One Reality. ~"Tn mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses and argues, the mystic lives and looks ; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram—impersonal and unattainable—the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive.
“Oh, taste and see!” they cry, in accents of astounding certainty and joy. “ Ours is an experimental science. We can — but communicate our system, never its result. We come to you not as thinkers, but as doers. Leave your deep and absurd trust in the senses, with their language of dot and dash, which may possibly report fact but can never communicate per- sonality. If philosophy has taught you anything, she has surely taught you the length of her tether, and the impossibility of attaining to the doubtless admirable grazing land which lies beyond it. One after another, idealists have arisen who, straining frantically at the rope, have announced to the world their ap- proaching liberty ; only to be flung back at last into the little
t The idea of Divine Union as man’s true end is of course of immeasurable antiquity. Its first definite appearance in the religious consciousness of Europe seems to coincide with the establishment of the Orphic Mysteries in Greece and Southern Italy in the sixth century B.c, See Adam, ‘‘The Religious Teachers of Greece,” p. 92. Itis also found in the Hermetic writings, which vary between the fifth and second century B.c. Compare Petrie, ‘‘ Personal Religion in Egypt before Christianity,” p. 102, and Khode, ‘‘ Psyche”’ (1898).
THE POINT OF DEPARTURE 29
circle of sensation. But here we are, a small family, it is true, yet one that refuses to die out, assuring you that we have slipped the knot and are free of those grazing grounds. This is evidence which you are bound to bring into account before you can add up the sum total of possible knowledge; for you will find it impossible to prove that the world as seen by the mystics, ‘unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright,’ is less real than that which is expounded by the youngest and most promising demonstrator of a physico-chemical universe. We will be quite candid with you. Examine us as much as you like: our machinery, our veracity, our results. We cannot promise that you shall see what we have seen, for here each man must adventure for himself; but we defy you to stigmatize our experiences as impossible or invalid. Is your world of ex- perience so well and logically founded that you dare make of it a standard? Philosophy tells you that it is founded on nothing better than the reports of your sensory apparatus and the tradi- tional concepts of the race. Certainly it is imperfect, probably it is illusion ; in any event, it never touches the foundation of things. Whereas “what the world, which truly knows nothing, calls ‘ “Mysticism, is the science | ‘of. ultimates kas the_science..of self-évident Reality, which cannot be ‘ reasoned _about, because it is the object « of pure reason or Perception.” a
ALLIED A TE DNA EO ”
me
; Coventry Patmore, ‘‘ The Rod, the ‘Root, and the F ee: ** Aurea Dicta,” CXXxVili.