M. Charles d'Ebeling. 3 tomes, Paris, 1864.

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daughter — " not all the same colour : some pale, the colour of flesh, some yellow and some white." l She watches St. Anne, the Virgin, and Mary Cleophas playing with the Holy Child — " I said to myself as I watched them," says Anne-Catherine simply, " Why, women with children are always the same! "
Sometimes this sense of actuality reaches an extra ordinarily high pitch. "The night had been extremely cold," she says, in her narrative of the trial of Jesus, " and the morning was dark and cloudy. A little hail had fallen, which surprised every one, but towards twelve o'clock the day became brighter . . . and when Jesus after the scourging fell at the foot of the pillar, I saw Claudia Proclus send to the Mother of God a bundle of linen. I do not know whether she thought that Jesus would be acquitted, and therefore would give His mother some thing to bind up His wounds, or whether this compassion ate pagan had a presentiment of that which the blessed Virgin would do with her gift." 2
Well may Anne-Catherine's biographer say that " her descriptions are like a photograph of the mysteries of salvation." Had she been that which the world calls a poet or an artist — had she given these same visions rhythmic or plastic form — the high quality of her imagina tive powers would have received general recognition. The point of interest for us — and the point which may possibly throw light on the composition of older and more sacred literature — is just this dramatic quality of her creative genius : this profound sense of actuality. She saw the things which she set down : saw them with a precision and a vividness which no memory of real events could come near. This is true, not only of those scenes for which Scripture, human life, or religious pictures might — and probably did — provide much of the raw material : but also of those which seem to originate in an
1 Op cit. Tome I. pp. 131-141. 2 Op. cit., Tome III. pp. 337-339.
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act of pure creation, such as her vision of the Nativity of Christ.
" I saw the light which surrounded Mary become ever more dazzling : the radiance of the lamps lighted by Joseph was eclipsed. And when midnight was nearly come the Most Holy Virgin entered into ecstacy, and I saw her raised up above the earth. Her hands were crossed upon her breast, her robe floated about her in billowy folds ; the splendour which surrounded her grew without ceasing. The vault, the walls and the floor of the grotto, as if vivified by the divine light, seemed themselves to feel joy. But soon the vault disappeared from my sight : a torrent of light which grew in splendour spread from Mary to the heights of heaven. In the midst of a wonder ful movement of celestial glories, I saw the choirs of angels descending, and taking as they drew near ever greater distinctness of form. The Holy Virgin, lifted up in the air in her ecstacy, looked down upon her God, adoring Him of Whom she had become the Mother, and Who under the aspect of a fragile, new-born babe, was lying upon the earth before her." *
" And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true : and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe." 2 These words, in which the Fourth Evangelist endorses his sublime vision of Life and Purification flowing from the heart of the crucified Christ, this woman might have taken, with no sense of incongruity, on her lips. Though he was the greatest of Christian seers, and she but a humble and obscure visionary, lacking his philosophic insight, his high poetic genius, his wide imaginative grasp, they speak the same language, for they are of the same race. The Fourth Gospel, then, when it is compared with the writings of other mystics, discloses itself as a profoundly subjective book, which tells us far more of the direct experi ences and deep religious passions of its writer than it does of the history of Jesus, or even of the position of the 1 Op. cit., Tome I. p. 112. 2 John xix. 35.
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second-century Church. John, poet, prophet, artist, but above all mystic and lover, here gives us the substance of his ecstatic communion with the Divine Life : his real yet romantic vision of the Man who was — is — the veritable expression of that Divine Life thrust into the temporal world.
For his ardent and synthetic vision, there was no sharp line of cleavage between the inward miracle which he had experienced and attributed to the touch of the exalted Christ, and the wonderful stories of new life flowing from that same contact, which were already fixed in the Christian tradition. He could not but accept the fact of a transmutation, which he had known in intensest form in his own person; the miracle of the " best wine" in the end ministered to him by the divine and all-enrich ing touch upon the common things of sense. He knew it all : the mysterious power given to his paralysed nature, the illumination poured on one blind from birth, the new life conferred on one long buried in the sepulchre of sense. He clothed with lovely and suggestive language, and transferred to this strange epic of the soul the heavenly declarations which he had heard with his inward ear, in those hours of deep absorption, of profound attention to Reality, when he knew of a Divine Presence, a brooding personal love, that was to him Food and Light, Way, Truth and Life — Christ, Paraclete and Logos — a Door by which he had entered on the fruition of Eternity, a Shep herd in whose care he was safe. The Fourth Gospel, says Loisy, " is above all a personal work, which bears from one end to the other the mark of the powerful genius who conceived it ... all the materials which the author has used have passed through the crucible of his powerful intellect and his mystical soul; and they have come forth from it metamorphosed, intimately penetrated and fused together, by the idea of the eternal Christ, the divine source of light and life." *
1 A. Loisy, Le Quatrieme Evangile, p. 55.
Ill
THE MYSTIC WAY IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL
ALTHOUGH it is unlikely that so subjective and poetic — so " inspired " — a book was systematically planned, yet the idea by which its writer was possessed, his one deep vision and conviction, does unfold itself in a certain order.
The main section, from the first to the twelfth chapters, exhibits the incarnate "Logos" as the eternal and ener getic Principle of life and the Light of life; breaking out into the temporal world in the human form of Jesus of Nazareth, that man might be entinctured with a new reality. "As many as received Him, to them He gave power to become the sons of God." l This great vision of a Divine Humanity, achieved in One and possible for all, which is the underlying motive of the whole poem, is expressed in the language of Hellenistic thought in the prologue; and illustrated from different points of view in the incidents and discourses which follow it. First Hebrew prophecy, in the person of the Baptist, is made to acknow ledge that the Christ-Logos represents the fulfilment of its dreams. Next, in the historical "call" of the first disciples, the immense attractiveness of the Divine Life is shown ; drawing those capable of transcendence, living " eternal life in the midst of time," from the ranks of common men. " And they said unto Him . . . where abidest thou? He saith unto them, Come, and ye shall
see." 2
By means of the story of the Marriage at Cana,3 there is suggested to us the newness, splendour and intensity of this life : which is not abstract, far-off, 1 John i. 12. 2 John i. 15-40. 8 John iii. l-il.
R 241
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divorced from human interests, but comes into the very midst of ordinary existence, to transmute by its touch the commonest things of sense, making of them the media of spiritual communion. Wine, which the mystical king Melchisedec ministered to Abraham, is the antique symbol of divine inebriation.1 For John, the mystical Christ is supremely the giver of such spiritual ecstacy: it is a part and an expression of the dower of " grace and truth " which the Logos has brought into time for the deepening and enriching of human experience. Those into whose lives this new force finds its way are to be " God-intoxi cated men." " The Logos," says Philo, " is master of the spiritual drinking feast." 2 So too the Synoptics had already compared the teaching of Jesus, the " Mystery of the Kingdom," with new wine.
From these attempts to suggest the power and splendour of the new life, surging up through humanity, the Johannine writer passes to a series of linked incidents symbolic of the action of that inflowing life upon the self which has received it; the purification and illumina tion of the character which is regenerated by its touch.
First, the terrible purging away of all impurities, the setting in order of that " house " which is to be, as Paul had said, the actual dwelling place of God.3 All which splits the attention of the Self, all the fussy surface interests, everything which distracts it from the supreme business of response to Reality, is driven out with a " scourge of cords," the harsh symbol of intensest penance
1 It is so explained by Philo. (See Reville, Le Quatritme Evangile> p. 134.) Compare the Sufi poet —
" The beauteous Cup-bearer, pitcher in hand, Stepped forth from a recess and placed it in the middle. He filled the first cup with that sparkling wine — Didst thou ever see water set on fire ? "
Jalalu 'ddin, Divan (Nicholson's trans., p. 163).
2 De Somn., II, 37.
3 The cleansing of the Temple (John ii. 14-16), here put out of all chronological order owing to the exigencies of the spiritual " plot."
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and mortification, that the sanctuary of man's being may be fitted for the reception of the incoming guest. The long struggles and readjustments of the Purgative Way are here condensed into one vivid scene : and poverty and detachment, the virtues of preparation, are exhibited as the necessary preliminaries of the new life. " Dio non alberga en core strecto
" povertate ha si gran pecto che ci alberga deitate." x
At once we pass to the positive experiences of that new life : the adventures which mark the growth of the new consciousness as John has known it. In the story of Nicodemus, the necessary beginning of the " Way " is insisted on ; in language perhaps drawn from the heathen mysteries, but now charged with the Christian reading of life. This " New Birth " is no voluntary or magical process of initiation,2 but a deep-seated psychological change ; a " fresh start " operated by the Spirit of Life, which inducts the self into another order of Reality, another plane of consciousness. " That which is born of the flesh is flesh ; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit," says John : it is St. Paul's distinction between " psychic " and " pneumatic " men — the fundamental Christian line of cleavage — re-stated in sacramental terms. Hence the difference between the boundless universe of the mystic, free as air, no more the helpless slave of " use and wont," and the cramped universe of the una wakened man, who has not " changed his mind " : who is, as Macarius said in a vivid image, on the wrong side of the partition wall. " Except a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom . . . cannot enter the Kingdom."
John next proceeds to exhibit the implications of this
1 God will not lodge in the narrow heart. . . . Poverty hath so ample a bosom that Deity itself may lodge therein. — Jacopone da Todi, Lauda LIX.
2 John i. 13. 8 John iii. 6, 3, 5, vii. 38.
K 2
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new life, its needs and powers. The new birth, the ascent to fresh levels of consciousness, has made man receptive of Reality : the " living water " of the universal Divine Spirit,1 pouring out from God, the Fountain of all life. This inflowing life, once received, becomes a source of new vitality, refreshment and peace ; welling up without ceasing from the depths of the soul " unto eternal life." " Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst." 2
Then, the gifts received by those in whom the new life is manifest; shown, in the allegorical manner common to Alexandrian piety, in a series of episodes chosen from the current " lives " of Jesus. New strength given to the weak and impotent : new vision given to the spirit ually blind : actual life given to the spiritually dead — manifestations, one and all, of the new dower of vitality now made available for men by the direct action of the " Energetic Word." 8 There are, in all, seven of these symbol-miracles, each given as the " outward and visible sign" of a real and eternal fact. Nor does the writer leave us in doubt as to the purely transcendental signifi cance which these stories bear for him, as demonstrations of the Divine Life. " My Father works unceasingly, and so do I," says the Johannine Logos : " As the Father awakens the dead and gives them life, so the Son also gives life to whom He wills." " For judgment I am come into the world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind." * Most striking of all is the declaration which marks the crowning miracle of Lazarus brought from the grave : u / am the resurrec tion, and the lire: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live : and whosoever liveth and
1 See Jer. ii. 13.
J John iv. 10-14. So, too, the newly baptised in the primitive Christian hymn — " I drank and was inebriated with the living water that does not die " (Odes of Solomon, XL).
8 John v. 2-9; ix. 1-7; and xi. 38—46.
4 John v. 17, 21 (Weymouth's trans.); John ix. 39.
THE JOHANNINE MYSTIC 245
believeth in Me shall never die." l This is the Pauline doctrine of conditional immortality — of the growing up of the New Man into the spiritual or eternal order — cast into a prophetic form.
Interwoven with these significant incidents, and com pleting the picture of the dependence of the illuminated soul on the spiritual order which strengthens, feeds and enlightens it, are the two long and beautiful discourses in which the Logos-Christ of John's mystic vision declares Himself under the Philonic titles of Bread of Life and Shepherd of Souls.2
The great poetic description of Christ as the Bread of Life is linked with the story of the "feeding of the multitude," its expression on the material and historical plane : but it presupposes as its background the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, which had already developed under the influence of St. Paul a definitely mystical char acter. In this sacrament Catholic mystics of every period have found a focus both for their rapturous contempla tion of God, and for their consciousness of His inflowing life veritably received by them. The " communion " of which it is the external sign has then that double aspect of personal intercourse with a Person and of the reception of an impersonal spiritual power or food, a definite access of vitality — grace — which is one of the paradoxes of the Christian apprehension of the spiritual order; a paradox constantly repeated, though never ex plained, in the lives of the great contemplatives. In the wonderful discourse on the Bread of Life, which the Fourth Evangelist puts into the mouth of Christ, this paradox receives its classical expression. The whole range of its author's highest mystical experiences, in contempla tion, in the "prayer of union," in those hours of still waiting upon the spiritual world in which the mystic seems to hear the very voice of Wisdom and Truth and
1 John xi. 25. a Caps. vi. and z,
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to feel the inflow of a new enabling life, are drawn upon.1 The apparently contradictory concepts of the separate soul fed by the substance of God : of the complete union of that soul with God : of indwelling, of the " Spirit," and the partaking of the " flesh and blood " — the identifica tion of the personal Christ with His impersonal self- donation as " grace " — all these represent the writer's effort to expound the historical incarnation of the Logos in the light of his own consciousness of an enor mously enhanced vitality : of a new spirit, power and life within him, directly dependent upon another Life whose emergence on the material plane represented the beginning of " new things " for the human race.
John knows himself to be a "partaker of the divine nature"; hence for him, as for Paul and the Synoptics, it is always a higher kind of vitality, the " Spirit that quickeneth " flowing out as "Logos" from the Absolute Source of life, which is in question. "As the living Father hath sent Me, and I live by the Father : so he that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me ... he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever." 2 Finally, the supreme expression of the Christian secret as John had understood and experienced it, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly " : 3 the unitive life of divine fecundity, of conscious participa tion in the Eternal Order, which is the supreme object of mystical growth and endeavour, the culmination of the Mystic Way. These words, which sum up the whole Johannine gospel, are a proof that their writer was not a theologian or a controversialist ; but a practical mystic, who had experienced in his own person the Christian secret of growth.
The discourse of the tenth chapter, with its " historical "
1 For the mystical aspect of the Eucharist compare Dionysius the Areopagite, De Eccles. Hier., cap. 3 ; Thomas a Kempis, De Imitations Christi, Bk. IV. ; Jacob Boehme, The Threefold Life of Man, cap. 13.
2 John vi. 57-58. 8 John x. 10.
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illustration, the bringing of Lazarus from death to life, completes the first part of John's great epic of the soul. It has shown the movement of the " converted" spirit through purification to " new birth," its gradual entrance into those powers which are characteristic of the illumin ative state : the reception of new strength and new vision, the inflow of grace, the deeper and deeper apprehension of the secrets of Reality disclosed in the Here-and-Now. It has brought the ideal Christian to the point at which the supreme mystery of union with the Divine Source of life and light is to be declared to him. Lazarus comes from the dark grave in which he has been four days buried, to the light of day and to a face-to-face encounter with the Presence who declares Himself as " Resur rection and Life": and here perhaps it is not wholly fantastic to trace a hint of the Evangelist's recognition, possibly his remembrance, of that period of gloom, desti tution and " spiritual death " through which the human consciousness must pass on its way to supreme spiritual attainment.
Nearly all critics of the Fourth Gospel have recognised that the beginning of the thirteenth chapter marks a new section of the work, a change of tone and subject.1 Out wardly the change is from the narrative of the ministry of Jesus to that of His Passion ; and from acts and teach ings performed in public, to deeper and more intimate discourses given within the circle of the "little flock." But in the scheme of spiritual growth which underlies this book, the change is from an objective to a subjective view of the revelation of Reality, the history of the " Logos made flesh." Whilst the first twelve chapters of the gospel exhibit Christ as the Principle of Life and the Light of Life, energising and illuminating the self which is turned in the new direction of growth, the thirteenth to the eighteenth chapters describe the intimate union and personal love which does or may subsist 1 Cf. Loisy, Le Quatrtime Evangile, p. 140.
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between this Principle of Life and the spirits of men : the joy and the creative power which springs from it. Here the figure of Jesus as all-revealing is balanced by the figure of the Beloved Disciple ; the mystic soul, friend and companion of the Logos, to whom the supremest mysteries of love and suffering are revealed.
When we understand the underlying principle of the book, we perceive why it is that this character now makes his first appearance. All that has gone before has been a preparation for him, a history of the process by which the Christian mystic is made. The change, then, which now takes place, is exactly analogous to the change from the Illuminative to the Unitive state of consciousness: a transition which John further illustrates, in accordance with his general method, by two significant events — the solemn anointing of one destined to suffer, and the Entry into Jerusalem of one destined to reign 1 — and by the announcement of that great central principle of self- naughting, " dying to live and losing to find " which every mystic who has come up to these levels of tran scendence has been forced to accept. This is here pre sented to us, not as a " religious " act, but as an essential part of the process of all life, a necessary stage in the growth of every self who aspires to the "Kingdom of Reality." The Pauline law of imitatio Christi is here fused with the Logos-doctrine peculiar to John.
The experiences of the Saints who have passed through the " dark night " of surrender suggest to us something of the suffering and destitution of spirit which lies behind this profound declaration, that utmost agony and utmost glory are the obverse and reverse of the " salvation " offered to men. " Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of Man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone : but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it;
1 John xii.
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and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. If any man serve Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there shall also My servant be : if any man serve Me, him will my Father honour." 1
This passage, and the comments which follow on it, form as it were the introduction to the last section of the gospel ; in which the unitive life of complete and loving surrender to that Creative Will with which the Logos or Life-Spirit is " one," is first expounded in the discourses which Jesus is described as giving to " His own" — those natural mystics, the re-born, the elect, who had received His message and " changed their minds " 2 — and then exhibited in action in the events of the Passion and Resurrection.
These discourses constitute our final evidence that the Fourth Evangelist was no theoretic Christian, but truly possessed of that actual mighty, inflowing life — rich, deep, and many-graded — which Jesus of Nazareth had exhibited in all its splendour and power. It is not memory or tradition, it is profound experience, first-hand knowledge, which speaks here. "Whither I go ye know, and the Way ye know," says the Johannine Christ to the members of the New Race; those who are " given Him by the Father." " I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard of My Father I have made known unto you." 3 Nowhere in the New Testament is the sense of separation between the children of the new order and the mass of mankind more strongly marked than in these chapters. " I pray not for the world," says the Johan nine Christ, " but for them which Thou hast given me, for they are Thine." 4 " In My Father's house are many
• ! John xii. 23-26.
2 " I speak not of you all : I know whom I have chosen (xiii. 18). ' Ye have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you " (xv. 16). By the time that this gospel came to be written it had become clear that few indeed were " chosen " though many " called."
3 John xiv. 4, xyji. 6 and xv. 15. 4 John xvii. 9.
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mansions"; in the Spiritual Order there are degrees of transcendence as innumerable as the shaded degrees of life ; but "I go to prepare a place for you " — for those capable of the supreme ascent in the wake of this pattern — " that where I am there ye may be also," i. e. in perfect union with the Being of God, the goal of the mystic quest. The way thereto is along the path of growth now declared and exhibited. " I am the way, the truth, and the life," l says that awful yet intimate Voice which speaks in the deeps of John's soul.
Moreover, the mystic's certitude of the unity of all spirit ; the immanence of God in man and man in God— and of love, " the ghostly bond which knits up the universe " as the clue to the meaning of the whole — finds expression over and over again in these chapters. In them, all mystics of later generations have found their mightiest discoveries forestalled. John here speaks to us indeed from " the summit of the inner life." Far more valuable to us than the reports of historical " witnesses " who did not understand, is this sublime and ecstatic statement of experience, by one who lived within the new Kingdom of Heaven. First under one image, then under another, he struggles to express the essence of that Kingdom, which he possesses and by which he is possessed : the indwelling of Divine Reality in the individual soul and of the individual soul in Divine Reality ; the doing away of the barriers of self-hood ; the conscious, loving and sustained communion of the awakened consciousness with the Source of its life. "I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me : . . . the Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works."2 This clear declaration of a tran scendent yet immanent Reality, Origin of all that is ; and of the identity of the Logos, the growing dynamic Spirit of Life, with the Absolute God, is thrice repeated. It is the kernel of John's message : for him, the whole great continuous effort is divine. In the fact that this 1 John xiv. 2, 3, 6. 2 John xiv. 10.
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Spirit of Life emerged in the historical Jesus, and that those who follow in His wake are caught in that great stream of transcendence, filled by its power, he finds the bridge which links this theological expression with the practical life of man; " I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you." In the soul made real, Reality itself is present and at work. " I will not leave you desolate, 1 come unto you. . . . We will come, and make our abode — the Paraclete, even the Holy Spirit, shall teach you all things " 1 — desperate efforts, one and all, to reduce supernal knowledge to concrete human speech. Tran scendent Father, Creative Logos, indwelling Spirit, are for John not scientific terms, but aspects of the unique and abounding life of God ; fluid symbols of man's varied ways of laying hold on that One Reality. The " promise of the Paraclete," the " coming " of the Exalted Christ, the eucharistic discourses, are so many artistic presenta tions of this same thing : the participation of the regenerate human consciousness in Eternal Life. John knew this by practical experience; and trying to express it, sometimes resorted to one image and sometimes to another. It is impossible to extract a consistent dogmatic system from his utterances, for though he sometimes tries to be a theologian, he remains at heart a realist and a poet.
In the end, all philosophic language came to seem to him inadequate : and he resorted, as so many mystics after him, to the heart's intuition of its Home and Father, " that dim silence where lovers lose themselves " as the only definition of God which did not defeat its own end. " We have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." 2 This, which was destined to be one of the fundamental ideas of Christian mysticism; which fought and conquered the Neoplatonic concept of God as the supreme object of knowledge, and contempla- 1 John xiv. 2
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tion as a u gnostic" act ; was John's most characteristic contribution to the interpretation of the Christian life. His was that piercing vision which discovered that the Spirit of Love is one with the Spirit of Truth, and that only those who love will ever understand. It was this which definitely established the essentially mystic char acter of Christian faith.
Mysticism, both Christian and other, has often been called the science of divine love. Mystics of every period have held its essence to consist in the " spiritual marriage," the rapturous reunion of the soul with its Origin : and have laid down the fundamental law that " by love He may be gotten and holden, but by thought never." * " I desired oftentimes," says Julian of Norwich, medi tating on her vision of Reality, " to wit what was our Lord's meaning. And fifteen years after, and more, I was answered in ghostly understanding, saying thus : Wouldst thou wit thy Lord's meaning in this thing? Learn it well : Love was His meaning. Who showed it thee ? Love. What showed He thee? Love. Wherefore showed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end." 2
This side of the mystic experience — this reading of the riddle of life — is found in its highest development in the writings of the Fourth Evangelist. He is indeed " the eagle that flies high, so right high and yet more high than does any other bird, because he is feathered with fine love, and beholds above other the beauty of the Sun, and the beams and the brightness of the Sun." 3 In the great discourse of the fifteenth chapter he gives artistic expres sion to this, his deepest intuition of truth. It is the Charter of the New Race ; the classical description of Christian mysticism. Here the two great aspects of man's
1 The Cloud of Unknowing, cap. 6.
2 Revelations of Divine Love, cap. 86.
3 The Mirror of Simple Souls.
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relation to Reality — fruition and creation — are fused in a living whole. Human personality is shown as a growing thing because it is part of a growing system ; a branch of the Living Vine. The Logos-life is flowing through it, and is the source of that power by which it buds and blossoms, becomes itself the parent of new life.
The characteristic notes of a sane and complete spiritu ality — joyous self-mergence in the life of the Whole, and the creative fertility of a truly living thing — are placed in the foreground as the signs whereby may be recognised that " new man " in whom the entincturing Spirit of Life dwells and works, as sap within the branches of the living, growing Vine. John's dream of the Vine is the exact equivalent of Paul's dream of the Mystic Body of Christ. Both are inspired by the same three-fold experience : of a power by which they are possessed, a growing life pouring itself out through them, a greater life whose interests they must serve. Moreover fruits, results — in a word " fertility " — are for both the earnests of the fact that this mysterious union between God and the soul has indeed taken place : of the mystic's participa tion in the life of Eternity. The " deified " man, " partaker of the divine nature," must exhibit something of the divine fecundity of God. He must " flow out," as Ruysbroeck said, in works of charity towards men. Creative power, the bringing forth of new life, of " fresh children of the infinite," say these primitive Christian mystics, is the one reliable sign of " Christ in you " — of the achievement of the full stature of Divine Humanity. Not something self-contained and complete, but some thing which entinctured, changed, enhanced, the environ ment in which it found itself — light, salt, leaven, a path, not a blind alley for the Spirit of Life — was the ideal of Jesus for His little flock : and John, like Paul, has realised this as central for the "gospel" of new life. "Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit He taketh away . . . as the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide
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in the vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in Me. 1 am the vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in Me and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit : for without Me ye can do nothing. . . . Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit ; so shall ye be My disciples. . . . These things have I spoken unto you, that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full." l
Christian mysticism is the history of this law in action : its initiates have demonstrated again and again in their lives and works the strange creative power, the amazing control over circumstance, of that spirit of more abundant life which transfuses their whole being, infects those who come within the sphere of their influence, and, in the higher stages of the Mystic Way, directs their actions. They are definitely conscious of some " power not themselves" — in the words of modern psychology, a " secondary personality of a superior and powerful type " —which energises them anew, and drives them on to the mighty careers of a Paul, a Francis, a Joan of Arc, an Ignatius, a Teresa ; helps and inspires the impassioned contemplations of a Julian or a St. John of the Cross.2 Right down the course of history, we can trace the emergence of this spiritual life, which " is not a mani festation of mere man, but of an independent reality, and . . . through a communication of this reality, gains a new and cosmic nature for man." 3
This spirit, the " sap " of the Mystic Vine and the indwelling Logos-life, is presented by John under another image as the "Paraclete": a word which means, not "comforter" but "auxiliary," and was one of Philo's
1 John xv. 2, 4, 5, 8, 11.
2 St. Paul is of course, as we have seen, one of the best examples of this " compulsion of the spirit " (cf. supra, Cap. III. § I). See also the Testament of St. Ignatius ; St. Teresa's Life and Book of the Foundations ; Fox's Journal ; and, for an example of the same type of experience in a mystical soul of our time, General Gordon's Letters to his Sister.
3 Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p. 544.
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names for the Logos. The impact of its " more abundant life " upon the human consciousness was a fact of experi ence for the primitive Christian — " Ye know Him, for He dwelleth in you," says John to those who had received the " fulness" of the new life.1 In the "Paraclete," which is but another aspect of the Logos-life, he finds the connecting link between the history of Jesus of Nazareth and the experience of those twice-born spirits who " walk even as He walked," 2 grow as He grew towards the perfect fruition of God ; and share His power of evoking a new and more vivid life in other men. The continued experience of this divine energy welling up within them is to be for them, as it was for Paul, the guarantee of their participation in " eternal life":3 and the tests of their possession of it are to be the Pauline tests of character and of work. Paul and John, so different in temperament, are identical in their conclusions ; identical in the " Kingdom " which they describe. Love and humility, which together include every aspect of the response of the awakened self to God and to the world of other men, are here presented as the sum of virtue. It is of these twin qualities that the author of The Cloud of Unknowing remarks that he who hath them hath all : for they represent knowledge of self and knowledge of God, the perfect adjustment of the individual to the universal life.
In his history of the Passion of Jesus, John shows to us the deepest humility, the highest, purest love in action : declares them as the final attributes of the divine nature here revealed to men. The Logos-Christ, humbling Himself and giving Himself out of love for the world, is to be the pattern, the norm of the New Race. That John here describes no historical and vicarious act of salvation, but something which is intimately con-
1 John xiv. 17. 2 I John ii. 6.
3 " The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God." — Rom. viii. 16.
256 THE MYSTIC WAY
nected with the life and growth of man, and which involves a demand made on every lover of Reality, is proved by the stern declaration in the fifteenth chapter, of the conditions of utter disinterestedness and self- donation on which alone man may be accepted as the "friend" of the divine Spirit of Life. uThis is my commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends : ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you." * Here we have again that call to surrender, to self-naughting, which lies at the heart of Christian mysticism, and which finds its perfect symbol in the Christian cross.
John's epic of " salvation" completes itself naturally by a description of the Resurrection — the supreme mystery of Christianity, the final guarantee of Eternal Life given to the world. In these lovely scenes, the vivid definition and high poetry which mark all the narrative passages of his book reach their fullest development. John himself, in the person of the " Beloved Disciple," seems to act, to suffer, and to hope, within the frame of the events he is describing : as so many mystics after him have declared that they have stood in dramatic vision beneath the Cross, and shared the agony of Mary, or seen at first hand the beauty and the wonder of the " strong and immortal " Christ. Yet these sections too are animated by the writer's passionate vision of unity, of Jesus as the pathfinder, cutting a thoroughfare for the race. " I ascend to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God." " As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you." 2 John, like his Master, has his eye upon Man; "these things are written . . . that ye might have life, through His name." 3
1 John xv. 12-14. a John xx. 17, 21, 31.
3 i.e. through His qualities; the "Name," for Hebrew thought, being the ultimate expression of being and personality. Hence the unknowable character of the "Name" of God, and the importance
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The Fourth Gospel is, then, the poetic description by a great mystic, who was also a great artist, of that new life, that new outbirth of Reality, which Jesus of Nazareth made available for the race. From the rhythmic and oracular Prologue, to the heavenly vision of the risen and eternal Christ — companion of the daily life of man— with which it ends, it bears the mark of the exalted state of consciousness in which it was composed. For that consciousness Christianity was a vital fact, not a belief : it was the joyous, free participation in the Eternal Order, the steady growing up of man, energised by the more abundant life of the Spirit, into that condition whereby he became " not a servant, but a son." More, it was the beginning of an organic transmutation in which adolescent spirit grows to a supernal maturity foreseen but not yet attained. John's Parousia is the achievement of that completed life. " Behold," he says in his epistle, "what manner of love the Father hath bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God : and such we are. For this cause the world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not. Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that if it shall be manifested, we shall be like Him . . . and every one that hath this hope purifieth himself, even as He is pure." l
attached in folklore to the discovery of " true " names. Cf. E. Clodd, Tom-tit-tot : Savage Philosophy in Folk-tale.
1 I John iii. 1-3 (R.V.).