II. pp. 95-100.

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that " they soon appeared to the pagans to be the distin guishing features of this silly religion! " 1
Yet behind this popular travesty of the secret of tran scendence, this vulgar and materialistic eschatology, the deep human instinct for a consummation of all things in God, some final attainment of Absolute Life, which is the motive power of all apocalyptic speculation, persisted. The " little secret love " went on, and with it, the secret, powerful growth ; the deeply-hidden leaven did not fail. In the steady stiffening of the Christian body, the growth of theology and ceremonial, the " organisation of the Church," the branching coral soon begins to seem more important than the scrap of Eternal Life which it hides : but that life is there, and those who know where to look may trace its operations, its passionate attention to Reality, its steady onward push towards expression. Here and there a phrase in the writings of the Fathers, a signifi cant detail in some rite, hints at the presence below the threshold of the vital spirit of growth.
Though the Church as it developed showed ever more strongly the tendency of all organised groups to fall back from the spontaneous to the mechanical, the instinct for novelty, for regeneration and growth, the sense of move ment towards a more complete life — a higher level of being — never ceased. In the few, it continued to produce the original " charismatic " effects, though this became more and more the rarely-observed mark of a peculiar sanctity. " There are still preserved amongst Christians," says Origen, writing in the third century, " traces of that holy Spirit which appeared in the form of a dove. They expel evil spirits and foresee certain events, according to the will of the Logos."2 A century later, however, when Christianity had become the State religion and a comfort able security had taken the place of the sufferings and enthusiasm of the past, Theodore of Antioch3 observes
1 Harnack, op. cit., Vol. I. p. 92. * Contra Celsum, I. 46.
* A.D. 350-428.
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that these special gifts " have ceased long ago to find a place amongst us. If you insist that they have not ceased, because there are persons who can do wonders by the power of prayer (though this does not often happen) I reply, that in this sense wonders will never cease, for the saints can never wholly fail us." *
Thanks to this unfailing family of saints, the Interior Church of mystic souls, who acted within the Christian body as the intuitive faculty acts within the individual man, the central features of the gospel of New Life were given ceremonial expression in the organised cult ; and remain to us as memorials of the life which was destined to be the " light of men." A more detailed consideration of the Christian liturgy2 will make it clear that the ritual and sacramental life of the Church, as we now possess it, is a drama of the deification of the soul : of the " making of Christs," to use the strong blunt language of Methodius. The twin mystic facts of re-birth and of union — the emergence of the separated spirit into the transcendental world, and a growth conditioned by its feed ing on the substance of Reality — are the focal points of the developed cuit : and the beginnings of this develop ment — most clearly seen, perhaps, in regard to baptism — are discernible in the primitive times.
Already in the Fourth Gospel we see the germ of an identification of the biological fact of " new birth " with baptism, the sacramental rite of initiation : the coupling together of "water" and " spirit."3 In all probability this idea reflects back to the baptismal experience of Jesus Himself, which was recognised in the earliest times as a vital condition of His career. Certainly it indicates the direction in which the " Mind of the Church " was to move. For the earliest converts, living in a world familiar with the idea of initiatory rites, and particularly of cere monial washing or purification as a preliminary to being
1 Com. on i Thess. v. ip, and 2 Thess. ii. 6. 2 Vide infra, Cap. VI. 8 John iii. 5.
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" saved," * it must often have happened that the deeply significant drama which admitted them to membership of the " new race " did coincide with a certain enhancement of consciousness, a flooding of the personality with a con viction of new life and light. There is every probability that the psychological phenomena of conversion were often witnessed. It is at any rate certain that in the primitive time the baptised Christian was looked upon, not as a person who had changed his belie fs, but as a person who was definitely re-born: thrust into another universe. The Johannine figure of "new birth," the Pauline language about " new creation " was accepted in its literal sense, because it was still a description of experience for many of the neophytes. The so-called " Odes >r of Solomon, probably our oldest collection of Christian hymns, bears abundant witness to this point of view.2 Many of these odes seem to have been composed for use at baptismal ceremonies ; and the sense of regeneration, of an actual change and newness, is their constant theme.
" The Spirit brought me forth before the face of the Lord. And although a son of man, I was named the Illuminate, the son of
God.3
For according to the Greatness of the Most High, so He made me, and like His own newness, He renewed me. And He anointed me for His own perfection, and I became one of His neighbours.4 Again :
" I received the face and the fashion of a new person, and I walked in it and was saved. . . .
1 Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Strom., V. II. "It is not without reason that in the mysteries which obtain amongst the Greeks, purifi cations hold the first place ; as also the laver amongst the Barbarians."
* The Odes and Psalms of Solomon, edited by J. Rendel Harris. It seems to me clear that many of these odes, which Mr. Harris supposes to be Messianic declarations put into the mouth of Christ, are really the birth-songs of the Christian neophyte.
8 The " illuminate " was one of the commonest of all names for the neophyte. Cf. Justin Martyr, Apology, I. 6l ; Fortescue, The Mass, p. 29. As to the " son of God," St. Paul and the Johannine mystic are sufficient evidence of its propriety as a description of the Christian soul. * Op. cit.t Ode xxxvi.
T
274 THE MYSTIC WAY
And all that have seen me were amazed, and I was regarded by them
as a new person. . . . Nothing appeared closed to me, because I was the door of everything." *
The most ancient baptismal frescoes of the catacombs express this same idea of a veritable renovation, or new birth. The giving of new power to the paralytic in the pool of Bethesda, and of light to the man blind from birth, are here the common symbols of baptism. In the rare pictures which represent the actual administration of the sacrament, the catechumen appears as a little child: whilst in the inscriptions the newly baptised are called infants and re-born — renati, neophyti, pueri, puell*.2 They were called " infants," says St. Augustine, who must often have seen the catacomb frescoes, " because they were regenerate, had entered on a new life, and were re-born into Eternal Life " : and this language persisted till his own day. " That aged man," he says, describing the conver sion and baptism of Victorinus, " did not blush to become the child of Thy Christ— the babe of Thy font." 3
The early liturgies tell the same tale. In the Gothic rite, the priest prays that the baptised be " regenerate, to grow and be strengthened evermore in the inner man." In the Mozarabic, that they may be " restored to a new infancy."4 The mass for the newly baptised in the Gelasian sacramentary invokes the Deity as "Thou who dost receive into the heavenly kingdom only those re-born."5 Further, in this respect the belief of the cata combs remains the belief of the living Church. The sublime invocation for the blessing of the waters of the font in the Roman Missal gathers up into one great prayer the whole cycle of mystical ideas connected with new birth.
1 Op. cit., Ode xvii.
2 Cf. Wilpert, Le Pitture delle Catacombe Romam, 1910, Vol. II. pp. 235-240, where a full description of all known examples will be found.
8 Augustine, Serm. 266, and Conf., Bk. VIII. cap. 2. 4 Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities^ articles " Baptism " and " Neophyte." 6 Wilpert, op. cit., p. 236.
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" May the Holy Spirit, by the secret intermingling of His divine power, make fruitful this water, prepared for the regeneration of men; that, holiness having been con ceived from the immaculate womb of the Divine Fountain, a celestial offspring may come forth, born again, trans formed into a new creature. And may all those distin guished either by sex in the body, or by age in time, be brought forth into one infancy by Grace, their mother." l
Moreover, throughout the primitive time — as if to emphasise the reality of this fresh start, this spiritual infancy — after his baptism milk and honey were given to the neophyte, as they were in the antique world to new born infants : honey to quicken and milk to feed.3 " What, then," says the second-century writer of the Epistle of Barnabas, " mean the milk and honey? This : that as the infant is kept alive first by honey, and then by milk, so also we, being quickened and kept alive by the faith of the promise, and by the Word, shall live ruling over the earth."8
As experience stiffened into creed, and the little con centrated Church of the Saints became the great diluted Church of the State, there was an inevitable transference of emphasis from interior fact to dramatic expression. Magic, which everywhere dogs the footsteps of religion
1 Missale Romanum : Benedict™ fontis. The idea of Grace, or of iti personification the Holy Spirit, as the " Mother " of the new creature is of great antiquity, and is found amongst other places in the writings of St. Macarius the Great of Egypt.
2 Cf. Cabrol, Origines liturgiques, p. 66, and Duchesne, Origines du culu chrhien, 3rd edition, pp. 183, 535. The Leonine Sacramentary gives the prayer with which the milk and honey were blessed — " Benedic, Domine, et has tuas creaturas fontis mellis, et lactis, et pota famulos tuos ex hoc fonte aquae vitae perennis qui est Spiritus veritatis, et enutri eos de hoc lacte et melle." Cf. Duchesne, op. cit.y p. 183. On the image of milk as a spiritual food of the " babes in Christ," cf. Clement of Alexandria, Paed., I. 6; the Odes of Solomon, Ode xix; Tertullian, De Corona, cap. 3. The pail of milk, no doubt with this same significance, appears amongst the frescoes of the catacombs. Cf. Wilpert, op. cit.
8 Epistle of Barnabas, cap. 6. T 2
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as automatism dogs the footsteps of life, seized on the Christian sacraments, and identified the exterior rite of baptism with the interior and psychological fact of "re generation." The springing up of the divine seed in the soul, the change of consciousness, the emergence of the tendency to Reality which begins the Mystic Way, was at last supposed to be conditioned by the external sign : as the interior feeding upon the Divine Nature was sup posed to be conditioned by Eucharistic communion. As the exterior Church grew in numbers and popularity the collective vision became dim, and the mystical experience rare : the majority of those swept into the Christian net were capable at most of a temporary exaltation of con sciousness, under the influence of those dramatic cere monies which are like poignant and suggestive pictures of the private adventures of the soul. These ceremonies did, and do, snatch up the attentive mind to heightened rhythms of being. They make it aware, according to its measure, of the supernal world; as the antique mysteries conferred on their initiates a temporary exaltation of con sciousness. Hence they soon imposed themselves upon the crowd, as a part of the actual body, instead of the out ward vesture of the " Bride." Yet their value, as fixing and making objective the meaning of the Christian life — dramatising it as a birth into, and a growth within a. new and higher order of Reality, a treading of the Mystic Way —cannot be over-rated. The whole biological secret of Jesus, the ascent of human personality to complete fruition of the Eternal Order — the progressive deification of the soul, by the dual action of an inflowing energy from without, and organic growth from within — is still implied in the two sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist ; though hidden beneath an elaborate magical apparatus of exorcism, lustration, and invocation, occult gestures and " Words of Power."
Moreover, these sacraments were often from the first veritable " means of grace," bridges flung out towards
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the Spiritual Order, for selves capable of receiving the messages of Reality. By their interweaving of the sensual with the super sensual, they brought the Eternal into time, translated the Song of Angels into a dialect that man could understand. They focussed, as great rituals can, the atten tive will in the new direction ; and conditioned a true change in the quality of consciousness. Thus St. Cyprian says of his own baptism : " After the stain of my early life had been washed away by the birth-wave, and a light from above poured into my purified and reconciled breast, and after I had drunk the Spirit from heaven and a second birth had restored and made me a new man — at once in a marvellous fashion my doubts began to be set at rest, doors which had been shut against me were thrown open, dark places grew light, what had seemed hard before was now easy of accomplishment, and what I had thought impossible was now seen to be within my power. So that I could now recognise that . . . that thing in me which the Holy Spirit was quickening had begun to be of God." l This is a real conversion : not a magical act but a veritable " change of mind," a quickening of the higher centres, which begins, as Cyprian himself recognises, a new growth towards Reality. So too the martyr Methodius, though in common with the whole church of his day he identifies initiation into the spiritual life with the sacramental act, says that those who so participate in the Divine Order are " made Christs " ; and adds that in the experience of each such re-born soul, the growth of Christ, the essential mystic movement from incarnation to passion, must repeat itself.2
1 Cyprian, Ad Donat., iv. Given by Swete, Tht Holy Spirit in the Ancient Church, p. 115.
2 Cf. Swete, op. cit.y p. 148.
II
ALEXANDRIA AND THE ART OF CONTEMPLATION
IT was no doubt the continued, and genuinely deep and fertile, experience of Novelty — change, conversion, growth into a fresh order of reality — in selves of power and enthusiasm, the occasional attainment of the Unitive Life in those of an exceptional sanctity, which kept alive the idea of a new life enjoyed by the " twice born " soul : a life of which the essence was participation in the Life of God. We find this idea in most of the earlier Fathers; and not only in those who have been subjected to that Neoplatonic influence which is supposed to condition all Christian mysticism. " Ye are imitators of God," says Ignatius to his fellow Christians.1 Union and com munion with Him, says Irenaeus of Lyons, still more strongly, is the object of the inflowing " Spirit " and the enhanced consciousness that it brings. Men are to be " lifted up into the Divine Life " : 2 and Jesus, born of a woman and ascending to the Father, "recapitulates" the history of the race, " uniting man to the Spirit, and causing the Spirit to dwell in man." 3 These statements are in the direct line of descent from St. Paul and the Fourth Evangelist, and represent the steady continuance of the thin bright stream of Christian mysticism.
Especially by the three great Egyptians, Clement of Alexandria, his pupil Origen, and that almost forgotten genius, St. Macarius the Great,4 — though only to one of
1 ^ Epb., cap. I a Contra Har., I. 2, and IX. I. * Op. cit., V. 20. 4 Clement, t. 150-60 — c. 220. Origen, c. 185-253. St. Macarius, c, 295-386.
278
MYSTIC LIFE IN EARLY CHURCH 279
them, and that the last, can we ascribe with certainty a pre-eminently mystic consciousness, a true and organic re-making on the levels of Eternal Life — the primitive secret of transcendence was preserved, and carried over the three dangerous centuries in which the temporal and intellectual bulwarks of the exterior Church were build ing: the time, stretching from the Apostolic Fathers to St. Augustine, during which the full flood of Hellenistic thought was poured into the Christian stream. It is largely owing to these three writers that, in this epoch of fluid and abounding theologies, of ceaseless speculation, of bewilderingly various expressions of life, we yet seem able to discern the survival of the genuine mystic type ; the awakened human spirit, the member of the "New Race," still pressing on towards a veritable participation in Reality, still trying to understand and to describe its felt experiences.
Those felt experiences, those first-hand communications from the Transcendent Order, those searching readjust ments towards the Universal Life, were soon observed to be the privilege of the few. Psychological fact refused to accommodate itself to magical theories of "baptismal grace" which linked the actuality of new birth with the symbolic drama of the font. Of those who changed their faith, only a few were found to have changed their minds. Hence, that primary cleavage of men into two orders which we find in the Synoptics, St. Paul and the Fourth Gospel — those who were susceptible of true organic regeneration, and those who could but receive at second hand the message of Eternal Life — reasserted itself vigorously. This distinction, which is rooted in life and not in philosophy, had forced itself in turn upon Jesus, Paul, and the Johannine mystic : each compelled by bitter experience to distinguish between the " little flock " who could receive the "Kingdom," respond to the vital impulse which led them into Truth, and the throng of "believers" to whom that inner family mediated a
280 THE MYSTIC WAY
certain measure of happiness and spiritual health, a fugitive experience of Reality. Hence the so-called " Gnostic " element in the New Testament.1
This element it is, disguised by its Hellenistic dress, and somewhat adulterated by the new wine of Neo- platonism, which inspires Clement of Alexandria's division of Christendom into those who live the higher life of spiritual Christianity or " knowledge," and those who live the lower life of popular or " somatic " Christianity, conditioned by " obedience and faith." 2 The unfortunate word "gnostic," chosen by Clement to describe the true Christian initiate, and the fact that he appeals to the authority not only of St. Paul, but of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Philo, in support of his theory that a lower and a higher form of spiritual life is a part of the necessity of things, have obscured the fact that his " gnostic " is really a " mystic " ; the lineal descendant of the " Beloved Disciple " of the Fourth Evangelist, the portrait of the New Man seen through another temperament.3 The "higher life," in fact, which Clement describes, is in essence the mystic life : the free transfigured existence of the " children of the bridegroom " as lived and preached by Jesus and Paul. In him the stream of spirit has found a fresh channel : changed somewhat in appearance by the banks between which it flows, but still the same " mount ing flood" which tends to freedom and reality, to the establishment of the regnant human personality within the framework of Time. The double tendency of the mystic — towards an outgoing search o£ Absolute Perfection, and towards an interior moral transformation or sanctifi- cation, which shall adjust the self to the goodness, truth and beauty of the Reality that it desires — so strongly
1 On this New Testament " Gnosticism," see H. J. Holtzmann, Neutestamentliche Theologie, Vol. II. pp. 437 et seq.
* Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alexandria, pp. 85-97, has an admirable account of the " two lives " in Clement.
3 Cf. Baron Ton Hiigel in the Encyclopedia Britannicat Vol. XV. pp. 452-457-
MYSTIC LIFE IN EARLY CHURCH 281
marked in the ethical and apocalyptic sides of the preach ing of Jesus1 is discovered again in Clement's "gnostic," for whom Faith, Hope and Charity are the steps of the upward way. Nor is there any real difference between the " spiritual man " whom Paul describes as " able to scrutinise all things " 2 because his new life "in" God has given him a span wider than that of the "psychic man," and the gnostic who owes his lucid vision of, and perfect adaptation to, Reality, to the fact that he "is the pupil of that holy spirit dispensed by God, which is the mind of Christ." 3
In contradistinction to the heretical " gnostic " sects, and in strict accordance with the teaching of Paul and John, the knowledge of this "true gnostic" is the work, not of intellect but of love; of the whole self's tendency and desire. Where the eyes of the mind are vanquished, this outgoing passion, this intuition of the heart, suc ceeds : Cor ad cor loquitur. "God, who is known to those who love, is love," says Clement, echoing the Fourth Gospel ; and proceeds " and we must be allied to Him by divine love, so that by like we may see like. . . . The transcendentally clear and absolutely pure in satiable vision, which is the privilege of intensely loving souls . . . such is the vision attainable by the pure in heart." 4
For Clement, as for Paul and the Fourth Evangelist, the state of " divine sonship," a union which depends on the upgrowth of a realness, a being, latent in man, is the aim of the spiritual life. To this condition the Logos, the " Instructor " or " hidden Steersman " of the soul, is training adolescent humanity.5 It is achieved by different
1 Cf. H. J. Holtzmann, Nfutestamentliche Tbeologie, Vol. I. pp. 284- 295 ; and von Hiigel, Eternal Life, p. 59.
2 I Cor. ii. 15. s Strom., V. 4. 4 Strom., V. I and VII. 3.
5 Paed.9 I. 7. Compare also the beautiful Clementine hymn, where the Logos is addressed as " Bridle of untamed colts, Wing of unwander- ing birds, sure Helm of babes, and Shepherd of royal lambs." Given in Warren, The Liturgy and Ritual of the Ante-Nicene Church, p. 182.
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selves in different degrees. The "gnostic," he says, is " made like the Lord up to the measure of his capacity " ; he " forms and creates himself." It is his destiny to be come " a divine image, resembling God " : for the Logos, impressing upon him the seal of " perfect contemplation" — the permanent consciousness of spiritual realities — makes him, as far as possible, "like the Essential Life through which we live the true life." 1
Clement introduces into Christian literature the term "deification" to describe this central fact of the uplifting of human life into freedom and reality. In him, too, we find first the " threefold way " of ascent, the threefold division of men into the " slaves, the servants, and the sons " of the Transcendent Order.2 This classification, probably borrowed from the language of the mysteries, corresponds closely with the purgative, illuminative and unitive states of consciousness successively experienced by the growing self; and became, during the patristic and mediaeval periods, a part of the technical language of Christian mysticism. The believer, he says in one place in profoundly mystical language, ascends through the stages of faith and of hope to that of love ; in which he is made like to the Well-beloved in striving to become that which is the object of his love.3
This idea of a growth, an advance, a progressive initia tion, as an integral part of Christianity, is deeply planted in Clement's mind. Though his witness to the mystical life-process is rather that of a looker-on than of one who has indeed participated in the fulness of the transcen dental life, yet he leaves us in no doubt that the vision which inspires his language is the true mystical vision of an organic growth up into Reality. He sees it, too, in its well-marked psychological stages of ascent: and finds in the mystery-dramas which expressed the religious longings of the Hellenistic world, an apt image of the Christian mystery of transcendence — an unfortunate fact
1 Strom., VII. 3. * Strom., I. 27. • Strom., V. 3.
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which has greatly confused the subsequent history of mysticism.
"It is not without reason," he says, " that in the mysteries that obtain amongst the Greeks, purification holds the first place; as also does the laver amongst the Barbarians. After these come the Lesser Mysteries, which have some foundation of instruction and preparation for that which is to come after; and then the Great Mysteries, in which nothing remains to be learned of the universe, but only to contemplate, to apprehend with the eye of the soul, the nature and being of things." 1
Here the drama of the Pagan mysteries provides Clement with a double image : first, of the discipline of the external Church, moving from penance and baptism through instruction to participation in the " Great Mystery " of the Eucharist : secondly, and perhaps specially, of the interior life of the growing soul, the gradual purification and enhancement of its consciousness as it passes along the purgative and illuminative ways to the heights of unitive contemplation. Such contemplation is to him the spiritual equivalent of the Eucharist. " The food of the full-grown ... is mystic contemplation : for this is the flesh and the blood of the Logos, that is, the laying hold of the divine power and essence." 2
But it is just here, in his way of conceiving of the last phase in Spirit's transcendence, that we touch the weak point in Clement's doctrine. Though for him the true gnosis is still, and definitely, something into which man must grow, which demands the vigorous purgation of his character, its re-making on higher levels, and is the reward of a "union of hearts"; yet the fact that he holds out to the neophyte the promise of a more abundant knowledge rather than a more abundant life, shows him to be already affected by the oncoming tide of Neoplatonic thought. Here and elsewhere in his writings, he makes it clear that
1 Strom., V. 2.
8 Strom., V. 10. Cf. St. Augustine, C*»/., Bk. VII. cap. 10.
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ecstatic contemplation, the still vision and fruition of Reality, is for him the supreme summit of the " higher life," the end and aim of transcendence ; 1 that he looks forward at last, not to the lifting up of man in his whole ness to ever deeper, richer, more various and creative activities, but to the freeing of some spiritual principle in him from the limitations of the flesh. This, rather than the all-round training of the true athlete, is the object of his ascetic discipline. It is to be attained through the gradual acquirement of a "holy indifference," or apathy, a steady progressive rejection of sensual images, a flight from the world. In all this, Clement is anticipating the mighty though one-sided genius of Plotinus, and turning his back on the rich and fertile ideal of Christian mysticism, at once " world-denying " and " world-renew ing," with its perpetual movement between contemplation and action, vision and service ; its dual discovery of God in Becoming and Being, in rest and in work.
This dissociation of the two compensating elements of the mystical life, and total concentration on the tran scendent aspect of Divine Reality, becomes yet more exaggerated in Clement's greatest disciple; the saintly scholar Origen. Origen, who was the fellow pupil of Plotinus in the Neoplatonic school of Ammonius Saccus,2
1 Dr. Bigg (Christian Platonists of Alexandria, p. 98) insists that there is no trace of " ecstacy " in Clement : adding some confused remarks about the identity of " ecstacy " with the " prayer of quiet," with which it has little in common. It is true that Clement's descriptions of the gnostic's vision lack the passionate realism of Plotinus ; the whole temper of his work is that of the mystically-minded man who sees the summits that he cannot reach. But he leaves us in no doubt that the consummation to which he looks is that state of impassioned attention to Transcendent Reality in which the soul forgets all earthly things and " has fulhead of fruition in the life of peace." Whether this fruition does or does not entail bodily trance, depends wholly on the psycho-physical organisation of the contemplative, whose concentration on the Supernal Order may or may not inhibit his consciousness of, and response to, the sensual world.
8 Harnack, History of Dogma, Vol. I. p. 348.
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has been called the ancestor of the mediaeval mystics; l but this is only true in a literary and intellectual sense. Though his life was marked by a profound asceticism, he was, as a matter of fact, less truly mystical than his master. Love is still with him the means by which the soul is united to its Source, and sternest purification the condition of all heavenly intimacy; but it is again the passion for knowledge, not the humble and generous instinct of self- surrender which drives man's spirit to the heights. We cannot deny that for Origen, in spite of the ardour which often inspires his words, the Christian " gnostic " is essen tially a " superior person "; a spiritual individualist, more interested in getting light for himself than in giving it back to the world. There is some truth in Harnack's description of his ideal as that of " a self-sufficient sage " who has transcended the evils and oppositions of the world, and lives in a state of supersensual contentment.2 Yet his powerful mind, perpetually working on the substance of the Christian " revelation " seized and gave expression to aspects of that "revelation" which might otherwise have perished. Porphyry said of him that he "lived like a Christian, but thought like a Greek." Hence, emancipated from the narrow sectarianism which already obsessed the great mass of believers, he saw the " new life " in its universal aspect : and came nearer than any other writer of the Patristic time — with the single exception of St. Macarius of Egypt — to an understanding of Christianity as the invasion and exhibition of super- sensual forces, an outbirth of Reality, a fresh manifesta tion of the ascending Spirit of Life. The action of this Spirit, he says, presses all rational creatures towards the state of perfection, that they may finally attain to the Vision of God. But the work of the Spirit is confined to those who are " turned towards the Best " : those, that is to say, who are orientated in the right direction, whose " attention to life " is concentrated upon the higher, not 1 Bigg, op. cit.y p. 188. * Harnack, op. cit., Vol. II. p. 337.
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the lower, levels of existence.1 Moreover, the career of Jesus is for him, as for Paul, the classic exhibition of human possibilities ; an earnest of the life attainable by all men. The interweaving of divine and human nature, the participation in Reality, begun in Him, is continued in all those who live His life and grow as He grew : and hence it is the duty of all Christians to " imitate Christ." This, the central truth of Christian mysticism, is stated by Origen in uncompromising terms. " From Him there began the interweaving of divine and human nature, in order that the human, by communion with the divine, might rise to be divine; not in Jesus alone, but in all those who not only believe but enter upon the life which Jesus taught." 2
" To Origen," says Harnack, " the highest value of Christ's person lies in the fact that the Deity has here condescended to reveal to us the whole fulness of His essence, in the person of a man, as well as in the fact that a man is given to us who shows that the human spirit is capable of becoming entirely God's. ... As in Christ's case His human soul gradually united itself with the Logos in proportion as it voluntarily subjected its will to God, so also every man receives grace according to his prayers." 3
Had the substance of Origen's spirituality always been consistent with this sublime intuition, he might indeed have been called the father of the Christian mystics. But the idea of God as the utterly transcendent and unknow able Absolute, only attainable by the via negativa of a total rejection of the sensual world, which he had learned from the Neoplatonists, coloured too much of his thought; and led to that harsh separation of the active from the contemplative life and of the temporal from the eternal world which is definitely un-Christian — a destruction of the synthesis achieved by Jesus, an unravelling rather than an interweaving of the "divine" and " human" sides
1 De Princ., I. 3, 5. 2 Contra Cehum, III. 28.
8 History of Dogma, Vol. II. pp. 314, 315.
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of life. " Contemplatives," says Origen, with more than a touch of arrogance, " are in the house of God : those who lead an active life are only in the vestibule"; * and the last stage of the perfect soul is that of the dove, flying from all terrestrial things in order that it may rest in " the treasures of knowledge and wisdom." 2 His theory of contemplation, in fact, is at bottom the theory of negative transcendence, of the attainment of Being by the rejection of Becoming, seen in excess in some forms of Hindu mysticism : though his Christian feeling gives to it a certain warmth of tone. It is, says Harnack with some justice, " a joyous ascetic contemplativeness, in which the Logos is the friend, associate, and bridegroom of the soul, which now, having become a pure spirit, and being herself deified, clings in love to the Deity " — one half, in fact, of the total Christian experience. " In this view the thought of regeneration, in the sense of a funda mental renewal of the Ego, has no place." s
Thus Origen really presents two opposing views of the mystic life, and betrays the mixed Christian and Pagan temper of his mind. In him " the brook and river " meet, but do not merge. In him, as in no other writer, are found side by side, though still unharmonised, all the elements which were afterwards characteristic of the developed mysticism of the Middle Ages. He is the first Christian to apply the passionate imagery of the Song of Songs to the relation of the soul with God. He adopted, and laid stress upon, the Neoplatonic diagram of a " ladder of ascent " : the psychological method by which the contemplative stops the wheel of imagination, empties the field of consciousness, abstracts himself one by one from visible things, from all that is known and all that may be conceived, until at last by this steady process of reduction he attains to a universe swept clear of all but the Unknowable One who is " above all being and above
1 In Ps. cxxxiii. 2 In Cant. I. 4.
8 Harnack, op. eit., Vol. II. p. 376.
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all knowledge." l This proceeding is often looked upon as the very essence of Christian mysticism.2 It is, on the contrary, merely a method or discipline, based upon psychological laws which have been formulated as the result ofgenerations of experience, and which is adopted by many Christian mystics to facilitate the difficult business of readjustment and exclusive attention to Reality, in those hours of contemplation which uphold their active life.
Some such method the mystic type was bound either to appropriate or to invent: and, since our mental machinery is undenominational, it here followed a true instinct in accepting and turning to new uses the system of mental training already evolved by the race. Whether the supersensual fact on which it is concentrated be called Brahma, the Celestial Venus, the Absolute, Allah, or the Blessed Trinity, consciousness passes through much the same stages, follows the same general laws, obeys the same psychological imperatives, in the course of attending to it. Hence Hindu, Sufi, Neoplatonic and Christian contem- platives have much in common, and may and do learn from one another the principles which should govern the training of their peculiar powers. Nor can they, as a class, dispense with such training. That which the great spiritual genius, the great natural artist, does by instinct, the many who only possess a talent for Reality must do by the nurture and gradual education of their lesser faculty for God. Jesus lived always in a state of direct and profound communion with the supernal order, " His head in Eternity, His feet in time." Paul and John had little need of the "Celestial Ladder" to help their flight towards the Origin of All that Is. But others, who lacked their power, did require the support of some system which should initiate them into the art of contemplation, show
1 Dionysius the Areopagite, Dg Myst. Tbeo. I. I. Cf. Harnack, History of Dogma, Vol. II. p. 375. 8 Especially by writers of the Ritschlian school. Cf . supr a, Cap. I, § V.
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them how the machinery of perception might be adjusted to the rhythm of this new universe.
Such a system — such a method — the Christian mystic of the third century found ready to his hand in Neo- platonism, and adapted to the purposes of his own experience. Hence results one of those confusing cases in which the characteristics of one form of life are found, " to a certain extent," in the other. The mystical philo sophy of the Neoplatonists was, like that of the classic Hindu schools — to which it may be indebted — fundamentally negative and sterile. It was directed to the attainment of pure Being by the total rejection of Becoming ; its ideal was static absorption in an unconditioned Reality, the personal satisfaction of the Vision of the One "whose dwelling-place is darkness." 1 We see it in its best and least forbidding form in the works of Plotinus ; for here the ardent soul of a great natural mystic perpetually wars with, and often conquers, the map-making brain of a metaphysician. Baron von Hugel has pointed out that the inconsistencies of Plotinus are largely the result of this war; of the refusal of the intuitive spirit to accept the conclusions of the logical mind. " In spite of the philosopher's insistence upon the emptiness of God, and the corresponding need of emptiness in the soul that would approach Him, Plotinus's words, where his own mystical experience speaks, really convey or imply the very opposite — the unspeakable richness of God in life, love and joy; His ever immediate, protective closeness to man's soul ; and this soul's discovery of Him, the Lover, by becoming aware of, and by completely willing, His actual contact, when it freely, heroically turns its whole being, away from the narrow self, to Him, its root and its true, overflowing life." 2
Thus it is that whilst the brain of the philosopher, struggling to measure infinite Fact by finite image, is driven at last to conceive of God in terms as negative,
i Cf. supra, Cap. I, § II. » Eternal Lift, p. 83.
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as abstract, and as arid as those employed by the most orthodox Hindu, yet the intuitive heart of Plotinus discerns something behind this Pure Being, this imper sonal and unconditioned Absolute, which evokes in him the same passionate love which the Christian or Sufi mystic offers to his personal Deity. Plainly it is the actual presence of God which Plotinus, the natural mystic, discerns and worships behind the forbidding diagrams invented by his busy intellect. So too his rapturous contemplation of Divine Perfection forces upon him a convinced consciousness of imperfection ; and a purifying process, a veritable purgation, becomes as necessary for him as for the Christian saints. Ordinary human exist ence " which is without God " is for him " a vestige of life and an imitation of that life which is real " : l a position which St. Augustine was able to accept without change.2 Like another Baptist, he calls on his disciples to " change their minds " and enter on a deliberate asceti cism, whereby the soul can detach itself alike from unreality and from desire, transcend the senses, and become a spiritual being dwelling in a spiritual world : a state of consciousness which bears a superficial resemblance to the Illuminative Way of the Christian mystics.
But the difference between the two systems — or rather between the artificial system and the organic life process — becomes clear when we reach the third stage ; the objective to which this training tends. Here, instead of the Unitive Life of the Christian, we find the Ecstatic Union of the Neoplatonist. We have seen what the completed life of union, or sonship, the true participation in the Divine Nature, meant for Paul and John : how far they were from confusing it with mere " other-worldliness " or with the temporary raptures of ecstatic vision, how deeply it was founded in the principles of self-surrender and heroic love, how closely they identified it with the career of divine fecundity, of glad self-spending in the interests i Ennead, VI. 9. * Aug., Conf., Bk. X. cap. 28.
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of the Universal Life. True, this untiring activity of the deified soul is supported by those ecstatic contemplations in which it enjoys a veritable fruition of God, and lives " eternal life in the midst of time " : but this is only one half of its completed movement — the outward swing to the Transcendent Order, which conditions the homeward turning swing of love to men. But for Plotinus there is no question of an outflowing gift to others of the vitality that has been received. Here " deification " means, not the acquisition of a divine creativeness, a participation in the glad travail of Infinite Life and Love, but merely the transitory experience of ecstatic union with God, "alone with the Alone " ; the intense assurance of Reality, the attainment of that strange, brief " silence in heaven " when the perceiver " seems to be one with the Thing perceived," and " folded about Divinity, has no part void of contact with Him." 1 Such a mysticism as this, however lofty its expression, is yet definitely self-regarding : the satisfaction of a spiritual lust rather than the veritable marriage of the souJ. In it the elan vital finds a blind alley, not a thorough fare : since its highest stage is a condition of static know ledge, not a condition of more abundant life. At its best it mistakes a means for an end : at its worst, it leads directly —and in historic fact did lead — to the soul-destroying excesses of that Quietism, that idle basking in the Presence of God, which all the true mystics unsparingly condemn.
This, then, was the substance of that new influence which the third century brought to bear upon Christian mysticism : with the result which might have been antici pated. For a time, the new art of contemplation, with its promise of ecstatic union with God, a direct fruition of Reality, swept all before it : destroying the delicate balance between life temporal and life eternal which constitutes the strength and beauty of the Christian idea. The Christian mystic — still more, the mystically-minded Christian who lacked the vitality, the romantic genius
* Enneads V. 3 and VI. 9. u a
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needed for the true business of transcendence — seems to have become intoxicated by this art when first it was introduced to him. The old vivid consciousness of a new life lived in closest communion with Reality, which had inspired the collective life of the Church, was fading : and this promise of the attainment of the Unchanging God — a swift yet veritable contact with Eternal Life— by the total rejection of all changing things, a deliberate elevation and concentration of the mind, offered him a tempting way of escape from the formalities and disillu sions of an ever more highly organised, more ecclesiastical and magical cult.
Moreover, this art was based on psychological experi ence. Those who practised it found that it worked. The artificial production of ecstacy, one of the oldest of human secrets, was here reduced to a scientific formula, and given a justification half religious, half philosophic. From this deliberate and studied emptying of the mind, " leaving behind both sensible perceptions and intellectual efforts, and all objects of sense and thought, and all that is and all that is not," they did attain that indescribable condition of consciousness which they called the " Divine Dark in which God is said to dwell." * All mystics, Christian and non-Christian, agree that such states of pure receptivity, mind, heart and will surrendered to the All, are peculiarly favourable to the spiritual life : that the barriers of sense are then broken, and a veritable fruition of the Infinite is enjoyed by the contemplative soul. We know from St. Augustine that such a fruition was experienced by the adepts of Neoplatonism, Christian and Pagan alike. Hence it is not surprising that they accepted the system as it was, with all its elements of exaggerated passivity and " other-worldliness," its arid and exclusively transcendent definition of God, its tendency to supersensual egotism. Hence it is impossible to deny that the art of contempla-
1 Dionysius the Areopagite, De Myst. Theo., I., and Letter to Dorothy the Deacon.
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tion, as it came to be taught at least by some of the Fathers, has a strongly Pagan tone.
The secret of Jesus, His power as the perfect expression of completed human nature, had lain in His steady alterna tion of action and contemplation, the interweaving of two orders of Reality; His discovery of the "Kingdom" in the common things of life, His ecstatic fruition of God and unwearied service of man. In the so-called " mysti cism" of the Greek Fathers from the time of Origen onwards, we find few traces of this dual consciousness of Reality. What we do find is an imperfectly Christianised version of the exclusively transcendentalist and largely impersonal mysticism of the Pagan Neoplatonists : a view of the universe and of the soul's path to God, founded upon its doctrine of " Emanations." These Fathers have little to say about the true Mystic Way, the vital principle of growth, the total lifting-up of man to the life of Reality. That Eternal Life is for them essentially static ; removed by a vast distance from the sensual world, from which it is separated by those intervening worlds, Emanations, or Hierarchies, which mediate the Uncreated Light to created things, decreasing in splendour and reality, increasing in multiplicity, as they recede farther and farther from the One.
" If," says St. Basil the Great, " you would speak worthily of God, or understand that which is said of Him, leave your body, leave your senses, abandon alike both land and sea, tread the air beneath your feet, leave behind you all that is temporal, all the successiveness of things, all the beauty of this world; and rise above the stars and above all that you find admirable therein, their brilliance and their greatness, their happy influence upon this world. . . . Transcend in spirit all this universe, take your flight above the skies, and, soaring at those sublime heights, let the eyes of your soul rest upon the fairest of all beings ; look upon the heavenly armies, the choirs of Angels, consider the might of the Archangels, the glory
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of the Dominations, the seats whereon the Thrones are established, the Virtues, the Principalities, the Powers. Then, transcending even all angelic natures, raising your self in thought beyond and above all creation, contemplate the Divine Nature, steadfast and immovable, exempt from every vicissitude and every emotion, simple and indi visible, Inaccessible Light, Ineffable Power, Limitless Splendour, Incomparable Glory, the sovereign desirable Good, the Perfect Beauty which inflicts upon the enrap tured soul an ineffable wound of love, but of which human language is powerless to tell the Majesty." 1
The doctrine of the transcendence of God could hardly go further than in this passage ; which contains in germ the central idea of Dante's Paradiso. Dionysius the Areopagite, usually and wrongly credited with the intro duction of these doctrines into Christian mysticism, says no more: and St. Basil wrote at least a hundred years before that enigmatic personage.2
It is clear that the one-sided development of such a tendency as this was of doubtful benefit to Christian mysticism. Yet on the other hand it must not be for gotten that the Christian mystic had much to learn from
1 First Homily on Faith.
J Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500) has obtained a far higher place than he deserves in the history of Christian mysticism. A strange and subtle thinker rather than a mystic, he fused together Jewish, Christian and Neoplatonic ideas to form a system of theology at once fantastic and profound. But of the really mystical ideas in his works hardly one is original. Writing after the great spiritual experimentalists and specu lative thinkers of the first five centuries had done their work, and the tradition of contemplation was consequently fixed, he gathered up from the writings and experiences alike of Christians and Neoplatonists, the elements of his mystical theology. It was chiefly through the preservation of his writings, their false attribution to the disciple of St. Paul, and their translation into Latin in the ninth century, that the Neoplatonic method of contemplation was inherited in its most exaggerated form by the mediaeval Church; but its principles were already antique when Dionysius was born. He did but reduce to intellectual terms a practical tcience which had already been worked out in life.
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the Neoplatonic specialists, though he paid for his lesson a heavy price. From those specialists came the whole discipline in contemplative prayer, the psychological drill, the "degrees of orison," the rules which govern the adjustment of our consciousness to the Transcendental World, which now form an integral part of the " Mystical Theology" of the Church, and have helped and con ditioned for centuries the communion of the contemplative saints with the Infinite Life. The stages of ascent described by Richard of St. Victor, St. Bonaventura, Ruysbroeck, Hilton; the degrees of orison of St. Bernard or St. Teresa; all these owe much to the acute observation and descriptive genius of the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, and probably through them to the adepts of older " mystic " cults. The ardent souls of the first Christian initiates, their wild, romantic passion for reality, somehow achieved that " contact with God," that immersion in the Spiritual Order, which sustained and nourished their organic growth* Just because of this spontaneous quality in it, their life " towards God " had a power and freshness never found again. They were great natural artists, who discovered for themselves — though often with great stress and difficulty — the requisite means of expression. Though the machinery of the mind were ill-adjusted to the task laid on it, an untamed ardour upheld them : their deep unconquerable instinct for transcendence, their stormy love found, somehow, the thoroughfare along which it could force a way. "The Spirit," says St. Paul, describing these struggles, " helpeth our infirmity; for we know not how to pray as we ought ; but the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us, with groanings which cannot be uttered." l
Such natural and untrained effort could not survive the first ages of enthusiasm. The " new creature " and his new powers must submit to education. The mental dis cipline elaborated by the Neoplatonists, the exercises which * Rom. viii. 26 (R.V.).
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turned the self's attention from the sensual to the super- sensual world, that process of detachment whereby the field of consciousness was emptied of all other objects, the mirror made clear for the reflection of the Uncreated Light, here came to the assistance of the Christian type : educated its wild genius, and prevented the shipwreck which might easily have overtaken the New Life in the hour of its necessary but perilous movement from the spontaneous to the organised stage.
It was greatly due to the philosophic language provided by the Neoplatonists, that the ecstatic, outgoing aspect of the Christian life — the fact of its empirical fruition of God — became fixed in the growing Christian tradition. This language it was which provided the means whereby the great intuitions of the contemplative, which would otherwise have remained merely personal experiences, were translated into intellectual concepts and entered into the currency of Christian thought. Hence it is that we know so much more about the transcendental experience of the mediaeval mystics — although the language by which they describe it is largely made up of negations — than about that of Paul or John; who are left inarticulate by their most sublime adventures. Silence wraps round the communion of Jesus with the Father. That he was " caught up into Paradise and heard unspeakable words 5> l is all that Paul can say of his own great adventure — he is unable to reduce his intuition to speech. Compare with this the description of Christian ecstacy given by St. Basil the Great,2 the classic treatise on " dark contem plation " of Dionysius the Areopagite, that jewel of mediaeval literature, The Cloud of Unknowing, the sublime poetry in which Dante tells of his brief vision of God,3 the wonderful self-analyses of St. Teresa, or the exact psychology of St. John of the Cross: and you will see the debt which the mystical consciousness of the Church owes to Alexandrian thought.
1 2 Cor. xii. 4. 2 Supra, p. 293. * Par., XXXIII.
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Moreover, as the centuries passed, and the first-hand experience of many great mystics worked upon the diagram which they had inherited from the Neoplatonists, a steady Christianisation of that diagram took place. The tendency which it represented became merged in the general process of the spiritual life. Its hard antitheses between action and contemplation, God and the World, Being and Becoming, were softened and humanised by the " fire of love." It is true that we can trace the persistence of its abstract and negative elements in the reports of many mediaeval contemplatives : in Angela of Foligno's ineffable vision of God in "great darkness," where the soul " seems to see nothing, yet sees all things," l in Tauler's description of the " Wilderness of the Quiet Desert of Godhead," 2 or — in lovelier shape— in Ruys- broeck's " Abyss of Darkness where the loving spirit dies to itself, and wherein begins the manifestation of God and of Eternal Life." 3 These concepts survive because they do no doubt represent the effort of the mind to express in human speech one side of man's ineffable experience of that Transcendent Reality which is " dark to the intellect and radiant to the heart " : that paradoxical synthesis of the extremes of deprivation and fulfilment which he calls the "rich nought," the "dim silence where lovers lose themselves," and in which, mysteriously, " the night of thought becomes the light of perception." 4
" Reck thee never," says The Cloud of Unknowing, " if thy wits cannot reason of this nought ; for surely, I love it much the better. It is so worthy a thing in itself, that they cannot reason thereupon. This nought may better be felt than seen : for it is full blind and full dark to them that have but little while looked thereupon. Nevertheless,
1 Visionum et instructionum liber, cap. 26 (Eng. trans., p. 183-185). * Third Instruction (The Inner Way, p. 324).
3 UOrnement des noces spirituelles, Lib. III. cap. 2.
4 Coventry Patmpre, T be Rod, the Root and the Flower, " Aurea Dicta," XIII.
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if I shall soothlier say, a soul is more blinded in feeling of it for abundance of ghostly light, than for any darkness or wanting of bodily light. What is he that calleth it nought? Surely it is our outer man, and not our inner. Our inner man calleth it All." x
But in all the works of true Christian mysticism, though the psychological methods of Neoplatonism are accepted and adapted to the Way of the Cross, these methods are perpetually sweetened and invigorated by the Christian elements of personal love and eager outgoing desire : the " little secret love " " speedily springing unto God as a sparkle from the coal " ; 2 the determined effort of awakened spirit to " be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man." Thus the developed Christian science of contemplation, though its origins are, on the intellectual side, Neoplatonic, is full of an implied appeal to the active will. It too has suffered a " new birth " ; received a new dower of vitality, and become a vigorous art, to be practised " stalwartly but listily, with a devout and a pleasing stirring of love." 8 It presses out and up from the known world of sense to the " Cloud of Unknowing " ; and there, all intellectual concepts tran scended, new worlds of wonder, new eternal opportunities of service, are disclosed to the questing heart.
This " science of the love of God," as some of the saints have called it, has the zest and joy of a living, growing thing : for it is one of the forms under which the Spirit of Life "conquers the oppositions of matter," and obtains a foothold in the Transcendent sphere. It is a sign, not of the " higher laziness," but of the movement of human personality in its wholeness to a participation in a greater universe, a closer and more impassioned union with the Deity Who is not only " Eternal Rest " but also " Eternal Work " : who is found not only in the One, but in the Many, not only in the Cloud of Unknowing
1 'The Cloud of Unknowing, cap. 68. * Op. «'*., cap. 4.
3 Op. cit.y cap. 6.
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but also in the busy, stirring, suffering world of things. " Without our own industry and love," says Ruysbroeck, " we cannot be blessed." * The true contemplative is above all things a worker and a lover, who both sees and seeks, possesses and desires. This love it was — romantic, dynamic, self-spending — with which the Christian mystics animated the scientific spirituality of the Neoplatonic schools.
If we wish to see the true difference between such a mysticism and the ecstatic ascent to Reality solus cum solo taught and practised by Plotinus, we have but to go to St. Augustine ; who stands at the end of the fourth century, the typical figure which links in experience these two tendencies of life, and transmits them — fused in the crucible of his ardent temperament — to the mediaeval world. A natural mystic, an inveterate seeker for God, he had been an adept of the Neoplatonic ecstacy before his conversion. Possessed of unequalled powers of observation, with a peculiar genius for the description of psychological states, the passages in which he compares Platonic and Christian contemplation are amongst the classics of religious psychology. St. Augustine's Christi anity, when at last he attained it, was the complete and vital Christian mysticism of Paul. A " real life " lived within the Eternal Order was its objective; not a brief ex perience of Perfect Beauty — a mere glimpse of the Being of God. Movement was of its essence. In the crucial change, the self-surrender of his conversion, he found, as he says, " the road leading to the blessed Country which is no mere vision but a home." a Hence he looks back upon the sterile satisfactions of his Neoplatonic period, when "for a moment he beheld from a wooded height the land of peace, but found no path thereto." 3
The literature of mysticism contains no more vivid and realistic description of supernal experience than Augus-
1 VOmemeni des noces sfiritutUes, Lib. II. cap. 77.
a Aug., Conf.t Bk. VII. cap. 20. • Loc. fit., cap. 21.
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tine's report of his Platonic experiment in introversion, his brief Plotinian contemplation of the One. " Being by these books [of the Platonists] admonished to return unto myself, I entered into the secret chamber of my soul, guided by Thee ; and this I could do because Thou wast my helper. I entered, and beheld with the mysterious eye of my soul the light that never changes, above the eye of my soul, above my intelligence. It was not the common light which all flesh can see, nor was it greater yet of the same kind, as if the light of day were to grow brighter and brighter and flood all space. It was not like this, but something altogether different from any earthly illumina tion. Nor was it above my intelligence in the same way as oil is above water, or heaven above earth, but it was higher because it made me, and I was lower because made by it. He who knows the truth knows that Light, and he who knows that Light knows Eternity. Love knows that Light. . . . Step by step I was led upwards, from bodies to the soul which perceives by means of the bodily senses, and thence to the soul's inward faculty, to which the bodily sense reports external facts, and thence to the reasoning power. And when this power also found itself changeable it withdrew its thoughts from experience, abstracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensu ous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed. . . . And thus with the flash of one hurried glance it attained to the vision of That which Is. And then at last I saw Thy invisible things, under stood by means of the things that are made, but I could not sustain my gaze : my weakness was dashed back, and I was relegated to my ordinary experience, bearing with me nothing but a loving memory, cherishing as it were the fragrance of those meats on which I was not yet able
In this experience St. Augustine, no less than Plotinus, believed that he had truly enjoyed for an instant the 1 Bk. VII. caps. 10 and 17 slightly condensed.
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beatific Vision of God ; which is one and the same for Christian and for Platonist.1 That which he saw from the " wooded height " was indeed the promised land : the mighty synthesis of All that Is. But for the Platonic contemplative that land remains a vision, he " sees the end, but not the road thereto." 2 Hence, this glimpse of it — this " hurried glance " — could not satisfy Augustine's deep craving for Reality. Had it done so, his conversion need never have taken place. In his own classic phrase, the mystic need is for a Home, not for a Vision. He is not content to balance himself for one giddy moment on the apex of " the sublime pyramid of thought " : but demands of his transfigured universe depth and breadth as well as height — an all-round expression of Reality. His objective is " the participation of Eternity, of all things most delightful and desired, of all things most loved by them who have it," 3 which alone can satisfy the cravings of heart, mind and will; and such a participation means the adjustment of consciousness to a greater rhythm, growth into a new order of Reality — the treading of that Mystic Way which was " built by the care of the Heavenly Emperor."4 Even the swift flash of thought in which Monica and Augustine " touched the Eternal Wisdom " * cannot satisfy this instinct for a completed life lived in the " diviner air." 6 It was not vision which Augustine acclaimed as the firstfruits of his conversion, but the power to perform " free acts." 7
1 Cf. De Civ. Dei, Bk. X. cap. 2. * Aug., Conf , Bk. VII. cap. 20.
3 Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, Bk. II. cap. 42.
4 Aug., Conf., Bk. VII. cap. 20. 5 Ibid., Bk. IX. cap. 10.
6 The difference between these two phases in Augustine is well illus trated by the two exactly equivalent phases which Mr. Edmund Gardner distinguishes in the development of Dante. First, the philosophic " apparent mysticism of the Convivio" " not based upon a true religious experience, but upon an intellectual process." Secondly, the true mysticism of the Divina Commedia, entailing the vital experiences of the conversion and purification of the soul (Dante and the Mystics, p. 19).
' Aug., Conf., Bk. XL cap. I.
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Hence the Christian mystic can never afford to accept the principle of contemplation divorced from the prin ciple of growth : never forgets that being, not knowing, is his aim — that he moves, not towards clearer vision, but towards closer and more fruitful identity with the Spirit of Life. " Christian Mysticism," says Delacroix, " sub stitutes for ecstacy a wider state : where the permanent consciousness of the Divine does not suspend practical activity, where definite action and thought detach them selves from this indefinite ground, where the disappear ance of the feeling of self-hood and the spontaneous and impersonal character of the thoughts and motor-tendencies inspire the subject with the idea that these acts do not emanate from him, but from a divine Source : and that it is God Who lives and acts within him." l
1 Etudes d'histoire ft dt psychologic du mysticisme, p. xi.
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THE struggle between the negative transcendentalism of the Neoplatonists and the dynamic, affirmative instincts of primitive Christian enthusiasm — between the ideal of a vision seen and of a life lived — endured for more than two centuries : and culminated, as such long-drawn warfare often does, in the apparent victory of both combatants, the apparent consummation of an alliance between them. Christian mysticism seems at first sight to have conquered Neoplatonism only after absorbing nearly everything that it possessed.1 In the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, which closed the Neoplatonic period and became the chief representative on the Christian side of its mystical philo sophy, we have a theory of the spiritual world and man's communion with it, which the Hellenist may call Neo- platonised Christianity, and the Christian, Christianised Neoplatonism.2 Here the Greek intellect and the Chris tian aspiration are present in about equal proportions : with the result that the character of each is modified to a degree which obscures its most vital characteristics.
The manner and extent in which the different members of the Christian body came to terms with Neoplatonism varied enormously. In some cases the assimilation was complete; and the new method of communion with
1 Cf. Harnack, History of Dogma, Vol. I. p. 361.
2 There are, of course, other elements, both Jewish and Oriental, in the religious metaphysics of Dionysius ; but these were known and used by later Pagan Neoplatonists, many of whom might have adopted Moliere's motto, " Je prends mon bien ou je le trouve."
303
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Reality, the new language which described it, did but educate and enrich the total experience of a " new creature " strong enough to digest this spiritual food. In others, Hellenism achieved a private victory by accept ing the title whilst obliterating the true marks, of the Christian mystic ; and substituting the sterile principle of static contemplation for the vital principle of growth.
That vital principle, however — the dynamic, richly human, all-embracing mysticism of Jesus and Paul — did not fail : though its triumphs in this period do not lie upon the surface of history. It shifted its centre, broke out in a new direction, and put on an almost impenetrable disguise before it undertook its pilgrimage to the west : a disguise behind which many scholars have failed to recognise the features of that Spirit of Life which is " movement itself." Superficially, the general tendency of fourth-century Christianity seems practical and intellectual rather than mystical : inclined ever more and more to sacrifice that character of mobility which is the essence of life, that it may obtain a secure foothold within the social framework in exchange. As the external Church rose towards power and splendour, entered upon warfare against heretics, built up her theological bulwarks and elaborated her ceremonial cult, her manifold activities — the numerous and inevitable compromises effected between the austere primitive spirit and the " world " to which it supposed itself to be sent— obscured the ideals of those mystical souls, those true citizens of the Kingdom of Reality, who constitute the "invisible church." The Church of the third century, says Harnack, was already and to a high degree secularised. She had not renounced her characteristic nature; but had dangerously lowered her standard of life.1 She had, in fact, " travelled far from the original conception of a community of saints, all washed, all sanctified, all justified : far from the ideal of that little company of disciples who stood aloof from the whole world lying under the power 1 Das Moncbtum, § 3.
MYSTIC LIFE IN EARLY CHURCH 605
of the evil one, and who could not sin because ' the seed of Him' (i John iii. 9) was abiding in them."1 Yet the descendants of that little company survived, the thoroughfare of life was still open, the original type con tinued to reproduce itself : chiefly, perhaps, amongst those ascetics and candidates for martyrdom who formed a permanent and well-marked class within the Christian community, and represented a vivid if one-sided appre hension of the Christian demand.
During the primitive period, these representatives of the " little flock," the glad romantic spirit of self-donation, had not separated themselves from ordinary life. Whilst the age of enthusiasm endured they stood — in idea if not in fact — for the Christian norm rather than the Christian exception. Later, the ascetics often lived in a partial seclusion on the outskirts of towns and villages : a stage of development described in the early chapters of the Vita Antonn. But as time went on, and the primitive instinct for a new life, a total change of outlook, grew more rare, those in whom " the mind of Christ " appeared were less and less able to adjust its stern demands to the counter-claim of the social system within which they found themselves ; and which was tolerated, if not accepted in theory, by the growing Church. More and more such spirits felt the need for that free life of poverty and detachment, that single-minded concentration on Reality, that opportunity of self-simplification, which He had proclaimed as the condition of a perfect fruition of Eternal
Life.2
The upgrowth of the monastic system within Christi anity, which began in Egypt early in the fourth century,3
1 Hannay, T£
2 Matt. xix. 16-22.
3 According to Dom Cuthbert Butler, the birth of Christian Monas- ticism coincides with St. Anthony's return from his great retreat in the desert (for which see below) and first attempt to organise the lives of his disciples This took place in the first years of the fourth century. Two of these disciples, St. Pachomius and St. Macarius, are usually regarded as
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represents the flight of these mystical spirits from the restless complications and unrealities of the world ; with its perpetual calls on attention, its perpetual tendency to deflect the movement of consciousness from the " strait and narrow path " of its thoroughfare to God. Here, the thwarted spirit of new life shifts its centre, begins to cut another " way out " towards transcendence, tries once again to conquer those " oppositions of matter," those tendencies to automatism, which dog its steps, and hinder the performance of its great office of bringing Eternity into time. "It is one of the most striking historical facts," says Harnack, " that the Church, precisely at the time when she was becoming more and more a legal and sacramental institution, threw out an ideal of life which could be realised not in herself, but only alongside of herself. The more deeply she became compromised with the world, the higher, the more superhuman, became her ideal. . . . Monasticism, unable to find satisfaction in c theology,' seriously accepted the view that Christianity is a religion, and demands from the individual a surrender of his life." 1 The monastic movement, then, was essen tially a mystical movement; one more exhibition of the imperishable instinct for new life, the ever-renewed neces sity for distinction between the " little flock " of forward- moving spirits and the crowd. It was a genuine outshoot from the parent stem : that official Church, which tended more and more to exchange spontaneity for habit and mystical actuality for symbolic form — to turn, in fact, on its own tracks, and adjust itself to this world rather than cut its way through to the next.2
This new off-shoot proclaimed itself, and with some reason, as a return to the primitive Christian ideal. Its aim was the double aim of the Christian mystic : a vital
the founders of the earliest monastic communities, which effected the transition from anchorite to monk. Cf. Dom C. Butler, " Monasticism," in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, nth ed., Vol. XVIII. p. 687. 1 Harnack, Das Mancbtum, § 3. 2 Cf. Harnack, kc. ctt.
MYSTIC LIFE IN EARLY CHURCH 807
and permanent union with God, and regeneration as the way thereto. Its emphasis was on life-changing and life- enhancement : and on penance and prayer — purification and communion — as the only means by which this could be achieved. It sought, as well as it could, escape from just those conditions which prevent the " imitation of Christ " ; and made the life of spirit possible to many selves whose vitality would not have sufficed for the hard and pioneer work of path-cutting through the jungle of the world. " Anciently," says Augustine Baker, " souls embracing a religious life were moved thereto merely out of the spirit of penance, without any regard at all to make use of their solitude for the getting of learning — their principal care being, to attend unto God, and to aspire unto perfect union in spirit with Him." 1
So the old Benedictine ascetic. Protestant scholarship supports the same view. According to the Greek and Roman churches, says Harnack, " the true monk is the true and most perfect Christian. Monasticism is not in the Catholic churches a more or less accidental phenomenon alongside of others : but as the churches are to-day, and as they have for centuries understood the gospel, it is an institution based on their essential nature — it is the Christian life." 2 Hence, from the fourth century onwards, a large proportion of those true mystics who have never failed to leaven the Christian Church, are likely to be found within the monastic system : and the life which that system proposes to its novices is likely to be framed upon lines corresponding with those psycho logical laws which govern the mystical temperament.
Both theories are justified by fact. Throughout the " dark ages " and the mediaeval period, the majority of those in whom the " new life " awoke tended more and more to adopt the religious profession, driven to specialisa tion by the oppositions of the world, and by an interior sense of their own limitations : the impossibility of moving 1 Holy Wisdom, p. 168. * Das Monchtum, § I.
X 2
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in two directions at once, conforming simultaneously to two discordant rhythms — in fact, of serving both " God and Mammon." Their object was the attainment of that interior sanctity which is the self's response to a perceived perfection : the inevitable corollary of the vision of God. True, in the case of all the greatest spirits, the real and complete " imitators of Christ," this retreat from the world was but the preliminary to a return. The great solitaries and monks were not the selfish visionaries, the cowardly fugitives from the battle of life, which the ultra- Protestant imagination delights to depict : but mighty and heroic lovers of Reality, who fulfilled the lover's function of handing on the torch of life. " Our holy fathers, filled with God," they are called in the liturgy of the Orthodox Church.1 Even St. Anthony, first and most uncompromis ing of hermits, who lived for twenty years shut up in a ruined fort without seeing the face of man, emerged from that long retreat when he felt that the time of preparation was over, and lived amongst his disciples, teaching them the mysteries of the ascetic life or " perfect way." 2 So too St. Bernard, St. Hildegarde, St. Francis, St. Teresa, and many another — sometimes by the creative power of their writings, sometimes by immediate act — were the instruments of a world-renewal which was directly de pendent on their own first movement of retreat and con centration, and could never have been effected by the busy and altruistic Martha " pulled this way and that"3 by a multitude of conflicting claims upon attention, will and love.
Religious orders, then, in so far as they retained the primitive spirit of self-donation, the primitive passion for sanctity, tended to attract those selves most capable of growth towards the Real. Hence results the fact that the discipline of those orders did, and does still, imitate in
1 Neale and Littledale, The Liturgies of SS. Mark, James, Clement, Chrysostom and Basil, p. 185.
2 Vita Antonii, caps. 10 and 48. 8 Luke x. 40 (We/mouth's trans.).
MYSTIC LIFE IN EARLY CHURCH 809
little the life process of the mystical soul, its spiral ascent towards union with Reality, as seen in perfection in Jesus and those who follow most closely in His steps. It does this because, as those who made the great monastic Rules, and those who lived them best, perpetually declare to us, the one object of the true monk is to " imitate Christ." Vita tua, via nostra, said a Kempis, speaking for all of them ; and his book, which is little more than an expan sion of this epigram, reflects in its purest form the true monastic ideal. " Our Lord saith : he that followeth me goeth not in darkness. These are the words of Christ in the which we are admonished to follow his life and his manners if we would be verily illumined and be delivered from all manner of blindness of heart. Wherefore let our sovereign study be — in the life of Jesu Christ. The teaching of Christ passeth the teaching of all saints and holy men; and he that hath the spirit of Christ should find there hidden manna. But it happeneth that many feel but little desire of often hearing of the gospel ; for they have not the spirit of Christ ; for whoever will understand the words of Christ plainly and in their savour, must study to conform all his life to his life." l
To this study — this effort to repeat life's greatest achievement — the monastic orders were dedicated. " The Benedictine rule," says Hannay, the rule which first gathered to an orderly system the principles of monas- ticism, and is the root of all subsequent develop ments in the West, " was true to the old ascetic ideal of seeking God only without compromise, and literally imitating Christ. If the monks of the order became afterwards colonists, philanthropists, scholars, statesmen, it was not because their rule trained them for such work. They were trained to be good, and nothing more. They sought the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. It was not because they pursued them, or laboured for them, or desired them, that all the other things were added to 1 De Imit. Christ*, Bk. I. cap. I.
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them afterwards. . . . The Benedictine rule aimed at making good men, and left the question of their usefulness to God." l
This being so, it is of special interest to observe how close is the accordance between this Rule, this " training in goodness," and — not only the ethics of the New Testament — but also, the psychological laws which govern mystic growth. The system of education implied by it, leads the postulant through the degrees of " Beginner" and "Proficient" towards that of "Perfect";2 a sequence which has a real and organic resemblance to the " mystic way " of Purgation, Illumination and Union. This "threefold way" of monastic asceticism begins by hard and unremitting mortification and penance, a true purga tion of the roots of self-hood ; an education, part mental, part physical, in which the regnant will obtains an ever increasing control of the lower centres of consciousness, character is slowly purged, braced, and readjusted to the new and higher life, and that humility which is "pure receptivity " 3 is attained. This is succeeded by a period in which, the " virtues " being conquered, and will and desire turned " towards the Best," the growing self is led to higher levels of correspondence with Reality, a balanced career of service and of prayer : finally — and often by way of the aridity and spiritual distress well known in the cloistered life — to that condition of perfect adjustment to the Divine Will, " by pureness and singleness of heart, by love and by contemplation," 4 which is the normal man's equivalent of the Unitive State attained by the great mystic in his last stage.5
1 Hannay, The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism, pp. 246, 250.
2 These are technical terms of Christian asceticism ; appearing in all books of monastic, and many of non-monastic, origin which treat of the mystic life. See for instances Rolle, The Mending of Life, cap. 12 ; The Cloud of Unknowing, cap. 35, and the Theologia Germanica, cap. 14.
8 Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 47.
4 Theo. Ger., loc. cit.
5 Details in almost any manual of Catholic asceticism : particularly
MYSTIC LIFE IN EARLY CHURCH 311
This, then, was the mould into which the " oppositions of matter" gradually forced the spirit of new life: with the inevitable result of that loss of elasticity and freedom which always follows upon the tendency of spirit to take material form. The subsequent history of monasticism is largely the history of the perpetually recurring lapse of the mystical into the mechanical : its periodical restoration through the appearance both within and without the cloister of great and vital spirits, able to triumph over the automatisms of the system which surrounded them. In these, the elan 'vital found, again and again, a new opportunity of expression, a new thoroughfare to the heights. From them, again and again, a new dower of vitality was poured out upon the world.1
It was with the emergence of a group of such great spirits — the first Egyptian hermits of the third and fourth centuries — that Christian monasticism began, and Chris tian mysticism found its fresh thoroughfare. The Coptic saints, Anthony the Great 2 and his pupil Macarius of Egypt,8 preserved and carried over to the post-Nicene Church the true " secret of the Kingdom " : the mystery of organic spiritual growth. They represent a genuine new movement on Life's part, the cutting of a fresh channel through the world of things.
Anthony, the hero and pioneer of this whole movement, was suddenly converted in true mystical fashion, and at
Augustine Baker, Holy Wisdom; A. Poulain, Graces cPoraison; A. Saudreau, L*s Dcgrts de la Vie sprituelle ; A. Devine, Manual of Ascetic Theology. 1 The history of vital religion is largely the history of such personalities and the new life which flows from them : for instance St. Benedict, St. Bernard, St. Hildegarde, St. Dominic, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, the Friends of God, St. Ignatius, St. Teresa. To these we may, perhaps, add our own " regenerators " : Bunyan, Fox, and Wesley.
1 A.D. 251-356.
3 St. Macarius, called " of Egypt," also " the Great," was born in either 295 or 300, and died in either 386 or 391. The best authorities incline to the earlier date.
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the psychologically probable age of eighteen,1 from a prosperous life in the world — he was the son of wealthy Christian parents — to the extreme of ascetic renunciation. It happened one day that he heard in church the words of the gospel : "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven : and come and follow Me." 2 As St. Augustine, hearing the child's voice say "Tolle, lege! " knew that it spoke for him alone ; as St. Francis was " smitten by unwonted visitations'5 in the lonely church and came out another man; as St. Catherine of Genoa suddenly received in her heart the " wound of the unmeasured love of God," so Anthony heard in these words a personal command. He at once obeyed them : and having stripped himself of all property, he went to and fro for some time amongst those Christians who were striving to live the ascetic life in the world — the " athletes of piety " as they were called in the language of that day — that he might learn from them all he could.
But the storms and trials of the Purgative Way soon seized upon him. His nature was strong and ardent : and its movement toward transcendence was one long series of battles between the lower and the higher centres of consciousness. He fled into the desert ; first to a tomb near his native village, then to a lonely ruined fort near the Nile. Here, for a long period of years, in utmost solitude, he struggled for self-conquest. The violence of his temptations, the heroic austerities by which he opposed them, can be discerned behind the symbolic form which they have taken in the ancient, and well known, legends of the " temptations of St. Anthony." When at last, at the age of fifty-five, he returned to the world of men, those who had expected to see a man physically wrecked and mentally over-strung by fasting, penance and lone liness, saw instead the adept of a true asceticism ; the " mortified " mystic, " normal in body simply sane in * Cf. supra, Cap. I, f IV. » Matt, xix. ^\.
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mind."1 Driven by the mystical impulse to service, Anthony now devoted himself to organising the lives of those ascetics who had followed him to the desert. During the persecution of Maximinus (A.D. 311) he went to Alexandria to comfort and strengthen the suffering church : but this period of contact with the world was followed, when the immediate need for his presence ceased, by a second retreat into more remote solitudes — the " inner mountain," near the Red Sea. Here he lived until his death : sometimes visiting his old disciples in the desert of the Thebaid, and ever accessible to the many who came to him for help, teaching and advice.2 It is said that his was one of those rare natures which never attained the equilibrium characteristic of a mature mystical con sciousness. His inner life was characterised by alternate conflict and high spiritual joy; swinging to and fro between the negative sense of sin and failure, and the ecstatic communion with God which he described as " the only perfect prayer";3 between the Divine Union and the Dark Night. As he put it in the figurative language that he loved, his " conflicts with demons" continued to the last.
In Anthony's second retreat, less savagely austere than that of his purgative period, work took its place by the side of contemplation as a part of the sane and normal monastic life : not only the constant spiritual work of teaching disciples, and giving comfort and advice to pilgrims who sought him out, but those homely trades of mat-weaving and agriculture which became a part of the rule observed by all later Egyptian solitaries and monks,4
1 Hannay, of. «'/., p. 99. I have condensed much of the preceding account of Anthony's conversion and penance, which occupies the first fourteen chapters of the Vita, from Mr. Hannay's excellent paraphrase.
2 Vita Antonii, caps. 49-58. 8 Cassian, Coll., IX. 31.
4 See Murray's Dictionary of Christian Biography, art. " Antonius Abbas." Such manual work was the great protection of the hermit against the monastic sin of " accidie " ; the restless misery and boredom which comes over the contemplative when his spiritual insight fails him,
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and give the first hint of that monastic ideal of ardent soul in industrious body which finds its classical expression in the Benedictine rule.
Anthony had little education, though the reports of his disputes with Pagan philosophers suggest that he possessed the ready wit and lucid mind so often found in great contemplatives. Hence, his mysticism never took literary form : we can but guess his doctrine from his life.1 That doctrine was propagated through his immediate personal influence ; the enduring influence and contagious quality, possessed by a commanding character, a natural leader and initiator of men. He " found a new form of life and justified it" — the peculiarity, says Delacroix, of the Christian mystical type : found it by the way of heroic sacrifices, nurtured it by the twin means of contemplation and service, and handed it on, through the disciples who inherited his vitality, to the generations that were to be.
and he is thrown back on the futilities of daily life. Hannay (op. cit.9 pp. 154-157) has a vivid and amusing account of the monk smitten with this spiritual disease.
1 The long sermon into which Anthony's teachings are condensed in the Vita deals chiefly with his favourite subject of " demons," and the way in which they may best be overcome.
IV
A MYSTIC OF THE DESERT
IT was probably in the years which immediately pre ceded and followed St. Anthony's death, that the principle which had inspired his career, the secret of that life to which he had attained, first found expression in literature : in the work of his favourite disciple, St. Macarius the Great of Egypt.1
Macarius had lived in closest sympathy with Anthony, and is said to have tended him during the last fifteen years of his life. Moreover, the curve of his development closely followed that of his master. For twenty years he too lived the solitary and penitential life of an anchorite " alone with the wild beasts " in the desert of the Thebaid : orientating his whole personality to that inflow ing Power by which he felt himself to be possessed, war ring with his lower nature, subduing the machinery of sense to the purposes of the spiritual consciousness, by those hard austerities which seem to our softer generation to be compounded of the offensive and the miraculous. Only when he had already become celebrated for an exceptional sanctity — when psychic equilibrium was restored, the affirmative state of spiritual illumination established in him — did the compensating instinct of service to his fellow men make itself felt. Then, as Anthony came out from his ruined fort " strong in the Spirit," to teach others how they might vanquish the demons of sin and desire, so Macarius too — urged by 1 Not to be confused with St. Macarius of Alexandria, also a " father of the desert."
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the entreaties of those disciples who perpetually broke in upon his solitude begging for spiritual help and advice — exchanged the life of complete isolation which he had loved, for that of the head of a " laura " or village com munity of hermits, who dwelt around him in the Scetic desert, and whom he trained in that rigorous asceticism which he regarded as the foundation of all spirituality. For these and others whom he helped and taught, he wrote the homilies and tracts upon the spiritual life- process and its " graces" which we still possess: the greatest literary monument of Christian mysticism in the fourth century. In asceticism the pupil of St. Anthony, in mystical thought the descendant of St. Paul and the Fourth Evangelist, he is the first scientific mystic of Chris tendom ; reducing the experiences and intuitions of the New Testament giants to a clear and orderly system which is yet lit up by the vivid light of personal experience.1
I have said that the mystical doctrine of Macarius, like the life which he learned from Anthony the Great, was rooted in asceticism. But this asceticism was not pur sued for its own sake : was neither the result of a Mani- chasan dualism, nor the deliberate self-torture of the fanatic, trying to propitiate an angry deity. It was a means to an end : the athletic and educative asceticism of the Christian mystic, re-ordering his disordered loves, subduing his vagrant instincts, that all his desires, all his conative powers, may be trained towards the one Reality. Its aim, says Macarius, is the production of a " strong, clean, and holy " personality : an instrument adapted to the true goal of life — the union of the soul with its
1 The life and works of Macarius arc in Migne, Pat. Grate., T. XXXIV. The chief sources for his biography are the His tori a Lausiaca of Palladius and the Historia Monachorum of Rufinus. The best account of his mysticism is by J. Stoffels, Die mystiche Theologie Makarius des Aegypters und die 'dltesten Ans'dtze christlicher Mystik (1908). I am much in debted to this excellent monograph.
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Creator.1 " We can only behold that which we are "— this law of knowledge, with its logical corollary that only the God-like can know God, was already clear to him.
It was, then, on the solid and practical basis of character- building — long and strenuous discipline, slow growth, profound psychological adjustments — that his theory of the mystical life was raised. Macarius was neither a theologian nor a philosopher : but he was a born psycho logist, with few illusions about human nature, and a singularly clear perception of those native disharmonies, those downward-falling tendencies always found in it, which we call " sin." Though his writings show that he was familiar with many schools of thought — had read not only the Scriptures and early Fathers, but the Stoics and some at least of the Alexandrian Neoplatonists — yet he does but use the language of these thinkers to express the results of an intense personal experience. It was by the Christian method of steadfast attention to the Spiritual Order, unwearied and loving meditation and prayer, and for the Christian reason of disinterested love, that he grew to the full stature of the mystic life : and it was by the same means that he strove to induct other men into that universe which he describes with the certitude and enthusiasm of a citizen, as " Light," " Glory " and " True Life."
From his homilies, and the seven little tracts on " Christian perfection," we can yet deduce the exultant vision by which Macarius was possessed : the form which it took in his consciousness. His whole " system " — though it is no more self-consistent, ring-fenced and com plete than any other vital and evolving thing — hangs on one central truth : itself the purest product of that mysti cism of the "Kingdom" and " divine sonship " which descends from Jesus of Nazareth. This truth has an obverse and a reverse, a temporal and an eternal side. The temporal, dynamic aspect of it is the idea of man's 1 StBffels, op. dt.j p. 6.
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soul as an infinitely precious and mysterious thing, pos sessed of a latent divine quality — a seed that can spring to life — and of deification as the natural goal of its develop ment. The other aspect is the complementary idea of God, the transcendent and eternal Reality, as revealing Himself to that divine-human soul and willing its union with Him : the mutual tendency or love existing between separated spirits and their Source. Like Origen, Macarius finds in the historic life of Jesus the classic " drawing together " of the human and divine, of immanent and transcendent Reality. This, first accomplished in Him, must be continued in the " New Race " which is descended from Him : and which represents a genuine fresh creation, a new type, one of Life's " saltatory ascents. " He speaks in uncompromising terms of this novelty and high destiny of the Christian life. " Christians belong to another world, they are the sons of a heavenly Adam, a new generation, the children of the holy Spirit, the bright and glorious brethren of Christ, perfectly like their Father." l The movement of the self towards this transcendence, its achievement of " divine humanity," is clearly under stood by Macarius as an organic, not a magical process. It takes place through the birth of consciousness into, and its growth within, a new order : helped by deliberate effort, moral storm and stress. As gradually and naturally as the embryo of physical life emerges into the physical world, the germ of real life which is latent in human personality takes form and develops to the mystic climax of perfect participation in the Eternal World. The whole great movement — at once a pilgrimage and a transmutation from the enslaved and degenerate life which he calls " sin " to the free, mature, exultant life which he calls " glory " — is for Macarius the essence of the Christian idea. " As the child in the womb does not suddenly grow into a man, but gradually takes form and comes to birth, and even then is not a perfect man, but must grow during 1 Horn. VIII.
MYSTIC LIFE IN EARLY CHURCH 819
many years that he may attain to manhood; so also must man grow gradually in the spiritual life, which is a state of highest wisdom and most ethereal form, until he attains at last to perfect manhood and to complete maturity." l
This gradual and orderly deification of human person ality originates, like human life, in the conjunction of two forces; in a communication of vitality from without. The fertilising touch of Divine Energy must somehow pene trate the ramparts of self-hood and sting to life the hidden seed, man's little spark of reality.3 It begins, in fact, with the experience of mystical conversion, the group of movements and changes that together result in " new birth." Moreover, Macarius sees with an unusual sharp ness that this same dependence on the Universal Life characterises the " new creature " during the whole of its unresting and adventurous career. Its growth is con ditioned by correspondences with that world of spirit which supports and feeds it. These correspondences are not automatic, but are set up by the deliberate willed acts of the free personality. Its attention and receptivity, its eagerness and desire, are essential to the inflow of power : " the perfect operation of the Spirit is conditioned by the will of man." 3
Thus will and grace, the interaction of an interior and an exterior energy, are the coefficients which together work the mystical life-process. This life-process, then, is not merely a miraculous gift forced upon man from with out, nor merely the gradual upgrowth of something "natural" which he has within, but the result of the interplay of both these elements: of a growth that depends, like physical growth, upon the perpetual eager, voluntary absorption of new material from the surround-
1 Horn. XV. 41. The birth imagery of Macarius, which is worked out in some passages with minute details of a physical kind, is reproduced by Dionysius the Areopagite (De Ecdes. Eier.t cap. 3, iii. 6), and hence became the common property of later mystics.
» Horn. II. 3 and IV. 6, and 7. s Horn. XXXVII. 10.
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ing universe, upon the feeding of the soul on the substance of Reality. The babe sucking its mother's breast, said Patmore, is the type and prince of mystics : l the child of the Infinite must be nourished at the source of his being if he is to grow up to maturity. This idea, prominent in the Fourth Gospel, is central for the mysticism of Macarius. " For as the body hath not life from itself, but from without, that is from the earth, and without those things which are external to it, cannot con tinue in life : so too the soul cannot be re-born from this world into that more living world, and take to itself wings and grow and grow up into the Spirit of God, and put on the secret heavenly clothing of beauty and holiness, with out that food which is its life. For the bread of life, and the living water, and the wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and the oil of gladness, and the whole variety of the food of the heavenly Spirit, and the heavenly clothing of light which is of God — in these doth the eternal life of the soul consist." 2
Note well, that it is not a sacramental act which St. Macarius is here concerned to acclaim : nor should we expect this in one who had lived, as did these first Egyptian mystics of the desert, outside the sphere of all ecclesiastical observances. The first hermits were as inde pendent of Church and sacraments as the Quakers them selves.3 They " walked and talked with God": their ideal was a direct and unmediated intercourse with the Divine Order. " The Lord Himself is the heavenly food
1 The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, " Aurea Dicta," 128.
2 Horn. I. ii.
3 Hannay, The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism, pp. 115-122. With the growth of the " lauras " or hermit villages, however, the need of a regular sacramental dispensation made itself felt; for here many came to attempt the religious life who would never have dared the terrors of a complete solitude. Hence Macarius himself, apparently on the advice of St. Anthony, was ordained a priest in the year 340 in order that he might minister to the community of disciples which had gathered about his cell (op. cit., p. 120).
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and spiritual drink of the soul," says Macarius.1 " I do not need the communion, for I have seen Christ Himself to-day," says the hermit Valens to his disciples ; 2 and this was no doubt the spirit of the true solitaries, whose loneliness would have been unendurable had it been as complete as it seemed to other men, unrelieved by that which Thomas a Kempis calls the " great craft " of heavenly conversation.
The beautiful chapters in which a Kempis tries to teach this heavenly art, this direct and loving intercourse, and describes its rapturous satisfactions, tell us far more of the secret life which was possessed by these fathers of the desert, the friendship that lit their loneliness, the character of their communion with, and " feeding upon," God, than the fantastic biographies of the Vit for a thousand years makes little difference to the true monastic temperament, which is conditioned by its out look on Eternity rather than by its circumstances in time. " In the wilderness the Beloved " must often have spoken thus to the heart of the lover, " as it were a bashful lover that his sweetheart before men entreats not."3 In the long still days and watchful nights a Presence drew near, and became the strength and refreshment of the solitary's soul.
" Shut thy door upon thee, and call unto thee Jesu thy Love," says a Kempis. "Dwell with him in thy cell, for thou shalt not find elsewhere so great peace. . . . When Jesu is nigh all goodness is nigh, and nothing seemeth hard ; but when Jesu is not nigh, all things are hard. When Jesu speaketh not within, the comfort is of little price ; but if Jesu speak one word, there is found great comfort. . . . To be without Jesu is a griev ous hell, and to be with Jesu is a sweet Paradise. If Jesu be with thee, there may no enemy hurt thee. . . . It is a great craft for a man to be conversant with
1 Horn. XIV. 3. 2 Vita Patrum, V. 24.
8 Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love, Bk. II. cap. 7.
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Jesu ; and to know how to hold Jesu, is a great prudence.5'1
Here, the intercourse of the soul with the supersensual takes its most intensely personal form. The " feeding " which Macarius describes is the completing opposite of such an experience. It is the impersonal aspect of man's most intimate communion with the Divine Order. His constant use of Christological language, his free move ment between the ideas of Personality and of Grace, show that for him, as for most great mystics, these were but two ways of apprehending one Reality. For him, in fact, as for Clement of Alexandria and Augustine, heavenly contemplation is the " food of the full grown spirit," the medium of its refreshment and sustenance, of an actual appropriation of new energy : yet, in that act of feeding, it is the personal Christ of whom he conceives, in true Johannine fashion, as mystically assimilated and knit up into the substance of the soul.
The new-born life of Spirit, thus sustained from. with out by its feeding on Reality, enters at once on the process of growth. This process is to Macarius so real, so objective, that he conceives of it not only as a spiritual, but in a sense as a physical occurrence. The gradual change from glory to glory into the image of God, which he accepts from Paul as the essence of Christian psychology, becomes a change in the substance, the con stitution of the soul : because he regards the soul, with the Stoic philosophers, as something not wholly im material, but made of a fine, ethereal stuff. The mystical life-process, then, signifies the actual steady transmutation of this substance from its original " density " to purest spirituality, under the purgative action of the Divine Fire, which cleanses, heals and renews it : and ends in a personal and physical approximation of the re-made, ethereal- ised, transmuted, soul to the spiritual being of Christ 2 —
1 De Imit. Christi, Lib. I. cap. 20 and Lib. II. cap. 8.
2 StBffels, p. 162.
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an elaboration of Paul's most splendid dream, made under the influence of Stoic philosophy.
Such a process means for consciousness a searching moral readjustment, a destruction of old paths, a cutting of new : the steadfast endurance of that which St. John of the Cross called " the dark night of loving fire " — in a word, Purgation of the most drastic kind. It means, for a mystic of that time and place, a thorough-going asceti cism; the outward and visible sign of this interior and painful change in the direction of life, this deliberate war declared on old ideals. As a corn of wheat hidden in the earth slowly ripens during the storms and hardships of winter, so Macarius — who loves, as do all great mystics, the close parallels between "nature" and "grace" — describes the seed of new life as slowly ripening amongst the turmoils, deprivations and miseries or this season of stress. It then, he says, puts forth four little shoots, which mark the steady march of its development : faith, renunciation, charity and humility. They are the crescent indications of the unfolding of the mystic type. Often enough Macarius and his disciples must have watched this natural process in the laura, where each hermit grew a patch of wheat sufficient for his own needs.
If it be faithful to the harsh and storm-swept career of sacrifice and love, the growing spirit passes from the period of stress to a spring-like state of mystical eleva tion : from Purgation to Illumination. " Like metals which, cast into the fire, lose their natural hardness, and the longer they remain in the furnace are more and more softened by the flame," he says under another image, its resistances to grace have been burned away ; the hard edges are melted, every part of it is made molten and incandescent by the Fire of Love.1 Hence, instead of the painful burning of the Fire, the agony of collision be tween two inharmonious orders of reality, it experiences that same onslaught of spirit, that same inflowing dower 1 Horn. IV. 14.
Y 2
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of grace and truth, as the irradiations of the heavenly Light.
This image of the divine vitality successively experi enced as a painful Fire and a heavenly Light — of the purging of the soul as in a furnace ; the anguish through which it passes to that condition of harmony in which, " itself becoming fire," the flame that had been in its onslaught a torment to the separated will becomes to the transmuted creature an indwelling radiance, a source of joy and life, — all this is found again and again in the later Christian mystics. Whatever be its ultimate origin, or the exact course of its descent, they all recognised it as a faithful picture of the experiences which they had known : and hence their declarations may help us to understand something of the spiritual adventures which Macarius here struggles to describe.
" As a bar of iron, heated red-hot, becomes like fire itself, forgetting its own nature," says St. Bernard, " or as the air radiant with sunbeams seems not so much to be illuminated as to be Light itself; so in the saints all human affections melt away, by some unspeakable trans mutation, into the Will of God." * " The naked will," says Ruysbroeck, " is transformed by the Eternal Love as fire by fire." 2 " We are like coals," he says in another place " burned on the hearth of Infinite Love." 3 " Souls thrown into the furnace of My charity," says the Divine Voice to St. Catherine of Siena, " the whole of them being inflamed in Me, are like a brand which is not wholly consumed in the furnace, so that no one can take hold of it or extinguish it, because it has become fire." 4
For St. Catherine of Genoa, too, the love of God was felt in terms of fire and light : and this conception is the basis of her celebrated doctrine of Purgatory. "This holy soul, yet in the flesh, found herself placed in the purgatory of God's burning love, which consumed and
1 De (liligendo Deo, cap. 10. 2 Samuel (Hello, p. 201).
8 De Septem gradibus amoiis, cap. 14. 4 Dialogo, cap. 78.
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purified her from whatever she had to purify, in order that after passing out of this life she might enter at once into the immediate presence of God her Love. By means of this furnace of love she understood how the souls of the faithful are placed in purgatory to get rid of all the rust and stain of sin that in this life was left unpurged. . . . The souls are covered with a rust, the rust of sin, which is gradually burned away by the fire of purgatory. The more it is burned away, the more they respond to God their true Sun : their happiness increases as the rust falls off, and lays them open to the Divine Light." 1
Here we have the exact psychological situation de scribed by Macarius. In the work of a later mystic, St. John of the Cross, its implications are made yet more clear. The Fire and the Light are, of course, two ways of experi encing one Reality, which brings torment or rapture according to the temper and purity of the receptive soul. "When the Divine Light beats upon the soul," he says, " it makes it suffer, because the purgative and loving knowledge, or Divine Light, is to the soul which it is purifying in order to unite it perfectly to itself as fire is to fuel which it is transmuting into itself." Because the spirit is opaque and resistant, it feels this Divine Energy as a " dark night of loving fire "; but " when it has been purified ... it will have eyes to discern the blessings of the Divine Light." 2
For the soul of the lover there is a subtle joy even in the anguish of the Fire. It is a " flame of living love," says John of the Cross again : and its pain is like the pain of lovers, strangely compounded of anguish and delight.
" O burn that burns to heal !
O more than pleasant wound ! And O soft hand, O touch most delicate,
That dost new life reveal,
That dost in grace abound, And, slaying, dost from life to death translate.
1 Trattato di Purgatorio, caps. I and 2.
2 Noche Escura del alma, Lib. II. caps. 9, 10, 12, 13.
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O lamps of fire that shined
With so intense a light That those deep caverns where the senses live,
Which were obscure and blind,
Now with strange glories bright Both heat and light to his beloved give." 1
The spiritual Fire and Light, then, shining ever more clearly within the purified soul which they have raised to their own tension and temperature, bring it to that state of perfect self-knowledge, in which its own situation within the transcendental order becomes clear to it ; enable it to apprehend the unspeakable revelations of God; and even confer on it the ecstatic vision of the Divine Nature.2 For Macarius, as for the Fourth Evangelist, Light and Life are identical : they are interchangeable names for the primal Reality manifested in the Christ-Logos, and now experienced by human consciousness. He leaves us in no doubt as to the all-round enhancement of life, the rich variety of response towards every level of existence, every aspect of the Being of God, made possible to those who are irradiated by this Incomprehensible Light : the balanced and Christ-like career of charity and contempla tion which awaits them.
"Those who have become the true children of God, and are re-born of the Spirit, . . . these receive from the Spirit of God many and various favours and activities. Sometimes, like guests at a royal feast, they are satiated with indescribable enjoyments ; sometimes they are filled with a divine and intimate delight, like that of the bride when she rejoices in the presence of the bride groom . . . sometimes the communication of the divine mysteries induces in them a holy inebriation. Sometimes they are seized by a lively compassion at the sight of human misery, and, in the ardour of their charity, they
1 St. John of the Cross, Llama de amor viva^ translated by Arthur Symons.
2 StOffels, op. ctt., p. 147.
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give themselves wholly to prayer and tears, begging the Divine Mercy for the whole human race ... as a brave soldier puts on the armour of his king, rushes into the battle, and returns victorious, so we sometimes see the spiritual man put on the armour of the Spirit, and attack the enemies of the soul and crush them under his feet. At other times, he immerses himself in a profound silence ; and then his soul enjoys great peace, and tastes in its quietude of ineffable delights. Or else the Holy Spirit illuminates his intelligence, and communicates to him a supernal wisdom, and high knowledge which human speech cannot express. Thus does divine grace cause the incessant alternations of peace and of activity."1
Such a career of inspired activities, however — irradiated by the Divine Spirit, but not yet one with it — is for Macarius only a half-way house. In very different language he describes the state of those " deified " selves in whom has been accomplished the spiritual marriage of the Logos and the soul. These are the utterly sur rendered spirits whom " the heavenly charioteer " drives wherever He will; and who are themselves so completely transmuted to another glory and power by the action of the divine Fire and Light, that they become centres which reflect something of that absolute Power and Glory to the world. " The soul," he says in the great homily which sums up his whole mystic doctrine, " that, prepared by the Holy Spirit to be His seat and habitation, and found worthy to participate in His light, is illuminated by the beauty of His ineffable glory, becomes all light, all face, all eyes ; 2 nor is there any part of her that is not
1 Horn. XVIII. 7-9.
2 The reference is of course to Ezekiel's vision of the Cherubim, which Macarius interpreted in proper Alexandrian fashion as an allegory of the glorified soul. " And their whole body, and their backs, and their hands, and their wings . . . were full of eyes . . . and the glory of the God of Israel was over them above. . . . Every one had four faces apiece, and every one had four wings ; and the likeness of the hands of a man was under their wings " (Ezek. z. 12, 19, 21).
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full of these spiritual eyes of light. That is to say, no part of her is in shadow, but she is all entirely wrought into light and spirit and is all full of eyes, having neither an anterior nor a posterior part ; but appears as it were all face because of the ineffable beauty of the glory of the Light of Christ, that hath descended on her and dwells with her. And as the sun is altogether of one likeness, having no hinder nor imperfect part, but is all throughout resplendent with light, and is all light without least variety of part; or even as fire, that is to say the light of fire, is all like unto itself, neither hath in itself before nor behind, greater nor less; so too the soul that is perfectly illuminated by the ineffable beauty of the glory of the light of the face of Christ, and perfectly partakes of the Holy Spirit, and is adjudged worthy to be made the dwelling-place and seat of God, becomes all eyes, all light, all face, all glory and all spirit. . . . The Cherubim, then, are driven, not whither they would themselves go, but the way in which He who holds the reins directs. Which way so ever He is willing, there they go, and He carries them. For it saith * Manus enim erat sub illis.' Thus the holy souls are led and directed on their way by the spirit of Christ, who leads them where He chooses ; sometimes into heavenly contemplation, sometimes to bodily activities. Where His pleasure is, there do they serve Him. ... If therefore thou art become the throne of God, and the Heavenly Charioteer hath seated Himself within thee, and thy soul is wholly become a spiritual eye, and is wholly made into light ; if too thou art nourished with the heavenly food of that spirit and hast drunk of the Living Water, and hast put on the secret vesture of light — if thine inward man has experienced all these things and is established in abundant faith, lo ! thou livest indeed the Eternal Life, and thy soul rests even in this present time with the Lord. Lo! thou art an adept, and hast verily received from the Lord these things that thou mayest live the true life. But if thou art conscious of
MYSTIC LIFE IN EARLY CHURCH 829
none of these things, lament and grieve and mourn, because as yet thou art not made a sharer of the eternal and spiritual riches and hast not received true life." *
We may observe in this passage a synthesis of all the main elements of Christian mysticism : and first, how completely it is governed, not by the idea of vision, but by the idea of life. " To live the true life " — this it is which St. Macarius has learned in the desert ; this total surrender of the individual to the universal purpose, which makes the mature soul like to the swift-moving Cherubim, seats of the Divine Wisdom, who " go not whither they would," but are driven by the will of the Spirit that holds the reins. At the end of the Mystic Way he finds himself, like Paul, to be God-possessed ; subject to a " secondary personality of a superior type," an indwelling power that drives him where it will. " The hand of the charioteer is under his wings." Even in this present life, then, he knows that such high levels of response to the Tran scendent Order are possible for the spirit of man. They represent the dynamic aspect of that supernal life and consciousness which he calls " glory " : the divinely governed progress, the " movement which is life itself," and which balances that fruition of Reality — " all joy, all delight, all exultation, all love" — in which the deified soul feels itself to be " immersed in the Spirit, as a stone at the bottom of the ocean is immersed in the sea."
Thus the end to which the mysticism of Macarius tends, and for which he has endured hunger, thirst and utter loneliness, the trials and uncertainties of the spiritual adolescence, and heroic struggles with the flesh, is no selfish satisfaction. It achieves the paradoxical combina tion of humility and ecstacy, of complete surrender and energetic love. Its aim is identical with the supreme ambition of the German mystic : " to be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man " — an absolute dedication to the purposes of the Infinite Life. The i Horn. I. 2. 2 Horn. XVIII. 10.
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mystic, like the Cherub, is submitted to the secret guidance of the Spirit ; yet his individual activity remains. He is " all eyes and all wings " — all vision and all energy ; "all light and all face " — reflecting the splendour of Reality to other men. To this career his new birth, his long endurance of the heavenly Fire, his steady upward growth, his participation in the heavenly Light, his final trans mutation into "light and spirit," have been directed. Such an ideal has more affinity with Gethsemane than with Alexandria, for it makes of self-naughting man's highest good: Non mea voluntas, sed tua fiat.
Macarius, in fact, looks back to Paul and John, and through them to Jesus. These are the real sources of his doctrine of true life, and he is the real inheritor of their tradition ; the channel through whom the " mounting flood " of their spirit passed on its way to the great mystics of the West. St. Basil the Great was his friend ; and from the Rule of Basil came ultimately the Rule of Benedict, and thence the whole mediaeval theory of the religious life, with its definite system of character-building, its eager pursuit of perfection, its balanced career of con templation and work. Hence Macarius the Coptic hermit, rather than Dionysius the Neoplatonist, is the vital link between East and West in the chain of the Christian Mystics ; a true thoroughfare of the Spirit of New Life.