CHAPTER I

MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE
". . . Made of chance and all a labouring strife,
We go charged with a strong flame ; For as a language Love hath seized on life His burning heart to story.
Yea, Love, we are thine, the liturgy of thee,
Thy thought's golden and glad name, The mortal conscience of immortal glee, Love's zeal in Love's own glory."
(LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE, Emblems of Love?)
" Change is the nursery Of music, joy, life, and eternity."
(JOHN DONNE.;
THE INSTINCT FOR TRANSCENDENCE
FOR nineteen hundred years there has been present in the world a definite variation of human life, the true significance of which man, as a whole, has been slow to understand. With anxious intelligence he has classified and divided those kinds of life which he calls animal and vegetable, according to many systems ; all useful, all artificial, none final or exact. But when it comes to the indexing of his own race, the discernment of its veritable characteristics, he seems unable to find any better basis of classification than racial groupings governed by measure ments of the skull and coloration of the skin.
It will hardly be contended that life exhibits to us anything of her meaning or her inwardness in such varia tions as these; mere symptoms and results as they are of the lower aspects of her everlasting struggle for expression, of spirit's efforts to penetrate matter and combine with it, to get and keep a foothold upon the physical plane. Life seen as a whole — at least as manifested on our particular speck of stellar dust — appears to be one great stream of Becoming, the mutual thrust and effort, the perpetual interpenetration of the two forms under which Reality is known to us : the inelastic, tangible somewhat called matter, the free, creative, impalpable somewhat called spirit. This struggle is one huge indivisible act — " from bottom to top of the organised world one great continuous B 2 *
4 THE MYSTIC WAY
effort " 1 — from the emergence of the amoeba to the final flowering of human consciousness; and it is to genuinely new combinations and reactions of the two powers involved in it that we must look, if we would discern the " meaning," the central reality of that amazing mystery which we so easily accept as " life."
Throughout the whole course of this struggle we observe on the side of spirit — or, if you like it better, on the psychic side of life — an unmistakable instinct for tran scendence : "an internal push, which has carried life by more and more complex forms to higher and higher destinies." 2 The greater the vitality, the higher the type, the more obvious becomes the fact that it is in via. Life appears unwilling merely to make itself at home in the material universe ; determined rather to use that material universe in its persistent and creative effort towards the discovery or acquirement of something else, of " a new kind of reality over against all mere nature." 3 All its proceedings seem to support the strange declaration of the Fourth Evangelist : " it is not yet made manifest what we shall be." 4 It seems called to some victory beyond the sphere that we call physical; feels within itself cravings and intuitions which that physical environment cannot satisfy, a capacity for freedom which its own highest physical manifestations are unable to express. Thus it is that " the strongest power within the world constitutes in reality the conviction of an over-world." 5
In our moments of clear sight, those moods of artistic innocence which are freed from the decomposing action of thought, we are well aware of this. We know then that the wistful eyes of Life are set towards a vision that is also a Home — a Home from which news can reach us now and again. Thus looking out from ourselves to our
1 Bergson, Involution creatrice, p. 138. a Ibid., p. in.
8 Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p. 87. 4 I John iii. 2 (R.V.).
5 Eucken, op. cit., p. 4.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 5
Universe, we seem to catch a glimpse of something behind that great pictorial cosmos of " suns and systems of suns," that more immediate world of struggle, growth, decay, which intellect has disentangled from the Abyss. We feel, interpenetrating and supporting us, the action of a surging, creative Spirit, which transcends all its material manifestations : something which the least dogmatic may be willing to describe as " the living presence of an eternal and spiritual Energy." 3 An Immanent Thought in ceaseless development is then discerned by us as the Reality manifested in all existence : an artistic inspiration which, like the little inspiration of men, moulds matter and yet is conditioned by it. Piercing its way to the sur face of things, engaged, as it seems to us, in a struggle for expression, it yet transcends that which it inhabits. It is a Becoming, yet a Being, a Growth, yet a Consummation : the very substance of Eternity supporting and making actual the process of Time. In such hours of lucidity we sec, in fact, the faint outline of the great paradox of Deity; as it has been perceived by the mystics of every age.
" For Thou," said Augustine, speaking for all of them, " art nothing else than supreme Being, supreme Life. For Thou art the highest and changest not, nor does To-day run out its hours in Thee ; and yet in Thee its hours run out, for in Thee is every moment of time." 2
So far as our small knowledge reaches, man seems to be Life's best effort towards the exhibition of that in dwelling Spirit's meaning and power. In him her imper fection and her restlessness — the groaning and travailing of creation — are all too clearly expressed : yet in spite, or because, of this, the Immanent Thought has found in human consciousness its least faulty thoroughfare.
" Man, swinging-wicket set
Between The unseen and the seen" —
1 Eucken, The 'Truth of Religion, p. 4. * Aug., Conf., Bk. I. cap. 6.
6 THE MYSTIC WAY
appears to be the gate through which the elan 'vital must pass towards the fulfilment of its highest destinies; for in him the creative spark attains consciousness of those destinies. Here it no longer sleeps or dreams, but knows. Hence he is able to link spirit immanent with spirit tran scendent. Whilst all Life's other creations have tended to adapt themselves more or less perfectly to the physical, man tends to adapt himself to something else. A divided aim is expressed in him : he hovers uncertainly between two worlds. He is " in this world like a balance," says Boehme.1 The " holy spark of the divine nature within him," says Law, " has a natural, strong, and almost infinite tendency or reaching after that eternal Light and Spirit of God from whence it came forth. It came forth from God, it came out of God, it partaketh of the divine nature, and therefore it is always in a state of tendency and return to God." 2 Here, in fact, Life's instinct for transcendence breaks through at last : " Man is the meeting-point of various stages of Reality."3
If this be so, the spiritual evolution of humanity, the unfolding of its tendency towards the Transcendental Order, becomes as much a part of biology as the evolu tion of its stomach or its sense. In vain for theology to set this apart as alone the work of " grace." The action of "grace," the spirit of love leading life to its highest expression, is continuous from the first travail of creation even until now.
As the appearance, then, of man the tool-making animal marks a true stage in the history of life, so the appearance of man the consciously spiritual animal must mark a genuine advance in the race, and must rank as its most significant achievement. It is not to be labelled " super natural," and ring-fenced, examined, admired, or criticised,
1 The Threefold Life of Man, cap. 5, § 30.
2 William Law, The Spirit of Prayer.
3 Eucken, Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens, p. 121.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 7
apart from the general aspects of that flux in which man finds himself immersed; as we ring-fence and consider the little patches labelled philosophy, mathematics, or physical science, forgetting the fertile and measureless jungle whence we have subtracted these conceptual worlds. Such a process deprives it of its deepest meaning, and our selves of all hope of understanding its relation to the whole.
The spiritual adventures of man, in so far as they possess significance and reality, are incidents, one and all, in the great epic of spirit; and can only be understood by those who will take account of the whole drift of that incomplete poem, as it pours without ceasing from the Mind of God. The path on which he travels " towards the Father's heart " is the path on which all creation is set : he gathers up and expresses the effort and longing of the Whole; and his attainment will be the attainment of all Life. " In such a province as this," says Eucken, " the individual's own nature is not isolated, but is in separably interwoven with the whole of the All, and turns to this source for its own life-content. Thus there is no depth in the individual portions if they do not exist in the Whole, if they are not able here to unfold them selves. In each separate point a struggle for the Whole takes place; and this struggle brings the Whole into activity." *
Moreover, the meaning and intention of the Poem, the beauty of its rhythmic life, far exceeds the achievement and the beauty of any one episode — even the greatest. In each of these we find it expressing itself with the help of matter, and suffering of necessity the retarding and coarsening influence of a medium which it can and must use, but cannot wholly subdue. That which Bergson has said of the effort and thrust of physical life appears in history as yet more profoundly true of the life of spirit. 1 Eucken, 'The Truth of Religion, p. 159.
8 THE MYSTIC WAY
" Of ten enough, this effort turns on itself; sometimes paralysed by contrary forces, sometimes distracted from that which it should do by that which it does, captured, as it were, by the very form which it is engaged in assuming, hypnotised by it as by a mirror. Even in its most perfect works, when it seems to have triumphed both over external and innate resistance, it is at the mercy of the material form which it has been forced to assume. Each of us may experience this in himself. Our freedom, in the very movements in which it asserts itself, creates budding habits which will stifle it, if it does not renew itself by a constant effort. Automatism dogs it. The most vital thought may freeze itself in the formula which expresses it. The word turns against the idea. The letter kills the spirit.
" The profound cause of these disharmonies lies in an incurable difference of rhythm. Life as a whole is move ment itself : the particular manifestations of life accept this movement unwillingly, and constantly lag behind. It ever goes forward : they tend to mark time. . . . Like eddies of dust raised by the passing wind, living things turn back upon themselves, borne up by the great current of Life."1
We ask ourselves, What seems to be the aim of this " great current of life," this wind of God blowing where it lists, in these its freest, least material manifestations? We have seen that it has a tendency to transcendence : that, hampered yet served by matter, dogged by auto matism, it seeks a spiritual sphere. Yet what sphere? To what state of reality would it adjust itself? What are the " free acts" which it struggles to perform? "Where lies the land to which the ship would go? "
To address such a question to our intellects is to invite failure in the reply; for the careful mosaic of neatly-fitted conceptions which those intellects will offer us in return 1 Bergson, U Evolution creatrice^ pp. 138, 139.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 9
will have none of the peculiar qualities of life : it will be but a " practical simplification of reality " 1 made by that well-trained sorting-machine in the interests of our daily needs. Only by direct contact with life in its wholeness can we hope to discern its drift, to feel the pulsations of its mighty rhythm; and this we can never contrive save by the help of those who by loyal service and ever-renewed effort have vanquished the crystallising tendencies of thought and attained an immediate if imperfect communion with Reality — " that race of divine men who through a more excellent power and with piercing eyes acutely perceive the supernal light " 2 — the artists, the poets, the prophets, the seers; the happy owners of unspoilt perceptions; the possessors of that " intuition " which alone is able to touch upon absolute things. Thanks to their disinterested attitude towards life, the fresh note of adoration which is struck in them by the impact of Beauty or of Truth, these do not wear the mental blinkers which keep the attention of the average man focussed on one narrow, useful path. Hence they are capable — as the average man is not — of acts of pure perception, of an enormous dilatation of consciousness, in which they appear to enter into immediate communion with some aspect of Reality.
The greater, then, man's mental detachment from the mere struggle to live, which forces him to select, label and dwell upon the useful aspects of things, the more chance there is that we may obtain from him some account of the meaning of that struggle, and the aim of the Spirit of Life. "Were this detachment complete," says Bergson; "did the soul no longer cleave to action by any of its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world has never yet seen. It would excel alike in every art at the same time; or rather, it would
1 Bergson, Le Rire, p. 155. * Plotinus, Ennead, V. n.
10 THE MYSTIC WAY
fuse them all into one. It would perceive all things in their native purity." *
In one rare class of men, and that alone, it seems as though this detachment were indeed complete. We have in those great mystics for whom "will and vision have been one " the perfect development of the artist type. These have carried the passionate art of contempla tion to that consummation in which the mentis dilatatio of psychology slips the leash of matter to become the mentis alienatio of the soul; and have expressed the result of their intuitions in the actual stuff of life. Hence there is justice in their claim to " perceive all things in their native purity"; or, as they declare in lovelier language, " all creatures in God and God in all creatures." 2
According to the universal testimony of such mystics, the drift of life, the effort of that Creative Seed within the world, is to establish itself in Eternity : in Boehme's words, to " hide itself within the Heart of God " : 3 to attain, in pure mystic language, " union with the Absolute." This is its " increasing purpose," to this it is in via. All the degrees of its development — all the inflorescences of beauty, skill and strength — are mile stones, by-paths, short cuts, false starts on this one way. It tends to the actualisation of a spiritual existence already intuitively known : to find its way to a Country, " non tantum cernandam sed et inhabitandam," 4 which the very constitution of its being makes a promised land.
" Movement itself," this spirit life of man has tried, as we might expect, many paths towards that union with the Real, that transcendence which it seeks. All through the history of humanity we find it experimenting here and there, sending out exploring tentacles into the
1 Bergson, Le Rire, p. 158.
2 Meister Eckhart, in Wackernagel, Altdeutsches Lesebuch, p. 891.
3 Aurora, Eng. trans. (1784 edition), p. 237.
4 Aug., Conf., Bk. VII. cap. 20.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 11
unseen. But life has only one way of attaining any stage or state : she must grow to it. Hence the history of the spirit is for us the history of a growth. Here we see, in fact, creative evolution at work ; engaged in the production of species as sharply marked off from normal humanity as " normal " humanity supposes itself to be marked off from the higher apes. The elan vital here takes a new direction, producing profound modifications which, though they are for the most part psychical rather than physical, yet also entail a turning of the physical machinery of thought and perception to fresh uses — a cutting of fresh paths of discharge, a modification of the normal human balance of intuition and intelligence.
The soul, says a great psychologist, is no more absolute and unchangeable than the body. " It, too, is a mobilised and moving equilibrium. Much once central is now lapsed, submerged, instinctive, or even reflex, and much once latent and budding is now potent and in the focus of consciousness for our multiplex, compounded and recompounded personality." 1 We know that this soul, this total psychic life of man, is something much greater than the little patch of consciousness which most of us idly identify with " ourselves." It is like a sword — the " sword of the spirit " — only the point of which pene trates matter, sets up relations with it, and cuts the path through which the whole of life shall move. But behind that point of conscious mental activity is the whole weight and thrust of the unseen blade : that blade which is weapon and warrior in one. Long ages of evolution have tempered the point to the work demanded of it by daily life. In its ceaseless onward push it cuts in one direction only : through that concrete " world of things " in which man finds himself, and with which he is forced to deal. The brain, through which it acts, with which, as it were, its living point is shod, closes it in, limits and defines 1 Stanley Hall, Adolescence, Vol. II. p. 58.
12 THE MYSTIC WAY
its operation : is on one hand a tool, on the other a screen. Had our development taken another path than that which we know and so easily accept, then much now latent might have budded, much now patent might have lapsed, and the matter of the brain, amenable to the creative touch of life, would have become the medium by which we orientated ourselves to another world, perceived and expressed another order of reality, now — and perhaps for ever — unknown.
In the mystics we seem to have a fortunate variation of the race, in which just this thing has come about. Under the spur of their vivid faculty of intuition they " gather up all their being and thrust it forward" — the whole personality, not its sharp, intellectual tip alone— on a new, free path. Hence it is that they live and move in worlds to us unrealised; see other aspects of the many- levelled, many-coloured world of Reality. Living with an intensity which is beyond the scope of " normal " men, deeper and deeper layers of existence are revealed to them. As a result, we may say of them that which Eucken has said of the founders of the great historical religions—
"Nothing gives the presence of an over-world within the human circle more convincing energy than the unswerving constancy with which such personalities are rooted in the Divine; than the manner in which they are completely rilled by the thought of this one relation; and than the simplicity and nearness which the great mystery has acquired for them. Hearts have never been won and minds have never been swayed without the presence of a regal imagination which understands how to win visible forms from an unseen world and to penetrate through all the multiplicity of things into a kingdom of fuller life. Nothing so elevated above the ordinary everyday exist ence is to be found as this, and nothing has governed in so compelling a manner the hearts of men as such a secure growth and such a presence of a new world." 1 1 Tbt Truth of Religion, p. 8.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 13
Thus it is that when Angela of Foligno says, " I had comprehension of the whole world, both here and beyond the sea, and the Abyss and all things else; and therein I beheld naught save the divine power in a manner which is verily indescribable, so that through greatness of marvelling the soul cried with a loud voice, saying, ' This whole world is full of God ' " l — when we read this, an intuition deep within us replies that it can here recognise the accent of truth. Again, when St. Augustine makes the confession — so irrational from the point of view of common sense — "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts shall have no rest apart from Thee," 2 that same remorseless echo sounds within the soul. Though we may live at levels far removed from those at which such immediacy of perception becomes possible for our consciousness, yet we understand the language of those who cry to us from the heights. The germ of their transcendent being is latent in us, for " whatsoever God is in His Nature, the spirit of man is in itself." 3 There are no breaks in the World of Becoming; Life, though it be instinct with spontaneity, though it cut new paths for its branching stream in fresh, unimaginable directions, behave in a thousand incalculable ways, ever remains one. As the past history of the whole is present in each streamlet, so in each streamlet a capacity for the ocean lurks. " I am the living water," says Life : " Let those who thirst for knowledge come to me and drink."
1 B. Angelae de Fulginio, Fisionum et Instructionum Liber, cap. 22.
* Aug., Conf., Bk. I. cap. I.
3 Boehme, 7bt Threefold Life of Man, cap. 5, § 90.
II
THE QUEST OF A THOROUGHFARE
" THE essence of a tendency," says Bergson, in one of his sudden and suggestive images, " is to develop like a sheaf, creating by the very fact of its growth divergent directions amongst which its impulse is shared." *
The spiritual tendency in man — or perhaps it were better to say the spiritual tendency which appears to be inherent in the very being of all life — has been no excep tion to this rule. Spreading sheaf-like, it has emerged in what seems at first sight to be a myriad diverse forms. In its origin a vague sense of direction, a dim unformu- lated desire for something other than the "given" world of sense, and in its later growths a conscious, anxious seeking, its history forms, of course, the greater part of the history of religion, philosophy and magic. Confused though it be with elements of fear, and of self-interest, degraded into servitude to the physical will- to-live, yet all veritable expressions of this tendency, this passion for the Absolute and the Eternal, have as their foundation something which we may rightly call mystical. We find them or their traces wherever man has emerged from that state of exclusive attention to the struggle for life which limits his consciousness to the physical sphere. Then at once the attention which had been screwed down to the concrete business of existence dilates, and sets off in one of a million directions upon some adventure of the soul.
1 Utvolution crtatrice, p. 108. 14
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 15
There are certain characteristics which seem common to all such adventures. Their point of departure is the same: the desire of spirit for the spiritual, the soul's hunger for its home. Their object is the same: the attainment of that home, the achievement of Reality, union with God. Their very definitions of that God have much in common; and behind superficial differences disclose the effort of an exalted intuition to describe one indescribable Fact. He is, says the ancient Hindu, " One Eternal Thinker, thinking non-eternal thoughts ; who, though One, fulfils the desires of many. The wise who perceive Him within their self, to them belongs eternal peace." And again, "They who see but One in all the changing manifoldness of this universe, unto them belongs eternal truth : unto none else, unto none else."3 " Having hearkened not unto me but unto the Logos," says the Greek, "it is wise to confess that all things are One." 2 " One God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all," says the Christian.3 " For, as it is said, God is not external to any one," says the Alexandrian Neoplatonist in words which seem an echo of St. Paul, " but He is present with all things, though they are ignorant that He is so." * So the Sufi poet —
" I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one; One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call. He is the first, He is the last, He is the outward, He is the inward." 5
So, too, the great Indian mystic of our own day, who seems to have caught and synthetised the vision and ardour of Eastern and Western faiths —
" Life of my life, I shall ever try to keep my body pure, knowing that thy living touch is upon all my limbs . . .
1 Katha Upanishad. * Heracleitus : Fragments.
8 Ephesians iv. 6. 4 Plotinus, Ennead, VI. 9.
5 Jalalu 'ddin, Divan (Nicholson's trans.), p. 127.
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Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well . . . Hidden in the heart of things thou art nourishing seeds into sprouts, buds into blossoms, and ripening flowers into fruitfulness." l
Yet, when we pass from the definition of Divine Reality to discussion of the road on which man's spirit shall travel thereto, we find that in spite of identity of aim — in spite, too, of certain remarkable similarities in method- divergence of direction soon begins to show itself.
As physical life, notwithstanding its countless varieties, the countless paths along which it has cut its way, yet shows one great line of cleavage, so that each of those infinite varieties has the character of one or other of two divergent forms — is, as we say, "animal" or "vegetable" — so, in the last resort, we find that the many paths along which spirit has tried to force an entrance into Reality can be classed, according to their tendencies, in two great families. We must, however, say of them, as Bergson has said of animal and vegetable life, that "Every effort to provide a rigorous definition of these two kingdoms has always failed. There is not one single property of vegetable life which has not been found, to a certain degree, in certain animals; not one single characteristic trait of the animal which has not been observed in certain species or at certain epochs of the vegetable world." None the less, in each case these tendencies do represent " divergent directions of an activity that split up as it grew. The difference between them is not a difference or intensity, nor more generally of degree, but of nature." ..." Here the world of plants with its fixity and insensibility ; there the animals with their mobility and consciousness."2
As the plant world has sacrificed one great power inherent in living things — mobility — in order that it may attain to a more intense development in other directions,
1 Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, 4, 67, 8 1.
2 L' Evolution crcatrice, pp. 115, 146, 123.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 17
so one great branch of the spreading sheaf of spirit tends to forego one aspect of life's heritage, in order that it may participate more completely in that other aspect which alone it accepts as real. We have said that the paradox of Deity, in so far as it is apprehended by human intuition and love, appears to us as a vast, all-encompass ing, all-penetrating Reality, which is both transcendent and immanent, static and dynamic, changeless yet changeful, ineffable yet personal, "Eternal Rest and Eternal Work" in respect of the soul and of the per ceived universe; in essence the still and unconditioned One, in action the unresting and conditioned flux. " Supreme Being and Supreme Life," said Augustine. From this dual manifestation of God, which demands for its full apprehension a dual movement on the part of man, one line of spiritual life selects the utterly tran scendent aspect — pure Being — as the only Reality, the objective towards which it is destined to return. From the rich possibilities of human nature it again selects one aspect — its Being — as real. For it, the true Self is as unconditioned as the Absolute; it does not struggle for expression, it has no qualities, it merely Is. Hence the soul only attains to reality when all will and all character have been eliminated.1 As the normal man's conscious ness is held down, by his attention to life, to the narrow contemplation of the concrete, this mystic's spiritual con sciousness is held down to the contemplation of an unconditioned reality. Refusing all else, it pours itself out in a single state, of which the intensity is progressively enhanced by concentration, by the cutting off of all contacts with the " unreal " world of things.
This proceeding constitutes that Via Negativa which is
too well known in the annals of mysticism : the attempt
to attain Being by the total rejection of Becoming, to
perfect Contemplation by the refusal of Action. Those
1 Royce, The World and the Individual, Vol. I. p. 167.
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who choose this road to transcendence go up alone to meet God on the mountain ; but they do not bring back any tidings of joy for the race. The tendency which they represent is, of course, found in its most characteristic form in Hindu mysticism of the philosophic type ; though pure — i. e. non-Christian — Neoplatonism, and the exag gerated forms of Quietism which have troubled the mystical history of Europe, belong in essence to the same great division of spiritual life.
As the fungi were called by Bergson the " abortive children of the vegetable world," 1 so the extreme types produced along this line of development might be called the abortive children of the spiritual world. Their different varieties are " so many blind alleys " down which Life has run on her instinctive quest of transcendence, only to find an impasse where she looked for a thorough fare. If we wish to demonstrate this, we need but look once more at Life in its wholeness — not merely natural, human, or intellectual life, but the whole mighty and indivisible stream of which these things are manifesta tions, the totality of the Flux — and then ask : What relation does that kind of life which is the ultimate object of pure Indian, or even of Neoplatonic mysticism, bear to this totality? Does it exhibit the character of life; does it carry up its highest powers to new conquests? Does it grow, create? Can it be called " movement itself " ? Does it tend towards the production of free acts, towards ever-deepening correspondence with rich and varied levels of reality?
Consider first the way in which our mental life proceeds.
We live upon the physical plane, are kept in touch with the outer world, by means of that faculty in us— not always consciously exercised — which we call our " attention to life." Attention makes the bridge between ourselves and that " somewhat " not ourselves, which we 1 L 'Evolution crtatrice, p. 117.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 19
know as the world of things. A rich, thick Universe, charged like a Bank Holiday crowd with infinite and unguessed possibilities of sight, sound and smell, waits at our door; and waits for the most part in vain. Atten tion keeps the turnstile, rejects the many and admits the few. The direction toward which the turnstile is set conditions the aspect of the world which we are to know; the pace at which it works ensures that a certain number of sense-impressions shall be received by us, deliver their message, and set up responsive movements on our part. The give-and-take of incoming feeling or sense-impres sion, and outgoing action or response — though feeling, pure perception, has passed through the cerebral sorting- house, and offers us only a selection of all that there is to feel — this, broadly speaking, seems to be the process of our normal mental life, in so far as it consists in the maintenance of a correspondence with the physical world.1
So, too, with the life of spirit. Though lived upon higher levels, it is not further removed from action : only the form of its action, the nature of its correspondences, is changed with that change of rhythm which makes us free of a wider universe. Still it is Life that is at work in us; and Life, though here she seems to break forth into something strangely new, exercising to the full her inherent freedom and spontaneity, remains at bottom true to her own methods. Her object here is the transcending of the merely physical, the obtaining of a foothold in Eternity; and Attention, Perception, Response must still be the means by which she moves towards that end.
The spiritual life of man, then, if it be a real life lived, must involve not only a deliberate attentiveness to this aspect of Reality — not only the reception of messages from the supernal sphere — but also the execution of movements in response. It shall be the soul at home in the spiritual world, swimming in the " Sea Pacific " 1 Compare Bergson, Matitre et mtmoire (Eng. trans.), p. 178.
C 2
20 THE MYSTIC WAY
of the Godhead,1 moving in unison with its tides; not the trained and clarified consciousness contemplating a vision of " That which Is " 2 by means of some " interior organ" able to " receive the absolute truth of the tran scendental world, a spiritual faculty which cognises spiritual objects." 3 Plainly such a transcendence involves a total growth and change of direction, which shall make possible of accomplishment the new responsive move ments of the soul. The spirit is " touched of God," spurred to a new quality of attention. It receives a message from the Transcendent, and moves, is changed, in response.
This receiving of something given on the part of the Spiritual, and the giving of ourselves back — this divine osmosis of spirit without and spirit within — is made possible by the soul's impassioned attentiveness, or Love; the primary condition of our spiritual life. The vision of Reality, says Plotinus, is the work of one who is anxious to perceive it; who is possessed by an "amatory passion " which " causes the lover to rest in the object of his love." 4 Such love, says St. Augustine, is the "weight of the soul," 5 the spiritual gravitation which draws all things to their place in God. It " is God," says the author of The Mirror of Simple Souls: demonstrates, that is to say — since we can only " behold that which we are" 6 — the interior presence of a Divine Reality; and man's spirit only attains reality and freedom "by con dition of Love." 7 Pure love, then, which is tendency raised to its highest power and reinforced by passionate will, an ardent, deliberate attentiveness to a Reality
1 St. Catherine of Siena, Dialogo, cap. 89.
2 Aug., Conf., Bk. VII. cap. 17.
3 Eckartshausen, The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, Letter I.
4 Plotinus, Ennead, VI. 9.
' Aug., Conf., Bk. XIII. cap. 9.
6 Ruysbroeck, De Contemplation (Hello, p. 145).
7 " I am God, says Love ; for Love is God and God is Love. And this soul is God by condition of Love " (The Mirror of Simple Souls).
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 21
without — " hidden Bread of spirit, mighty Husband of mind " 1 — on the part of the scrap of self-creative Reality within; this is the only driving power of the soul on its path towards the Spiritual Life. It is the mainspring of all its responsive acts, its growth and its fecundity. This is the fact which lies at the root of all activistic mysticism.
" 'Twere better that the spirit which wears not true love as a garment Had not been : its being is but shame. Be thou drunken in love, for love is all that exists." 2
Thus the Sufi mystic; and his Christian brother answers, in a saying of which few can hope to plumb the deeps, "He that loveth not, knoweth not God; for God is love." 3
We shall expect, then, that life going forward to new levels will go forward in a spirit or love; nor can a con summation in which such love is transcended have any other meaning than annihilation for human conscious ness. " In love," says Aquinas, " the whole spiritual life of man consists." 4 In the East, however, the contem plative and world-renouncing quest of the Absolute, the movement from Becoming to Being, which developed under the influence of Hindu philosophy, has been from the first divorced from the warmly vital and more truly mystic, outgoing and fruitful, world-renewing attitude of Love. The two movements of the complete spiritual life have here been dissociated from one another; with a resulting loss of wholeness and balance in each.
The search for transcendence, as we see it in orthodox Hinduism and Buddhism, represents in its general ten dency, not a movement of expansion, not the generous industry of insatiable love; but a movement of withdrawal,
1 Aug., Cm/., Bk. I. cap. 13.
* Jalalu 'ddin, Divan (Nicholson's trans.), p. 51.
8 I John iv. 8.
4 On Perfection, Opusculum XVIII. cap. I.
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the cultivation of an exquisite and aristocratic despair. Inspired by the intellect rather than by the heart, the great mystical philosophy of the Hindus " has as its presupposi tion a strong feeling of the transitoriness and unreality of existence." 1 It demands from its adepts, as a condition of their attainment of God, an acknowledgment of the illusory nature of the Here-and-Now, the web of appear ance; which, though sometimes combined with a belief in Divine Immanence, robs that doctrine of all practical bearing on diurnal life.
In theory orthodox Hindu religion offers three paths to its disciples : the path of works — that is to say, not the pursuit of virtue, but the accurate fulfilment of cere monial obligations; the path of knowledge, of philosophic speculation — which includes in its higher stages the trans cending of illusion, the " mystical " art of contemplating the Being of God; and the path of devotional love, or Bhakti.2 The history of Bhakti religion is a curious and significant one. It arose about the fourth century B.C., and then possessed a strongly mystical and ethical charac ter; its central idea being the impassioned and personal love of the One God, who was called by His worshippers " the Adorable," and with whom they believed com munion to be possible, even for those still immersed in the temporal world. This phase, which seems to represent a true outburst of natural mysticism, the effort of life to find a new path to transcendence, the instinct of the heart for its home and origin, is recorded in the most ancient parts of the Bhagavad-gita. " Bhakti," however, was but one of Life's "false starts"; a reaction against the arid performances of the religious intellect, a premature move ment towards levels on which the human mind was still too weak to dwell. Thwarted and finally captured by the
1 Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p. 7.
• Cf. Hastings' Dictionary of Religion and Ethics. Vol. II, Article " Bhakti Marga."
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 23
philosophising tendency of Brahminism, against which it was in origin directed, it sank to a static and intellectualis- ing system of vaguely pantheistic piety.
But in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries the deep- seated instinct — the profound human need — which it repre sents again broke out with vigour. As if in revolt against the abstract transcendentalism of the philosophical schools, a wave of passionate devotion, demanding as its object a personal and attainable God, swept over the land, under the influence of three great spiritual teachers and their disciples. Regarded by the orthodox Brahmins as heretics, these reformers split off from the main body, and formed independent sects of a mystical type; which brought back into prominence the original and long-lost idea of Bhakti, as a communion of love and will between the human spirit and an attainable and personal God.1 From them descends that intensely personal, incarnational type of mystical feeling which is sometimes called " Vaish- navite religion," and is seen in its purest form in the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.
The really mystical element in the teaching of these reformers had, however, little connection with native Hindu Mysticism : represented, rather, a deliberate oppo sition to it. They were adventurers, departing from the main road of Brahmin theology in search of more abundant life; of closer communion with the substance of reality. The first of them, Ramanuja (c. 1150), had been brought up in immediate contact with Indian Christianity : that ancient Christian church of Malabar which dates from the first or second century and claims to have been founded by the Apostle Thomas himself. It is probable that some
1 The fact that this movement, on its lower and popular side, gave support to the most erotic and least desirable aspects of the Krishna cult, ought not to prejudice our judgment of its higher and purer aspect. The wholesale condemnation of a faith on account of its worst by-products is a dangerous principle for Christian critics.
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of the new inspiration which he brought to the antique and moribund science of the Love of God may be traced to this source. An uncompromising monotheist, he taught, in contradistinction to all previous theologians, the thoroughly foreign doctrine that the human soul is distinct from God, and that the "union" which is its proper end is not an annihilation, but a satisfaction; since it retains its identity and separate consciousness even when re-absorbed in Him — a position which is indistinguishable from the Christian idea of the Beatific Vision.1
By the end of the thirteenth century the influence of Ramanuja had faded. Then arose the great Ramananda, and his greater pupil, the weaver-poet Kabir : still living forces in Indian religion. Under the influence of Rama-
O
nanda, Bhakti — now identified with the " incarnational " cult of Rama — was transformed into a system which has many striking correspondences with mystical Christianity. Ramananda was familiar with the Gospels ; and his life and doctrine are full of deliberate Christian parallels. He trained and sent out twelve apostles, and taught a Christian system of ethics. Like Ramanuja, he insisted on the continued separate existence of the soul after the consummation of its union with the Absolute God. Many of the doctrines of Sufiism were also adopted by him, and his teaching is charged with the ardent personal emotion which we find in the Sufi and Christian saints.2 The result was a sort of cross-bred mystical religion of Christian feeling on a basis of Hindu theology, which owed its driving power to the purity and enthusiasm of the soul which first conceived it. To this type of Bhakti, which expresses itself in its popular form in a personal
1 Cf. Oman, The Mystics, Ascetics and Saints of India, p. 116.
2 The influence of Sufiism and Hinduism was to some extent mutual. There seems little doubt that certain aspects of the Krishna cult provided the model for many of the favourite Sufi expressions of "spiritual love."
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 25
devotion to the God Vishnu under one or other of his incarnations, the bulk of North Indian Hindus still adhere; but it can hardly be claimed as evidence of the strength and splendour of true Indian mysticism.
In Ramananda's disciple Kabir, poet and mystic, a great religious genius hardly known in the West, the Christian incarnational element — dynamic perfection found within the Here-and-Now — appears under another form. Far from encouraging a rejection of the World of Becoming in order that pure Being might be found, Kabir — who was strongly influenced by Sufiism and shows many Christian correspond ences — taught that man's union with God, the conformity of his spirit to that "rhythm of love and renunciation" which sways the universe, was best achieved in the fret of diurnal existence. He praised the common life and strongly discouraged all professional asceticism, all negative contemplation. Holding that the Absolute Godhead was unknowable save by intuitive love, he found the Divine immanent in the race as a whole : a fragmentary truth which survives in the sect still called by his name.
Thus Brahminism shows a perpetual tendency, on the part of its most spiritual members, to break away from the negative transcendentalism which is its inmost principle, in the direction of a more human and fruitful reading of the secret of life. Even of those who have been true to that transcendentalism, with its deliberate cultivation of the ecstatic consciousness, its solitary and ineffable experiences of the Absolute, some of the greatest have felt, and obeyed, an inconsistent impulse towards active work amongst their fellow-men; so true is it that " there is no single property of one form of life which is not found, to a certain degree, in the other." Unable to solve the paradox of imago e cerchio, the tendency towards the real and eternal which is inherent in Hinduism splits into two streams, representing severally the search for a personal and an impersonal object of devotion — a "way
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out " in the direction of knowledge, and in the direction of love.
When we turn to Buddhism — particularly that esoteric Buddhism of which the mystical quality and vast superior ity to all Western religion has been so loudly advertised of recent years — we find somewhat similar phenomena. In essence this mysticism, if mysticism it can be called, is definitely self-regarding and definitely negative. It is a Way, not of attainment, but of escape. The "Noble Eightfold Path " of high moral virtue and extreme detachment on which its disciples are set, the art of contemplation practised by its higher initiates, are both directed towards the extinction of all that bears the character of life; that which its Scriptures call the " delusion of being a self." The strength of Buddhism lies in the fact that personal holiness is its immediate aim ; but this is not sought out of any generous motive of self-donation, any longing to enter more deeply into the unspeakable riches of the universe, any passion for God. For Buddhists the ultimate fact is not God, but Law. They seek the elimination of selfhood and desire purely as a means of transcending " Dukka " : that is to say, suffering, pain, misfortune, unhappiness, all the illusions and distresses of conscious existence. Suffering is felt to be the central reality of such conscious exist ence : "all things are impermanent . . . pain-engendering . . . without soul." * Therefore the Path must lead to the cessation of such existence, to the realm of simple Being, Nirvana : a word which means literally " the blowing out of the flame." 2 " Just this have I taught
1 Cf. Mrs. Rhys Davids' Buddhism (Home University Library), pp. 157 et seq., 218, 234, etc. This admirable and eminently fair-minded little