book is the best of all introductions to Buddhism. For a more attractive

and less judicial view of the Buddhist spirit at its best, see The Creed of Buddha.
2 Cf. Mrs. Rhys Davids, op. cit., p. 175; also Baldwin's Dictionary of
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 27
and do I teach,55 says the Buddha, " ill, and the ending of ill55; l and the last grade of sanctity or wisdom is that in which the disciple is able to say, "This is 111; this is the cause of 111; this is the cessation of 111; this is the way leading to the cessation of 111.55 2
Yet, as though some intuition of the soul rebelled against this reading of life, later Buddhism, in defiance of consistency, began to exhibit some of the characters which were to find their full expression in Christianity. The growth towards sanctity, the selection and training of selves capable of transcendence, dynamic movement and change, became an integral part of it; and the three grades of training through which the self was led on this "Pathway to Reality55 — Higher Conduct, Higher Con sciousness, Higher Insight — present the closest of parallels with the Mystic Way described by the Christian saints. Moreover, Buddhist ethics took a warmer tone. A " sympathising love 55 for all created things, not far removed from Pauline charity, took a high place in the scale of virtues; and this love soon demanded an objective in the spiritual sphere. Hence, as the Christian focussed his religious emotions on Christ, so Gautama himself, at first revered only as the teacher of this sublime but despairing system of morality, came to be adored as an incarnation of the Everlasting but Unknowable God; and the immediate aim of the believer was directed to being a " partaker of his nature " — a sharer in his illumination and freedom — though still with the cardinal idea of escaping from re-birth in the dreaded world of illusion, the flux of life.3
Philosophy and Psychology, Vol. II. p. 231, and Hastings' Dictionary of Religion and Ethics, Vol. II, article " Asceticism."
1 Majjhima-Nikaya, I. 140. Quoted by Mrs. Rhys Davids, op. cit.t p. 159.
• Mrs. Rhys Davids, op. cit., p. 200.
3 Baldwin, op. cit.
28 THE MYSTIC WAY
Such facts as these, matched by the presence within the Christian fold of the phenomena of "metaphysical" contemplation, quietism, and holy indifference, and the exaggerated language of some mystics concerning a " self- loss in the desert of God " which seems indistinguishable from complete annihilation, only accentuate those diffi culties of definition which trouble all orderly observers of that wayward, lawless thing, the Spirit of Life. They warn us of the dangers which threaten all who yield to the human passion for classification; suggesting that here too, as with animal and vegetable creation, the character istic traits of one class are found " to a certain degree " in the other. The angles at which consciousness is set towards Reality are infinite; and every teacher gives us the system which he represents, not as a demonstration of scientific " truth," but, as an artist, " through a temperament."
Nevertheless, reviewing the material here presented to us, we can truthfully say that the governing emotional characteristic of unchristianised Hindu and Buddhist mysticism is a subtraction from, rather than an addition to, the rich multiplicity of life — a distrust and dislike of illusion, the craving for a way of escape. In the place of that humble yet romantic note of adoration, that ecstatic and energetic passion for the One Reality every where discerned by the eyes of love, that " combined aptitude for intuition and action," * which inspires the other great kingdom of spiritual life, the Hindu, and after him the Neoplatonist, puts a self-regarding concentration on contemplation alone, a pathetic trust in the saving power of intellectual knowledge : the Buddhist, a severe morality which, though inculcating an utter selflessness, is yet pursued for personal ends. The philosophy on which both systems rest is a negative monism of inconceivable harshness, for which the whole World of Becoming, the 1 Delacroix, Etudes d'histoire et de psychologic du mysticism*.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 29
realm of the Here-and-Now is, for the Hindu, a dream : for the Buddhist a cruel wheel of misfortunes from which he must escape if he can. Pure Being, the unconditioned and absolute God, is all that exists ; and He, though supreme Knower, must be in truth unconscious.1
True union with such an Absolute really involves the shedding of every human — more, every vital — character istic. That transcendence which is the aim of all spirit it accomplishes, therefore, not by a true regeneration, an enriching and uplifting of the elements of life, that they may grow, branch out, create upon higher, more complex levels of reality; but by a subtraction, a rejection rather than transmutation of the World of Becoming, which has as its ideal the extinction of all emotion and the attain ment of untroubled calm, complete indifference. Its last flower is a concentration upon Pure Being, an other worldly specialism, so complete as to inhibit all action, feeling, thought : a condition which escapes from love no less than from hate, from joy no less than from pain; an absorption into the Absolute which involves the oblitera tion of everything that we know as personality.2
" It follows," says Royce justly, after an able discussion of Oriental mystical philosophy, " that if mysticism is to escape from its own finitude and really is to mean by its Absolute Being anything but a mere nothing, its account of Being must be so amended as to involve the assertion that our finite life is not mere illusion, that our ideas are not merely false, and that we are already, even as finite, in touch with Reality." 3 As in the vegetable
1 Royce, The World and the Individual, Vol. I. p. 168.
* The reference here is, of course, to the last stage of Hindu contempla tion. The Neoplatonic ecstacy, at any rate as seen in that true mystic, Plotinus, appears to have been a state of consciously exultant com munion with the One (vide Bigg, Neoplatonism, p. 286), and may be regarded as an intermediate form between Eastern and Western spiritual life.
» The World and the Individual, Vol. I. p. 182.
30 THE MYSTIC WAY
kingdom, so here, life has made the fatal mistake of sacrificing mobility; and with it that capacity for new creative acts which is essential if the whole man is ever to be lifted to the spiritual sphere and develop all his latent possibilities. It has left untapped the richest layers of human nature : its power of self-donation, its passion for romance, that immense spiritual fertility which has made so many of the great mystics of the West the creative centres of widening circles of life.
Since the life of the spirit is to express for us the inmost and energising reality, the total possibilities of our rich and many-levelled universe, we shall surely ask of such a true spiritual life that it prove itself capable of striking not one but all the notes possible to humanity; and this with a greater evocative power than any other way of life can attain. We shall demand of it the passion, the colour, the variety of music ; since these are the earnests of abundant life.1 We shall expect it to compass the full span of human nature, and extort from that nature the full measure alike of perception and of act. Its consciousness must go from the still and rapturous heights of adoration to the deeps of utter self-knowledge; from the candid simplicity of joy to the complex entanglements of grief. It must not dissociate action from contempla tion, Becoming from Being, knowledge from love. He who lived this veritable life of spirit would be alive in the deepest, fullest sense; for his functions of reception and response would be raised to their highest pitch of develop ment. Far from seeking a condition of static calm, he would accept emotion for that which it is; psychic move ment, evidence of life, one of the noblest powers of the conscious soul. Those superb cravings and satisfactions which are produced in us by the sacraments of natural
1 " A beautiful, breathing instrument of music, the Lord made man," says Clement of Alexandria, whereon the spirit of Life " makes melody to God " (Cohortatio ad Gentes, I.).
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 31
beauty or of human love — true out-going movements as they are in the direction of reality — such an one would not transcend, but would lift to a new level of immediacy. Where we received hints, he would have communion with certainties. The freshness of eternal springs would speak to him in the primrose and the budding tree. Not blankness but beauty would characterise his ecstacy : a beauty including in some inconceivable union all the harmonies and contrasts which express the Thought of God. To these he would respond, with these be in tune : so that his life would itself be musical.
" Is it beyond thee to be glad with the gladness of this rhythm ; to be tossed and lost and broken in the whirl of this fearful joy ?
All things rush on, they stop not, they look not behind, no power can hold them back, they rush on.
Keeping steps with that restless, rapid music, seasons come dancing and pass away — colours, tunes, and perfumes pour in endless cascades in the abounding joy that scatters and gives up and dies every moment." l
To " be glad with the gladness of this rhythm "— - to keep step with the music of Reality — this is the aim, these are the possibilities, which have been seized and employed by that current of life which has chosen the second path towards the transcendent sphere : the positive and activistic mysticism of the West. Here we find inclusion rather than subtraction : a growing intuitive conviction that the One shall justify rather than exclude the many, that the life of spirit shall involve the whole man in all his activities and correspondences. The mount ing soul carries the whole world with it; the cosmic cross- bearer is its true type. It does not abandon, it re-makes : declaring that the "glory of the lighted mind," once he has attained to it, will flood the totality of man's nature, lighting up the World of Becoming, and exhibiting not merely the unknowable character of " the Origin of all
1 Rabindranath Tagore, op. cit. 70.
32 THE MYSTIC WAY
that Is," but the knowable and immediate presence of that Immanent Spirit in Whom " we live and move and have our being." As the heightening of mental life reveals to the intellect deeper and deeper levels of reality, so with that movement towards enhancement of the life of spirit which takes place along this path, the world assumes not the character of illusion but the character of sacrament ; and spirit finds Spirit in the lilies of the field, no less than in the Unknowable Abyss. True, there is here too a certain world-renouncing element; for the spiritual life is of necessity a growth, and all growth represents a renunciation as well as an achievement. Something, if only perambulator and feeding-bottle, we are compelled to leave behind. But that which is here renounced is merely a low level of correspondences, which enslaves and limits the mind, confining its attention to its own physical needs and desires. The sometimes sterile principle of "world-denial" is here found united with the ever fruitful principle of " world renewal " : and thus the essential quality of Life, its fecundity and spontaneity, is safeguarded, a " perennial inner movement " is assured.1 This kind of life, this distinct variety of human con sciousness, is found fully developed in those mystics whom we call Christian; less perfectly expressed — since here mingled with certain Oriental elements — in their cousins the Sufis, and partially present, as we have seen, in those Hindu sects which have affinities with Christi anity. It is attained by them as the result of a life process, a kind of growth, which makes of those who experience it a genuine psychic species apart; which tends to the winning of freedom, the establishment of that state of equilibrium, " that eternal outgoing and eternal life, which we have and are eternally in God." 2 These mystics grow through a constant and well-marked series
1 Cf. Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p. 14.
2 Ruysbroeck, VOrnement des Noces Spirituelles, Lib. III. cap. 5.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 33
of states to a definite consummation : that so-called "unitive life" of enormously enhanced vitality, of harmonious correspondence with the transcendental order, in which each becomes a self-creative centre of spiritual no less than of physical life.
"Eternal life in the midst of Time," says Harnack, is the secret of Christianity.1 " For all ontological minnesingers of the love of God," says Stanley Hall, " it is eternal life to know Him." 2 But the power of living such a life depends upon organic adjustments, psychic changes, a heightening of our spiritual tension ; not on the mere acceptance of specific beliefs. Hence the true object of Christianity — hidden though it be beneath a mass of credal and ritual decorations — is the effecting of the changes which lead to the production of such mystics, such " free souls " : those profound psychic and spiritual adjustments, which are called in their totality " Regeneration." By the ancient natural modes of birth and growth it seeks the induction of Man in his wholeness into the life of Reality; that "Kingdom of God" which, once his attention is given to it, he not only finds without but has within. It is less a " faith " than a life-process. It differs from all other religions in that it implies and controls actual and organic psychological growth. That rare thing, the real Christian, is a genuinely new creation ; not an ordinary man with a new and inspiring creed. " If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature," said St. Paul ; and described in those words a most actual phenomenon, the perennial puzzle of the religious psychologist.3 The re-birth which is typified by the Church's sacrament of initiation, and the participation in the Divine Life which is dramatised in its sacrament of
1 Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 5 (Eng. trans., p. 8). 1 Adolescence, Vol. II. p. 128.
3 2 Cor. v. 17. Cf. the sections dealing with conversion in Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion ; and James, Varieties of Religious Experience.
34 THE MYSTIC WAY
communion — " the food of the full-grown " l — these are facts, these are things, which really happen to Christian mystics ; to all those, in fact, who follow this path of development, whatsoever their theological creed. The authentic documents of Christianity — those produced by minds which have submitted to the discipline and experi enced the growth — speak with no uncertain voice as to the actual and unique character of this life. Its result, they say, is no splitting up of personality, no isolation of the " spiritual sense " ; but the lifting of the whole man to new levels of existence "where the soul has fulhead of perception by divine fruition " ; 2 where he not only knows, but is, not only is, but acts. " My life," said St. Augustine, looking forward to that existence in God which he recognised as his destiny, " shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee." 3 « The naked will," says Ruysbroeck of that same consummation, " is trans formed by the Eternal Love, as fire by fire. The naked spirit stands erect, it feels itself to be wrapped round, affirmed and affixed by the formless immensity of God," since " our being, without losing anything of its per sonality, is united with the Divine Truth which respects all diversity." 4 Here is the authentic voice of Western mysticism; and here we indeed recognise spirit pressing forward in a new direction towards new conquests, bring ing into expression deeper and deeper levels of life.
1 Clement of Alexandria, Strom., V. 10.
2 The Mirror of Simple Souls.
3 Aug., Conf., Bk. X. cap. 28.
4 Samuel (Hello, p. 201) and De Contemplations (Hello, p. 145).
Ill
THE FINDING OF THE THOROUGHFARE
THE first full and perfect manifestation of this life, this peculiar psychological growth, in which human person ality in its wholeness moves to new levels and lives at a tension hitherto unknown — establishes itself in the inde pendent spiritual sphere — seems to coincide with the historical beginning of Christianity. In Jesus of Nazareth it found its perfect thoroughfare, rose at once to its classic expression; and the movement which He initiated, the rare human type which He created, is in essence a genuinely biological rather than a merely credal or intel lectual development of the race. In it, we see life exercising her sovereign power of spontaneous creation : breaking out on new paths.
Already, it is true, some men — peculiarly sensitive per haps to the first movement of life turning in a fresh direction — had run ahead of the common experience and stumbled upon the gateway to those paths ; even taken tentative steps along the way in which mankind was destined to be "guided and enticed"1 by the indwelling Spirit of Love. They are those whom we call " natural mystics." Their intuitions and experiences had been variously, but always incompletely expressed; in creed and ceremonial, in symbolic acts which suggested the inner experience that they sought — sometimes in prophecies understood by none but those who made them. Nor is this inconsistent with Life's methods, as we may discern
1 Tauler, Sermon on the Nativity of Our Lady (The Inner Way, p. 168). D 2 35
86 THE MYSTIC WAY
them on other levels of activity. The elan vital of the human race is about to pour itself in a new direction. It tries to break through, first here, next there; pressing behind the barrier of the brain.
On two sides especially we observe this preparation on Life's part for the new movement; the tendency towards new regions intuitively discerned. We have first the persistent prophetic and poetical element in Judaism — that line of artist-seers " mad with the Spirit " l of whom John the Baptist is the last — proclaiming passionately and insistently, though most often under racial and political symbols, the need of change, regeneration; trying in vain to turn the attention of man in a new direction, to stem the muddy " torrent of use and wont." Here the mystical spirit, the untamed instinct for God, penetrates to the field of consciousness. Over and over again, in the works of the prophets and psalmists, that strange and insatiable craving for Reality, the " diadem of beauty," 2 appears. The primitive Deity, who is feared, obeyed, and pro pitiated, gradually gives place to the Deity who is loved and longed for — the " Very Rest " of the human soul. " As the hart desires the water-brooks " these pathfinders of the race desire and foretell the attainment of this Deity; and with it a coming efflorescence of spirit, an opening up of human faculty, the breaking forth of new life upon high levels of joy. " And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions : and also upon the servants and the handmaids in those days will I pour out my Spirit." 3
True, this splendid re-ordering and exaltation of things
seems to them something peculiar to their own " elect "
race ; they picture it as best they can, with the poor
materials available to them, and within the narrow limita-
1 Hos. ix. 7. a Isa. xxviii. 5. 8 Joel ii. 28, 29.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 87
tions of a tribal consciousness. But the important matter is the original intuition : not its translation into the con crete terms of the " Apocalyptic " or the " Messianic " hope. The lovely dreams of the Isaianic prophets, the vision of divine humanity in the Book of Daniel, the passion for an unrealised perfection which burns in many of the psalms; all these tend the same way. " For as the rain cometh down and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, and giveth seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so shall my Word be that goeth forth out of my mouth; it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." *
With the passing of the centuries, the conviction of this new budding and bringing forth of the " Word," the divine idea immanent in the world, grows stronger and stronger.2 All the prophets feel it, all agonise for it; but they do not attain to it. We watch them through the ages, ever stretching forward to something that they shall not live to see. " Like as a woman with child, that draweth near the time of her delivery, is in pain and crieth out in her pangs; so have we been before thee, O Lord. We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have as it were brought forth wind ; we have not wrought any deliverance in the earth, neither have inhabitants of the world been born." 8 This is the epitaph of Jewish prophecy.
Opposed, as it seems, to this line of growth, though
1 Isa. Iv. 10-12 (R.V.). The primitive, and never wholly forgotten concept of Jahveh as peculiarly the God of storm, cloud, rain, and dew (cf. the stories of Noah, Sodom, the pillar of cloud, Moses on Sinai, Gideon, etc.), gave to these metaphors a peculiar poignancy in Jewish ears.
1 Cf. E. G. King (Early Religious Poetry of the Hebrews, pp. 144 et seq.} on the development of the word " Tzemach " or " Outspring " in Hebrew literature, from a natural to a Messianic sense.
3 Isa. xxvi. 17, 18 (R.V.), marginal reading.
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actually representing another of life's efforts in the same direction, we have the so-called " enthusiastic religions," the mystery-cults of the antique world; dramatising, many of them, with a certain crude intensity, that actual process of re-birth and ascent to the spiritual sphere already instinctively discerned by the spirit of life as the path upon which man's soul was destined to move. But, how ever close the much-advertised correspondences between the symbolic ritual of the Orphics, or of later and more elaborate mystery cults, and the interior process through which the human soul grows to conscious union with God, these sacramental dramas remain the picture of something perceived and longed for, rather than the earnest of some thing actually done to the participants. To " him whose initiation was recent " 1 they may have given a vision of the Divine World : but vision alone will not quicken that " seed of the divine life . . . that has all the riches of eternity in it, and is always wanting to come to the birth in him and be alive," 2-— the seed which, once germinated, grows steadily through the seasons, nourished by the whole machinery of life, to a perfect correspondence with Reality. " Salvation and the New Birth," says Prof. Percy Gardner, " did not attain in the Pagan mysteries more than a small part, an adumbration of the meaning those phrases were to attain in developed Christianity. They only furnished the body wherein the soul was to dwell. They only provided organs which were destined for functions as yet undeveloped." 3 No doubt there were isolated spirits in whom the teaching and ritual of these mysteries really quickened the " spark of the soul," initiated a life-movement; as there were others who rose, like St. Augustine, through the sublime speculations of Greek philosophy to a brief intellectual vision of That Which Is.4 But evidence of this spiritual precocity is
1 Plato, Phczdrus, § 250. « W. Law, The Spirit of Prayer.
3 Exploratio Evangelic^ p. 337. 4 Aug., Conf., Bk. VII. cap. 9.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 39
lost to us. We find ample record of the craving, little of the attainment. The Graeco-Roman world, which has bequeathed to us the rich results of its genius for beauty and for abstract thought, even for ethics of the loftiest kind, and the life-history of its many heroic men of action, gives us no work either of pure literature or of biography in which we can recognise — as we may in so many records of the Mahomedan as well as the Christian world — the presence of that peculiar spiritual genius which we call " sanctity."
Whilst no reasonable student of mysticism would wish to deny the debt which our spiritual culture owes to Greek thought, it remains true that the gift of Hellenism here has often been misconstrued. Hellenism gave to the spirit of man, not an experience, but a reading of experience. In the mysteries, the natural mystic saw a drama of his soul's adventures upon the quest of God. In Neoplatonism he found a philosophic explanation of his most invincible desires, his most sublime perceptions : " saw from a wooded height the land of peace, but not the road thereto." l Greece taught first the innately mystical, and afterwards the typically Christian soul, how to understand itself; produced the commentary, but not the text. Paul, caught up to the third heaven, had little to learn from the Platonic ecstacy; and it was not from Dionysus or Cybele that the mystic of the Fourth Gospel learned the actual nature of New Birth.
The "mysteries," in fact, were essentially magical dramas ; which stimulated the latent spiritual faculties of man, sometimes in a noble, but sometimes also in an ignoble way. Their initiates were shown the symbols of that consummation which they longed for; the union with God which is the object of all mysticism. They passed, by submission to ceremonial obligations, through stages which curiously anticipated the actual processes of life; 1 Aug., Conf., Bk. VII. cap. 21.
40 THE MYSTIC WAY
sometimes, as in the primitive rites of the Dionysus cult, induced in themselves an artificial state of ecstacy by the use of dancing, music and perfumes.1 Antiquity shows us everywhere these dramas, always built more or less according to the same pattern, because always trying to respond to the same need — the craving of the crescent soul for purity, liberation, reality and peace. But the focal point in them was always the obtaining of personal safety or knowledge by the performance of special and sacred acts : at the utmost, by a temporary change of con sciousness deliberately induced, as in ecstacy.2 They im plied the existence of a static, ready-made spiritual world, into which the initiate could be inserted by appropriate disciplines; thereby escaping from the tyranny and un reality of the Here-and-Now. Far from being absorbed into the Christian movement, they continued side by side with it. The true descendants of the Pagan mystes are not the Christian mystics, as certain modern scholars would pretend; these have little in common with them but an unfortunate confusion of name. Their posterity is rather to be sought amongst that undying family of more or less secret associations which perpetuated this old drama of regeneration, and insisted on attributing to its merely ritual performance an awful significance, a genuine value for life. In early times the Manichaeans3 and the
1 Cf. Erwin Rohde, Psyche, Vol. II. p. 26.
2 For a sane and scholarly treatment of this whole subject of the Pagan mysteries, consult Daremberg et Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquites. Arts. " Eleusis," " Isis," " Mysteria," " Orpheus." For the thiasi and syncretistic mystery cults about the Christian era, see P. Gardner, Ex- ploratio Evangelica, and Glover, The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire.
3 Harnack (Augustins Konfessionen, p. 21) expressly compares the Mani- chasans with modern Freemasons ; and says, " they offered to their members a serious way of life in which one mounted step by step, through ever narrower and higher circles, until one found one's goal in a society of saints and saviours." The Third Book of St. Augustine's Confessions
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 41
Gnostics, with their elaborate but confused systems of mixed Pagan and Christian ideas, later the Rosicrucians, the Cabalists, the Freemasons,1 and later still the Martin- ists and other existing societies of " initiates," which lay claim to the possession of jealously-guarded secrets of a spiritual kind, have continued the effort to find a "way out " along this road : but in vain. Not a new creation, but at best a protective mimicry, is all that life can manage here.
More and more as we proceed the peculiar originality of the true Christian mystic becomes clear to us. We are led towards the conclusion — a conclusion which rests on historical rather than religious grounds — that the first person to exhibit in their wholeness the spiritual possi bilities of man was the historic Christ; and to the corol lary, that the great family of the Christian mystics — that is to say, all those individuals in whom an equivalent life- process is set going and an equivalent growth takes place —represents to us the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, in respect of the upward movement of the racial consciousness. This family con stitutes a true variation of the human species — in Leuba's words, " one of the most amazing and profound varia tions which have yet been witnessed " — producing, as it seems to other men, a " strange and extravagant " and yet a " heroic " type.2 There is in them, says Delacroix, "a vital and creative power"; they "have found a new form of life, and have justified it." 3
is a sufficient commentary on these lofty pretensions. " The Truth, the Truth ! they were always saying, and often said to me ; but it was not in them " (Aug., Conf., Bk. III. cap. 6).
1 It is well known that the ceremony which confers the Third Degree of Craft Masonry is an allegory of regeneration. It probably represents far more accurately than many of the inflated and imaginative descriptions now presented to us, the kind of " secret knowledge " which was com municated to the pagan initiate. • Revue Pbilosopbique, July 1902.
8 Etudes d'histoire et de psychologic du mysticisme, p. iii.
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This new form of life, as it is lived by the members of this species, the peculiar psychic changes to which they must all submit, whatsoever the historic religion to which they belong, may reasonably be called Christian; since its classic expression is seen only in the Founder of Christ ianity. But this is not to limit it to those who have accepted the theological system called by His name. "There is," says Law, " but one salvation for all man kind, and that is the Life of God in the soul. God has but one design or intent towards all Mankind, and that is to introduce or generate His own Life, Light, and Spirit in them. . . . There is but one possible way for Man to attain this salvation, or Life of God in the soul. There is not one for the Jew, another for a Christian, and a third for the Heathen. No ; God is one, human nature is one, salvation is one, and the way to it is one." I We may, then, define the Christian life and the Christian growth as a movement towards the attainment of this
o
Life of Reality ; this spiritual consciousness. It is a phase of the cosmic struggle of spirit with recalcitrant matter, of mind with the conditions that hem it in. More abundant life, said the great mystic of the Fourth Gospel, is its goal ; and it sums up and makes effective all the isolated struggles towards such life and such liberty which earlier ages had produced.
Christianity, of course, has often been described as a "life." The early Christians themselves called it not a belief, but a " way " 2 — a significant fact, which the Church too quickly forgot; and the realist who wrote the Fourth Gospel called its Founder both the life and the way. But these terms have been employed by all later theologians with a discreet vagueness, have been accepted in an artistic rather than a scientific sense; with the result that Christianity as a life has meant almost anything, from obedience to a moral or even an ecclesiastical code at one 1 W. Law, The Spirit of Prayer. * Acts ix. 2, xix. 23.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 43
end of the scale, to the enjoyment of peculiar spiritual sensations at the other. I propose, then, to define and demonstrate as clearly as I can, by the help of the only possible authorities — those who have lived it — what is really meant by the phrase " Christianity is a life." Nor is this done by way of apologetic, but rather by way of exploration. History and psychology will be our primary interests; and should theological conclusions emerge, this will be by accident rather than design.
The beginning of Christianity, we say, seems to repre sent the first definite emergence of a new kind of life ; at first — yes, and still, for nineteen hundred years are little in the deep and steady flow of so mighty a process of becoming — a small beginning. Very, very slowly, the new type of human consciousness emerged. Here one, and there another possessed it: the thin bright chain of the Christian mystics stretching across the centuries. We see clearly, when we have cleansed our vision of obscuring prejudices, that Jesus, from the moment of His attainment of full spiritual self-consciousness, was aware that life must act thus. Loisy is doubtless right in stating that He " intended to found no religion." 1 In His own person He was lifting humanity to new levels ; giving in the most actual and concrete sense new life, a new direction of movement, to " the world " — the world for man being, of course,, no more and no less than the total content of his consciousness. The "revelation" then made was not merely moral or religious : it was in the strictest sense biological. "We may assume," says Harnack most justly, " what position we will in regard to Him and His message; certain it is that thence onward the value of our race is enhanced." 2
But such a gift can only gradually be disclosed, only
1 Hibbert Journal, Oct. 1911.
a Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 45 (Eng. trans., p. 70).
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gradually be appropriated. Those who can appropriate, who can move in this fresh direction, grow to this state of high tension, develop this spiritual consciousness— these are the " little flock " to whom the Kingdom, the Realm of Reality, is given. These, not the strenuous altruist nor the orthodox believer, are the few chosen out of the many called; actual centres of creative life, agents of divine fecundity, the light, the salt, the leaven, the pathfinders of the race. It is the glory of Christianity that, hidden though they be by the more obvious qualities of the superstitious and the ecclesiastically minded, these vital souls have never failed the Church. Thus "by personal channels — the flame of the human and human ising Spirit passing from soul to soul — there has come down to our days, along with a great mass of nominal or corrupt Christianity, a true and lineal offspring of the Church established on the Rock." l
It is true that mystical Christianity offers infinitely graded possibilities of attainment to the infinitely graded variations of human temperament, love and will. But all these graded paths take a parallel course. All run, as Dante saw, towards the concentric circles of the same heaven; a heaven which has many mansions, but all built upon the same plan. It deals, from first to last, with the clear and victorious emergence of the spiritual in the Here-and-Now, and with the balanced response of the total spirit of man to that declared Reality. Its history purports to tell us how this revelation and response hap pened once for all in a complete and perfect sense; how the Divine Life nesting within the world broke through and expressed itself, thereby revealing new directions along which human life could cut its way. Its psy chology tries to describe how life has attacked those new paths; the phenomena which attend on and express the evolution of the Christian soul, the state of equilibrium 1 E. A. Abbott, The Son of Man, p. 813.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 45
to which that soul attains. It demonstrates over and over again that the little company of its adepts — and those other born lovers of reality who went with them " not knowing what they sought " — have all passed by the same landmarks and endured the same adventures in the course of their quest. In all, the same essential pro cess — the steadfast loving attention to some aspect of Transcendent Reality perceived, and the active movement of response — has led to the same result : growth towards new levels, transmutation of character, closer and closer identification with the Divine Life. In every such case the individual has learned " to transfer himself from a centre of self-activity into an organ of revelation of universal being, to live a life of affection for, and oneness with, the larger life outside." 1
The proposition that this quest and this achievement constitute an egotistical and " world renouncing religion " suited only to contemplatives, is only less ridiculous than the more fashionable delusion which makes Christianity the religion of social amiability, democratic ideals and " practical common sense." On the contrary, the true mystic quest may as well be fulfilled in the market as in the cloister; by Joan of Arc on the battlefield as by Simeon Stylites on his pillar. It is true that since human vitality and human will are finite, many of the great mystics have found it necessary to concentrate their love and their attention on this one supreme aspect of the " will-to-live." Hence the cloistered mystic and the recluse obeys a neces sity of his own nature : the necessity which has produced specialists in every art. But the life for which he strives, if he achieves it, floods the totality of his being; the " energetic " no less than the " contemplative " powers. It regenerates, enriches, lifts to new heights of vision, will and love, the whole man, not some isolated spiritual part of him; and sends him back to give, according to his 1 Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion, p. 147.
46 THE MYSTIC WAY
capability as teacher, artist, or man of action, " more abundant life " to the surrounding world. The real achievements of Christian mysticism are more clearly seen in Catherine of Siena regenerating her native city, Joan of Arc leading the armies of France, Ignatius creating the Society of Jesus, Fox giving life to the Society of Friends, than in all the ecstacies and austerities of the Egyptian " fathers in the desert." That mysticism is an exhibition of the higher powers of love : a love which would face all obstacles, endure all purifications, and cherish and strive for the whole world. In all its variations, it demands one quality — humble and heroic effort ; and points with a steady finger to one road from Appearance to Reality— the Mystic Way, Transcendence.
IV
THE MYSTIC WAY
As in those who pass through the normal stages of bodily and mental development, so in those who tread this Mystic Way — though the outward circumstances of their lives may differ widely — we always see the same thing happening, the same sort of growth taking place.1
The American psychologist, Dr. Stanley Hall, has pointed out 2 that as the human embryo was said by the earlier evolutionists to recapitulate in the course of its development the history of ascending life, to the point at which it touches humanity — presenting us, as it were, month by month, with plastic sketches of the types by which it had passed — so the child and youth do really continue that history ; exhibiting stage by stage dim and shadowy pictures of the progress of humanity itself.
Thus the vigorous period of childhood from eight to twelve years of age, with its practical outdoor interests and instinct for adventure, represents a distinct stage in human evolution; the making of "primitive" man, a strong intelligent animal, utterly individualistic, wholly
1 I have discussed the stages of this growth in detail elsewhere (Mystic ism : a Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Conscious ness, 4th edition, 1912, Pt. II.). The biographies of numerous mystics exhibit them with great clearness; particularly the Blessed Angela of Foligno, Visionum et Instructionum Liber ; Suso, Leben ; St. Catherine of Genoa, Vita ; St. Teresa, Vida ; Madame Guyon, Vie par Elle-meme ; and other records to which reference will be made in the course of the present work.
• In Adolescence : its Psychology, etc., 2 vols. New York, 1904.
47
48 THE MYSTIC WAY
concentrated on the will-to-live. In the formation of the next type, which is the work of the adolescent period, we see reproduced before us one of nature's " fresh starts"; the spontaneous development of a new species, by no means logically deducible from the well-adapted ' animal which preceded it. Much that characterised the child- species is now destroyed; new qualities develop amidst psychic and physical disturbance, " a new wave of vitality " l lifts the individual to fresh levels, a veritable " new birth " takes place.
Normal human adolescence is thus "an age of all-sided and saltatory development, when new traits, powers, faculties and dimensions, which have no other nascent period, arise." 2 It is not merely deduced from the child hood which preceded it : it is one of life's creative epochs, when the creature finds itself re-endowed with energy of a new and higher type, and the Ego acquires a fresh centre. " In some respects early adolescence is thus the infancy of man's higher nature, when he receives from the great all-mother his last capital of energy and evolu tionary momentum."3 "Psychic adolescence," says this same authority, " is heralded by all-sided mobilisation." As the child, so again the normal adult ; each represents a terminal stage of human development. Each is well adjusted to his habitual environment; and were adaptation to such environment indeed the " object " of the life- spirit, the experience of " the boy who never grew up " might well be the experience of the race. But ascending life cannot rest in old victories. " At dawning adolescence this old unity and harmony with nature is broken up; the child is driven from his paradise and must enter upon a long viaticum of ascent, must conquer a higher kingdom of man for himself, break out a new sphere and evolve a more modern storey to his psycho-physical nature.
1 Adolescence : its Psychology, Vol. I. p. 308.
• Op. dt., Vol. I. p. 47. 3 Op. «>., Vol. II. p. 71.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 49
Because his environment is to be far more complex, the combinations are less stable, the ascent less easy and secure. . . . New dangers threaten on all sides. It is the most critical stage of life, because failure to mount almost always means retrogression, degeneracy, or fall."1 In the making of spiritual man, that " new creature," we seem to see this process again repeated. He is the " third race" of humanity; as the Romans, with their instinct for realism, called in fact the Christian type when first it arose amongst them.2 Another wave of vitality now rolls up from the deeps with its " dower of energy "; another stage in life's ascent is attacked. Mind goes back into the melting pot, that fresh powers and faculties may be born. The true mystic, indeed, is the adolescent of the Infinite; for he looks forward during the greater part of his career — that long upward climb towards a higher kingdom — to a future condition of maturity. From first to last he exhibits all the characteristics of youth ; never loses — as that arrested thing, the normal adult must — the freshness of his reactions on the world. He has the spontaneity, the responsiveness, the instability of youth; experiences all its struggles and astonishments. He is swept by exalted feeling, is capable of ideal vision and quixotic adventure: there is " colour in his soul."
As with the adolescent of the physical order, the mystic's entrance on this state, this new life, — however long and carefully prepared by the steady pressure of that trans cendent side of nature we call " grace," and by his own interior tendency or " love," — yet seems when it happens to be cataclysmic and abrupt : abrupt as birth, since it always means the induction of consciousness into an order previously unknown. The elan vital is orientated in a new direction : begins the hard work of cutting a fresh
1 Adolescence, Vol. II. p. 71.
a Cf. Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity, Vol. I. pp. 300-352, where numerous examples are given. E
50 THE MYSTIC WAY
path. At once, with its first movement, new levels of reality are disclosed, a transformation both in the object and in the intensity of feeling takes place. The self moves in both an inner and an outer " world unrealised." As the self-expression of the Divine Life in the world conforms to a rhythm too great for us to grasp, so that its manifestation appears to us erratic and unprepared; so is it with the self-expression, the emergence into the field of consciousness, of that fontal life of man which we have called the soul's spark or seed, which takes place in the spiritual adolescence. This emergence is seldom under stood by the self in relation with life as a whole. It seems to him a separate gift or " grace," infused from without, rather than developed from within. It startles him by its suddenness; the gladness, awe and exaltation which it brings : an emotional inflorescence, parallel with that which announces the birth of perfect human love. This moment is the spiritual spring-time. It comes, like the winds of March, full of natural wonder ; and gives to all who experience it a participation in the deathless magic of eternal springs. An enhanced vitality, a wonderful sense of power and joyful apprehension as towards worlds before ignored or unknown, floods the consciousness. Life is raised to a higher degree of tension than ever before; and therefore to a higher perception of Reality.
" O glory of the lighted mind. How dead I'd been, how dumb, how blind. The station brook, to my new eyes, Was babbling out of Paradise, The waters rushing from the rain Were singing Christ has risen again. I thought all earthly creatures knelt From rapture of the joy I felt. The narrow station-wall's brick ledge, The wild hop withering in the hedge, The lights in huntsman's upper storey, Were parts of an eternal glory,
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 51
Were God's eternal garden flowers. I stood in bliss at this for hours." *
The exaltation of Saul Kane, the converted poacher, here breaks into an expression which could be paralleled by many a saint. By the unknown poet of the " Odes of Solomon " crying, " Everything became like a relic of Thyself, and a memorial for ever of Thy faithful works.'5 2 By Angela of Foligno, to whom, as she climbed the narrow pathway from the vale of Spello to Assisi, and looked at the vineyards on either hand, the Holy Spirit perpetually said, "Look and see! this is My Creation"; so that suddenly the sight of these natural things filled her with ineffable delight.3 By St. Teresa, who was much helped in the beginning of her spiritual life by looking at fields, water and flowers; for " In them I saw traces of the Creator — I mean that the sight of these things was as a book unto me." 4 By George Fox, to whom at the time of his first mystic illuminations, " all creation gave another smell beyond what words can utter." 5 By Brother Lawrence receiving from the leafless tree " a high view of the providence and power of God." 6 By the Sufi, for whom " when the mystery of the essence of being has been revealed to him, the furnace of the world becomes transformed into a garden of flowers," so that "the adept sees the almond through the envelope of its shell ; and, no longer beholding himself, perceives only his Friend ; in all that he sees, beholding his face, in every atom perceiving the whole." 7 All these have experienced an abrupt access of divine vitality, rolling up
1 Masefield, The Everlasting Mercy, p. 97. 8 Ode XI. (Harris' edition, p. 105).
3 Visionum et Instructionum Liber, cap. 20.
4 Vida, cap. ix. 6.
5 Journal, Vol. I. cap. 2.
6 The Practice of the Presence of God, p. 9.
7 'Attar, The Seven Valleys.
E 2
52 THE MYSTIC WAY
they know not whence; breaking old barriers, overflow ing the limits of old conceptions, changing their rhythm of receptivity, the quality of their attention to life. They are regenerate; entinctured and fertilised by somewhat not themselves. Hence, together with this new power pour ing in on them, they receive new messages of wonder and beauty from the external world. New born, they stand here at the threshold of illimitable experiences, in which life's powers of ecstacy and of endurance, of love and of pain, shall be exploited to the full.
This change of consciousness, this conversion, most often happens at one of two periods : at the height of normal adolescence, about eighteen years of age, before the crystallising action of maturity has begun; or, in the case of those finer spirits who have carried into manhood the adolescent faculties of growth and response, at the attainment of full maturity, about thirty years of age.1 It may, however, happen at any time; for it is but an expression of that life which is " movement itself." During epochs of great mystical activity, such as that which marked the " apostolic age " of Christianity, the diffused impulse to transcendence — a veritable " wind of the spirit," — stimulates to new life all whom it finds in its way. The ordinary laws of growth are then sus pended; and minds in every stage of development are invaded by the flooding tide of the spiritual consciousness.
The stages of growth which follow are well known to mystical and ascetic literature. Here conditions of stress and of attainment, each so acutely felt as to constitute
1 St. Francis of Assisi, Suso, Madame Guyon, Richard Jefferies, are examples of the first class; St. Augustine, Angela of Foligno, St. Ignatius, St. Teresa, Pascal, of the second. It almost seems as though there were mutation periods in the history of man not unlike those of which de Vries claims that he has demonstrated the existence in the history of plants (cf. Die Mutationstheorii). After a period of stability and rest, the unstable " tendency to variation " breaks out with enormous force.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 53
states of pain and of pleasure, alternate with one another — sometimes rapidly, sometimes in long, slow rhythms — until the new life aimed at is at last established and a state of equilibrium assured. First after the joy of " re-birth " there comes a period of difficult growth and effort; the hard and painful readjustment to a new order, the disci plines and renunciations in which the developing soul re makes its inner world. All that helps life to move in the new direction must now be established. The angle of the mental blinkers must be altered, attention focussed on the new outlook. All that holds the self back to a racial past, the allurements of which have now become a retard ing influence or " sin " must be renounced. This process, in its countless forms, is Purgation. Here it is inevitable that there should be much struggle, difficulty, actual pain. Man, hampered by strong powers and instincts well adapted to the life he is leaving, is candidate for a new and higher career to which he is not fully adapted yet. Hence the need for that asceticism, the training of the athlete, which every race and creed has adopted as the necessary preliminary of the mystic life. The period of transition, the rearrangement of life, must include some thing equivalent to the irksome discipline of the school room; to the deliberate curbing of wild instincts long enjoyed. It is, in fact, a period of education, of leading forth : in which much that gave zest to his old life is taken away, and much that is necessary to the new life is poured upon him through his opening faculties, though in a form which he cannot yet enjoy or understand.
Next, the period of education completed, and those new powers or virtues which are the " ornaments of the spiritual marriage " put on, the trained and purified con sciousness emerges into that clear view of the Reality in which it lives and moves, which is known sometimes as the "practice of the Presence of God"; or, more generally, as Illumination. "Grace," the transcendent
54 THE MYSTIC WAY
life-force, surges up ever stronger from the deeps — "wells up within, like a fountain of the Spirit,"3 forming new habits of attention and response in respect of the supernal world. The faculty of contemplation may now develop, new powers are born, the passion of love is disciplined and enhanced. Though this stage of growth is called by the old writers on mysticism " the state proper to those that be in progress," it seems in the com pleteness of its adaptation to environment to mark a " terminal point " of spiritual development — one of the halts in the upward march of the soul — and does, in fact, mark it for many an individual life, which never moves beyond this level of reality. Yet it is no blind alley, but lies upon the highway of life's ascent to God. In the symbolic language of the Sufis, it is the Tavern, where the pilgrim rests and is refreshed by " the draught of Divine Love " : storing up the momentum necessary for the next " saltatory development " of life.
True to that strange principle of oscillation and insta bility, keeping the growing consciousness swinging between states of pleasure and states of pain — which seems, so far as our perception goes, to govern the mystery of growth — this development, when it comes, destroys the state which preceded it as completely as the ending of childhood destroys the harmonious universe of the child. Strange cravings which it cannot under stand now invade the growing self : the languor and gloom, the upheavals and loss of equilibrium, which adolescents know so well. Like the young of civilised man, here spiritual man is "reduced back to a state of nature, so far as some of the highest faculties are con cerned, again helpless, in need not only of guidance, but of shelter and protection. His knowledge of self is less adequate, and he must slowly work out his salvation." 2
1 Ruysbroeck, UOrnement des Noces Spiritutlles, Lib. II. cap. 3. * Stanley Hall, Adolescence t Vol. II. p. 71.
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 55
This is the period of spiritual confusion and impotence, the last drastic purification of the whole character, the re-making of personality in accordance with the demands of the transcendent sphere, which is called by some mystics the Dark Night of the Sow/, by others the " spiritual death," or " purgation of the will." What ever the psychological causes which produce it, all mystics agree that this state constitutes a supreme moral crisis, in which the soul is finally cleansed of all attachments to self hood, and utterly surrendered to the purposes of the Divine Life. Spiritual man is driven from his old paradise, enters on a new period of struggle, must evolve " another storey to his soul."
The result of this pain and effort is the introduction of the transmuted self into that state of Union, or com plete harmony with the divine, towards which it had tended from the first : a state of equilibrium, of enhanced vitality and freedom, in which the spirit is at last full-grown and capable of performing the supreme function of maturity — giving birth to new spiritual life. Here man indeed receives his last and greatest " dower of vitality and momentum"; for he is now an inheritor of the Universal Life, a " partaker of the Divine Nature." l " My life shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee."
" Mankind, like water fowl, are sprung from the sea — the sea of the soul; Risen from that sea, why should the bird make here his home ? Nay, we are pearls in that sea, therein we all abide ; Else, why does wave follow wave from the sea of soul ? JTis the time of union's attainment, 'tis the time of eternity's beauty, 'Tis the time of favour and largesse, 'tis the ocean of perfect purity. The billow of largesse hath appeared, the thunder of the sea hath
arrived, The morn of blessedness hath dawned. Morn ? No, 'tis the light of
God."2
Now it is exactly this growth in vitality, this appro-
1 2 Peter i. 4.
2 Jalalu 'ddin, Divan (Nicholson's trans., p. 35).
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priation of the " billow of largesse," — called by her theo logians " prevenient grace," — which Christianity holds out as the ideal not merely of the religious aristocrat, but of all mankind. It is a growth which goes the whole way from " earth" to " heaven," from the human to the divine; and may as easily be demonstrated by the pro cesses of psychology as by the doctrines of religion. At once " natural " and " supernatural," it tends as much to the kind of energy called active as to the other, rarer kind of energy called contemplative. " Primarily a life of pure inwardness, its conquests are in the invisible; but since it represents the life of the All, so far as man is able to attain that Life, it must show results in the All." * Its end is the attainment of that " kingdom " which it is the one business of Christianity to proclaim. She enshrined the story of this growth in her liturgy, she has always demanded it in its intensest form from all her saints, she trains to it every novice in her religious orders — more, every Christian in the world to whom his faith means more than assent to a series of credal definitions. As we shall see, when she asks the neophyte to " imitate Christ " she is implicitly asking him to set in hand this organic process of growth. Whether the resultant character tends most to contemplation or to action will depend upon individual temperament. In either case it will be a character of the mystical type; for its reaction upon life will be conditioned by the fact that it is a ^partaker of Reality.
If the theory which is here outlined be accepted, it will follow that Christianity cannot be understood apart from the psychological process which it induces in those who receive it in its fulness. Hence the only interpreters of Christian doctrine to whose judgment we are bound to submit will be those in whom this process of develop ment has taken place ; who are proved to have followed 1 Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p. 457.
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" the Mystic Way," attained that consciousness, that independent spiritual life, which alone is really Christian, and therefore know the realities of which they speak. Thus- not only St. Paul and the writer of the Fourth Gospel, but also St. Macarius or St. Augustine will be come for us "inspired" in this sense. So too will later interpreters, later exhibitors of this new direction of life : the great mystics of the mediaeval period. Those who lived the life outside the fold will also help us — Plotinus, the Sufis, Blake. " My teaching is not mine, but His that sent me : if any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the teaching." l
" Just as we cannot obtain," says Harnack, " a com plete knowledge of a tree without regarding not only its root and its stem, but also its bark, its branches, and the way in which it blooms, so we cannot form any right estimate of the Christian religion unless we take bur stand upon a comprehensive induction that shall cover all the facts of its history. It is true that Christianity has had its classical epoch; nay more, it had a Founder who Himself was what He taught — to steep ourselves in Him is still the chief matter; but to restrict ourselves to Him means to take a point of view too low for His significance. . . . He had His eye on win, in whatever external situation he might be found — upon man, who funda mentally always remains the same." 2 Man, the thorough fare of Life upon her upward pilgrimage; self -creative, susceptible of freedom, able to breathe the atmosphere of Reality, to attain consciousness here and now of the Spiritual World.
1 John vii. 17.
* Harnack, Das Wescn des Ckristtntums, pp. 7, II (Eng. trans., pp. II, 17).
THE CHRISTIAN MYSTIC
OF course, those who adopt the hypothesis which is here suggested will find opposing them almost every view of Christianity which is, or has been, fashionable within the last half-century or more : the Ritschlian view, the Eschatological view, the view which derives Christianity from an admixture of Jewish revivalism and the " Mysteries," the view which sees in Jesus of Nazareth either an essentially unmystical ethical or political reformer, or the victim of prophetic illuminism, and half a hundred other ingenious variations upon orthodoxy. Above all, we shall be in conflict with those who see in the teaching of St. Paul an opposition to the teaching of Christ, and with those who consider the mystical element in Christianity to be fundamentally unchristian and ultimately descended from the Neoplatonists.1
The first class of critics will be dealt with in a later chapter;2 but the often violently expressed views of the second class must be considered before we pass on. Their position, one and all, seems to result from a fundamental misunderstanding of mysticism; defined by them as con sisting solely in that form of negative contemplation, that spiritual mono-ideism, often tinctured with intense
1 This is the opinion of practically the whole Ritschlian group, who inherited their master's anti-mystical bias. The most complete and extreme statement of their position is by W. Herrmann, Der Ferkehr des Christen mit Gott.
2 Fide infra, Cap. III.
58
MYSTICISM AND HUMAN LIFE 59
emotion and rising to an unconditioned ecstacy, in which the mystic claims to have enjoyed fruition of the Absolute. This art of contemplation, practised by the Neoplatonists and inherited from them by the Christian Church,1 repre sents, of course, but one aspect of the mystic life — its accident indeed, rather than its substance — and, when it appears divorced from the rest of that life, is an aberration meriting some at least of the strictures which Ritschl, Herrmann and even Harnack shower upon it.
Thus Herrmann says, " When the influence of God upon the soul is sought and found solely in an inward experience of the individual; when certain excitements of the emotions are taken, with no further question, as evidence that the soul is possessed by God; when at the same time nothing external to the soul is consciously and clearly perceived and firmly grasped; when no thoughts that elevate the spiritual life are aroused by the positive contents of an idea that rules the soul — then that is the piety of mysticism. . . . Mysticism is not that which is common to all religion, but a particular species of religion, namely, a piety which feels that which is historical in the positive religion to be burdensome and so rejects it." The natural corollaries follow, that " the Christian must pronounce the mystic's experience of God to be a delusion," and that " in the narrow experiences into which mysticism dwindles there is no room for real Christian life." 2 Granting the premisses, so thoroughgoing a mystic as St. John of the Cross himself would almost certainly have agreed with the conclusion; 3 but a very
* Vide infra, Cap. V, § II.
1 W. Herrmann, Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott, Bk. I. cap. I, § 4, 7, and cap 2, § 3 ; and Bk. II. cap. 6, § IO.
3 " It is a most perilous thing, and much more so than I can tell, to converse with God by these supernatural ways, and whosoever is thus disposed cannot but fall into many shameful delusions." " The humble soul will not presume to converse with God by itself . . . God will not enlighten him who is alone, nor confirm the truth in his heart : such a
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slight acquaintance with the works of the Christian mystics is enough to show how perverse is the whole argument, how inaccurate its statement of " fact."
Far from "feeling the historical to be burdensome," true Christian mysticism rejects without hesitation all individual revelations which do not accord with the teaching and narrative of the canonical Scriptures — its final Court of Appeal. Thus Richard of St. Victor, che a consider ar fu piu che viro,1 and through whose school nearly every mediaeval mystic has passed, says of the soul which claims to have enjoyed an ecstatic vision of God, " Even if you think that you see Christ trans figured, be not too ready to believe aught you may see or hear in Him unless Moses and Elias run to meet Him. I hold in suspicion all truth which the authority of Scripture does not confirm; nor do I receive Christ in His glory, save Moses and Elias be talking with Him." 2 Many other masters of the spiritual life have spoken to the same effect.
The " discerning of spirits," — the sorting out, that is to say, of real from false spirituality — has formed from the earliest times an important branch of Christian mysti cism; and its duties have generally been performed with severity, completeness and common sense. For it " tradi tion" and "experience," "authority" and "revelation" —that is to say, the individual and universal movements of life — must go hand in hand, justifying and com pleting one another, if they are to be accepted as the veritable pathway of the soul.
The great contemplative and astute psychologist who wrote the Cloud of Unknowing has left a letter — the " Epistle of Discretion " — addressed to a disciple "full able and full greatly disposed to such sudden
one will be weak and cold " (St. John of the Cross, Subida del Monte Carmelo, Lib. II. caps. 21, 22). 1 Par. X. 132. • Benjamin Minor, cap. 81.
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stirrings of singular doings, and full fast to cleave unto them when they be received," which perfectly represents the point of view of the best schools of Christian mysticism. Such " sudden and singular stirrings," he says, are ever perilous, " seem they never so likely, so high nor so holy"; unless they have the witness and consent of spiritual teachers " long time expert in singular living." Moreover, he continues, with an acid wit not rare amongst the saints, they are often mere monkey- tricks of the soul. " As touching these stirrings of the which thou askest, ... I say to thee that I conceive of them suspiciously, that is, lest they should be conceived on the ape's manner. Men say commonly that the ape doth as he seeth others do; forgive me if I err in my suspicion, I pray thee. . . . Beware and prove well thy stirrings, and whence they come; for how so thou art stirred, whether from within by grace, or from without on ape's manner, God wote, and I not." Neither this "greedy disposi tion " to spiritual joys, nor the ascetic practices of " strait silence, singular fasting, lonely dwelling " are the central facts for the mystic. Often they may be helps; often hindrances. Porro unum est necessarium: a total self- giving, an active, loving surrender to Reality, an orienta tion of the whole self towards the spiritual world— "lovely and listily to will to love God." "For if God be thy love and thy meaning, the choice and the point of thine heart, it sufficed! to thee in this life." l Direction of life, transcendence, rather than a busy searching out of deep things or some private experience of the Infinite, is again brought home to us as the primal fact for the developing soul.
The personal revelation or " stirring," then, is only esteemed by the true mystic where it ministers to the fruitful and lofty character of the individual life. The
1 " A very necessary Epistle of Discretion in Stirrings of the Soul." Printed by E. Gardner in The Cell of Self -Knowledge, pp. 95-115.
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real glory and originality of the Christian mystics does not consist in the fact that they possess — and that often in a supreme degree — those special intuitions which Herrmann so unworthily describes as " beclouded con ceptions of an Infinite Being," or, in Ritschl's scornful phrase, " enjoy an imaginary private relationship with God." It consists rather, according to Delacroix — an investigator who writes without theological prejudice- in their great constructive and synthetic power, their development of a consciousness which can embrace both Being and Becoming in its sweep, giving to its possessor an unprecedented wholeness of life. " They move," he says, " from the Infinite to the Definite : they aspire to infinitise life and to define infinity." 1 "By one of love's secrets which is only known to those who have experienced it," 2 the World of Becoming is disclosed to them as a sacrament of the Thought of God; and this is why the historical and the actual, instead of being " burdensome," as they so often prove to a merely metaphysical religion, are seen by all true mystics to possess adorable and inexhaustible significance. Here they perceive " the foot steps of God, presenting some one or other perfection of that Infinite Abyss." 3
A long series of such mystics, capable with Angela of Foligno of perceiving that " the whole world is full of God," have helped their fellow men towards the great task of infinitising life; thanks to their heightened power of " consciously and clearly perceiving " the wealth of beauty, truth and goodness exterior to the soul. In particular, the historical life of Christ assumes for those who are Christians a capital importance : since life is that which they seek, and here they find it raised to its highest
1 Etudes d'bistoire et de psycbologie du mysticisms, p. 235.
8 Malaval, La Pratique de la vraye theologie mystique, Vol. I. p. 342.
8 John of Holy Crosse, Philothea's Pilgrimage to Perfection, p. 192.
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denomination and manifested before the eyes of men. They call it the Book of Life in which all must read and meditate,1 the Bridge by which pilgrim man may travel to his goal.2
" My humanity is the road which all must tread who would come to that which thou seekest," said the Eternal Wisdom to Suso.3 " I see clearly," says St. Teresa, " that if we are to please God, and if He is to give us His great graces, everything must pass through the hands of His most sacred humanity. ... I know this by repeated experi ence. I see clearly that this is the door by which we are to enter, if we would have the supreme Majesty reveal to us His great secrets." * This humanity, says Ruysbroeck, mystic of the mystics, is the "rule and key" — ascending as it does to the fruition of God, without losing touch with the joys and sorrows of humanity — "which shows all men how they should live." 5 His biting description of the false mystic " subtle in words, expert in dealing with sublime things, full of studies and observations and subtle events upon which he exercises his imagination," but fundamentally sterile and incapable of " coming forth from himself " to live a life corresponding with the inflow ing Spirit of Reality, seems framed for the condemnation of all these peculiarities which Herrmann imagines to be characteristic of mysticism as a whole.6
Such a view as this, far from absolving mysticism from dependence on the historical, consolidates the link between inward experience and outward event. It effectually checks the one-sided and quietistic interpretation of mysticism, which put such a dangerous weapon of attack
1 B. Angelas de Fulginio, Visionum et Instructionum Liber, cap. 59.
a St. Catherine of Siena, Dialogo, cap. 22.
3 Buchlein von der ewigen Weisheit, cap. 2.
4 Fida, cap. ix. 9.
5 UOrnement des Noces Spirituelles, Lib. II. cap. 77.
6 Op. cit.y Lib. II. cap. 45.
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into the hands of the Ritschlian school; but, on the other hand, it opposes the peculiar and limited theory of the function of the historical Christ, which is advocated by that school. It gives back to the human soul the freedom of the Infinite, yet does not loose hold of the method by which that freedom in its fulness was first made available to men. The Ritschlian says in effect, " We only know Deity as we see it expressed in Christ " 1 ; a statement which, if it is to have any meaning at all, seems to demand a highly developed mystical consciousness in those who subscribe to it. The true mystic answers, " Life, not knowledge, is our aim : nothing done for us, or exhibited to us, can have the significance of that which is done in us. We can only know the real in so far as we possess reality : and growth to that real life in which we are in union with God is an organic process only possible of accomplishment in one way — by following in the most practical and concrete sense the actual method of Christ."
" Christian mysticism," says Delacroix — almost alone amongst modern psychologists in seizing this vital fact— " is orientated at one and the same time towards the in accessible God, where all determination vanishes, and towards the GoD-Locos, the c Word of God,' the wisdom and holiness of the world. In spite of the sometimes contradictory appearance of absorption in the Father, it is, at bottom, the mysticism of the Son. Its ambition is to make of the soul a divine instrument, a place where the divine power dwells and incarnates itself: the equi valent of Christ" 2
Such growth towards the Life of God must imply — so the Christian mystics think — a growth in the godlike
1 Herrmann even goes to the length of saying, " We do not merely come through Christ to God. It is truer to say that we find in God nothing but Christ" (op. cit., Bk. I. cap. I, § u).
2 fitudes cFhistoire et de psychologic du mysticisme, p. xiii.
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power of self-expression under two orders, the Eternal and the Temporal, the contemplative and the active; for " Perfection ever moves on two poles, extremely opposite; which St. Paul calls Height and Depth, St. Francis What is God, and what am I?"1 Thus "the truly illuminated man," says Ruysbroeck, " flows out in universal charity toward heaven and upon earth." 2 He is " the intermediary between God and Creation." 3 His life has been surrendered, not that it may be annihilated, but only that it may be made more active, and more real.
" What then is wanted," says Baron von Hiigel, " if we would really cover the facts of the case, is evidently not a conception which would minimise the human action, and would represent the latter as shrinking, in proportion as God's action increases; but one which, on the contrary, fully faces, and keeps a firm hold of, the mysterious paradox which pervades all true life, and which shows us the human soul as self-active in proportion to God's action within it. ... Grace and the Will thus rise and fall, in their degree of action, together ; and man will never be so fully active, so truly and intensely himself, as when he is most possessed by God." *
This total and life-enhancing surrender to the Tran scendent is the consummation towards which the Christian mystics move. Life in its wholeness is their aim; a concrete and actual existence which shall include both God and the world, and shall raise to their highest terms, use for their highest purposes, that power of receptivity, that power of controlled attention, that power of energetic response, which characterises human consciousness. Their method is positive, not negative : they reject nothing, but
1 John of Holy Crosse, Pbilotbea's Pilgrimage to Perfection, p. 219.
* UOrnement des noces spirituelles, Lib. II. cap. 45.
8 Op. cit., Lib. II. cap. 44.
4 The Mystical Element of Religion, Vol. I. p. 80.
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re-order all, completing human nature by the addition of a " top storey " which crowns instead of crushing the foundation upon which it is raised. By a process which is the secret of the mystic consciousness, and which finds its classic expression in the historic Christ, they achieve a synthesis of those " completing opposites " in which St. Augustine, and after him Ruysbroeck, saw revealed the essential character of Deity : the changeless and the changeful, the ceaseless onward push of the elan vital, and the Pure Being which transcends and supports the storm of life and change.
In this paradoxical union of Being and Becoming— " Peace according to His essence, activity according to His nature : absolute stillness, absolute fecundity " — Ruysbroeck held that the secret of Divine Reality was hid : and that those who had reached the supreme summit of the inner life and claimed actual participation in the "life of God," must possess an equivalent whole ness of experience * — in activity and contemplation, in fruition and work, " swinging between the unseen and the seen." They must go, he says of them, " toward God by inward love in eternal work, and in God by fruitive inclination in eternal rest," 2 running by His side upon the Highway of Love : 3 and, because of this complete conformity to the Universal Rhythm, harmonising that interior consciousness of perfect rest which is the reward of the surrender of finite to Infinite Life with the cease less activity of an auxiliary of God, who desires only to "be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man." 4
We may translate all this to our reason-loving minds, though at the cost of much beauty and significance, as
1 D€ Vera Contemplatione (Hello, p. 175).
* UOrnement des noces spirituelks, Lib. II. cap. 73.
3 Ibid., Samuel (Hello, p. 207).
4 Theolegia Germanica, cap. 10.
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the achievement of an abiding sense of the reality and importance of the flux of things, and of Spirit's veritable life growth and work within that flux, united with a deeply conscious participation in that transcendent, all- embracing Divine Order — that independent, changeless, unfathomable Life of God — within which the striving world of Time is held secure. The real possessors of that " new creation," the Christian consciousness, look towards a divine synthesis inconceivable to the common mind, wherein this Being and this Becoming, la forma universal di questo nodo, are reconciled and embraced in the transcendent life of Reality. " For the intermittent and alternating mysticism of the ecstatic, they substitute a mysticism which is continuous and homogeneous." * This synthesis is prefigured for them, the way to its attainment shown, in the historic life of Christ ; where they find the pure character of God, the secret tendency of Spirit, expressed under the limitations of a growing and enduring world. Of this life, they know themselves to be the direct inheritors. Thus, treading as well as they can in the footsteps of their pattern, they actually " bring the Eternal into Time" ; and by this act lift the process of Time into the light of Eternity.
" There is an inward sight," says the Theologia Germanica, " which hath power to perceive the One true Good, and that it is neither this nor that, but that of which St. Paul saith; * When that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.5 By this he meaneth, that the Whole and Perfect excelleth all the fragments, and that all which is in part and imperfect is as nought compared to the Perfect. . . . Behold! where there is this inward sight, the man perceiveth of a truth, that Christ's life is the best and noblest life, and therefore the most to be preferred, and he willingly accepteth and endureth it, without a question or a complaint, whether 1 Delacroix, Etudes tFbistoire et de psychologie du mysticism*, TV.
F 2
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it please or offend nature or other men, whether he like or dislike it, find it sweet or bitter and the like. And therefore wherever this perfect and true Good is known, there also the life of Christ must be led, until the death of the body. And he who vainly thinketh otherwise is deceived, and he who saith otherwise, lieth, and in what man the life of Christ is not, of him the true Good and eternal Truth will never more be known." *
This passage undoubtedly represents the norm of Christian mysticism — the " path to that which is Best." 2 Over and over again we find its doctrine repeated and affirmed. We see, when we examine Christian literature, that to all its greater saints and most of its greater writers the concrete events in the life of the historical Christ have seemed of overwhelming significance. Vita tua, via nostra, says a Kempis. " He appeared amongst us," says Angela of Foligno, " in order that we might be instructed by means of His life, His death, and His teaching. . . . His life is an ensample and a pattern for every mortal that desireth to be saved."3 More, these events, in the order in which they are reported to us, have always been for them the types of successive events in the inner history of the ascending soul. They speak of its " New Birth," its " Temptation," " Transfiguration," " Gethsemane," "Crucifixion" and "Resurrection"; and test the healthiness of its growth by its conformity to this pattern of development. Readers of ascetic literature are so accustomed to this, that it has ceased to strike them as strange; yet, were the Ritschlians right in their theory as to the non-Christian nature of the mystic life, it would be strange indeed.
St. Ignatius Loyola, whose Spiritual Exercises show him to have been possessed of a knowledge of human person ality so penetrating and exact that it might almost be 1 Theologia Germanica, cap. 18. » Ibid., cap. 23.
3 B. Angelas de Fulgiaio, Fisionum et instructionum liber , cap. 59.
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called inspired, mapped out the complex whole of man's spiritual career into " three degrees of humility." The first degree, which is that of a beginner, brings the mind to a point at which it will make any sacrifice rather than commit a " mortal " sin. The second degree, that of " proficient," educates the moral sensibility to a point at which it will make any sacrifice rather than commit "venial" sin. This would appear to be the limit of normal ethical transcendence : but it is merely the prepara tion of the third degree, that of the "perfect." Those who have risen to this height are completely set upon one object, for which they easily abandon everything else— " to make their lives harmonise with the life of Christ." When we read this, we suddenly perceive why it was that the author of the Imitatio Christi called his book the "Ecclesiastical Music"; for in it we hear the melody of the Church's inner life.
Observe that St. Ignatius, though himself a great mystic, wished by this method to create active and heroic rather than contemplative Christians. He would gladly have subscribed to the dictum of Recejac, that " Mysticism ought never to depart from the formula so admirably adapted to it by Aristotle — c to play the man.5 " * Yet the way upon which he sets the growing soul is the Mystic Way — the life it is to follow is that " lovely life " in which " it can be said of a truth God and man are one." 2 The state at which it is to aim is not the state supposed to be characteristic of "practical Christianity"; but the transfigured life of the unitive mystic, living " Eternal Life in the midst of Time."
1 Fondements de la connaissance mystique, Pt. I. cap. 2, § 6. 1 Thfo. Gtr., cap. 24.