III. 28.)

THE SYNOPTIC RECORD
WE have said that the appearance of Christianity marks the discovery by man, or the revelation to man — opposite poles of the same substantial fact — of a genuinely new form of life. Already discerned by certain spirits behind veils, and known in part, it is now exhibited in its whole ness ; establishing itself upon heights which — since they reach, and unite with, Reality — lay claim to the great title "divine."
Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Christ, was, says the Church, " divine and human " — fully and completely human, " of reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.5 ' The working, then, of that strange principle in Him which religious speculation calls " divine," which marks His profound and unsullied participation in Reality, will be conditioned by the ways and limitations of that normal body and soul which we call " human." Here is a com monplace of modern theology; the root idea which lies at the bottom of its doctrine of "Kenosis"; one of the thin places in the dogmatic fence, through which it is accustomed to escape in haste from untenable positions.
The discussion of the " divine nature " of Christ be longs, of course, to theology and metaphysics : though even here it is possible that the most intense experiences of those mystics who have attained to the Unitive — or, as they persistently call it, the Deified — state, can give us hints as to the way in which such an identity with the Transcendent Order is likely to express itself within the
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limitations of human consciousness. But the discussion of His human nature, of the " reasonable soul " in which that consciousness of divine sonship developed, is in part at least the business of psychology.
"If," says Prof. Gardner, "we began by making as sumptions as to what the divine nature must be, instead of inquiring how it is revealed to us, we enter on a fruit less task." 1 It is plain that if the psychic life, the human nature, through which that revelation reached us were human at all, it must have been deeply and completely so. " Not as not being man, but as being from men, He was beyond men," says Dionysius the Areopagite;2 and in the same spirit a very different theologian has observed that the expression " Son of Man " means " one who completely fulfilled the idea of man, and as such was in specially close relationship to the Father." 3 The study, then, of such a truly human nature, which accepts and does not escape the machinery and the limitations which have been developed by the evolution of the race, whilst " exercising for us a certain new God-incarnate energy," 4 cannot be undertaken apart from the general study of human consciousness. The personality of Christ, whilst itself unique, yet touches the normal personality of man at every point. The reverent process of insulation to which it is too often subjected, entirely destroys its meaning for life.
The existing material, then, must be re-examined in the light of psychological science; and in the light of the reports of those who declare that they experienced in some measure that which Jesus claimed in full measure — the union of the Human and the Real. That existing material is of four kinds, (i) The scantily reported acts of Jesus
1 Ex'ploratio Evangelic a, p. 37.
* Fourth Letter to Gains TherapeuUs.
3 Prof. Driver, in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. IV. p. 581.
4 Dionysius the Areofagite, op. cit.
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as preserved in the Synoptic gospels. (2) Such of His words and teachings as have survived in these same col lections. (3) The attitude and tradition of the early Church, which, founded on experience and on the teach ings of two supreme mystics, St. Paul and the writer of the Fourth Gospel, largely conditioned the selection of acts and teachings which have been preserved for us, the development of the rites in which those teachings took dramatic form. (4) The lives of the Christian mystics, and the subsequent history of the Church; the direction of its secret life — conscious only at rare intervals, and in the personalities of its greatest mystics and saints — through the change that marks its steady onward sweep.
If these materials are to be of use to us, it is imperative that we learn to look at them with " innocence of eye " : that the concepts of popular religion or the equally distort ing imaginations of " higher critics " be not allowed to intrude themselves between our vision and the statements made by a Mark or a Paul, the evidence afforded by the experience of a Francis or a Teresa. Seen with such incorrupt perceptions, such artistic freshness, they begin once more to live ; and the quality and power of growth comes home to us, as a primal element of the revelation they contain.
If we look at the acts of any great man, we invariably find that they exhibit development; though this develop ment may be of very various kinds. The creative genius disclosed by those acts may be spiritual, ethical, artistic, mechanical — what you will; but whatever it be, it grows, gradually invading and subduing more and more of the elements of conscious life to its dominion. Such a growth is an essential attribute of life : and its absence makes, not for divinity, but for unreality. Now the character of Jesus, taken alone as it stands revealed in the canonical gospels, and without any theological presuppositions, certainly represents, at the very least, a personality of transcendent
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spiritual genius; towering in its wholeness high above even the loftiest levels of " normal " sanctity or power. This much the reverent agnostic is always willing to allow. But this human nature, this personality, is placed in Time : is immersed in the stream of Becoming. If, then, it be really human, really alive, it will share — and share in the most intense way possible — the regnant characteristic of all living things. It will move and grow. " To live is to change; and to be perfect is to have changed often." 1
Since we know nothing of life apart from movement, from its ceaseless sweeping curve from birth to death, theology itself cannot afford to conceive Christ's life as emancipated from the law of growth. This would make it the miraculous emergence of the ready-made into a world of which creative effort is the soul ; a static freak, absolved from that obligation of enduring through inces sant change which is implicit in all life. Rather should we see in it the elan 'vital " energising enthusiastically"; raised, in the language of the vitalists, to the highest possible tension, but none the less retaining its specific character, obeying the imperative need of all life, divine and human alike, to push on, to spread, to create — the passion for perfection, the instinct for transcendence. Perhaps, when we have learned to see it thus, " miracle will no longer be a term reserved for a series of facts choicely isolated from organic connection with nature or life; but will be best seen in the wonder and awe felt for all nature, and perhaps specially for growth." 2
"The essence of life lies in the movement by which it is transmitted." What, then, was the movement by which this " more abundant life " was transmitted to the race ?
The answer which appears to result from a careful study of the Synoptics is this : that the life of Jesus exhibits in
1 J. H. Newman, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. 1 Stanley Hall, Adolescence, Vol. II. p. 127.
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absolute perfection — in a classic example ever to be aimed at, never to be passed — that psychological growth towards God, that movement and direction, which is found in varying degrees of perfection in the lives of the great mystics. All the characteristic experiences of a Paul, a Suso, a Teresa, are found in a heightened form in the life of their Master. They realise this fact; and, one and all, constantly appeal to that life as a witness to the reality and naturalness of their own adventures. The life of Christ, in fact, exhibits the Independent Spiritual Life being lived in perfection by the use of machinery which we all possess ; in a way, then, in which we can live it, not in some miraculous unnatural way in which we cannot live it. His self-chosen title of Son of Man suggests that this, and not theological doctrine or ethical rule, forms the heart of His revelation.
" Apparve in questa forma Per dare a noi la norma."
The few points on which we can rely, the few episodes which did certainly occur in a determined order, in the historical life of Jesus, are just those which indicate the kind of growth, and kind of experience, most characteristic of the mystic life. Religious self-suggestion, which the amateur psychologist will at once advance as the cause of this phenomenon, is excluded by the fact that mystics who have hardly known the name of Christ grow in this same way, conform to this pattern : and " Neoplatonic influence," so often claimed as the sole origin of the mystic element in Christianity, fails to explain how it is that each of the Synoptic gospels, written long before the Mystic Way had been codified or described — long before the diagrams of Neoplatonism had elucidated the difficult path of the Cross — preserve intact amidst many variations and inconsistencies the record of this process of transcendence.
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It may be true, as many critics have declared, that adequate materials for a biography of Jesus do not exist. But materials for a history of His psychological de velopment do undoubtedly exist; preserved and set in order by the best of all witnesses, those who did riot know the bearing of the facts which they have reported, or the significance of the sequence in which they are placed.
Since the Gospel literature was formed after the Church, and not the Church after the Gospel literature — since the Synoptics are, as they stand, post-Pauline books, written to supply the immediate needs of Paul's spiritual families — we may expect to find in them interpretation as well as history; perhaps, on the whole, more interpretation than history, since their aim is to prepare the mind for Life's amazing future, rather than to preserve the record of the equally amazing past. In the language of modern criti cism, they are " eschatological books." They look for wards, not backwards ; and imply in every line the Parousia which shall complete the revelation that they begin. Moreover, they are written by those who have actually, practically experienced, not merely a " belief " in a Messiah, a Saviour, or an institution, but that amaz ing inflow of new life, that " New Birth " which Chris tianity initiated, in the thoroughness and violence with which it appears to have been experienced in apostolic times. We may expect, then, that the love and enthusi asm of the convert will blaze in their words, and illuminate the events of which they treat : and as a result, that the finished production will tend to be a great work of art — a musical revelation of reality — rather than an exact work of science, an analysis of " observed phenomena."
The three Synoptic gospels are at bottom three such works of art : in each we see the Christian " revelation," and the life which expressed it, " through a temperament." Of these three temperaments that of the author of
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Matthew seems to be of the historical and traditionalist type, with the unconscious tendency of this kind of character to select and value events with an eye to their causal relations with the past; to the fulfilment of pro phecies, the satisfaction of national ideals. Mark's document, as we now have it, is like the work of a practical missionary, whose whole experience has led him to appreciate the value of the sensational and miraculous. "Luke's" character is more interesting;1 and its result upon his work in some respects more valuable. His peculiar insight has led him to bring out certain deeply significant sides of the primitive revelation which the other Synoptics hardly touch. This does not mean that we find special value in incidents for which Luke is the only witness. All the essential facts are found in either the " double " or the " triple " tradition; the great events in all three gospels, the great teachings in Matthew and in Luke. But many of these facts and sayings are shown by Luke alone in a light which reveals their true import : not as isolated maxims or marvels, but as proclamations of the conditions of New Life. Those who accept the traditional authorship of the Third Gospel or the docu ment which underlies it, will naturally connect this quality in Luke partly with his Greek nationality and possible Hellenistic education, but chiefly with the fact that he was the friend and pupil of the deeply mystical Paul, and had learned to understand Christianity as Paul understood and lived it — as an actual and new kind of life. Hence the traditional biography, which both he and Matthew
1 The authorship of the Third Gospel is still a matter of controversy. Harnack, Sir W. Ramsay, and other recent critics ascribe its substance to St. Luke himself. Cf. Harnack, Lukas der Arzt ; Ramsay, Luke the Physician. Against this must be placed ^the fact that the most fearless and acute of living scholars, Loisy, Les Evangiles synoptiques, is strongly opposed to the traditional view. No final settlement of the problem is yet in sight, and all who base arguments on the peculiarities of this gospel are bound to take into consideration the uncertainties surrounding it.
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probably took from Mark — who is now regarded as the source of the Synoptic narratives — is here seen in a new proportion and invested with a fresh significance.1
Amongst the things upon which Luke lays deliberate stress, are all the ascetic and " other-worldly " elements in the teaching of Christ. He it is who has preserved the commendation of Mary, type of the contemplative soul.2 Had his gospel alone survived, many incidents, it is true, wouM have been known to us only in a twisted and poetic form. But the rules of the real Christian life, the primal laws which govern the emergence of the spiritual consciousness, and the sequence of states which mark its establishment, would have been preserved intact. Poverty, Asceticism, Detachment, Vocation, mystical Charity — these watchwords of the mystics are all found in his work, stated with far greater emphasis than in either of the other Synoptics. The term " grace," regnant in the works of St. Paul, is found eight times in this gospel; though never used by Matthew and Mark. " We are struck," says Jiilicher, " by the unworldliness of his tone, by his aversion to property and enjoyment, by his glori fication of poverty, his accentuation of the duty of self- sacrifice and especially of almsgiving. One need merely read Luke xiv. 26-32 beside Matthew x. 37 in order to feel the sternness of Luke's demands ; one almost has the impression that the boundless charity towards sinners shown by this gospel was to be compensated for by the equally exalted character of the demands made on the disciple." 3 Yet this austere moralist, this counsellor of
1 The so-called " Pauline " elements in Mark, detected by Loisy (op. cit.}, appear to rest on very slender foundations, and refer rather to the Paul of theological imagination than to the living genius who speaks in the epistles. * Luke x. 42.
3 Introduction to the New Testament, p. 335. Liberal Protestant theology has tried to discredit this ascetic tendency, so difficult to reconcile with its favourite theories, by detecting " Ebionite influence " in Luke, but has not yet produced any valid evidence in support of this hypothesis.
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perfection, is in a high degree an artist and a poet. From him come the matchless scenes of the Annunciation and Nativity. He is our authority for that exquisite cento of Old Testament phrases, the Magnificat; and with him " imaginative wonder " first takes its place side by side with historic belief.
True, the essence of these things — the austerity and the romance — underlies the descriptions of Matthew and Mark. They have of necessity a place in every gospel, and cannot be eliminated in the, interests of merely " ethical" or " healthy-minded " Christianity. But Matthew and Mark do not perceive their essential character with such clear ness as this Evangelist : a clearness we might naturally expect from the companion and pupil of St. Paul. One gives us the Messiah who is a bridge between the prophets and the Church; the other gives us the marvellous Divine Man. Luke, reviewing the material in the light of a richer experience — perhaps his own, perhaps that of Paul —accepts both; but he gives us chiefly the Revealer of a New Life, who " saves " mer by Himself living that life, and so putting them upon the road by which it may be obtained : exhibiting " that mysterious evolution of the divine out of the human to which we give the name of redemption." 1 The three gospels, then, represent the temperamental tendencies of ecclesiastic, missionary, ascetic: and the effect of their cumulative testimony is to establish the fact that the new life which informed all these aspects of the Church's energies was primarily and fundamentally Mystic.
We may probably accept the conclusion of Julicher8 as broadly true, that the life of Jesus did, in its general outline, unfold itself in the order given by Mark. The first significant moment of His life was an experience of profound personal illumination; followed by a withdrawal
1 E. A. Abbott, The Son of Man, p. xii. * Introduction to the New Testament, p. 318. G
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into solitude — the " cell of self-knowledge " of the mystics — where the divine elements of His human nature were harmonised and adjusted to His supreme destiny. Then the public appearance; the preaching, "as one who had authority," the announcement of that apocalyptic coming of " new things " of which He felt Himself to be the pioneer. At first an object of wonder, He gradually provoked the opposition of the world — and particularly of the prosperous, orthodox, and self-satisfied — by His suc cessful preaching of an uncompromising moral transcend ence. Having provoked the enmity of the upper classes — and, we might add, having proved the impossibility of communicating His message of new life to humanity as a whole — He withdrew, and limited His teachings to the " little flock " destined to be the thoroughfare through which that life should pass. When the " time was accom plished," the human frame spent by the violence of the spiritual life which it expressed, the forces of destruction had their way. The bitter mental accompaniments of the Passion — the Agony in the Garden, the Eloi, eloi of the Cross — testify to the presence of that darkness through which the soul of every mystic must pass to the condition of complete identification with the Transcendental Order which they so often call the " Resurrection-life." Mark, the least mystical of evangelists, yet preserves intact the story of this psychological development, beneath the series of marvellous and astonishing minor incidents which were to him the earnest of its existence and truth.
II
THE BAPTISM AND TEMPTATION
THE first events which all three Synoptists report, as at once historical and significant, are of course the preach ing of John the Baptist, his baptism of Jesus of Nazareth, and the phenomena which attended it. Though it is at least highly probable that the youth of Jesus exhibited the presence and growth of those qualities which controlled His public career, here it is that these qualities first declared themselves in their splendour and power. Here, definitely and visibly, for the first generation of Christians, the new era began. This, they said, was the Epiphany, the revelation of God; and they gave to it an honour, invested it with a crucial meaning, which was afterwards transferred to the story of the Nativity.1
John the Baptist is a figure not difficult to realise or understand, when we have learnt to shift our point of view from the conceptual and edifying categories of tradition to the rich actualities of life. He is the supreme example of a general law : of the fact that all great changes in the worlds of spirit and of thought have their fore runners; minds which perceive the first significant move ment, the sword of the spirit stirring in its sheath, long before the new direction is generally perceived or under stood. John was a " prophet " — that is to say, a spiritual genius — with that intuitive knowledge of the immediate tendencies of life often found in those who are possessed of an instinct for Transcendent Reality. The span of a great mind, a great personality, gathers up into its
1 Cf. Loisy, Lfs fcvangilts synoptiqves, Vol. I. pp. 405-7. 02 83
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" Now," and experiences " all at once," a number of smaller rhythms or moments which are separate experi ences for lesser men. As we, in our wide rhythm of perception, gather up the countless small and swift vibra tions of the physical world and weld them into sound or light ; so the spiritual genius gathers up into his consciousness of a wide present, countless little tendencies and events. By this synthetic act he transcends the storm of succession, and attains a prophetic vision, which seems to embrace future as well as past. He is plunged in the stream of life, and feels the way in which it tends to move. Such a mind discerns, though he may not under stand, the coming of a change long before it can be known by other men; and, trying to communicate his certitude, becomes a "prophet" or a ". seer."
John the Baptist, then, that strange figure watching and waiting in the desert for some mighty event which his heightened powers could feel in its approach but could not see, is the real link between two levels of humanity. Freed by his ascetic life from the fetters of the obvious, his intuitive faculties nourished by the splendid dreams of Hebrew prophecy, and by a life at once wild and holy, which kept him closer than other men to the natural and the supernatural worlds, he felt the new movement, the new direction of life. Though its meaning might be hidden, its actuality was undeniable. Something was coming. This conviction flooded his consciousness, " inspired " him ; became the dominant fact of his exist ence. " A message from God came upon John," 1 speak ing without utterance in the deeps of his soul. He was driven to proclaim it as best he could; naturally under the traditional and deeply significant images of the Jewish Scriptures and apocalyptic books. Hence he was really its Forerunner, the preparer of the Way.
The Synoptics are agreed as to the form which the Baptist's preaching took. His message was simple and yet 1 Luke iii. 2 (Weymouth's trans.).
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startling. He said perpetually, " Change your minds, for the Kingdom of Heaven is close at hand." l " A new form of life is imminent — there is One coming after me mightier than I — therefore prepare its thoroughfare, make its highway straight, lest it crush those things it finds upon its path. It will not travel along the old, easy paths of perception. The crooked places shall be turned into straight roads, and the rugged ways into smooth. . . . Live lives which shall prove your change of heart."2
For John, whatever the apocalyptic form which his religious education caused him to give to these intuitions, it is plain that there was newness in the air. This, after all, is the important matter ; this intuitive grasp of novelty. Here consciousness lays hold on life. The unimportant matter is the symbolic picture into which the brain translates it. "The baptism of the Spirit and of Fire " — the vitalising wind, the fierce and purging flame — he cries in the strange, poetic, infinitely suggestive language of prophecy. If he is to be taken as a true harbinger, as an earnest of the quality of the Christian life; then, how romantic, how sacramental — above all, how predominantly ascetic — that life must seem! Nothing here forecasts the platitudinous ethics of modern theology. Deliberate choice, deep-seated change, stern detachment, a humble preparation for the great re-making of things : no comfortable compromise, or agreeable trust in a vicarious salvation. As a matter of fact, in the lives of that small handful in whom the peculiar Christian con sciousness has been developed, the demands of John the Baptist were always fulfilled before the results promised by Jesus were experienced. Asceticism was the gateway to mysticism ; and the secret of the Kingdom was only understood by those who had " changed their minds."
1 Matt. iii. 2. This is the literal meaning of the Greek, obscured by the A.V. " Repent " and the Vulgate " Poenitentiam agite ! " Cf. Weymouth, New Testament in Modern Speech, p. 7.
• Luke iii. 16, 5, 8 (paraphrase).
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It was clear to John, contrasting the austere splendour of his vision with the mean curiosity and fear of the crowds who ran to his preaching, that this imminent newness which overshadowed and " inspired " him, was destined to make a sharp division in the world of life. Some would ascend to the new levels now made plain; others, incapable of the necessary struggle and readjust ment, would fall back. A new sorting-house was here set up; a new test was established of the spirit's fitness to survive. " His fan is in his hand, thoroughly to cleanse his threshing-floor, and to gather the wheat to his garner ; but the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire." l Tame words to us, dulled by long use; but terrible upon the lips of a man who had given up everything which we think desirable in order that he might speak them.
Yet, according to Mark and Luke — who here represent the most trustworthy tradition — when the new life actually approached him, came within his field of perception, John, tuned up to the expectation of some amazing event, did not recognise it : so complete was its identification with that great stream of Becoming which it was destined to infect and control. The Forerunner turns on his own tracks, to become the unconscious initiator of Him whose Way he had prepared ; for the baptism of Jesus marks the definite emergence of His consciousness of a unique destiny, a unique relation to Reality. It revealed Him to Himself, and paralleled upon transcendent levels the psychological crisis of " mystical awakening " or con version ; the change of mind which is experienced in various degrees of completeness by all those who are destined to follow the Mystic Way and reach the levels of consciousness known as " union with God."
"Now when all the people had been baptised," says Luke, " and Jesus also had been baptised and was praying, the sky opened and the Holy Spirit came down in bodily 1 Luke iii. 17 (R.V.).
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shape like a dove upon Him, and a voice from Heaven which said, Thou art My Son, dearly loved : in Thee is My delight." l
Matthew and Mark make clear the subjective nature of this vision by saying, " He saw the Spirit of God descending," and " He saw an opening in the sky."2 Moreover, the words of the message are compounded of two texts from the Hebrew Scriptures, suddenly heard within the mind and invested with a special meaning and authority. They are instances of audition, of the " distinct interior words " whereby the spiritual genius commonly translates his intense intuition of the transcendent into a form with which his surface mind can deal. The machinery of this whole experience is in fact natural and human machinery, which has been used over and over again in the course of the spiritual history of mankind.
A crucial moment had come. The strange, new life latent in Jesus of Nazareth, suddenly flooded His human consciousness. That consciousness was abruptly lifted to new levels ; suddenly became aware of Reality, and of its own complete participation in Reality. Such a realisa tion, so vast an intuition, transcended all the resources of that mental apparatus with which our incarnate spirits are fettered and equipped. Yet it must be seized, and crushed into some limiting concept, if it were ever to be expressed. Artistic symbols, the image of the dove — a type for Semitic thought of the creative, fertilising power brooding upon the surface of life3 — the fragment of poetry heard
1 Luke iii. 21 (Weymouth's trans.).
« Matt. iii. 16, and Mark i. 10 (Weymouth's trans.). The form "'1Us is my beloved Son" in Matthew suggests that the spiritual experience was already developing into the external miracle. Cf. Carpenter, The First Three Gospels, 2nd ed., p. 165.
3 " This comparison of the Spirit of God to a dove was the property of the scribal erudition of that day : for instance, it compared the Spirit of God brooding over the waters of chaos in Gen. i. 2 to Noah's dove flutter ing over the waters of the deluge in Gen. viii. 8 " (O. Holtzmann, Leben Jesu, p. 105).
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with the inward ear and now invested with a new and intense significance, the " vision " and " audition " which form the links between spiritual and sensuous experience : these came into play. To acknowledge this is only to acknowledge the completeness of the humanity of Christ; who " came, not to destroy but to fulfil " the slow- budding potentialities of the race.
Yet in this case even more than in all other cases, the cerebral pantomime of voice and vision, the vivid light which is nearly always the brain's crude symbol of that expansion and illumination of consciousness in which Reality breaks in upon it, or it breaks in upon Reality — these things could but represent a fraction of the whole, real experience of the mind : as a poem tells but a fraction of the ecstatic adventure of the poet. " The brain state," says Bergson, " indicates only a very small part of the mental state; that part which is capable of translating itself into movements of locomotion." 1 Behind this lies a vast region of perceptions and correspondences which elude the image-making powers of the surface consciousness. Pure perception must be translated into such images by the brain, if thought is to lay hold of it ; but the more transcendent the perception, the less of it the image will contrive to represent. This is the explanation of the obvious discrepancy between such events as the baptismal vision of Jesus, the conversion vision of St. Paul, the " Tolle, lege " of St. Augustine, the voices heard by Joan of Arc, and the immense effects which appear to flow from them. Such visions are true sacraments, crude outward signs of inward grace, of a veritable contact between the soul and its Source. In the case of Jesus, the outward expression accompanies a sudden and irrevocable know ledge of identity with that Source ; so complete, that only the human metaphor of sonship can express it.1
1 Matter and Memory, xiii.
* Though the expression " Son of God " is never used by Jesus of Himself, the idea of the Fatherhood of God, as experienced by Him in a
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Thisdifficult idea of " Fatherhood,5 'central for Christian mysticism, yet so easily degraded into anthropomorphism of the most sentimental kind, has been beautifully treated by the great nameless mystic of the Theologia Germanica. " Christ hath also said : c No man cometh unto Me, except the Father, which hath sent Me, draw him.' Now mark : by the Father, I understand the Perfect, Simple Good, which is All and above All, and without which and besides which there is no true Substance, nor true Good, and without which no good work ever was or will be done. And in that it is All, it must be in All and above All. . . . Now behold, when this Perfect Good, which is unname- able, floweth into a Person able to bring forth, and bringeth forth the Only-begotten Son in that Person, and itself in Him, we call it the Father." *
There is one deeply significant difference between this psychological crisis in the life of Jesus and its lesser equivalent in the lives of Christian and other mystics. I mean the total absence of the " sense of sin." 2 In such rare moments of illumination the normal self becomes conscious of Divine Perfection : a perfection transcending not merely all that it may be, but all that it may dream. This consciousness is always and inevitably balanced by
special manner, is notoriously a central fact of the Gospel. He adopted this term for God from the popular usage of the time, whilst giving to it a fresh and personal significance. Cf. Dalman, The Words of Jesus, pp. 188-280.
1 Theologia Germanica, cap. 53.
• The inconsistency of one in whom there was no sense of sin seeking the baptism of John, which was " for the remission of sins," has been dwelt on by modern critics. See A: Reville, Jesus de Nazareth, Vol. II. p. 8, and Carpenter, The First Three Gospels, p. 118. This paradox was felt as a difficulty in early times ; and the apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews attempts a feeble explanation of it. But the correct view would seem to be, that freedom from sin was but one condition of the complete " change of mind" which John preached and Jesus actually brought in. This " change " it was which was offered to the candidates for baptism ; and which Jesus experienced in its fullest splendour in the symbolic drama recorded by the Synoptists.
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a terrible consciousness of personal imperfection : of dis harmony with that which is beheld. Thus the seeing self is torn between adoration and contrition ; the joy of discovered Reality soon fades before the sense of some thing frustrated and unachieved, which results from the first collision between temporal actualities and eternal possibilities in man's soul. " For whilst the true lover with strong and fervent desire into God is borne, all things him displease that from the sight of God with draw." 1 He is, to use once more Augustine's image, caught up by Perfect Beauty and dragged back by his own weight. In the case of Jesus, the exact opposite is reported to us. Here there is no collision : only a discovery. His predominant conviction, expressed by the inward voice, is of identity with that which He sees : of a complete harmony, a "sonship" never to be lost or broken, which normal man can only win in a partial degree by long efforts towards readjustment. " God is the only Reality, and we are real only so far as we are in His order and He is in us." 2 The declaration of sonship, the descent of the dove, imaged this truth, and revealed to the surface consciousness of Jesus His unique reality among the sons of men.
Yet this reality, since it was expressed through and by human nature, could not without conflict grow and declare itself. Body and mind must be adjusted to it. Elements, not evil yet recalcitrant, must be subdued. Even here, there are paths to be made straight. Consciousness must face this new situation, this immense increase of power, must unify itself about this centre now declared. "At once the Spirit impelled Him to go out into the desert," 3 forsaking for a time the world He was destined to renew. The swing of ascending consciousness between amrma-
1 Rolle, The Fire of Love, Bk. I. cap. 23.
* Coventry Patmore, The Rod, the Root and the Flower, " Magna Moralia," XXII. 3 Mark i. 12 (Weymouth's trans.).
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tion and negation had begun. " The road to a Yea lies through a Nay, we must separate in order again to unite, and must depart from our ordinary state in order again to return to it. There enters thus a negative element into the work of life; all definite departure on the new road follows through toil and struggle, doubt and pain." * Thus, though much that the mystics include in the Way of Purgation — the difficult struggle with vices, the stress and turmoil, misery and despair in which their conscious ness is re-made in the interests of new life — seems to have been absent from the experience of Jesus, yet He neces sarily trod that Way. Solitude, mortification, the crucial and deliberate choice between Power and Love, both within the reach of those who possess a genius for reality : these are the outstanding features of the " temptation " as recorded by Matthew and Luke. The psychological accuracy of their report is evidence that, though obviously expressed in symbolic and poetic language, it is founded upon fact rather than upon pious tradition.
It is a natural instinct in those who have received a revelation of Reality, under whatever form it may have disclosed itself, to retreat from the turmoil and incessant changes of daily life, and commune alone with the treasure that they have found. A love which is both shy and ecstatic, a deep new seriousness which conflicts with the incorrigible frivolity of the world, has awoke in them. They long to go away and be alone with it : to develop, in a rapt communion where wonder and intimacy dwell side by side, their new consciousness of Spirit, Beauty, or Love. Though men may distract, here it seems that nature helps them; so they go with the Hindu ascetic to the jungle, with the Sufi to a preparatory life of seclusion. With St. Francis they love the solitude of La Verna, with St. Ignatius they solve their problems best whilst gazing alone at the flowing stream. So the artist, the lover, the poet in the time of inspiration, is notoriously unsocial. 1 Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p. 93.
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Still more the soul which has received a direct revelation of the Divine. " Abandon life and the world that you may behold the Life of the World," says the great Persian mystic.1 " Just as some one waiting to hear a voice that he loves," says Plotinus, " should separate himself from other voices, and prepare his ear for the hearing of the more excellent sound when it comes near; so here it is necessary to neglect sensible sounds, so far as we can, and keep the soul's powers of attention pure, and ready for the reception of supernal sounds." 2
" In the wilderness," says Rolle, u speaks the loved to the heart of the lover : as it were a bashful lover, that his sweetheart before men entreats not, nor friendly-wise, but commonly and as a stranger he kisses." 3 Need we feel surprised that one in whom such a consciousness of heavenly intimacy assumed its intensest form, whilst the human elements of character also assumed their intensest form, felt impelled by this same necessity? Moreover, knowledge of self, says Richard of St. Victor, is the Holy Mountain, up which man must first climb on his way towards union with God : and knowledge of ourselves, which we too easily confuse with knowledge of our sins, means accurate consciousness of our powers as well as of our deficiencies. It means the bringing of all the levels of our nature into the field of consciousness : a complete review of the available material. Such a self-investigation is the equivalent of a " temptation "; that is to say, it is a testing, a proving, an opportunity of choice, a revela tion of various ways in which we may lay hold of life, various paths on which we are able to move. " We live and are in God," says Boehme, " we are of His substance, we have heaven and hell in ourselves; what we make of ourselves, that we are." 4 If this is so for the little normal
1 Jalalu 'ddin, Divan (Nicholson's trans.), p. 64. * Ennead, VI. 9.
3 Rolle, The Fire of Love, Bk. II. cap. 7.
4 Jacob Boehme, The Threefold Life of Man, cap. 14, § 72.
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human creature, how much more for the spirit in which the utmost possibilities of humanity, reinforced by a " something other " which we call an immediate contact with Divine Reality, are present in their fulness, untainted and unwarped?
"Perfect man" means something very different from "sinless man"; something richer, deeper, more positive, blazing with colour and light — " so unspeakably rich and yet so simple, so sublime and yet so homely, so divinely above us precisely in being so divinely near." 1 It means a deep and accurate instinct for an infinite number of possible paths on which life can move, an infinite number of possible attainments, and the power of free choice between them; for human and spiritual perfection is never mechanical, will and love are the essence of its life. It means a synthesis of opposites : patience and passion, austerity and gentleness, the properties of dew and fire. It means high romantic qualities, daring vision, the spirit of adventure, the capacity for splendid suffering, and for enjoyments of the best and deepest kind; for only those capable of Life are also capable of God, only those capable of romance are capable of holiness.
Such complete and deeply vital spirits cannot but see before them many and different possibilities of greatness. They feel within themselves the power of transcending and subduing to their use the intractable physical world — yet their destiny is towards supra-sensible conquests : the power of dominating and governing men, " the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them," — yet surrender is to be their highest good. They feel themselves to be freed from the anxieties and limitations of humanity; so central is the Invisible for their consciousness, so securely is their life founded in Reality, that anything might happen, yet all would be well. But their destiny is to accept in their fulness the burdens and limitations of the race. Not self- cultivation aloof on super-human levels, but self-donation 1 Von Hiigel, The Mystical Element of Religion, Vol. I. p. 26.
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in the interests of the All is their vocation. The greatest mystic is not he who " keeps his secret to himself," " pouring himself out towards God in a single state of enormous intensity"; but he who most perfectly realises the ideal of the " leaven which leaveneth the lump."
This fact is the very heart of Christian mysticism : and Christian mysticism was born in the wilderness, when its Author and Finisher, "alone with the wild beasts," faced the unique and stupendous possibilities of His own nature. The world-renouncing ascent to Pure Being, which Indian and Platonic mysticism attempts and sometimes perhaps attains, was within His reach; as it has never been within the reach of any other of the sons of men. Yet this refusal of the temporal in the supposed interests of Eternal Life, this satisfaction of the spirit's hunger for its home, He decisively rejected. In the full tide of illumination, knowing Himself, and knowing that Transcendent Order in which He stood, He turned His back upon that solitude in which, " alone with the Alone," He might have enjoyed in a unique degree the perpetual and undisturbed fruition of Reality. The whole man raised to heroic levels, " his head in Eternity, his feet in Time," never losing grasp of the totality of the human, but never ceasing to breathe the atmosphere of the divine; this is the ideal held out to us.
It is this attitude, this handling of the stuff of life, which is new in the spiritual history of the race : this which marks Christian mysticism as a thing totally different in kind from the mysticism of India or of the Neoplatonists. That power which is the human crown, yet seems the super-human gift : that quality of wholeness, whereby man participates at once in the worlds of Becoming and of Being — " Eternal Life in the midst of Time" — this it is that Jesus unfolded to the world; and in this the " Gospel of the Kingdom " consists. Under the imagery in which the Temptation in the Wilderness is described by Luke and Matthew, we may see the story of
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a crucial choice in which life turned in a new direction, chose a new path; resisting those impulses towards the development and satisfaction of one aspect of personality alone which must beset every great spirit conscious of its freedom and its power. Nor is there any " irreverence " in this view; since the strength of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation — even when understood in its most orthodox form — lies not in human necessities shirked, but in human necessities fulfilled.
Yet see the pace at which that flaming thing which was the soul of Jesus burned its way to full expression. Compare with the forty days of solitary communion from which He came out " in the power of the Spirit," speaking " as one who had authority," the three years' solitude or St. Paul or St. Catherine of Siena, the sixteen years' struggle of Suso, the thirty years' war of St. Teresa; all destined to that same end of the unification of character about this centre of life. Thus may we gain some measure of the difference in power resulting from their partial yet ever growing participation in the Infinite — that " divine spark " whose possession they claimed — and the fulness of life, the overpowering strength, of the spirit which so quickly subdued to its uses the whole mechanism of thought and sense, and set up in that physical frame which was the agent of its expression the requisite " paths of discharge."
Ill
THE ILLUMINATED LIFE
JESUS, says Luke, returned to Galilee from the wilder ness " in the power of the Spirit, and a fame went out concerning Him " * — strong and definite words. Already, if we may trust a tradition preserved by the Fourth Gospel, the intuitive mind of John the Baptist had per ceived in His baptismal ecstacy the marks of a spiritual greatness; of a creative personality, far transcending the merely prophetic type.2 That prophetic type — looking forward, rather than living forward — can be no more than the sign-post on the way, the humble servant of ascending Life. Now, that very Life was to declare itself. " The Bridge which goes from heaven to earth" and links " the earth of humanity with the greatness of Deity " was com plete.3 The mind and character of Jesus, permanently subdued to the use of His transcendental consciousness, became media whereby that consciousness could be ex pressed : " His word was with power." We see, then, the " Forerunner of the Race " entering upon the stage which was destined to be called, in the experience of those who inherited His life, the " Illuminative State." That state, however manifested, is in essence a condition of stability, of enhanced and adjusted life, interposed between two periods of pain and unrest ; the purifications, as the mystics often call them, of senses and of soul. So we find in the life of Jesus two such painful periods of read-
* Luke iv. 14 (R.V.).
8 John i. 29-34. Cf. Salmon, The Human Element in the Gospels, p. 76. 3 St. Catherine of Siena, Diakgo, cap. 22.
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justment, struggle and effort — the Temptation and the Agony — at the opening and the close of His public career.
In that career, all those peculiar characteristics of the illuminated mystic which we have already considered — the deep and vivid consciousness of the Presence of God, the lucid understanding, the enhanced power, the supreme peace, the sacramental vision of the world — were for once exhibited in their completeness. More, from the time of the beginning of the Ministry we see the rapid emergence, the swift, resistless growth of many of those traits which even the greatest of mystics were only to show in their last and most perfect stage : the characters, that is to say, of the Unitive Way, or Deified Life, the life which has completed the course of its transcendence and perfected its correspondences with Reality.
Whatsoever its circumstances, the method and result of such a life is always the same. Its method is the sur render of the part to the whole; its result is a veritable participation in the life of God. For it, " in the midst of the visible, an invisible but more actual kingdom is set up; which sees more and more in the visible, and which enables the visible to produce new effects." It founds, in fact, " the whole of reality on a cosmic inner life " l — the life of God — and has learned the delicate balance which keeps consciousness poised between Eternity and Time. Hence there is for it no gap between sacramentalism and upure spirituality"; no opposition between the tran scendence and the immanence of Divinity, or between the contemplative and active ideals of humanity. It knows that " the creating and sanctifying God is the principle at once of natural and of supernatural life " : hence " the ineffable God of Neoplatonic metaphysics — the God of ecstacy — is at the same time the God of life," 2 and work and contemplation are but two aspects of the one great act of communion with Reality.
1 Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p. 510.
* Delacroix, Etudes d'histoire et de psychologic du mysticisme, p. xii.
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The traces of this dual character of intuition and action, work and rest, as they were exhibited in their perfection in the life of Jesus, are easily discoverable in the Synoptics. Works of pity, works of healing, harmonising, correcting, teaching, the free giving under forms both lowly and exalted of u more abundant life," together with unwearied self-spending in the efforts to initiate humanity into the actual new order in which it stood — His blazing apocalyp tic vision of a Kingdom both here and to come — were balanced by long hours of solitary prayer and contempla tion, of intense and direct correspondence with the Absolute l : which, could we but penetrate their secret, would teach us all we want to know of the link between man's spirit and the Spirit of God.
The destiny to which that human spirit tends is " free dom " : that high level of being, upon which life achieves reality and becomes the self-creative auxiliary of the divine. In Jesus of Nazareth we may see, for the first time, this freedom fully achieved. In Him, defying the limitations and automatisms which dog the race, it " ascends like a flame," exhibiting its two-fold character of perfect correspondence with the Many and with the One.
" Freedom," says Ruysbroeck, " the conqueror of the world and of the evil one, ever ascends. It rises up in adoration towards the Eternity of its Lord and God. It possesses the divine union and shall never lose it. But a heavenly impulse comes : and it turns again towards men, it has pity on all their needs, it stoops to all their miseries, for it must sorrow, and it must bring forth. Freedom gives light, like fire; like fire it burns; like fire it absorbs and devours, and lifts up to heaven that which it has devoured. And when it has accomplished its work below, it ascends and takes once more, ardent with its own fire, the path which leads towards the heights."2
1 Matt. xiv. 23 ; Mark i. 35 and vi. 46 ; Luke vi. 12. 8 Ruysbroeck, Regnum amantium Deum (Hello, p. 224).
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This character of freedom, moving easily between two worlds, becomes apparent from the very beginning of the public life of Christ. It is unconsciously revealed to us wherever a connected section seems to describe that life as it was really lived. Consider, for instance, the amazing first Sabbath in Capernaum, after the definite "call" of Peter, Andrew, James and John.1 Here, in the consecu tive events of a typical day and night, we have a classic description of the kind of power exhibited, the kind of life lived, by the illuminative mystic : the swaying to and fro of an enormously enhanced consciousness between the human and the spiritual worlds. Vividly impressed in its newness and strangeness upon the mind of Peter, this forms a specially valuable, because realistic, portion of his reminiscences as recorded by Mark.
The day begins with teaching in the synagogue : and at once the sense of power and of novelty is felt. " He taught as one having authority; " with a lucid under standing, a flaming conviction, a sureness of touch in respect of the spiritual world, which astonished all who heard. Next, the overflowing sympathy and healing power: the sick restored to health, the unstable and ill- adjusted brought back to their true poise by contact with this perfectly adjusted consciousness, serenity and effici ency — more life, more light — irradiated as it were, freely poured out, on all within the field of its influence. It is as if the resources of the Universal Life had here been tapped — and this, not in the exclusive interests of one rare soul, but in order that the vivifying streams might be poured out on other men, who should receive according to their measure an enhancement of life for the bodily frame or for the energising mind.2 This vast new life surging up, this "extra dower" of vitality, may well empower its possessors for acts which are beyond the reach of common men; yet are veritable results of the spirit of life overflowing the petty barriers of " use and wont."
1 Mark i. 16-38. a Mark ii. 9-12.
H 2
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But after this free self-giving, this perfection of service, the other side of the true mystic life asserts itself with imperative power. This passionate, ardent spirit owes His strength to other contacts than that of the world of men. The irresistible passion for God, the hunger for direct and profound communion with Reality — the tend ency of like for like — seizes upon His consciousness. "And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed : " 1 renewing those supernal contacts, absorbed in that deep intimacy, which was the necessary source of life, the final secret, of that Personality which claimed at once identity with the human and with the divine.
In the lives of the great Christian mystics, we see- though doubtless upon far lower levels — this duality of experience repeated over and over again. These share to some extent their Master's profound participation in two orders : they are " in this world like a balance,' ' rejecting nothing of the " given," but moving to and fro between Appearance and Reality. Thus only can they solve the paradox of Being and Becoming; and truly " live Eternal Life in the midst of Time." We see this in St. Francis of Assisi, whose active love ran up to the supreme and solitary experience of La Verna, and out to the untir ing industries of missionary and healer; to the humblest works of service to men and beasts, the loving discovery of the Divine in birds and flowers. In St. Catherine of Siena, profound ecstatic, yet wise politician, active teacher and philanthropist. In Ruysbroeck, with his continual insistence on man's necessary movement between loving work and restful fruition, the ascent and descent of the ladder of love. In St. Catherine of Genoa, balancing those deep and solitary contemplations and ecstacies from which she came forth " joyous and rosy-faced," with the hard work and generous self-spending of her active career
1 Mark i. 35.
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in hospital and slum.1 In St. Teresa, who declared both in word and action that the " combination of Martha and Mary " is necessary to the perfect life.2 These, far better than any reverent process of insulation, may help us to know something of the nature of that " new life " which, flashing upon the world in its highest possible expression, was exhibited to men during the short ministry of Jesus.
It is clear from every line of the canonical records that "newness" was indeed of its essence; as seen both by the loving and intimate vision of disciples, and by the curious and astonished crowd. Actual novelty was felt here if ever, breaking out through the world of things.
" If," says Gamble, " we try to determine the first and most general impression which the person of Jesus made on His followers, we have no great difficulty in reaching it. They were deeply penetrated by the sense of His unlikeness to ordinary men. This feeling is apparent on every page of the Synoptic gospels. It excites among the disciples sometimes astonishment, sometimes selr- surrender, sometimes terror. . . . We shall find the most marked characteristic of Jesus to be a certain collectedness, composure, or serenity of mind under the utmost stress of circumstance. We are made aware of this trait in all the various situations into which the narrative brings us. We feel throughout that we are in the company of One who is equal to the many demands which life makes upon Him, and who is in possession of a peace which nothing can disturb." 8
This newness and strangeness, though none could be expected to comprehend it in its fulness — much less express it in the crude and limited symbols of speech — some at least could recognise ; far though it w.as from all Messianic conceptions and hopes. This it is, forced into correspondence with the formulae of Jewish prophecy,
1 Von Hiigel, The Mystical Element of Religion, Vol. I. p. 139 * El Castillo Interior, Moradas Setimas, iv. 8 J. Gamble, Christ and Criticism, p. 59.
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which finds expression in the confession of Peter,1 and in the " Messianic claims " and much of the apocalyptic prophecy of Jesus Himself. " From the parables of the garment and of the wine bottles," says Dobschiitz, "we learn that He looks on Himself and His surroundings as something quite new. . . . The prophets all announced a time of fulfilment to come. Jesus knew that He was bringing this time." 2
But the emergence of Novelty, the real movement of life in a direction that is truly new, must mean for the human mind which experiences it — has had as it were for a moment its blinkers snatched away, but cannot focus the fresh worlds disclosed — a sense of strangeness, of immeasurable possibilities. For such a mind the world, abruptly perceived from a new standpoint, seems full of portents : moves to some fresh definite consummation which, because inwardly felt, must be outwardly dis closed. There are "signs in the sun and the moon" — yes, signs in every springing leaf, in every sudden breeze. The strangeness of a Parousia truly imminent, in a sense actually present for consciousness, flings its shadow upon the World of Appearance. A mind ever stretched towards Eternity tinctures with its own peculiar essence the stream of perceptions as they flow in from the " world of sense." The result of such factors will be something not far differ ent from that which is called the " apocalyptic element " in the teaching of Jesus.
Such an " apocalyptic element " is seldom wholly absent from the declarations of those mystics whose ascent towards Reality is conditioned by the sense of a " mediatorship " laid upon them : whose vision of Infinite Perfection brings with it the impulse to communicate the implications of that vision to the race. A necessary per fecting of all life, individual and racial, as part of the Divine Plan, is then made clear to them. Deeply merged in the stream of Becoming, they feel the tendencies of its
1 Mark viii. 29. a The Eschatokgy of the Gospels, pp. 19 and 172.
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movement; become aware of its inexorable laws. As best they can, they condense the substance of those intui tions — the plot of the Drama of God — into the shorter rhythms of human thinking. A great certitude burns in their symbolic language. Because the supernatural side of history is so widely unrolled before them, they acceler ate the pace of its great processes, and feel the inevitable end as already near. It is all part of the supreme human business of " bringing the Eternal into Time." Thus Joachim of Flora, St. Hildegarde, and the crowd of mystical seers down to our own apocalyptic prophetess Jane Lead, all come back from their communion with Reality to cry like John the Baptist, " Change your minds, for the Kingdom is at hand."
Alike the mediaeval seers and their forbears the Jewish prophets, were violent in their declarations, vivid and definite in the pictures which they made of the changes that must come. But Jesus, towering to greater certitudes, embracing a wider horizon, was more violent, more vivid than them all. A sharper pencil than theirs, a more impassioned poetry, was needed if He were to communi cate a tithe of His great vision, of His interior sense of power and newness, to the world.
Thus " apocalyptic language" — lyrical and pictorial speech — is seen to have been inevitable for Him. Its relics survive in the gospels, though emptied now of all their fire and light. Each successive redaction of those gospels removed them a little further from that shin ing world of wonder in which they had their origin, to deposit them at last in the anatomical museums where the dead fancies of faith are preserved. As the living Personality slowly stiffened into the " deified hero " — as Christianity developed from a life to a cult — so more and more the ecstatic and poetic quality of such utterances was obscured by an insistence on those features which appeared to ratify the ancient prophecies of Israel, or fore cast definite events on the physical plane. These fore-
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castSj unfulfilled, were but the construction put by the intellect — limited on all sides by tradition, education, race — on that amazing vision of novelty and change, worlds of the spirit indeed brought to judgment and re-made, which was perceived by an intuition so exalted that it touched and experienced the creative sphere.
Thus the vivid poetic description of the preaching of the Gospel * seems to foretell, as Schweitzer points out, an immediate appearance of the Glorified Messiah. But that which it really does describe is the threefold interior process of the coming of the Kingdom of Reality, as it is experienced by the growing human soul. First the natural resistance of normal life, ever tending to lag behind, to oppose the forward march of spirit, to trouble it and struggle with it, old habits fighting against new : the dreadful obstinacy of the respectable when faced by the romantic, of the ethical as opposed to the religious sense. " Beware of men, for they will deliver you up to the Councils ... ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake." 2 Then the first victory of the inflowing tide of life, far stronger than the individuals who are its instruments — " it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your father which speaketh in you." Then, in spite of struggles ever renewed on the part of the recalcitrant lower nature, the gradual growth and final establishment of divine humanity — the "Son of Man," who is also the son of God. Chandler observes that these prophecies describe, in a foreshortened form, the actual events which attended upon the establishment of the Christian Church as "a supernatural and spiritual society." 3 They also describe the inward events which attend upon the growth towards reality — in Christian language the "entrance into the Kingdom " — of the individual soul.
This " Kingdom " — its nature and its nearness, its pro found significance for life — is the theme of all the preach ing of Jesus, during the period of His public activity.
1 Matt. i. 16-23. * Matt. x. 17, 22. 8 Faith and Experience, p. 59.
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Its " mystery " is the " good news " which the Twelve were sent out to proclaim. Its announcement, rather than any moral law, any " scheme of salvation," is recog nised by the Synoptics as His typical utterance. " From that time Jesus began to preach and to say, c Change your minds ! for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.' " " Jesus came into Galilee preaching the good news of the King dom of God, and saying, ' The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand.' " " And he said unto them, I must preach the Kingdom of God to other cities also : for therefore am I sent." l
As Christians of a later date took the language of the old mysteries and gave to it a new and vital significance, so their Founder, in His effort to convey His transcendent intuitions to the race, took a phrase which was on every one's lips, although generally understood either in a national and political or in an apocalyptic sense — the Kingdom of God — and lifted it into a new region of beauty and of truth. The " Kingdom " is an artistic and poetic transfiguration of a well-known figure of speech : one of those great suggestive metaphors, without which the creative mind can never communicate its message to men. It represents a world and a consciousness dominated by the joyful awareness of Divine Reality — " the key that first unlocks the meaning and aim of life." 2 The estab lishment of such a consciousness is the goal to which that life's unresting travail is directed. The spark from which it springs is deep buried in the soul. It is like a grain of mustard seed; the germ which seems the least of things, yet bears within itself the divine secret of self -creation. It is a hidden treasure awaiting discovery. Again, it is like leaven; an invisible organism which, once introduced into the field of consciousness, will entincture and trans mute the whole of life.3 There is about it, as it exists in
1 Matt. iv. 17 ; Mark i. 14 ; Luke iv. 43.
2 Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 40.
3 Matt. xiii. 31-33.
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human nature, something rudimentary, embryonic, yet powerful. It is not inserted ready-made. Those who desire its possession must acquiesce in the necessity of beginning over again; of re-birth. "Unless you change your minds and become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdom." * Over and over again, by a multitude of fluid images, we are brought back from soaring visions to the homely and direct implications of life and of growth.
The truth which these parables and teachings conceal is therefore as much a truth of psychology as of religion. It is the fact, and the law, of the mystic life; now made central for the race. "The law and the prophets were until John : from that time the good news of the King dom of God is preached." 2 " O thou bright Crown of Pearl," says Boehme of this mystic seed or thing revealed to man, " art thou not brighter than the sun ? There is nothing like thee; thou art so very manifest, and yet so very secret, that among many thousand in this world, thou art scarcely rightly known of any one; and yet thou art carried about in many that know thee not." 3
Reality, and man's relation to it — his implicit posses sion of it — is, then, the subject of the good news. This is the omnipresent and eternal mystery which is neither "Here" nor "There," but "Lo! everywhere." This Reality and this relation, as perceived by the human soul in its hours of greatest lucidity, are double-edged. Each has for consciousness a personal and an impersonal aspect. Jesus called the first of these the " Fatherhood of God," and the second the " Mystery of the Kingdom." They must be regarded as the completing opposites of a truth which is one.
The doctrine of the Fatherhood of God involves, of course, the corresponding doctrine of man's "sonship"; his implicitly real or divine character, a seed or spark, an inherited divine quality latent in him, which makes possible
1 Matt, xviii. 3. 2 Luke xvi. 1 6.
8 The Threefold Life of Man, cap. 6, § 99.
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the filial relation. It is the basis alike of all passionate seeking, all intimate and loving communion with God, and of that claim to " deification," to final union with Divine Reality, which all the great mystics make.1 The love and dependence felt as towards Deity by every awakened religious consciousness, here receive their justi fication. Yet, since no one definition of Reality can exhaust the resources of an All which transcends the totality of its manifestations, this declaration of Divine Personality, and man's close and loving relationship with it, is balanced by another declaration : that of the Godhead considered as a place or state — St. Augustine's " country of the soul." This is the "Kingdom" in which Jesus Himself lives, and into which it is His mission to intro duce the consciousness of other men. It is this awareness of our true position that we are to seek first : this firm hold upon a Reality, loved and possessed, though never understood. Through it all other things, then seen in their true proportion, will be " added unto us." 2
The two ideas taken together as we find them in the gospels, with all their living interchange of fire and light, presented by a Personality to whom they were not terms of thought but facts of life, represent therefore the obverse and reverse of man's most sublime vision of Deity: the cerchio and imago of Dante's dream.3 The completeness and perfection of balance with which Jesus possesses this dual vision, is the secret of His unique freshness and reality : His power of infecting other men with that "more abundant life."
Yet the mass of words and actions in which this new direction of life is indicated to us, the attention orientated
1 It is a mistake to credit Neoplatonism with the introduction of " deification " into Christianity. True, the expression itself is Hellenic, and was first used in a Christian sense by Clement of Alexandria : but the experience which it describes is indistinguishable from the " divine sonship " of Paul and the Fourth Evangelist.
» Matt. vi. 33. 3 Par., XXXIII. 136.
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toward this immanent yet transcendent Kingdom of God, cannot be forced into any rigid scientific system of doctrine. It is itself alive; an essentially artistic and direct revelation, which plays over the whole field of human activity and hope. " Contemplative theology, the off spring of doubt,5' was, says Deissmann, completely out side the sphere of Christ's nature, "because He was in daily personal intercourse with the higher world, and the living God was in Him. ... To this latter fact His con fessions, His words of controversy, consolation and reproof, bear witness. It is impossible to unite all these sayings into the artistic mosaic of an evangelical system : they are the reflections of an inner life full of unbroken strength." *
In His teachings He had His eye on two things, two states : obverse and reverse of one whole. First, on the immediate and largely ascetic and world-renouncing " struggle for good, that is to say for true life " which all infected by His transcendent vitality, and found capable of the new movement, must set in hand; the quest of personal perfection, which is for every mystic the inevit able corollary of his vision of Perfect Love. Secondly, on the end and aim of that struggle — the " final flowering of man's true being " 2 as He saw it in apocalyptic vision — the conscious attainment of the " Kingdom," the appro priation of Divine Sonship, the deified life of the mystic soul. He taught that there was no limit to the power of the spiritual life in man. The " grain of mustard seed " hidden in the ground of his nature was a mighty dynamic agent for those who understood the divine secret of growth. As the fine rootlets of the baby plant press resistless through the heavy and recalcitrant soil, so this embryo of a transcendent vitality can dominate matter, " move mountains," and by a magic transmutation of the inorganic build up the Tree of Life. Thus the whole
1 Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, p. 386. « A. Rdville, J/sus de Nazareth, Vol. II. p. 5.
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mystery of the kingdom is already manifested in the latent possibilities of the little child; and this, rather than the clever but crystallised adult, is the raw material of the New Race.
From a profound consciousness of this indwelling spark of perfection, there flowed that sense of the sacredness and limitless possibilities of life which governed the ethical teaching of Jesus. Here is the source of that undying magic, that creative touch, which evoked from all the common things of our diurnal existence the august quality of romance ; and found in the deep passional life of the Magdalene the clue to her reconciliation with the Fontal Life of men. For Him the lawless vitality of the sinner held more promise than the careful piety of the ecclesi astic. Realness was His first demand : " Woe unto you, play-actors," His bitterest reproach. The everlasting miracle of growth, the strange shimmer in our restless World of Appearance which seems to shake from out the folds of all created things a faery and enticing light, dis cerned in our moments of freedom as a veritable message from our home — this He gathered up and made a heritage for us. Fulfilled by a profound consciousness of union, with the fundamental reality of All that Is — a " deep, graduated glow of love for the graduated realities of our real world " 1 — He disclosed to us the glory of that One Reality ablaze in the humblest growing things : " Con sider the lilies of the field how they grow; . . . even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." 2
Twelve hundred years passed before this characteristic ally Christian saying was really understood, and entered through the life and example of Francis of Assisi into the
1 Von Hiigel, Eternal Life, p. 281.
1 Matt. vi. 28, 29 ; Luke xii. 27. " Of all Christ's sayings," saya Abbott, " this is the most original : no parallel to it can be discovered in ancient literature. To us it is a truism ; in the first century it must have seemed a paradox of paradoxes " (E. A. Abbott, The Son of Man, 3565 b and d).
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main stream of Christian consciousness. "As of old the three children placed in the burning fiery furnace invited all the elements to praise and glorify God, so this man also, full of the Spirit of God, ceased not to glorify, praise and bless in all the elements and creatures the Creator and Governor of them all. What gladness thinkest thou the beauty of flowers afforded to his mind as he observed the grace of their form and perceived the sweetness of their perfume ? . . . When he came upon a great quantity of flowers he would preach to them and invite them to praise the Lord, just as if they had been gifted with reason. So also cornfields and vineyards, stones, woods, and all the beauties of the field, fountains of waters, all the verdure of gardens, earth and fire, air and wind would he, with sincerest purity, exhort to the love and willing service of God. In short, he called all creatures by the name of brother ; and in a surpassing manner, of which other men had no experience^ he discerned the hidden things of creation with the eye of the heart, as one who had already escaped into the glorious liberty of the children of God." 1
The imparting and making central for other men of this new inner life, the building of this top storey to the spirit of man, is the art or secret with which, at bottom, the whole of Christ's preaching is concerned. By the completeness of His union with God, He is bringing it in; making it for ever after an integral part of the stream of human life. Possessing it in the fullest measure, He spends Himself in the effort to impart it; and, as a fact, He does so impart it to the inner circle of followers capable of that divine infection. We here touch the secret upon which, ultimately, the whole history of the Christian type depends — the characteristic quality of infectiousness pos sessed by the mystic life. This fact, which makes every great mystic in the Unitive Way a real centre of that
1 Thomas of Celano, Legenda prima, cap. 29.
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which has been called " Divine Fecundity " * — the founder of a family in the Transcendental Order — of course received its supreme manifestation in Jesus Himself. The mystic life springs up as it were, flowering in the most sterile places, beneath the feet of a Paul, a Francis, an Ignatius, a Teresa; each possesses the power of stinging to activity the dormant spark in the souls of those whom they meet. But the superabundant divine life in Jesus, the life which it communicates to others, the "new birth" which it operated in the immediate circle of dis ciples living within the field of its influence, is the fount and origin of the whole Christian Church.
All the " ethical " teaching of Jesus is concerned with the way in which this new life, once it has germinated, may best grow, be nurtured, move towards its destined goal. Those in whom it has sprung up are a race apart : they are " My brother, and sister, and mother." a They belong to an inner circle, the "children of the bride groom," the great family of the secret sons of God. More is demanded of them than of other men. Since they are capable of another vision, live at a higher tension, are quickened to a more intimate and impassioned love, total self-donation is asked of them; complete concentration on the new transcendent life.3 The collection of sayings put together in Matthew v., vi. and vii., with others scattered through the Synoptics, tend to establish an ideal of character of which the outstanding qualities are Humility, Detachment, Poverty, Charity, Purity, Courage : the marks, in fact, of the Christian saint. Amongst the many psychological necessities which these sayings bring into prominence, are the completeness with which the new transcendent life must be established if it is to succeed — ye
1 Richard of St. Victor, De quatuor gradibus violentce charitatis (Migne, Pat. Lat., T. CXCVI.).
1 Matt. xii. 50 and Mark iii. 35.
3 Matt. viii. 19-23, xvi. 24, xix. 16-21 ; Mark viii. 34, x. 17-22; Luke ix. 23, xiv. 25-33, xviii. 18-23.
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cannot serve God and Mammon : 1 the need of purity if one is to keep the power of perceiving Reality : 2 the courage and endurance with which the logical results of conversion must be faced : 3 the dynamic power of the fervent will : 4 the fact that " entrance into the Kingdom" is not a belief, but an act.5
This ideal in its totality became, and remains — not at all the standard of social Christianity, which is always trying to whittle it down, and prove its impracticable character, but — the ideal towards which the disciplines of Christian asceticism are set. Read first the Sermon on the Mount, and then side by side the Imitatio Christi and any work of edification proceeding from the Ritschlian school ; and you will be left in no doubt as to which is the more " evangelical." Fulfilment of this ideal is the standard aimed at by all those heroic mortifications which constitute the mystic's Way of Purgation, or on a lower plane the novitiate of the religious life ; directed as they are towards " self-naughting," the acquirement of that radiant charity which sees all things in the light of God, that evangelical poverty which Jacopone da Todi called " highest wisdom," the harmonious rearrangement of character round a new and higher centre of life; though neither mystic nor monastic postulant may recognise the origin of that pattern to which his growing intuition of reality urges him to conform. Over and over again its principles have been given practical expression : by Francis, embracing Poverty and receiving with it a joyous participation in the Kingdom of God; by Suso, blessed when men said all manner of evil against him; by Teresa in her convent taking no thought for the morrow, or denying herself social intercourse in the effort towards singleness of eye — a pure and untainted vision of Reality.
The violent other-worldliness of this ideal, its para doxical combination of charity and austerity, of intensest
1 Matt. vi. 24. a Matt. v. 8, vi. 22. ' Matt. vii. 13.
4 Matt. v. 6. 5 Matt. vii. 21.
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joy and pain, its " unpracticalness " as a guide for those whom we consider normal men leading that which we like to think a normal life, is notorious. But it was the rule of a new life, a new man, whose standard must tran scend that of the respectable citizen; and is the inevitable condition of his appropriation of the vision and secret called the " Kingdom of God " : " Except your righteous ness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." l Unendurably hard for those who " loved the world," the others, breathing the crisp air of Reality, found that its yoke was easy and its burden light.
Participation in this Kingdom was at first freely offered to the whole race. So great, so compelling was the new vision of Reality, that it seemed impossible that any to whom it was declared could disbelieve. We see this same convinced optimism even in the preaching of St. Francis, of Tauler, of Fox : the clear triumphant certitude of an Eternal Life attainable by all men who turn towards it, who chose to knock, to ask, to seek,2 slowly work ing itself out to the same tragic conclusion in con flict with the deadly inertia of the crowd — the " unbeliev ing and crooked-minded generation," 3 with its exas perating tendency to degrade all spiritual power to its own purposes, make it useful, exploit in the interests of present comfort the marvellous and the occult. In one who lived in the full blaze of the Divine Presence, to whom the atmosphere of Reality was native air, such an attitude of hope and expectation was inevitable. As with the man who made the great supper, it seemed enough to say, " Come, for all things are now ready." 4 The few sarcastic sentences in which that most ironic of parables is completed show the cruel disappointment of the result.
It soon became plain that only a few were capable of the
1 Matt. v. 20. « Matt. vii. 7.
* Matt. rvii. 17 (Weymouth's trans.). 4 Luke xiv. 17.
I
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new movement of life : possessed the courage and sim plicity needed for its fundamental sacrifices and readjust ments. " For narrow is the gate, and straitened the way, that leadeth unto life, and few be they that find it." l Hence in the end the secrets of the " Kingdom " were de liberately confined to a handful of men; the " little flock," temperamentally able to slip the leash of old illusions and " live the life." There came a point at which, the dis tinction between those susceptible of this new birth and those incapable of moving in the new direction became so clear to Jesus, that the inner circle of initiates even received the stern warning to avoid " giving that which is holy to the dogs, and casting pearls before swine." 2 The whole race, it is true, are called to the Kingdom; but in the event few are chosen. These few His unerring intuition detects — a man here, a man there, in the least likely situations. They are the natural mystics, the " salt of the earth," the " light of the world," the finders of the treasure, of the pearl, the wise who build their lives on a foundation of Eternity 3 — those in fact who are capable of the recognition of Reality, and are destined to live the new Transcendent Life; or become, in Johannine language, " branches of the Vine."
The swift growth of Jesus in the Illuminated Life is reflected for us in the impression made by Him on this inner circle, this spiritual aristocracy. It is an impression which culminates in the confession of Peter, and in the parallel story of the Transfiguration,4 where voice and vision do but drive home the same conviction which breaks out irresistibly in Peter's words — the conviction of a unique transcendence experienced here and now, and making a link for man with the spiritual sphere.
The Transfiguration belongs to a group of incidents prominent in the Synoptics, which we can hardly dismiss,
1 Matt. vii. 14 (R.V.). 2 Matt. vii. 6.
3 Matt. v. 13-16, xiii. 44-46, vii. 24.
4 Matt. rvi. 16 and xvii. 1-8 ; Mark viii. 29 and ix. 2-8 ; Luke ix. 20, 28-36.
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but must treat with a certain reserve. They are incidents which find many reported parallels throughout Christian history in the lives of the saints; and, indeed, of other abnormal psychic subjects who cannot be ranked as saints. They include — to give them their modern pseudo-scientific names — instances of foreknowledge of events, such as the announcements of the Passion, of the betrayal of Judas and the denial of Peter: of clairvoyance — " Jesus perceived in His spirit that they so reasoned within them selves : " l of levitation — the walking on the sea. Such incidents are viewed with dislike by the modern mind, which, far from regarding them as " helps to faith," makes haste to drape them in the decent vestments of " symbol " and "myth."2 They seem to us bizarre and startling; largely because the closed system of " natural law " with which the nineteenth century endowed us, has blunted our perception of the immense possibilities lurking in the deeps of that universe of which we have only explored the outward and visible signs. Losing the humble sense of wonder, we only find queerness in the phenomena which our conceptual systems refuse to accommodate. But it is our own brains which supply the " queerness "; always their first reaction to the encounter with novelty. Yet there is a great body of evidence, difficult to set aside, that those in whom that organic development which we have called the " Mystic Way " takes place, do often exhibit powers and qualities outside the range of more " normal " experience. Nor are such peculiarities limited to the voices, visions, and ecstatic intuitions which are the recognised media of exalted religious perception. The faculty by which St. Francis of Assisi read the minds of others ; 3 the telepathic communications, collective audi-
1 Mark ii. 8.
2 Instances in almost any modern work on the Synoptics : the Lives of Jesus by A. Re>ille, and O. Holtzmann ; Carpenter, The First Three Gospels, and Loisy, Les fivangiles synoptiques.
8 Sptculum, § V.
I 2
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tions of a " Divine Voice " speaking to them, and other psychic powers developed in the fourteenth century amongst the mystical society of the " Friends of God "; * St. Francis,2 St. Catherine of Siena,3 St. Teresa,4 St. Philip Neri,5 St. Francis Xavier,6 and many other mystics of all creeds,7 reported by contemporary witnesses as lifted above the earth when absorbed in prayer ; the predic tion of her own martyrdom by Joan of Arc ; even the wide range of psychic powers observed in that unstable and sentimental mystic, Madame Guyon — all these are hints which may at least help us to read with more open rninds the stories of " marvellous " psychic phenomena incorporated in the gospels. If the dynamic power of mind, its control of many of the conditions called " material," be indeed a fact, here if anywhere we may expect that power to show itself. Spirit is cutting a new path to transcendence — life is making the greatest of its " saltatory ascents " — hence, its energising touch may sting to new activities tracts which it never reached before. Moreover, the very disharmonies which must result from such abrupt and uneven developments will encourage the production of bizarre phenomena. Hence in the present state of the evidence, a definite rejection of these narratives is as unscientific as the worst performances of pious credulity.
True, it is impossible as yet to draw any certain con clusions from them. We are but at the beginning of our study of the human mind and its true relations with the flesh. But when the psychic nature of man is better understood, it may well be that much now regarded by New Testament critics as myth or allegory will be recog nised as a description — sometimes indeed exaggerated
1 Rufus Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, p. 257.
2 St. Bonaventura, Vita, cap. 10.
3 Dialogo, cap. 79.
5 Acta SS., T. 19, May 26. 6 Bonhours, Fie, Lib. 6, p. 557.
7 Good Japanese examples in Harrison, The Fighting Spirit of Japan.
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or misrepresented, but sometimes also soberly realistic— of the rare but natural phenomena which accompany the breaking out of new paths by the Spirit of Life. The quiet change of attitude which has taken place amongst rationalistic scholars during the last twenty years in regard to the stigmatisation of the saints — once a pious fairy tale, now " only a blush in a certain limited area " * — is a warning against premature judgment in such matters as " levitation," fore-knowledge, or the curious self -radiance said to be observed in ecstatics of a certain type.
Those who take the view here suggested, and who are willing to allow the propriety of using the indirect evi dence afforded by the lives of those saints who are the closest imitators and greatest followers of Jesus of Nazareth, in the effort to understand our confused and scanty records of His life, have ready to their hand much material which seems to bear on the story of the Trans figuration. The kernel of this story — no doubt elabor ated by successive editors, possessed by that passion for the marvellous which Jesus unsparingly condemned— seems to be the account of a great ecstacy experienced by Him in one of those wild and solitary mountain places where the soul of the mystic is so easily snatched up to communion with supreme Reality.2 Such a profound and exclusive experience of Eternal Life, a total con centration on the Transcendental Order, in which the intuition of Reality floods consciousness and blots out all knowledge of the temporal world is, as we know, an almost invariable incident in the career of great contemplatives. Then "the spring of Divine Love flows out of the soul, and draws her out of herself into the nameless Being, into her origin, which is God alone." 3 Hence it is at least probable that such ecstacies were a frequent
1 Cutten, Psychological Phenomena of Christianity, p. 84. * In such lonely spots, said Francis of Assisi, the Holy Spirit vouchsafed itself much more intimately to him (St. Bonaventura, Vita, cap. 10). 8 Meister Eckhart, On the Steps of the Soul (Pfeiffer, p. 153).
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feature of those nights of prayer which supported the active life of Jesus; that this was the way in which His communion with the Father expressed itself. But those ecstacies, if experienced at all, were experienced in soli tude; this was witnessed by Peter, James and John, admitted to new intimacy since their realisation of His Messiahship.
"And while He was praying, the appearance of His face underwent a change," l says Luke ; he alone preserv ing for us this vital fact of " prayer," of profound and deliberate absorption in the Divine Life, as the immediate cause of the transfigured bodily state. This change, this radiance seemed to the astonished onlookers to spread to the whole personality; conferring upon it an enhancement and a splendour which the limited brains of those who saw could only translate into terms of light — " His cloth ing became white, and like the flashing lightning " 2— whiter, says Mark, with a touch of convincing realism, than any fuller can bleach it.3 Bound together by a com munity of expectation and personal devotion, and now in that state upon the verge of sleep 4 in which the mind is peculiarly open to suggestion, it is not marvellous that this, to them conclusive and almost terrible testimony of Messiahship, should produce strange effects upon those who were looking on. In an atmosphere so highly charged with wonder and enthusiasm, the human brain is at a hopeless disadvantage. Such concepts as it is able to manufacture from the amazing material poured in on it, will take of necessity a symbolic form. In minds domin ated by the influence of a personality of unique spiritual greatness, and full of images of those Old Testament prophecies which seemed to be in course of actual fulfil ment before their eyes, all the conditions were present
1 Luke ix. 29 (Wey mouth's trans:). * Loc. cit.
3 Mark ix. 3.
4 Luke ix. 31. The quick intelligence of Luke perceives the importance of this detail, and incorporates it from some unknown source.
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for the production of a collective vision in which such images played a prominent part; bodying forth the ideas evoked in them by the spectacle of their Master's ecstacy. That Master, whose deep humanity had never failed them yet, whose strangest powers had always been evoked in response to the necessities of men, was now seen removed from them by a vast distance. Unconscious of their very existence, His whole being appeared to be absorbed in communion with another order, by them unseen. With whom was He talking in that radiant world, of which they saw upon His face the reflected glory? The mind that asked the question answered it. As the devout Catholic is sure that the saint in ecstacy talks with Christ and the Virgin, so these devout Jews are sure that their Master talks with the supreme law-giver and supreme seer of the race — " There appeared to them Elijah accompanied by Moses, and the two were conversing with Jesus." 1 We observe that there is no suggestion that Jesus Him self saw the patriarch or the prophet. His veritable experience remains unknown.
After the vision, the audition : the voice which explains the meaning of the picture that has been seen, and brings the whole experience to an end. This voice tells them nothing new: it simply affirms, in almost identical language, that fact of "divine sonship" which Jesus Himself had experienced at His baptism, and no doubt communicated to His friends. Given the fact of a collec tive consciousness, developed in its lowest form in all crowds, and often appearing upon higher intellectual and moral levels in mystical and religious societies,2 this episode should offer no difficulty to the psychologist; and those critics who have so hastily dismissed it as legend would do well to reconsider their position. It is a thoroughly characteristic event in the career of a mighty
1 Mark ix. 4 (Weymouth's trans.).
2 For instance, amongst the Friends of God. Cf. Rufus Jones, loc. cit. Curious modern examples in H. Bois, Le Rtveil au Pays de Galles.
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Personality of the mystical type; and of the disciples to whom He has communicated something of His over flowing spiritual consciousness.
In all records which have been preserved for us of the ecstacies of the great mystics, there appears the same note of amazement — the sense of an actual change in them, the consciousness of a profound separation in those who look on — which we notice in the story of the Transfiguration. In these too the alteration of personality which takes place when the life is withdrawn from sensual experience, and concentrated on the spiritual world — " at home with the Lord," in Paul's vivid phrase 1 — is perceived by the lookers-on as a transfiguring radiance, which often endures after the ecstacy is at an end. It is possible that this radiance may be related to the so-called aura, which the abnormally extended vision of many " psychics " perceives as a luminous cloud of greater or less brilliance surround ing the human body; which varies in extent and intensity with the vitality of the individual, and which they often report as shining with a white or golden glory about those who live an exceptionally holy life. This phenomenon, once dismissed as a patent absurdity by all " rational " persons, is now receiving the serious attention of physicians and psychologists; and it is well within the range of possi bilities that the next generation of scholars will find it no more " supernatural " than radio-activity or the wireless telegraph.2 It is one of the best attested of the abnormal phenomena connected with the mystic type : the lives of the saints providing us with examples of it which range from the great and luminous glory to a slight enhance ment of personality under the stress of spiritual joy.
Thus we are told that Francis of Assisi, when absorbed in prayer, " became changed almost into another man " :
1 2 Cor. v. 8.
2 Cf. Walter J. Kilner, The Human Atmosphere (London, 1911), where the examination and measurement of the aura by the use of chemical screens is fully described.
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and once at least was " beheld praying by night, his hands stretched out after the manner of a cross, his whole body uplifted from the earth and wrapt in a shining cloud as though the wondrous illumination of the body were a witness to the wondrous enlightenment of his mind." 1 Thus the sympathetic vision of her closest companions saw Teresa's personality, when she was writing her great mystical works, so changed and exalted that it seemed to them that her countenance shone with a supernatural light. "Ana de la Encarnacion, sometime prioress of Granada, affirmed in her evidence for Teresa's beatification that whilst she was writing the Moradas in her convent of Segovia, she (Sor Ana), stationed at the door of Teresa's cell in case she wanted anything, had seen her face illu mined by a glorious light, which gave forth a splendour like rays of gold, and lasted for an hour ; until twelve at night, at which time Teresa ceased to write and the resplendence faded away, leaving her in what, in com parison with it, seemed darkness." 2 Again, St. Catherine of Bologna, always pale on account of her chronic ill- health, was seen by her sisters in choir with a " shining, rosy countenance radiant like light " : 3 and we are told of St. Catherine of Genoa, that when she came forth from her hiding-place after ecstacy " her face was rosy as it might be a cherub's : and it seemed as if she might have said, Who shall separate me from the love of God ? " 4 In such reports we seem to see the germ of that experience which lies at the root of the story of the Transfiguration of Christ. As Moses came down with shining face from the mountain, so these turn towards the temporal order a countenance that is irradiated by the reflection of the Uncreated Light. In another respect the experience of the mystics justifies
1 St. Bonaventura, Vita, loc. cit.
* G. Cunninghame Graham, Santa Teresa, Vol. I. p. 203.
3 J. Grasset, Vita (A eta SS., T. 8, March pth).
4 Vita e dottrina di S. Caterina da Geneva, cap. 5.
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the veracity of the gospels. Mark, dependent according to tradition upon Peter's memory, tells us that when Jesus came down from the mountain there was a strange ness still about Him — " all the people, when they beheld Him, were greatly amazed." 1 Something of the glory of His rapture hung about Him yet : and expressed itself in a physical enhancement, an " otherness " so marked as to impress the imagination of the crowd. Such an altera tion is often recorded as the result of the ecstacies of the saints ; for " something great," as Teresa says, is then given to the soul,2 its condition of abnormal receptivity permits the inflow of new life. St. Francis, whom ecstatic prayer " changed almost into another man," found it necessary to " endeavour with all diligence to make him self like unto others " when he returned to active life.3 St. Catherine of Genoa came with the face of a cherub from her encounter with love. The pilgrim in the " Vision of Nine Rocks" returned from his ecstatic vision of God " inundated with life and joy "; even " his physical nature transfigured " by this short immersion in the One Reality.4 " God poureth into the soul," says Angela of Foligno of her own ecstacies, "an exceeding great sweetness, in a measure so abundant that it can ask nothing more — yea, verily, it would be a Paradise if this should endure, its joy being so great that it filleth the whole body . . . because of this change in my body therefore, I was not always able to conceal my state from my companion, or from the other persons with whom I consorted; because at times my countenance was all resplendent and rosy, and my eyes shone like candles." 5 That steady and organic process of transcendence, that re-making of spiritual man on new and higher levels of vitality, which is the mystic life, since it affects the spirit, affects almost of necessity the body which that spirit
1 Mark ix. 15. * Vida, cap. xx. § 29.
51 St. Bonaventura, loc. cit. 4 Jundt, Rulman Merswin, p. 27.
5 B. Angelae de Fulginio, Visionum et instructionum liber, cap. 52.
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animates. In the story of the Transfiguration — in form poetic, but in substance true — we have the record of the dramatic moment in which this fact was brought home to the companions of Jesus. It marks the completion of one phase in that " new movement " which He was bringing in — in psychological terms, the full attainment by His human consciousness of the powers of the Illuminative Way,
IV
THE WAY OF SORROW
THE Transfiguration, we have said, marks in Jesus the climax of the "illuminated" life ; the full flowering of the separated spiritual consciousness. It marks the achievement in Him, under conditions completely human, of a Transcendent Life, so unique and so clearly exhibited as to call forth Peter's great confession that here was no prophet but a new creation — Divine Humanity, the " son " of the Living God.
But the Mystic Way is no steady unhindered progress, no merely joyful and unchecked appropriation of more abundant life. Wherever it is developed in connection with human nature, the limits and oppositions of human nature will make themselves felt. Already the first sign of that great reaction, that bitter period of suffering and apparent failure which is experienced by every soul in its growth towards Reality, had shown itself within this pattern life. The declaration of that " Kingdom" not found " here " nor " there," but nesting in the very heart of existence, its triumphant establishment for the inner circle of initiates, the " Children of the Bridegroom," living upon high levels of joy and breathing the very atmosphere of God — this steady growth of power had nearly reached its term. There ensued a period of tran sition, of quick alternations between the exultant con sciousness of Reality and the depressed consciousness of coming failure; that swinging pendulum of the unstable, growing self, moving to new levels, which the Christian mystics often call " the Game of Love."
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It is certain that psycho-physical conditions have their