CHAPTER III

ST. PAUL AND THE MYSTIC WAY
" The great Fact of Existence is great to him. Fly as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this Reality. His mind is so made ; he is great by that first of all. Fearful and wonderful, real as Life, real as Death, is this Universe to him. Though all men should forget its truth and walk in a vain show, he cannot. At all moments, the Flame-image glares in on him. . . . Direct from the Inner Fact of things ; he lives, and has to live, in daily communion with that." (THOMAS CARLYLE : The Hero as Prophet.)
THE GROWTH OF THE NEW MAN
THE second stage of any great movement has often a significance as great as, if not greater than, the first. Then it is that we begin to know whether life's initial effort is destined to success, whether it is indeed upon its way to new creations and new levels; or whether this new move ment, this saltatory ascent that seemed so full of possi bilities, is only a passing freak, a variation which cannot be transmitted — another eddy of dust in the wind.
Had it been left to the original apostles to carry forward the Christian impulse of new life — to repeat the " for tunate variation" which flamed out in Jesus of Nazareth, and fix it — we can feel little doubt that this fresh creation would have twisted on its tracks, have wavered, sunk and died, when the stimulus of His great presence was with drawn and the generation which knew Him in the flesh had passed away. Our earnest of the fact that the life of Jesus was no sporadic freak, but a genuine phase in cosmic evolution, a part of the great movement of things —that here life's mightiest, most significant ascent was caught in progress — is the further fact that this did not happen : that a stranger, who " knew Him not after the flesh," yet takes up the forward push where He left it, picked out as it were by the wind of the Spirit to live and grow in the new way.
Paul, who was the first to declare that the essence of the Christian mystery was growth and transmutation, and that the only Christian life was that which followed the curve of the human life of Christ,1 was himself, so far as we know, the first to exhibit this organic process of
1 " Be imitators of me, in so far as I in turn am an imitator of Christ. . . . All of us, with unveiled faces, reflecting like bright mirrors the glory of
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development in its fulness; and grow "from glory to glory " to man's full stature along the path which Jesus had cut for the race. "It is the leading thought of the New Testament,' ' says Dr. Matheson, " and it is the specially prominent thought in the writings of St. Paul, that the life of the Christian Founder is repeated in the lives of His followers; that the stages of each Christian's experience are designed to be a reproduction of those stages by which the Son of Man passed from Bethlehem to Calvary. Paul has himself declared that the process of Christian development is a process whereby the follower of Christ is 'transformed into the same image from glory to glory.' No words can more adequately express his view of the nature of this new spiritual order. It is a transformation not only into the image of the master, but into that progressive form in which the image of the master unfolded itself. The Christian is to ascend by the steps of the same ladder on which the life of the Son of Man climbed to its goal; he is to proceed from 'glory to glory ' ... no man can read Paul's epistles without being impressed on every page with the predominance of this thought." *
It is no new thing to claim St. Paul as a mystic; or at least as an exponent, amongst other things, of what are called " mystical " ideas. The problem of the part which such ideas play in his message has often been attacked; in various ways, leading, as one might expect, to contradictory conclusions.2 The other and more fundamental problem,
the Lord, are being transformed into the same likeness . . . that in this mortal nature of ours it may also be clearly shown that Jesus lives . . . For those whom He has known beforehand, He has also predestined to bear the likeness of His son, that He might be the eldest in a vast family of brothers " (i Cor. xi. I ; 2 Cor. iii. 1 8 and iv. II ; Rom. viii. 29. Wey- mouth's trans.).
1 Matheson, Spiritual Development of St. Paul, p. 6.
2 For instance, by Inge in Christian Mysticism ; A. Sabatier in UApStre Paul ; Wernle in The Beginnings of Christianity, Vol. I ; Wienel in St. Paul ; }. M. Campbell in Paul the Mystic ; P. Gardner in The Religious
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however, of his relation to the mystic life, the Mystic Way — the history, that is to say, of his inward growth, his slow development of the transcendental consciousness — has been almost entirely neglected; and those who have come nearest to solving it, notably Matheson in The Spiritual Development of St. Paul, and Deissmann in St. Paul, have failed to see, or to set out, the many close and significant parallels which his life presents with the experiences of the Christian Founder and the Christian saints.
It might be thought that the confused and scanty records which we possess of the life of St. Paul were not sufficient to allow us to compare his psychological development with the standard diagram of man's spiritual growth. But by a comparison of the authentic epistles with the fragments of biography embedded in Acts, more can be made out than might at first be supposed.1 As a matter of fact, he is the supreme example of the Christian mystic : of a " change of mind " resulting in an enormous dower of vitality : of a career of impassioned activity, of " divine fecundity " second only to that of Jesus Himself. In him, the new life breaks out, shows itself in its dual aspect; the deep consciousness of Spiritual Reality which is characteristic of the contemplative nature, supporting a practical genius for concrete things. The Teresian prin ciple, that the object of the Spiritual Marriage is the incessant production of work, received in him its most
Experience of St. Paul, and — with considerable insight — by A. Deissmann in St. Paul : a Study in Social and Religious History.
1 Following the example of the majority of recent critics, I reckon Colossians and Ephesians as being in all probability genuine Pauline letters ; but do not make use of the epistles to Timothy and Titus, the authenticity of which is open to grave suspicion. Cf. Gardner, The Religious Experience of St. Paul ; W. Wrede, Paul ; and Deissmann, St. Paul. As to the use of Acts, this last authority says that St. Luke's representation is " indispensable in supplementing the letters of St. Paul ; it may be corrected occasionally in some details by the letters, but in many others it rests on good tradition " (Deissmann, op. cit., p. 24).
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striking illustration : he was indeed " to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man." Paul's great family of spiritual children, the train of churches ablaze with his spirit which he left in his wake, are alone enough to demonstrate that he lived upon high levels the mystic life.
The stages through which this great active moved to perfect harmony with the Life of God, are plainly marked in the story of his life. His conversion, the experience which lies behind the three rather dissimilar accounts given in Acts,1 was of course characteristically mystical. Those prudent scholars who would explain away the light, the voice, the blindness, the vivid con sciousness of a personal and crucial encounter with the spiritual world, as picturesque exaggerations due to Luke's " literary and unscientific" attitude of mind,2 will find little support for their view in the annals of religious psychology. When spiritual intuitions — more, spiritual imperatives — long submerged and working below the threshold, break their way into the field of consciousness and capture the centres of feeling and of will, the change effected has nothing in common with the mild intellectual acquiescence in new ideas, the sober and judicious weigh ing of evidence, which may be at the bottom of any less momentous " change of mind." That which happens is a veritable psychic storm, abrupt and ungovernable ; of greater or less fury, according to the strength of the nature in which it takes place. When that nature is destined to the career of a great mystic, the volitional element is certain to preponderate. It will oppose, perhaps till the last moment, in growing agony of mind — yet with a fierceness that has in it the germ of the heroic — the steady, remorse less pressure of the transcendental sense ; thus inflicting upon itself all the tortures of a hopeless resistance. " How hard it is for thee to kick against the goad! " Hence,
1 ix. 1-9, xxii. 6-1 1, xxvi. 1 2-1 8.
2 P. Gardner, The Religious Experience of St. Paul, p. 29.
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warded off as it were to the last, the change, when it comes, comes with a catastrophic violence : tearing the old world to pieces, smashing to fragments the old state of consciousness, instantly establishing the new. The sword of the spirit is about to cut its way through fresh levels of reality ; and, turning sharply in the new direction, crushes and wounds the hard tissues of selfhood which have grown closely around it, held it down to its business of serving the individual life.
All those incidents which Luke reports of Paul's con version — and we must look upon them as fragments remembered and set down, from Paul's own efforts to de scribe indescribable events — find many parallels in the his tory of the mystics. The violence and unexpectedness, the irrevocable certitude and prompt submission — " I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision"1 — the accompany ing sensation of intense light, the revelation of transcendent Personality conveyed under the forms of vision and voice as the " triumphing spiritual power " floods and conquers a strong and resistant consciousness : all this is a part of the usual machinery by which a change in the direction of life is brought home to the surface intelligence. Normal, too, is the direct connection between this abrupt change of mind and a profound and permanent change of life : that sense of the influx of novelty, which never left him, and which breaks out again and again in his works. Every great mystic who has passed through this crisis knows himself to be thus " a new creature," dead to his old universe, old interests, and old fears. For him, in this sudden moment of readjustment, all values are trans- valuated : " old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." 2
Thus St. Francis of Assisi, " smitten by unwonted
visitations " in the church of S. Damiano, " finds himself
another man" than the creature whom he had known as his
" self" before. For him too, as for St. Paul, the new and
1 Acts xxvi. 19. 2 2 Cor. v. 17.
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overwhelming apprehension of Reality is at once crystallised in vision and audition — the speaking crucifix — and in a direct command, an appeal to the active will.1 Thus St. Catherine of Genoa, when the moment of her spiritual ado lescence was come, " suddenly received in her heart the wound of the unmeasured love of God," with so clear an intuition of her own relation to the spiritual world, now laid bare to her lucid vision, that " she almost fell upon the ground." At this point " if she had possessed a thousand worlds, she would have thrown all of them away." 2 Rulman Merswin, the merchant of Strassburg, bred in orthodox piety like Saul of Tarsus himself, was as suddenly turned from it to the Mystic Way. " A brilliant light shone around him ; he heard in his ears a divine voice of adorable sweet ness; he felt as if he were lifted from the ground and carried several times round the garden." 3 Pascal, caught to his two hours' ecstatic vision or the Fire, obtains like Paul from this abrupt illumination an overwhelming revelation of personality — " not the God of philosophers and of scholars" — and a " certitude" which demands and receives the "total surrender" of his heart, intellect, and will.4
The reverberations, too, of such an upheaval are often felt through the whole psycho-physical organism : showing themselves in disharmonies of many different kinds. Thus Suso in his conversion " suffered so greatly that it seemed to him that none, even dying, could suffer so greatly in so short a time." 5 "A deep, rich age of growth," says Baron von Hiigel, "is then compressed into some minutes of poor clock- time " 6 — with the resultant wear and tear of a physical body adapted to another, slower rhythm. So it may well be that Paul was
1 Cf. Thomas of Celano, Legenda Secunda,V, and P. Sabatier's Life, cap. 2.
2 Vita e dottrina di S. Caterina da Genova, cap. 2.
3 Jundt, Rulman Merszoin, p. 19.
4 Penstes, fragments et lettres de Pascal, T. I. p. 269.
5 Leben, cap. 3.
• The Mystical Element of Religion, Vol. I. p. 107.
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struck with a physical blindness by the splendour of the Uncreated Light, and " was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink." 1
There is, then, at any rate the strongest of probabilities that his experience " when it pleased God to reveal His Son in me" did conform in its general outlines to the account which is given in Acts. Here there was not, as in the case of Jesus, an easy thoroughfare for the inflowing spirit of life. " As the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth even unto the west," a flash that rends asunder the spiritual sky, it came tearing apart the very substance of personality, breaking down the old adjustments, and cutting with violence the path of its discharge. How wide the difference between two natures which could dramatise the same experience, one as " Thou art My beloved Son," the other as " Saul, Saul! why persecutest thou Me? " Yet how close the identity between the two lines of growth which led one to the surrender of Gethsemane, and the other to " I live, yet not I! " Only this can explain the paradox of Paul's career : the fact that although he " never knew Jesus during His lifetime, nevertheless it was he who understood Him best." 2
St. Paul's proceedings after his conversion are no less characteristic of the peculiar mystic type. His first instinct was an instinct of retreat. " Immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood; neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me." The tran scendent fact which had torn his being asunder did not need to be supported by the reminiscences of those who had known Jesus in the flesh. " But I went into Arabia " 3 — alone into a desert country : a proceeding which at once reminds us of the retreat of Jesus into the wilder ness. This phase in Paul's career of course corresponds with that period of solitude and withdrawal from the world which nearly every great mystic has felt to be the essential
1 Acts ix. 9.
2 Wernle, The Beginnings of Christianity, Vol. I. p. 159. 8 Gal. i. 1 6, 17.
M 2
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sequel of that mighty upheaval in which their tran scendental faculties emerge. The soul then retreats into the " cell of self-knowledge," " cleansing its interior mirror/' says Richard of St. Victor, from the earth stains which distort its reflections of the Real : a slow and difficult process which cannot be undertaken in the bustle of the world of things. We have seen how generally the need of such a time of seclusion is felt l : as in St. Anthony's twenty years of self-imprisonment in the ruined fort, St. Catherine of Siena's three years of hermit-like solitude, which initiated her missionary career, Suso's sixteen years of monastic enclosure, the retreat of St. Ignatius at Manresa, St. Teresa's struggle to withdraw from the social intercourse she loved, the three years of lonely wandering and inward struggles which prepared the great missionary career of George Fox. Paul, alone in the Arabian desert, " in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often," 2 orientating his whole nature to the new universe disclosed to him, " when he had seen Christ lighten in that dawn," did but submit, like his brothers and sisters, to a necessary phase of all spiritual growth. It was from this long period of self- discipline and self-adjustment, from deep brooding on the revelation of Damascus, not from any apostolic state ment about the human career of Jesus, that the Pauline gospel emerged. It was the " good news" of a new kind of life experienced, not of a prophecy fulfilled. " Grace and faith and power . . . this I knew experimentally," says Fox. So Paul : " Neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ." 3
The whole preparatory experience of Fox, whose char acter provides so many Pauline parallels, may help us to understand something of this phase in Paul's life — the difficult changes which prepared him for the emergence of the " illuminated consciousness," the personal interior
1 Cf. supra, Cap. II. § II. 2 2 Cor. xi. 27. 8 Gal. i. 12 (R.V.).
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" showing " or revelation which became the central fact of his new career.
" I cannot," he says, " declare the great misery I was in, it was so great and heavy upon me, so neither can 1 set forth the mercies of God unto me in all my misery . . . when all my hope in them and in all men was gone so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do; then O! then I heard a voice which said: c There is one, even Christ Jesus that can speak to thy condition,' and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy . . . though I read the Scriptures that spake of Christ and of God, yet I knew Him riot but by revelation." l
Dating his conversion A.D. 33,2 and the retreat in Arabia and return to Damascus A.D. 34—35, St. Paul's first visit as a Christian to Jerusalem took place c. 36.3 There, pray ing in the Temple — a spot charged for his racial and religious consciousness with countless memories and sug gestions — he experienced his first ecstacy; a characteristic ally mystic combination of vision, audition, and trance, in which the ferment of his inner life, its paradoxical sense of unworthiness and greatness, swaying between pain- negation and joy-affirmation, found artistic expression. The agony of contrition for the past — " Lord, they know that I imprisoned and beat in every synagogue them that believed on Thee" — is balanced by prophetic knowledge of the future, an abrupt intuition of his amazing destiny — " I will send thee far hence unto the Gentiles." 4
This vision seems to correspond in time with the ecstacy described in 2 Cor. xii. 2, 4 ; in which Paul, caught up to the third heaven, "heard unspeakable words." Com parison with the lives of the mystics shows how frequently such ecstatic perception — such abrupt and
1 Fox's Journal, Vol. I. pp. 80, 83.
2 I adopt Ramsay's chronology, excepting his theory as to the early date of Galatians. Sabatier and others place the chief events about a year and a half later, but this does not affect my argument.
3 Gal. i. 1 8. 4 Acts xxii. 17-22.
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temporary emergence of the growing transcendental powers, lifting the consciousness to levels of Eternal Life — breaks out in the early part of the " Purgative Way." " Whilst I was wrestling and battling," says Jacob Boehme, " being aided by God, a wonderful light arose in my soul. It was a light entirely foreign to my unruly nature; but in it I recognised the true nature of God and man, and the relation existing between them, a thing which heretofore I had never understood, and for which I would never have sought." * " One day," says Fox, " when I had been walking solitarily abroad and was come home, I was taken up in the love of God so that I could not but admire the greatness of His love; and while I was in that condition, it was opened unto me by the Eternal light and power." 2 So too Henry Suso tells us that " in the first days after his conversion," being alone in the choir, his soul was rapt " in his body or out of his body," and he saw and heard ineffable things, by which his prayers and hopes were all fulfilled. He saw a " Shining Brightness, a manifestation of the sweetness of Eternal Life in the sensations of silence and rest." The ecstacy lasted nearly an hour; and "when he came to his senses, it seemed to him that he returned from another world." 3
There followed upon this first visit to Jerusalem a period of ten or twelve years, in which Paul seems to have been occupied in useful but inconspicuous work in the Christian cause : a long, quiet time of growth, which is often over looked by those who are dazzled by the dash and splendour of his missionary career. But the powers which marked that career were not yet developed. The interior instinct which became vocative in his ecstacy, and told him that he was " called to the Gentiles," had to conquer many opposi tions in his individual and national consciousness before it could become effective for life. During this time Paul's rank was that of an ordinary teacher ; not even that of a
1 Hartmann, Jacob Boelme, p. 50. 2 Fox's Journal, Vol. I. p. 85. 3 Suso, Lebtn, cap. 3.
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" prophet," much less an " apostle," a word to which great and definite meaning was attached by the early Church. He went to Antioch in 43 merely as the assistant of Barnabas,1 who had befriended him when his past record as an agent of persecution made him an object of suspicion to the Church. This long period, then, forms part of the "Purgative Way"; the transmuting of char acter in the interests of new life, the slow, hard growth and education of the transcendental consciousness. In St. Teresa's case, the equivalent period, to the point at which she was impelled to leave her convent and begin her independent career of reform, lasted thirty years ; and included, as with Paul, visionary and ecstatic phenomena.2
When we consider what Paul's position must have been within the Christian community — that small, strait body, not perhaps very bright-minded, living upon the " Spirit" which a regnant personality had left behind — we begin to realise how great an education in the characteristically mystic qualities of humility, charity, mortification, and detachment the long period of subordinate work at Antioch may have involved. Twelve years' submission to one's spiritual and intellectual inferiors, obeying orders upon which one could easily improve : twelve years of loyal service, subject all the while to a certain doubt and suspicion, yet inwardly conscious of huge latent powers, of a vocation divinely ordained — this is no small test of character. It transformed the arrogant and brilliant Pharisee into a person who had discovered that long- suffering and gentleness were amongst the primary fruits of the Spirit of God. Perhaps we may trace back to this period the origin of his recognition of the supremacy of the " love that seeketh not its own, suffereth long, and is kind," as transcending in importance even the burning faith and hope on which he lived.
The entrance of St. Paul on the "Way of Illumina tion" — the point, that is to say, at which his transcen-
1 Acts xi. 25, 26. * Cf. G. Cunninghame Graham. Santa Teresa.
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dental powers definitely captured the centres of conscious ness, and pain and struggle gave way before the triumphant inflow of a new vitality — seems to coincide with the begin ning of his first missionary journey, c. 47-48. More, this change, this access of power in him, appears to have been felt intuitively, either by the whole community — still living at those high levels of close sympathy and spiritual fervour on which such collective intuitions can be experienced — or by one of those prophetic spirits in whom its consciousness was summed up and expressed. Whether or no Paul had communicated to these his interior knowledge of vocation, now at any rate they realised that the hour for him had struck. " While they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, 4 Set apart for me now, at once, Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.5 " l
As his Master " went forth in the power of the Spirit," so now this " firstfruits of new life." We see by the language of Acts from this point onwards that, in its writer's opinion, the Paul thus separated for a great career was a very different personality from the obscure and industrious teacher Saul, the protege of Barnabas ; whose unfortunate past was doubtless remembered by his fellow- Christians, if generously overlooked. No sooner is the work begun than this change becomes obvious. Paul starts upon his travels as the subordinate — at best the equal — of Barnabas, " with John to their minister." But by the time that they reach Cyprus his transfigured per sonality has taken command. In primitive Christian lan guage, he is " filled with the Holy Ghost." The " spark of the soul," the growing spiritual man, now irradiates his whole character and inspires his speech.2
Soon psychic automatism manifests itself : not only in the " visions and revelations of the Lord" which from
1 Acts xiii. 2 (Weymouth's trans.). By " the Holy Spirit said " we may probably understand an ecstatic or prophetic utterance on the part of some member of the congregation. 2 Acts xiii. 9.
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this time onwards accompanied and directed his whole career,1 but in the inspired and ecstatic utterance in which he excelled all his fellow-Christians,2 in gifts of sugges tion s and healing.4 The " secondary personality of a superior type " is making ever more successful incursions into the field of consciousness. It fills Paul with a sense of fresh power, " opens doors " on new spheres of activity, overrules his most considered plans, and compels him to declare to others the new-found Reality in which he lives and moves and has his being. This sense of an irresistible vocation, of being a tool in the hands of " the Spirit," is stamped on all his work. " Though I preach the gospel," he says to the Corinthians, " I have nothing to glory of, for necessity is laid upon me : for woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel." 5 It is no common " creed " but a direct intimation of the Transcendent, a life, by which he is possessed; and whose secret he struggles to communicate. " By the grace of God I am what I am." . . . " I make known to you, brethren, as touching the gospel which was preached by me, that it is not after man. For neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ." *
The way that this inflow of novelty worked in the mind of Paul is peculiarly significant for the subsequent
1 2 Cor. xii. I. Cf. also Gal. ii. 2 ; Acts xvi. 9, xviii. 9.
2 " I thank my God I speak with tongues more than ye all " (i Cor. xiv. 18).
8 " But Saul, who also is called Paul, filled with the Holy Ghost, fastened his eyes on him, and said, O full of all guile and all villany . . . behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thce, and thou shalt be blind, not seeing the sun for a season. And immediately there fell on him a mist and a darkness ; and he went about seeking some to lead him by the hand " (Acts xiii. 9-11, R.V.).
4 As at Lystra, Philippi, Corinth and Troas (Acts xiv. 10, xvi. 18, xix. n, 12). 6 i Cor. ix. i6(R.V.).
0 i Cor. xv. 10 ; Gal. i. 12 (R.V.). So Fox, "These things I did not see by the help of man nor by the letter (though they are written in the letter) but I saw them by the light of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by His immediate Spirit and power " (Journal, Vol. I. p. 101).
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history of the Christian type. This new life that he had, that he felt and experienced, seemed to him so strange, so remote from life as he had known it, that he could not call it his own. " I live, yet not I " : something else, something distinct from mere human selfhood, has taken the reins. He is " possessed " and driven, his whole being enhanced, by somewhat not himself : " by the grace of God I am what I am." From a mingling of this experi ence with tradition, the two fused together within an intellect of strongly poetic and creative cast, he elaborated his marvellous dream of a mystical and exalted Christ, spiritual yet actual, personal yet omnipresent, of whose body all who shared His life were "Members"; of the believers' existence in Him and His existence in the trans muted soul l — the report of concrete fact under the beautiful veils of religious imagination. This presence, this supernal comradeship, was to him so actual that it made all investigation of the records or memories of the life of Jesus seem superfluous. As we do not interrogate the past of our friends in order to make sure that they exist in the present, so the immediacy of Paul's apprehension obscured for him the interest of historical facts.
More and more, as growth went on in him, he lived under the direction of that swiftly growing mystic con sciousness. The " Spirit" which dwelt in his body as a Presence in a shrine declared itself to be in touch with another plane of being, controlled all his actions, directed the very route by which he must travel, and spoke with an authoritative voice. " They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden of the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia . . . they assayed to go into Bithynia ; and the Spirit of Jesus suffered them not . . . Paul was constrained by the Word." 2 Even so has many a mystic placed on record the involuntary nature of his most successful activities. Teresa's foundations were 1 Gal. ii. 20. 2 Acts xvi. 6, 7, and xviii. 5 (R.V.).
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most often made, in defiance of common sense, in obedi ence to the mandates of an interior voice ; nor had she ever cause to regret her obedience to it.1 " Then was I moved of the Lord to go up unto them," says Fox of one of his least discreet adventures, " and when they had done I spake to them what the Lord commanded to me, and they were pretty quiet . . . they asked me why we came thither; I said, God moved us so to do." 2 In such cases as these we see again the action of the same directive consciousness which "opened doors" before Paul the traveller and the seer.
Yet deliberate mortification, incessant self-discipline, that " wise and noble, warm because ever love-impelled, asceticism," 3 which is the gymnastic of the adolescent soul, persists during the whole of this stage in Paul's development. As the athletes who run in the games, so this great runner runs on the highway of new life : with a clear consciousness of the need for perpetual self-control, of a latent antagonism between the " flesh " and the " spirit," the old levels of existence and the new. The secret, cease less work of growing, stretching, testing, training, is the background of his marvellous career. " Every com petitor in an athletic contest," he says, " practises abstemi ousness in all directions. They indeed do this for the sake of securing a perishable wreath; but we, for the sake of securing one that will not perish. That is how I run, not being in any doubt as to my goal. I am a boxer who does not inflict blows on the air, but I hit hard and straight at my own body and lead it ofF into slavery, lest possibly after I have been a herald to others I should myself be rejected." 4
Here we look deep into Paul's interior life : to find it governed, like the life of all great mystics during their period of development, by the sense of unresolved dis-
1 Cf. Thf Book of the Foundations. 2 Journal, Vol. I. p. 112.
3 Von Hugel, Eternal Life, p. 65.
4 i Cor. ix. 25-27 (Weymouth's trans.).
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harmonies, the alternate and conflicting consciousness of perfect spirit and imperfect man. " We have," he says— and a personal conviction, a personal experience, shines in the words — " this treasure in earthen vessels, that the exceeding greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves. We are pressed on every side, yet not straitened; perplexed yet not unto despair; pursued, yet not forsaken ; smitten down, yet not destroyed." 1
Once more we see the enormous difference in quality between the nature of Jesus and that of His first and greatest successor. With Him, the stress and effort which is felt behind all Paul's attainments are concentrated into the two swift and furious battles of the wilderness and of Gethsemane. These were enough to make straight the thoroughfare of His ascending life. The consciousness which won each battle and became dominant for the succeeding phase of growth, was untainted by that sense of unresolved discords or " sin " somewhere latent — the perpetual possibility of degeneration — which haunts Paul, and after him the greatest of the Christian mystics; some times impelling them to an exaggerated practice of mortification.
As with most illuminatives, however, so with Paul, it is the joyful awareness of enhanced life which prevails : the consciousness of new power and freedom, of adoption into the Kingdom of Real Things. " Am I not an apostle? am I not free?" he asks, writing to the Corinthians; and claims that on his visit to them (A.D. 53—54) " the signs of an apostle were wrought among you in all patience, in signs and wonders and mighty deeds." 2 Taken literally — and there is really no ground for refusing so to take it — this is a stupendous statement; especially when it is compared with the twelve years of subordinate, inconspicuous work in a provincial church which had pre ceded it. When we compare this state of things with the careers of other mystics, we find such a growth of the 1 2 Cor. iv. 7-9 (R.V.), 2 I Cor. ix. I and 2 Cor. xii. 12.
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automatic powers, such an enhancement of personality and genius for success, together with the claim of living by "revelation" — profound and life-giving ecstacies uphold ing the active career — and the experience of the " pressure of the Spirit," to be highly characteristic of the period of illumination. The self has attained to a state of equi librium, a condition of interior harmony with, and joyful response to, the constant sense of a Divine Presence which accompanies it, and floods the consciousness with a cer tainty of attainment, authority and power : in Eucken's phrase, a " triumphing spiritual life."
This enabling presence Paul of course identifies with the exalted Christ. He speaks of the "power of Christ " which can be " put on," and in many oblique phrases refers to the experience of a supernal companionship — " Christ in me " — as the source of his certitude and strength. So, too, his brothers and sisters in the Spirit : " When the soul doth feel the presence of God more deeply than is customary," says Angela of Foligno, " then doth it certify unto itself that He is within it. It doth feel it, I say, with an understanding so marvellous and so profound, and with such great love and divine fire, that it loseth all love for itself and for the body, and it speaketh and knoweth and understandeth those things of which it hath never heard from any mortal whatsoever. And it understandeth with great illumination, and with much difficulty doth hold its peace. . . . Thus doth the soul feel that God is mingled with it, and hath made companionship with it." l " Not to believe that He was present was not in my power," says Teresa of her own experience in this kind, " for it seemed to me that I felt His presence." 2 " The Lord's power brake forth; and I had great openings and prophecies," says Fox.3 The spiritual man is growing and stretching himself, finding ever new and amazing correspondences with Reality; correspondences which he
1 B. Angelas de Fulginio, Visionum et Instructionum Liber, cap. 52.
2 Vida, cap. xviii. 20. 8 Journal, VoL I. p. 90.
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expresses to himself by vision, voice, or overpowering intui tion, and which condition him in practical as in spiritual affairs : as when Brother Lawrence was helped by this inward presence in the business of buying wine for his con vent, a matter in which his native ignorance was complete.1 A more human mark of St. Paul's thoroughly mystical temperament can be referred to this period, though its first appearance may date from an earlier time; namely, the " thorn in the flesh " 2 which has taxed the ingenuity of so many commentators, and provided critics of the patho logical school with a sufficient explanation of all the abnormal elements in his experience. Epilepsy, malaria, and other diseases have been suggested as the true names of this malady.3 St. Paul, however, links it directly with his mystical powers; ulest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of revelation, there was given unto me a thorn in the flesh.'' Here, again, lives of later mystics justify Paul as against his biographers : showing that there is a definite type of ill health which dogs the possessors of great mystical genius, resulting from the enormous strain which they put upon an organism evolved for very different purposes than that of correspondence with Transcendent Reality. The psychic pain and insta bility which accompany growth to new levels have their reverberations in the bodily frame. The life which found
1 Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, p. 13.
2 Gal. iv. 13 ; 2 Cor. xii. 7.
3 Ramsay's argument in favour of malaria (cf. St. Paul, the Traveller and the Roman Citizen) has gained ground of recent years. There seems, however, more probability in Dr. Matheson's suggestion that the " thorn " on its physical side was a severe affection of the eyes, connected perhaps with the results of the temporary blindness which accompanied Paul's conversion (Acts ix. 8), when " new light shone for him out of the dark ness." Hence the description of the sympathy shown him by the Gala- tians, who, " if it had been possible, would have plucked out their own eyes and given them to him " ; hence the " large letters " in which he traces the few words of the epistle " written with his own hand " (Gal. iv. 14, 15, and vi. Ii). Cf. Matheson, The Spiritual Dei'elopment of St. Paul, pp. 54-64.
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its perfect thoroughfare in Jesus of Nazareth had to break its way into expression in lesser men. His radiant efficiency, and perfect co-ordination of soul and body, are seldom repeated in the inheritors of His life ; and the making of successive stages of that new creation is a matter of turmoil and stress. " Mystic ill health," then, is the natural result, and not the pathological cause, of the characteristic activities of the mystics. Baron von Hiigel, who has analysed it in connection with St. Catherine of Genoa, has clearly exhibited this; and successfully defended its victims from the common charge of hysteria.1 The lives of Suso, Rulman Merswin, Angela of Foligno, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa and others, provide well- known examples of this bodily rebellion against growing spiritual stress ; which mystical writers accept as an inevitable part of the "Way." "Believe me, children," says Tauler, " one who would know much about these high matters would often have to keep to his bed; for his bodily frame could not support it." 2 "In order that I might not feel myself exalted by the magnitude and the number of the revelations, visions, and conversings with God," says Angela of Foligno, obviously adapting Paul's own words to her not dissimilar case, " and that I might not be puffed up with the delight thereof, the great tempter was sent unto me, who did afflict me with many and diverse temptations; wherefore I was afflicted both in soul and body. The bodily torments were indeed number less, and were administered by many demons in divers ways; so that I scarce believe the suffering and infirmity of my body could be written down. There was not one of my members which was not grievously tormented, nor was I ever without pain, infirmity or weariness. Always I was weak, feeble and full of pain, so that I was com pelled to be almost continually lying down. All my limbs
1 The Mystical Element of Religion, Vol. II. pp. 14-47.
2 Sermon for the First Sunday after Easter (Winkworth, p. 302).
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were as though beaten, and with many troubles did the demons afflict me." l
Paul's " infirmities " and " bufferings of Satan," then, are amply accounted for as the price paid by this type of genius for the mental and physical wear and tear involved in its superhuman activities. For the ordinary animal, transcendence is a dangerous trade ; and the cutting of new paths must mean the infliction of new wounds. The mystical temperament, like that of most creative artists, is nervously unstable. Hypersensitiveness is a condition of its power of receiving the high rhythms of reality ; hence it swings easily between pain and pleasure, and also between supernormal energy and the psycho-physical exhaustion and ill-health which the free spending of such energy implies. " One law," says Chandler, " seems fairly clear; namely, that bodily suffering is a condition of the highest exaltation of the spirit. . . . The powers, mental and physical, of our organisation have come to be so highly specialised, have been, that is, so exclusively directed to the external visible world, that they are 'out of practice' with spiritual work, and suffer pain and dis comfort in attempting to perform it. The organism that can respond at all readily to spiritual forces will be an 4 abnormal' one; nerves and fibres which heredity has made slack, will throb with pain when they are, in these abnormal cases, brought into tune with heavenly melodies; and again the abnormality and tension and pain will increase as they are used in this unearthly music." 2
The usual dates given for St. Paul's visits to Galatia and Corinth — according to Ramsay A.D. 50, according to Sabatier and others A.D. 52 — suggest that the great visita tion of his malady occurred a few years after his full attainment of the Illuminative state ; a likely period for psycho-physical reaction of this kind to make itself felt.8
1 B. Angela de Fulginio, Visionum et Instructionum Liber, cap. 19.
2 A. Chandler, Faith and Experience, p. 106.
8 It is impossible, however, to come to any certain conclusion on this
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"Ye know," he says to the Galatians, " how through infirmity of the flesh I preached the Gospel unto you at the first." * Signs, however, of the fret of physical dis ability may be discerned in all the epistles of the first group, and the check which such weakness put upon his activities was one of the greatest of his trials. Yet his inner, deeper mind knew that physical suffering also had its place in the growth towards new liberty which was taking place in him; that the new vitality poured in on him was little hindered in its operations by the weakness and rebellion of the flesh. " I besought the Lord thrice that it might depart from me. And He said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee ; for My strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities that the power of Christ may rest upon me. . . . For when I am weak, then am I strong."2 Here we see Paul dramatising his correspondence with the divine; and presenting his deep intuitions to the surface consciousness, as nearly all great mystics have done, in the form of " interior words." 3
point. The researches and deductions of the best Pauline scholars have but led to contradictory results. Thus Ramsay, who considers the " thorn in the flesh " to be a severe and chronic form of malaria, thinks that the worst attack is connected with the visit to Galatia (St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen). Baron von Hiigel (The Mystical Element of Religion, Vol. II. p. 44) and Matheson (Spiritual Development of St. Paul, caps. 4, 6 and 7) detect the records of three distinct visitations of the malady, " I besought the Lord thrice that it might depart." But, whilst the first of these authorities recognises the intimate connection between the illness and Paul's visionary experiences, identifying the three attacks (a) with the vision of the third heaven, (£) with the Galatian mission, (c) with the period of creative activity in which the first group of epistles were composed, Dr. Matheson — who believes the " thorn " to have involved some recurrent affection of the eyes — places the three crises in which Paul besought that it might depart from him (a) in Arabia, (£) in Antioch, (c) in Galatia.
1 Gal. iv. 13. 2 2 Cor. xii. 8-10.
3 Cf. Suso, Leben ; St. Teresa, Vida ; Angela of Foligno, op. cit. ; St. John of the Cross, Subida del Monte Carmelo.
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" My strength is made perfect in weakness." Here is the first appearance in Christian history of that amazing fact which the lives of the saints demonstrate again and again; the fact that the enormous activities of the mystics are little hindered, their mental lucidity seldom impaired, by the physical suffering which dogs their steps. St. Paul, so frail in body, so much opposed by circumstance — stoned, beaten with rods, imprisoned, incessantly exposed to cold, fatigue and famine, the countless dangers and discomforts of a traveller in the antique world l — yet created, during years of hard and unresting labour in the teeth of every obstacle and danger, the nucleus of the Catholic Church. Not many of the most stalwart men of action have endured such bitter hardships, achieved such great results; and Paul is here but the first of an undying family, who have proved that no physical con ditions can successfully oppose those whose transfigured wills are " with God." St. Teresa, racked by ill-health, yet travelling through Spain under circumstances of dis comfort which few healthy women would willingly face, founding convents, dealing with property, directing the spiritual life of her many " families " of nuns ; St. Catherine of Siena and St. Catherine of Genoa, full of bodily sufferings, yet strong and unwearied in philan thropic, political and literary work; St. Francis, often sick yet never sad, who rejuvenates by the transmission of his abounding vitality the life of the mediaeval Church ; St. Ignatius, that little lame man, yet most formidable soldier of Christ — all these and many others " strong in their weakness," might well "glory in their infirmities," mere signs of the stress endured by that earthen vessel in which they had received the treasure of more abundant life.
We have now come to the period in Paul's career in
1 " In journeyings often, in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils from my countrymen, in perils from the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea " (2 Cor. xi. 26, R.V.).
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which the earliest of his extant letters, ist and 2nd Thes- salonians, were written. From this point onwards, then, his surviving correspondence takes its place with — or rather above — our scanty knowledge of his outward acts, as evidence of his inward development. These letters, by reason of their very characteristics, their technical peculiarities, are strong and precious evidence of the mystical quality of their writer's mind. "Each," says Deissmann most justly, " is a portrait of St. Paul, and therein lies the unique value of St. Paul's letters as materials for an historical account of their writer. There is probably not a single Christian of any importance in later times from whom we have received such absolutely honest materials to enable us to realise what his inner life was like." l Thanks to the sudden transitions of thought which these epistles exhibit, the wide field over which they play, they have always baffled — always will baffle — those who attempt to extract from them an orderly and watertight system of dogmatic " truth." But approached from the standpoint of a student of mystical literature, able to recognise the presence of a mind " drunk with intellectual vision " and seeking to express itself under the crude symbols of speech, they are not hard to under stand. These letters are the impassioned self-revelations of a great and growing spirit, intensely conscious on the one hand of his communion with Transcendent Reality, on the other of the duty laid upon him to infect others with his vision if he can. Hence the constant rapid alternation of the practical and the poetic ; the superb lyrical outbursts, the detailed instructions in church dis cipline and morality. There is in Paul's rhythmic utter ances that strongly marked automatic character, as of an inspiration surging up from the deeps and overpowering the surface mind, which we find, for instance, in the most exalted portions of the Canticle of St. John of the Cross, or of the Divine Dialogue of St. Catherine of
1 A. Deissmann, St. Paul, p. 23. N a
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Siena : a book of which many parts are said to have been dictated in the ecstatic state, and which reproduces his balanced combination of stern practical teaching and exalted vision.1
There is a marked development in the Pauline epistles, which also throws light upon their writer's growth in the new life. The series of letters from ist Thessalonians to Philippians — from A.D. 50 to A.D. 60 — clearly reflects the changes taking place in the mind which composed them : its steady process of transcendence, its movement on the Mystic Way. This is shown, curiously enough, by the analysis of Lightfoot ; 2 an analysis made without any reference to a possible connection between St. Paul and the doctrines of mysticism. ist and 2nd Thes salonians, he says, are dominated by the idea of " Christ the Judge " — of penance; the next group in time, ist and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans, by that of Christ as the Saviour-God; the last group — Philip pians, Philemon, and the disputed but probably authentic pair, Ephesians and Colossians — by the concept of Christ as the Indwelling Word. Thus the first group represents the kind of consciousness peculiar to the Purgative Way, the sense of imperfection " judged " in the light of newly perceived Perfection. The next is governed by that growing dependence on the power and companionship of Divine Personality, which is felt during Illumination; " Not I, but the grace of God which was with me ; " 3
1 I Thess. v. 5-10; Rom. viii. 31-39; Eph. ii. 4-10 and vi. 10-17 are good examples of Paul's lyrical outbursts. So marked is their rhythmic structure that Arthur Way (The Letters of St. Paul, 3rd edition, pp. xii- xiv) regards these and many other similar passages as true hymns, which may have been in use in the early Church. The frequent and spontaneous appearance, however, of such abrupt poetic passages in the writings of the great mystics makes this hypothesis entirely unnecessary. Compare the alternate prose and poetry in Mechthild of Magdeburg, Das ftiessende Licht der Gottkeit, and the mingling of lyrics with the sternest ascetic teaching in the writings of St. John of the Cross.
2 Biblical Essays, p. 232. 3 I Cor. xv. 10.
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the last, by the state of " divine union " between the Logos and the soul, the condition of equilibrium and fruition, which is the goal of the process of transcendence. A comparison of dates shows that this " doctrinal " result of experience crystallizes into literary form — as we might expect — a little later than it appears in the life.
The epistles to the Galatians and the Corinthians, though certainly their general attitude reflects experience obtained during the Illuminative Way, contain statements which suggest that at the time of their composition, c. 55—57, the inevitable break-up of this state of con sciousness was already in progress. With Paul, as with other great mystics, psychic disturbances, the emergence of old, unresolved disharmonies, moods of deep depres sion, a sense of conflict between two natures in him, "warring in his members," accompanied this movement towards new levels of consciousness; this " fresh start" upon the way. Reading side by side the story given in Acts, and the self -revealing touches in his writings, we gather that he lived for several years — perhaps from c. 52, the period of his visit to Athens, to c. 57, a little before the epistle to the Romans was written — in a state of psychic disequilibrium, swaying between a growing ecstatic consciousness of supernal freedom, a veritable if intermittent " union " with the exalted spirit of Christ, and the misery and depression which are characteristic of the " Dark Night of the Soul." l It is probable that the active and volitional cast of his mind saved him from some at least of the worst destitutions of that state : from the dull impotence felt by more passive natures, and from the acute emotional despair of such born romantics as Suso and Teresa. Yet that he suffered, and suffered intensely, in the " Upper School of Perfect Self-abandon-
1 Cf. Acts xviii. 5-11, where his rejection by the Jews is immediately counterbalanced by a mystical experience, renewing under the forms of voice and vision his consciousness of the inspiring and supporting presence of God.
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ment," there can be little doubt. As Jesus Himself paid for His ascent to the Mount of Transfiguration by cruel reactions, so Paul in his turn endured weariness, humilia tion, and despair. As with so many of the mystics,1 inner and outer events combined to oppress him : the turmoil of his interior life, the natural result of spiritual fatigue, lowering his power of dealing with circumstance. " When we were come into Macedonia, our flesh had no relief, but we were afflicted on every side : without were fightings, within were fears."2 The loss of friends, the bitter dis appointment of his failure to win intellectual Athens for Christ, poverty, persecution, ill-health, the sharp and growing contrast between his sublime vision of the Per fect and its partial, wavering realisation in the Church ; all this went step by step with his deep inward miseries and struggles. Paul's nature had gone back into the melt ing-pot, to be re-born on higher levels ; re-grouped about those centres of Love and Humility which dominate the transfigured mystical consciousness in its last and highest stage.
Through the shifting moods, the poetic rhapsodies of the early epistles we catch a glimpse now and then of the struggle that was in progress in this most storm-tossed and most powerful of the saints : that recrudescence of the disharmonies and " sinful " tendencies against which the mortifications of the Purgative Way are directed, and which so often re-emerge during these periods of dis equilibrium, and torment even the greatest of mystics : 3 the weary hopelessness and humiliations endured by a highly strung nature, whose destiny seems to overpass its powers. " In distress and affliction," he wrote about
1 For instance, Suso (Leben, cap. 22), Madame Guyon (Fie, Pt. I. cap. 20-23), St. Teresa (Vida, cap. 30).
2 2 Cor. vii. 5 (R.V.).
3 Cf. E. Gardner, St. Catherine of Siena, p. 20; Angela of Foligno, op.cit., cap. 19; St. Teresa, Fida, cap. 30; Madame Guyon, Fie, Pt. I. cap. 25.
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A.D. 52 to the Thessalonians.1 He went to the Corinthians at that same period " in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. " 2 Five years later his letters to those Corinthians still betray affliction and " anguish of heart" ;s signs, too, that he was bitterly conscious of the contempt with which his intellectual equals regarded his new faith. " We are made as the filth of the world, the off- scouring of all things; " 4 hardest of trials for a proud and sensitive personality. Yet, though " we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened," 5 the conviction of a triumph ing spiritual force working in him, an exultant life greater than that of other men, persists through his bitterest pain. "Dying, and behold! we live; chastened, and not killed." 6 "I have been crucified with Christ " — a phrase which still implied intense humiliation as well as agony— " yet I live, yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me." 7 "Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body." 8 These, and many other equivalent phrases imply clear identification on Paul's part of his own neces sary sufferings with the passion endured by Jesus. So, too, we can trace a convinced consciousness of that slow transmutation of personality, that process of fresh creation which the mystics call " New Birth." " If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature."9
The epistle to the Romans appears to be the literary expression of the last phase in Paul's long struggle for transcendence. In the seventh and eighth chapters of that most wonderful of letters, we seem to see the travail of his interior life coming to its term, the new state towards which his growth was directed established at last. The helpless consciousness of disharmony, the terrible conviction of sin and impotence, here rises to its height; the upward, outward push of the growing spirit warring
1 i Thess. iii. 7 (R.V.). 8 I Cor. ii. 3 (R.V.). » 2 Cor. ii. 4 (R.V.). 4 i Cor. iv. 13 (R.V.), & 2 Cor. v. 4 (R.V.). « 2 Cor. vi. 9 (R.V.). 7 Gal. ii. 20 (R.V.), « 2 Cor. iv. 10 (R.V.). » 2 Cor. v. 17 (R.V.).
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with the old established habits of life, which " ever tends to turn on its tracks and lag behind." " I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do I know not : for not what I would, that do I practise; but what I hate, that I do. . . . For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing : for to will is present with me, but to do that which is good is not. For the good which I would I do not : but the evil which I would not, that I practise. . . . For I delight in the law of God after the inward
O
man : but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?"1
In all the annals of religious psychology we shall find no more vivid presentation than this of the stress and misery which accompanies the last purification of person ality : when " the sensual part is purified in aridities, the faculties in emptiness of their powers, and the spirit in thick darkness." 2 We stand here with St. Paul at the very frontier of new life, and with the opening of the next section of his letter, that frontier is passed.
u The law of the Spirit of Life . . . made me free."3 The terrible effort to live according to something seen has given way before the advent of something at last possessed. " The billow of largesse hath appeared, the thunder of the sea hath arrived." A new dower of vitality — the Spirit of Life which was brought into time by Jesus — floods his nature, and suddenly transmutes it to the condition of the " children of God," the citizens of the Kingdom of Reality: the Unitive Life. Before this inflow of joy, certainty and power, the miseries and efforts of the past fade into the background ; and are
1 Rom. vii. 14, 15, 18, 19, 22-24 (R-V.).
2 St. John of the Cross, Nocbe Escura del Alma, Lib. II. cap. 6. Cf. Poulain, Graces d'Oraison, pp. 433 et seq.
3 Rom. viii. 2.
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seen in their true light as a part of that process of growth in the likeness of Divine Humanity which is the privilege of those who are "joint heirs with Christ." "If so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with him."1
In this moment of supreme attainment, Paul seems for the first time to penetrate to the very heart of the secret of Jesus, the "Mystery of the Kingdom"; and applies it, with the sublime optimism of his Master, to the col lective consciousness of the Christian Church. " Ye have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God : and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ."2
"The glorious liberty of the children of God! "8 he exclaims in a very passion of joy, intoxicated as it seems by his new and wondrous consciousness of freedom — the freedom of a great swimmer "amidst the wild billows of, the Sea Divine." " If God is for us, who is against us? ... I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God."4 The sudden wild happiness of the spirit caught up to supreme communion with the Absolute has seldom found finer expression than this : here another personality seems to speak from the heart-broken prisoner who had cried but a page or two earlier, " Who shall deliver me from the body of this death ? "
About three or four years separate the composition of Romans — the characteristic epistle of transition — from that of the last group : Philemon, Colossians, Ephesians, and Philippians. This period, of course, includes Paul's arrest at Jerusalem, his long imprisonment at Caesarea and voyage to Rome.5 During that interval of outward
1 Rom. viii. 17 (R.V.). 2 Rom. viii. 15-17 (R.V.). 3 Rom. viii. 21. 4 Rom. viii. 31, 38-39. 5 Acts xxiii.-xxviii.
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inactivity, with its opportunity for those long contem plations on which the growing spirit of the mystic feeds, his interior life seems to have come to perfect maturity. Whereas Corinthians and Galatians provide us with many evidences of the state of mental disequilibrium which mystical writers know by that curious term, the " Game of Love " — the alternate onset and withdrawal of the transcendental consciousness — and we can detect behind the argument of Romans the struggle of a strong nature against heavy gloom, its abrupt emergence into light; we see in Ephesians and Philippians the reflection of a spirit which has come to live naturally and permanently in that state to which the writer of Galatians, Corinthians and Romans ascended in ecstatic moments; and of which he could only speak in terms of wonder and awe.
Philippians, says Lightfoot, is the mystical and contem plative epistle; which is exactly what we might expect it to be, if our diagram of its author's spiritual growth be correct. Both in subject and in temper, this and the con temporary letters to the Colossians and Ephesians1 are in close and peculiar harmony with the attitude of all the great unitive mystics : the mighty and creative person alities in whom life's " new direction " has come to its own, and whose correspondence with Transcendent Reality is not that of " servants," but of " sons." Not something believed, but something veritably and securely possessed, is the governing idea of these letters : a trans muting power, a supernal life, established in Paul's spirit after long grief and pain, and seen by him as the central secret of creation, " the fulness of Him that filleth all in all."2 This new consciousness of his he continues to translate, on the one hand as an inflow of fresh life from
1 The attribution of these two epistles to St. Paul has been much disputed, but the tendency of recent criticism is to restore them to him. Cf. P. Gardner, Tke Religious Experience of St. Paul, pp. 13-15. For those who accept the psychological theory here advocated, the developed mystic ism of these writings will be strong evidence of their Pauline authorship.
2 Eph. i. 23.
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without — the presence of an indwelling and energising Divine Spirit, " something which is not himself " — on the other, as a growth from within.
The Spirit is identified, as always in Paul's mind, with the personal and glorified Christ; like his follower, the Fourth Evangelist, he makes no distinction between those two manifestations of God which theology afterwards described as " Son " and " Spirit.'5 The true mystery, he says, is " Christ in you ... it is God which worketh in you. ... I labour also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily . . . for me to live is Christ." l All mystics in the unitive state make equivalent declarations. They feel themselves to be God- possessed; are agents of the divine activity. Thus Gerlac Petersen : " Thou art in me, and I in Thee, glued together as one and the selfsame thing, which shall never be lost nor broken," 2 and St. Catherine of Genoa : " My me is God, nor do I know my selfhood save in Him." 3 These are plainly reports of that same condition of conscious ness, often called by the dangerous name of " deification," to which Paul was now come ; the transmuted self's awareness that it participates in, and is upheld by, the great life of the All. On the other hand, Paul never loses hold of his central idea of growth and change, as the secret of all true and healthy life. The goal he sets before his converts is the attainment of perfected humanity, " a full-grown man . . . the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ . . . grow up in all things into Him . . . and put on the new man." 4
There are other peculiarities of these epistles which indicate the high levels of spirituality on which their author moved, the exultant life which now possessed him. Humility, the " full true sister of truth " and paradoxical mark of supreme mystical attainment, dominates their
1 Col. i. 27 ; Phil. ii. 13 ; Col. i. 29 ; Phil. i. 21 (R.V.).
2 The Fiery Soliloquy with God, cap. 15.
8 Vita e Dottrina, cap. 14. 4 Eph. iv. 13, 15, 24 (R.V.).
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intellectual attitude : for his smallness in the Kingdom of Real Things has now obscured for Paul all sense of his greatness and unique vocation in the world of men. His deep intuitive vision of perfection discloses to him the unspeakable heights of wisdom and love : and it is against those everlasting hills that the child of the Infinite must measure himself. The note of assurance and authority so marked in 2 Cor. xi. and xii. and other passages of the earlier letters is gone. Instead, " Brethren, I count not myself yet to have apprehended; but one thing I do ... I press on toward the goal, unto the prize of the upward-calling of God," " unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given." * Further, written from captivity in a time of much anxiety, not the austere acceptance of suffering, but simple joy, is their emotional note. " I now rejoice in my sufferings for you . . . making request with joy. . . . Christ is preached and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice . . . that your rejoicing may be more abundant. ... I joy, and rejoice with you all ; for the same cause do ye joy, and rejoice with me." Moreover, this rejoicing, this gladness of heart, is dependent on the mystic fact of the mergence of the human consciousness with the Divine Nature ; it is the feeling-state proper to one dwelling " in God." " Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord . . . rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, Rejoice." 2
In every mystic who has attained that perfect harmony with the supernal order, that high state of transcendence called " union with God," we find this accent of eager gaiety overpowering the difficulties, sufferings and responsibilities of his active life; this joy, "proper to the children of the Bridegroom," which seems to have been shed by Jesus on that little company of adepts who had learned the secret of the Kingdom of Heaven. The glad heart exults in its own surrender : the little child of the
1 Phil. iii. 13, 14; Eph. iii. 8 (R.V.).
2 Col. i. 24; Phil. i. 4, 1 8, 26; ii. 17; iii. I ; iv. 4.
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Infinite laughs as it runs to its father's arms. " I must rejoice without ceasing," said Ruysbroeck, " although the world shudder at my joy." * St. Catherine of Siena, pros-
I trate in illness, was " full of laughter in the Lord." 2 The
true lover, says Richard Rolle of the soul which has attained its full stature, " Joy of its Maker endlessly doth
i use." 3 " Good and gamesome play, as father doth with
child," says the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, is the reward of the true contemplative.4 Even the self- tormenting soul of Pascal was flooded with simplest joy by his short and vivid vision of Reality : " Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie! "
So St. Paul's injunction to his converts in Colossians and Ephesians, that they should use " psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord "5 finds many a parallel in the lives of the mystics; for whom music is ever a spiritual thing, an apt symbol of the harmonies which fill the universe. " As the work of the husbandman is the ploughshare : and the work of the steersman is the guidance of the ship," says the early Christian poet, " so also my work is the psalm of the Lord. . . . For my love is the Lord, and therefore will I sing unto him."6 The servants of the Lord are His minstrels, said Francis of Assisi, and the ideal Franciscan is the lark. The " sweet melody of spirit" often possessed him and he urged the duty of song on all the world.7 Rose of Lima sang duets with the birds,8 Teresa sang of her love as she swept the convent corridors,9 Rolle found mystic truth a " sweet ghostly song " and declared that the souls of the perfect no longer pray but sing.10 Nor
f1 Canticle I. 2 E. Gardner, St. Catherine of Siena, p. 48.
3 The Fire of Love, Bk. II. cap. 7. 4 The Cloud of Unknowing, cap. 47. 5 Eph. v. 19 ; Col. iii. 16.
6 The Odes and Psalms of Solomon, Ode xvi.
7 Speculum, cap. 113 and 100.
8 De Bussierre, Le Perou et Ste. Rose de Lime, p. 415.
9 G. Cunninghame Graham, Santa Teresa, Vol. I. p. 304.
10 The Fire of Love, Book I. cap. 23.
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is this concept of divine melody, and the soul's necessary participation in it, confined to Christian mysticism. It seems to be one of the primal forms assumed by spirit's tendency to Spirit, the self's passion for its Source, Home, and Love; and is found as well in the East as in the West, in the modern as in the ancient world.
" When thou commandest me to sing it seems that my heart would
break with pride; and I look to thy face and tears come to
my eyes. All that is harsh and dissonant in my life melts into one sweet harmony
— and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird on its flight
across the sea. I know thou takest pleasure in my singing. I know that only as a
singer I come before thy presence. I touch by the edge of the far-spreading wing of my song thy feet which
I could never aspire to reach. Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself, I call thee friend who art
my lord." 1
We have seen that the great theopathetic mystics, the real inheritors of the " new direction of life," have always been concerned not only with " highness of love in con templation," but with hard and active work. They swing between Time and Eternity : between fruition of God and charity toward men. " These two lives," says the Cloud of Unknowing, " be so coupled together that, although they be divers in some part, yet neither of them may be had fully without some part of the other ... so that a man may not be fully active, but if he be in part contem plative; nor yet fully contemplative, as it may be here, but if he be in part active."2 This is the pure doctrine of mysticism; and here, of course, St. Paul is emphatically true to type. The splendid mystic balance of ecstacy and practical ability, of outgoings in charity toward God and man, " the ascent and descent of the ladder of love " is early manifested in him. Inspiring spirit and industrious will, he thinks, are not opposite, but complementary ex-
1 Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanfali, 2. * The Cloud of Unknowing, cap. 8.
ST. PAUL AND THE MYSTIC WAY 191
pressions of life ; and man's will and work are themselves a part of the divine energy. " I laboured more abund antly than they all," he says, " yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me."1 Prayerful communion and practical work — to be "at home in the body," or " at home with the Lord " — is equally a part of the business of man.2 " Whether we be beside ourselves it is to God, or whether we be of sober mind, it is unto you." 3
Despite his great contemplative gifts, he was no en- courager of dreamy " mysticality " : his passion for all- round efficiency sometimes made demands which faulty human nature can hardly meet. " Work out your own salvation; " " Whatsoever ye do, work heartily as unto the Lord, and not unto men." 4 Philippians and Philemon reinforce our knowledge of his Teresian grasp of detail, his interest in ordinary affairs. Here we see the busy missionary who had not urun and laboured in vain" side by side with the peaceful mystic, to whom " to live is Christ, and to die is gain." 5 Paul has put on that "dual character of action and fruition," of joy and work, which is the peculiar mark of " the fulness of the stature " of Jesus; and is found again in every man who has attained " the supreme summit of the inner life." He possesses, too, its paradoxical and Christ-like combination of exalta tion and humility — " the mind which was also in Christ Jesus."6 " I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me : " but " Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect. ... I count not myself yet to have apprehended."7
This is the psychological state exhibited in St. Paul's last writings; " being such an one as Paul the aged," 8 yet the ever young. An ambassador in bonds from Life to
1 i Cor. xv. 10 (R.V.). Cf. Phil. ii. 13, " it is God which worketh in you both to will and to work."
2 2 Cor. v. 6-8. 3 2 Cor. v. 13. 4 Phil. ii. 12 ; Col. iii. 23 (R.V.). 5 Phil. ii. 16 and i. 21. 6 Phil. ii. 5.
7 Phil. iv. 13 and iii. 12, 13 (R.V.). 8 Philemon 9.
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life, "reflecting as in a glass the glory of the Lord," he has indeed been " transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even from the Lord, the Spirit," l yet according to the primal, sacred laws of growth. It is paralleled in the self-revelations of such mystics of genius as St. Francis, St. Ignatius, St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Teresa, George Fox. Those who attain to it have developed, not merely their receptive, but their creative powers; are directly responsible for the emergence of new life, new out-births of Reality, into the world. It is the condition of " divine fecundity " which Richard of St. Victor describes as the consummation of the mystic life : the perfect state, to which the Christian mystic tends. " My little children of whom I travail in birth . . . my joy and crown," said St. Paul of those whom he had endowed with his own overpowering spiritual vitality. " My son, whom I have begotten in my bonds," of the runaway slave Onesimus, converted in prison, for whom he intercedes.2 These " children," this trail of Christian Churches marking the path of one poor missionary, whose " bodily presence was weak and his speech of no account " 3 — who started his career under a cloud, and was dogged by ill-health — are the best of all evidence that Paul had indeed inherited the " mystery " of that king dom which is not in "word," but in " power," 4 was a thoroughfare through which its life was transmitted, and followed, on high levels, the organic process of transcend ence which is called the " Mystic Way."
1 2 Cor. iii. 1 8. 2 Gal. iv. 19; Phil. iv. I ; Philemon 10.
3 2 Cor. x. 10 (R.V.). 4 I Cor. iv. 20.
II
THE LAWS OF THE NEW LIFE
IT is now clear that for Paul, as for Jesus, the good news of the mystery of the "Kingdom" consists, not in a body of doctrines, a closed system of beliefs, but in a new and amazing series of profound experiences; in the " lift-up" of his nature, and therefore potentially of all human nature, to new levels of life. This lift-up in the wake of Jesus, from the psychic to the spiritual, is made possible for the Self by a change in its lire, the setting in hand of a new kind of organic growth. It is a practical mysticism, the turning of the vital human powers of atten tion, reception, and response, in the direction of Reality; and can only be understood or transmitted by those who are living it, the members of the " New Race." Hence, the living, growing creature Paul, as he reveals himself to us " in process of being saved," is a more valuable subject of investigation than the intellectual formulae under which he tried and often failed to communicate his intuitions of the independent spiritual world.
Yet, as in the case of Jesus, so in that of Paul, a con sideration of his most characteristic teachings does but exhibit the more clearly the fundamentally mystical quality of that consciousness in which they arose. Only, of course, by the study of such a consciousness, and of the laws which govern its activity, can we hope to under stand his so-called " doctrines " ; or resolve the apparent inconsistencies of a thought which derives its worst obscurities from his attempts to pour the new wine of an intense personal revelation into the old bottles of o 193
194 THE MYSTIC WAY
u Rabbinic," " apocalyptic " or " Hellenistic " ideas. Paul's theology is an artistic and intellectual embodiment —the reduction to terms which try to be logical and always succeed in being suggestive — of the stream of new life by which he was possessed. It is a poem in which he celebrates the adventures of his soul. His analytic yet poetic mind plays perpetually over an experience and a life which he understands from within, because he is himself in process of living it : understands so well that he often forgets how hard it will be for his readers to understand it at all. Many a phrase which has provided a handle or an obstacle for critics, is but the hopeless attempt of the mystic to communicate by means of artistic symbols his actual and supernal experience to unmystical men. Perpetually we notice that even his most dogmatic arguments are simply the reflection of his own psycho logical adventures : that he always proceeds upon the assumption that the process " wrought" in him will be wrought in all other minds that are " chosen," and that the new world on which he looks is indeed the one and only Kingdom of Reality.
What, then, was Paul's universe? It was a universe soaked through and through by the Presence of God : that transcendent-immanent Reality, " above all, and through all, and in you all " as fontal " Father," energis ing " Son," indwelling " Spirit," in whom every mystic, Christian or non-Christian, is sharply aware that " we live and move and have our being." l To his extended con sciousness, as first to that of Jesus, this Reality was more actual than anything else — " God is all in all." 2 For him, as long after for Julian of Norwich — often so Pauline in her thought — " as the body is clad in the cloth and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God, and enclosed." s
1 Eph. iv. 6 ; Acts xvii. 28. 2 I Cor. xv. 28.
8 Revelations of Divine Love, cap. 6.
ST. PAUL AND THE MYSTIC WAY 195
The one great Pauline principle, says Ramsay, is this — " only the Divine is real, all else is error." L Hence, man only attains reality in so far as the rhythm of his being accords with the great rhythm of God; in so far as he is " in the Lord " ; and in this attainment his " salvation " consists. The perpetually recurring oppositions between "psychic" and "spiritual" existence, "flesh" and "spirit," the "old man" and the "new," are Paul's ways of expressing the fundamental difference between these two levels of life, two qualities of consciousness.2
This doctrine is simply the " Mystery of the Kingdom " as declared by Jesus, seen through another temperament and re-stated in a form which could be assimilated by the Hellenistic mind. It is the primal truth upon which the whole of Christian mysticism is built. " Do not," says Paul to his converts, " walk as the Gentiles in the vanity of their mind, alienated from the life of God." 3 Partici pation in that life is your one business, and is achieved by those for whom the Eternal Order is the central fact of life ; who " walk not after the flesh but after the spirit." 4 Thus, when Patmore wrote, " God is the only Reality, and we are real only as far as we are in His order and He is in us," 5 he condensed the frame work of Paul's theology — or rather biology — into one vivid phrase.
The conscious attainment of this reality, this intensified and completed life — this " dynamic growth in grace "— is for Paul the essence of Christianity. It is to be done individually, by living and growing along the lines of mystical development exhibited by Jesus — the " putting on of the New Man " and slow attainment of full man hood, the " stature of Christ " — and collectively, by the Church, in which Paul, with the passionate optimism of
1 The Cities of St. Paul, p. 12.
2 Gal. v. 16 and vi. 8 ; I Cor. ii. 14, 15 and rv. 46-49; Rom. viii. 4-9.
3 Eph. iv. 1 8. 4 Rom. viii. 4.
5 The Rod, the Root and the Flower, " Magna Moralia," XXII.
O 2
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those who see " all creatures in God and God in all creatures," finds as it were the bodying forth of that new ardent spirit of life which emerged in the historic Christ; a vast new creation of many members, serving, and con trolled by, that head. This mystic church built up of mystic souls, is the crown of creation; the expression in time and space of that new spiritual world which man is bringing into existence. It is the " new thing " which apocalyptic writers saw in vision ; the answer to the riddle of life.
For Paul, who has himself a strong tendency to apoca lyptic speculation, the whole world of things — a world which he perceives as fundamentally dynamic — is grow ing and striving towards Perfection. It is vital through and through : vital, and therefore free. " Becoming " is its primal attribute : there is in it nothing static, nothing complete. Even the spirit of the Christian is ever in process of being saved.1 The sacramental magic of a later day, the " One Act " which transferred man from the world of nature to the world of grace, has no part in the Pauline scheme of things. That outward going, eager, endless push of life, "from lowest to highest a mounting flood " — God working and willing within His own creation 2 — which opposes the downward falling tend ency of matter 3 is felt and known as a fundamental part of Reality by this great mystic, in whom it energised enthusi astically to the bringing forth of " the perfection of the sons of God." Man and all else in this world is free to grow, and move, in either direction : up toward Spirit, Transcendence, Reality, a participation in the Divine Order; which is "salvation": or down towards Matter, Degeneracy, Unreality; which is " sin and death." 4 All depends upon the direction of his move ment, the attitude of his mind; whether his life be centred about the higher or the lower consciousness — the " spirit "
1 i Cor. i. 1 8 (R.V.). 2 I Cor. xv. 10.
? Bergson, U Evolution creatrice, p. 292. 4 Rom. vi. 23.
ST. PAUL AND THE MYSTIC WAY 197
or the " flesh." " For the mind of the flesh is death ; but the mind of the spirit is life." l There is no third choice. Nothing stands still in the Pauline universe. Everything is moving, swiftly as the stars, either to perfection or from it — is either " perishing " or " being saved." 2
Now, according to the deep intuitive vision of Paul — a vision reinforced by his own amazing experience — man, in whom creation comes to self-consciousness, and who may, if he will, participate in the Eternal Order, is destined, because of that very fact, to lead the Cosmos back again to its bourne. From the Godhead, " fount and origin of all Is," it sprang : thither it must return, though " with groaning and travailling," with all the effort that attends on the process of life and growth. The way man does this is by growing in the way that Jesus grew, into a more complete maturity, a deeper, richer, more profoundly active life : by putting on " Divine Humanity." Jesus was the beginning of a new race, says Paul again and again — a "fresh creation," " the new Adam," " firstborn amongst many brethren." 3 He was significant not only in Himself, but as making possible, by a sharing of His mighty impetus, the forward leap of life — " the last Adam became a Y\iz- giving spirit " 4 — and demonstrating the meaning of the whole. " For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travailleth in pain together until now." 5
Within this dynamic world, perpetually urged up towards perfection, yet always by the process of growth — " one unique impulse, contrary to the movement of
1 Rom. viii. 6 (R.V.). 2 i Cor. i. 18 (R.V.).
8 Rom. viii. 29 (R.V.). 4 I Cor. xv. 45.
5 Rom.- viii. 19-21 (R.V.).
198 THE MYSTIC WAY
matter and itself indivisible " 1 — the soul of man is seen by Paul as a thing uniquely susceptible of the divine infection of reality. It can appropriate " grace " : that regnant word of the Pauline theology, which is but another name for the inflow of transcendent vitality, the action of creative love; the " triumphing spiritual power" which all mystics feel and acknowledge as the source of their true being. "It is God which worketh in you." " By the grace of God I am what I am." 2 Two centuries before Plotinus, Paul knew as surely as that great ecstatic that " the Supplier of true life was present " to those whose attention was turned towards the Real, and that appropriation of this life had " made him free." 3
From this consciousness of " grace," of a veritable inflow from the spiritual order, and its supremacy for the spirit-life of man, comes his favourite antithesis between those two things, or qualities of consciousness, which he symbolises, in his poetic and suggestive way, as " the law" and "Christ." The first — "law" — is an ethical compulsion laid upon the Self and acting from without inwards. It is a deliberate artifice; the sign of a dis harmony unresolved, and so a bondage. The second — " Christ " — is a mystical impulsion. It springs from the very heart of life; and is a quickening spirit, the sign of a " New Creature," 4 a true change of personality, not merely of conduct or belief. To be " in Christ" is to be lifted up into harmony with the divine nature, by close union with that Transcendent Personality who was the comrade and inspiration of Paul's career. It is the doing away of that flame of separation which keeps the human spirit from its home. To be under " the law " is to live solitary behind the ramparts of personality, obsessed by the ceaseless effort to conform to a life which is seen but not shared.
" Justification by faith," that most perverted, least com- 1 Bergson, op. cit.y p. 293. 2 Phil. ii. 13 ; I Cor. xv. TO.
3 Rom. viii. 2. 4 Gal. vi. 17.
ST. PAUL AND THE MYSTIC WAY 199
prehended of all dogmas, is an idea closely related to this vision of the world. Harsh and unreasonable though it sound in our ears, it is really an artistic image, half poetic and half practical, by which Paul strove to com municate one of his deepest intuitions, and which springs from the very heart of his inner life. It is the intellectual expression of another inward experience, and represents his sudden flashing comprehension that the world a man lives in — the universe which he accepts — is the central fact of his existence and the best of all indications of character. It shows the direction in which he is moving, the sort of creature he is going to be; and so infinitely transcends in importance and value for life his deliberate and self- chosen activities or "works." As "law" to "Christ," so " works " to " faith " : a dead and limiting convention, set over against participation in the freedom of Reality.
By " faith " man centres himself in the spiritual order, identifies himself with its interests, and thus justifies himself as a spiritual creation; for the essence of Pauline faith is not " belief," but awareness o/, surrender to, union with the " Kingdom " — convinced consciousness of a life lived in the atmosphere of God. Such faith as this is the test of a man's wholeness and sanity : it proves that he "walks in the Spirit," that there is sunshine in his soul. It implies the nature of his total reaction to the universe, and actually conditions his communion with reality — " We have access by faith into the grace wherein we stand." 1 Thus it justifies him as a spiritual being in a way that no mere " works " of a deliberate morality, no obedience to a human code, can ever do. This is a doctrine which comes naturally to the mystic, whose tran scendent experience has indeed acquitted, enlarged and made him free : 2 and wears for him — though for
1 Rom. v. 2.
2 " Acquittal " or " release " is perhaps the most exact translation of the Pauline " justification." For an excellent discussion of the whole subject cf. Deissmann, St. Paul, p. 145.
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few others — an air of obviousness, of concrete certainty.
Superhuman aspiration, then, " the blind intent stretch ing towards God," as the Cloud of Unknowing says — in fact, steadfast attention to Reality — Paul regards as the primal necessity. Slackening of such attention, con cessions made to the indolence of the lower nature, ever tending to lag behind : this is a betrayal of that holy Spirit of Life which has the body for its temple, a check on the process of growth; and implies degeneration or " sin." All creation, he says in Romans, is " gazing eagerly as if with outstretched neck " * towards that ultimate Per fection which is, in respect of our tentative and faltering consciousness, " present yet absent, near yet far." When this Perfection comes in its wholeness, and the " King dom" is established, then "all that which is in part shall be done away." 2
As in the case of Jesus, Paul's deep prophetic vision of this Perfection, his intuitive sympathy with the movement of life towards some rapturous consummation in God, inevitably took an apocalyptic form. With the mystics, he looked forward to a permanent condition of harmony with the Divine Life, the " rose-garden of union," as the necessary end of the Way; with the prophets, he objecti- vised as a universal transformation, a sudden and imminent "coming with power," the slow and steadfast change which he felt taking place at the very heart of his lire. The Pauline eschatology is the fruit of a collision between this profound intuitive conviction, and its imperfect earthly realisation : a collision taking place in a mind of strongly artistic cast, which was saturated with the myriad apocalyptic fancies born of the political miseries and
1 Rom. viii. 19 (Weymouth).
* I Cor. xiii. 10. u But when," says Tbeologia Germanica, " doth it come ? I say, when as much as may be it is known, felt and tasted of the soul " (Tb/o. Gfr., cap. i).
ST. PAUL AND THE MYSTIC WAY 201
religious restlessness of the Jews.1 The triumph of Divine Humanity, he thought, was near. So sure was he of the steady march of life towards transcendence, that he did not realise the slowness of the pace. That figure of the glorified Jesus, the New Man, in whom all his spiritual apprehensions found their focus, must emerge soon into the Time-world, which was waiting for " the manifesta tion of the sons of God." " Maran aiha I " " Our Lord, come!" he cries in the language of primitive Christen dom, at the end of the first letter to the Corinthians.2
But as the years pass, with Paul's own growth in the Mystic Way a change comes over his eschatology. As the deified life to which he looked as the only satis faction of desire, was established within his own spirit; as the Triumphing Spiritual Power which " cometh not with observation " slid into the very centre of his life, and became for him so close a comrade that he could say of it, " I live, yet not I," he felt less and less the need of any merely external readjustment, of a Liberator who should " descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God." 3 That cataclysmic vision is the fruit of a mind which has not yet unified itself, and looks for a consummation, a reconciling of the world's disharmonies, which it feels to be a part of the Divine Plan, yet cannot find within the framework of the Here-and-Now. It is characteristic of Paul's illuminative period, as it has been since of many a mystical genius struggling to reconcile the discordant worlds of Appearance and of Reality.
As. he approaches the unitive life, Paul learns — though he never wholly abandoned the Messianic hope — that the true Parousia is an inward coming of the Spirit : 4 that the rose-garden of joy, the one and only kingdom of Reality, is waiting at the door of every heart. Gradually, then,
1 Cf. I Cor. xv. 20-28, where current " Messianic " ideas concerning the setting up of the Kingdom are incorporated into the Christian hope.
2 I Cor. xvi. 22. 3 I Thess. iv. 16. 4 Col. i. 27.
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the idea of the uParousia" gives way before the idea of the " Mystery," that revelation which " hath been kept in silence through times eternal, but now is manifested5':1 and the work of the Christian missionary — which had been, like that of John the Baptist, a pre paring of the way of the Lord — changes to something far nearer the ideals of Jesus Himself. Paul becomes a "steward of the mysteries":2 an initiator into the new direction of life, the new state of consciousness prepared ufor them that love Him" who are "sealed with the Spirit " — " the unsearchable riches of Christ " 3 — rather than a forewarner of the imminent and apocalyptic re-making of the external world.4
The " Mystery " appears early in Paul's writings ; a translation of his own concrete and positive knowledge that the change of mind and life which he had suffered, the purifications he had endured, had initiated him — as some neophyte at Eleusis — into secrets closed to the eyes of other men : had effected, in a vital sense, the regeneration promised to the adepts of the ancient cults. In those cults he saw foreshadowed the vital experiences of the soul "in process of being saved": the re-birth, the heightened perception of reality, even the sacramental feeding on the Divine Substance disclosed in the common things of sense. Hence, with the instinct of the mis sionary for any image that might bring his meaning home to other minds, he snatched at the language of the " Mysteries," and salted it with the salt of Christ. " I came unto you," he says to the Corinthians in c. 57, " proclaiming the mystery of God " . . . " God's wisdom in a mystery, even the wisdom that hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory, which none of the rulers of this world knoweth . . . but
i Rom. xvi. 25, 26 (R.V.). 2 i Cor. iv. I. 3 Eph. iii. 8.
4 The Pauline " Mystery " has been studied in detail by Prof. P. Gardner in The Religious Experience of St. Paul ; though with more attention to its Hellenistic than to its mystical aspects.
ST. PAUL AND THE MYSTIC WAY 203
as it is written, Things which eye saw not and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man, what soever God prepared for them that love him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit : for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. . . . We received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things which are freely given to us by God. . . . Now the natural [literally, psychic] man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God : for they are foolishness unto him : and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things and he himself is judged of no man. For, c who hath known the mind of the Lord that he should instruct Him? ' (Is. xl. 13). But we have the mind of Christ." l
" The mind of Christ " : that new, peculiar quality of consciousness developed in Jesus, whereby He had direct and intuitive apprehension of the spiritual world. Attain ment of that mind, re-birth into that order of perception, is the Pauline " Mystery." All his " doctrine," all his arguments, all his high impassioned poetry, are but the variously successful efforts of the artist in him to dis cover a medium whereby he may communicate this one supremely actual thing. He has it in virtue of his growth in it : and the one passion which supports his strenuous career is the desire and determination to initiate others, that they too may see face to face. The " Mystery," then, is but another name for the " secret of the King dom " — the participation of the " human " in the " divine " life. It is an invitation to transcendence, " that we might know the things which are freely given
1 I Cor. ii. I, 7-12, 14-16 (R.V.). Swete (The Holy Spirit in the New Testament, p. 179) reads, " The psychic man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him and he cannot take cognisance of them, because they are scrutinised by spiritual methods. But the spiritual man, whilst he scrutinises everything, is himself scrutinised by none" — a translation which has the advantage of elucidating the mystical character of the passage.
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to us by God " : things obvious to the mystic, but which purblind man, his eyes shut to Reality, never contrives to see. This divine life Paul, owing to his bent of mind and the special visionary circumstances connected with his conversion, objectified as the continuing, diffused, mystic life of the historic but " pre-existent " Christ : as, later, the Johannine mystic identified it alternately with the Logos and the " Spirit." " Christ-Spirit," says Baron von Hiigel, " is here the element by which the human spirit is surrounded and penetrated, as man is by the air which he breathes and by which he lives." l Paul's " Christology " is one long attempt to convey something of the secret of this inward companionship, sometimes by personal, sometimes by spatial imagery : a com panionship which finds many a parallel in the records of religious genius, both within and without the Christian Church. Union with this supernal Life — which, dwelling in him, constituted his true being, and yet within which his life was hid — he knew, as innumerable contemplatives have done, as the result of putting in hand the process of mystic growth. The name which he gave to it matters little : the experience which lies behind that impassioned and artistic language is all.
His strange doctrine of " conditional immortality" — for it is clear that according to the Pauline ideas only Christians will live again " in Christ," who is the fount of all spiritual vitality 2 — is an intellectual deduction from the fact, which he knows by experience, that real Christians have already that new kind of life which he calls " pneumatic," and which is different in kind from the natural or " psychic " life of other men. It is a vivid, crescent, unconquerable life, " capable de culbuter toutes les resistances, et de franchir bien des obstacles, meme peut- etre la mort." 3 " Or life or death or things present or
1 Eternal Life, p. 69.
2 Rom. viii. 1 2-14 and other passages. Cf. P. Gardner, op. cit., p. 136.
3 Bergson, V Evolution creatrice, p. 294.
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things to come," he says to the Christian initiate, "all are yours." 1 Jesus of Nazareth was the " first fruits " of this new direction of life, the "new" Adam, the " heavenly" man2: and those who really receive His " gospel," turning to follow in His tracks, grow by a process at once biological and spiritual into the heritage of its powers.
This life it is, not the seed whence grew the thorny plant of ecclesiasticism, which Paul "plants and waters" in the hope that God may " give increase." 3 Never theless, though he limits " salvation," the attainment of complete and permanent vitality, to those who are initi ated into this " mystery " of the Kingdom, incorporated into the "mystical body" of the New Man, he never dwells upon the idea of the "lostness" of those who are " not called." He lives, as do all the great mystics, in a positive world; all his attention set upon Reality, all his life a series of responses to it. There lies his interest : in discovering and declaring how men grow in and towards the Real — what the criterion whereby we may judge of their participation in the divine life. This problem he solves — once more by an appeal to pure ex perience — in the great rhapsody on Charity : * there declar ing the conditions, and setting the standard, to which the whole of Christian mysticism has since striven to conform.
In the poem of Charity we hear a music which has been beaten out in pain and effort upon the anvil of Paul's own heart. The high conviction which fills it, the lucid knowledge which it represents, had been won at the cost of many battles with arrogant intellect and dominant will. He never had the crystalline simplicity of Jesus. The diversities of gifts which besiege the awakened conscious ness and amongst which his travailling personality moved, the many blind alleys down which life may run on her quest of Reality; these were for him true opportunities
1 i Cor. iii. 22. 2 I Cor. xv. 46-49.
3 i Cor. iii. 6. 4 I Cor. xiii.
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of error. One feels that Paul had at least considered, if he had not tried, the claims of all those kinds of spirit uality which he here contrasts with the one all-conquering claim of Heavenly Love. Inspired utterance, phophetic genius, the abnormal powers which are often exhibited by selves which have attained to the illuminated state, we know that he possessed. He was naturally inclined to that deep brooding upon supernal mysteries which is so attractive to the speculative intellect. Practical altruism, untiring industry, high courage in bitter persecu tion, he had shown abundantly. One after another he reviews them. Prophet, ecstatic, philosopher, philan thropist, even martyr — every " way out " towards the Absolute which seems to the self-deluded human creature to be full of interest and promise, every type of deliberate spirituality — Paul tests and throws away. They are well enough in themselves, gifts which may indeed be " desired earnestly " : he was no advocate of a pious stupidity, still less of a tame or indolent religion. But it is not by such means that Life makes her great saltatory ascents to freedom. " A still more excellent way show I unto you." Radiant Charity, that exquisite, outflowing attitude of mind and heart, at once so gentle and so ardent, which is characteristic of the " self-naughted soul " — the perfect state of balanced response to God and to Creation which appears when the "remora of desire" is done away — this and this only is to be the test of the mystic con sciousness, the condition of all real spiritual experience. All else partakes of the character of illusion : "we know in part, and we prophesy in part." Only by heavenly love can man enter into direct communion with Reality; only by its dynamic power will he raise up the temple in which that Reality can make its home. "Knowledge puffeth Up — love buildeth up," l says Paul the craftsman, with the craftsman's eye for the difference between shoddy and solid work: and here all the great mystics agree with
1 I Cor. viii. I.
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him. " Whoso then will hear angel's song," says Hilton, "and not be deceived by feigning of himself nor by imagination, nor by the illusion of the enemy, him behoveth for to have perfect Charity, and that is when all vain love and dread, vain joy and sorrow, is cast out of the heart, so that it love nothing but God, nor joyeth nor sorroweth nothing but in God, or for God. Whoso might by the grace of God go this way, he should not err." l
Amidst the confusions and disappointments of a know ledge and a prophecy that is " in part," the betrayals of an intellect struggling with something that it cannot grasp, the steady onward push of self-surrendered love " never faileth " : and progress in it is the only trust worthy sign that man the spiritual creature is " growing straight." Even hope, the convinced and rapturous expectation of the Perfect, even the wide clear vision of faith, gives place to this living spirit of communion; this humble and glad self-mergence in the mighty stream of life. " Now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three, but the greatest of these is charity."
The " new creature," in virtue of his change of mind, is to find all things in God, and God in all things. He is there too, within that divine atmosphere — for him, the primal reality — and, sharing it, seeing all things transfused by it, must necessarily reflect and impart the celestial sunshine which he has received.
Paul put this truth in the forefront of his teaching. From him it has descended through the lives and works of the great mystics ; which do but gloss this one declaration of the mighty genius who claimed— not without reason — participation in " the mind of Christ." To all of them the difficult way of their growth is a discipline of love; an education and advancement in it. Love, says Augustine, is the weight of the soul, which draws it to its home in God. The angels who are nearest
1 Walter Hilton, The Song of Angels. Printed in The Cell of Self- knowledge, edited by E. Gardner, p. 68.
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to the One, says Dionysius the Areopagite, are the seraphim, aflame with perfect love. By the four degrees of burning charity, says Richard of St. Victor, the soul moves to that Spiritual Marriage in which it gives new life to the world. For St. Bernard, and for the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, the love of God, truly com prehended, embraces the whole activity of man. By the seven steps of ever-growing love, says Ruysbroeck, we mount up to that consummation in which we are burned up like live coals on the hearth of His infinite charity — that Fire of Love which transmuted Richard Rolle to the state of " heavenly song.55 For Julian of Norwich the revelation of Reality was a " revelation of divine love " : for St. John of the Cross, a rapt absorption in love is the goal of spirit's transcendence.1 " Oh, dear Charity! " says Rolle, " he that on earth, whatever else he may have, has thee not, is made naught. He truly that in thee is busy, to joy is soon lift above earthly things. Thou enterest boldly the bed-chamber of the Everlasting King; thou only art not ashamed to take of Christ. . . . Oh, merry love, strong, ravishing, burning, wilful, stalwart, un- quenched, that brings all my soul to thy service and suffers it to think of nothing but thee. Thou claimest for thyself all our life, all that we savour, all that we are." 2
Not only those who " call themselves Christians," but others who have submitted to this growth, from Plotinus the metaphysician to Blake the artist-seer, share Paul's conviction that Love is enough.3 " Every moment the voice of Love is coming from left and right," says the Sufi. " 'Tis Love and the lover that live to all eternity; set not thy heart on aught else : 'tis only borrowed." 4 " They come with their laws and their codes to bind me fast," says the Indian mystic, echoing the Pauline vindica-
1 Canticle. Stanza 26.
2 Richard Rolle, The Mending of Life, cap. II.
3 Cf. supra, Cap. I, § I.
4 Jalalu 'ddin, Divan (Nicholson's trans., pp. 33, 151).
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tion of the supremacy of " faith " over " works," " but I evade them ever; for I am only waiting for Love to give myself up at last into his hands." *
All these have felt life's new direction and responded to it; and like Paul, who received that new dower of vitality under forms of intensest radiance, have learned to pass it on to the world which " earnestly expects " its manifestation, as the Love which seeketh not its own.
1 Rabindra nath Tagore, Gitanjali, 17.