CHAPTER IV

THE JOHANNINE MYSTIC
" What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light : and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the house-tops." — Matt. x. 27.
Sed quid hujusmodi secreta colloquia proferimus in publicum ? cur ineffabiles et inenarrabiles affectus verbis communibus conamur exprimere? Inexpert! talia non intelligunt, nisi ea expressius legant in libro experientiae, quos ipsa doceat unctio. — Scala Claustralium, cap. 6.
" As the vintages of earth Taste of the sun that riped their birth, We know what never cadent Sun Thy lamped clusters throbbed upon, What plumed feet the winepress trod; Thy wine is flavorous of God."
(FRANCIS THOMPSON.)
P ?
A GOSPEL OF EXPERIENCE
THE new kind of life, new form of consciousness which blazed into perfect expression in Jesus of Nazareth, and found another thoroughfare in Paul, can still be studied in both these great examples under the all-revealing cir cumstances of growth. There we see it germinate and develop. Differing enormously in power, in circum stances and temperament, each of these shows to us as in a mirror a steady process of organic change taking place; a steady approximation of the human consciousness to perfect union with Spiritual Reality. Jesus of Nazareth, from the first uniquely aware of huge changes and ascents now begun for the race, and of His own great part in them, objectivised some at least of these changes as external and catastrophic transformations about to take place in the world of things. In the course of His passionate efforts to express and make plain His un equalled intuition of the Eternal Order, He poured the new wine of perfect experience of God into the old bottles of Jewish apocalyptic. Paul, His direct descendant — inheritor too of those current apocalyptic and eschato- logical ideas, the feverish expectations of the time — came before his earthly life was ended to another reading of this new movement of life. He saw it at last, not as a passionate river rushing quickly to the sea ; but as a steady, growing, branching stream that should water and fertilise all the earth. The Christian missionary became for Paul not a herald of the Last Things, but an initiator into the Mystic Way, the parent of a new life. His churches were his spiritual family, for which he " travailed in birth " ; that they might be re-born, as he hoped, into the Kingdom
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of Reality. He is the typical Christian mystic of the second generation, and performed the necessary function of " spreading the news," scattering the seed, that it might reach those capable of receiving it.
Plainly, even from the days of Jesus, that seed had most often fallen upon sterile ground. Amongst the first disciples only a " little flock " were found able to inherit the mystical " Kingdom " : and these were held within its atmosphere rather by the superabundant vitality of their Master, the infection of His transcendental con sciousness, than by their own inherent power of response to those high rhythms of Reality which He declared to them. Paul's wide net swept into his churches, along with those rare selves truly and temperamentally " called to be saints," a host of spiritual parasites, hearers and not doers of the "Word"; who lacked the vitality, the peculiar psychic organisation, the power of receptivity, which is necessary to mystical growth. The energising Spirit of Life cannot be communicated in a sermon. Hence the greater number of Paul's converts quickly degenerated into mere formal believers, once the stimulus of his great personality was withdrawn.1 Thus the dis tinction between the " inner and the outer church," so
1 This is a situation constantly repeated in the history of Christian mysticism. The great mystic, always an imparter of more abundant life, is generally surrounded by a group of spiritual children, in whom he seems able to evoke something of his own peculiar consciousness of Reality. We see this in St. Francis, St. Catherine of Siena, the Friends of God, St. Ignatius, St. Teresa. But when his immediate influence is removed, this consciousness soon lapses ; except in the case of those who themselves possess the " genius for transcendence " and are willing to endure the pain and stress incidental to its development. Thus the early Franciscans, differing widely in temperament, were " fragrant " one and all with the exquisite spirituality of Francis, so long as they remained within the field of his personal power ; but quickly lost it after his death. Thus in Teresa's lifetime her convents were full of true contemplatives, but soon degenerated to the common level of contem porary religion after their founder's death. Yet each great wave, though it ebbs, has carried the mounting flood a little higher up the shore.
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strongly marked in the Synoptic gospels, was, if not acknowledged, at once established; the outer church of new creed, the inner church of new creatures, of organic change and growth. We who are studying, not a " system," but a new movement of the free spirit of life toward the transcendence that it seeks, must — even in this first eager period of its emergence — sharply distinguish " Christian Mysticism," the transcendental yet biological secret of Jesus, from the compromise which is commonly called " Christianity." Within the formal system, the quickly-deposited outer shell, that "New Race," the inheritors of the secret, never failed : though often un noticed and always misunderstood. The thoroughfare of the spiritual life was tortuous and narrow, but the living water never ceased to flow. No doubt many, perhaps most, of those through whom it passed are unknown to us. But enough are known, through their lives and their writings, to enable us to establish the continuance and ever richer, deeper growth of the mystical life-force at work within humanity : the development of the new " seed " within the world, destined to serve the interests of the Divine Plan.
The ideal of " New Life " was always present, always ready to break out wherever it could cut its way. The Christian prophet had it in his blood : and the prophetic type dominated the early Church. Even for the violently eschatological imagination of the writer who composed the Christian parts of the " Apocalypse of St. John," the real Parousia, the consummation to which all must tend, is the free appropriation of more abundant life. To this the Spiritual Order and its " bride," the new Christian society, is calling the race. " And he showed me a river of water of life, proceeding out of the throne of God. . . . And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And he that heareth, let him say Come. And he that is athirst, let him come : he that will, let him take the water of life freely."1 1 Rev. xxii. i, 17 (R.V.).
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This, says Harnack most truly, and not the warlike operations of the Conquering Messiah, is the " last word " of Christian apocalyptic.1
Plainly, from the time of St. Paul's last writings the power of that apocalyptic, its credibility as a definite fore cast of immediate events, was waning. It began to be clear as the years passed that the " Kingdom " was not destined to come with the swiftness and violence which formed part of the old crude Messianic dream. If the " water of life " were free indeed, it must be outpoured in its fulness within the Here-and-Now. Not some crisis in the external world, but a readjustment within the indi vidual consciousness, must forge the missing link between Appearance and Reality. In the letters of his last period Paul taught this as well as he could. Thirty or forty years after his death, when the Synoptic gospels, with their emphasis on the local and eschatological side of the vision of Jesus, were already in circulation, a book appeared in which the deepest and richest experience of the Christian mystic found once for all their supreme literary expression, and established themselves as the central facts of the Christian " revelation." That book is the Fourth Gospel of the New Testament canon, traditionally attributed to the Apostle St. John ; and depending from it, and com pleting its doctrine, is the short letter called his " First Epistle."
This is no place for a discussion of the so-called " Johan- nine Problem " : that is to say, the question of the author ship and provenance of these powerful and mysterious writings. It is unlikely that this problem will ever be solved. But there is a consensus of opinion amongst the best critics to the effect that the Fourth Evangelist must have been a Christian Jew familiar with Alexandrian religious idealism : 2 that he probably lived at Ephesus in
1 Harnack, Militia Chris ti, p. 1 1.
2 The relations of the Fourth Evangelist to Alexandrian thought have been worked out in great detail by Holtzmann, NeuUstamentlichg Tbeologie, Vol. II. pp. 409 et seq.
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the first years of the second century : and that his gospel is in no sense a historical, but a poetic and devotional book. It, more than any other writing in the New Testa ment, bears the mark of prophetic inspiration : but the many proved inaccuracies and impossibilities of its narra tives, the wide difference between its portrait of Jesus and that given by the Synoptics, the curiously unearthly atmosphere which pervades it, all tend to contradict the tradition that it was composed by a personal friend of the historic Christ.1 The First Epistle, if not written by the author of the Gospel, was certainly the work of a pupil saturated with his spirit. It may then be regarded as immediately dependent on his teaching, and ultimately upon the inner experience whence that teaching arose.
The fine crop of contradictory theories as to the mean ing and aim of this most difficult and fascinating of books tend not to enlightenment, but to mutual destruction.2
1 Cf. H. J. Holtzmann, Neutestamentliche Theologie, 2nd ed.,Vol. II.; A. Julicher, Introduction to the New Testament; A.^Loisy, Le Quatridme fcvangile (Paris, 1903) ; J. Reville, Le Quatrieme Evangile (Paris, 1901) ; F. C. Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission (Edinburgh, 1906) ; Baron F. von Hiigel in the Encyclopedia Britannic tf,Vol. XV. pp. 452-457, and the same writer's Eternal Life (1912), pp. 73-80. The best defence of the traditional view is Dr. Drummond's brilliant Enquiry into the Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel (London, 1903) ; but even here, though the Apostolic authorship of the book is considered probable, the unhistorical character of the narrative and discourses is taken for granted, a paradox not easy to accept. It must be remembered that the attribution of this book to the Apostle St. John involves not merely his removal from Jerusalem to Ephesus in extreme old age, which is possible though unauthenticated; but a complete and incredible change of mind at the same advanced period of life, from those narrow Jewish- Christian ideas and crude apocalyptic hopes which are attributed to him in the Synoptics and in Acts, to that Pauline universalism which he had always opposed. For John the Apostle, as Paul and the writer of Acts knew him, the Christian Church was a Jewish sect expecting the imminent return of the national Messiah. For the author of the Fourth Gospel it was a community of " twice-born " souls, regenerated by the touch of a metaphysical Reality.
2 For instance, Weizsacker thinks that it was written to uphold the authority of St. John as against that of St. Peter ; Wernle, as a " tract
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From their wreck, and from an unprejudiced examination of the book itself, one fact seems to emerge : that its power, its daring originality, and its unique characteristics can only be explained as the fruit of a profound inward experience, an experience so intense as to seem to the self who had it far more deeply true than any merely external event. It is not a tract, it is not a biography, it is not a controversial document. Its author, though his mind was steeped in the theology of St. Paul, and perfectly familiar with the Jewish-Hellenistic philosophy popular in his day, was primarily a mystic seer. Incident is only valuable to him in so far as it is the expression of super- sensual truth; the past is sacred to him because it fore shadows the present fruition of Reality. That which he gives to us is no historical " tradition " — Johannine or other — though sometimes he expresses it by means of traditional forms. It is the record of a new kind of life breaking out into the empirical order : a life which this Evangelist knows because he has received it in its fulness, has been " born again " to a new growth and a new world. In him we see the reaction of a new kind of temperament to that same stimulus which put St. Paul on the Mystic Way; the first appearance of certain phenomena destined to be common in the mystical experience of Christendom, but characteristic of the kind of response made by artistic and prophetic natures, rather than those of the active and volitional type, to the impact of spiritual reality.
Paul showed step by step, almost year by year, the growth that was taking place within his consciousness : the inpouring dower of new vitality received by him, the building of that " top storey " of human personality which touches the transcendent sphere. His letters are revela-
for the times " against Gnosticism ; Jiilicher, as a Christian apologetic against the anti-Christian propaganda of the Jews ; Pfleiderer, to mediate between Catholic and Gnostic theology; Brandt, to oppose the narrow ecclesiasticism of the Petrine Church ; Abbott, as a deliberate attempt at " indirect biography."
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tions of interior activity; the difficult cutting of fresh paths, the ecstatic contemplation of fresh landscapes, the breakdown of the old order, the establishment of the new. In the Fourth Gospel we see nothing of this "process of becoming," though the life presented is the Pauline life mirrored in a different temperament.1 This book is written from the standpoint of one in whom the " great work " of readjustment is already accomplished; who has " entered the Kingdom " and knows himself the member of a new order, inhabited by a new life. " Of His fulness we have all received," says John,2 addressing his ideal audience of fellow-mystics : of those who have been re-born " of the Spirit " into the Kingdom of Reality. Here we have in fact not the historical, but the eternal " Gospel," seen in vision by a great spiritual genius who had realised in its deepest completest sense — as the Synoptics had not — the meaning of Christianity. This meaning, this secret, he knew — as men know the secrets of love — with a com pleteness far beyond the fragmentary resources of speech. Only by oblique suggestion could he convey them to us : by evoking in us something of his own intuitive power. In the fact that he is able to do this, in a degree unique in literature, lies the source of his immortal power and charm. Behind all his artistic imagery, all his prophetic rhapsodies, as behind the music of the poet, we can discern the " pres sure of the Spirit " ; the deeper mind struggling to give utterance to its perception of Reality. His work is not allegorical, as some critics have maintained, but sacra mental : raising to its highest power an essential character of all great art. The difficulty of criticising such a document is the old difficulty which is inherent in all
1 " The greatest monument of most genuine appreciation of St. Paul's mysticism," says Deissmann, " is the Gospel and the Epistles of St. John " (St. Paul, p. 133).
2 I retain for convenience' sake this traditional name, which may \*ell be that of the actual author. " John " was a common name in Christian circles.
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mystical literature. The sword of John's spirit is cutting through experience in a new direction; and he is trying to describe some of its operations, the new tracts of reality it lays bare, in the language which we have invented to serve the ordinary jog-trot piety of the normal man. Worse, since he wrote generations of sentimentalists have degraded his vivid phrases to the purposes of their own religion. Hence, few of us can now come near any accurate conception of the nature of John's passionate communion with that Reality which he called the " Logos- Christ," or guess the richness and colour of the universe in which such a consciousness as his is immersed. Every phrase that he uses, every scene which he chooses to repre sent, is to him a little human symbol which conveys the substance of some divine and eternal fact. Men, fighting over the tendency or historicity of the incidents in this book, have but fought over the form of the chalice, the composition of the bread, whereby John was concerned to communicate the Body and Vitality of his God.
This he could do only in so far as he had himself partaken of it : as the priest at the Christian altar must first be fed before he gives the Divine Mysteries to other men. Hence, as behind the little vivid tract of conscious ness there lies the immense region of our psychic life, so behind the words of the Fourth Gospel there seems to lie one of the most complete of all experiences of the limit less u Kingdom of Heaven " : an experience not only of new birth, of struggle, of attainment, but of that high permanent life of union, that impassioned and loving self- mergence in the universal life, in which the " new creature " feels himself to be a " branch " of the great tree which Life is building up: humble, yet exalted; though finite, a partaker of the Infinite; energised, not by his own separate strength, but by the sap which flows through the Whole.
n
THE LOGOS-LIFE IN VOICE AND VISION
THE theme of John's book, then, is the real meaning of the career of Jesus of Nazareth, as felt and known by a soul in closest sympathy with Him. He saw in that career the clear emergence in the Here-and-Now of the Divine Nature ; the sudden and perfect self-expression of the creative Spirit of God, in and through humanity; the path of intensest life mapped out for the race. For Mark, Jesus represented a national fulfilment; for John, the triumph of an eternal principle, latent in the Universe, and now manifested before the eyes of men. As he puts it in the language of the current religious idealism- language which his intellectual equals were bound to understand — " The Logos was made flesh and dwelt among us."
The fluid and poetic notion of the " Logos " which he shared with contemporary philosophy, enabled John to present it in his gospel as something which is at once " cosmic " and " personal." For him it is the Creative Principle itself : " all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made." 1 Yet in the historic Christ this Spirit of Life is seen " in a point " : as Julian of Norwich saw God. Hence the Johannine Logos meets the two great demands of the mystical consciousness : which must, as we have seen, find in its Deity both cerchio and imago, the infinite and the definite ; an opportunity for intimate and loving com munion, and for limitless outgoing expansion — complete self-loss in the All.
The Logos, which is in essence the energetic expression
1 John i. 3.
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of the Divine Nature, creative Spirit ever seeking to penetrate and mould the material world, he describes as Light struggling with darkness, as the " Life of men," pouring itself out from the fountain of Godhead like " living water." It is the Bread which feeds man, the Paraclete which perpetually helps and enlightens him, the Door through which finite returns to infinite; the living, growing Vine of which men are but the branches ; and at the same time the personal Son of God, the Saviour and Shepherd of Souls. This richly-various manifesta tion of Eternal Reality, he says, broke out through man kind in its perfect and " saving " form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. There the divine energy found its perfect thoroughfare, and appeared " in the flesh." 1
But the Logos-doctrine which John bequeathed to the Christian family is not, like that of Philo, philosophic and speculative. It has its origin in profound experience, rather than in dialectic : represents knowledge won in those sudden moments of lucidity which are the reward of the mystic's steadfast attention to God. It has, then, the quality of a mystical, rather than a metaphysical, diagram of Reality : comes to us highly charged with feeling, full of melody, radiant with colour and light.
1 This multiple view of the Logos is found in Philo, and was common in and before his day. The Rev. C. Martindale, S.J. (in The Month, Jan. and Feb. 1912) has collected a number of examples showing how fluid was the notion which lay behind this term. Zeus, Pan, Eros, Heracles, " the incarnation of effort," Hermes, " the messenger of God to man " were all, at one time or another, regarded as personi fications of the Logos. For Philo, the Logos is manifested in the flesh in Moses and Elijah. He is also Truth, Conscience, the Inspirer of all Good, the heavenly Food and Drink, the Initiator into the higher life, the Pneuma or Divine Spirit. More, the personal Shepherd of Souls, and the Firstborn of the Sons of God (cf. Reville, Le Quatrieme Evangilc, p. 92, where all the references are given). For Plutarch, who was probably contemporary with the Fourth Evangelist, God gives matter life and meaning by impressing it with His own Logos (Martindale, op. cit.f p. 26). Thus John found ready to his hand a mass of poetic symbolism which he " baptised into Christ " and used almost without alteration as a medium wherewith to tell his message to the world.
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For John, as for Clement after him, the Logos is a principle of gladness, a " new song." * Hence, the heart of his mighty vision is the idea, not of impersonal Divine Energy, but of personal Divine Love, the eager, generous outflowing of the Spiritual Order towards man.
Paul knew that love, and responded to it. But John, pioneer of Christian contemplatives, was the first amongst men to display it in its full grandeur, as the very Name of God; the "word of power," operative in all things from the greatest to the least, linking the Transcendent Godhead with His creative spirit, creature with creator, and man with man. A century or more before Plotinus, he knew that only this ardent passion of like for like could lead man from the prison of illusion into all Truth, and " cause the lover to rest in the object of his love." 2 " He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love. Herein was the love of God manifested in us, that God hath sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. . . . He that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him. . . . We love, because He first loved us."3
With this vision of all-penetrating love as the sub stance of Reality, the key to the spiritual world and man's relation with it, John transmutes idealism into mysticism, and lays the foundations of Christian philosophy. Hardly a mystic who comes after him has escaped the influence of his mighty spirit : and Christendom as a whole, incap able of his deep intuitive communion with Reality, has lived for eighteen centuries on the vision which it inherited from this unknown seer. He it was who bridged the dreadful gap between history and actuality : who wove together Paul's direct spiritual experience and the tradi tions of the life of Jesus, into a great poem at once truly human and truly divine.
1 Clement of Alexandria, Cohort. I.
2 Ennead, VI. 9. Fide supra, Cap. I. § II.
3 i John iv. 8, 9, 16, 19 (R.V.).
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As the Synoptics are the " good news " of the new kind of life emerging on the historical plane, the Fourth Gospel is the good news of its eternal existence in God, and its continual emergence in the human soul. This idea of life controls the whole book : the new, vivid, indestruct ible " Eternal Life which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us " 1 — not merely hoped for as the result of some Parousia, but actually enjoyed by the members of the New Race.2 As the primitive psalmist says in purely Johannine language, " The dwelling-place of the Logos is man, and its truth is Love." 3
This Life — the divine elan vital — is an energetic spirit, thrusting itself to expression in and through the world. John has himself experienced it in the strange fresh dower of energy, the " more abundant life " invading the con verted self and lifting it in its wholeness to fresh levels of insight and of creative power; a definite psychic fact for the primitive Christians, and called by them the "reception of the Holy Spirit." " Ye have an anointing from the Holy One," he says to those for whom he writes. " Hereby know we that we abide in Him and He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit." *
His possession of this spirit, this grace which makes the soul aware of truth, is directly connected for John with its first and only perfect appearance in Jesus : whose actual career he sees as a brief, supreme revelation of Reality and man's kinship to it, the "gift" of eternal life to the race. Hence, and because for the born mystic all outward events tend to become symbols without ceasing to be facts — seem to the contemplative mind to be charged with an infinite significance — he finds in the historic tradition concerning Jesus the foreshadowing of all those things which he and all other initiates of Reality experience in their own persons as a result of setting in hand the mystical process of transcendence. He reviews
1 i John i. 2. 2 Cf. Von Hiigel, Eternal Life, p. 75.
3 Odes of Solomon XII. 4 i John ii. 20 and iv. 13 (R.V.).
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the historical life, its fixed outlines and legendary accretions, as it was known to Ephesian Christians at the end of the first century; not from the point of view of the historian concerned for outward truth, but from that of the mystic concerned for inward significance. " There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man coming into the world." 1 As he broods upon it, it shines ever brighter ; and the biography of the Nazarene is transmuted into the eternal drama of God's wisdom and love.
Absolutely uncritical in his use of material, he is naturally attracted to those things through and by which he can communicate the living secret which he knows " not by the flesh but by the spirit." This does not mean that the events described by John are merely symbols. For us they are of varying degrees of credibility, but for him they were doubtless facts and symbols; as they became later for the patristic commentators. They had been the material of his meditation before they became the material of his gospel : and even those least practised in that difficult art know what treasure of significance and beauty the simplest image will yield up when subjected to this still and brooding attentiveness of mind. Thus it is that whereas the comparatively impersonal narrative of the Synoptics has kept for us the priceless record of a real Person who lives and grows within the world of time; here it is a being at once personal and metaphysical — mysterious and remote, yet intimate and dear — whom the genius of John puts before us. It is the fruit of his own vision and meditation, his own first-hand experi ence of the divine which he pours into the evangelical mould.
The watchword of the Johannine Christ is " I am."
He is static, because for the Johannine writer He belongs
not to the past, but to the present; not to the swift world
of Becoming, but to the timeless world of mystical con-
1 John i. 9 (R.V.).
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templation. In this sublime conception, for the first time in the history of religion, the two great aspects of spiritual Reality are merged in one ; and the eternal, unchanging Source of light and life is seen to be the beloved com panion of man's soul, the energetic spirit of ascending life, "loving His own to the end," and incarnate in the race.
The drama of the entry of this Logos from Eternity into Time, His fight witK " darkness " — the oppositions of matter — and triumphant return to His natural habita tion in God, whither He is to be followed by all who, having inherited His life, are in union with Him, con stitutes therefore the "plot" of the Fourth Gospel. This subject is developed partly by means of episodes chosen from the current biographies of Jesus, apparently as illustrative of different aspects of the main theme, and partly by the wonderful discourses which are the fruit and expression of John's ecstatic contemplation of God in Christ.
As with other mystics, his intuitive communion with the Spiritual Order, in itself " above all feeling and above all thought," had somehow to be interpreted to the surface-consciousness : and here we may take it as axiomatic that, however great his inspiration, it would act through, not against, the normal process of our mental life. Only by means of image and symbol, by casting it into artistic shape, retranslating it into terms of sensual perception, can the contemplative reduce his apprehension of Truth to a form with which his intellect is able to deal. Such a retranslation on the mystic's part is more often involuntary than voluntary. His creative powers seize on the new universe disclosed to them and deal with it as well as they can ; giving it back to him in the " voice " or the " vision," which seems to " come into the body by the windows of the wits," but has really been made at home.
Mystical literature abounds in examples of this proceed-
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ing; of the infinitely various ways in which the human mind adapts the rough-and-ready machinery of sense to the purposes of its spiritual intuitions. In one case at least we see it at work in a form which is not without bearing on the problems which lie behind the Gospel of John. Julian of Norwich, more apt than many contemplatives at analysis of her own states, has told us that her " revela tions " came to her in a three-fold form : inwardly, as a vivid but ineffable apprehension of Divine Reality; out wardly, as a concrete and detailed vision; and — linking together the image and the intuition — as a voice which answered her questions and declared to her in language at once homely and exalted the hidden mysteries of the Love of God. In the language of later mysticism, Julian's revelation was received by her under the forms of Intellectual Vision, Corporeal Vision, and Distinct Interior Words? " All this was showed me by three ways," she says : " that is to say, by bodily sight, and by word formed in mine understanding, and by ghostly sight. But the ghostly sight I cannot nor may not show it, as openly nor as fully as I would." 2
Here we have, described by a natural mystic, a simple woman unversed in religious psychology, the complex effort of human consciousness to lay hold of an experi ence which transcends the normal machinery of perception. The "ghostly sight," says Julian — the direct intuition of Reality — was ineffable, and thwarts all her descriptive efforts. She " cannot nor may not show it." But that tendency to visualisation which plays so large a part in our mental life, and is specially powerful in minds of artistic or creative cast, here came into play ; in spite of the fact that, in common with most real mystics, she had no desire for visionary experiences — " I desired never bodily sight, nor showing of God." It put before
1 For a full and careful study of all these automatisms, see St. John of the Cross, Subida del Monte Carmek, Lib. II. cap. 19-31.
2 Revelations of Divine Love, cap. 8.
0,2
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her eyes a vividly realistic picture of the Passion of Christ : for Christians the ultimate symbol of love. " Suddenly I saw the red blood trickle down from under the garland hot and freshly and right plenteously, as it were in the time of His Passion." 1 This external vision continued side by side with the " ghostly showing " or interior lucidity; and the triple experience was completed by a voice "formed" as she says, "in the understand ing," which was yet accepted without question by Julian as the veritable voice of Christ.2
In the Fourth Gospel we seem to trace the artistic results of such a complex experience as this, taking place in a mind of great delicacy and power. Many of its peculiarities may well have arisen from the "visionary" and " auditive " form — the picture seen and the discourse heard — into which John's creative imagination crystal lised those imageless facts of the spiritual universe which were apprehended by his deeper mind, giving human words to the voice of that Companion who " spoke without utterance " in his soul. The sense of intimate communion with a transcendent Personality — usually identified with the exalted Christ — is one of the best attested phenomena of Christian mysticism. This vivid " consciousness of the Presence " exists as a rule quite independently of vision, save that " intellectual " vision which is only another name for intuition itself : though it often finds expression in those " divine locutions " and dialogues between God and the soul, reported by Julian, Catherine of Siena, and many others, in which the con templative — involuntarily translating his direct intuitions into symbolic speech — seems to hear with his inward ear
1 Revelations of Divine Love, caps. 3 and 4.
2 " Then said our good Lord Jesus Christ : ' Art thou well pleased that I suffered for thee ? ' I said : ' Yea, good Lord, I thank Thee ; yea, good Lord, blessed mayst Thou be/ Then said Jesus, our kind Lord : ' If thou art pleased, I am pleased : it is a joy, a bliss, an endless satisfying to Me that ever suffered I passion for thee ; and if I might suffer more, 1 would suffer more ' " (Ibid., cap. 22).
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the very voice of the Beloved.1 " Often," says St. Teresa, " when the soul least expects it, and is not even thinking of God, our Lord awakes it, swiftly as a comet or a thunderbolt. It hears no sound, but distinctly under stands that its God calls it. ... On one side, the Beloved clearly shows the soul He is with it ; on the other, He calls it." 2
I believe that such an acute " sense of the Presence " is the fundamental fact for the writer of the Fourth Gospel : that upon it his whole superstructure of picture and poetry is built. It is not the memory of the disciple — even the " beloved " disciple whose reminiscences, if he be not a purely symbolic figure, may well have coloured the Ephesian traditions of Jesus' death — but the vivid first-hand knowledge, the immovable certitude of the mystic " in union " with the Object of his adoration, which supplies material for this unearthly picture of the earthly life of Jesus. Such experiences of vivid personal communion with Transcendent Life, such first-fruits of a regenerate consciousness steadfastly focussed on Reality, had already been described by Paul ; and are repeated again and again in the lives of later contemplatives, who declare to us — often, it is true, under symbols which are hard to understand — the responses made by the supernal order to the impassioned attentiveness of man. It is by the comparison and study of such examples that we shall best understand the spiritual adventures reported in the New Testament.
1 The sense of intimate communion with Divine Personality is not of course peculiar to Christianity, though there seen in its full beauty and power. A personal object of devotion, linking human with divine reality, seems to be a permanent need of the religious consciousness. Hence in India the worship of Krishna, in Japan that of Amida, reproduce many of the characteristics of the romantic and personal adoration and love felt by Christian mystics for the person of Jesus : whilst the Sufis have been driven by the same temperamental necessity to apply the lan- guage of human passion to their communion with the Absolute God of Islam. 2 El Castillo Interior, Moradas Sextas, ii.
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Such a comparison suggests to us that we owe to these adventures the beautiful discourses of the Johannine Christ : discourses couched in that exalted and rhythmical language which is characteristic of all "automatic" activity, all involuntary or inspired weaving up of intui tions into words. Poles asunder from the directness and simplicity of the Synoptics, these musical and solemn phrases, this fluid symbolism, this oblique suggestive language — giving, as St. Teresa says, " in few words that which our mind could only express in many " 1 — alone suggests to us the presence of prophetic or poetic inspira tion of a high type.2 These heavenly rhapsodies are not the fruits of any personal or traditional memory of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth : nor are they deliberately composed for purposes of edification. We hear in them the voice of an immediate transcendental Presence ; addressing itself, by means of a sensory automatism familiar to religious psychology, to the consciousness of a great mystic, member of a formed spiritual society, for whom utterances which would have been unintelligible to the followers of the Synoptic Jesus, present no diffi culty. " I am the Bread of Life ... I am the Door ... I and my Father are one " — these are statements which John's own high and intimate experience has proved to be true : and it is as immediate truth, not merely as poetry or history that he puts them before us. " No pro phet," says Tyrrell, " allows or would feel that his utter ances are merely poetical or allegorical; he feels that they are not less but more truly representative of reality, as repre sentative of a truer and deeper reality, than the prose lan guage of historical narrative or philosophical affirmation.3 "
1 El Castillo Interior, Moradas Sextas, iii.
2 Loisy (Le Quatrieme Evangile, p. 762) and others have remarked on their close resemblance to Jewish prophecy ; and their chief peculi arities are found again in the " divine dialogues " of the mediaeval mystics. For the rhythmic character of mystical locutions see von Htigel, The Mystical Element in Religion, Vol. I. p. 189.
8 Tyrrell, Through Scylla and Cbarybdis, p. 230.
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Not otherwise, indeed, can we reconcile the intense conviction of a first-hand experience, " we speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen," 1 the sharp definition of each pictured scene, with reports of sayings which could have had no meaning as addressed to the primitive group of apostles, but which presuppose the outward conditions and developed sacramental doctrines of the Church at the beginning of the second century : the advanced mystical status of the mind which received them. Thus, " Other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours " : true enough of those who followed St. Paul, not of those who preceded him. "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you " — incredible upon the lips of the human Jesus. " If the world hate you, ye know that it hated Me before it hated you" : a direct reference to the first persecutions of the Church. " I am in my Father, and ye in Me, and I in you " : the deeply mystical formula of John's own experience and belief.2 Even Resch, who upholds the traditional authorship of the Fourth Gospel, is driven to the conclusion that it must have been written in a sort of ecstacy, which caused the author to confuse his visions and his memories.3
Moreover, comparison with such known masterpieces of ecstatic composition as the Divine Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena, the Consolations of Angela of Foligno, or the Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich, establish the strong parallels which exist between the sublime discourses of the Johannine Christ and the " divine locutions " in which these, and many other mystics, heard with the inward ear the revelations which they attributed to the direct communications of that same enduring Presence. These chapters have in a high degree
1 John iii. n. 2 John iv. 38, vi. 53, xv. 18, xiv. 20.
3 Ausserkanonische Paralldtexte zu d. Evangelicn ; IV. Paralleltexte zu Johannes. 1896.
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the three qualities which, according to St. Teresa, mark the locutions which really " come from God " — i. e. represent a genuine intuition of the Transcendent — the accent of power, the atmosphere of intense peace, the un forgettable character.1 Did the discourses of the Fourth Gospel cdme fresh into our hands without history, I cannot think that any religious psychologist would hesitate to put them amongst literature of this class. There we find the same air of authority, the same certitude that the words reported were spoken by a Presence at once intimate yet divine. All have to a marked degree that quality of timelessness, that sense of an Eternal Now, which is a peculiarity of the ecstatic consciousness. In such experiences the human spirit seems to be lifted up above the flux of becoming, and tastes the " eternal " aspect of the Divine Life in which it is immersed.
Here it is that we find repeated again and again the solemn / am of the Johannine Christ : the dramatic ex pression of the mystic's certainty. " Thou didst cry from afar," says Augustine, "I AM THAT I AM. And I heard as the heart heareth, and there was left no room for doubt." 2 "1 am Fire, the Accepter of Sacrifice," says the same Presence to St. Catherine of Siena. " Our Lord Jesus oftentimes said," says Julian of Norwich, " I it am, I it am; I it am that is highest, I it am that thou lovest, I it am that thou enjoyest, I it am that thou servest, I it am that thou longest for, I it am that thou desirest, I it am that thou meanest, I it am that is all."3 As Angela of Foligno walks between the vineyards " on the narrow road which leadeth upward to Assisi, and is beyond Spello," it is " said " to her — " 1 am the Holy Spirit, who am come unto thee to bring thee such con solation as thou hast never before tasted. ... I will bear thee company and speak with thee all the way; I will
1 El Castillo Interior, loc. cit.
2 Aug., Conf., Bk. VII. cap. 10.
3 Revelations of Divine Love, cap. 26.
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make no end to my speaking and thou wilt not be able to attend unto any save unto Me. ... I have been with the apostles, who did behold Me with their bodily eyes, but they did not feel Me as thou feelest Me. . . . And He did expound to me His Passion and the other things which He did for our sake; then He did add, ' Behold now if there be aught in Me save love.' " 1
"Happy," says Hilton of such experiences as these, " is that soul which is ever fed with feeling of love in His presence . . . how that presence is felt may better be known by experience than by any writing, for it is the life and the love, the might and the light of a chosen soul."3
The rationalist will naturally attribute all these state ments to the direct operation of those heavenly twins, Hysteria and Hallucination. But even so, they are reports of veritable and normal occurrences within the mystical field of consciousness; and must therefore be taken into account in the effort to understand the origin and meaning of the literature by which that con sciousness seeks to communicate to us its intuitions of Reality. Moreover, for those who profess a belief in the immortality of the soul, the idea that an influence emanat ing from the exalted and discarnate spirit of Jesus of Nazareth might be experienced by those — and perhaps only those — who shared in some degree His transcend ental consciousness and had entered into the Kingdom of new life, does not seem outside the bounds of the reasonable. Nor on the other hand is it unnatural that those deep intuitions of an Infinite Life and Love com panioning and upholding the finite human creature, which are a constant feature of the mystical vision of God,
1 B. Angelas de Fulginio, Visionum ft Instructionum Liber, cap. 20 (Eng. trans., p. 160). It is interesting to notice that Angela, the orthodox mediaeval Catholic, identifies in experience the Holy Spirit with the exalted Christ, as Paul and the Fourth Evangelist had done before her.
2 The Scale of Perfection, Bk. III. cap. 2.
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should be objectivised by the Christian as due to the abiding companionship of the " author and finisher of his faith." John's bold identification of the historic Jesus with the metaphysical Logos, or self-expression of Deity, made this divine-human concept possible to all later con- templatives. Hence students of Christian mysticism are faced by the fact that nearly all the great Christian mystics claim to have experienced such personal and intimate communications from the spiritual order; and that most of them, from St. Paul downwards, somehow identify that Transcendent Personality of whom they are directly con scious with the " exalted Christ." It is this fact which makes Christian mysticism so human and so complete : the abstract and static contemplation of the Godhead as Eternal Rest, to which mystics of every creed naturally tend, being balanced, enriched and brought back into immediate relation with life and growth, by that sense of a personal presence for which the doctrine of the Incarnation allows them to find a place.
It is this " sense of the Presence " which is regnant in the Fourth Gospel, as it is in the later Epistles of St. Paul. But, whilst it seems to have induced in Paul a
Profound indifference to the historical life of the human esus — which formed for that great mystic only one short episode in the intensely actual and eternal life of the spiritual " Christ " — it induced in the more Hellen istic and philosophical mind of John a conviction that somehow the human and the supernal life must be one. So, he projected the Divine Companion whom he knew, in common with all other contemplatives, by direct experience, on to the temporal background of the historic life : he selected from the huge and quickly-growing Christian legend, those events which seemed to him like the types, the dramatic representations of the great wonders and changes which had been wrought within his soul. For him all was fused together in one poignant and dramatic vision of new life.
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Now, as the discourses in which the Divine Nature discloses itself in its relation to man seem to reflect back to "auditive" experiences on the part of the Evangelist; so these incidents — so sharp and realistic in their detail, yet so transfigured by the writer's peculiar point of view — suggest to us that another form of automatic activity had its part in the composition of his gospel. As we read them, we are reminded again and again of those visionary scenes, formed from traditional or historical materials, but enriched by the creative imagination, the deep intuition of the seer, in which the fruit of the mystic's meditation takes an artistic or dramatic instead of a rhetorical form. The lives of the later mystics show to us the astonishing air of realism, the bewildering intermixture of history with dream, which may be achieved in visionary experience of this kind; and which can hardly be understood save by those who realise the creative power of the mystical imagination, the solidarity which exists for the mystic's consciousness between his intensely actual present and the historical past of his faith. In his medita tions, he really lives again through the scenes which history has reported to him : since they are ever-present realities in that Mind of God to which his mind aspires. He has a personal interest in doing this, in learning as it were the curve of the life of Christ; for vita tua, via nostra is his motto — uhe that saith he abideth in Him ought himself also so to walk even as He walked." *
Further, his vivid sense of actuality, the artistic powers which are part of his psychic constitution, help to build up and elaborate the picture of the events upon which he broods. He sees this picture, in that strong light and with that sharp definition which is peculiar to visionary states. He has not produced it by any voluntary process : it surges up from his deeper mind, as do the concepts of the artist, invading that field of consciousness which his state of meditation has kept in a mood of tense yet
1 I John ii. 6.
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passive receptivity. So real it is to him, so authoritative, so independent of his deliberate efforts, that the transi tion is easy from " thus it must have been " to " thus it was." Those critics who claim that the homely and realistic details in the incidents reported by John are proof of their historical character, will find it hard to defend their position in the face of the many visions of a similar kind reported by the Christian visionaries and saints. There we find repeated the peculiar Johannine fusion of poetry and actuality : the minute and homely detail, and the sense of eternal significance.1 This proposition might be illustrated from many sources. From St. Bernard, who received in vision and audition the Virgin's own account of her life : from Angela of Foligno and Julian of Norwich, spectators of the Passion of Christ : from St. Teresa, who saw Him " as He was on the morning of the Resurrection." In all these cases, and probably in that of the Fourth Evangelist also, deep meditation on the life of Christ or of Mary seems to have passed over into visualisation so vivid as to impose itself on the mystic's mind as a veritable " revelation from God" rather than a pictured dream. The narrative parts of the little book called the Meditations of St. Bonaventura, which so strongly influenced the poetry and art of the later Middle Ages, may well have originated in experience of this kind : so sharp is the author's visualisation of the scenes that he describes. I choose, however, instead of these well-known examples, the astonishing and well-attested visions of the poor German nun Anne-Catherine Emmerich, who died in i824.2 This woman, whose literary knowledge of Christianity
1 Such dramatic reconstructions of gospel history, often adorned with original details of great beauty, are common in the mediaeval mystics. See especially Mechthild of Magdeburg, Das Fliessende Licbt der Gottheit and Angela of Foligno, Visionum et Instructionum Liber.
2 The best account of her life and visions is contained in the French edition, Visions £ Anne-Catherine Emmerich, coordonntes en un seul tout,
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was confined to the liturgic gospels, the Church cate chism, the imagery of current books of devotion and the legendary history of the Madonna and Christ, exhibited in profusion all the physical and psychical peculiarities of a mystic of the visionary and ecstatic type. During the last years of her life, her automatic — particularly her visionary — powers became so highly developed that she would pass involuntarily from meditation on any incident in the life of Christ or the Blessed Virgin to a state of intense dramatic vision, in which she saw the incident which she had placed before her mind, re-enacted with every circumstance of realism, and with the addition of countless vivid details unknown either to the gospels or to the legends of the Virgin and of Christ. The impres sion given, as we read the reports of these experiences, is that they are the first-hand accounts of a spectator, possessed of abnormal powers of observation, who was actually present at the event which she relates. The dress of each personage, the movement of crowds, the land scape, the state of the weather, innumerable little human details — only significant because they seem so real — are incorporated into the picture that she describes, side by side with ideal and mystical elements.
She sees the Virgin arriving at Bethlehem, and stop ping to rearrange her dress as she alights from the ass : Joseph running his eye down the genealogical table exhibited at the census, that he may find his family and tribe on them, and then noticing for the first time that Mary is of the house of David. She goes with the Magi on their pilgrimage : " the camels moving very quietly, with long strides, and placing their feet so care fully that one would think they were trying to avoid crushing something." She sees Joseph busy preparing the stable at Bethlehem for his distinguished guests; and the gift of fresh roses which St. Anne sends to her
selon Fordre des faits, par le R. Pere Fr. Joseph Alvas Dulay, traduits par