CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY
““ Mystic’ and “ Mysticism’? are words which meet us constantly in all books that deal with religious experience ; and indeed in many books which do not treat of religion at all. They are generally so vaguely and loosely used that they convey no precise meaning to our minds, and have now cofne to be perhaps the most ambiguous terms in the whole vocabulary of religion. Any vague sense of spiritual things, any sort of sym- bolism, any hazily allegorical painting, any poetry which deals with the soul—worse than that, all sorts of superstitions and magical practices—may be, and often are, described as “ mystical.” A word so generalized seems almost to have lost its meaning ; and indeed, not one of these uses of “‘ Mysticism ” is correct, though the persons to whom they are applied may in some instances be mystics. Mysticism, according to its historical and psycho- logical definitions, is the direct intuition or experience of God ; and a mystic is a person who has, to a greater or less degree, such a direct experience— 9
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one whose religion and life are centred, not merely on an accepted belief or practice, but on that which he regards as first-hand personal knowledge. In Greek’ religion, from which the word comes to us, the myste were those initiates of the ‘‘ mysteries ”’ who were believed to have received the vision of the god, and with it a new and higher life. When the Christian Church adopted this term it adopted, too, this its original meaning. The Christian mystic therefore is one for whom God and Christ are not merely objects of belief, but living facts experimentally known at first-hand ; and mysticism for him becomes, in so far as he responds to its demands, a life based on this conscious communion with God. It is found in experience that this communion, in all its varying forms and degrees, is always a communion of love ; and, in its perfec- tion, so intimate and all-pervading that the word “union ”’ describes it best. When St. Augustine said, “‘ My life shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee,’’ he described in these words the ideal of a true Christian mysticism.
Such a general definition as this evidently needs much more explanation if we are to grasp all that it means. It shows us that mysticism represents the very soul of religion ; that-it is, in fact, another name for that which is sometimes called the “spiritual life,” and that no Church in which it is not present truly lives. Not only the act of contemplation, the vision or state of consciousness in which the soul of the great mystic realizes God, but many humbler and dimmer experiences of prayer, in which the little human spirit truly feels
the presence of the Divine Spirit and Love, must Io
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be included in it. We cannot say that there is a separate “‘ mystical sense,’’ which some men have and some have not, but rather that every human soul has a certain latent capacity for God, and that in some this capacity is realized with an astonish- ing richness. Such a realization may be of many kinds and degrees—personal or impersonal, abrupt and ecstatic, or peaceful and continuous. This will depend partly on the temperament of the mystic, and partly on his religious background and education.
If we take all these experiences together— appearing as they do wherever religion becomes a living interest to men—we find that they are, as a matter of fact, the actual foundations on which all the great faiths are built. All the knowledge of God which is possessed by men has come to us in the last resort through some human consciousness of Him. Each great religious tradition, when we follow it back, is seen to originate in the special experiences of some soul who has acted as the revealer of spiritual reality ; for the great mystics never keep their discoveries to themselves—they have a social meaning, and always try to tell others what they have known. ‘Thus at the root o Mohammedanism we find that it was a direct intuition and revelation of the Eternal, a vivid mystical experience, which made Mohammed the Prophet of the One God ; and the spiritual content of his message has been re-afirmed through the centuries by the Sifi saints. So, too, the Christian Church, rooted in history and fed by experience, has been renewed again and again by the fresh
contacts of its mystics with God. “I desire,” II
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said the great Ruysbroeck, ‘‘to be by the grace of God a life-giving member of Holy Church” ; and no words could express more perfectly what the office of the mystics ought to be. ‘Their work within the religious family is to supply, and keep on supplying, the prophetic element of religion : the ever life-giving consciousness of God and His presence in and with man. We might indeed call them the eyes of the Body of Christ. They maintain that awestruck outlook towards the Infinite, and that warmly loving sense of God’s indwelling grace, without which all religious institutions quickly become mechanical and cold. More than this, their vivid first-hand experience urges them to a total consecration to the service of God and of men. In them the life of prayer informs the life of action: their contemplation of Reality makes all that they do more real. Thus they show what Christian spirituality can be, and what a contribution it can make to the corporate life. By communion with them, the merely active Christian can realize the actuality of the world of spirit, and even catch something of their fire.
The mystics are the greatest of all teachers of prayer, and of that deeper communion to which disciplined prayer can lead. This they can do because of their solid hold upon unseen realities in which, at best, most of us merely “ believe.’ In an experience which often transcended all their powers of expression, they realized God as an abiding Fact, a living Presence and Love ; and by this their whole existence was transformed. And this happened to them, not because He loved and attended to them more than He does to us; but
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because they loved and attended to Him more than wedo. When we read the words of St. Augustine : “T entered, and beheld with the eye of the soul the Light that never changes ; above the eye of the soul, above my intelligence”; or when Angela of Foligno says : “‘ I beheld the ineffable fullness of God, but I can relate nothing of it, save that I have seen the fullness of Divine Wisdom, wherein is all goodness ”; or St. Catherine of Siena: “I now know for certain, Eternal Truth, that Thou wilt not despise the desire of the petitions I have made unto Thee’; or St. Catherine of Genoa, “Tf I could only show you a tithe of that Love in which I dwell !’’—we feel ourselves to be in the presence of an actual experience, so far surpassing common levels of feeling that it eludes both the subject’s powers of speech and ours of apprehen- sion.
It is obvious that since the Reality of God transcends all human conceptions, there is room for many differing types of mystical experience, and all will be incomplete. Sometimes the experience seems by reason of its strangeness dim and form- less ; sometimes rich, personal, vivid. ‘The books which the mystics write represent their efforts to tell us about it and teach us to share it: and if we read these books with sympathy and a humble effort to understand, we shall find that they do tell or at least suggest to us something of the “ mighty Beauty’ which these great lovers of God have known. As artists and musicians, able to see and hear created beauty to which average eyes and ears are closed, interpret and express some of it for us in their works and so give us a new vision of
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the world ; so the great mystics, who are geniuses in the sphere of religion, show to us the uncreated beauty of spiritual realities which we cannot find alone, and form a great body of witness to humanity’s experience of God. In reading them, as in reading great poetry, we are taken out of ourselves, and become aware of deep regions of truth and beauty still beyond our reach. The Reality they are trying to show us is the same Reality which is the object of our faith ; but we see “through a glass darkly,” and they, in their best moments, face to face.
It is only this view of the mystics, as people who see and experience more vividly a Reality which is there for us all, that can bring us into brotherly relation with them, and so help us in our own lives. So long as we regard them as spiritual freaks, practising some intense and esoteric sort of religion opposed to that which is sometimes called “* practical Christianity,” they will remain foreign to us ; and we shall miss our share of that life and light, that special knowledge of God and of the soul’s relation to Him, which it is their first business to bring into the world. But if we receive their messages with the sympathy and humility which we must bring to all works of art that we desire to understand, then they will increase our religious sensitiveness, give to us a new standard and incen- tive in prayer, and initiate us, at least in some degree, into the veritable “‘ riches of the House of God.” ;
The classic Christian writers say that all our knowledge of God comes to us from three sources. First, He is manifested in the natural world and
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its creatures ; and realization of this is ‘“ natural theology.” Next, He has declared Himself to us in history ; in many varying degrees, but supremely in and through the Christian revelation. This aspect of truth 1s expressed in “‘ dogmatic theology.” Last, He is found through the soul’s secret and direct experience ; and this is called ‘‘ mystical theology.” For the fullest development of our spirits, a complete all-round religious life, we need something of all these three factors. We must learn to see and adore God’s immanent presence in nature; we must draw near to His perfect self-expression in the historic Christ ; we must seek Him at first-hand in the life of prayer. But it is only by this third aspect of religion, the cultiva- tion of the secret inner life, that we can hope fully to enter into the other two. Without what might generally be called a prayerful disposition of mind, neither God’s revelation in nature nor the teaching and practices of the Church can mean or do much for our souls. ‘Therefore we must learn from the mystics, the great artists of that inner life, if we wish to grow up into mature men and women of God. The history of mysticism in the Church is the history of the reaction of many different tempera- ments to one Reality and one demand. ‘Thus it is » a varied history, as anything so closely concerned with human character is bound to be. It does not put before us one particular kind of experience or one uniform type of perfection. Francis and Richard Rolle, full of poetry and music ; Catherine, the tanner’s daughter; Ignatius, the aristocratic soldier ; John of the Cross, the peasant saint ; Teresa, the cloistered celibate ; Lucie Christine, 15
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the devoted mother and wife; Boehme, the working cobbler; Fénelon, the courtly pridit: they all form one family and all go the same way. We find defenders of orthodoxy and initiators of heresy, deep thinkers, vivid writers, passionate lovers, vigorous men of action, organizers, parents of spiritual families, and solitary souls. But a man or woman who is to rank among the mystics of the Church must have some channel of self-expression, must be a God-possessed and life-giving personality within the corporate religious scheme.
We must not be afraid to admit that some of the experiences, actions, and conceptions which we find among the mystics were excessive and distorted ; . that they were sometimes affected by mistaken views both of divine and human nature, or attributed spiritual value to emotion of a lower kind. This is one reason why mysticism so greatly needs to be tested and corrected by the general good sense of the Church, and so often tends to extravagance when divorced from it. A mystic is not necessarily a perfect human being ; and the imperfections and crudities of his character or outlook may influence and mingle with his mysti- cism. He may at times be feverishly emotional, or lacking in genial appreciation of his fellows ; he may be too narrowly intense, combative, in- tolerant. In Mechthild of Magdeburg, Richard Rolle, George Fox, we see traces of some of these failings.
It is true that the nearer the mystic draws to God, the more that meekness and love which He always awakens in the soul will triumph over these
faults of character. Still, something of the natural 16
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disposition will often remain, and must be taken into account by us. These human inequalities affect the self-expression of the mystic, and help to produce that variety of type which makes Christian history so rich and so interesting. They warn us, too, against the error of over-simplification, of trying to reduce mysticism to a single and identical experience. ‘This experience will vary in the degree in which human beings vary ; that is to say, it will exhibit the freshness and intricacy, the infinitely graduated responses, characteristic of all real life.
In reading the mystics, then, we must be careful not to cut them out of their backgrounds and try to judge them by spiritual standards alone. ‘They are human beings immersed in the stream of human history ; children of their own time, their own Church, as well as children of Eternal Love. Like other human beings, that is to say, they have their social and their individual aspects ; and we shall not obtain a true idea of them unless both be kept in mind.
A. On the historical side, every mystic is pro- foundly influenced by his environment, and cannot be understood in isolation from it. He is rooted in the religious past of his race, its religious present surrounds and penetrates him whether he will or no, and through this present and this past some, indeed much, of his knowledge of God must come. However independent, however “ direct ’’ the revela- tion he has received, careful investigation shows how much, as a matter of fact, he owes to his spiritual ancestry, his reading, the influences that have shaped. his early life. Were he indeed the lonely
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THE MYSTICS “OP THE CHORCH
soul he sometimes likes to think himself, he would have no significance for his fellow-men, and such a term as “‘the mystics of the Church” would be meaningless. But even where he is in opposition to the external Church-life of his period—as he often is to a greater or less degree—he yet remains in a wider sense the debtor, indeed the child of the Church. The common food of the great Christian family sustains him ; and he is obliged to use its common language if he wants to be understood. From it come, ultimately, most of his conceptions ; and where he remains by choice within the institu- tion, the beneficent effects of the corporate life, the help given him by tradition, are strongly marked.
As the life and growth of the Church proceed, her corporate consciousness, enriched by all the discoveries of the saints, grows richer : so that she has more and more to give to each of her sons. The beautiful interdependence of all Christian souls, living and dead, everything that is meant by the doctrine of the “Communion of Saints,” is here strongly illustrated ; and refutes the common idea that mysticism is individualistic, and can flourish independently of history or tradition. Thus all Christian mysticism is soaked in the language and ideas of the Bible; is perpetually taught and re-taught by St. Paul and St. John. In addition to this, it reflects the special religious colour of the period to which it belongs, and hands on to a later time the spiritual treasures extracted from it. The Catholic mystics of the Middle Ages have the peculiar beauties of their epoch, and frequently in their sayings remind us of the very spirit of
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Gothic art. After the Reformation, another mood and attitude predominate, yet the link with the past is not really broken. Even such one-sided mystics as the Quakers, who hold that all truth is revealed directly by the Inner Light of God in the soul, or the Quietists, who try to wait in a blank state of passivity for His message, still depend for their most characteristic notions on the deep common beliefs of Christendom concerning God and His com- _ munion with the spirit of man. ,
The corporate side of Christian mysticism has therefore great importance. If we want really to understand its literature, its history, and especially its p8ychology, we cannot afford to neglect the influence of that great and growing body of spiritual truth on which, knowingly or not, each successive mystic feeds his soul. In all religious experience, a large part is and must be played by that which psychologists call ‘‘ apperception.” By appercep- tion is meant the fact that there are in all our experiences two distinct factors. There is first the apprehension, the message, which comes to us from the outside world; secondly there are the ideas, images and memories already present in our minds, which we involuntarily combine with the message, and by which we develop, modify or explain it. Now this mixture of perceptions and memories obviously takes place in all mystical experience. The mind which the mystic brings to his encounter with God is not a blank sheet. On the contrary, it is generally richly furnished with religious ideas and metaphors, and trained to special kinds of religious practices, all of which help him to actualize the more or less obscure
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apprehensions of Eternal Truth that come to him in his contemplations. Were it not so, he could hardly tell us anything of that which he has felt and known. ‘Thus it is that certain symbols and phrases—for instance, the Fire of Love, the . Spiritual Marriage, the Inward Light, the classic stages of the soul’s ascent—occur again and again in the writings of the mystics, and suggest to us the substantial unity of their experiences. These phrases lead us back to the historical background within which those mystics emerge ; and remind us that they are, like other Christians, members of one another, and living (though with a peculiar intensity) the life to which all Christians are called.
B. So much for Christian mysticism in its corporate aspect; that great continuing fact of first-hand spiritual religion, first-hand communion with God, which has never failed to vitalize the Church within which it appears. But of equal importance for us is its individual aspect: the form which it takes, the effects it produces, in the souls of the mystics themselves.
Mysticism has been defined as “the science of the Love of God,” and certainly those words describe its essence. But, looking at it as it appears in the Christian Church in all its degrees and forms, I would prefer to call it “the life which aims at union with God.” These terms—life, aim, union —suggest its active and purposive character ; the fact that true Christian mysticism is neither a philosophic theory nor a name for delightful religious sensations, but that it is a life with an aim, and this aim is nothing less than the union
of man’s spirit with the very Heart of the Universe. 20
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That more or less vivid experience of God which may come early in the mystic’s career, and always awakens a love and a longing for Him, is, so to speak, only the raw material of real mysticism. It is in the life and growth which follow upon this first apprehension, the power developed, the creative work performed, that we discover its true value and its place in the economy of the spiritual world.
All life, as we know, involves growth. It begins in a small way, changes, develops to maturity. It is greatly affected by its surroundings, needs food and shelter, expresses itself in varied responses and activities. It is creative, can become the parent of new life.
These characters, easily seen in the life of the natural world, are equally true of the life of the spiritual world. The life of the mystic develops from small beginnings, and passes through succes- sive stages of growth, marked by different types of response to its spiritual surroundings. Mystics need food for their souls, and this they get from prayer and reading, from their silent contemplation of God, and frequently from the sacraments of their Church—for the idea that the typical Christian mystic is a religious free-lance, independent or contemptuous of tradition and organized worship, is, as we shall afterwards see, an illusion.
Finally, mystics are truly creative. Through their lives, deeds, and teachings, they are great sources of new spiritual life ; they gather disciples, and constantly become, as it were, the fathers or mothers of spiritual families. It was his intense mystical life in Christ which made St. Paul the real parent of the first Christian Churches ; so that it
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was in no merely metaphorical sense that he called them his ‘little children,” of whom he had “‘ travailed in birth.” No one can read the Epistle to the Romans without realizing what that life- giving life had meant to him or what it had cost ; and we could say the same of St. Francis, St. Teresa, George Fox, Wesley, and many more. . Thus by Christian mysticism we mean a conscious growing life of a special kind: that growth in “ Love, true Being, and creative spiritual Person- ality ’? which has been described as the essence of holiness. ‘This life does not involve an existence withdrawn from common duties into some rapturous religious dreamland, which many people suppose to be mystical. The hard and devoted life of some of the greatest mystics of the Church at once contradicts this view. It is a life inspired by a vivid and definite aim ; the life of a dedicated will moving steadily in one direction, towards a perfect and unbroken union with God. Whatever form the experience of the mystics took—whether expressed in the deep peace of contemplative prayer or in ecstasy and other ‘‘abnormal ways’”’—at bottom all comes down to this. They felt; or rather feel —for there are plenty of them in the world to-day —an increasing and overwhelming certainty of first-hand contact with God, penetrating and trans- figuring them. By it they were at once deeply humbled yet intensely stimulated : it became, once for all, the supreme factor in their lives, calling forth a total response from mind, feeling and will. Such an experience, though not peculiar to Christianity, has taken within the Christian Church a special form which is not found elsewhere. ‘There 22
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are, of course, two distinct but complementary currents in Christian feeling and worship. One is directed towards God, the Eternal and Infinite Spirit ; the other towards His incarnate revelation in Jesus Christ. ‘These two strains are reflected in Christian mystical experience. On the one hand, we have a group of mystics of whom St. Augustine and St. Catherine of Genoa are supreme types, whose dominant spiritual apprehension is of the absolute Being of God, and of the soul’s union with Him. In technical language, they are “theocentric.”” God is realized by them under more or less impersonal symbols, and especially as Light and Love. ‘‘ What,” says St. Augustine, “do I love when I love Thee? It is a certain light that I love, and melody, and fragrance and embrace, that I love when I love my God.”’ Mystics of this temperament often show close correspon- dences with the experience of other great lovers of God, outside the Christian fold. This should not surprise us; for since God is one, and “is not far from any one of us,” there must be a common element in our limited human apprehension of Him. .
On the other hand, the inner life of many of the most ardent Christian mystics is controlled by their sense of a direct personal communion with our Lord: they are “ Christocentric,” and can say with Walter Hilton that for them “God, grace and Jesus are all one.” Within that consciousness of God as the eternal and abiding Reality, which is perhaps she mystic sense, this type of religious — experience apprehends the intimate presence here and now of a personal Love, identified by them
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with the Risen and Exalted Christ, and accepted as the Master, Companion, and Helper of the soul. Christianity is unique among the world’s great religions in this : that its Founder is to His closest followers not merely a prophet, pattern of conduct, or Divine figure revealed in the historic past, but the object here and now of an experienced com- munion of the most vivid kind. Christians claim that this communion has continued unimpaired for nineteen hundred years, and is the true source of the Church’s undying energy. Those persons who have—in continuous succession since the first Easter—most vividly experienced this, have been the means of making the Church’s loyalty to her Master a living thing. These people are properly to be called mystics ; for believers in the Incar- nation must, with the Fourth Evangelist, regard their apprehension as an apprehension of God in Christ. As Fénelon observes : ‘“‘ The Word, when He speaks to us in the state of prayer as Incarnate, must be heard with as great attention as when He speaks without representing to us His Incarnation.” Plainly, then, the lovely medieval cult of the Holy Name, and that which is sometimes called the Evangelical experience, are alike mystical in character. Indeed, it is only by depth, intensity, and closeness that we can distinguish from these types of personal religion the intercourse claimed by the great Christocentric mystics, such as St. Catherine of Siena or Richard Rolle. The same must be said in respect of the sacramental experience through which some of the most ap- eae abstract contemplatives, among them uysbroeck and St. Catherine of Genoa, have 24
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actualized and supported their vividly personal sense of communion with God. This, too, differs in degree rather than in kind from that which nourishes the religious life of myriads of simple souls,
These two streams of feeling—in technical language, the theocentric and the Christocentric tendencies—actualized in varying degrees and pro- portions by fervent and contemplative spirits, make together the mystical consciousness of the Church. Within that atmosphere of spirit which is the essence of religion, this consciousness swings, as it were, between the poles of two great experiences : the transcendent and the incarnate manifestations of God. Historically these experiences are derived, the first through St. Augustine from Greek, the second through St. Paul from New Testament, sources. Psychologically they represent in their extreme forms the complementary reactions of two different types of mind to the grace of God.
In the individual, one or the other of them inevitably tends to predominate. But the greatest and most truly characteristic of the Christian mystics, from St. Paul onwards—among them Jacopone da Todi, our own Julian of Norwich, St. Teresa, and above all the mighty Ruysbroeck —embrace in their span both these aspects of man’s fullest and deepest communion with Creative Love. In their contemplations of Eternity they can feel and know the Infinite God un- incarnate, as the ‘“‘onefold and Ineffable,” the “Light without measure, and Goodness without Form.” Yet they can love and serve Him incar- nate, as the eternal and indwelling Christ. Thus
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including in their sweep both the historic and the unchanging manifestations of the Divine Life, they develop at their best a type of spirituality which is both lofty and homely ; penetrated through and through by the awed sense of God’s Eternal Being, yet balancing this by an ardent personal devotion to, and communion with, Christ.
A word must be said in conclusion about the ‘‘mystic way” to which constant reference 1s made in works on mysticism. The ‘‘ mystic way,” with its three stages of purgation, illumination, and union, is a formula which was first used by the Neoplatonists and borrowed from them by Christian writers on the spiritual life. It describes in general terms the way in which the soul of the mystic usually develops ; and is paralleled by the other formula, ‘‘ Beginner, Proficient, and Perfect,” which many of the medizval teachers preferred. We must remember that all these terms are often used by different writers in different senses, and thus become misleading if too rigidly understood.
By “ purgation ”’ is usually meant the purification of character and detachment from earthly interests, which is worked partly by the soul’s own penitence and effort when it first seriously begins the spiritual life, and partly by the inflowing grace of God. Such purification always marks the early stages of mystical experience; and is an intensive form of the difficult self-conquest to which, in some degree, all who really face the issues of life and the facts of their own nature are called. The term ‘““purgative way” is also sometimes applied—for instance, by St. John of the Cross—to the gradual spiritualization of the mystic’s prayer, especially
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the painful struggles and obscurities which accom- pany the transition from the stage of meditation on religious themes and figures to the beginnings of real contemplation.
By “‘illumination”’ is meant that peaceful certi- tude of God, and perception of the true values of existence in His light, which is the reward of the surrendered will: a perception which, as it grows, enters more and more deeply into the truths of religion and the meaning and loveliness of life— as when Angela of Foligno perceived that “the whole World is full of God.” All artists in whom the love of beauty is greater than the love of self enjoy a measure of this illumination. These two stages are not rigidly separated. Indeed, in many mystics purification and progressive illumination are seen to go hand in hand; for the nearer these draw to the vision of the Perfect, the more imperfections they discover in themselves.
Finally, by “‘ union ”’ is meant that perfect and self-forgetting harmony of the regenerate will with God which makes the full-grown mystic capable of ‘being to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.” Whereas in the earlier stages he saw and moved towards the life of Spirit, now he finds himself to be immersed in it, inspired and directed in all his actions by the indwelling love of God. This is the flower of the consecrated life, and often brings with it an astonishing access of energy and endurance, a power of dealing with persons and events far beyond the self’s “‘ natural ” capacities—as we see in such lives of heroic action as those of the early Franciscans, St. Teresa, or the Quaker saints. This is the true “spiritual
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marriage” of the soul: a union with God so completely established that it persists unbroken among the distractions of the world, and often drives those who achieve it to renounce the private joys of contemplation in order to do work for God. The “ prayer of union” described by St. Teresa and others is the reflection within the devotional life of this total and creative self-abandonment.
_ It need hardly be said that all these terms are general; many differing degrees and sorts of attainment are subsumed under them, and they are seldom used with scientific exactitude. We must not therefore make them into a diagram to which we expect every mystic to conform, nor must the successive degrees of prayer and contemplation which many of the mystics describe to us be elevated into scientific laws. We are to deal with intensely living creatures, conditioned by temperament, his- tory and environment, and must expect them to display the variety and freshness characteristic of all true life.
ILLUSTRATIVE WORKS
Butler, Dom Cuthbert. Western Mysticism. London, 1922.
Herrmann, W. The Communion of the Christian with God. London, 1895.
Hiigel, Baron F. von. ‘The Mystical Element of Religion. 2nd edition. London, 1923.
Inge, W. R. Christian Mysticism. London, 1899.
Poulain, A, The Graces of Interior Prayer. London, IQIO.
Underhill, E. Mysticism, oth edition. London, 1924.
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