CHAPTER II

MYSTICISM IN THE BIBLE ST. PAUL
CurisTian literature begins with a handful of letters written by a mystic: that is to say, with the epistles of St. Paul, the oldest books of the New Testament. Though we might well appeal to the Synoptic portrait of Jesus, as our real guarantee for that balanced life of loving communion with God and active charity to men which is the ideal of Christian mysticism—still, the Gospels as we have them are later than St. Paul’s career. This means that the earliest documentary witness to Jesus Christ which we possess is the witness of mysticism ; and it tells us, not about His earthly life, but about the intense and transfiguring experi- ence of His continued presence, enjoyed by one who had never known Him in the flesh. With St. Paul all that 1s most distinctive of truly Christian mysticism bursts on the world in its richest form, becomes the inspiration of his missionary labours, and is bequeathed by him to the infant community. Therefore any account of the office which the mystics fill in the Church must begin here.
Yet even at this apparent fountain-head the solidarity of mankind, the dependence of the soul, not only on God but also on other souls, shows
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itself. Christian mysticism has its roots in pre- Christian history. The voice which spoke to St. Paul on the road to Damascus addressed a mind steeped in the Old Testament, coloured especially by its prophetic writings, and accepting without question the prophetic claim to a first-hand experi- ence of God. If, then, by the mysticism of the New Testament we must chiefly understand the claim of the first disciples to direct communion with the Spirit of Jesus, that mysticism contains and hands on factors already present in the highest forms of Jewish religion. It was fed by Hebrew literature, perhaps specially by the Psalms ; and the Church, basing on those psalms her own devotional life, was true to a great historic fact. Though on its philosophic side later Christian mysticism is often said to be derived from the Neoplatonists, this dependence upon Scripture is its real characteristic. From St. Augustine to Blake, all its greatest figures are emphatically “ Bible Christians” ; and obscure Biblical phrases are the real sources of many of those symbols and images over which students now puzzle and dispute.
A conviction of direct communion with God— a vivid consciousness of His reality and presence —is characteristic of all the loftiest Old Testament writers, and indeed of Jewish personal religion as a whole. This conviction, present in germ even in the early non-literary prophets, with their ten- dency to ecstasy and trance and their merely national conception of Jehovah, becomes marked in the half-legendary stories centred on Samuel and Elijah ; where no one can miss the accent of
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sincerity in their descriptions of secret intercourse between the soul of the prophet and his God.
In such a verse as 1 Kings xix. 12 we surely recognize that absolute certitude which comes into the mind of the mystic through the deep quiet of his contemplation. Such experiences were the true, indeed the only possible, source of the immense demand for a genuine and not merely formal purity and righteousness which these men and their successors made on the still half-civilized Hebrew tribes of their day. Developed in the literary prophets, from Amos onwards, this implicit mysticism reaches its culmination in the First and Second Isaiah. A rich and direct consciousness of God, essentially mystical in character, inspired the great utterances of Ezekiel. The profound sense of the intercourse of spirit with Spirit is strongly marked in Jeremiah, who is perhaps the most mystical of the prophets—certainly the one who has most directly revealed to us the secrets of his own inner life. .
Moreover, many of the psycho-physical peculi- arities which often appear in connection with Christian mysticism—ecstasy, visions, the hearing of supernatural voices, the performance under interior compulsion of bizarre symbolic acts—seem to have been prominent in the prophets; who become more intelligible to us when we compare them with their real successors, the mystics of the Christian Church. In the earliest stages of Hebrew prophecy, as in other primitive religions, ecstasy —supposed to involve Divine possession, but most often merely releasing subconscious intuitions and dreams of varying degrees of value—seems to have
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been deliberately induced, by music, dancing, and other devices. There was something dervish-like in the methods of the first ‘‘ prophetic bands ”’ ; and even after this crude stage of development was passed, many of the oracles of the great prophets appear to have been delivered in such an “ inspired or automatic state as that in which St. Catherine of Siena dictated her Dialogue. Though some of their accounts of visions may be regarded as a literary convention, it is certain that many represent real experiences, closely allied to those visions and voices in which the deep spiritual intuitions of the mystics are frequently expressed.
In the great dynamic vision which marks the consecration of Isaiah (Isa. vi.) we have the evident record under pictorial imagery of a mystical experi- ence of God of the highest order.t Here the mysticism of the Old Testament achieves its most sublime expression. In these few verses we are able to recognize all the distinctive moments in a human soul’s apprehension of the Being of God. First, the revelation of an ineffable Reality, filling and transcending all things, upon which even the highest of created spirits dare not look :
‘* T saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and His skirts filled the temple. Above Him stood the seraphim : each one had six wings ; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.”
t Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige, regards this as one of the greatest of all descriptions of man’s apprehension of the Divine. We may com- pare the opinion of those Biblical critics who consider that it describes a heavy thunderstorm, in the course of which Isaiah became un- nerved:
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Then the unmeasured awe and adoration thrilling through the created Universe, and expressed in the seraphs’ song :
“ Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts: the fulness of the whole earth is His glory !”
Then the abject nothingness and self-abasement of the creature, thus brought face to face with the otherness and mystery of the Eternal:
“Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone ; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips : for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.”
Then the cleansing pain which follows quickly on the vision : the immediate sense of vocation and self-offering which completes the soul’s response :
“Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: and he touched my mouth with it, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips ; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged. And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for gaowetpen. 1 said, Here am «I; .séend«me”’ (Isa. vi. 1-8, R.V.).
This majestic passage has great historical as well as psychological importance ; for medieval mystics, recognizing its quality, have used its images again and again. One thing only seems missing in it: the note of joyous intimacy, the tender feeling, which always mingles with the awestruck rapture of the Christian ecstatic: as we see if we compare it, for instance, with the vision which determined the vocation of St. Francis of Assisi, or with the gentle, almost ironic, accent of reproach in the
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voice that spoke to St. Paul on the way to Damascus. Here is the dividing line between the spiritual experiences of the Old and New Testaments. Yet if we refuse to allow that behind the visions and oracles of Hebrew prophecy there lies a genuine mystical apprehension of God, we are left without any adequate explanation of the way in which the vivid sense of His directive presence entered Hebrew religion and was maintained in it. Still more are we at a loss to understand why the intui- tions of the prophet had for him such irresistible authority. But, once we acknowledge the unity of man’s religious sense, we see that the reluctant Jeremiah accepting his destiny from the inward monitions of God, or Isaiah going three years barefoot and dressed as a captive at the Divine command, are the true spiritual ancestors of the apostle who “ was not disobedient to the heavenly vision,” and in the strength which that vision gave him created the Gentile Church.
Not only Jewish prophecy, but also Jewish poetry, has conditioned and nourished the develop- ment of the Christian mystics. The Synoptics represent our Lord Himself as deeply influenced by the poetry of the Psalms, and meeting His death with their phrases upon His lips ; and even apart from this, the continuity of feeling between the highest reaches of Jewish spirituality expressed in them and the Christian mystical temper is complete. The mystics of the Church have ob- tained more food and stimulus from this than from any other single literary source. From the psalmists come the expressions by which they best communicate their sense of the intimate yet uni-
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versal presence of God, His indwelling light and love; as in Psalms xxiii., lxiii., and the wonderful Psalm cxxxix.—above all, Psalm Ixxiii., with its fusion of abasement and loving certitude :
So foolish was I, and ignorant:
I was as a beast before Thee,
Nevertheless I am continually with Thee :
Thou hast holden me by my right hand.
Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel,
And afterward receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but Thee ?
And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.
The essence of the mystical life and attitude is in these lines.
St. Paul, then, the first and one of the greatest of the Church’s mystics, looking forward to the great procession of Christian mystical saints and giving them the language in which their most sacred apprehensions were to be expressed, looks back to the Hebrew prophets and psalmists, and testifies to the unbroken stream of spiritual life which quickens the Church. We recognize easily in him the three-fold strand of the “‘ mystic way ”’ : the moral struggles and purifications, the slow self-conquest, so vividly described in Romans ; the deep insights and illuminations characteristic of the developing life of prayer ; the sense of unbroken union with Christ which sustained his immense activities ; the final achievement of that surrender and rebirth in power in which he was able to say “‘ I live, yet not I.” Comparison of his epistles with the most trustworthy parts of Acts helps us to reconstruct, at least tentatively, the probable course of this spiritual evolution; and in
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so doing gives us a clue to the true meaning of many of his sayings, which, supposed by aca- demic critics to be statements of doctrine, are often desperate attempts to describe or suggest his own experience.
The swift expansion in our Lord’s outlook and teaching which we can trace in the Gospels, and which must be placed in the short period—perhaps less than two years—between the Baptism and the Crucifixion, stands in vivid contrast to that of His greatest follower. The conversion of St. Paul took place somewhere between the years a.D. 30 and a.p. 36. It follows from this that whether we regard Galatians (possibly a.p. 46) or 1 Thessa- lonians (circa A.D. 49) as his earliest surviving epistle, at least ten and perhaps fifteen or more years elapsed between his baptism and his appear- ance aS a missionary apostle and organizer of the Churches. We can deduce by the methods of comparative psychology something of the way in which this period was probably spent. He was born in the early years of the century, and therefore at the time of St. Stephen’s martyrdom would be _about thirty years of age. An exact and well- instructed Jew, evidently possessing a marked re- _ ligious temperament, his conversion was in no sense a conversion to God: the struggle which it ended had been a struggle to avoid recognizing in Jesus God’s manifestation among men. ‘The voice, the light, the certitude which changed his life, were essentially an inward revelation of this. The actual form this experience took tells us much about St. Paul’s temperament; its emotional vehemence, its psychic instability. In many lives of the
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mystical type the moment of crisis and re-birth has been marked by the hearing of a voice, summing up and forcing on the mind the truth, the need, or the choice which the self has been trying to ignore. Thus St. Francis, at the moment which decided his vocation, suddenly heard the voice of Christ say to him, ‘“ Francis ! go and repair My house ’’ ; and Suso, hesitating before the sufferings demanded by complete self-abandonment to God’s will, heard the bracing command, “ Play the man!’ We might indeed expect that the crisis which determined St. Paul’s surrender should take the form of a voice speaking, since the call of the Hebrew prophet is often thus described. Never- theless in this, as in most great conversions, the actual experience was merely the last stage in a process begun long before. The gently ironic words, ‘‘It is hard for thee to kick against the goad !”’ suggest that the pressure to which Paul at last surrendered had been long and steadily. applied ; and the record in Acts gives us its prob- able origin, namely the events associated with St. Stephen’s martyrdom. ‘Though other onlookers at this tragedy only saw perhaps the execution of a tiresome fanatic, something in St. Paul responded to the joyful heroism and certitude of Stephen, and realized that they had an origin which lay beyond the world. We have here, in fact, the first and one of the greatest of examples of that peculiarly con- tagious character of Christian joy and holiness described by St. Augustine in the famous saying : “One loving spirit sets another spirit on fire.” Through Stephen ‘‘ gazing up into heaven” with self-forgetfulness and delight, St. Paul receives an 37
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impression which he cannot forget. His acquies- cence in the martyrdom, the almost frenzied hatred of the Christians implied in the words “ made havoc of the Church... threatenings and slaughter ’’ (Acts viii. 3 and ix. 1)—all this seems to indicate desperate instinctive resistance to a revelation which he knew, if once accepted, would demand his life. The reaction to God or to Christ of the real mystical temperament, once it 1s awakened, is always that which psychology calls an all-or-none reaction. The whole impulsive nature first resists, and then, when at last the pressure becomes too strong, capitulates completely.
Of this law the conversion of St. Paul pro- vides a perfect illustration. His initiation into the mystical life was both realistic and ecstatic in character. In all subsequent references to it he states his own distinct conviction that the Risen Jesus, who had appeared many times to the disciples, and whose continued activity with them is assumed in the last verses of St. Matthew and St. Mark, “‘ appeared to me also,’’ and once and for all laid hold on him—‘ I was apprehended” (Phil. iii, 12). The rest of his life was to be governed by the wonder and awe of that experience ; he was steadily “‘ obedient to the heavenly vision,” and slowly all that was involved in it unfolded, and more and more possessed and fed his soul. Hence- forth, as Deissmann has well said, “‘ At the com- manding centre of St. Paul’s contemplation of Christ there stands the Living One who is also the Crucified, or the Crucified who is also alive” ; and further: ‘‘ There can be no doubt that St. Paul became influential in the world’s history
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precisely by reason of his mysticism about Christ.”
The violent breaking up of his resistances, the flooding of his mind with a new loyalty and love, produced in this ardent temperament intense psycho-physical effects. The impression of a dazzling light was followed by a brief functional blindness, in which he remained three days without food or drink ; marking the intensity of the crisis in which he had passed from the old to the new life. All that the war taught us of such psychic illness lights up and supports the short account in Acts of the seizure and its cure. From it St. Paul emerged—as St. Francis from his experience at S. Damiano—‘ another man than before,” and at once began, with his natural thoroughness and ardour, to evangelize in the name of Christ ; already become for him a boundless source of energy and enthusiasm.
Since our only object here is to study the character of St. Paul’s mysticism, his claim to the foremost place among the mystics of the Church, there is no need to follow out in detail his external history save in so far as it reveals his inner growth. The fact which mainly concerns us is this : in his mystical experience he breaks entirely new ground. He is the unique link between the primitive apostolic experiences of communion with the Risen Jesus and the still-continued Christocentric mysticism of the Church; and might with some justice be called both the first of Evangelicals and first of Catholics.
We can gather pretty well from references in his letters and our knowledge of the mystical
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type the lines upon which his inner life developed. These letters, it is true—written with practical objects and largely addressed to groups of persons at the non-mystical levels of religious feeling— are not intended to disclose the deep secrets of his personal experience. Yet, as we become intimate with them, we begin to realize what their familiar phrases implied for the man who used them first ; and who was actually creating the forms under which, ever since, the Christian experience has been handed on. The raw material of St. Paul’s mysticism was doubtless a temperament specially sensitive towards religion, unstable, given to the alternate depression and exaltation so characteristic of the type, and unable to rest in anything less than God. We may add to these general predispositions the violent upheaval and complete surrender of his conversion. But the upheaval disclosed interior conflicts as well as aptitudes ; the surrender was that of an ardent neophyte, and not of a completed saint. It placed him only at the beginning of the way. ‘Therefore the statement in Galatians, that without discussion with his fellow-Christians, or even waiting to make the acquaintance of the apostles, St. Paul at once retreated into Arabia, carries with it its own explanation. Perhaps in imitation of what he had heard of Jesus, perhaps impelled only by the sense of his own need, he was driven into the solitude of the wilderness to face the facts of his new life and discover the will of God. Not till three years after his conversion does he make what appears to be his first visit as a Christian to Jerusalem.
It is certain that those years had been full of
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difficulty and costly moral effort: all that the later mystics meant by the purgative way. The Gentile Church was not founded by a dreamy pietist, but by a vigorous man of action acquainted with human conflicts and temptations. If, over twenty years later, he could write in Rom, vii. the unequalled description of the incessant battle between his higher and lower impulses, his moral impotence when under the ‘‘ Law,” and the rescue effected in him by the power of Christ, what must this inward struggle have been when at its height P We may be sure that when he speaks of the Christian process as a veritable death and re-birth to new life—and custom has blunted for us the tremendous meaning of these words—he is not merely borrowing an image from the pagan mysteries, but describing something through which he has passed. “* For if we have grown into him by a death like his, we shall grow into him by a resurrection like his, knowing as we do that our old self has been crucified with him in order to crush the sinful body’ (Rom. vi. 5, 6, Moffatt). This period of self-conquest seems to have been accompanied by the development of those visionary and ecstatic tendencies which the circumstances of his conversion prove St. Paul to have possessed. We are told in Acts that while praying in the Temple at Jerusalem, he experienced an ecstasy in which knowledge of his peculiar vocation was revealed to him; and we have his own admission that at least during this period he was subject to such visitations—apparently even in the pronounced form known to later mystics as “‘ rapture,” when the soul seems caught up beyond time and place 4I
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to an immediate apprehension of reality, and con- sciousness of bodily life is lost. 7
In the violent little letter of which 2 Cor. xu. forms part, he speaks of the “‘ abundance of revela- tions” or “wealth of visions”? (Moffatt) which he has enjoyed; and of the persistent ill-health which accompanied them and was probably, as with many of the later mystics, a direct result of the psycho-physical strain involved in his ecstasies. If this letter, as is probable, was written about A.D. 53, then the great spiritual experience recorded in it as having occurred fourteen years before must have happened about a.p. 39; 4 likely date for the visit to Jerusalem which is described in Acts xx.17 and Gal.i.18. In this passage St. Paul distinctly lays claim to a full ecstatic experience, with its special characters of a narrowed and en- tranced consciousness—‘‘ whether in the body or out of the body I cannot tell,”—and of ineffability, “hearing unspeakable words,” or, as Moffatt translates, “‘ sacred secrets which no human lips can repeat.”
If, then, we are to obtain a true idea of St. Paul’s personality and the source of his amazing powers, we must correct the view which sees him mainly as theologian and organizer by that which recognizes in him a great contemplative. For here we have not only a sense of vivid contact with the Risen Jesus, translated into visionary terms—‘‘I fell into a trance and saw him saying to me’’—but an immediate apprehension of the Being of God, such as we meet again in St. Augustine and in certain medieval ecstatics.
If we compare one of the later Christian mystics,
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of whose development we know a good deal, with our fragmentary knowledge of St. Paul’s inner life, much emerges that is of interest. One of the best examples for this purpose is St. Teresa ; for though the careers of the cloistered nun and of the unresting Jewish missionary seem at first sight to have little in common, the spiritual likeness between them is often close. Both possessed a devouring enthusiasm for God and Christ, and were subject to voices, visions and ecstatic trances. Both were persons of singular courage, energy and common sense. The mystical life of St. Teresa falls into two distinct parts. During the first she lived in much retirement in her convent; displaying little outward initiative, but making great progress in the interior life. Towards its close she, like St. Paul, enjoyed “an abundance of revelations ”’ and experienced the visions and ecstasies described in her Life. The second period—that of her active career as founder and reformer of religious houses—was marked by fewer ecstasies and visions, which were replaced by a steady inward certainty of union with God, and, by a new strength and endurance, a capacity for action, which she attri- buted to this cause. In the conventional language of mysticism, these two stages were those of the ** illuminative ”’ and the “‘ unitive ’’ life.
A somewhat similar development can be traced in St. Paul. During the ten or twelve almost unchronicled years in which he remained a sub- ordinate working in the Jewish Christian Church, he, too, as we have seen, claims to have “ enjoyed ' visions and revelations of the Lord” (2 Cor. xii.). At this time, too, we may suppose that he was
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faced by the task of conquering not only his own nature, but also the suspicions with which he was at first inevitably regarded (Acts ix. 26). But when his vocation definitely declared itself, perhaps about a.D. 46-47, and he ‘“‘ was separated by the Spirit” for the active missionary career, this mainly subjective stage of development was replaced by that deeper, more fruitful sense of total possession by the indwelling Spirit of Christ, which supported his astonishing labours and sufferings and inspired his writings. Doubtless he remained, like most men of religious genius, liable to abrupt and authoritative intuitions—what George Fox called ‘* openings ’”—and also to sudden waves of fervent feeling, when he seemed “beside himself as towards God,” though none the less calm and sober in his practical dealings with men (2 Cor. v. 13). Ecstatic phenomena were almost taken for granted in the Early Church; and St. Paul’s distinction as a mystic lies not in their possession, but in the detachment with which he regarded them. Thus in a.p, 52, when he wrote his first letter to the Corinthians, he acknowledged his continued possession of the much-prized “ gift of tongues’; those outbursts of ecstatic but unin- telligible speech common in times of religious excitement. But his attitude toward such external “* manifestations of the Spirit ” is marked by a cool common sense which must amaze us when we con- sider the period in which he wrote, the universal respect for the marvellous, and the circumstances of his own conversion. His rule is simple. He discounts any “‘ gifts”? and experiences which do not help other souls. The mystical communion 44
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of his soul with Christ must not be a matter of personal enjoyment: it must support and not supplant the apostolic career. ‘‘ Forasmuch as ye are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek that ye may excel to the upbuilding of the Church.... I will pray with the Spirit, avd I will pray with the understanding too.”
Therefore we misunderstand St. Paul’s mysti- cism if we confuse it with its more sensational expressions. As his spiritual life matured his con- viction of union with the Spirit of Christ became deeper and more stable. It disclosed itself, not as an interference with the natural order, but as a source of more than natural power. Its keynote is struck in the great saying of his last authentic letter : “‘ I can do allthings through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Phil. iv. 13). This statement has long ago been diluted to the pious level, and we have ceased to realize how startling it was and is. But St. Paul used it in the most practical sense, in a letter written from prison after twelve years of superhuman toil, privation, and ill-usage, -accompanied by chronic ill-health; years which had included scourgings, stonings, shipwreck, im- prisonments, ‘“‘in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren ; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness ”’ (2 Cor. xi. 26, 27). These, and not his spiritual activities and successes alone, are among the memories which would be present in St. Paul’s
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consciousness when he declared his ability ‘‘ to do all things.”
With this sudden phrase there enters Christian history a conception, or rather an enlargement of human experience, destined to have an influence which we can hardly over-rate. Benedict, creating single-handed the fabric of Western monasticism ; Bernard achieving the impossible at Clairvaux ; Ignatius Loyola, physically feeble, yet tramping penniless from Paris to Rome under the spur of his vocation; Elizabeth Fry in Newgate Gaol ; Livingstone in Africa—all go back to St. Paul for a description of the actual, yet mysterious, power by which they felt themselves supported and enhanced. He was the first to experience and describe this newness of life, this self-abandoned energy and freedom, which, as he insisted, make every real Christian a “ new creature,”’ and consti- tute the essential characters of Christian mysticism properly so called. Much of the difficulty of St. Paul’s “‘ doctrine’ comes from the fact that he is not trying to invent a theology, but simply to find words which shall represent to others this vivid truth—‘I live, yet not I... to live is Christy... .«. Christ: ##\;meun4. aa Bebindiaes efforts to prove to recalcitrant hearers the logical nature of the Christian case, we feel the pressure of that “‘ overflowing grace and free gift’ (Rom. v. 17) which transcends argument, and must be suggested rather than declared.
If now we read even such a comparatively unmystical letter as that to the Galatians, what do we find to support our idea of Paul’s. mysticism ? The letter, of course, had a practical aim; its
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personal references are scattered and indirect ; but we are made to feel that a personal experience, and that of a unique kind, determines the writer’s whole attitude. The first sentence emphasizes the ruling fact of his supernatural “‘call.’’ ‘‘ Paul, an apostle, not appointed by men, but by Jesus Christ’? ; and this vivid sense of acting always under the direct impulsion of his Master is implied in every line. “It is no longer I who live : Christ lives in me” (ii. 20). His disgust at the folly of the Galatian converts is proportionate to the intensity of his own religious realism. ‘ O sense- less Galatians! who has bewitched you?... Have you had all that experience for nothing?” (iii. 1, 4). And if we ask what this experience has been, the magnificent outburst of the fourth chapter answers us: it is that consciousness of the soul’s life in God which makes him “‘ no more a servant, but a son... not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.”” A long development lies between the young zealot’s capitulation outside Damascus, with its note of submission and awe, and this sense of being at home in the spiritual world. All that he says to the Galatians we may be sure he has himself experienced ; and, with the humility and optimism of all great spirits, believes that they can experience too.
The period of twelve or fourteen years within which the extant epistles were written gives time for considerable spiritual development ; and we can trace a distinct progress from the stress and vehemence of St. Paul’s earlier writings to that tranquil joy and peace which mark real maturity of soul, and are the outstanding characteristics of
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Philippians. His mystical conceptions are already developed in the period of 1 Corinthians, with its great distinction between the “ psychic” or intellectual, and the spiritually sensitive man, and its declaration of the hidden wisdom revealed by the immanent spirit “that searcheth a// things ; yea, the deep things of God,’’ to those who have the mind of Christ (1 Cor, il. 10).
We notice in Romans, the typical letter of his middle period (c. a.D. 56), a growing sense of power, stability and freedom : a condition closely associated in St. Paul’s mind with the idea of “Grace.” ‘Grace’? is for him no theological abstraction, but an actual, inflowing energy, which makes possible man’s transition from the natural to the spiritual state.
Anyone who still supposes him to be predomi- nantly a legalist should consider how profoundly supernatural a conception of Christianity underlies the opening paragraph of Romans; whata struggle to describe the actual but subtle facts of the inner life is to be felt in its greatest passages, which often seek to suggest an experience beyond the range of common speech. ‘This letter is the work of a man who has fully emerged into a new sphere of consciousness, has been “‘ made free by the Spirit of Life,” “‘a new creature,’’ and enjoys that sense of boundless possibility which he calls “the glorious liberty of the children of God”? (viii. 21). He knows the mysterious truth, which only direct experience can bring home to us, that somehow even in this determined world “ a// things work together for good to them that love God.’’ Nor does he fail to link this grand, because selfless,
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confidence with the tensions and sufferings of practical life. ‘“* Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ... Nay, in a// these things we are more than conquerors ”’ (vill. 35, 37).
Power and tranquillity, then, are the fruits of St. Paul’s mysticism ; sufficiently astonishing fruits in _ one who seems to have combined natural vehemence with considerable ill-health. He had learned, in action and in contemplation, that ‘‘ to be spiritually minded is life and peace” (villi. 6), ‘The whole secret of Christian sanctity seems to be distilled in this little phrase.
This life and peace, when we come to the latest of his surviving epistles, are found more and more to dominate the scene, bringing a power and joy which no external trials can dim. The character- istic epistle here is, of course, Philippians, written from prison, and probably from Rome, about A.D, 60; but the same temper of mind emerges in Colossians, which—if accepted as a genuine Pauline letter—also belongs to this period.
In these writings we recognize an ever more perfect mingling of the mystical outlook and the practical demand: of other-worldly joy, and immediate stress. Dealing with the most concrete problems, they are transfused by a spiritual glow. Almost the whole science of the inner life could be deduced from them : the paradoxical combina- tion of self-discipline and joy ; the emphasis on humility and love ; the demand for detachment ; the developed doctrine of union with Christ as a veritable source of power (Phil. ii. 1-9 ; ii. 8 ;
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iv. 13). In the technical language of mysticism, St. Paul, at full spiritual maturity, is now living the ‘‘ theopathetic life,” humbly yet deeply aware of the actual energy of God operative within each deed and decision of his own. By the time Philippians was written, it is plain that some at least of his converts had also reached the deeper levels of spiritual experience. Hence in iii. 15 he deliberately addresses the “* perfect ’’—that is, those who are no longer neophytes, but have been initiated into the mysterious realities of Christian regeneration, and, drawn to the full life of consecra- tion, press with him “towards the mark.” To these he promises, as the reward of a complete self-abandonment which is “‘ careful for nothing,” that inexplicable tranquillity which abides in the deeps of the perfectly surrendered soul: the peaceful presence of the Infinite “‘ which passeth all understanding,” keeping steady guard within and beneath all fluctuations of feeling and thought. In this phrase, I think, we reach the heart of St. Paul’s mystical experience, the point in which his vivid apprehensions of the living personal Christ and of the spaceless and eternal God unite. For he is a true mystic, and the originator of the great mystical tradition of Christianity, in this : that he ever retains, in and with his ardent and realistic Christology, a profound consciousness of the Infinite, Unchanging God, Who manifests Himself in Christ. The secret experiences of his soul have compelled St. Paul to find in Christ the “Yes of God”’ (2 Cor. i, 20), the “* pleroma of Deity” (Col. ii. 9). But his sacramental outlook, his personal consciousness of immanent Christ- 50
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spirit, are enfolded in an unmeasured transcenden- talism, an awed consciousness of ‘‘ the vast and stormy sea of the Divine”; and they gain their meaning and value from this. ‘‘ God shall be all in all |’ is his last word for the consummation for which he waits (1 Cor. xv. 28). Though the actual words of the Sermon at Athens (Acts xvii. 22-28) may not be those used by the Apostle, they are certainly true to his spiritual outlook. His God is an eternal and discoverable Presence, a boundless substance, intimate and all-controlling, near yet far, “‘in Whom we live and move and have our being.”
Hellenistic thought, always congenial to the mystical temperament, has here added something to the loftiest intuitions of Judaism, and interpreted anew the gospel of Divine Fatherhood proclaimed by Jesus. Such a phrase as this already looks towards that Christian Platonism through which so many mystics have expressed their profoundest experiences. Its authority covers St. Catherine of Genoa’s daring ‘‘ My me is God, nor do I know my selfhood save in Him,” and Ruysbroeck’s *‘ Where He comes, there He is: and where He is there He comes . . . and everything in which He is, is in Him, for He never goes out of Him- self.’ It is this power of combining the infinite and the human aspects of God’s self-revelation to men which gives St. Paul his unique importance as the first of the great mystics of the Church.
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ILLUSTRATIVE WORKS
Deissmann, A, St. Paul. London, 1912. Gardner, Percy. The Religious Experience of St. Paul. London, 1911. Moffatt, J. The Old Testament: a new translation. 2 vols. London, 1924. The New Testament : a new translation. London. Smith, Prof. David. Lifeand Letters of St. Paul. London,
1919. Way, A. The Letters of St. Paul. 3rd edition. London, IgII.
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