CHAPTER III

MYSTICISM IN THE EARLY CHURCH
CASSIAN—ST. AUGUSTINE—DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE
Ir is certain that the Christian Church has never been without mystics; that is to say, persons capable of direct experience of God and of spiritual things. Yet there are periods in which this mystical instinct seems to rise to the surface of her conscious life, expressed in some great per- sonality or group of personalities. Then it becomes articulate, and starts a fresh current of thought and feeling in respect of the infinite mysteries of God. Any short account of the mystics of the Church must fix our attention on these landmarks. But their significance is only understood if we remember that they are not solitary beacons set up in the arid wilderness of ‘‘ external religion”; they are rather surviving records of a spiritual culture, content, for the most part, to live in secret, and leaving few memorials behind. The stretches of country between them were inhabited by countless humble spirits, capable in their own degree of first-hand experience of God. Only realizing this can we reach a true conception of the perennial richness and freshness of the Church’s inner life. Thus, the importance of St. Paul’s epistles does 53
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not abide only in their writer’s mystical greatness, his unique power of describing the mysterious intercourse of the Christian soul with Christ, but also, indeed largely, in the fact that the persons St. Paul was addressing included some capable of understanding the height, breadth and depth of his utterance ; of sharing his vision and joy. This means that in the Primitive Church St. Paul’s experience was not unique in kind, but only in degree. So, too, the significance of Cassian’s Dialogues, or of the literature produced in the fourteenth century by the Friends of God, lies in the fact that they do not merely tell the experiences of one privileged spirit ; but represent and minister to the mystical demands of a whole period eager for, and able to assimilate, the secrets of the contemplative life.
Mysticism only thus becomes articulate when there is a public which craves for the mystic’s message ; for except in response to the need of others, it is the instinct of every contemplative to keep his secret to himself. Thus each of our chosen landmarks witnesses to more than its own achievement ; registers an upward surge of humanity towards the things of God.
Such an upward surge—the first Christian mystical period—is recorded in the New Testament, and is dominated by the experiences of St. Paul: and the Fourth Evangelist. From it comes one of the two great streams of tradition which have nourished the secret life of the Church. We can trace in the early Greek Fathers—especially Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-220) and his pupil Origen (c. 18 3—2 53), the approximate contemporary
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of Plotinus—the beginnings of the second stream of tradition; that of Christian Neoplatonism. Neither of these vigorous thinkers can properly be called mystics ; we feel in both an excess of the knowledge of the head over the wisdom of the heart, a lack, too, of the heroic self-abandonment of the saints. But Christian spirituality owes them a great debt. Clement, insisting on the contempla- tion of God as the goal of Christian achievement, and applying the language of the Hellenic mysteries —their three grades of purification, enlightenment and union—to the growth of the contemplative soul, laid the foundations of “‘ mystical theology.”’ So, too, in Origen we find wonderful insights ; but hardly in either that supernatural life of action transfused by resignation, which is the mark of the self fully united to God.
Both the Montanist movement of the second century, with its unbridled cultivation of ecstatic phenomena and impossible demand for “a spiritual church of spiritual men,” and the half-pagan the- osophy of the Gnostics, are often brought forward as evidences of the mystical life of the Early Church. But history shows that it is never in such insistence on the abnormal that man finds the true sources of spiritual life or real communion with eternity. These movements, with their feverish exaltation, lack of balance and humility, arrogant claim to peculiar knowledge, added nothing to the Chris- tian’s experience of Reality ; nor any names to the Church’s roll of honour. They are merely examples of that spurious mysticality which arises © at intervals throughout Christian history. Not here, but in the sober life of prayer and union
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which has always been practised by thousands of humble and nameless contemplative souls, we find the continuing mystical life of the Church.
With the fourth century we reach the next signifi- cant period for the growth of Christian mysticism : when the Church, growing and groping, was bringing in new elements of Egyptian, Greek and Latin origin to actualize and enrich her inner experience, give variety and unity both to her doctrine and to her apprehension of God. Then arose the primitive monasticism of the monks and hermits of the Egyptian desert; a great if one-sided attempt to develop the contemplative life, provide a frame within which men might live in perfect communion with, and surrender to, God. As a later mystic said of his own turning from the world, the early monk “‘ fled that which him confused ’’; and was able as the result of this simplification to give the Church new and deeper insights into spiritual things.
The early monk’s excessive depreciation of natural life ought not to blind us to the truth that this was a great concerted attempt to develop through self-denial the spiritual side of human nature and advance in the knowledge of God. It was intensive: but religion would be greatly impoverished were all its intensive experiments suppressed. The heroic renunciations of the early Fathers of the Desert deeply impressed the general Christian consciousness ; as we see in those passages of St. Augustine’s Confessions which describe how his conversion was facilitated by hearing, for the first time, the history of St. Anthony of Egypt, and of “‘ the crowded monasteries, the
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ways of Thy sweetness, the teeming solitudes of the desert” which had resulted from his example and activity (Conf. viii. 6). And after his baptism Augustine’s first thought was to retire with a few companions to Africa, and form an ascetic com- munity of the Egyptian type. We stand here, in fact, at the fountainhead of that ‘‘mysticism of the cloister’? which produced many lovely examples of the life of union with God. Along this line the psychology and discipline of the mystical life were developed, and the laws of prayer and contem- plation gradually worked out. The spontaneous enthusiasm, the loving ardours of primitive Chris- tian spirituality here submitted to a drastic—even a ferocious—education: the idea of deliberate purification and discipline, implicit in the Greek mysteries, entered the Christian scheme, and mysticism became allied for good or evil with asceticism.
Two great books reveal the spirit of this closed