chapter in the history of man’s spiritual evolution,

and have been the channels through which the wisdom of these early monks passed to the medieval and modern worlds. One is the Vite Patrum, a vast collection of miscellaneous material relating to the lives and sayings of the Fathers of the Desert ; the other is the celebrated Dialogues of Cassian, probably composed within a few years of St. Augustine’s death, but dependent for its substance on a form of life already well developed in his day.
A man of much learning and holiness, the pupil of St. John Chrysostom, Cassian was born about A.D. 350, and educated at Bethlehem. In early middle age he journeyed for seven years through
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the Egyptian desert, visiting the great monasteries, studying their life, and conversing on spiritual things with the monks. The material thus collected forms the basis of the Dialogues, which, says Abbot Butler, ‘‘ was the first considerable scientific exposition ever composed on the spiritual life : and it remains to this day in many respects the finest and best.’’ All the later Christian mystics are much indebted to it. We find here the first psychological account of those moods and move- ments of the religious consciousness, afterwards codified as the ‘‘ degrees of prayers”’ ; and their correspondence with the successive stages of the spiritual life. ‘This alone gives the Dialogues unique importance for those who wish to understand the thoroughly historical character of Christian mysticism. Since St. Benedict wrote his rule, they have formed part of the spiritual reading of every Benedictine monk. St. Thomas Aquinas kept them always upon his desk. Their language and imagery can be recognized in the works of all the great masters of the spiritual life: and a return to their solid doctrine might do much for us.
The sober realism of Cassian’s descriptions has always been appreciated by those who have had the training of souls ; and modern psychology has. but endorsed their essential truthfulness. He shows the life of communion with God developing by gradual stages, which keep pace with the self’s increasing purification, till it reaches that state of pure thanksgiving and adoration in which it is “lifted up with fervour of heart to a certain burning prayer which the speech of man cannot express,
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nor the thought of man comprehend,” and at last attains “‘a still more sublime and exalted condition, which is brought about by the contemplation of God alone and by ardent love ; wherein the mind, as it were flung and dissolved into this love, con- verses with Him in utmost familiarity.”
But even this ineffable experience is realized by Cassian as a means, not an end; and is to be judged by its fruits. ‘‘ When we are lifted up and established in this sublime state of children of God, we shall at once feel ourselves inflamed by that filial desire with which all His true children burn ; and, no longer concerned with our own selfish interests, we shall seek solely the honour and glory of our Father.”” Hence the essence of the monastic life, as he says in another place, consists not in plous exercises, but in a daily and hourly act of renunciation ; bringing the soul to that condition of constant and uninterrupted communion with God which is substantially identical with the “‘unitive way’ of mysticism. ‘‘ The end of all our perfection is thus so to act that the soul, strip- ping itself daily of all earthly and carnal inclinations, lifts itself up without ceasing more and more towards spiritual things ; that so all its works and thoughts, and all the movements of the heart, may become nothing else but a continuous act of prayer ’’ (Dial. x. cap. 5).
This lofty and bracing idea of the spiritual life, not the performance of long religious exercises, still remains that which the contemplative orders of the Church set before their subjects. Many mystics have practised, none have improved upon it ; for it is consistent not only with a cloistered,
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but also with an active career. It involves such a genuine remaking of personality on levels of self-devotion that at last—to quote Cassian again —‘‘ all we love and desire, all we seek and wish for, all that we think and perceive, all that we speak of and hope for, is God.”
But the wisdom of the Egyptian solitaries was not the only great contribution made by the fourth century to Christian mysticism. In the person and work of St. Augustine we have the second great landmark in the history of the mystics of the Church: a landmark of such importance, that fully to understand the medizval mystics, we ought to know his Confessions almost by heart. The significance of St. Augustine is two-fold. First, he was a great natural mystic, with remarkable powers of self-analysis and expression; and has left us one of the most marvellous records in history of the transmutation of a soul by the supernatural grace of God. Next, he brought Greek thought and religious feeling into the main stream of Christian mysticism, thus giving it a colour which it has never lost.
The influence of Plotinus, the great Neopla- tonist and ecstatic (A.D. 204-270), was decisive. for the form in which his experience of Eternal Life was to be described. Had Plotinus not been a great mystic as well as a great philosopher, his works would not have affected Augustine so much. Had Augustine not become a great mystic, he could not have filled up the Plotinian conceptions of God with the light and fire which have made them channels of revelation. It is the considered opinion of Eucken that Plotinus, who rejected
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Christianity, has nevertheless influenced Christian thought more than any other writer since St. Paul : and this persistent influence of the Pagan mystic upon the spiritual development of Christendom was chiefly exercised through St. Augustine’s works.
Augustine, born in North Africa in a.p. 354, by temperament a sensualist and eager taster of experience, capable of a wide range of reactions —a thirster after truth and beauty, an ardent lover and friend—was the stuff of which great converts are made. He was thirty-two when his conversion took place, in circumstances known to all readers of religious literature. The fact, and everything in the varied and uneasy life which had preceded it, are all contained in the most celebrated of his utterances—‘‘ Our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”
The list of the lesser satisfactions of mind and sense by which he had failed to be satisfied is fully set out in the early books of the Confessions ; where we can trace the long three-cornered struggle between the claims of his ardent passions, his logical intellect, his deeply mystical and God-desiring soul. He shows very clearly the dependence of the mystic on environment: the extent in which all the circumstances of his life—even the most apparently unspiritual—contribute to his forma- tion. He is not an anemic visionary, but a whole man ; who has loved, sinned and endured, indulged his passions without remorse, and used his mental
owers without humility. His vitality poured
itself out in passionate appreciation of every aspect
of life. His devoted friendships prove his personal 61
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attractiveness ; an attractiveness perhaps more felt by his equals than by his superiors.
The passage in the Confessions which shows the self-assured young professor penetrating to the presence of St. Ambrose, to find that his appear- ance—usually so appreciated—is not even perceived, throws an amusing light on the education of the embryo saint. Augustine’s love of argument, intellectual vanity and self-absorption, expectations and disillusionments, are all exhibited in this little encounter between the restless, brilliant, conceited young don and the calm old shepherd of souls. “I could not ask him what I wanted as I wanted, because the shoals of busy people to whose infirmi- ties he ministered came between me and his ear and lips. . . . Often when we attended (for the door was open to all, and none was announced) we saw him reading silently, but never otherwise, and after sitting for some time without speaking— for who would presume to trouble one so occupied ? —we went away ... the flood of my difficulties could only be poured out to a listener with abundant leisure at his disposal, and such an one I could not find !’’ (Conf. vi. 3).
Augustine’s real obstacles, however, were not intellectual problems. ‘They were difficulties of character and conduct: the tyranny of “ carnal use and wont,”’ the unresolved discord between his behaviour and his ideals, above all the paralysing sense of his own cleverness. When he wrote the Confessions, after mine years’ experience of the spiritual life, these facts were clear to him ; and he has set them down in a series of vivid phrases.
By my swelling pride gine separated from Thee,
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and my puffed-up face closed up mine eyes !” He longed for God, but only on his own terms —"I wished to be as certain of things unseen, as that seven and three make ten.” He hung about on the verge of the essential surrender—‘ I prayed for purity, but not yet !’’ Hence vision stopped short of action. ‘“‘I was caught up to Thee by Thy Beauty, and dragged back by my own weight ; and fell once more with a groan to the world of sense. . . . I attained in the flash of one hurried glance to the Vision of That Which Is, but I could not sustain my gaze” (Conf. viii. 17).
From no other writer do we obtain so clear a sense as that which Augustine gives us of the direct, moulding action of Spirit upon human life: the over-ruling Energy drawing each soul to its own place. ‘‘I tossed upon the waves, and Thou didst steer.... Thou, Lord, who standest by the helm of all things that Thou hast made.”
Yet this mysterious guidance was exercised through and in the things of mind and sense. The books of the Platonists, especially the Enneads of Plotinus with their mystical realism and philosophic sweep, explicating the meaning of Christian theism, began Augustine’s conversion ; turning his vague belief in God into an intense though still largely intellectual realization. There came a moment when ‘I was astonished to find I loved Thee, my God, and no more an empty phantom,” But these dazzling glimpses were still far from the mystics’ peaceful, awestruck, and fruitful experience of Reality. They could “ show as from a wooded height the land of peace, but
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not the road thereto”: possessed no life-trans- forming power. With the humbling perception of this fact, Augustine realized that his difficulties were not caused by mental superiority, but by spiritual incapacity and childishness. ‘‘ When first I knew Thee, Thou didst take hold of me, so that I could see there was something to be seen, though I was not yet fit to see it... . And Thou didst beat back my weak sight, dazzling me with Thy splendour, and I thrilled with love and dread ; and I perceived that I was far away from Thee in the land of unlikeness, as if I heard Thy voice from on high crying unto me—‘I am the Food of the full-grown ; grow, and thou shalt feed on Me’” (Conf. vii. 7 and 10). This stretching of the ‘‘ narrow house of his soul’”’ for an experience still beyond his span was set going by two agen- cies. First, by a new and humble discovery of Christian spirituality in the epistles of St, Paul, which he re-read at this critical moment of his career ; secondly, by the personal influence of Christian souls, Thus his achievement of God, in the end, was the direct result of historical and social contacts ; far, indeed, from the Plotinian “‘ flight of the Alone to the Alone!” In St. Paul Augus- tine discovered ‘‘that love which buildeth on humility”; a quality of soul which Platonic philosophy cannot teach. In his mother, St. Monica, he saw and felt this love in action: and her faithful life of prayer was doubtless a chief factor in his transformation. At the right moment, the wise old priest Simplicianus told him of the conversion of Victorinus—a person whose intellect Augustine was bound to respect—and that eminent 64
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philosopher’s humble profession of faith (Conf. Vill. I, 2). Finally, the history of St. Anthony and the Egyptian monks, told by his friend Pontitianus, roused Augustine’s instinct for heroic self-donation ; forced him to realize his own unworthy refusals, the petty vileness of his past life. ‘“‘ Thou, O Lord, didst turn me round into my own sight. I had set myself, as it were, at my own back, because I was unwilling to see myself. And now Thou didst place me before mine own eyes, so that I beheld how ugly I was ; how deformed, filthy, spotted, and ulcerous !”’ (Conf. viii. 7.) In that moment conceit was killed and spirituality was born.
We see by how many strands Augustine was attached to history and human existence, by how many channels the new life forced its way into his starving yet reluctant soul, how false any account of his conversion as a sudden and solitary encounter with God. The child’s voice heard in the garden completed a situation long prepared.
At thirty-three years old, then—approximately the period of St. Paul’s conversion—Augustine entered the mystic way, with the uncompromising completeness of a greatsoul. As St. Paul hid himself in Arabia, so his first desire was to leave the world in which he was so successful a figure, go back to Africa, and there lead a humble, ascetic life. He sacrificed at one blow career, tastes, passions, everything he had loved : nor did he get in exchange the quietude for which the mystic always longs. He was beset by homely and practical responsi- bilities : family ties, pupils, disciples. His chief spiritual support, the sanctity and devoted love of
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his mother, was removed within a year of his con- version. The wonderful scene at Ostia, described in the most celebrated section of the Confessions (Bk. ix. 10) suggests that St. Monica was her son’s first director in the contemplative life ; that in the ascent of their souls to the fleeting experience of “the Eternal Wisdom that abides above all,” it was hers, disciplined by years of self-denial and prayer, that supported and led him on. Hence the desolation caused by her death. Perhaps it is to her that he refers in De Quantitate Anime, written soon after his baptism; where, describing the last stage of the spiritual ascent, the attainment in this life of ‘“‘the perfect peace and breath of Eternity,” he speaks of ‘‘ Certain great and incom- parable souls, whom we believe to have seen, and to see, these things ; and who have told as much as they judged meet.”
We see from this quotation that at the time of St. Monica’s death Augustine claimed no such experience of the Vision of God, as he describes in many passages of the Confessions, composed at a later stage in his Christian life. ‘This means that the nine years following his conversion witnessed the whole of that interior growth which turned the fiery and tormented convert into the solid man of prayer, able to take “‘ the food of the full grown.” They converted ardour into charity ; the desire for redemption into the desire to redeem; the self-centred craving for God to the outflowing love which desires chiefly to impart Him. It is an Augustinian maxim that the heart of man is as great as its love: and narrowness of soul was prominent among the imperfections he discovered
MYSTICISM IN THE EARLY CHURCH
in himself—‘‘ The house of my soul is narrow —O enlarge it, that Thou mayst enter in!” (Conj..1.'5). :
The conditions in which this expansion took place were far from those supposed to be congenial to the mystic. Increasing pressure of pastoral and official work, constant demands on time, thought and sympathy, trained and tested his charity, suppleness and self-oblivion. Five years after his conversion Augustine became, with great reluctance, a priest and the assistant-bishop of Hippo ; four years later, at the age of forty-one, its bishop. His position at Hippo was not unlike that of the overworked rector of a large city parish, in which some new and sensational religious move- ment has carried off most of the congregation. The Donatist schism had split the African Church, and the Catholic section was the smaller and less popular of thetwo. Constant controversy and propa- ganda were required of its bishop ; Augustine’s genius for argument and rhetoric found new scope. Endless sermons, books, tracts against heresy, and private letters marked his episcopate: his inward life, like that of St. Paul, prompted to creative work. Pauline, too, is the interest he now developed in the corporate side of Christianity ; for this great mystic and Platonist was the first to define the nature of the Church, as a home for souls and a necessary condition of the life of grace.
Augustine, then, beginning again on fresh levels that fullness of mental and practical life which marked his youth, provides one of the greatest examples of that union Py action with contempla-
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tion in which, as St. Teresa put it, “‘ Martha and Mary combine.” |
The Confessions were written early in his episco- pate: thus their great mystical outbursts repre- sent his position and feeling after nine years’ hard work as a member of the Church. Those years had doubtless involved extreme and purify- ing tension ; a constant struggle to reconcile the claims of the outer and inner life. No one less resembled the “‘idle contemplative” of popular imagination ; yet in no one more than in this untiring writer, preacher and administrator do we feel the vivid reality of the world of spirit, the actual flight of the soul to God.
The Confessions, then, contain not merely spiritual biography, but the deep meditations of a Chris- tian mystic on his past experience. ‘‘ With what fruit,’’ says Augustine, “‘ do I by this book before Thee confess unto men, what at this time I now am, not what I have been?” (Conf. x. 3).
He had become, as the Confessions prove, a great experimental theist ; perhaps the greatest who has recorded his intercourse with God. After making every allowance for natural eloquence and the influence of Neoplatonism, none can mistake the language of first-hand experience and passionate feeling. Looking back, he sees from the eainaie the steadfast pursuit of the Hound of Heaven ; the moulding action of that Love which now penetrates and supports his active life. “I fell away, and became all darkened ; yet even thence, even thence, came I to love Thee! I went astray, and I remembered Thee. I heard Thy voice
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I discern it for the noise of the enemies of peace ! And see, here I return now, sweating and panting after Thy fountain. Let no man forbid me ; this will I drink, thus will I live |!” (Conf. xii. 10). “ Give Thyself unto me,O my God! Yea, restore Thyself unto me. Lo, I love Thee ; and if it be too little, let me love Thee with more might. I cannot measure my love, that I may know how much it needs to be enough—that my life may run to Thy embrace and turn not away, till it be hidden in the hiding-place of Thy countenance ”’ (xiii. 8). “Not doubtfully, but with a sure knowledge, Lord, I love Thee. Thou didst strike my heart with Thy Word, and I loved Thee! . . . What then do I love, when I love Thee? . .. I lovea certain light, and a certain voice, a certain fragrance, a certain food, a certain embrace when I love my God: a light, voice, fragrance, food, embrace of the inner man. Where that shines upon my soul which space cannot contain, that sounds which time cannot sweep away, that is fragrant which is scattered not by the breeze, that tastes sweet which when fed upon is not diminished, that clings close which no satiety disparts. ‘This it is that I love, when I love my God !”’ (x. 6).
Well might the author of such passages say in one of his letters, ‘‘ I enjoy at times a vivid realiza- tion of things that abide” (Ep. iv. 2). In this little sentence he gives us the key to his conception of the spiritual life as a growth or pilgrimage towards the eternal object of love. Our whole perfection, says Augustine, consists in growing and not stopping ; it is a steady effort, a march, voyage, or ascent, but always an ascent of love to
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Love—a movement of the changeful creature to “that which abides.””’ Though deeply Christian, there is slight trace in him of the predominantly Christocentric mysticism of St. Paul. The deepest attractions of his soul are towards the Eternal and Unchanging God. ‘‘ Something not susceptible of change!” is the chilly formula behind which he conceals the rapturous joy of union with Ultimate Reality. Yet of this same ‘“‘ Something ” he can exclaim in another mood, ‘‘ What can I say, my God, my Life, my Holy Joy? And what can any man say when he speaks of Thee?” (Conf. i. 4). With this deep personal sense of an abiding object of adoration, “‘ fairest yet strongest, near yet far,” he has enriched the mystical consciousness of the Church.
Augustine, then, is with St. Paul a source from which all later mystics have drunk deeply and to their profit. Nor is it only on the transcendental side that they are indebted to him. They owe to his influence that virile temper, that insistence on the primary importance of will and desire as the main instruments of our spiritual progress, which give their works such a sane and bracing quality. From him, too, comes their steady recogni- tion of humility and charity as the twin foundations of the true interior life (Conf. vii. 20). He was an inspired psychologist, and modern explorations of the soul endorse the accuracy of his statements. “We are nothing else but wills . . . love cannot be idle’... . love and do -what you like lwye Virtue is the ordering of love. Perfect love is perfect righteousness. . . . The soul is only per- fect in health when it is perfect in love . . . in
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Thy Will is our peace... my love is my weight.” These Augustinian phrases, and many other of his conceptions, reappear in the works of the medizval school, all of which depend directly upon his teaching,
A third great writer contributed to that com- plete fusion of Christian and Hellenistic influences which nourished the later mystics of the Church. If through Cassian they received the teaching of the early solitaries on prayer, and Augustine gave them a deeper and richer concept of God’s dealings with the soul, it was the mysterious writer known as Dionysius the Areopagite who—going back to Proclus, and through him to Plotinus, for his metaphysical background—brought into Christi- anity a fresh and awe-struck sense of the unsearch- able divine transcendence. Written in Greek toward the end of the fifth century, and probably by a Syrian monk, the Dionysian books became known in the West in the ninth century, when they were translated into Latin by John the Scot. Their influence on the medieval mystics was great ; and they provided the conceptions by means of which Ruysbroeck and other supreme contemplatives were able to express something of their deepest intuitions of Reality.
In reading Dionysius we must remember that he is struggling by means of an intellectual lan- guage borrowed from philosophy—and mainly from Proclus—to describe a non-intellectual and indeed a supra-rational experience: the secret ascent of the soul to God. ‘The Divine Darkness, or Ignor- ance, of which he speaks is a psychological condi- tion; in which that soul exchanges discursive
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thought for the state of pure fruition, or contempla- tion, where it achieves ‘‘ union with Him Who is above all knowledge and all being.”
The great mystics—for whom, no doubt, these books were chiefly written—have always found in Dionysius much that explained their loftiest experi- ences. He lives upon the mountains, and those who can breathe their rarefied air will understand his statements ; his perpetual struggle to drive home the otherness and distinctness of God, the unspeakable nature even of man’s fragmentary experiences of the Divine. “‘ Our speech is re- strained in proportion to the height of our ascent ; but when our ascent is accomplished, speech will cease altogether and be absorbed into the ineffable.” (De Myst. Theo., cap. ili.)
It is true that the gentleness and intimacy of Christian feeling are absent; and no theory of mysticism based on Dionysius alone could com- pletely represent man’s spiritual needs and possi- bilities. He encourages a dangerous abstraction from concrete life, and invites unwary spirits to ascents which few can safely undertake. But he did great things for the deepening and enrichment of the mystical consciousness by his emphatic pesca of the supernatural mystery of the
ivine Nature; the “Being beyond being, Existence Uncreate,’’ which enfolds and transcends all man’s partial apprehensions of God. Souls of many different types have been fed by him: the unmitigated intellectualism of Eckhart, the passion- ate fervour of Jacopone da Todi, could find in him something which tallied with their experience. Therefore he well completes the trilogy of writers
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who developed in this period the growing Christian science of contemplation, and prepared the way for the mysticism of the Medieval Church.
ILLUSTRATIVE WORKS
Augustine, St. Confessions : Textand Translation. (Loeb Classical Library.) London, 1919.
Bertrand, Louis. St. Augustine. London, 1914.
Butler, Dom Cuthbert. Benedictine Monachism. London, 1919.
Western Mysticism. London, 1922.
Casstan, J. Dialogues. (Select Nicene and Post-Nicene Library.) Oxford, 1894.
Dionysius the Areopagite. ‘The Divine Names and Mystical Theology. Trans. C. E. Rolt. London, 1920.
Hannay, J.O. ‘The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monas- ticism. London, 1903.
Hiigel, Baron F. von. Eternal Life. London, 1912.
Pourrat, P. Christian Spirituality. Vol. i. London, 1922.
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