Part 2

First we notice how gentle, gradual and natural is the process of sublimation that Dionysius demands of us. According to him, the mystic life is a life centred on reality: the life that first seeks reality without flinching, then loves and adores the reality perceived, and at last, wholly surrendered to it, is “led by God alone.” First, the self is “inclined to learn _true_ wisdom.” It awakes to new needs, is cured of its belief in sham values, and distinguishes between real and unreal objects of desire. That craving for more life and more love which lies at the very heart of our selfhood, here slips from the charmed circle of the senses into a wider air. When this happens abruptly it is called “conversion”; and may then have the character of a psychic convulsion and be accompanied by various secondary psychological phenomena. But often it comes without observation. Here the essentials are a desire and a disillusionment sufficiently strong to overcome our natural sloth, our primitive horror of change. “The first beginning of all things is a craving,” says Boehme; “we are creatures of will and desire.” The divine discontent, the hunger for reality, the unwillingness to be satisfied with the purely animal or the purely social level of consciousness, is the first essential stage in the development of the mystical consciousness.

So the self is either suddenly or gradually inclined to “true wisdom”; and this change of angle affects the whole character, not only or indeed specially the intellectual outlook, but the ethical outlook too. This is the meaning of “purgation.” False ways of feeling and thinking, established complexes which have acquired for us an almost sacred character, and governed though we knew it not all our reactions to life—these must be broken up. That mental and moral sloth which keeps us so comfortably wrapped in unrealities must go. This phase in the mystic’s growth has been specially emphasized and worked out by the Christian mystics, who have made considerable additions to the philosophy and natural history of the soul. The Christian sense of sin and conception of charity, the Christian notion of humility as a finding of our true level, an exchanging of the unreal standards of egoism for the disconcerting realities of life seen from the angle of Eternity; the steadfast refusal to tolerate any claim to spirituality which is not solidly based on moral values, or which is divorced from the spirit of tenderness and love—all this has immensely enriched the mysticism of the West, and filled up some of the gaps left by Neoplatonism. It is characteristic of Christianity that, addressing itself to all men—not, as Neoplatonism tended to do, to the superior person—and offering to all men participation in Eternal Life, it takes human nature as it is; and works from the bottom up, instead of beginning at a level which only a few of the race attain. Christianity perceived how deeply normal men are enslaved by the unconscious; how great a moral struggle is needed for their emancipation. Hence it concentrated on the first stage of purgation, and gave it new meaning and depth. The monastic rule of poverty, chastity and obedience—and we must remember that the original aim of monasticism was to provide a setting in which the mystical life could be lived—aims at the removal of those self-centred desires and attachments which chain consciousness to a personal instead of a universal life. He who no longer craves for personal possessions, pleasures or powers, is very near to perfect liberty. His attention is freed from its usual concentration on the self’s immediate interests, and at once he sees the Universe in a new, more valid, because disinterested light.

“Povertate è nulla avere e nulla cosa poi volere ed omne cosa possedere en spirito de libertade.”

Yet this positive moral purity which Christians declared necessary to the spiritual life was not centred on a lofty aloofness from human failings, but on a self-giving and disinterested love, the complete abolition of egoism. This alone, it declared, could get rid of that inward disharmony—one aspect of the universal conflict between the instinctive and the rational life—which Boehme called the “powerful contrarium” warring with the soul.

Now this “perfect charity in life surrendered,” however attained, is an essential character of the true mystic; without it, contemplation is an impossibility or a sham. But when we come to the means by which it is to be attained, we re-enter the region of controversy; for here we are at once confronted by the problem of asceticism, and its connection with mysticism—perhaps the largest and most difficult of the questions now facing those who are concerned with the re-statement of the laws of the spiritual life. Originally regarded as a gymnastic of the soul, an education in those manly virtues of self-denial and endurance without which the spiritual life is merely an exquisite form of hedonism, asceticism was identified by Christian thought with the idea of mortification; the killing out of all those impulses which deflect the soul from the straight path to God. For the true mystic, it is never more than a means to an end; and is often thrown aside when that end is attained. Its necessity is therefore a purely practical question. Fasting and watching may help one to dominate unruly instincts, and so attain a sharper and purer concentration on God; but make another so hungry and sleepy that he can think of nothing else. Thus Jacopone da Todi said of his own early austerities that they resulted chiefly in indigestion, insomnia and colds in the head; whilst John Wesley found in fasting a positive spiritual good. Some ascetic practices again are almost certainly disguised indulgences of those very cravings which they are supposed to kill, but in fact merely repress. Others—such as hair shirts, chains, and so forth—depended for their meaning on a mediæval view of the body and of the virtues of physical pain which is practically extinct, and now seems to most of us utterly artificial. No one will deny that austerity is better than luxury for the spiritual life; but perfect detachment of the will and senses can be achieved without resort to merely physical expedients by those living normally in the world, and this is the essential thing.

The true asceticism is a gymnastic not of the body, but of the mind. It involves training in the art of recollection; the concentration of thought, will, and love upon the eternal realities which we commonly ignore. The embryo contemplative, if his spiritual vision is indeed to be enlarged, and his mind kindled, as Dionysius says, to “the burning of love,” must acquire and keep a special state of inward poise, an attitude of attention, which is best described as “the state of prayer”; that same condition which George Fox called “keeping in the Universal Spirit.” If we do not attend to reality, we are not likely to perceive it. The readjustments which shall make this attention natural and habitual are a phase in man’s inward conflict for the redemption of consciousness from its lower and partial attachments. This conflict is no dream. It means hard work; mental and moral discipline of the sternest kind. The downward drag is incessant, and can be combated only by those who are clearly aware of it, and are willing to sacrifice lower interests and joys to the demands of the spiritual life. In this sense mortification is an integral part of the “purgative way.” Unless the self’s “inclination to true wisdom” is strong enough to inspire these costing and heroic efforts, its spiritual cravings do not deserve the name of mysticism.

These, then, seem essential factors in the readjustment which the mystics call purgation. We go on to their next stage, the so-called “way of illumination.” Here, says Dionysius, the mind is kindled by contemplation to the burning of love. There is a mental and an emotional enhancement, whereby the self apprehends the reality it has sought; whether under the veils of religion, philosophy, or nature-mysticism. Many mystics have made clear statements about this phase in human transcendence. Thus the Upanishads invite us to “know everything in the Universe as enveloped in God.” “When the purified seeker,” says Plato, “comes to the end, he will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty.... Beauty absolute, separate, simple and everlasting.” His follower Plotinus says that by spiritual intuition man, “wrought into harmony with the Supreme,” enters into communion with _Nous_, the “intelligible world” of eternal realities—that splendour yonder which is his home: and further that this light, shining upon the soul, enlightens it, makes it a member of the spiritual order, and so “transforms the furnace of this world into a garden of flowers.” Ruysbroeck declares that this eternal world “is not God, but it is the light in which we see Him.” Jacopone da Todi says that the self, achieving the crystalline heaven, “feels itself to be a part of all things,” because it has annihilated its separate will and is conformed to the movement of the Divine Life. Kabir says: “The middle region of the sky, wherein the Spirit dwelleth, is radiant with the music of light.” Boehme calls it the “light-world proceeding from the fire-world”; and says it is the origin of that outward world in which we dwell. “This light,” he says, “shines through and through all, but is only apprehended by that which unites itself thereto.” It seems to me fairly clear that these, and many other descriptions I cannot now quote, refer to an identical state of consciousness, which might be called an experience of Eternity, but not of the Eternal One. I say “an experience,” not merely a mental perception. Contemplation, which is the traditional name for that concentrated attention in which this phase of reality is revealed, is an activity of all our powers: the heart, the will, the mind. Dionysius emphasizes the ardent love which this revelation of reality calls forth, and which is indeed a condition of our apprehension of it; for the cold gaze of the metaphysician cannot attain it, unless he be a lover and a mystic too. “By love He may be gotten and holden, by thought never,” says the author of _The Cloud of Unknowing_. It is only through the mood of humble and loving receptivity in which the artist perceives beauty, that the human spirit can apprehend a reality which is greater than itself. The many declarations about noughting, poverty and “holy nothingness” refer to this. The meek and poor of spirit really are the inheritors of Eternity.

So we may place the attitude of selfless adoration, the single-hearted passion of the soul, among the essentials of the mystic in the illuminated way. A very wide range of mystical experiences must be attributed to this second stage in man’s spiritual growth. Some at least of its secrets are known to all who are capable of æsthetic passion; who, in the presence of beauty, know themselves to stand upon the fringe of another plane of being, where the elements of common life are given new colour and value, and its apparent disharmonies are resolved. So, too, that deep sense of a divine companionship which many ardent souls achieve in prayer is a true if transitory experience of illumination. We shall probably be right in assuming that the enormous majority of mystics never get beyond this level of consciousness. Certainly a large number of religious writers on mysticism attribute to its higher and more personal manifestations the names of “divine union” and “unitive life”; thereby adding to the difficulty of classifying spiritual states, and showing themselves unaware of the great distinction which such full-grown mystics as Plotinus, Jacopone da Todi or Ruysbroeck describe as existing between this “middle heaven” and the ecstatic vision of the One which alone really satisfies their thirst for truth. Thus Jacopone at first uses the strongest unitive language to describe that rapturous and emotional intercourse with Divine Love which characterized his middle period; but when he at last achieves the vision of the Absolute, he confesses that he was in error in supposing that it was indeed the Truth Whom he thus saw and worshipped under veils.

“Or, parme, fo fallanza, non se’ quel che credea, tenendo non avea vertá senza errore.”

Thus Ruysbroeck attributes to the contemplative life, “the inward and upward-going ways by which one may pass into the Presence of God,” but distinguishes these from that super-essential life wherein “we are swallowed up, beyond reason and above reason, in the deep quiet of the Godhead which is never moved.”

All the personal raptures of devotional mysticism, all the nature-mystic’s joyous consciousness of God in creation, Blake’s “world of imagination and vision,” the “coloured land” of Æ., the Sūfi’s “tavern on the way,” where he is refreshed by a draught of supersensual wine, belong to the way of illumination. For the Christian mystic the world into which it inducts him is, pre-eminently, the sphere of the divine Logos-Christ, fount of creation and source of all beauty; the hidden Steersman who guides and upholds the phenomenal world:

“Splendor che dona a tutto ’l mondo luce, amor, Iesú, de li angeli belleza, cielo e terra per te si conduce e splende in tutte cose tua fattezza.”

Here the reality behind appearance is still mediated to the mystic under symbols and forms. The variation of these symbols is great; his adoring gaze now finds new life and significance in the appearances of nature, the creations of music and of art, the imagery of religion and philosophy, and reality speaks to him through his own credal conceptions. But absolute value cannot be attributed to any of these, even the most sacred: they change, yet the experience remains. Thus an identical consciousness of close communion with God is obtained by the non-sacramental Quaker in his silence and by the sacramental Catholic in the Eucharist. The Christian contemplative’s sense of personal intercourse with the divine as manifest in the incarnate Christ is hard to distinguish from that of the Hindu Vaishnavite, when we have allowed for the different constituents of his apperceiving mass:

“Dark, dark the far Unknown and closed the way To thought and speech; silent the Scriptures; yea, No word the Vedas say.

“Not thus the Manifest. How fair! how near! Gone is our thirst if only He appear— He, to the heart so dear.”

So, too, the Sūfi mystic who has learned to say: “I never saw anything without seeing God therein;” Kabir exclaiming: “I have stilled my restless mind, and my heart is radiant; for in Thatness I have seen beyond Thatness, in company I have seen the Comrade Himself;” the Neoplatonist rapt in contemplation of the intelligible world “yonder”; Brother Lawrence doing his cooking in the presence of God, reveal under analysis an identical type of consciousness. This consciousness is the essential; the symbols under which the self apprehends it are not.

Among these symbols we must reckon a large number of the secondary phenomena of mysticism: divine visions and voices, and other dramatizations of the self’s apprehensions and desires. The best mystics have always recognized the doubtful nature of these so-called divine revelations and favours, and have tried again and again to set up tests for discerning those which really “come from God”—_i. e._ mediate a valid spiritual experience. Personally, I think very few of these phenomena are mystical in the true sense. Just as our normal consciousness is more or less at the mercy of invasions from the unconscious region, of impulses which we fail to trace to their true origin; so too the mystical consciousness is perpetually open to invasion from the lower centres. These invasions are not always understood by the mystic. Obvious examples are the erotic raptures of the Sūfi poets, and the emotional, even amorous relations in which many Christian ascetics believe themselves to stand to Christ or Our Lady. The Holy Ghost saying to Angela of Foligno, “I love you better than any other woman in the vale of Spoleto”; the human raptures of Mechthild of Magdeburg with her Bridegroom; St. Bernard’s attitude to the Virgin; the passionate love-songs of Jacopone da Todi; the mystical marriage of St. Catherine of Siena; St. Teresa’s “wound of love”; these, and many similar episodes, demand no supernatural explanation, and add nothing to our knowledge of the work of the Spirit in man’s soul. So, too, the infantile craving for a sheltering and protective love finds expression over and over again in mystical literature, and satisfaction in the states of consciousness which it has induced. The innate longing of the self for more life, more love, an ever greater and fuller experience, attains a complete realization in the lofty mystical state called union with God. But failing this full achievement, the self is capable of offering itself many disguised satisfactions; and among these disguised satisfactions we must reckon at least the majority of “divine favours” enjoyed by contemplatives of an emotional type. Whatever the essence of mysticism may turn out to be, it is well to recognize these lapses to lower levels as among the least fortunate of its accidents.

We come to the third stage, the true goal of mystic experience; the intuitive contact with that ultimate reality which theologians mean by the Godhead and philosophers by the Absolute, a contact in which, as Richard of St. Victor says “the soul gazes upon Truth without any veils of creatures—not in a mirror darkly, but in its pure simplicity.” The claim to this is the loftiest claim which can be made by human consciousness. There is little we can say of it, because there is little we know; save that the vision or experience is always the vision or experience of a Unity which reconciles all opposites, and fulfils all man’s highest intuitions of reality. “Be lost altogether in Brahma like an arrow that has completely penetrated its target,” say the Upanishads. This self-loss, says Dionysius the Areopagite, is the Divine Initiation: wherein we “pass beyond the topmost altitudes of the holy ascent, and leave behind all divine illumination and voices and heavenly utterances; and plunge into the darkness where truly dwells, as Scripture saith, that One Which is beyond all things.” Some recent theologians have tried to separate the conceptions of God and of the Absolute: but mystics never do this, though some of the most clear-sighted, such as Meister Eckhart, have separated that unconditioned Godhead known in ecstasy from the personal God who is the object of devotional religion, and who represents a humanization of reality. When the great mystic achieves the “still, glorious, and absolute Oneness” which finally satisfies his thirst for truth—the “point where all lines meet and show their meaning”—he generally confesses how symbolic was the object of his earlier devotion, how partial his supposed communion with the Divine. Thus Jacopone da Todi—exact and orthodox Catholic though he was—when he reached “the hidden heaven,” discovered and boldly declared the approximate character of all his previous conceptions of, and communion with God; the great extent to which subjective elements had entered into his experience. In the great ode which celebrates his ecstatic vision of Truth, when “ineffable love, imageless goodness, measureless light” at last shone in his heart, he says: “I thought I knew Thee, tasted Thee, saw Thee under image: believing I held Thee in Thy completeness I was filled with delight and unmeasured love. But _now_ I see I was mistaken—Thou art not as I thought and firmly held.” So Tauler says that compared with the warm colour and multiplicity of devotional experience, the very Godhead is a “rich nought,” a “bare pure ground”; and Ruysbroeck that it is “an unwalled world,” “neither this nor that.” “This fruition of God,” he says again, “is a still and glorious and essential Oneness beyond the differentiation of the Persons, where there is neither an outpouring nor an indrawing of God, but the Persons are still and one in fruitful love, in calm and glorious unity.... There is God our fruition and His own, in an eternal and fathomless bliss.”

“How, then, am I to love the Godhead?” says Eckhart. “Thou shalt love Him as He is: not as a God, not as a Spirit, not as a Person, not as an image, but as a sheer pure One. And in this One we are to sink from nothing to nothing, so help us God.” “This consciousness of the One,” says Plotinus, “comes not by knowledge, but by an actual Presence superior to any knowing. To have it, the soul must rise above knowledge, above all its wandering from its unity.” He goes on to explain that all partial objects of love and contemplation, even Beauty and Goodness themselves, are lower than this, springing from the One as light from the sun. To see the disc, we must put on smoked glasses, shut off the rays, and submit to the “radiant darkness” which enters so frequently into mystical descriptions of the Absolute.

It is an interesting question whether this consummation of the mystic way need involve that suppression of the surface-consciousness which is called ecstasy. The majority of mystics think that it must; and probably it is almost inevitable that so great a concentration and so lofty an intuition should for the time it lasts drive all other forms of awareness from the field. Even simple contemplation cannot be achieved without some deliberate stilling of the senses, a deliberate focusing of our vagrant attention, and abolishes self-consciousness while it lasts. This is the way that our mental machinery works; but this should not make us regard trance-states as any part of the essence of mysticism. The ecstatic condition is no guarantee of mystic vision. It is frequently pathological, and is often found along with other abnormal conditions in emotional visionaries whose revelations have no ultimate characteristics. It is, however, just as uncritical to assume that ecstasy is necessarily a pathological symptom, as it is to assume that it is necessarily a mystic state. We have a test which we can apply to the ecstatic; and which separates the results of nervous disorder from those of spiritual transcendence. “What fruit dost thou bring back from this thy vision?” is the final question which Jacopone da Todi addresses to the mystic’s soul. And the answer is: “An ordered life in every state.” The true mystic in his ecstasy has seen, however obscurely, the key of the Universe: “la forma universal di questo nodo.” Hence he has a clue by which to live. Reality has become real to him; and there are no others of whom we can fully say that. So, ordered correspondence with each level of existence, physical and spiritual, successive and eternal—a practical realization of the proportions of life—is the guarantee of the genuine character of that sublimation of consciousness which is called the mystic way; and this distinguishes it from the fantasies of psychic illness or the disguised self-indulgences of the dream-world. The real mystic is not a selfish visionary. He grows in vigour as he draws nearer and nearer the sources of true life, and his goal is only reached when he participates in the creative energies of the Divine Nature. The perfect man, says the Sūfi, must not only die into God in ecstasy (_fana_), but abide in and with Him (_baqa_), manifesting His truth in the world of time. He is called to a life more active, because more contemplative, than that of other men: to fulfil the monastic ideal of a balanced career of work and prayer. “Then only is our life a _whole_,” says Ruysbroeck, “when contemplation and work dwell in us side by side, and we are perfectly in both of them at once.”