Part 7

“I saw Eternity the other night Like a great ring of pure and endless light.”

Blake’s

“To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.”

Whitman’s

“Light rare, untellable, lighting the very light.”

Thompson’s

“Ever and anon a trumpet sounds From the hid battlements of Eternity.”

These are artistic, sidelong representations of the mystic’s direct apprehension of the Infinite on, so to speak, its cosmic and impersonal side. Others reflect the personal and intimate contact with the Divine Life which forms the opposite side of his complete experience. Thus Francis Thompson:

“With his aureole The tresses of my soul Are blent In wished content.”

So, too, St. John of the Cross:

“All things I then forgot, My cheek on him who for my coming came; All ceased, and I was not, Leaving my cares and shame Among the lilies, and forgetting them.”

Best of all, perhaps, Jalāluddin Rūmi:

“In a place beyond uttermost place, in a tract without shadow of trace, Soul and body transcending I live, in the soul of my loved one anew.”

Sometimes the two aspects, personal and impersonal, are woven together by the poet: and then it is that we come nearest to an understanding of the full experience he is trying to express. A remarkable example of this occurs in Gerard Hopkins, perhaps the greatest mystical poet of the Victorian era:

“Thou mastering me God! giver of breath and bread; World’s strand, sway of the sea; Lord of the living and dead; Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.”

“I kiss my hand To the stars, lovely-asunder Starlight, wafting him out of it; and Glow, glory in thunder; Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west: Since, though he is under the world’s splendour and wonder, His mystery must be instressed, stressed; For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.”

So much for the poets. In the prose writings of the mystics we find again the same characters, the same high imaginative qualities, the same passionate effort to give the ineffable some kind of artistic form. This effort includes in its span a wide range of literary artifices; some endeavouring to recapture and represent in concrete symbols the objective reality known; some, like one dominant art movement of the present day, trying to communicate it obliquely, by a representation of the subjective feeling-state induced in the mystic’s own consciousness. At one end of the scale, therefore, we have the so-called negative language of mysticism, which describes the supersensuous in paradox by refusing to describe it at all; by declaring that the entry of the soul upon spiritual experience is an entry into a Cloud of Unknowing, a nothing, a Divine Darkness, a fathomless abyss. The curious thing is, that though here, if anywhere, the mystic seems to keep his secret to himself, as a matter of fact it is just this sort of language which has been proved to possess the highest evocative power. For many types of mind, this really does fling magic casements wide; does give us a momentary glimpse of the perilous seas. I am inclined to think that, many and beautiful as are the symbolic and pictorial creations of mystical genius, it is here that this genius works most freely, produces its most magnificent results. When Ruysbroeck speaks of the boundless abyss of pure simplicity, that “dim silence where all lovers lose themselves”; when he assures us that, “stripped of its very life,” the soul is destined to “sail the wild billows of that Sea Divine,” surely he effects a true change in our universe. So, too, the wonderful series of formless visions—though “vision” is a poor word for intuitive experience of this sort—experienced by Angela of Foligno, far exceed in their suggestive power her vividly pictured conversations with Christ, when she declares that she beheld “those eyes and that face so gracious and so pleasing.”

“I beheld,” she says of her ultimate experience of the Absolute, “a Thing, as fixed and stable as it was indescribable; and more than this I cannot say, save what I have often said already, namely, that it was all good. And though my soul beheld not love, yet when it saw that ineffable Thing it was itself filled with unutterable joy, and it was taken out of the state it was in, and placed in this great and ineffable state.... But if thou seekest to know that which I beheld, I can tell thee nothing, save that I beheld a Fullness and a Clearness, and felt them within me so abundantly that I cannot describe it, nor give any image thereof: for what I beheld was not bodily, but as though it were in heaven. Thus I beheld a beauty so great that I can say nothing of it save that I saw the Supreme Beauty, which contains in itself all goodness.”

In the end, all that Angela has said here is, “Come and see!” but in saying this, she tells us far more than many do who go about to measure the City of Contemplation. Here words suggest, they do not tell; entice, but do not describe. Reminding us of the solemn declaration of Thomas à Kempis, that “there is a distance incomparable between those things that imperfect men think, and those that men illumined by high revelation behold,” they yet extend to other minds a musical invitation to intercourse with new orders of reality.

This sort of language, this form of paradoxical, suggestive, allusive art is a permanent feature in mystical literature. It is usually supposed to be derived through Dionysius the Areopagite from the Platonists, but is really far older than this. As it comes down the centuries, it develops in depth and richness. Each successive mystic takes up the imagery of negation where the last one leaves it—takes it, because he recognizes that it describes a country where he too has been—and adds to it the products of his own most secret and august experiences. As in the torch-race of the antique world, the illuminating symbol, once lit, is snatched from hand to hand, and burns ever brighter as it is passed on.

I take one example of this out of many. Nearly all the great mystics of the later Middle Ages speak of the Wilderness or Desert of Deity; suggesting thus that sense of great, swept spaces, “beyond the polar circle of the mind”—of a plane of experience destitute of all the homely furniture of thought—which seems to characterize a certain high type, or stage, of contemplation. It represents the emergence of the self into a real universe—a “place beyond uttermost place”—unrelated to the categories of thought, and is substantially the same experience which Dionysius the Areopagite and those mystics who follow him call the Divine Ignorance or the Dark, and which his English interpreter names the Cloud of Unknowing, where the soul feels itself to be lost. But each mystic who uses this traditional image of amazement—really the description of a psychological situation, not of an objective reality—gives to it a characteristic touch; each has passed it through the furnace of his own passionate imagination, and slightly modified its temper and its form. This place, or state, says Eckhart, is “a still wilderness where no one is at home.” It is “the quiet desert of the Godhead,” says Tauler; “So still, so mysterious, so desolate! The great wastes to be found in it have neither image, form, nor condition.” Yet, says Richard Rolle—suddenly bringing the positive experience of the contemplative heart to the rescue of the baffled contemplative mind—in this same wilderness consciousness _does_ set up an ineffable correspondence with Reality.

“[There] speaks the loved to the heart of the lover; as it were a bashful lover, that his sweetheart before men entreats not, nor friendly-wise but commonly and as a stranger kisses ... and anon comes heavenly joy, marvellously making merry melody.”

Here the mystic, with an astonishing boldness, weaves together spatial, personal and musical imagery, positive and negative experience, in order to produce his full effect.

Finally, St. John of the Cross, great thinker, manly and heroic mystic, and true poet, effects a perfect synthesis of these positive and negative experiences—that apparent self-loss in empty spaces which is also, mysteriously, an encounter of love.

“The soul in dim contemplation (he says) is like a man who sees something for the first time, the like of which he has never seen before ... hence it feels like one who is placed in a wild and vast solitude where no human being can come; an immense wilderness without limits. But this wilderness is the more delicious, sweet and lovely, the more it is wide, vast and lonely; for where the soul seems most to be lost, there it is most raised up above all created things.”

All this language, as I have said, belongs to the oblique and paradoxical side of the mystic’s art; and comes to us from those who are temperamentally inclined to that pure contemplation which “has no image.” Psychologically speaking, these mystics are closer to the musician than to any other type of artist, though they avail themselves when they wish of material drawn from all the arts. But there is another kind of mystic, naturally inclined to visualization, who tends to translate his supersensual experience into concrete, pictorial images; into terms of colour and of form. He uses, in fact, the methods of the painter, the descriptive writer, sometimes of the dramatist, rather than those of the musician or the lyric poet. He is, I think, as a rule much less impressive than the artist of the illusive kind, and is seldom so successful in putting us into communion with reality. On the other hand—and partly because of his more concrete method—he is the more generally understood. For one person to whom Plotinus or Ruysbroeck communicates his sublime intuition of reality, a hundred accept at their face-value, as true “revelations,” the visions of St. Gertrude or St. Teresa.

The picture-making proceedings of this type of mystical artist are of two kinds. Sometimes they are involuntary, sometimes deliberate. Often we find both forms in the same individual; for instance, in Mechthild of Magdeburg and in Suso, where it is sometimes extremely difficult to find the dividing line between true visionary experience entirely outside the self’s control, and the intense meditation, or poetic apprehension of truth, which demands a symbolic and concrete form for its literary expression. In both cases an act of artistic creation has taken place; in one below, in the other above, the normal threshold of consciousness. In true visionaries, the translation of the supersensual into sensual terms is uncontrolled by the surface intellect; as it is indeed in many artists. Without the will or knowledge of the subject, intuitions are woven up into pictures, cadences, words; and, by that which psychologists call a psycho-sensorial automatism, the mystic seems to himself to receive the message of Reality in a pictorial, verbal, dramatic or sometimes a musical form—“coming in to his body by the windows of the wits,” as one old writer has it.

Thus the rhythmic phrases in which the Eternal Wisdom speaks to Suso, or the Divine Voice to St. Catherine of Siena, verge on poetic composition; but poetic composition of the automatic type, uncontrolled by the mystic’s surface-mind. Thus, too, the great fluid visions of the prophets, the sharply definite, often lovely, pictures which surge up before the mind of Suso, the Mechthilds, St. Gertrude, Angela of Foligno, of the great St. Teresa herself, are symbolic pictures which represent an actual interior experience, a real contact with the supersensual; exhibiting the interpretative power inherent in the mystical imagination. These pictures are seen by the mystic—sometimes, as he says, within the mind, sometimes as projections in space—always in sharp definition, lit by that strong light which is peculiar to visionary states. They are not produced by any voluntary process of composition, but loom up, as do the best creations of other artists, from his deeper mind, bringing with them an intense conviction of reality. Good instances are the visions which so often occur at conversion, or mark the transition from one stage of the mystic way to another: for example, the mystic marriage of St. Catherine of Siena, or that vision of the Upper School of True Resignation, which initiated Suso into the “dark night of the soul.” I believe that we may look on such visions as allied to dream-states; but in the case of the great mystics they are the richly significant waking-dreams of creative genius, not the confused and meaningless dreaming of normal men. Suso himself makes this comparison, and says that none but the mystic can distinguish vision from dream. In character they vary as widely as do the creations of the painter and the poet. The personal and intimate, the remote and metaphysical, sides of the spiritual life are richly represented in them. Sometimes the elements from which they are built up come from theology, sometimes from history, legend, nature, or human life. But in every case the “glory of the lighted mind” shines on them.

Often a particularly delicate and gay poetic feeling—a faëry touch—shows itself in the symbolic pictures by which these mystics try to represent their encounter with the spiritual world. Coventry Patmore once spoke of a “sphere of rapture and dalliance” to which the great contemplatives are raised; and it is from such a sphere that these seem to turn back to us, trying, by direct appeals to our sense of joy, the most stunted of our spiritual faculties, to communicate their exultant experience of that Kingdom of Reality which is neither “here” nor “there” but “everywhere.”

Music and dancing, birds and flowers, the freshness of a living, growing world, all simple joyous things, all airy beauties, are used in the effort to tell us of that vision which Clement called the privilege of love. When we read these declarations we feel that it is always spring-time in those gardens of the soul of which they tell. St. John of the Cross, who described those spiritual gardens, said that fragrant roses brought from strange islands grew there—those strange islands which are the romantic unexplored possibilities of God—and that water-lilies shine like stars in that roaring torrent of supernal glory which pours without ceasing through the transfigured soul. This is high poetry; but sometimes the mystic imagination shows itself under simpler, more endearing forms, as when St. Mechthild of Hackeborn saw the prayers of her sisters flying up like larks into the presence of God; some soaring as high as His countenance and some falling down to rest upon His heart. An angel carried the little, fluttering prayers which were not strong enough to rise of themselves. Imagery less charming than this has gone to the making of many a successful poem.

Between the sublime intensity of St. John and the crystalline simplicity of St. Mechthild, mystical literature provides us with examples of almost every type of romantic and symbolic language; deliberate or involuntary translation of the heavenly fact into the earthly image. True, the earthly image is transfused by a new light, radiant with a new colour, has been lifted into a new atmosphere; and thus has often a suggestive quality far in excess of its symbolic appropriateness. In their search for such images the mystics explore the resources of all the arts. In particular, music and dancing—joyous harmony, unceasing measured movement—have seemed to them specially significant _media_ whereby to express their intuitions of Eternal Life. St. Francis, and after him Richard Rolle, heard celestial melodies; Kabir, the “Unstruck Music of the Infinite.” Dante saw the saints dancing in the sphere of the sun; Suso heard the music of the angels, and was invited to join in their song and dance. It was not, he says, like the dancing of this world, but was like a celestial ebb and flow within that incomprehensible Abyss which is the secret being of the Deity. There is no need to dwell upon the remarkable way in which mystics of all countries and periods, from Plotinus to Jacob Boehme, resort to the dance as an image of the glad harmonious movements of liberated souls. I will take two characteristic examples, from the East and from the West. The first is a poem by Kabir:

“Dance, my heart! dance to-day with joy. The strains of love fill the days and the nights with music, and the world is listening to its melodies; Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythm of this music. The hills and the sea and the earth dance. The world of man dances in laughter and tears.... Behold! my heart dances in the delight of a hundred arts, and the Creator is well pleased.”

The next is the German mystic and poetess, Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose writings are amongst the finest products of mystical genius of the romantic and emotional type. This Mechthild’s book, _The Book of the Flowing Light of the Godhead_, is a collection of visions, revelations, thoughts and letters, written in alternate prose and verse. The variety of its contents includes the most practical advice on daily conduct, the most sublime descriptions of high mystical experience. Mechthild was an artist, who was evidently familiar with the literary tradition and most of the literary expedients of her time. She uses many of them in the attempt to impart to others that vision of Life, Light and Love which she knew. I take, as an example of her genius, and a last specimen of the mystic’s creative art, the celebrated letter addressed to a fellow-pilgrim on that spiritual “Love-path” which she trod herself with so great a fortitude. It represents not only the rich variety of Mechthild’s literary resources, but also those several forms of artistic expression which the great mystics have employed. Here, concrete representation is perpetually reinforced by oblique suggestion; the imagery of the poet is double-edged, evoking moods as well as ideas. We observe that it opens with a spiritual love-scene, closely related in style to the secular and romantic literature of Mechthild’s time; that this develops to a dramatic dialogue between soul and senses—another common artifice of the mediæval author—and this again leads by a perfectly natural transition to the soul’s great acclamation of its destiny, and the crowning announcement of the union of lover and beloved.

The movement of this mystical romance, then, like the movement of ascending consciousness, goes from the concrete image to the mysterious and sidelong apprehension of imageless facts. First we have picture, then dialectic, then intuitive certitude. Here, too, we find both those aspects of experience which dominate mystical literature: the personal and intimate encounter of love, and the self-loss of the soul in an utterly transcendent Absolute. Surely the union of these “completing opposites” in one work of art must rank as a great imaginative achievement.

Mechthild tells her story of the soul’s adventure in snatches of freely-rhymed verse, linked together by prose narrative passages—a form which is not uncommon in the secular literature of the Middle Ages.[1] We are further reminded of that secular literature by the imagery which she employs. The soul is described as a maiden, the Divine Lover is a fair youth whom she desires. The very setting of the story is just such a fairy landscape as we find in the lays and romances of chivalry; it has something of the spring-like charm that we feel in _Aucassin and Nicolette_—the dewy morning, the bird-haunted forest, the song and dance. It is, in fact, a love story of the period adapted with extraordinary boldness to the purposes of mystical experience.

When the virgin soul, says Mechthild at the opening of her tale, has endured all the trials of mystical purification, she is very weary, and cries to her Love, saying, “Oh, beautiful youth! I long for thee. Where shall I find thee?” Then the Divine Youth answers:

“A gentle voice I hear, Something of love sounds there: I have wooed her long and long, Yet not till now have I heard that song. It moveth me so, Towards her I must go. She is the soul who with pain is torn, And love, that is one with the pain. In the early dew of the morn, In the hidden depths, which are far below, The life of the soul is born.”

Then her vassals, which are the five senses, say to the soul, “Lady, adorn thyself.”

“We have heard the whisper clear; The Prince is coming towards thee here, In the morning dew, in the bird’s song. Ah, fair Bride, tarry not long!”

So the soul adorns herself with the virtues, and goes out into the forest: and the forest, says Mechthild, is the company of the saints. Sweet nightingales sing there night and day of true union with God, and there in the thicket are heard the voices of the birds of holy wisdom. But the youth himself comes not to her. He sends messengers to the intent that she may dance: one by one he sends her the faith of Abraham, the aspirations of the Prophets, the pure humility of our Lady Saint Mary, all the virtues of Christ, and all the sanctity of His elect; and thus there is prepared a most noble dance. And then comes the youth and says to the soul, “Maiden, as gladly shouldst thou have danced, as mine elect have danced.” But she replies:

“Unless thou lead me, Lord, I cannot dance; Would’st thou have me leap and spring, Thou thyself, dear Lord, must sing, So shall I spring into thy love, From thy love to understanding, From understanding to delight. Then, soaring human thought far, far above, There circling will I dwell, and taste encircling love.”

So sings the Bride; and so the youth must sing, that she may dance. Then says he:

“Maiden, thy dance of praise was well performed. Now thou shalt have thy will of the Virgin’s Son, for thou art weary. Come at midday to the shady fountain, to the resting-place of love: and with him thou shalt find refreshment.”

And the maiden replies:

“Oh Lord, it is too high, too great, That she should be thy chosen mate, Within whose heart no love can be Till she is quickened, Lord, by thee.”

By this romantic, story-telling method Mechthild has appealed to the fancy and emotion of the reader, and has enticed him into the heart of the spiritual situation. Next, she passes to her intellectual appeal; the argument between the soul and the senses. From this she proceeds, by a transition which seems to be free and natural, yet is the outcome of consummate art, to the supreme declarations of the deified spirit “at home with the Lord,” as St. Paul said.

The dialogue moves by the process of reduction to a demonstration of God as the only satisfaction of the questing soul which has surrendered to the incantations of Reality. One after another, substitutes for the First and Only Fair are offered and rejected. The soul says to the senses, which are her vassals: “Now I am for a while weary of the dance. Give place! for I would go where I may refresh myself.” Then say the senses to the soul: “Lady, wilt thou refresh thyself in the tears of love of St. Mary Magdalene? This may well satisfy thee?” But the soul says: “Hush, sirs, you know not what I mean! Let me be, for I would drink a little of the unmingled wine.”

Then say the senses: