Chapter II

Quel diable de jargon entends-je ici? Voici bien du haut style.

MOLIÈRE.

Mysticism has no genealogy. It is no tradition conveyed across frontiers or down the course of generations as a ready-made commodity. It is a state of thinking and feeling, to which minds of a certain temperament are liable at any time or place, in occident and orient, whether Romanist or Protestant, Jew, Turk, or Infidel. It is more or less determined by the positive religion with which it is connected. But though conditioned by circumstance or education, its appearance is ever the spontaneous product of a certain crisis in individual or social history.

A merely imitative mysticism, as exemplified by some Tractarian ecclesiastics, is an artificial expedient, welcome to ambitious minds as an engine, to the frivolous as a devotional diversion, to the weak and servile as a softly-cushioned yoke.

Were mysticism a transmitted principle we should be able to trace it through successive translations to a form which might be termed primitive. We might mark and throw off, as we ascended, the accretions with which it has been invested, till we reached its origin—the simple idea of mysticism, new-born. The mysticism of India, the earliest we can find, shows us that nothing of this sort is possible. That set of principles which we repeatedly encounter, variously combined, throughout the history of mysticism, exhibits itself in the Bagvat-Gita almost complete. The same round of notions, occurring to minds of similar make under similar circumstances, is common to mystics in ancient India and in modern Christendom. The development of these fundamental ideas is naturally more elevated and benign under the influence of Christianity.

Summarily, I would say, this Hindoo mysticism—

(1.) Lays claim to disinterested love, as opposed to a mercenary
religion;

(2.) Reacts against the ceremonial prescription and pedantic
literalism of the Vedas;

(3.) Identifies, in its pantheism, subject and object, worshipper
and worshipped;

(4.) Aims at ultimate absorption in the Infinite;

(5.) Inculcates, as the way to this dissolution, absolute passivity,
withdrawal into the inmost self, cessation of all the powers,—giving
recipes for procuring this beatific torpor or trance;

(6.) Believes that eternity may thus be realized in time;

(7.) Has its mythical miraculous pretentions, _i.e._, its theurgic
department;

(8.) And, finally, advises the learner in this kind of religion to
submit himself implicitly to a spiritual guide,—his Guru.

With regard to (1), it is to be observed that the disinterestedness of the worship enjoined by Crishna is by no means absolute, as Madame Guyon endeavoured to render hers. The mere ritualist, buying prosperity by temple-gifts, will realise, says Crishna, only a partial enjoyment of heaven. Arjoun, too, is encouraged by the prospect of a recompence, for he is to aspire to far higher things. ‘Men who are endowed with true wisdom are unmindful of good or evil in this world,—wise men who have abandoned all thought of the fruit which is produced from their actions are freed from the chains of birth, and go to the regions of eternal happiness.’

In some hands such doctrine might rise above the popular morality; in most it would be so interpreted as to sink below even that ignoble standard.

(3.) ‘God,’ saith Crishna, ‘is the gift of charity; God is the offering; God is in the fire of the altar; by God is the sacrifice performed; and God is to be obtained by him who maketh God alone the object of his works.’ Again, ‘I am moisture in the water, light in the sun and moon, ... human nature in mankind, ... the understanding of the wise, the glory of the proud, the strength of the strong,’ &c.

(4.) This eternal absorption in Brahm is supposed to be in some way consistent with personality, since Crishna promises Arjoun enjoyment. The mystic of the Bagvat-Gita seeks at once the highest aim of the Hindoo religion, the attainment of such a state that when he dies he shall not be born again into any form on earth. Future birth is the Hindoo hell and purgatory.

So with Buddhism, and its Nirwana.

But the final absorption which goes by the name of Nirwana among the Buddhists is described in terms which can only mean annihilation. According to the Buddhists all sentient existence has within it one spiritual element, homogeneous in the animal and the man,—Thought, which is a divine substance. This ‘Thought’ exists in its highest degree in man, the summit of creation, and from the best among men it lapses directly out of a particular existence into the universal. Thus the mind of man is divine, but most divine when nearest nothing. Hence the monastic asceticism, inertia, trance, of this kindred oriental superstition. (_See_ Spence Hardy’s _Eastern Monachism_.)

(5.) ‘Divine wisdom is said to be confirmed when a man can restrain his faculties from their wonted use, as the tortoise draws in his limbs.’

The devotees who make it their principal aim to realise the emancipation of the spirit supposed to take place in trance, are called Yogis.

‘The Yogi constantly exerciseth the spirit in private. He is recluse, of a subdued mind and spirit, free from hope and free from perception. He planteth his own seat firmly on a spot that is undefiled, neither too high nor too low, and sitteth upon the sacred grass which is called Koos, covered with a skin and a cloth. There he whose business is the restraining of his passions should sit, with his mind fixed on one object alone; in the exercise of his devotion for the purification of his soul, keeping his head, his neck, and body steady, without motion; his eyes fixed on the point of his nose, looking at no other place around.’

The monks of Mount Athos, whose mysticism was also of this most degraded type, substituted, as a gazing-point, the navel for the nose.

Ward, in describing the Yogi practice, tells us that at the latest stage the eyes also are closed, while the fingers and even bandages are employed to obstruct almost completely the avenues of respiration. Then the soul is said to be united to the energy of the body; both mount, and are as it were concentrated in the skull; whence the spirit escapes by the basilar suture, and, the body having been thus abandoned, the incorporeal nature is reunited for a season to the Supreme.[9]

Stupefying drugs were doubtless employed to assist in inducing this state of insensibility.

Crishna teaches that ‘the wisely devout’ walk in the night of time when all things rest, and sleep in the day of time when all things wake. In other words, the escape from sense is a flight from illusion into the undeceiving condition of trance. So the Code of Menu pronounces the waking state one of deceptive appearances—a life among mere phantasmata; that of sleep a little nearer reality; while that of ecstasy, or trance, presents the truth—reveals a new world, and enables the inner eye (which opens as the outer one is closed) to discern the inmost reality of things.

These are pretensions which mysticism has often repeated. This notion underlies the theory and practice of spiritual clairvoyance.

(6.) ‘The learned behold him (Deity) alike in the reverend Brahmin perfected in knowledge; in the ox and in the elephant; in the dog, and in him who eateth the flesh of dogs. Those whose minds are fixed on this equality gain eternity even in this world’ (transcend the limitation of time).

(7.) The following passage, given by Ward, exhibits at once the nature of the miraculous powers ascribed to the highest class of devotees, and the utter lawlessness arrogated by these ‘god-intoxicated’ men:—

‘He (the Yogi) will hear celestial sounds, the songs and conversation of celestial choirs. He will have the perception of their touch in their passage through the air. He is able to trace the progress of intellect through the senses, and the path of the animal spirit through the nerves. He is able to enter a dead or a living body by the path of the senses, and in this body to act as though it were his own.

‘He who in the body hath obtained liberation is of no caste, of no sect, of no order; attends to no duties, adheres to no shastras, to no formulas, to no works of merit; he is beyond the reach of speech; he remains at a distance from all secular concerns; he has renounced the love and the knowledge of sensible objects; he is glorious as the autumnal sky; he flatters none, he honours none; he is not worshipped, he worships none; whether he practises and follows the customs of his country or not, this is his character.’

In the fourteenth century, mystics were to be found among the lower orders, whose ignorance and sloth carried negation almost as far as this. They pretended to imitate the divine immutability by absolute inaction. The dregs and refuse of mysticism along the Rhine are equal in quality to its most ambitious produce on the banks of the Ganges.

(8.) The Guru is paralleled by the Pir of the Sufis, the Confessor of the Middle Age, and the Directeur of modern France.[10]

A mysticism which rests ultimately on the doctrine that the human soul is of one substance with God, is fain to fall down and worship at the feet of a man. Such directorship is, of course, no essential part of mysticism—is, in fact, an inconsistency; but, though no member, or genuine outgrowth, it is an entozoon lamentably prevalent. The mystic, after all his pains to reduce himself to absolute passivity, becomes not theopathetic, but _anthropopathetic_—suffers, not under God, but man.

Footnote 9:

See Wilkins’ _Bagvat-Gita_, pp. 63-65. _Ward_, ii. 180. Also, _Asiatic
Researches_, vol. xvii. pp. 169-313, containing an account of these
Yogis, by Horace Hayman Wilson. One sect, we are told, have a way of
contemplating Vishnu in miniature, by imagining the god in their
heart, about the size of an open hand, and so adoring him from top to
toe. In this gross conception of an indwelling deity these Hindoos do
indeed exceed St. Theresa, who after swallowing the wafer conceives of
Christ as prisoner in her inwards, and, making her heart a
doll’s-house, calls it a temple. But beyond her, and beyond the
Indians, too, in sensuousness, are the Romanist stories of those
saints in whom it is declared that a _post-mortem_ examination has
disclosed the figure of Christ, or the insignia of his passion,
miraculously modelled in the chambers of the heart.

Footnote 10:

_Asiatic Researches_, _loc. cit._ The worshipped principle of
Hindooism is not love, but power. Certain objects are adored as
containing divine energy. The Guru is a representative and vehicle of
divine power—a Godful man, and accordingly the most imperious of
task-masters. The prodigies of asceticism, so abundant in Indian
fable, had commonly for their object the attainment of superhuman
powers. Thus Taraki, according to the Siva Puran, stood a hundred
years on tip-toe, lived a hundred years on air, a hundred on fire, &c.
for this purpose.—Notes to _Curse of Kehama_, p. 237.

The following passage, cited by Ward, exhibits the subjective idealism
of these Hindoos in its most daring absurdity. ‘Let every one meditate
upon himself; let him be the worshipper and the worship. Whatever you
see is but yourself, and father and mother are nonentities; you are
the infant and the old man, the wise man and the fool, the male and
the female; it is you who are drowned in the stream—you who pass over;
you are the sensualist and the ascetic, the sick man and the strong;
in short, whatsoever you see, that is you, as bubbles, surf, and
billows are all but water.’

Now, there is an obvious resemblance between this idealism and that of
Fichte. The Indian and the German both ignore the notions formed from
mere sensible experience; both dwell apart from experience, in a world
fashioned for themselves out of ‘pure thought;’ both identify thought
and being, subject and object. But here the likeness ends. The points
of contrast are obvious. The Hindoo accepts as profoundest wisdom what
would be an unfair caricature of the system of Fichte. The idealism of
the Oriental is dreamy and passive; it dissolves his individuality; it
makes him a particle, wrought now into this, now into that, in the
ever-shifting phantasmagoria of the universe; he has been, he may be,
he, therefore, in a sense is, anything and everything. Fichte’s
philosophy, on the contrary, rests altogether on the intense
activity—on the autocracy of the Ego, which posits, or creates, the
Non-Ego. He says, ‘The activity and passivity of the Ego are one and
the same. For in as far as it does _not_ posit a something in itself,
it posits that something in the Non-Ego. Again, the activity and
passivity of the Non-Ego are one and the same. In as far as the
Non-Ego works upon the Ego, and will absorb a something in it, the Ego
posits that very thing in the Non-Ego.’ (_Grundlage der gesammten
Wissenschaftslehre_, § 3. _Sämmtliche Werke_, v. i. p. 177.) Action is
all in all with him. God he calls ‘a pure Action’ (_reines Handeln_),
the life and principle of a supersensuous order of the world—just as I
am a pure Action, as a link in that order. (_Gerichtliche
Verantwortung gegen die Anklage des Atheismus, Werke_, v. p. 261.)
Charged with denying personality to God, Fichte replies that he only
denied him that conditioned personality which belongs to ourselves—a
denial, I suppose, in which we should all agree. The only God in his
system which is not an uninfluential abstraction is manifestly the
Ego—that is dilated to a colossal height, and deified. Pre-eminently
anti-mystical as was the natural temperament of Fichte, here he opens
a door to the characteristic misconception of mysticism—the
investiture of our own notions and our own will with a divine
authority or glory. He would say, ‘The man of genius _does_ think
divine thoughts. But the man who is unintelligible, who, in the very
same province of pure thought as that occupied by the true
philosopher, thinks only at random and incoherently; _he_ is mistaken,
I grant, in arrogating inspiration—_him_ I call a mystic.’ But of
unintelligibility or incoherence what is to be the test,—who is to be
the judge? In this anarchy of gods, numerous as thinkers, one deity
must have as much divine right as another. There can be no appeal to
experience, which all confessedly abandon; no appeal to facts, which
each Ego creates after its own fashion for itself.