Chapter III: Part 3

“In his life” a new summit has been conquered by humanity. But are we to stop there? Is not the attainment of that same summit, the achievement of that life-giving surrender to the Universal Spirit—“a life-giving life,” Ruysbroeck calls it—just what the great mystics, following as well as they can the curve of the life of Christ, try to do according to their measure? Theirs, after all, is the vision which sees that “there is no other way to _life_ but the way of the Cross,” and that the human life of Christ is “the door by which all must come in.” Thus the spiritual victory of the Cross is for them not so much a unique, as a pioneer act. It is the first heroic cutting of a road on which they are to travel as far as they can; not merely the vicarious setting-right of the balance between God and man, upset by man’s wilful sin. In their ascent towards union with God, are not they road-makers, or at any rate road-menders, too? Are they not forging new links between two orders of reality, which are separate for the once-born consciousness? If so, then we may regard each one of them as a bit of the slowly achieved atonement of the race; that gradual pressing-on of humanity into the heart of the Transcendent Order. For Christians, this movement was initiated by Christ. But surely it is continued and helped by every soul in union with Him, even those who knew not His Name; and Julian of Norwich was right when she said that she knew she was “in the Cross with Him.”

Two things are perpetually emphasized in modern presentations of religion. First, the stress tends more and more to be upon experience. Nothing which authority tells us is done for us truly counts, unless we feel and realize it as done in us. In so far as this is so, the tendency is to a mystical concept of religion; and, speaking generally, to just the concept of religion which is supposed to conflict with the idea of atonement as usually understood. But, secondly, the social and corporate character of Christianity is strongly emphasized; and, where this corporate character is admired more than it is understood, mysticism is harshly criticized as the religion of the spiritual individualist, a “vertical relation,” the “flight of the alone to the Alone.” St. Paul’s “completing opposites,” in fact, are still in the foreground of our religious life; and so perhaps some re-statement of the solution by which he found room for both of them, and hence both for personal responsibility and atonement, may be possible and fruitful for us, too.

And first we notice that those enthusiasts for the corporate idea who condemn the mystics as religious egoists seem to forget that they are contradicting themselves; that if their vision of the Church of Christ as a mystical _body_ be true, then the mystic’s ascent to God cannot be a flight of the Alone. The poisonous implication of that phrase—true in its context but always misunderstood—has stuck like mud to the white robes of the saints. But the mystic is not merely a self going out on a solitary quest of Reality. He can, must, and does go only as a member of the whole body, performing as it were the function of a specialized organ. What he does, he does for all. He is, in fact, an atoner pure and simple: something stretched out to bridge a gap, something which makes good in a particular direction the general falling-short. The special kind of light or life which he receives, he receives for the race; and, conversely, the special growth which he is able to achieve comes from the race. He depends on it for his past; it depends on him for its future. All are part of life’s great process of becoming; there are no breaks. Although there is perfect individualization, there is interpenetration too. His attainment is the attainment of the whole, pressing on behind him, supporting him. Thus—to take an obvious example—the achievement of peculiar sanctity by the member of a religious order is the achievement of that order in him; and this not in a fantastic and metaphorical sense. The support of the Rule, the conditions of the life, the weight of tradition, the special characters which each religious family inherits from its Patriarch, have all contributed something to make the achievement possible; and are factors governing the type which that achievement assumes. We recognize the Cistercian stamp upon St. Bernard, the Dominican on Suso and Tauler, the Carmelite on St. John of the Cross. Each such case vindicates once more the incarnational principle; it is the true spirit of the community, flowering in this representative of theirs, which we see. Thus, as we may regard Christ from one point of view as supremely ideal Man incarnate—the “heavenly man” as Paul calls Him—summing up, fulfilling, lifting to new heights all that came before, and therefore actualizing all that humanity was ever intended to do, and changing for ever more the character of its future achievements; so, in a small way, we may regard St. Teresa as Carmel, the ideal Carmel, incarnate. Each is a concrete fact which atones for the falling-short of a whole type, and yet is conditioned by that type. The thought of what the Carmelite life was meant to do, the pressure of that idea seeking manifestation, did condition Teresa’s achievement. Are we not also bound to say that the thought of the Jewish visions of an ideal humanity, of the Son of Man and the Suffering Servant, did condition the external accidents of the life and death of Christ?

So as to the past. Still more as to the future are the corporate and individual aspects of spiritual life inextricably twined together. As that done by one is an outbirth of the whole, so that done to one may avail for the whole. Only by staying within the circle of this thought—a thought which surely comes very close to the doctrine of Atonement—can we form a sane and broad idea of what the mystic, and the mystic’s experience, mean for the race. Consider again the case of Teresa. As, even in a time and place of considerable monastic corruption—for no one who has read her life and letters can regard the Convent of the Incarnation as a forcing-house of the spiritual life—still the idea of her order conditioned her great and Godward-tending soul, and her dedicated life filled up the measure of its glory; yet more has Teresa’s own, separate, unique achievement conditioned the spirit of her order ever since. All the saints which it has nourished have been salted with her salt. All that she won has flowed out from her in life-giving streams to others. She has been a regenerator of the religious life, has achieved the ideal of Richard Rolle, and become a “pipe of life” through which the living water can pass from God to man. Is not this, too, rather near the idea of Atonement, a curiously close and faithful imitation of Christ; especially when we consider the amount of unselfish suffering which such a career entails?

The objective of the Christian life, we say, is union with God: that paradoxical victory-in-surrender of love which translates us from finite to infinite levels. Most of us in this present life and in our own persons fall short of the glory of this. We are not all equally full of grace; we do not all grow up to the full stature of the Sons of God; and it is no use pretending that we do. But the mystical saint does achieve this, and by this act of mediation—this “vicarious” achievement, if you like to put it so—performed by a member of our social organism, the gift does really “abound unto the many.” For what other purpose, indeed, are these apparently elect souls bred up? What other social value can we attribute to them than that which we see them actually possessing in history—the value, that is, of special instruments put forth by the race, to do or suffer something which the average self cannot do, but which humanity as a whole, in its Godward ascent, must, can, and shall do; ducts, too, whereby fresh spiritual energy flows in to mankind; eyes, open to visions beyond the span of average sight; parents of new life. Carlyle said that a hero was “a man sent hither to make the divine mystery more impressively known to us”—to atone, in fact, for the inadequacy of our own perception of Reality, our perpetual relapses to lower levels of life; to make a bridge between us and the Transcendent Order. And when the hero as mystic does this, is he not in a special sense a close imitator of Christ?

We seem to have here the highest example of a principle which is operative through the whole of the seething complex of life, for there is a sense on which every great personality fulfils the function of an atoner. On the one hand he does something towards the making good of humanity’s “falling short” in one direction or another; on the other hand, he gives to his fellow-men—adds to their universe—something which they did not possess before. Burke, speaking of the social contract, has said that society is a partnership in all science, all art, every virtue, and all perfection; and, since the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained but in many generations, it is a partnership between the living, the dead, and the unborn. “Each contract of each particular state,” he says, “is but a clause in the great primæval contract of eternal society, _linking the lower with the higher natures_, connecting the visible and the invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures each in their appointed place.” In such a partnership—linking higher and lower, visible and invisible worlds in one—the creative spirits in every department of life may properly be called “atoners,” for they have a corporate and racial value which is in exact proportion to their individual achievement of reality. Thus the great artist, or the great musician, really redeems his fellows from slavery to a lower level of colour, form, sound. He atones for their dullness towards that which has always been there, and endows them with new possibilities of vision and hearing; gives them, in fact, more abundant life; is the Door, the Way, to a wider universe. His creative acts open new gates to the whole race. The fact that he has lived and worked has effected a permanent change in the stream of life, which can never again be that which it was before. If we were more accustomed, on the one hand, to look at the achievements of religious genius from the artistic and creative point of view, and on the other hand, to discern the work of the Holy Spirit in the artistic as well as the religious field, I believe that we should find a close parallel between the work of supreme personality redeeming spirit, and the work of the great artist redeeming sense, from servitude to old imperfections and disharmonies.

We might almost make it the test of true greatness, this wonderful power of flinging out the filaments of life in all directions; this way in which noble and creative personalities of every type seem to be so much more than themselves—to count for so much more than themselves—to be, in their generous activities, the servants of all life. They appear to be the sum of tendencies which preceded them; and to gather those tendencies to a focus and distribute them again, enhanced and re-directed, to succeeding generations of souls. Such a personality has to the full the divine power of giving and of taking. Whilst he seems specially original, it is always true that the past, the race, nourishes him to an enormous extent. Christ Himself conformed to this law. The great man is rooted in history, plaited up in the life of his own time: absorbs from the human as well as from the spiritual. His feet are in Time, though his head is in Eternity. He is never isolated and ring-fenced. Where he seems so, that appearance is found on examination to be deceptive, as Dr. Rufus Jones has shown in the case of Jacob Boehme, and Baron von Hügel in that of George Fox. So, again, the special act, vision, or experience of the spiritual genius never ends with him. He is a centre of divine fecundity—it is the mystics’ own phrase. The touch of the divine life stimulates him to creation. He is a regenerator, a whirlpool of new forces, a parent of new things. It seems that life’s “tendency to lag behind,” its tendency _not_ to do its best, receives its corrective in all such great spirits; and the Christian atonement becomes the supreme, the divine manifestation of a vital law which we find operative on every level of existence.

If we acknowledge the extent to which Grace, Spirit, God, works on man through personality, through specific men—as a communication of transcendent vitality to certain souls (“elect,” if you like) in order that they may bring forth new life, new vision, new goodness, may fertilize the race afresh—then shall we not expect to find that Christianity, being a vital, dynamic system, has exhibited and emphasized these facts throughout the whole of her great career? This outward thrust of great personalities from the social organism, these fresh unique saving contacts made by the individual in the name of the All, these sudden, incalculable, upward leaps of life, these changes in the national consciousness which the hero, poet, prophet can produce—we shall expect to find all this operative in the highest degree in the Christian Church. We shall expect to find her claiming for her greatest and most God-achieving spirits, not only special honour, but a special value, a special redeeming power in respect of the corporate body to which they belong; and this, of course, is exactly what we do find. The mystical saints, in fact, seem to provide us with a link between the doctrine of the Atonement—of the special racial value of the utterly surrendered life in God, which was once, and once only, perfectly achieved—and the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, or interpenetration and mutual help of all souls “in Christ.” From these two ideas there follows of necessity that further doctrine of the “prevailing merits” of the saints, their special “atoning” value for other men, the corporate social work done by heroic virtue flowering in individual souls, which the Catholic Church has always deduced from them. At the back of both ideas we find the same fact; that Life and Love, when supremely evoked within the temporal order, cannot keep themselves to themselves. Such life and such love have, in spite of their marked individuality, a profoundly social character; they are violently contagious; they spread, they interpenetrate, they transmute all selves that will receive them. They entincture the whole stream of duration, make good its shortcomings, make widening circles of splendour within the flux.

So, if we want to think of a Celestial Hierarchy, actual to us, founded in history, related with us by a thousand links, it is surely of the saints and the mystics that we ought to think; rising as it were in graduated orders, according to the strength and purity of their union with God, the fullness of their possession of Eternal Life, towards the Cross in which their tendencies are perfected and gathered up. These are amongst the highest values which life has given to us. The apostolic type; the men of action, dynamic manifestations of the Spirit. The prophetic type; men of supreme vision, enlarging the horizons of the world. The martyr-type; men of utter sacrifice and complete interior surrender. These are the three ways in which the mystical passion for God breaks out through humanity. These three types make good—atone for—our corporate spiritual shortcomings; redeem the dead level of that race which has thrust them forth towards the Infinite.

Perhaps it seems to us that their difference from us is too great; that they are cut off, divided by a chasm from the common experience of man to form an exclusive, “other-worldly” type. Their life rises up like a great mountain, full of beauty and strangeness; and ours is like the homely plain. But there is no break between the plain and the mountain. It is pushed out from us, it is part of us; its value is bound up with the value of the whole—with our value, as struggling, growing men. It, every inch of it, atones for our flatness and enhances the average level of the race. We have all seen in Catholic countries how a sudden hill with a Calvary on its summit can glorify and atone for the whole landscape—so poor without it, so noble with it—from which it is lifted up. Now the Cross is, and remains, the central feature in the Christian landscape too: but is it not the long slope of that hill, going from the common level to the heights, which makes it so homely to us, so accessible to us, so supremely a part of us, and completes its task of linking humanity and divinity?

These are some of the reasons why the doctrine of Atonement seems to be closely bound up with the mystical vision of life, and hard to understand—whether we mean by it a spiritual principle or a historic event—without that mystical vision. We have Christianity saying to us, on the one hand, that the utmost ideal of humanity, the ideal of perfect self-donation to the purposes of Spirit, perfect self-surrender to the interests of the All, was completely and transcendently achieved in Jesus. In Him man leapt to the heights; and this unique attainment counts for the whole race. But, on the other hand, it says that all who can are called to go as far as they are able on the same road; to “fill up the measure of the sufferings,” to “grow to the full stature,” to “press on to the high calling” of the human soul. Through these more vital personalities—the mystics, the twice-born, the saints—the radiance of the spiritual streams out on the race; God speaks to man through man. Such personalities act as receivers and transmitters; they really and practically distribute the flashes of the Uncreated Light. Their activities are vicarious; they do atone for the disabilities of other men. Therefore the social value of the mystics, their place in the organism, is intimately connected with the atoning idea. Were it not for the principle which the doctrine of Atonement expresses, the mystics would be spiritual individualists, whose life and experience would be meaningless except for themselves. And were it not for the continuance of the mystical life, the perpetual renewal of the mystical self-donation in love, its known value for the race, then the historic Atonement of Jesus would be an isolated act, unrelated to the great processes of the Spiritual World, of which it should form the crown.

THE MYSTIC AS CREATIVE ARTIST

Hostile criticism of the mystics almost invariably includes the charge that their great experiences are in the nature of merely personal satisfactions. It is said that they stand apart from the ruck of humanity, claiming a special knowledge of the supersensual, a special privilege of communion with it; yet do not pass on to others, in any real and genuine sense, the illumination, the intuition of Reality, which they declare that they have received. St. Bernard’s favourite mistranslation from Isaiah, “My secret to myself,” has again and again been used against them with damaging effect; linked sometimes with the notorious phrase in which Plotinus defined the soul’s fruition of Eternity as “a flight of the alone to the Alone.”

It is true that these hints concerning a solitary and ineffable encounter do tally with one side of the experience of the mystic; do describe one aspect of his richly various, many-angled spiritual universe, one way in which that divine union which is his high objective is apprehended by the surface-consciousness. But that which is here told, is only half the truth. There is another side, a “completing opposite,” to this admittedly indescribable union of hearts; a side which is often—and most ungraciously—forgotten by those who have received its benefits. The great mystic’s loneliness is a consecrated loneliness. When he ascends to that encounter with Divine Reality which is his peculiar privilege, he is not a spiritual individualist. He goes as the ambassador of the race. His spirit is not, so to speak, a “spark flying upwards” from this world into that world, flung out from the mass of humanity, cut off; a little, separate, brilliant thing. It is more like a feeler, a tentacle, which life as a whole stretches out into that supersensual world which envelops her. Life stretches that tentacle out, but she also draws it in again with the food that it has gathered, the news that it has to tell of the regions which its delicate tactile sense has enabled it to explore. This, it seems to me, is the function of the mystic consciousness in respect of the human race. For this purpose it is specialized. It receives, in order that it may give. As the prophet looks at the landscape of Eternity, the mystic finds and feels it: and both know that there is laid on them the obligation of exhibiting it if they can.

If this be so, then it becomes clear that the mystic’s personal encounter with Infinite Reality represents only one of the two movements which constitute his completed life. He must turn back to pass on the revelation he has received: must mediate between the transcendent and his fellow-men. He is, in fact, called to be a creative artist of the highest kind; and only when he is such an artist, does he fulfil his duty to the race.

It is coming to be realized more and more clearly that it is the business of the artist not only to delight us, but to enlighten us: in Blake’s words, to “Cleanse the doors of perception, so that everything may appear as it is—infinite.” Artists mediate between the truth and beauty which they know, and those who cannot without their help discern it. It is the function of art, says Hegel, to deliver to the domain of feeling and delight of vision all that the mind may possess of essential and transcendent Being. In this respect it ranks with religion and philosophy as “one of the three spheres of Absolute Spirit.” Bergson, again, declares that it is the peculiar business of art to brush aside everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with the real, the true. The artist is the man who sees things in their native purity.

“Could reality,” he observes in a celebrated passage, “come into direct contact with sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves—then, we should all be artists.... Deep in our souls we should hear the uninterrupted melody of our inner life: a music often gay, more often sad, always original. All this is around and within us: yet none of it is distinctly perceived by us. Between nature and ourselves—more, between ourselves and our own consciousness—hangs a veil: a veil dense and opaque for normal men, but thin, almost transparent, for the artist and poet.” He might have added, for the mystic too.

This veil, he says again, is woven of self-interest: we perceive things, not as they are, but as they affect ourselves. The artist, on the contrary, sees them for their own sakes, with the eyes of disinterested love. So, when the mystics declare to us that the first conditions of spiritual illumination are self-simplification, humility and detachment, they are demanding just those qualities which control the artist’s power of seeing things in their beauty and truth. The true mystic sees Reality in its infinite aspect; and tries, as other artists, to reveal it within the finite world. He not only ascends, but descends the ladder of contemplation; having heard “the uninterrupted music of the inner life,” he tries to weave it into melodies that other men can understand.

Bergson’s contemporary, Eucken, claims—and I think it is one of his most striking doctrines—that man is gradually but actually bringing into existence a spiritual world. This spiritual world springs up from within through humanity—that is, through man’s own consciousness—yet at the same time humanity is, as it were, growing up into it; finding it as an independent reality, waiting to be apprehended, waiting to be incorporated into our universe. In respect of man’s normal universe, this spiritual world is both immanent and transcendent: “Absent only from those unable to perceive it,” as Plotinus said of the _Nous_. We are reminded of the Voice which said to St. Augustine, “I am the Food of the Full-grown.”

This paradox of a wholly new order of experience thrusting itself up through the race which it yet transcends, is a permanent feature in the teachings of the higher religions and philosophies, and is closely connected with the phenomena of inspiration and of artistic creation. The artist, the prophet, the metaphysician, each builds up from material beyond the grasp of other souls, a world within which those other souls can live and dream: a world, moreover, which exhibits in new proportions and endows with new meanings the common world of daily life. When we ask what organ of the race—the whole body of humanity—it is, by and through which this supernal world thus receives expression, it becomes clear that this organ is the corporate spiritual consciousness, emerging in those whom we call, pre-eminently, mystics and seers. It is, actually and literally, through them that this new world is emerging and being built up; as it is through other forms of enhanced and clarified consciousness, in painters, musicians, philosophers, and the adepts of physical science, that other aspects of the universe are made known to men. In all of these, and in the mystic too, the twin powers of a steadfast, selective attention and of creative imagination are at work. Because of their wide, deep, attention to life they receive more news from the external world than others do; because of the creative cast of their minds, they are able to weave up the crude received material into a living whole, into an idea or image which can be communicated to other men. Ultimately, we owe to the mystics all the symbols, ideas and images of which our spiritual world, as it is thought of by the bulk of men, is constructed. We take its topography from them, at second-hand: and often forget the sublime adventures immortalized in those phrases which we take so lightly on our lips—the Divine Dark, the Beatific Vision, the Eternal Beauty, Ecstasy, Union, Spiritual Marriage, and the rest. The mystics have actually created, from that language which we have evolved to describe and deal with the time-world, another artistic world; a self-consistent and spiritually expressive world of imaginative concepts, like the world of music or the world of colour and form. They are always trying to give us the key to it, to induct us into its mysterious delights. It is by means of this world, and the symbols which furnish it, that human consciousness is enabled to actualize its most elusive experiences; and hence it is wholly due to the unselfish labours of those mystics who have struggled to body forth the realities by which they were possessed, that we are able, to some extent, to enter into the special experiences of the mystical saints; and that they are able to snatch us up to a brief sharing of their vision, to make us live for a moment “Eternal Life in the midst of Time.”

How, then, have they done this? What is the general method by which any man communicates the result of his personal contacts with the universe to other minds? Roughly speaking, he has two ways of doing this, by description and by suggestion; and his best successes are those in which these two methods are combined. His descriptions are addressed to the intellect, his suggestions are appeals to the imagination, of those with whom he is trying to communicate. The necessities which control these two ways of telling the news—oblique suggestion and symbolic image—practically govern the whole of mystical literature. The span of this literature is wide. It goes from the utterly formless, yet infinitely suggestive, language of certain great contemplatives, to the crisply formal pictorial descriptions of those whose own revelations of Reality crystallize into visions, voices, or other psycho-sensorial experiences. At one end of the scale is the vivid, prismatic imagery of the Christian apocalypse, at the other the fluid, ecstatic poetry of some of the Sūfi saints.

In his suggestive and allusive language the mystical artist often approaches the methods of music. When he does this, his statements do not give information. They operate a kind of enchantment which dilates the consciousness of the hearer to a point at which it is able to apprehend new aspects of the world. In his descriptive passages, on the other hand, he generally proceeds, as do nearly all our descriptive efforts, by way of comparison. Yet often these comparisons, like those employed by the great poet, are more valuable for their strange suggestive quality than for any exact parallels which they set up between the mystic’s universe and our own. Thus, when Clement of Alexandria compares the Logos to a “New Song,” when Suso calls the Eternal Wisdom a “sweet and beautiful wild flower,” when Dionysius the Areopagite speaks of the Divine Dark which _is_ the Inaccessible Light, or Ruysbroeck of “the unwalled world,” we recognize a sudden flash of the creative imagination; evoking for us a truth far greater, deeper and more fruitful than the merely external parallel which it suggests. So too with many common metaphors of the mystics: the Fire of Love, the Game of Love, the Desert of God, the Marriage of the Soul. Such phrases succeed because of their interior and imaginative appeal.

We have numerous examples of this kind of artistic language—the highly charged imaginative phrase—in the Bible; especially in the prophetic books, and the Apocalypse.

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.
I will give thee treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret
places.
The Lord shall be a diadem of beauty.
He showed me a pure river of the water of life.
I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters.
I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

Whereas the original prophetic significance of these phrases is now meaningless for us, their suggestive quality—their appeal to the mystic consciousness—retains its full force. They are artistic creations; and have the enormous evocative power proper to all great art. Later mystics use such passages again and again, reading their own experiences into these traditional forms. The classic example of this close alliance between poetic readings of life and practical mysticism is of course the mystical interpretation of the _Song of Songs_, which appears in Christian mysticism at least as early as the fourth century. But there are many other instances. Thus St. Macarius finds in Ezekiel’s vision of the Cherubim a profoundly suggestive image of the state of the deified soul, “all eyes and all wings,” driven upon its course by the Heavenly Charioteer of the Spirit. Thus in _The Mirror of Simple Souls_, another of Ezekiel’s visions—that of the “great eagle, with great wings, long wings, full of feathers, which took the highest branch of the cedar”—becomes the vivid symbol of the contemplative mind, “the eagle that flies high, so right high and yet more high than does any other bird, for she is feathered with fine love, and beholds above other the beauty of the sun.”

When we pass to the mystical poets, we find that nearly all their best effects are due to their extraordinary genius for this kind of indirect, suggestive imagery. This is the method by which they proceed when they wish to communicate their vision of reality. Their works are full of magical phrases which baffle analysis, yet, as one of them has said:

“Lighten the wave-washed caverns of the mind
With a pale, starry grace.”

Many of these phrases are of course familiar to every one. Vaughan’s

“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!”