Chapter IX: Psycho-Physical and Temperamental Questions (3)

Hence “many souls, to whom visions have never come, are incomparably more advanced in the way of perfection than others to whom many have been given”; and “they who are already perfect, receive these visitations of the Spirit of God in peace; ecstasies cease, for they were only graces to prepare them for this greater grace.” Hence, too, “one desire only doth God allow and suffer in His Presence: that of perfectly observing His law and of carrying the Cross of Christ. In the Ark of the Covenant there was but the Book of the Law, the Rod of Aaron, and the Pot of Manna. Even so that soul, which has no other aim than the perfect observance of the Law of God and the carrying of the Cross of Christ, will be a true Ark containing the true Manna, which is God.” And this perfected soul’s intellectual apprehensions will, in their very mixture of light and conscious obscurity, more and more approach and forestall the eternal condition of the beatified soul. “One of the greatest favours, bestowed transiently on the soul in this life, is to enable it to see so distinctly and to feel so profoundly, that it cannot comprehend Him at all. These souls are herein, in some degree, like the Saints in Heaven, where they who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly that He is infinitely incomprehensible; for those who have the less clear vision do not perceive so distinctly as the others how greatly He transcends their vision.”[50]

3. _Second special difficulty in testing ecstasies._

The second special difficulty is this. Have not at least some of the saints of this definitely ecstatic type shown more psycho-physical abnormality than spiritually fruitful origination or utilization of such things, so that their whole life seems penetrated by a fantastic spirit? And have not many others, who, at their best, may not have been amenable to this charge, ended with shattered nerve- and will-power, with an organism apparently incapable of any further growth or use, even if we restrict our survey exclusively to strength-bringing ecstasy and to a contemplative prayer of some traceable significance?

(1) As a good instance of the apparent predominance of psycho-physical and even spiritual strangeness, we can take the Venerable Sister Lukardis, Cistercian Nun of Ober-Weimar, born probably in 1276. Her life is published from a unique Latin MS. by the Bollandists (_Analecta_, Vol. XVIII, pp. 305-367, Bruxelles, 1899), and presents us with a mediaevally naïve and strangely unanalytic, yet extraordinarily vivid picture of things actually seen by the writer. “Although,” say the most competent editors, “we know not the name nor profession of the Author, whether he belonged to the Friars or to the Monks,[51] it is certain that he was a contemporary of Lukardis, that he knew her intimately, and that he learnt many details from her fellow-nuns. And though we shall be slow to agree with him when he ascribes all the strange things which she experienced in her soul and body to divine influence, yet we should beware of considering him to be in bad faith. For, though he erred perchance in ascribing to a divine operation things which are simply the work of nature, such a vice is common amongst those who transmit such things.”[52] I take the chief points in the order of their narration by the _Vita_.

“Soon after Lukardis had, at twelve years of age, taken the Cistercian habit, her mother died,” over twelve English miles away, at Erfurt, yet Lukardis “saw the scene” in such detail “in the spirit,” that, when her sister came to tell her, she, Lukardis, “anticipated her with an account of the day, the place and hour of the death, of the clothes then being worn by their mother, of the precise position of the bed and of the hospital, and of the persons present at the time.”

She soon suffered from “stone” in the bladder; “quartan, tertian, and continuous fevers,” and from fainting fits; also from contraction of the muscles (_nervi_) of the hands, so that the latter were all but useless and could not even hold the staff on which she had to lean in walking, till they had been “tightly wrapped round in certain clothes.” Yet “she would, at times, strike her hands so vehemently against each other, that they resounded as though they had been wooden boards.” “When lying in bed she would sometimes, as it were, plant her feet beneath her, hang her head down” backwards, “and raise her abdomen and chest, making thus, as it were, a highly curved arch of her person.” Indeed sometimes “she would for a long while stand upon her head and shoulders, with her feet up in air, but with her garments adhering to her limbs, as though they had been sewn on to them.” “Often, too, by day or night, she was wont to run with a most impetuous course;--she understood that, by this her course, she was compensating Christ for His earthly course of thirty-three years.”[53]

“On one occasion she had a vision of Christ, in which He said to her: ‘Join thy hands to My hands, and thy feet to My feet, and thy breast to My breast, and thus shall I be aided by thee to suffer less.’ And instantly she felt a most keen pain of wounds,” in all three regions, “although wounds did not as yet appear to sight.” But “as she bore the memory of the hammering of the nails into Christ upon the Cross within her heart, so did she exercise herself in outward deed. For she was frequently wont, with the middle finger of one hand, impetuously to wound the other in the place appropriate to the stigmata; then to withdraw her finger to the distance of a cubit, and straightway again impetuously to wound herself. Those middle fingers felt hard like metal. And about the sixth and ninth hour she would impetuously wound herself with her finger in the breast, at the appropriate place for the wound.”--After about two years “Christ appeared to her in the night of Blessed Gregory, Pope” (St. Gregory VII, May 26?), “pressed her right hand firmly in His, and declared, ‘I desire thee to suffer with Me.’ On her consenting, a wound instantly appeared in her right hand; about ten days later a wound in the left hand; and thus successively the five wounds were found in her body.” “The wounds of the scourging were also found upon her, of a finger’s length, and having a certain hard skin around them.”[54]

“At whiles she would lie like one dead throughout the day; yet her countenance was very attractive, owing to a wondrous flushed look. And even if a needle was pressed into her flesh, she felt no pain.”--“On one occasion she was carried upon her couch by two sisters into the Lady Chapel, to the very spot where her body now reposes. After having been left there alone for about an hour, the Blessed Virgin appeared to her, with her beloved Infant, Jesus, in her arms, and suckling Him. And Lukardis, contrary to the law of her strength”--she had, by now, been long confined to a reclining posture--“arose from her couch and began to stand upright. And at this juncture one of the Sisters opened the Chapel door a little, and, on looking in, marvelled at Lukardis being able to stand, but withdrew and forbade the other Sisters from approaching thither, since she feared that, if they saw her standing thus, they might declare her to be quite able, if she but chose, to arise and stand at any time. Upon the Blessed Virgin twice insisting upon being asked for some special favour, and Lukardis declaring, ‘I desire that thou slake my thirst with that same milk with which I now see thee suckling thy beloved Son,’ the Blessed Virgin came up to her, and gave her to drink of her milk.” And when later on Lukardis was fetched by the Sisters, she was “found reclining on her couch. And for three days and nights she took neither food nor drink, and could not see the light of day. And as a precaution, since her death was feared, Extreme Unction was administered to her. And, later on, the Sister who had seen her standing in the Chapel, gradually drew the whole story from her.”[55]

“After she had lain, very weak, and, as it were, in a state of contracture, for eleven years, it happened that, about the ninth hour of one Good Friday, the natural bodily heat and colour forsook her; she seemed nowise to breathe; her wounds bled more than usual; she appeared to be dead. And her fellow-Sisters wept greatly. Yet about Vesper-time she opened her eyes and began to move; and her companions were wondrously consoled. And then in the Easter night, about the hour of Christ’s Resurrection, as, with the other sick Sisters, she lay in her bed placed so as to be able to hear the Divine Office, she felt all her limbs to be as it were suffused with a most refreshing dew. And straightway she saw stretched down to her from Heaven a hand, as it were of the Blessed Virgin, which stroked her wounds and all the painful places, the ligaments and joints of her members, gently and compassionately. After which she straightway felt how that all her members, which before had for so long been severely contracted, and how the knots, formed by the ligaments (_nervi_), were being efficaciously resolved and equally distended, so that she considered herself freed from her hard bondage. She arose unaided from her couch, proceeded to the near-by entrance to the Choir, and prostrated herself there, in fervent orison, with her arms outstretched in cross-form, for a very long hour. And then, commanded by the Abbess to rise, she readily arose without help, stood with pleasure, and walked whithersoever she would.” “At all times she ever suffered more from the cold than any of her companions.”[56]

“As, during those eleven years that she lay like one paralyzed, she was wont, on every Friday, to lie with her arms expanded as though on the Cross, and her feet one on the top of the other; so, after the Lord had so wonderfully raised her on that Paschal day, she, on every Friday and every Lenten day, would stand erect with her arms outstretched, crosswise, and, without any support, on one foot only, with the other foot planted upon its fellow, from the hour of noon to that of Vespers.”--“Whilst she was still uncured, and required some delicate refection which the Convent could not afford, there came to her,” one day, “the most loving Infant, bearing in His Hand the leg of a chicken, newly roasted, and begging her to eat it for His sake.” She did so, and was wonderfully strengthened. Apparently late on in her life “they procured, with much labour and diligence, all kinds of drinkables from different and even from distant places for her. But she, having tasted any one of them, would straightway shake her head, close her lips, and then declare that she could not drink it up.” “However delicious in itself, it seemed to be so much gall and wormwood when applied to her mouth.”[57]

And if we look, not at seemingly childish fantasticalness in certain mystical lives, but at the later state of shattered health and apparently weakened nerve- and will-power which appears so frequently to be the price paid for the definitely ecstatic type of religion, even where it has been spiritually fruitful, our anxiety is readily renewed. Look at the nine, possibly thirteen, last years of Catherine’s, or at the last period of St. Margaret Mary’s life; note the similar cases of SS. Maria Magdalena de Pazzi and Juliana Falconieri. And we have a figure of all but pure suffering and passivity in St. Lidwina of Schiedam (1380-1433), over which M. Huysmans has managed to be so thoroughly morbid.

(2) And if such lives strike us as too exceptional to be taken, with whatever deductions, as a case in point, we can find a thoroughly fair instance in the life of Father Isaac Hecker. Here we have a man of extraordinary breadth, solidity, and activity of mind and character, and whose mysticism is of the most sober and harmonious kind. Yet his close companion and most faithful chronicler, Father Walter Elliott, tells us: “From severe colds, acute headaches, and weakness of the digestive organs, Father Hecker was at all times a frequent sufferer. But, towards the end of the year 1871, his headaches became much more painful, his appetite forsook him, and sleeplessness and excitability of the nervous system were added to his other ailments. Remedies of every kind were tried, but without permanent relief. By the summer of 1872 he was wholly incapacitated.” “The physical sufferings of those last sixteen” (out of the sixty-nine) “years of his life were never such as to impair his mental soundness … though his organs of speech were sometimes too slow for his thoughts.” His digestion and nervous system had been impaired by excessive abstinence in early manhood, and by excessive work in later life, “till at last the body struck work altogether. During the sixteen years of his illness every symptom of bodily illness was aggravated by the least attention to community affairs or business matters, and also by interior trials,” although he still managed, by heroic efforts, at times directly to serve his congregation and to write some remarkable papers. Yet this state continued, practically unbroken, up to the end, on December 22, 1888.[58] And although the various proximate causes, indicated by Father Elliott, had no doubt been operative here, there can, in view of the numerous similar cases, be no question that the most fundamental of the reasons of this general condition of health was his strongly mystical type and habit of mind and his corresponding psycho-physical organization.

(3) In view of those fantasticalnesses and of these exhaustions, we cannot but ask whether these things are not a terrible price to pay for such states? whether such states should not be disallowed by all solid morality, and should not prompt men of sense to try and stamp them out? And, above all, we seem placed once more, with added anxiety, before the question whether what is liable to end in such sad general incapacitation was not, from the first, directly productive of, and indeed simply produced by, some merely subjective, simply psycho-physical abnormality and morbidness?

(4) Three points here call for consideration. Let us, for one thing, never forget that physical health is not the true end of human life, but only one of its most important means and conditions. The ideal man is not, primarily and directly, a physical machine, perfect as such in its development and function, to which would be tacked on, as a sort of concomitant or means, the mental, moral, and spiritual life and character. But the ideal man is precisely this latter life and character, with the psycho-physical organism sustained and developed in such, and only such, a degree, direction, and combination, as may make it the best possible substratum, stimulus, instrument, material, and expression for and of that spiritual personality.[59] Hence, the true question here is not whether such a type of life as we are considering exacts a serious physical tribute or not, but whether the specifically human effects and fruits of that life are worth that cost.

No one denies that mining, or warfare, or hospital work, both spiritual and medical, involve grave risks to life, nor that the preparation of many chemicals is directly and inevitably injurious to health. Yet no one thinks of abolishing such occupations or of blaming those who follow them, and rightly so; for instant death may and should be risked, the slow but certain undermining of the physical health may be laudably embarked on, if only the mind and character are not damaged, and if the end to be attained is found to be necessary or seriously helpful, and unattainable by other means.

The simple fact, then, of frequent and subsequent, or even of universal and concomitant ill-health in such mystical cases, or even the proof of this ill-health being a direct consequence or necessary condition of that mystical life, can but push back the debate, and simply raises the question as to the serious value of that habit and activity. Only a decision adverse to that serious value would constitute those facts into a condemnation of that activity itself.

And, next, it must be plain to any one endowed with an appreciable dose of the mystical sense, and with a sufficiently large knowledge of human nature and of religious apprehension in the past and present,--that, if it is doubtless possible quite erroneously to treat all men as having a considerable element of mysticism in them, and hence to strain and spoil souls belonging to one of the other types: it is equally possible to starve those that possess this element in an operative degree. Atrophy is as truly a malady as plethora.

And here the question is an individual one: would that particular temperament and psycho-physical organism congenial to Sister Lukardis, to Catherine Fiesca Adorna, to Marguerite Marie Alacocque, and to Isaac Hecker, have--taking the whole existence and output together--produced more useful work, and have apprehended and presented more of abiding truth, had their ecstatic states or tendencies been, if possible, absent or suppressed? Does not this type of apprehension, this, as it were, incubation, harmonization, and vivifying of their otherwise painfully fragmentary and heavy impressions, stand out,--in their central, creative periods,--as the one thoroughly appropriate means and form of their true self-development and self-expression, and of such an apprehension and showing forth of spiritual truth as to them,--to them and not to you and me,--was possible? And if we are bound to admit that, even in such cases, ecstasy appears, psycho-physically, as a kind of second state, and that these personalities find or regain their fullest joy and deepest strength only in and from such a state; yet we know too that such ecstasy is not, as in the trances of hysteria and of other functional disorders, simply discontinuous from the ordinary, primary state of such souls; and that,--again contrary to those _maladif_ trances,--whenever the ecstasy answers to the tests insisted upon by the great mystics, viz. a true and valuable ethico-spiritual content and effect, it also, in the long run, leaves the very body strengthened and improved.

And if, after this, their productive period, some of these persons end by losing their psycho-physical health, it is far from unreasonable to suppose that the actual alternative to those ecstasies and this break-up, would, _for them_, have been a lifelong dreary languor and melancholy self-absorption, somewhat after the pattern of Catherine’s last ten pre-conversion years. Thus for her, and doubtless for most of the spiritually considerable ecstatics, life was, taken all in all, indefinitely happier, richer, and more fruitful in religious truth and holiness, with the help of those ecstatic states, than it would have been if these states had been absent or could have been suppressed.

And thirdly, here again, even from the point of view of psycho-physical health and its protection, it is precisely the actual practice and, as interpreted by it, the deepest sayings of the standard Christian mystics which are being most powerfully confirmed,--although necessarily by largely new reasons and with important modifications in the analysis and application of their doctrine,--by all that we have gained, during the last forty years, in definite knowledge of the psycho-physical regions and functions of human nature, and, during two centuries and more, in enlargement and precision of our religious-historical outlook.

If we consider the specific health-dangers of this way, we shall find, I think, that their roots are ever two. These dangers, and with them the probability of delusion or at least of spiritual barrenness, always become actual, and often acute, the minute that we allow ourselves to attach a primary and independent importance to the psycho-physical form and means of these things, as against their spiritual-ethical content, suggestions, and end; or that we take the whole man, or at least the whole of the religious man, to consist of the specifically mystical habits and life alone. Now the first of these dangers has been ceaselessly exposed and fought by all the great ethical and Christian mystics of the past, _e.g._ St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa; and the latter has been ever enforced by the actual practice, as social religionists, of these same mystics, even if and when some of their sayings, or the logical drift of their speculative system, left insufficient room or no intrinsic necessity and function for such things.

(5) And everything that has happened and is happening in the world of psychological and philosophical research, in the world of historico-critical investigation into the past history and modalities of religion, and in the world of our own present religious experience and requirements, has but brought to light fresh facts, forces, and connections, in proof both of the right and irreplaceableness of the Mystical element in life and religion, and of the reality and constant presence of these its two dangers. For, as to these dangers, we now know, with extraordinary clearness and certainty, how necessary, constant and far-reaching is, on its phenomenal surface, the auto-suggestive, mono-ideistic power and mechanism of the mind; yet how easily, in some states, too much can be made of such vivid apprehensions and quasi-sensible imagings of invisible reality,--things admirable as means, ruinous as ends. And we also know, with an astonishing universality of application, how great a multiplicity in unity is necessarily presented by every concrete object and by every mental act and emotional state of every sane human being throughout every moment of his waking life; and how this unity is actually constituted and measured by the multiplicity of the materials and by the degree of their harmonization.--Hence, not the absence of the Mystical element, but the presence both of it and of the other constituents of religion, will turn out to be the safeguard of our deepest life and of its sanity, a sanity which demands a balanced fulness of the soul’s three fundamental pairs of activities: sensible perception and picturing memory; reflection, speculative and analytic; and emotion and volition, all issuing in interior and exterior acts, and these latter, again, providing so much fresh material and occasions for renewed action and for a growing unification in an increasing variety, on and on.

The metaphysical and faith questions, necessarily raised by the phenomenal facts and mechanisms here considered, but which cannot be answered at this level, will be discussed in a later chapter. Here we can but once more point out, in conclusion, that no amount of admitted or demonstrated auto-suggestion or mono-ideism in the phenomenal reaches and mechanism of the mind decides, of itself, anything whatsoever about, and still less against, the objective truth and spiritual value of the ultimate causes, dominant ideas, and final results of the process; nor as to whether and how far the whole great movement is, at bottom, occasioned and directed by the Supreme Spirit, God, working, in and through man, towards man’s apprehension and manifestation of Himself.[60]