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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
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"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
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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
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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
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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
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vivid, prismatic imagery of the Christian apocalypse, at the
other the fluid, ecstatic poetry of some of the Sufi 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
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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."
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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, Jalaluddin Rumi:
"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
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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
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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 a Kempis,
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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,"
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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
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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
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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 status. 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
faery touch — shows itself in the symbolic pictures by which
these mystics try to represent their encounter with the
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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 appropriate-
[page 79]
ness. 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
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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
mediaeval 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.
[1] For the verse-translations in the following extracts I am indebted
to the great skill and kindness of Mrs. Theodore Beck, who, possessing
a special talent for this difficult art, has most generously made for
me these versions of Mechthild's poetry.
[page 81]
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
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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
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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:
"Oh Bride, in virgin chastity,
Is the Love of God made ready for thee."
And the soul says:
"Even so; yet though high and pure it be,
That path is not the highest for me."
And the senses:
"In the blood of the martyred saints
May'st thou refresh thy soul that faints."
And the soul:
"I have been martyred so many a day,
I cannot now tread in that way."
And the senses:
"By the wise Confessors' side,
The pure in heart love to abide."
And the soul:
"And their counsel will I obey,
Both when I go and when I stay;
And yet I cannot walk their way."
And the senses:
"In the Apostles' wisdom pure,
May'st thou find a refuge sure."
And the soul:
"I have their wisdom here in my heart,
And with it I choose the better part."
[page 84]
And the senses
"O Bride, the angels are fair and bright,
Full of God's love, full of God's light;
Would'st thou refresh thee, mount to their height."
And the soul:
"The angel's joy is but heartache to me,
If their Lord and my Bridegroom I do not see."
And the senses:
"In holy penance refresh thee and save,
That God to St. John Baptist gave."
And the soul:
"I am ready for pain, ready for grief,
Yet the combat of love is first and chief."
And the senses:
"O Bride, would'st thou refreshed be,
So bend thee to the Virgin's knee,
To the little Babe, and taste and see
The milk of joy from the Maid's breast,
That the angels drink, in unearthly rest."
And the soul:
"It is but a childish love indeed,
Babes to cradle, babes to feed;
I am a fair, a full-grown bride,
I must haste to my Lover's side."
And the senses:
"O bride, if thou goest thou shalt find,
That we are utterly dazzled and blind.
Such fiery heat in God doth dwell —
Thou thyself knowest it well
That all the flame and all the glow
Which in Heaven above and the Saints below
Burneth and shineth — all doth flow
From God Himself. His divine breath
Sighed by the Spirit's wisdom and power,
Through His human lips, born to death,
— Who may abide it, e'en for an hour ?"
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And the soul says:
"The fish in the water cannot drown,
The bird in the air cannot sink down,
Gold in the fire cannot decay,
But shineth fairer and clearer alway.
To all creatures God doth give,
After their own natures to live.
How can I bind my nature's wings ?
I must haste to my God before all things.
My God, by His nature my Father above,
My Brother in His humanity,
My Bridegroom in His ardent love,
And I His from Eternity.
Think ye, that Fire must utterly slay my soul ?
Nay — fierce He can scorch — then tenderly cool and console.
"And so did the utterly loved go in to the utterly lovely;
into the secret chamber of the Pure Divinity. And there
she found the resting place of love, and the home of love, and
the Divine Humanity that awaited her."
And the soul said:
"Lord, God, I am now a naked soul
And Thou art arrayed all gloriously:
We are Two in One, we have reached the goal,
Immortal rapture that cannot die.
Now, a blessed silence doth o'er us flow,
Both wills together would have it so.
He is given to her, she is given to Him,
What now shall befall her, the soul doth know —
And therefore am I consoled."
This is the end of all mysticism. It is the term to which
all the artistic efforts of the mystics have striven to lead the
hearts of other men.
END