Chapter 1 Section 3: The Finding of the Thoroughfare
[p.35] The first full and perfect manifestation of this life, this peculiar psychological growth, in which human personality in its wholeness moves to new levels and lives at a tension hitherto unknown — establishes itself in the independent spiritual sphere — seems to coincide with the historical beginning of Christianity. In Jesus of Nazareth it found its perfect thoroughfare, rose at once to its classic expression; and the movement which He initiated, the rare human type which He created, is in essence a genuinely biological rather than a merely credal or intellectual development of the race. In it we see life exercising her sovereign power of spontaneous creation: breaking out on new paths.
[Note personification once again — Life is female and self-determining, though admittedly experimental — there are "dead end" paths. The so-far-unacknowledged goal of this drive seems to be forming as a path towards unitive consciousness, as exemplified in Western, Christian mysticism, and in perfection by Jesus of Nazareth.
What we need to remember here is to differentiate between the events of mystical experience and the context in which they are placed. EU's context is determined to a large extent by her Anglican and Catholic sympathies — though the refusal of the Catholic Church to acknowledge some of the contemporary developments in theological thinking was sufficient to prevent her converting — and the "vitalism" expounded most notably by Henri Bergson. Assumptions of the innate superiority of Western civilisation are also plentiful in her work. This is the age that produced Biggles.
None of these would be nearly so influential for a modern writer — and even EU in a 1930 publication seems to have moved somewhat from Bergson's thinking. Nevertheless, in all of this, EU's accounts of the actual events of mysticism remain some of the great classics of mystical literature. DCW]
Already, it is true, some men — particularly sensitive perhaps to the first movement of life turning in a fresh direction — had run ahead of the common experience and stumbled upon the gateway to those paths; even taken tentative steps along the way in which mankind was destined to be "guided and enticed" [1] by the indwelling Spirit of Love. They are those whom we call "natural mystics". Their intuitions and experiences had been variously, but always incompletely, expressed; in creed and ceremonial, in symbolic acts which suggested the inner experience that they sought — sometimes in prophecies understood by none but those who made them. Nor is this inconsistent with Life's methods, as we may discern [p.36] them on other levels of activity. The elan vital of the human race is about to pour itself in a new direction. It tries to break through, first here, next there; pressing behind the barrier of the brain.
On two sides especially we observe this preparation on Life's part for the new movement; the tendency towards new regions intuitively discerned. We have first the persistent and prophetical element in Judaism — that line of artist-seers, "mad with the Spirit" [2] of whom John the Baptist is the last — proclaiming passionately and insistently, though most often under racial and plotical symbols, the need of change, regeneration; trying in vain to turn the attention of man in a new direction, to stem the muddy "torrent of use and wont". Here the mystical spirit, the untamed instinct for God, penetrates to the field of consciousness. Over and over again, in the works of the prophets and psalmists, that strange and insatiable craving for Reality, the "diadem of beauty" [3] appears. The primitive Deity, who is feared, obeyed, and propitiated gradually gives place to the Deity who is loved and longed for — the "Very Rest" of the human soul. "As the hart desires the water brooks" these pathfinders of the race desire and foretell the attainment of this Deity; and with it a coming efflorescence of spirit, an opening up of the human faculty, the breaking forth of new life upon high levels of joy. "And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: and also upon the servants and handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit."[4].
True, this splendid re-ordering and exaltation of things seems to them something peculiar to their own "elect" race; they picture it as best they can, with the poor materials available to them, and within the narrow limitations [p.37] of a tribal consciousness.
[To those familiar with other writings of mine on the subject of the limitations of tribal consciousness, these concepts were in my thought triggered by the writings of Carolyn Myss and only later expanded by my encounters with EU's writing some eighty years before. DCW]
But the important matter is the original intuition: not its translation into the concrete terms of the "Apocalyptic" or "Messianic" hope.
[It is tempting to speculate what EU might have made of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the insights into these traditions provided by this material. DCW]
The lovely dreams of the Isaianic prophets, the viosion of divine humanity in the Book of Daniel, the passion for an unrealised perfection which burns in many of the psalms; all these tend the same way. "For as the rain cometh down and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth and maketh it bring forth and bud, and giveth seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so shall my Word be that goeth forth out of my mouth; it shall not retun to me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." [5]
With the passing of the centuries, the conviction of this new budding and bringing forth of the "Word", the divine idea immanent in the world, grows stronger and stronger. [6] All the prohets feel it, all agonise for it; but they do not attain to it. We watch them through the ages, ever stretching forward to something that they shall not live to see. "Like as a woman with child, that draweth near the time of her delivery, is in pain and crieth out in her pangs; so have we been before thee, O Lord. We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have as it were brought forth wind; we have not wrought any deliverance in the earth, neither have inhabitants of the world been born." [7] This is the epitaph of Jewish prophecy.
Opposed, as it seems, to this line of growth, though [p.38] actually representing another of life's efforts in the same direction, we have the so-called "enthusiastic religions", the mystery cults of the antique world; dramatising, many of them, with a certain crude intensity, that actual process of rebirth and ascent to the spiritual sphere already instinctively discerned by the spirit of life as the path upon which man's soul was destined to move.
[Again, possibly a poetical usage, but now we are faced with not just "life" seeking its own ends, but the "spirit of life". Also, this "spirit of life" is able to discern the destined path of the soul, if only instinctively, and act in accordance with this perceived destiny. A large number of unstated assumptions about cosmic process lurk beneath the surface. DCW]
But, however close the much-advertised correspondences between the symbolic ritual of the Orphics, or of later and more elaborate mystery cults, and the interior process through which the human soul grows to conscious union with God, these sacramental dramas remain the picture of somethingperceived and longed for, rather than the earnest of something actually done to the participants. To "him whose initiation was recent" [8] they may have given a vision of the Divine World: but vision alone will not quicken that "seed of the divine life ... that has all the riches of eternity in it, and is always wanting to come to the birth in him and be alive", [9] — the seed which, once germinated, grows steadily through the seasons, nourished by the whole machinery of life, to a perfect correspondence with Reality. "Salvation and the New Birth," says Prof. Percy Gardner, "did not attain in the Pagan mysteriesmore than a small part, an adumbration of the meaning those phrases were to attain in developed Christianity. They only furnished the body wherein the soul was to dwell. They only provided organs which were destined for functions as yet undeveloped." [10] No doubt there were isolated spirits in whom the teaching and ritual of these mysteries really quickened the "spark of the soul", initiated a life movement; asthere were others who rose, like St Augustine, through the sublime speculations of Greek philosophy to a brief intellectual vision of That Which Is. [11] But evidence of this spiritual precosity is [p.39] lost to us. We find ample record of the craving, little of the attainment. The Graeco-Roman world, which has bequesthed to us the rich results of its genius for beauty and for abstract thought, even for ethics of the loftiest kind, and the life-history of its many heroic men of action, gives us no work either of pure literature or of biography in which we can rdcognise — as we may in so many records of the Mahomedan as well as the Christian world — the presence of that particular spiritual genius which we call "sanctity".
Whilst no reasonable student of mysticism would wish to denthe debt which our spiritual culture owes to Greek thought, it remains true that the gift of Hellenism here has often been misconstrued. Hellenism gave to the spirit of man, not an experience, but a reading of experience. In the mysteries, the natural mystic saw a drama of his soul's adventures upon the the quest of God. In Neoplatonism he found a philosophic explanation of his most invincible desires, his most sublime perceptions: "saw from a wooded height the land of peace, but not the road thereto".[12] Greece taught first the innately mystical, and afterwards the typically Christian soul, how to understand itself; produced the commentary but not the text. paul, caught up to the third heaven, had litle to learn from the Platonic ecstacy; and it was not from Dionysus or Cybele that the mystic of the Fourth Gospel learned the actual nature of New Birth.
The "mysteries", in fact, werfe essentially magical dramas; which stimulated the latent spiritual faculties of man, sometimes in a noble, but sometimes also in an ignoble way. Their initiates were shown the symbols of that consummation which they longed for; the union with God which is the object of all mysticism. They passed, by submission to ceremonial obligations, through stages which curiously anticipated the actual processes of life; [p.40] sometimes, as in the primitive rites of the Dionysus cult, induced in themselves an artificial state of ecstacy by the use of dancing, music and perfumes. [13] Antiquity shows us everywhere these dramas, always built more or less to the same pattern, because always trying to respond to the same need — the craving of the crescent soul for purity, liberation, reality and peace. But the focal point in them was always the obtaining of personal safety or knowledge by the performance o special and sacred acts: at the utmost, by a temporary change of consciousness deliberately induced, as in ecstacy. [14] They implied the existence of a static, ready-made spiritual world, into which the initiate could be inserted by appropriate disciplines; thereby escaping from the tyranny and unreality of the Here-and-Now. far from being absorbed into the Christian movement, they continued sise by side with it. The true descendants of the Pagan mystes are not the Christian mystics, as certain modern scholars would pretend; these have little in common with the but an unfortunate confusion of name. their posterity is rather to be sought amongst that undying family of more or less secret associations which perpetuated this old drama of regeneration, and insisted on attributing to its merely ritual performance an awful significance, a genuine value for life. In early times the Manichaeans [15] and the [p.41] Gnostics with their elaborate but confused systems of mixed Pagan and Christian ideas, later the Rosicrucians, the Cabalists, the Freemasons, [16] and later still the Martinists and other existing societies of "initiates", which lay claim to the possession of jealously-guarded secrets of a spiritual kind, have continued the effort to find a "way out' along this road, but in vain. Not a new creation, but at best a protective mimicry, is all that life can manage here.
More and more as we proceed the peculiar originality of the true Christian mystic becomes clear to us. We are led towards the conclusion — a conclusion which rests on historical rather than religious grounds — that the first person to exhibit in their wholeness the spiritual possibilities of man was the historic Christ; and to the corollary, that the great family of the Christian mystics — that is to say, all those individuals in whom an equivalent life process is set going and an equivalent growth takes place — represents to us the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, in respect of the upward movement of the racial consciousness. This family constitutes a true variation of the human species — in Leuba's words, "one of the most amazing and profound variations which have yet been witnessed" — producing, as it seems to other men, a "strange and extravagant" and yet a "heroic" type [17]. There is in them, says Delacroix, "a vital and creative power"; they "have found a new form of life, and have justified it." [18] [p.42]
This new form of life, as it is lived by the members of this species, the peculiar psychic changes to which they must all submit, whatsoever the historic religion to which they belong, may reasonably be called Christian; since its classic expression is seen only in the Founder of Christianity. But this is not to limit it to those who have accepted the theological system called by His name. "There is," says Law, "but one salvation for all mankind, and that is the Life of God in the soul. God has but one design or intent towards all Mankind, and that is to introduce or generate His own Life, Light, and Spirit in them... There is but one possible way for Man to attain this salvation, or Life of God in the soul. There is not one for a Jew, another for a Christian, and a third for the Heathen.
[It is in small, almost throwaway, comments such as this that we see Biggles alive and well in the Edwardian Church. This is the cultural filter — and filler — that we must allow for at all times in the work of EU and her contemporaries, omitting from the picture what the culture is not able to conceive, and often placing in the picture what it insists is there as a matter of convention rather than evidence.
If we can practise awareness right here, where awareness is relatively easy to attain, it will come more easily to us when we are considering the effect of our own culture on the meaning we too give to events. DCW]
No; God is one, human nature is one, salvation is one, and the way to it is one." [19]
[An Edwardian cultural penchant towards rhetoric will often permit it to pass for logic. DCW]
We may, then, define the Christian life and the Christian growth as a movement towards the attainment of this Life of Reality; this spiritual consciousness. It is a phase of the cosmic struggle of spirit with recalcitrant matter, of mind with the conditions that hem it in. More abundant life, said the great mystic of the Fourth Gospel, its goal; and it sums up and makes effective all the isolated struggles towards such life and liberty as earlier ages had produced.
Christianity, of course, has often been described as a "life". The early Christians themselves called it not a belief but a "way" [20] — a significant fact, which the Church too quickly forgot —
[One of the reasons, despite my criticism of her rhetoric, that I return to these writing as a kind of home, is her evident sense of dissatisfaction with what I term the Power aspects of the Christian Church, dissatisfaction which she lays out publically with an honesty and clarity rare for her time, or for any time, on the part of a member of the Church in good standing. She keeps returning to the simple message that the real life and the only legitimate life of the Church is to be found in the experience of its mystics — the mystic way — and in its hosting of such experience. DCW]
and the realist who wrote the Fourth Gospel called its founder both the "life" and the "way". But these terms have been employed by all later theologians with a discreet vagueness, have been accepted in an artistic rather than a scientific sense; with the result that Christianity as a life has meant almost anything, from obedience to a moral, or even an ecclesiatical, code at one [p.43] end of the scale, to the enjoyment of rather peculiar spiritual sensations at the other. I propose, then, to define and demonstrate as clearly as I can, by the help of the only possible authorities — those who have lived it — what is really meant by the phrase, "Christianity is a life". Nor is this done by way of apologetic, but rather by way of exploration. History and psychology will be our primary interests; and should theological conclusions emerge, this will be by accident rather than design.
The beginning of Christianity, we say, seems to represent the first definite emergence of a new kind of life; at first — yes, and still, for nineteen hundred years are little in the deep and steady flow of so mighty a process of becoming — a small beginning. Very, very slowly, the new type of human consciousness emerged. Here one, and there another possessed: the thin bright chain of Christian mystics stretching across the centuries. We see clearly, when we have cleansed our vision of obscuring prejudices, that Jesus, from the moment of His attainment of full spiritual consciousness, was aware that life must act thus. Loisy is doubtless right that He "intended to found no religion".[21] In His own person he was lifting humanity to new levels; giving in the most actual and concrete sense new life, a new direction of movement, to "the world" — the world for man being, of course, no more and no les than the total content of his consciousness. The "revelation" then made was not merely moral or religious; it was, in the strictest sense, biological. "We may assume," says Harnack most justly, "what position we will in regard to Him and His message; certain it is that thence onward the value of our race is enhanced." [22]
But such a gift can only gradually be disclosed, only [p.44] gradually be appropriated. Those who can appropriate, who can move in this fresh direction, grow to this state of high tension,
[I have to confess that at present the meaning of this phrase "high tension" in a spiritual context remains outside my comprehension. Noted and moved along from. DCW]
develop this spiritual consciousness — these are the "little flock" to whom the Kingdom, the Realm of Reality is given. these, not the strenuous altruist nor the orthodox believer, are the few chosen out of the many called; actual centres of creative life, agents of divine fecundity, the light, the salt, the leaven, the pathfinders of the race.
[When you consider the enormity of the message, of the claim, in this paragraph, the magnitude of its implications, and when you appreciate that it was made from within the Church, in the early years of the 20th century, and made with authority, you may come to see why I think this is a woman to die for. DCW]
It is the glory of Christianity that, hidden though they be by the more obvious qualities of the superstitious and the ecclesiatically minded, these vital souls have never failed the Church. Thus, "by personal channels — the flame of the human and humanising Spirit passing from soul to soul — there has come down to our days, along with a great mass of nominal or corrupt Christianity, a true and lineal offspring of the Church established on the Rock."[23]
It is true that mystical Christianity offers infinitely graded possibilities of attainment to the infinitely graded variations of human temperament, love and will. But all these graded paths take a parallel course. All run, as Dante saw, towards the concentric circles of the same heaven; a heaven which has many mansions, but all built upon the same plan. It deals, from first to last, with the clear and victorious emergence of the spiritual in the Here-and-Now and with the balance response of the total spirit of man to that declared Reality. its history purports to tell us how this revelation and rsponse happened once for all in a complete and perfect sense; how the Divine Life nesting within the world broke through and expressed itself, thereby revealing new directions along which human life could cut its way. Its psychology tries to describe how life has attacked these new paths; the phenomena which attend on and express the evolution of the Christian soul, the state of equilibrium [p.45] to which that sou attains. It demonstrates over and over again that the little company of its adepts — and those other born lovers of reality who went with them, "not knowing what they sought" — have all passed by the same landmarks and endured the same adventures in the course of their quest. In all, the same essential process — the steadfast loving attention to some aspect of Transcendental Reality perceived and the active movement of response — has led to the same result: growth towards new levels, transmutation of character, closer and closer identification with Divine Life. In every such case, the individual has learned "to transfer himself from a centre of self-activity into an organ of revelation of universal being, to live a life of affection for, and oneness with, the larger life outside."[24]
The proposition that this quest and this achievement constitute an egotistical and "world-renouncing religion", suited only to contemplatives, is only less ridiculous than the more fashionable delusion which makes Christianity the religion of social amiability, democratic ideals and "practical common sense". On the contrary, the true mystic quest may as well be fulfilled in the market as in the cloister; by Joan of Arc on the battlefield as by Simon Stylites on his pillar. It is true that since human vitality and human will a re finite, many of the great mystics have found it necessary to concentrate their love and their attention on thisone supreme aspect of the "will to live". hence the cloistered mystic and the recluse obeys a necessity of his own nature: the necessity which has produced specialists in every art. But the life for which he strives, if he achieves it, floods the totality of his being; the "energetic" no less than the "contemplative" powers. It regenerates, enriches, lifts to new heights of vision, will and love, the whole man, not some isolated spiritual part of him; and sends him back to give, according to his [p.46] capability as teacher, artist, or man of action, "more abundant life" to the surrounding world. the real achievements of Christian mysticism are more clearly seen in St Catherine of siena regenerating her native city, Joan of Arc leading the armies of France, Ignatius creating the Society of Jesus, Fox giving life to the Society of Friends, than in all the ecstasies and austerities of the Egyptian "fathers in the desert". That mysticism is an exhibition of the higher powers of love: a love which woul;d face all obstacles, endure all purifications, and cherish and strive for the whole world. In all its variations, it demands one quality — humble and heroic effort; and points with a steady finger to one road from Appearance to Reality — the Mystic Way, Transcendance.
Notes
1. Tauler, Sermon on the Nativity of our Lady (The Inner Way, p. 168).
2. Hos. ix. 7
3. Isa. xxviii. 5.
4. Joel ii. 28, 29
5. Isa. lv. 10-12 (R.V.) The primitive, and necer whiolly forgotten concept of Jahveh as peculiarly the God of storm, cloud, rain, and dew (cf. the stories of Noah, Sodom, the pillar of cloud, Moses on Sinai, Gideon etc) gave to these metaphors a peculiar poignancy in Jewish ears.
6. Cf. E.G. King (Early Religious Poetry of the Hebrews, pp 144 et seq.) on the development of the word "Tzemach" or "Outspring" in Hebrew literature, from a natural to a Messianic sense.
7. Isa. xxvi. 17, 18 (R.V.) marginal reading.
8. Plato, Phaedrus, §250.
9. W. Law, The Spirit of Prayer.
10. Exploratio Evangelica, p. 337.
11. Aug., Conf., Bk VII. cap. 9.
12. ibid., Bk VII. cap 21
13. Cf. Erwin Rohde, Psyche, Vol II. p. 26.
14. For a sane and scholarly treatment of this whole subject of the Pagan mysteries, consult Daremburg et Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquites. Arts. "Eleusis", "Isis", "Mysteria", "Orpheus". For the thiasi and syncretistic mystery cults about the Christian era, see P. Gardner, Exploratio Evangelica, and Glover, The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire.
15. Harnack (Augustins Konfessions, p. 21) expressly compares the Manichaeans with the modern Freemasons; and says, "they offered to their members a serious way of life in which one mounted step by step, through ever narrower and higher circles, until one found one's goal in a society of saints and saviours." The Third Book of Augustines Confessions is a sufficient commentary on these lofty pretensions. "The Truth, the Truth! they were always saying, and often said to me; but it was not in them." (Aug., Conf., Bk III. cap 6). [Augustine's personal and unsupported-by-evidence authority may be sufficient for EU, but I am left wondering what criteria he might have used in reaching his conclusion. DCW]
16. It is well known that the ceremony which confers the Third Degree of Craft Masonry is an allegory of regeneration. It probably represents far more accurately than many of the inflated and imaginitive descriptions now presented to us, the kind of "secret knowledge" which was communicated to the Pagan initiate.
17. Revue Philosophique, July 1902
18. Etudes sur le psychologie du mysticisme, p. iii
19. W Law, The Spirit of Prayer.
20. Acts ix. 2, xix. 23
21. Hibbert Journal, Oct 1911.
22. Das Wesen des Christentums, p. 45 (Eng trans., p. 70).
23. E.A. Abbott, The Son of Man, p. 813.
24. Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion, p. 147.
