Chapter 1 Section 5: The Christian Mystic
[p.58] Of course, those who adopt the hypothesis which is here suggested will find opposing them almost every view of Christianity which is, or has been, fashionable within the last half-century or more: the Ritschlian view, the Eschatological view, the view which derives Christianity from an admixture of Jewish revivalism and the "Mysteries", the view which sees in Jesus of Nazareth either an essentially unmystical ethical or political reformer, or the victim of prophetic illuminism, and half a hundred other ingenious variations upon orthodoxy. Above all we shall be in conflict with those who see in the teaching of St Paul an opposition to the teaching of Christ, and with those who consider the mystical element in Christianity to be fundamentally unchristian and ultimately descended from the Neoplatonists. [1]
The first class of critics will be dealt with in a later chapter [2]; but the often violently expressed views of the second class must be considered before we pass on, Their position, one and all, seems to result from a fundamental misunderstanding of mysticism; defined by them as consisting solely in that form of negative contemplation, that spiritual mono-ideism, often tinctured with intense [p.59] emotion and rising to an unconditioned ecstacy, in which the mystic claims to have enjoyed fruition of the Absolute. This art of contemplation, practised by the Neoplatonists and inherited from them by the Christian Church, [3] represents, of course, but one aspect of the mystic life — its accident, indeed, rather than the substance — and, when it appears divorced from the rest of that life, is an aberration meriting at least some of the strictures which Ritschl, Herrmann and even Harnack shower upon it.
Thus Hermann says, "When the influence of God upon the soul is sought and found solely in an inward experience of the individual; when certain excitements of the emotions are taken, with no further question, as evidence that the soul is possessed by God; when at the same time nothing external to the soul is consciously and clearly perceived and grasped; when no thoughts that elevate the soul are aroused by the positive contents of an idea that rules the soul — then that is the piety of mysticism..... Mysticism is not that which is common to all religion, but a particular species of religion, namely a piety which feels that which is historical in the positive religion to be burdensome and so rejects it." The natural corollaries follow that "the Christian must pronounce the mystics experience of God to be a delusion," and that "in the narrow experiences into which mysticism dwindles there is no room for real Christian life." [4] Granting the premisses, so thoroughgoing a mystic as St John of the Cross himself would almost certainly have agreed with the conclusion; [5] but a very [p.60] slight acquaintance with works of the Christian mystics is enough to show how perverse is the whole argument, how inaccurate its statement of "fact".
Far from "feeling the historical to be burdensome," true Christian mysticism rejects without hesitation all individual revelations which do not accord with the teaching and narrative of the canonical Scriptures — its final Court of Appeal. Thus Richard of St Victor, che a considerar fu piu che viro,[6] and through whose school nearly every mediaeval mystic has passed, says of the soul which claims to have enjoyed an ecstatic vision of God, "Even if you think that you see Christ transfigured, be not too ready to believe aught you may see or hear in Him unless Moses and Elias run to meet Him. I hold in suspicion all truth which the authority of Scripture does not confirm; nor do I receive Christ in His glory, save Moses and Elias be talking with Him."[7] Many other masters of the spiritual life have spoken to the same effect.
[Personally I do not place any limits or strictures on the form in which I permit God or Christ to present Himself to me, or on the company He is obliged to keep when visiting, though I am highly suspicious of any message purporting to be from God that would send me on a crusade of any kind. The flag of God does not fly over a battlefield. DCW]
The "discerning of spirits," — the sorting out, that is to say, of real from false spirituality — has formed from the earliest times an important branch of Christian mysticism; and its duties have generally been performed with severity, completeness and common sense
[With the exception, of course, of the Inquisition and one or two other aids to religious correctness over the centuries. Severity certainly, and completeness, who knows, but common sense? Sorry, I can't wear that one in any form. DCW]
For it, "tradition" and "experience", "authority" and "revelation" — that is to say, the individual and universal movements of life — must go hand in hand, justifying and completing one another, if they are to be accepted as the veritable pathway of the soul.
The great contemplative and astute psychologist who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing has left a letter — the "Epistle of Discretion" — addressed to a disciple "full able and full greatly disposed to such sudden [p.61] stirrings of singular doings, and full fast tocleave unto them when they be received," which perfectly represents the point of view of the best schools of Christian mysticism. Such "sudden and singular stirrings," he says, are ever perilous, "seem they never so likely, so high nor so holy"; unless they have the witness and consent of spiritual teachers "long term expert in singular living". Moreover, he continues with an acid wit not rare among the saints, they are often mere monkey tricks of the soul. "As touching these stirrings of which thou askest ...I say to thee that I conceive of them suspiciously, that is, lest they be conceived on the ape's manner. Men say commonly that the ape doth as he seeth others do; forgive me if I err in my suspicion, I pray thee.... Beware and prove well thy stirrings, and whence they come; for how so art thou stirred, whether from within by grace, or from without on the ape's manner, God wote and I not." [Somewhat more generous than others quoted, yet adequately cautious. DCW] Neither this "greedy disposition" to spiritual joys, nor the ascetic practices of "strait silence, singular fasting, lonely dwelling" are the central facts for the mystic. Often they may be helps; often hindrances. Porro unum est necessarium: a total self-giving, an active loving surrender to Reality, an orientation of the whole self towards the spiritual world — "lovely and listily to will to love God". "For if God be thy love and thy meaning, the choice and the point of thine heart, it sufficeth to thee in this life." [8] Direction of life, transcendance, rather than a busy searching out of deep things or some private experience of the Infinite, is again brought home to us as the primal fact for the developing soul.
The personal revelation or "stirring", then, is only esteemed by the true mystic where it ministers to the fruitful and lofty character of the individual life. The [p.62] real glory and originality of the Christian mystics does not consist in the fact that they possess — and that often in a supreme degree — those special intuitions which Herrmann so unworthily describes as "beclouded conceptions of an Infinite Being", or, in Ritschl's scornful phrase, "enjoy an imaginary private relationship with God." It consists rather, according to Delacroix — an investigator who writes without theological prejudice — in their great constructive and synthetic power, their development of a consciousness which can embrace both Being and Becoming in its sweep, giving to its possessor an unprecedented wholeness of life. "They move," he says, "from the Infinite to the Definite: they aspire to infinitise life and define infinity." [9] "By one of love's secrets which is only known to those who have experienced it," [10] the World of Becoming is disclosed to them as a sacrament of the Thought of God; and this is why the historical and the actual, instead of being "burdensome", as they so often prove to a purely nmetaphysical religion, are seen by all true mystics to possess adorable and inexhaustible significance. here they perceive "the footsteps of God, presenting some one or other perfection of that Infinite Abyss.." [11]
A long series of such mystics, capable with Angela of Foligno of perceiving that "the whole world is full of God", have helped their fellow men towards the great task of infinitising life; thanks to their heightened power of "consciously and clearly perceiving" the wealth of beauty, truth and goodness exterior to the soul. I particular, the historical life of Christ assumes for those who are Christians a capiutal importance: since life is that which they seek, and here they find it raised to its highest [p.63] denomination and manifested before the eyes of men. they call it the Book of Life in which all must read and meditate [12] the Bridge by which pilgrim man may travel to his goal. [13]
"My humanity is the road which all must tread who would come to that which thou seekest," said the Eternal Wisdom to Suso.[14] "I see clearly," says St Teresa, "that if we are to please God, and if He is to give us His great graces, everything must pass through the hands of His most sacred humanity.... I know this by repeated experience. I see clearly that this is the door by which we are to enter, if we would have the supreme Majesty reveal to us His great secrets." [15] This humanity, says Ruysbroeck, mystic of the mystics, is "the rule and key". — ascending as it does to the fruition of God, without losing touch with the joys and sorrows of humanity—"which shows all men how they should live". [16] His biting description of the false mystic "subtle in words, expert in dealing with sublime things, full of studies and observations and subtle events upon which he exercises his imagination" but fundamentally sterile and incapable of "coming forth from himself" to live a life corresponding with the inflowing Spirit of Reality, seems framed for the condemnation of all these peculiarities which Herrmann imagines to be characteristic of mysticism as a whole. [17]
Such a view as this, far from absolving mysticism from dependence on the historical, consolidates the link between inward experience and outward event. It effectually checks the one-sided and quietistic interpretation of mysticism, which put such a dangerous weapon of attack [p.64] into the handsof the Ritschlian school; but, on the other hand, it opposes the peculiar and limited theory of the function of the historical Christ, which is advocated by that school. It gives back to the human soul the freedom of the Infinite, yet does not loose hold of the method by which that freedom in its fulness was first made available to men. The Ritschlian says in effect, "We only know Deity as we see it expressed in Christ"; [18] a statement which, if it is to have any meaning at all, seems to demand a highly developed mystical consciousness in those who subscribe to it! The true mystic answers, "Life, not knowledge, is our aim: nothing done for us or exhibited to us, can have the significance of that which is done in us. [This is another one of those simple, almost throwaway, lines of EU that I find so breathtaking in their power. DCW] We can only know the real in so far as we possess reality: and growth to that real life in which we are in union with God is an organic process only possible of accomplishment in one way — by following in the most practical and concrete sense the actual method of Christ."
"Christian mysticism," says Delacroix — almost alone among modern psychologists in seizing this vital fact — "is oriented at one and the same time towards the inaccessible God, where all determination vanishes, and towards the GOD-LOGOS, the 'Word of God', the wisdom and holiness of the world. In spite of the sometimes contradictory appearance of absorption in the Father, it is at bottom the mysticism of the Son. Its ambition is to make of the soul a divine instrument, a place where the divine power dwells and incarnates itself: the equivalent of Christ". [19]
Such growth towards the Life of God must imply — so the Christian mystics think — a growth in the godlike [p.65] power of self-expression under two orders, the Eternal and the Temporal, the contemplative and the active; for "Perfection ever moves on two poles, extremely opposite, which St Paul calls Height and Depth, St Francis, What is God and what am I?" [20] Thus "the truly illuminated man", says Ruysbroeck, "flows out in universal charity toward heaven and upon earth." [21] He is "the intermediary between God and Creation." [22] His life has been surrendered, not that it may be annihilated, but only that it may be made more active and more real.
"What then is wanted," says Baron von Hugel, "if we would really cover the facts of the case, is evidently not a conception which would minimise the human action, and would represent the latter as shrinking, in proportion as God's action increases; but one which, on the contrary, fully faces, and keeps a firm hold of, the mysterious paradox which pervades all true life, and which shows us the human soul as self-active in proportion to God's action within it ... Grace and the Will thus rise and fall, in their degree of action, together; and man will never be so fully active, so truly and intensely himself, as when he is most possessed by God."[23]
This total and life-enhancing surrender to the Transcendant is the consummation towards which the Christian mystics move. Life in its wholeness is their aim; a concrete and actual existence which shall include both God and the world, and shall raise to their highest terms, use for their highest purposes, that power of receptivity, that power of controlled attention, that power of energetic response, whicxh characterise human consciousness. Their method is positive, not negative: they reject nothing, but [p.66] re-order all, completing human nature by the addition of a "top storey" which crowns instead of crushing the foundation on which it is raised. By a process which is the secret of the mystical consciousness, and which finds its classic expression in the historic Christ, they achieve a synthesis of these "completing opposites" in which St Augustine, and after him Ruysbroeck, saw revealed the essential character of Deity: the changeless and the changeful, the ceseless onward push of the elan vital. and the Pure Being which transcends and supports the storm of life and change.
In this paradoxical union of Being and Becoming — "Peace according to His essence, activity according to His nature: absolute stillness, absolute fecundity" — Ruysbroeck held that the secret of Divine Reality was hid: and that those who had reached the supreme summit of the inner life and claimed actual participation in the "life of God" must possess an equivalent wholeness of experience [24] — in activity and contemplation, in fruition and work, "swinging between the unseen and the seen." They must go, he says of them,"toward God by inward love in eternal work, and in God by fruitive inclination in eternal rest,"[25] running by His side upon the Highway of Love: [26] and because of this complete conformity to the Universal Rhythm, harmonising that internal consciousness of perfect rest which is the reward of the surrender of finite to Infinite Life with the ceaseless activity of an auxiliary of God, who desires only to "be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man." [27]
We may translate all this to our reason-loving minds, though at the cost of much beauty and significance, as [p.67] the achievement of an abiding sense of the reality and importance of the flux of things, and of Spirit's veritable life growth and work within that flux, united with a deeply conscious participation in that transcendant, all-embracing Divine order — that independent, changeless , unfathomable Life of God — within which the striving world of Time is held secure. The real possessors of that"new creation", the Christian consciousness, look towards a divine synthesis inconceivable to the common mind, wherein this Being and this Becoming, la forma universal di questo nodo, are reconciled and embraced in the transcendant life of Reality. "For the intermittent and alternating mysticism of the ecstatic, they substitute a mysticism which is continuous and homogeneous." [28] This synthesis is prefigured for them, the way to its attainment shown, in the historic life of Christ; where they find the pure character of God, the secret tendency of Spirit, expressed under the limitations of a growing and enduring world. Of this life they know themselves to be the direct inheritors. thus, treading as well as they can in the footsteps of their pattern, they actually "bring the Eternal into Time"; and by this act, lift the process of Time into the light of Eternity.
"There is an inward sight," says the Theologia Germanica, "which hath power to perceive the One true Good, and that it is neither this nor that, but that of which St Paul saith; 'When that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.' By this he meaneth that the Whole and Perfect excelleth all the fragments, and that all which is in part and imperfect is as nought compared to the Perfect.... Behold! where there is inward sight, the man perceiveth of a truth, that Christ's life is the best and noblest life, and therefore the most to be preferred, and he willingly accepteth and endureth it, without a question or a complaint, whether [p.68] it please or offend nature or other men, whether he like or dislike it, find it sweet or bitter and the like. And therefore wherever this perfect and true Good is known, there also the life of Christ must be led, until the death of the body. And he who vainly thinketh otherwise is deceived, and he who saith otherwise lieth, and in that man the life of Christ is not, of him the true Good and eternal Truth will never more be known. [29]
[If we attain and manifest the life of the Christ in ourselves, it will be our own lives that are lived in perfection, for the Christ I believe to be the perfect inner life of each and all of us, the image of Himself that God created us in, and from which we departed on the outward path of the prodigal son.
I have some grave reservations about using the physical events of the life of Jesus as a role model, if that is what is intended here, especially in the light of information from the Dead Sea Scrolls which suggests that while the "biography" that appears in the gospels may in fact lay out a spiritual sequence, it bears little resemblance to the historical events of the life of Jesus as we are able to determine them by a careful reading of extant materials. DCW]
This passage undoubtedly represents the norm of Christian mysticism — the "path to that which is Best" [30] Over and over again we find its doctrine repeated and affirmed. We see, when we examine Christian literature, that to all its greater sains and most of its greater writers, the concrete events in the life of the historical Christ have seemed of overwhelming significance. Vita tua, via nostra, says à Kempis. "He appeared among us," says Angela of Fuligno,"in order that we might be instructed by means of His life, His death and His teaching... His life is an ensample and a pattern for every mortal that desireth to be saved. [31]
[I believe that the desire to be "saved", from whatever, is a manifestation of fear, and as such separates us from God even further than we were to begin with. (Perfect fear casts out all love.) It is, quite simply, a form of sin. As a motive, fear leads one into the practice of magic, of trading in supernatural goods in return for knowledge, power or security.]
More, these events in the order in which they are reported to us have always been for them the types of successive events in the inner history of the ascending soul. They speak of its "New Birth", its "Temptation", "Transfiguration", "Gesthemane", "Crucifixion" and "Resurrection"; and test the healthiness of its growth by its conformity to this pattern of development. readers of ascetic literature are so accustomed to this, that it has ceased to strike them as strange; yet were the Ritschlians right in their theory as to the non-Christian nature of the mystic life, it would be strange indeed.
St Ignatius Loyola, whose Spiritual Exercises show him to have been possessed of a knowledge of human personality so penetrating and exact that it might almost be [p.69] called inspired, mapped out the complex whole of man's spiritual career into "three degrees of humility". The first degree, which is that of a beginner, brings the mind to a point at which it will make any sacrifice rather than commit a "mortal" sin. The second degree, that of "proficient" educates the moral sensibility to a point at which it will make any sacrifice rather than commit a "venial" sin. This would appear to be the limit of normal ethical transcebdance: but it is merely the preparation of the third degree, that of the "perfect". Those who have risen to this height are completely set upon one object, for which they easily abandon everything else — "to make their lives harmonise with the life of Christ". When we read this we suddenly perceive why it was that the author of the Imitation Christi called his book the "Ecclesiastical Music"; for in it we hear the melody of the Church's inner life.
[The Church's obsession with so called ethical behaviour, "sin", has been responsible for an unparallelled history of ecclesiastical and social brutality. Good and evil are strictly relative to existing personal and social/tribal benefits or disadvantages perceived as arising out of behaviour. Fifty years down the track, most ethical injunctions look quaint, to put it charitably.
They are a function of an existence oriented towards power, knowledge and security, one separated from the life of God.
Our behaviour will be ethical to the extent that we manifest God in our lives. The converse is NOT true, that we manifest God in our lives to the extent that our behaviour is ethical. None of us has the capacity to live a life, of ourselves, that is sufficiently ethical to command the presence of God. But if we seek first the presence of God in our lives.....DCW]
Observe that St Ignatious, though himself a great mystic, wished by this method to create active and heroic rather than contemplative Christians. He would gladly have subscribed to the dictum of Recejac, "that mysticism ought never to depart from the formula so admirably adapted to it by Aristotle — "to play the man'" [32] Yet the way upon which he sets the growing soul is the Mystic Way — the life it is to follow is that "lovely life" in which "it can be said of a truth that God and man are one." [33] The state at which it is to aim is not the state supoposed to be characteristic of "practical Christianity"; but the transfigured life of the unitive mystic, livbing "Eternal Life in the midst of Time."
Notes
1. This is the opinion of practically the whole Riyschlian group who inherited their master's anti-mystical bias. the most complete and extreme statement of their position is by R Herrmann, Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott.
2.Vide infra, Cap. III.
3. Vide infra, Cap V, § II
4. R. Herrmann, Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott, Bk. I. cap 1, §4, §7,
and cap. 2, § 3 and Bk II, cap. 6, § 10.
5. "It is a most perilous thing, and much more so than I can tell, to converse with God by these supernatural ways, and whosoever is thus disposed cannot but fall into many shameful delusions." "The humble soul will not prsume to converse with God by itself. ... God will not enlighten him who is alone, nor confirm the truth in his heart: such a one will be weak and cold." (St John of the Cross, Subida del Monte Carmelo, Lib II caps. 21, 22.
6. Par. X. 132
7.Benjamin Minor, cap. 81.
8. "A very necessary Epistle of Discretion in Stirrings of the Soul." Printed by E. Gardner in The Cell of Self-Knowledge, pp. 95-115.
9. Etudes sur la psychologie du mysticisme, p.235
10.Malaval, La Pratique de la vraye theologie mystique, Vol I. p. 342
11. John of Holy Crosse, Pilgrimage to Perfection, p. 192
12. B. Angelae de Fulginio, Visionem er Instructionum Libre, cap. 59.
13. St Catherine of Siena, Dialogo, cap. 22.
14. Buchlein von der ewigen Weisheit, cap. 2.
15. Vida, cap. ix. 9.
16. L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, Lib II. cap 77.
17. Op. cit., Lib. II, cap. 45
18. Herrmann even goes to the length of saying, "We do not merely come through Christ to God. It is truer to say that we find in God nothing but Christ" (op cit., Bk I cap.5. § 11.
19. Etudes sur le psychologie du mysticisme, p. xiii
20. John of Holy Crosse, Pilgrimage to Perfection, p. 219
21. L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, Lib. II. cap. 45.
22. op cit., Lib. II. cap. 44.
23. The Mystical Element of Religion, Vol. I. p. 80.
24. De Vera Contemplatione (Hello, p.175).
25. L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles, Lib. II. cap. 73.
26. Ibid., Samuel (Hello, p. 207).
27. Theologica Germanica, cap. 10.
28. Delacroix, Etudes sur la psychologie de mysticisme, xv.
29. Theologica Germanica, cap. 18.
30. Ibid., cap 23.
31. B. Angelae de Fulginio, Visionem et instructionum liber, cap. 59.
32. Fondements de la connaissance mystique, Pt I. cap. 2, § 6
33. Theologica Germanica, cap. 24.
