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Jesus, says Luke, returned to Galilee from the wilderness "in the power of the Spirit, and a fame went out concerning Him " (1) — strong and definite words. Already, if we may trust a traditlon preserved by the Fourth Gospel, the intuitive mind of John the Baptist had perceived in His baptismal ecstacy the marks of a spiritual greatness; of a creative personality, far transcending the merely prophetic type. (2) That prophetic type — looking forward, rather than living forward — can be no more than the sign-post on the way, the humble servant of ascending Life. Now, that very Life was to declare itself. "The Bridge which goes frorn heaven to earth" and links "the earth of humanlty with the greatness of Deity" was complete.(3) The mind and character of Jesus, permanently subdued to the use of His transcendental consciousness, became media whereby that consciousness could be expressed: "His word was with power." We see, then, the "Forerunner of the Race "entering upon the stage which was destined to be called, in the experience of those who inherited His life, the "Illuminative State." That state, however manifested, is in essence a condition of stability, of enhanced and adjusted life, interposed between two periods of pain and unrest; the purifications, as the mystlcs often call them, of senses and of soul. So we find in the life of Jesus two such painful periods of readjustment,
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struggle and effort — the Temptation and the Agony — at the opening and the close of His public career.
In that career, all those peculiar characteristics of the illuminated mystic which we have already considered — the deep and vivid consciousness of the Presence of God, the lucid understanding, the enhanced power, the supreme peace, the sacramental vision of the world — were for once exhibited in their completeness. More, from the time of the beginning of the Ministry we see the rapid emergence, the swlft, reslstless growth of many of those traits which even the greatest of mystics were only to show in their last and most perfect stage: the characters, that is to say, of the Unitive Way, or Deified Life, the life which has completed the course of its transcendence and perfected its correspondences with Reality.
Whatsoever its circumstances, the method and result of such a life is always the same. Its method is the surrender of the part to the whole; its result is a veritable participation in the life of God. For it, "in the midst of the visible, an invisible but more actual kingdom is set up; which sees more and more in the visible, and which enables the visible to produce new effects." It founds, in fact,"the whole of reality on a cosmic inner life." (4) — the life of God — and has learned the delicate balance which keeps consciousness poised between Eternity and Time. Hence there is for it no gap between sacramentalism and "pure spirituality"; no opposition between the transcendence and the immanence of Divinity, or between the contemplative and active ideals of humanity. It knows that "the creating and sanctifying God is the principle at once of natural and of supernatural life": hence " the ineffable God of Neoplatonic metaphysics — the God of ecstacy — is at the same time the God of life," (5) and work and contemplation are but two aspects of the one great act of communion with Reality.
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The traces of this dual character of intuition and action, work and rest, as they were exhibited in their perfection in the life of Jesus, are easily discoverable in the Syoptics. Works of pity, works of healing, harmonising, correcting, teaching, the free giving under forms both lowly and exalted of "more abundant life," together with unwearied self-spending in the efforts to initiate humanity into the actual new order in which it stood — His blazing apocalyptic vision of a Kingdom both here and to come — were balanced by long hours of solitary prayer and contemplation, of intense and direct correspondence with the Absolute (6): which, could we but penetrate their secret, would teach us all we want to know of the link between man's spirit and the Spirit of God.
The destiny to which that human spirit tends is "freedom"; that high level of being, upon which life achieves reality and becomes the self-creative auxiliary of the divine. In Jesus of Nazareth we may see, for the first time, this freedom fully achieved. In Him, defying the imitations and automatisms which dog the race, it ascends like a flame, exhibiting its two-fold character of perfect correspondence with the Many and with the One.
"Freedom," says Ruysbroeck, "the conqueror of the world and of the evil one, ever ascends. It rises up in adoration towards the Eternity of its Lord and God. It possesses the divine union and shall never lose it. But a heavenly impulse comes: and it turns again towards men, it has pity on all their needs, it stoops to all their miseries, for it must sorrow, and it must bring forth. Freedom gives light, like fire; like fire it burns; like fire it absorbs and devours, and lifts up to heaven that which it has devoured. And when it has accomplished its work below, it ascends and takes once more, ardent with its own fire, the path which leads towards the heights."(7)
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This character of freedom, moving easily between two worlds, becames apparent from the very beginning of the public life of Christ. It is unconsciously revealed to us wherever a connected section seems to describe that life as it was really lived. Consider, for instance, the amazing first Sabbath in Capernaum, after the definite "call" of Peter, Andrew, James and John.(8) Here, in the consecutive events of a typical day and night, we have a classic description of the kind of power exhibited, the kind of life lived, by the illuminative mystic: the swaying to and fro of an enormously enhanced consciousness between the human and the spiritual worlds. Vividly impressed in its newness and strangeness upon the mind of Peter, this forms a specially valuable, because realistic, portion of his reminiscences as recorded by Mark.
The day begins with teaching in the synagogue: and at once the sense of power and of novelty is felt. He taught as one having authority;" with a lucid understanding, a flaming conviction, a sureness of touch in respect of the spiritual world, which astonished all who heard. Next, the overflowing sympathy and healing power: the sick restored to health, the unstable and illadjusted brought back to their true poise by contact with this perfectly adjusted consciousness, serenity and efficiency — more life, more light — irradiated as it were, freely poured out, on all within the field of its influence. It is as if the resources of the Universal Life had here been tapped — and this, not in the exclusive interests of one rare soul, but in order that the vivifying streams might be poured out on other men, who should receive according to their measure an enhancement of life for the bodily frame or for the energising mind.(9) This vast new life surging up, this "extra dower" of vitality, may well empower its possessors for acts which are beyond the reach of common men; yet are veritable results of the spirit of life overflowing the petty barriers of "use and wont."
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But after this free self-giving, this perfection of service, the other side of the true mystic life asserts itself with imperative power. This passionate, ardent spirit owes His strength to other cantacts than that af the world of men. The irresistible passion for God, the hunger for direct and profound communion with Reality — the tendency of like for like — seizes upon His consciousness. "And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed:" (10) renewing those supernal contacts, absorbed in that deep intimacy, which was the necessary source of life, the final secret, of that Personality which claimed at once identity with the human and with the divine.
In the lives of the great Christian mystics, we see — though doubtless upon far lower levels — this duality of experience repeated over and over again. These share to some extent their Master's profound participation in two orders : they are "in this world like a balance," rejecting nothing of the "given", but moving to and fro between Appearance and Reality. Thus only can they solve the paradox of Being and Becoming; and truly "live Eternal Life in the midst of Time.'' We see this in St. Francis of Assisi, whose active love ran up to the supreme and solitary experience of La Verna and out to the untiring industries of missionary and healer; to the humblest works of service to rren and beasts, the loving discovery of the Divine in birds and flowers. In St. Catherine of Siena, profound ecstatic, yet wise politician, active teacher and philanthrapist. In Ruysbroeck, with his continual insistence on man's necessary movement between loving work and restful fruition, the ascent and descent of the ladder of love. In St. Catherine of Genoa, balancing those deep and solitary contemplations and ecstacies from which she came forth "joyous and rosy-faced," with the hard work and generous self-spending of her active career
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in hospital and slum.(11) In St, Teresa, who declared both in word and action that the "combination of Martha and Mary" is necessary to the perfect life.(12) These, far better than any reverent process of insulation, may help us to know something of the nature of that "new life " which flashing upon the world in its highest possible expression, was exhibited to men during the short ministry of Jesus.
It is clear from every line of the canonical records that "newness" was indeed of its essence; as seen both by the loving and intimate vision of disciples, and by the curious and astonished crowd. Actual novelty was felt here if ever, breaking out through the world of things.
"If," says Gamble, "we try to determine the first and most general impression which the person of Jesus made on His followers, we have no great difficulty in reaching it. They were deeply penetrated by the sense of His unlikeness to ordinary men. This feeling is apparent on every page of the Synoptic gospels. It excites among the disciples sometimes astonishment, sometimes self-surrender, sometimes terror. . . . We shall find the most marked characteristic of Jesus to be a certain collectedness, composure, or serenitv of mind under the utmost stress of circumstance. We are made aware of this trait in all the various situations into which the narrative brings us. We feel throughout that we are in the company of One who is equal to the many demands which life makes upon Him, and who is in possession of a peace which nothing can disturb." (13)
This newness and strangeness, though none could be expected to comprehend it in its fulness — much less express it in the crude and limited symbols of speech — some at least could recognise; far though it was from all Messianic conceptions and hopes. This it is, forced into correspondence with the formulae of Jewish prophecy,
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which finds expression in the confession of Peter,(14) and in the- " Messianic claims'' and much of the apocalyptic prophecy of Jesus Himself. "From the parables of the garment and of the wine bottles,'' says Dobschutz, "we learn that He looks on Himself and His surroundings as something quite new. . . . The prophets all announced a time ot fulfilment to come. Jesus knew that He was bringing this time." (15)
But the emergence of Novelty, the real movement of life in a direction that is truly new, must mean for the human mind which experiences it — has had as it were for a moment its blinkers snatched away, but cannot focus the. fresh worlds disclosed — a sense of strangeness, of immeasurable possibilities. For such a mind the world , abruptly perceived from a new standpoint, seems full of portents: moves to some fresh definite consummation which, because inwardly felt, must be outwardly disclosed. There are "signs in the sun and the moon" — yes, signs in every springing leaf, in every sudden breeze. The strangeness of a Parousia truly imminent, in a sense actually present for consciousness, flings its shadow upon the World of Appearance. A mind ever stretched towards Eternity tinctures with its own peculiar essence the stream of perceptions as they flow in from the " world of sense." The result of such factors will be something not far different from that which is called the " apocalyptic element " in the teaching of Jesus.
Such an "apocalyptic element'' is seldom wholly absent from the declarations of those mystics whose ascent towards Reality is conditioned by the sense of a "mediatorship" laid upon them: whose vision of Infinite Perfection brings with it the impulse to communicate the implications of that vision to the race. A necessary perfecting of all life, individual and racial, as part af the Divine Plan, is then made clear to them. Deeply merged in the stream of Becoming, they feel the tendencies of its
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movement; beco:ne aware of its inexorable laws. As best they can, they condense the substance of those intuitions — the plot of the Drama of God — into the shorter rhythms of human thinking. A great certitude burns in their symbolic language. Because the supernatural side of history is so widely unrolled before them, they accelerate the pace of its great processes, and feel the inevitable end as already near. It is all part of the supreme human business of "bringing the Eternal into Time". Thus Joachim of Flora, St. Hildegarde, and the crowd of mystical seers down to our own apocalyptic prophetess, Jane Lead, all come back from their communion with Reality to cry like John the Baptist, "Change your minds, for the Kingdom is at hand."
Alike the mediaeval seers and their forbears the Jewish prophets, were violent in their declarations, vivid and definite in the pictures which they made of the changes that must come. But Jesus, towering to greater certitudes, ernbracing a wider horizon, was more violent, more vivid than them all. A sharper pencil than theirs, a more impassioned poetry, was needed if He were to communicate a tithe of His great vision, of His interior sense of power and newness, to the world.
Thus "apocalyptic language" — lyrical and pictorial speech — is seen to have been inevitable for Him. Its relics survive in the gospels, though emptied now of all their fire and light. Each successive redaction of those gospels removed them a little further from that shining world of wonder in which they had their origin, to deposit them at last in the anatomical museums where the dead fancies of faith are preserved. As the living Personality slowly stiffened into the "deified hero" — as Christianity developed from a life to a cult — so more and more the ecstatic and poetic quality of such utterances was obscured by an insistence on those features which appeared to ratify the ancient prophecies of Israel, or forecast definite events on the physical plane. These fore-
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casts, unfulfilled, were but the construction put by the intellect — limited on all sides by tradition, education, race — on that amazing vision of novelty and change, worlds of the spirit indeed brought to judgment and remade, which was perceived by an intuition so exalted that it touched and experienced the creative sphere.
Thus the vivid poetic description of the preaching of the Gospel(16) seems to foretell, as Schweitzer points out, an immediate appearance of the Glorified Messiah. But that which it really does describe is the threefold interior process of the corning of the Kingdom of Reality, as it is experienced by the growing human soul. First the natural resistance of normal life, ever tending to lag behind, to oppose the forward march of spirit, to trouble it and struggle with it, old habits fighting against new: the dreadful. obstinacy of the respectable when faced by the romantic, of the ethical as opposed to the religious sense. "Beware of men, for they will deliver you up to the Councils . . . ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake." (17) Then the first victory of the inflowing tide of life, far stronger than the individuals who are its instruments — " it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your father which speaketh in you." Then, in spite of struggles ever renewed on the part of the recalcitrant lower nature, the gradual growth and final establishment of divine humanity — the "Son of Man," who is also the son of God. Chandler observes that these prophecies describe, in a foreshortened form, the actual events which attended upon the establishment of the Christian Church as "a supernatural and spiritual society." (18) They also describe the inward events which attend upon the growth towards reality — in Christian language the entrance into the Kingdom " — of the individual soul.
This "Kingdom" — its nature and its nearness, its profound significance for life — is the theme of all the preaching of Jesus, during the period of His public activity.
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Its "mystery" is the "good news'` whicn the Twelve were sent out to proclaim. Its announcement, rather than any moral law, any "scheme of salvation," is recognised by the Synoptics as His typical utterance. "From that time Jesus began to preach and to say 'Change your minds! for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.'" "Jesus came into Galilee preaching the good news of the Kingdom of God, and saying, 'The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand.'" " And he said unto them, I rnust preach the Kingdom of God to other cities also: for therefore am I sent." (19)
As Christians of a later date took the language of the old mysteries and gave to it a new and vital significance, so their Founder, in His effort to convey His transcendent intuitions to the race, took a phrase which was on everyone's lips, although generally understood either in a national and political or in an apocalyptic sense — the Kingdom of God — and lifted it into a new region of beauty and of truth. The "Kingdorn" is an artistic and poetic transfiguration of a well-known figure of speech: one of those great suggestive metaphors, without which the creative mind can never communicate its message to men . It represents a world and a consciousness dominated by the joyful awareness of Divine Reality — " the key that first unlocks the meaning and aim of life."(20) The establishment af such a consciousness is the goal to which that llfe's unresting travail is directed. The spark from which it springs is deep buried in the soul. It is like a grain of mustard seed; the germ which seems the least of things, yet bears within itself the divine secret of self-creation. It is a hidden treasure awaiting discoverv. Again, it is like leaven; an invisible organism which, once introduced into the field of consciousness, will entincture and transmute the whole of life.(21) There is about it, as its exists in
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human nature, something rudimentary, embryonic, yet powerful. It it not inserted ready-made. Those who desire its possession must acquiesce in the necessitv of beginning over again; of re-birth. "Unless you change your minds and become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdorn." (22) Over and over again, by a multitude of fluid images, we are brought back from soaring visions to the homely and direct irnplications of life and of growth.
The truth which these parables and teachings conceal is therefore as much a truth of psychology as of religion. It is the fact, and the law, of the mystic life; now made central for the race. "The law and the prophets were until John: from that time the good news of the- Kingdom of God is preached." (23) "O thou bright Crown of Pearl," says Boehme of this mystic seed or thing revealed to man, "art thou not brighter than the sun? There is nothing like thee; thou art so very manifest, and yet so very secret, that among many thousand in this world, thou art scarcely rightly known of any one; and yet thou art carried about in many that know thee not." (24)
Reality, and man's relation to it — his implicit possession of it — is then, the subject of the good news. This is the omnipresent and eternal mystery which is neither "Here " nor " There," but " Lo ! everywhere." This Reality and this relation, as perceived by the human soul in its hours of greatest lucidity, are double-edged. Each has for consciousness a personal and an impersonal aspect. Jesus called the first of these the "Fatherhood of God," and the second the " Mystery of the Kingdom." They must be regarded as the completing opposites of a truth which is one.
The doctrine of the Fatherhood. of God involves, of course, the corresponding doctrine of man's " sonship "; his implicitly real or divine character, a seed or spark, an inherited divine quality latent in him,which makes possible
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the filial relation. It is the basis alike of all passionate seeking, all intimate and loving cornmunion with God, and of that c.laim to "deification," to final union with Divine Reality, which all the great mystics make.(25) The love and dependence felt as towards Deity by every awakened religious consciousness, here receive their justification. Yet, since no one definition of Reality can exhaust the resources of an All which transcends the totality of its manifestations, this declaration of Divine Personality, and man's close and loving relationship with it, is balanced by another declaration: that of the Godhead considered as a place or state — St. Augustine's "country of the soul." This is the "Kingdom" in which Jesus Himself lives, and into which it is His mission to introduce the consciousness of other men. It is this awareness of our true position that we are to seek first: this firm hold upon a Reality, loved and possessed, though never understood. Through it all other things, then seen in their true proportion, will be added unto us." (26)
The two ideas taken together, as we find them in the gospels with all their living interchange of fire and light, presented by a Personality to whom they were not terms of thought but facts af life, represent therefore the obverse and reverse of man's most sublime vision of Deity : the cerchio and imago of Dante's dream.(27) The completeness and perfection of balance with which Jesus possesses this dual vision, is the secret of His unique freshness and reality: His power of infecting other men with that "more abundant life."
Yet the mass of words and actions in which this new direction of life is indicated to us, the attention orientated
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toward this immanent yet transcendent Kingdom of God, cannot be forced into any rigid scientific system of doctrine. It is itself alive; an essentially artistic and direct revelation, which plays over the whole field of human activity and hope."Contemplative theology, the offspring of doubt," was, says Deissmann, completely outside the sphere of Christ's nature, "because He was in daily personal intercourse vvith the higher world, and the living God was in Him. . . . To this latter fact His confessions, His words of controversy, consolation and reproof, bear witness. It is impossible to unite all these sayings into the artistic mosaic of an evangelical system: they are the reflections of an inner life full of unbroken strength."
(28)
In His teachings He had His eye on two things, two states: obverse and reverse of one whole. First, on the immediate and largely ascetic and world-renouncing "struggle for good, that is to say for true life" which al infected by His transcendent vitality, and found capable of the new movement, must set in hand; the quest of personal perfection, which is for every mystic the inevitable corollary of his vision of perfect Love. Secondly, on the end and aim of that struggle — the "final flowering of man's true being "(29) as He saw it in apocalyptic vision — the conscious attainment of the "Kingdom," the appropriation of Divine Sonship, the deified life of the mystic soul. He taught that there was no limit to the power of the spiritual life in man. The "grain of mustard seed" hidden in the ground of his nature was a mighty dynamic agent for those who understood the divine secret of growth. As the fine rootlets of the baby plant press resistless through the heavy and recalcitrant soil, so this embryo of a transcendent vitality can dominate matter, move mountains, "and by a magic transmutation of the inorganic build up the Tree of Life. Thus the whole
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mystery of the kingdom is already manifested in the latent possibilities of the little child; and this, rather than the clever but crystallised adult, is the raw material of the New Race.
From a profound consciousness of this indwelling spark of perfection, there flowed that sense of the sacredness and limitless possibilities of life which governed the ethical teaching of Jesus. Here is the source of that undying magic, that creative touch, which evoked frorn all the common things of our diurnal existence the august quality of romance; and found in the deep passionate life of the Magdalene the clue to her reconciliation with the Fontal Life of men. For Him the lawless vitality of the sinner held more promise thar the careful piety of the ecclesiastic. Realness was His first demand : Woe unto you, play-actors," His bitterest reproach. The everlasting miracle of growth, the strange shimmer in our restless World of Appearance which seems to shake frorn out the folds of all created things a faery and enticing light, discerned in our moments of freedom as a veritable message from our home — this He gathered up and made a heritage for us. Fulfilled by a profound consciousness of union with the fundamental reality of All that Is — a deep graduated glow of love for the graduated realities of our real world"(30) — He disclosed to us the glory of that One Reality ablaze in the humblest growing things :"Consider the lilies of the field how they grow; . . . even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." (31)
Twelve hundred years passed before this characteristically Christian saying was really understood, and entered through the life and example of Francis of Assisi into the
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main stream of Christian consciousness. "As of old the three clhildren placed in the burning fiery furnace invited all the elements to praise and glorify God, so this man also, full of the Spirit of God, ceased not to glorify, praise and bless in all the elements and creatures the Creator and Governor of them all. What gladness thinkest thou the beauty of flowers afforded to his mind as he observed the grace of their form and perceived the sweetness of their perfume? . . . When he came upon a great quantity of flowers he would preach to them and invite them to praise the Lord, just as if they had been gifted with reason. So also cornfields and vineyards, stones, woods, and all the beauties of the field, fountains of waters, all the verdure of gardens, earth and fire, air and wind would he, with sincerest purity, exhort to the love and willing service of God. In short, he called all creatures by the name of brother; and in a surpassing manner, of which other men had no experience, he discerned the hidden things of creation with the eye of the heart, as one who had already escaped into the glorious liberty of the children of God." (32)
The imparting and making central for other men af this new inner life, the building of this top storey to the spirit of man, is the art or secret with which, at bottom, the whole of Christ's preaching is concerned. By the completeness of His union with God, He is bringing it in; making it for ever after an integral part of the stream of human life. Possessing it in the fullest measure, He spends Himself in the effort to impart it; and, as a fact, He does so impart it to the inner circle of followers capable of that divine infection. We here touch the secret upon which, ultimately, the whole history of the Christian type depends — the characteristic quality of infectiousness possessed by the mystic life. This fact, which makes every great mystic in the Unitive Way a real centre of that
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which has been called "Divine Fecundity "(33) — the founder of a family in the Transcendental Order — of course received its supreme manifestation in Jesus Himself. The mystic life springs up as it were, flowering in the most sterile places, beneath the feet of a Paul, a Francis, an Ignatius, a Teresa; each possesses the power of stinging to activity the dormant spark in the souls of those whom they meet. But the superabundant divine life in Jesus, the life which it communicates to others, the "New Birth" which it operated in the immediate circle of disciples living within the field ot its influence, is the faunt and origin of the whole Christian Church.
All the "ethical" teaching of Jesus is concerned with the way in which this new life, once it has germinated, may best grow, be nurtured, move towards its destined goal. Those in whom it has sprung up are a race apart: they are "My brother, and sister, and mother." (34) They belong to an inner circle, the "children of the bridegroom," the great family of the secret sons of God. More is demanded of them than of other men. Since they are capable of another vision, live at a higher tension, are quickened to a more intimate and impassioned iove, total self-donation is asked of them; complete concentration on the new transcendent life.(35) The collection of sayings put together in Matthew v., vi. and vii., with others scattered through the Synoptics, tend to establish an ideal of character of which the outstanding qualities are Humility, Detachment, Poverty, Charity, Purity, Courage: the marks, in fact, of the Christian saint. Amongst the many psychological necessities which these sayings bring into prominence, are the completeness with which the new transcendent life must be established if it is to succeed — ye
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cannot serve God and Mammon: (36) the need of purity if one is to keep the power of perceiving Reality: (37) the courage and endurance with which the logical results of conversion must be faced: (38) the dynamic power of the fervent will: (39) the fact that "entrance into the Kingdom", is not a belief, but an act.(40)
This ideal in its totality became, and remains — not at all the standard of social Christianity, which is always trying to whittle it down, and prove its impracticable character, but — the ideal towards which the disciplines of Christian asceticism are set. Read first the Sermon on the Mount, and then side by side the Imitatio Christi and any work of edification proceeding from the Ritschlian school; and you will be left in no doubt as to which is the more "evangelical." Fulfilment of this ideal is the standard aimed at by all those heroic mortifications which constitute the mystic's Way of Purgation, or on a lower plane the novitiate of the religious life; directed as they are towards " self-naughting," the acquirement of that radiant charity which sees all things in the light of God, that evangelical poverty which Jacopone da Todi called " highest wisdom," the harmonious rearrangement of character round a new and higher centre of life; though neither mystic nor monastic postulant may recognise the origin of that pattern to which his growing intuition of reality urges him to conform. Over and over again its principles have been given practical expression: by Francis, embracing Poverty and receiving with it a joyous participation in the Kingdom of God; by Suso, blessed when men said all manner of evil against him; by Teresa in her convent taking no thought for the morrow, or denying herself social intercourse in the effort towards singleness of eye — a pure and untainted vision of Reality. The violent other-worldliness of this ideal, its paradoxical combination of charity and austerity, of intensest
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joy and pain, its "unpracticalness'' as a guide for those whom we consicer normal men leading that which we like to think a normal life, is notorious. But it was the rule of a new life, a new man, whose standard must transcend that of the respectable citizen; and is the inevitable condition of his appropriation of the vision and secret called the Kingdom of God": "Except your righteousness shall exceed tne righteousness of the scribes and pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." (41) Unendurably hard for those who "loved the world," the others, breathing the crisp air of Reality, found that its yoke was easy and its burden light.
Participation in this Kingdom was at first freely offered to the whole race. So great, so compelling was this new vision of Reality, that it seemed impossible that any to whom it was declared could disbelieve. We see this same convinced optimism even in the preaching of St. Franicis, of Tauler, of Fox: the clear triumphant certitude of an Eternal Life attainable by all men who turn towards it, who chose to knock, to ask, to seek,(42) slowly working itself out to the same tragic conclusion in conflict with tne deadly inertia of the crowd — the " unbelieving and crooked-minded generation,'' (43) with its exasperating tendency to degrade all spiritual power to its own purposes, make it useful, exploit in the interests of present comfort the marvellous and the occult. In one who lived in the full blaze of the Divine Presence, to whom the atmosphere of Reality was native air, such an attitude of hope and expectation was inevitable. As with the man who made the great supper, it seemed enough to say " Come for all things are now ready." (44)
The few sarcastic sentences in which that most ironic of parables is completed show the cruel disappointment of the result.
It soon became plain that only a few were capable of the
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new movement of life: possessed the courage and simplicity needed for its fundamental sacrifices and readjustments. "For narrow is the gate, and straitened the way that leadeth unto life, and few be they that find it."(45) Hence in the end the secrets of the "Kingdom" were deliberately confined to a handful of men; the " little flock," temperamentally able to slip the leash of old illusions and "live the life." There came a point at which the distinction between those susceptible of this new birth and those incapable of moving in the new direction became so clear to Jesus, that the inner circle of initiates even received the stern warning to avoid "giving that which is holy to the dogs, and casting pearls before swine." (46) The whole race, it is true, are called to the Kingdom; but in the event few are chosen. These few His unerring intuition detects — a man here, a man there, in the least likely situations. They are the natural mystics, the "salt of the earth," the " light of the world," the finders of the treasure, of the pearl, the wise who build their lives on a foundation of Eternity (47) — those in fact who are capable of the recognition of Reality, and are destined to live the new Transcendent Life; or become, in Johannine language, " branches of the Vine."
The swift growth of Jesus in the Illuminated Life is reflected for us in the impression made by Him on this inner circle, this spiritual aristocracy. It is an impression which culminates in the confession of Peter, and in the parallel story of the Transfiguration,(48) where voice and vision do but drive home the same conviction which breaks out irresistibly in Peter's words — the conviction of a unique transcendence experienced here and now, and making a link for man with the spiritual sphere.
The Transfiguration belongs to a group of incidents prominent in the Synoptics, which we can hardly dismiss,
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but must treat with a certain reserve. They are incidents which find many reported parallels throughout Christian history in the lives of the saints; and, indeed, of other abnormal psychic subjects who canrot be ranked as saints. They include — to give them their modern pseudo-scientific names — instances of foreknowledge of events, such as the announcements of the Passion, of the betrayal of Judas and the denial of Peter: of clairvoyance — "Jesus perceived in His spirit that they so reasoned within themselves: " (49) of levitation — the walking on the sea. Such incidents are viewed with dislike by the modern mind, which, far from regarding them as "helps to faith", makes haste to drape them in the decent vestments of " symbol " and " myth." (50) They seem to us bizarre and startling; largely because the closed system of "natural law" with which the nineteenth century endowed us, has blunted our perception of the immense possibilities lurking in the deeps of that universe of which we have only explored the outward and visible signs. Losing the humble sense of wonder, we only find queerness in the phenomena which our conceptual systems refuse to accommodate. But it is our own brains which supply the "queerness"; always their first reaction to the encounter with novelty. Yet there is a great body of evidence, difficult to set aside, that those in whom that organic development which we have called the " Mystic Way " takes place, do often exhibit powers and qualities outside the range of more "normal" expernence. Nor are such peculiarities limited to the voices, visions, and ecstatic intuitions which are the recognised media of exalted religious perception. The faculty by which St. Francis of Assisi read the minds of others ;(51) the telepathic communications, collective auditions
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of a "Divine Voice" speaking to them and other psychic powers developed in the fourteenth century amongst the mystical society of the Friends of God "(52); St. Francis,(53) St. Catherine of Siena,(54) St.Teresa,(55) St. Philip Neri,(56) St. Francis Xavier (57) and many other rnystics of all creeds (58), reported by contemporary witnesses as lifted above the earth when absorbed in prayer; the prediction of her own martyrdom by Joan of Arc; even the wide range of psychic powers observed in that unstable and sentimental mystic, Madame Guyon — all these are hints which may at least help us to read with more open minds the stories of "marvellous" psychic phenomena incorporated in the gospels. If the dynamic power of mind, its control of many of the conditions called "material," be indeed a fact, here if anywhere we may expect that power to show itself. Spirit is cutting a new path to transcendence — life is makirg the greatest of its "saltatory ascents" — hence, its energising touch may sting to new activities tracts wnich it never reached before. Moreover, the very disharmonies which must result from such abrupt and uneven developments will encourage the production of bizarre phenomena. Hence in the present state of the evidence, a definite rejection of these narratives is as unscientihc as the worst performances of pious credulity.
True, it is impossible as yet to draw any certain conclusions from them. We are but at the beginning of our study of the human mind and its true relations with the flesh. But when the psychic nature of man is better understood, it may well be that much now regarded by New Testament critics as myth or allegory will be recognised as a description — sometimes indeed exaggerated
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or misrepresented, but sometimes also soberly realistic — of the rare but natural phenomena which accompany the breaking out of new paths by the Spirt of Life. The quiet change of attitude which has taken place amongst rationalistic scholars during the last twenty years in regard to the stigmatisation of the saints — once a pious fairytale, now "only a blush in a certain limited area" (59) — is a warning against premature judgment in such matters as "levitation," fore-knowledge, or the curious self-radiance said to be observed in ecstatics of a certain type.
Those who take the view here suggested, and who are willing to allow the propriety of using the indirect evidence afforded by the lives of those saints who are the closest imitators and greatest followers of Jesus of Nazareth, in the effort to understand our confused and scanty records of His life, have ready to their hand much material which seems to bear on the story of the Transfiguration. The kernel of this story — no doubt elaborated by successive editors, possessed by that passion for the marvellous which Jesus unsparingly condemned — seems to be the account of a great ecstacy experienced by Him in one of those wild and solitary mountain places where the soul of the mystic is so easily snatched up to communion with supreme Reality.(60) Such a profound and exclusive experience of Eternal Life, a total concentration on the Transcendental Order, in which the intuition of Reality floods consciousness and blots out all knowledge of the temporal world is, as we know, an almost invariable incident in the career of great contemplatives. Then "the spring of Divine Love flows out of the soul, and drains her out of herself into the nameless Being, into her origin, which is God alone." (61) Hence it is at least probable that such ecstacies were a frequent
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feature of those nights of prayer which supported the active life of Jesus; that this was the way in which His communion with the Father expressed itself. But those ecstacies, if experienced at all, were experienced in solitude; this was witnessed by Peter, James and John, admitted to new intimacy since their realisation of His Messiahship.
"And while He was praying, the appearance of His face underwent a change,"(62) says Luke; he alone preserving for us this vital fact of "prayer," of profound and deliberate absorption in the Divine Life, as the immediate cause of the transfigured bodily state. This change, this radiance seemed to the astonished onlookers to spread to the whole personality; conferring upon it an enhancement and a splendour which the limited brains of those who saw could only translate into terms of light — "His clothing became white, and like the flashing lightning"(63) — whiter, says Mark, with a touch of convincing realism, than any fuller can bleach it.(64) Bound together by a community of expectation and personal devotion, and now in that state upon the verge of sleep (65) in which the mind is peculiarly open to suggestion, it is not marvellous that this, to them conclusive and almost terrible testimony of Messiahship, should produce strange effects upon those who were looking on. In an atmosphere so highly charged with wonder and enthusiasm, the human brain is at a hopeless disadvantage. Such concepts as it is able to manufacture from the amazing material poured in on it, will take of necessity a symbolic form. In minds dominated by the influence of a personality of unique spnritual greatness, and full of images of those Old Testament prophecies which seemed to be in course of actual fulfil- ment before their eyes, all the conditions were present
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for the production of a collective vision in which such images played a prominent part; bodying forth the ideas evoked in them by the spectacle of their Master's ecstacy. That Master, whose deep humanity had never failed them yet, whose strangest powers had always been evoked in response to the necessities of men, was now seen removed from them bv a vast distance. Unconscious of their very existence, His whole being appeared to be absorbed in communion with another order, by them unseen. With whom was He talking in that radiant world, of which they saw upon His face the reflected glory? The mind that asked the question answered it. As the devout Catholic is sure that the saint in ecstacy talks with Christ and the Virgin, so these devout Jews are sure that their Master talks with the supreme law-giver and supreme seer of the race — "There appeared to them Elijah accompanied by Moses, and the two were conversing with Jesus." (66) We observe that there is no suggestion that Jesus Himself saw the patriarch or the prophet. His veritable experience remains unknown.
After the vision, the audition: the voice which explains the meaning of the picture that has been seen, and brings the whole experience to an end. This voice tells them nothing new : it simply affirms, in almost identical language, that fact of "divine sonship" which Jesus Himself had experienced at His baptism, and no doubt communicated to His friends. Given the fact of a collective consciousness, developed in its lowest form in all crowds, and often appearing upon higher intellectual and moral levels in mystical and religious societies(67) this episode should offer no difficulty to the psychologist; and those critics who have so hastily dismissed it as legend would do well to reconsider their position. It is a thoroughly characteristic event in the career of a mighty
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Personalty of the mystical type; and of the disciples to whom He has communicated something of His overflowing spiritual consciousness.
In all records which have been preserved for us of the ecstacies of the great mystics, there appears the same note of amazement — the sense of an actual change in them, the consciousness of a profound separation in those who look on — which we notice in the story of the Transfiguration. In these too the alteration of personality which takes place when the life is withdrawn from sensual experience, and concentrated on the spiritual world — "at home with the Lord," in Paul's vivid phrase" (68) — is perceived by the lookers-on as a transfiguring radiance, which often endures after the ecstacy is at an end. It is possible that this radiance may be related to the so-called aura, which the abnormally extended vision of many "psychics" perceives as a luminous cloud of greater or less brilliance surrounding the human body; which varies in extent and intensity with the vitality of the individual, and which they often report as shining with a white or golden glory about those who live an exceptionally holy life. This phenomenon, once dismissed as, a patent absurdity by all "rational" persons, is now receiving the serious attention of physicians and psychologists: and it is well within the range of possibilities that the next generation of scholars will find it no more "supernatural" than radio-activity or the wireless telegraph. (69)It is one of the best attested of the abnormal phenomena connected with the mystic type: the lives of the saints providing us with examples of it which range from the great and luminous glory to a slight enhancement of personalitv under the stress of spiritual joy.
Thus we are told that Francis of Assisi, when absorbed in prayer, "became changed almost into another man" :
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and once at least was "beheld praying by night, his hands stretched out after the manner of a cross, his whole body uplifted from the earth and wrapt in a shining cloud as though the wondrous illumination of the body were a witness to the wondrous enlightenment of his mind.(70) Thus the sympathetic vision af her closest companions saw Teresa's personality, when she was writing her great mystical works, so changed and exalted that it seemed to them that her countenance shone with a supernatural light. "Ana de la Encarnacion, sometime prioress of Granada, affirmed in her evidence for Teresa's Beatification that whilst she was writing the Moradas in her convent of Segovia, she (Sor Ana), stationed at the door of Teresa's cell in case she wanted anything, had seen her face illumined by a glorious light, which gave forth a splendour 'like ravs of gold, and lasted for an hour; until twelve at night, at which time Teresa ceased to write and the resplendence faded away, leaving her in what, in comparison with it, seemed darkness." (71) Again, St. Catherine of Bologna, always pale on account of her chronic ill-health, was seen by her sisters in choir with a "shining rosv countenance radiant like light":(72) and we are told of St. Catherine of Genoa, that when she came forth from her hiding-place after ecstacy "her face was rosy as it might be a cherub's : and it seemed as if she might have said, who shall separate me from the love of God? "(73) In such reports we seem to see the germ of that experience which lies at the root of the story of the Transfiguration of Christ. As Moses came down with shining face from the mountain, so these turn towards the temporal order a countenance that is irradiated by the reflection of the Uncreated Light.
In another respect the experience of the mystics justifies
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the veracity of the gospels. Mark, dependent according to tradition upon Peter's memory, tells us that when Jesus came down from the mountain there was a strangeness still about Him — "all the people, when they beheld Him, were greatly amazed."(74) Something of the glory of His rapture hung about Him yet: and expressed itself in a physical enhancement, an "otherness" so marked as to impress the imagination of the crowd. Such an alteration is often recorded as the result of the ecstacies of the saints; for "something great," as Teresa says, is then given to the soul,(75) its condition of abnormal receptivity permits the inflow of new life. St. Francis, whom ecstatic prayer "changed almost into another man," found it necessary to "endeavour with all diligence to make hirnself like unto others" when he returned to active life.(76) St. Catherine of Genoa came with the face of a cherub from her encounter with love. The pilgrim in the "Vision of Nine Rocks" returned from his ecstatic vision of God "inundated with life and joy"; even "his physical nature transfigured" by this short immersion in the One Reality.(77) "God poureth into the soul,"says Angela of Foligno of her own ecstacies, "an exceeding great sweetness, in a measure so abundant that it can ask nothing more — yea, verily, it would be a Paradise if this should endure, its joy being so great that it filleth the whole body . . . because of this change in my body therefore, I was not always able to conceal mv state from my companion, or from the other persons with whom I consorted; because at times my countenance was all resplendent and rosy, and my eyes shone like candles." (78)
That steady and organic process of transcendence, that re-making of spiritual man on new and higher levels of vitality, which is the mystic life, since it affects the spirit, affects almost of necessity the body which that spirit
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animates. In the story of the Transfiguration — in forrn poetic, but in substance true —we have the record of the dramatic moment in whlch this fact was brought home to the companions of Jesus. It marks the completion of one phase in that "new movement'' which He was one bringmg in — in psychological terms, the full attainment by His human consciousness of the powers of the
Illuminated Way.
Notes
1. Luke iv. 14 (R.V.).
2. John i. 29-34. Cf. Salmon, The Human Element in the Gospels, p.76.
3. St Catherine of Siena, Dialogo, cap. 22.
4. Eucken, The Truth of Religion, p. 510
5. Delacroix, Etudes sur le psychologie du mysticisme, p xii.
6. Matt. xiv. 23; Mark 1. 35; and vi. 46; Luke vi. 12.
7. Ruysbroeck Regnum amantium Deum (Hello, p. 224)
8. Mark i. 16-38
9. Mark ii. 9-12
10. Mark i. 35
11. Von Hugel, The Mystical Element of Religion, Vol.I. p. 139
12. El Castillo Interior, Moradas Setimas, iv.
13. J. Gamble, Christ and Criticism, p. 59.
14. Mark viii. 29
15. The Eschatology of the Gospels, pp. 19 and 172
16. Matt. x. 16-23
17. Matt. x. 17, 22
18. Faith and Experience, p. 59
19. Matt. iv. 17; Mark i. 14; Luke iv. 43
20.Harnack, Das Wesen des Christientums, p. 40
21. Matt. xiii. 31-33
22. Matt xviii. 3
23. Luke xvi. 16
24. The Threefold Life of Man, cap. 6, § 99
25. It is a mistake to credit Neoplatonism with the introduction of "deification" into Christianity. True, the expression itself is Hellenic, and was fir4st used in a Christian sense by Clement of Alexandria: but the experience which it describes is indistinguishable from the "divine sonship" of Paul and the Fourth Evangelist.
26. Matt vi. 23
27. Par.,XXXIII. 136
28. Deissman, Light from the Ancient East, p. 386
29. A Reville, Jesus de Nazareth, Vol II. p. 5.
30. Von Hugel, Eternal Life, p. 281.
31. Matt. vi. 28, 29; Luke xii. 27. "Of all Christ's sayings," says Abbot, "this is the most original: no parallel to it can be discovered in ancient literature. To us it is a truism; in the first century it must have seemed a paradox of paradoxes." (E.A. Abbot, The Son of Man, 3565 b and d).
32. Thomas of Celano, Legenda Prima, cap. 29
33. Richard of St Victor, De quatuor gradibus violentae charitatis (Migne, Pat. Lat., T. CXCVI.).
34. Matt. xii. 50 and Mark iii. 35.
35. Matt. viii. 19-23, xvi. 24, xix. 16-21; Mark viii. 34, x. 17-22; Luke ix. 23, xiv. 25-33, xviii. 18-23.
36. Matt. vi. 24
37. Matt. v. 8, vi. 22
38. Matt vii. 13
39. Matt. v. 6
40. Matt. vii. 21
41. Matt. v. 20
42. Matt. vii. 7
43. Matt. xvii. 17 (Weymouth's Translation)
44. Luke xiv. 17
45. Matt. vii. 14 (R.V.)
46. Matt. vii. 6
47. Matt. v. 13-16, xiii, 44-46, vii. 24.
48. Matt. xvi. 16 and xvii. 1-8; Mark viii. 29 and ix. 2-8; Luke ix. 20, 23-26
49. Mark ii. 8
50. Instances in almost any modern work on the Synoptics: the Lives of Jesus by A Reville, and O. Holzmann; Carpenter, The First Three Gospels, and Loisy, Les Evangiles synoptiques.
51. Speculum, § V
52. Rufus Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, p. 257
53. St Bonaventura, Vita, cap. 10.
54. Dialogo, cap. 79.
55. Vida, cap. xx, § 7, 9
56. Acta SS., T. 19, May 26
57. Bonhours, Vie, Lib. 6, p. 557.
58. Good Japanese examples in Harrison, The Fighting Spirit of Japan
59. Cutten, Psychological Phenomena of Christianity, p. 84.
60. In such lonely spots, said Francis of Assisi, the Holy Spirit vouchsafed itself more intimately to him (St Bonaventura, Vita, cap.10).
61. Meister Eckhart, On the Steps of the Soul (Pfeiffer, p. 153)
62. Luke ix. 29. (Weymouth's translation)
63. Loc. cit.
64. Mark ix. 3.
65. Luke ix. 31. The quick intelligence of Luke pewrceives the importance of this detail, and incorporates it from some unknown source.
66. Mark ix. 4 (Weymouth's translation)
67. As for instance the community of the Friends of God, above mentioned. Cf. Rufus Jones, loc. cit.
68. 2 Cor. v. 8.
69. Cf Walter J Kilner, The Human Atmosphere (London, 1911), where the examination and measurement of the aura by the use of chemical screens is fully described
70. St Bonaventura, Vita, loc. cit.
71. G. Cunninghame Graham, Santa Teresa, Vol. I. p. 203
72. J. Grasset, Vita (Acta SS., T. 8, March 9th).
73. Vita et dottrina di S. Caterina da Genova, cap. 5.
74. Mark ix. 15
75. Vida, cap. 20: § 29
76. St Bonaventura, loc. cit.
77. Jundt, Rulman Merswin, p. 27
78. B. Angelae de Fulginio, Visionum et iinstructionum liber, cap. 52.
