[p.193] It is now clear that for Paul, as for Jesus, the good news of the mystery of the "Kingdom" consists, not in body of doctrines, a closed system of beliefs, but in a new and amazing series of profound experiences; in the "lift-up" of his nature, and therefore potentially of all human nature, to new levels of life. This lift-up in the wake of Jesus, from the psychic to the spiritual, is made possible for the Self by a change in its life, the setting in hand of a new kind of organic growth. It is a practical mysticism, the turning of the vital human powers of attention, reception, and response, in the direction of Reality; and can only be understood or transmitted by those who are living it, the members of the "New Race".
Hence, the living, growing creature, Paul, as he reveals himself to us "in process of being saved," is a more valuable subject of investigation than the intellectual formulae under which he tried and often failed to communicate his intuitions of the independent spiritual world.
Yet, as in the case of Jesus, so in that of Paul, a consideration of his most characteristic teachings does but exhibit the more clearly the fundamentally mystical quality of that consciousness in which they arose. Only, of course, by the study of such a consciousness, and of the laws which govern its activity, can we hope to understand his so-called "doctrines"; or resolve the apparent inconsistencies of a thought which derives its worst obscurities from his attempts to pour the new wine of an intense personal revelation into the old bottles of [p.194] "Rabbinic", "apocalyptic" or "Hellenistic" ideas.
[Summary: There is nothing in Rabbinic, apocalyptic or Hellenic tradition that is able to contain the essence of Paul's experience. His attempts to so contain it lie at the root of the apparent confusion and contradiction where these occur his teaching. It is therefore more instructive for a mystic to watch Paul as he changes and grows, rather than listen to him. DCW]
Paul's theology is an artistic and intellectual embodiment — the reduction to terms which try to be logical and always succeed in being suggestive — of the stream of new life by which he was possessed. It is a poem in which he celebrates the adventures of his soul. His analytic yet poetic mind plays perpetually over an experience and a life which he understands from within, because he is himself in process of living it: understands so well that he often forgets how hard it will be for his readers to understand it at all.
Many a phrase which has provided a handle or an obstacle for critics is but the hopeless attempt of the mystic to communicate by means of artistic symbols his actual and supernal experience to unmystical men. Perpetually we notice that even his most dogmatic arguments are simply the reflection of his own psychological adventures: that he always proceeds upon the assumption that the process "wrought" in him will be wrought in all other minds that are "chosen", and that the new world on which he looks is indeed the one and only Kingdom of Reality.
What, then, was Paul's universe? It was a universe soaked through and through by the Presence of God: that transcendant-immanent Reality, "above all, and through all and in you all", as fontal "Father", energising "Son", indwelling "Spirit", in whom every mystic, Christian or non-Christian, is sharply aware that "we live and move and have our being".[1] To his extended consciousness, as first to that of Jesus, this Reality was more actual than anything else. "God is all in all." [2] For him, as long after for Julian of Norwich — often so Pauline in her thought — "as the body is clad in the cloth and the flesh in the skin and the bones in the flesh and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God, and enclosed."[3]
[p.195] The one great Pauline principle, says Ramsay, is this — "only the Divine is real, all else is error." [4] Hence man only attains reality in so far as the rhythm of his being accords with the great rhythm of God; in so far as he is "in the Lord"; and this attainment his "salvation" consists. The perpetually recurring oppositions between "psychic" and "spiritual" existence, "flesh" and "spirit", the "old man" and the "new", are Paul's way of expressing the fundamental difference between these two levels of life, two qualities of consciousness.[5]
This doctrine is simply the "Mystery of the Kingdom" as declared by Jesus, seen through another temperament and re-stated in a form which could be assimilated by the Hellenistic mind. It is the primal truth upon which the whole of Christian mysticism is built. "Do not," says Paul to his converts, "walk as the Gentiles in the vanity of their mind, alienated from the life of God." [6] Participation in that life is your one business, and is achieved by those for whom the Eternal Order is the central fact of life; who "walk not after the flesh but after the spirit". [7] Thus, when Patmore wrote, God is the only Reality, and we are real only as far as we are in His order and He is in us," [8] he condensed the framework of Paul's theology — or, rather, biology — into one vivid phrase.
The conscious attainment of this reality, this intensified and completed life — this "dynamic growth in grace" —is for Paul the essence of Christianity. It has to be done individually, by living and growing along the lines of mystical development exhibited by Jesus — the "putting on of the New Man" and slow attainment of full manhood, the "stature of Christ" — and collectively, by the Church, in which Paul, with the passionate optimism of [p.196] those who see " all creatures in God and God in all creatures," finds as it were the bodying forth of that new ardent spirit of life which emerged in the historic Christ; a vast new creation of many members, serving, and controlled by, that head. This mystic church built up of mystic souls, is the crown of creation; the expression in time and space of that new spiritual world which man is bringing into existence. It is the "new thing " which apocalyptic writers saw in vision ; the answer to the riddle of life.
For Paul, who has himself a strong tendency to apocalyptic speculation, the whole world of things — a world which he perceives as fundamentally dynamlc — is growing and striving towards Perfection. It is vital through and through: vital, and therefore free. "Becoming" is its primal attribute: there is in it nothing static, nothing complete. Even the spirit of the Christian is ever in process of being saved.[9] The sacramental magic of a later day, the "One Act" which transferred man from the world of nature to the world of grace, has no part in the Pauline scheme of things. That outward going, eager, endless push of life, "from lowest to highest a mounting flood" — God working ahd willing within His own creation [10] — which opposes the downward falling tendency of matter [11] is felt and known as a fundamental part of Reality by this great mystic, in whom it energised enthusiastically to the bringing forth of "the perfection of the sons of God."
Man and all else in thls world is free to grow, and move, in either direction: up toward Spirlt, Transcendence, Reality, a participation in the Divine Order; which is "salvation": or down towards Matter, Degeneracy, Unreality; which is "sin and death." [12] All depends upon the direction of his movement, the attitude of his mind; whether his life be centred about the higher or the lower consciousness — the "spirit" [p.197] or the " flesh." "For the mind of the flesh is death ; but the mind of the spirit is life." [13] There is no third choice. Nothing stands still in the Pauline universe. Everything is moving, swiftly as the stars, either to perfection or from it — is either " perishing " or " being saved." [14]
Now, according to the deep intuitive vision of Paul — a vision reinforced by his own amazing experience — man, in whom creation comes to self-consciousness, and who may, if he will, participate in the Eternal Order, is destined, because of that very fact, to lead the Cosmos back again to its bourne. From the Godhead, "fount and origin of all Is," it sprang: thither it must return, though "with groaning and travailling," with all the effort that attends on the process of life and growth.
[From God it came, to God it must return. Rhetoric rather than necessity. It may be correct but nothing in my own experience guarantees this and the logic is not compelling. DCW]
The way man does this is by growing in the way that Jesus grew, into a more complete maturity, a deeper, richer, more profoundly active life: by putting on "Divine Humanity." Jesus was the beginning of a new race, says Paul again and again — a "fresh creation," " the new Adam," " firstborn amongst many brethren." [15] He was significant not only in Himself, but as making possible, by a sharing of His mighty impetus, the forward leap of life — "the last Adam became a life-giving spirit" [16] — and demonstrating the meaning of the whole.
[My own experience agrees that the mystical path is something caught rather than taught or sought, that it is a function of grace, that it most often depends on an encounter with someone who is to a greater or lesser extent realised as a mystic - though not necessarily a Christian. So, in this sense, the role of Jesus as an awakener I do not dispute, though I cannot say I understand ithe process. The analogy I use is that of a guitar resonating when a particular note is struck on a piano. DCW]
"For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travailleth in pain together until now." [17]
Within this dynamic world, perpetually urged up towards perfection, yet always by the process of growth — " one unique impulse, contrary to the movement of [p.198] matter and itself indivisible" [18] — the soul of man is seen by Paul as a thing uniquely susceptible of the divine infection of reality. It can appropriate "grace": that regnant word of the Pauline theology, which is but another name for the inflow of transcendent vitality, the action of creative love; the "triumphing spiritual power" which all mystics feel and acknowledge as the source of their true being. "It is God which worketh in you." "By the grace of God I am what I am." [19] Two centuries before Plotinus, Paul knew as surely as that great ecstatic that "the Supplier of true lif e was present" to those whose attention was turned towards the Real, and that appropriation of this life had "made him free." [20]
From this consciousness of "grace," of a veritable inflow from the spiritual order, and its supremacy for the spirit-life of man, comes his favourite antithesis between those two things, or qualities of consciousness, which he symbolises, in his poetic and suggestive way, as "the law" and "Christ." The first — "law " — is an ethical compulsion laid upon the Self and acting from without inwards. It is a deliberate artifice; the sign of a disharmony unresolved, and so a bondage. The second — "Christ" — is a mystical impulsion. It springs from the very heart of life; and is a quickening spirit, the sign of a "New Creature," [21] a true change of personality, not merely of conduct or belief. To be "in Christ" is to be lifted up into harmony with the divine nature, by close union with that Transcendent Personality who was the comrade and inspiration of Paul's career. It is the doing away of that flame of separation which keeps the human spirit from its home. To be under the "the law" is to live solitary behind the ramparts of personality, obsessed by the ceaseless effort to conform to a life which is seen but not shared.
[This is effectively a (p)restatement of my contention that morality has nothing to do with spirituality. Morality is imposed from without, with regard to the interests of oneself, one's family, one's immediate or larger social group. Spirituality generates behaviour from within that is in tune with the oneness of creation. Or as Underhill sums up below, "... a dead and limiting convention, set over against participation in the freedom of Reality". DCW]
"Justification by faith," that most perverted, least comprehended [p.199] of all dogmas, is an idea closely related to this vision of the world. Harsh and unreasonable though it sound in our ears, it is really an artistic image, half poetic and half practical, by which Paul strove to communicate one of his deepest intuitions, and which springs from the very heart of his inner life. It is the intellectual expression of another inward experience, and represents his sudden flashing comprehension that the world a man lives in — his vision of the universe — is the central fact of his existence and the best of all indications of character. It shows the direction in which he is moving, the sort of creature he is going to be; and so infinitely transcends in importance and value for life his deliberate and selfchosen activities or "works." As "law " to "Christ " so "works" to "faith": a dead and limiting convention, set over against participation in the freedom of Reality.
By "faith" man centres himself in the spiritual order, identifies himself with its interests, and thus justifies himself as a spiritual creation; for the essence of Pauline faith is not "belief," but awareness of, attention to, union with the "Kingdom " — convinced consciousness of a life lived in the atmosphere of God. Such faith as this is the test of a man's wholeness and sanity: it proves that he "walks in the Spirit," that there is sunshine in his soul.
[Where did that come from? DCW]
It implies the nature of his total reaction to the universe, and actually conditions his communion with reality — "We have access by faith into the grace wherein we stand." [22] Thus it justifies him as a spiritual being in a way that no mere "works " of a deliberate morality, no obedience to a human code, can ever do. This is a doctrine which comes naturally to the mystic, whose transcendent experience has indeed acquitted, enlarged and made him free: [23] and wears for him — though for [p.200] , few others — an air of obviousness, of concrete certainty.
Superhuman aspiration, then, "the blind intent stretching towards God," as the Cloud of Unknowing says — in fact, steadfast attention to Reality — Paul regards as the primal necessity. Slackening of such attention, concessions made to the indolence of the lower nature, ever tending to lag behind: this is a betrayal of that holy Spirit of Life which has the body for its temple, a check on the process of growth; and implies degeneration or "sin." All creation, he says in Romans, is "gazing eagerly as if with outstretched neck"[24] towards that ultimate Perfection which is, in respect of our tentative and faltering consciousness, "present yet absent, near yet far." When this Perfection comes in its wholeness, and the "Kingdom" is established, then "all that which is in part shall be done away."[25]
As in the case of Jesus, Paul's deep prophetic vision of this Perfection, his intuitive sympathy with the movement of life towards some rapturous consummation in God, took at first an apocalyptic form. With the mystics, he looked forward to a permanent condition of harmony with the Divine Life, the "rose garden of union," as the necessary end of the Way; with the prophets, he objectivised as a universal transformation, a sudden and imminent "coming with power," the slow and steadfast change which he felt taking place at the very heart of his life. The Pauline eschatology is the fruit of a collision between this profound intuitive conviction, and its imperfect earthly realisation: a collision taking place in a mind of strongly artistic cast, which was saturated with the myriad a apocalyptic fancies born of the political miseries and [p. 201] religious restlessness of the Jews.[26]
[The metaphors I use here are individual rather than collective: the return of the prodigal son, the re-entry to the oneness of the garden of Eden past the angel with the flaming sword. I haven't eliminated the possibility that the second coming is a personal rather than a social event. DCW]
The triumph of Divine Humanity, he thought, was near. So sure was he of the steady march of life towards transcendence, that he did not realise the slowness of the pace. That figure of the glorified Jesus, the New Man, m whom all his spiritual apprehensions found their focus, must emerge soon into the Time-world, which was waiting for "the manifestation of the sons of God." « Maran atha! " "Our Lord, come ! " he cries in the language of primitive Christendom, at the end of the first letter to the Corinthians.[27]
But as the years pass, with Paul's own growth in the Mystic Way a change comes over his eschatology. As the deified life, to which he looked as the only satisfaction of desire, was established within his own spirit; as the Triumphing Spiritual Power which "cometh not with observation" slid into the very centre of his life, and became for him so close a comrade that he could say of it, "I live, yet not I," he ceased to feel the need of any merely external readjustment, of a Liberator who should "descend from heaven with a shout, with the ,; voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God."[28] That cataclysmic vision is the fruit of a mind which has not yet unified itself, [I agree absolutely. DCW] and looks for a consummation, a reconciling of the world's disharmonies, which it feels to be a part of the Divine Plan, yet cannot find within the framework of the Here-and-Now. It is characteristic of Paul's illuminative period, as it has been since of many a mystical genius struggling to reconcile the discordant worlds of Appearance and of Reality.
As he approaches the unitive life, Paul learns, with the setting up of that state of consciousness, that the true Parousia is an inward coming of the Spirit:[29] that the rose-garden of joy, the one and only kingdom of Reality, is waiting at the door of every heart. Gradually, then, [p.202] the idea of the " Parousia " gives way before the idea of the " Mystery," that revelation which " hath been kept in silence through times eternal, but now is manifested "[30] and the work of the Christian missionary — which had been, like that of John the Baptist, a preparing of the way of the Lord changes to something far nearer the ideals of Jesus Himself. Paul becomes a " steward of the mysteries " [31] an initiator into the new direction of life, the new state of consciousness prepared "for them that love Him" and are "sealed with the Spirit" — " the unsearchable riches of Christ " [32] rather than a forewarner of the imminent and apocalyptic re-making of the external world.[33]
[I believe that it is this early, (and mystically immature?) vision of Paul's of the second coming as a final triumph over evil that has helped generate the confusion that persists to this day between morality and spirituality. The battle against evil is not a spiritual one: it is a moral one and a relative one at that, given the myriad moral codes in existence. The spiritual triumph is that of unitive experience over dualism, and is internal and personal. It is a triumph, not over evil, but over BOTH good and evil. DCW]
The "Mystery" appears early in Paul's writings; a translation of his own concrete and positive knowledge that the change of mind and life which he had suffered, the purifications he had endured, had initiated him — as some neophyte at Eleusis — into secrets closed to the eyes of other men: had effected, in a vital sense, the regeneration promised to the adepts of the ancient cults. In those cults he saw foreshadowed the vital experiences of the soul "in process of being saved": the re-birth, the heightened perception of reality, even the sacramental feeding on the Divine Substance disclosed in the common things of sense. Hence, with the instinct of the missionary for any image that might bring his meaning home to other minds, he snatched at the language of the " Mysteries," and salted it with the salt of Christ. " I came unto you," he says to the Corinthians in c.57, "proclaiming the mystery of God" . . . "God's wisdom in a mystery, even the wisdom that hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory, which none of the rulers of this world knoweth . . . but [p.203] as it is written, Things which eye saw not and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man, whatsoever God prepared for them that love him. But unto us God revealed them through the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. . . . We received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things which are freely given to us by God. . . . . Now the natural (literally, psychic) man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things and he himself is judged of no man. For, 'who hath known the mind of the Lord that he should instruct Him ?' (Is. xl. 13). But we have the mind of Christ." [34]
"The mind of Christ ": that new, peculiar quality of consciousness developed in Jesus, whereby He had direct and intuitive apprehension of the spiritual world. Attainment of that mind, re-birth into that order of perception, is the Pauline "Mystery." All his "doctrine," all his arguments, all his high impassioned poetry, are but the variously successful efforts of the artist in him to discover a medium whereby he may communicate this one supremely actual thing. He has it in virtue of his growth in it: and the one passion which supports his strenuous career is the desire and determination to initiate others, that they too may see face to face.
The "Mystery," then, is but another name for the "secret of the Kingdom" — the participation of the "human" in the "divine" life. It is an invitation to transcendence, "that we might know the things which are freely given [p.204] to us by God ": things obvious to the mystic, but which purblind man, his eyes shut to Reality, never contrives to see. This divine life Paul, owing to his bent of mind and the special visionary circumstances connected with his conversion, objectified as the continuing, diffused, mystic life of the historic but "pre-existent" Christ: as, later, the Johannine mystic identified it alternately with the logos and the "Spirit." "Christ-Spirit," says Baron von Hugel, ''is here the element by which the human spirit is surrounded and penetrated, as man is by the air which he breathes and by which he lives." [35]
Paul's "Christology" is one long attempt to convey something of the secret of this inward companionship, sometimes by personal, sometimes by spatial imagery: a companionship which finds many a parallel in the records of religious genius, both within and without the Christian Church. Union with this supernal Life — which, dwelling in him, constituted his true being, and yet within which his life was hid — he knew, as innumerable contemplatives have done, as the result of putting in hand the process of mystic growth. The name which he gave to it matters little: the experience which lies behind that impassioned and artistic language is all.
His strange doctrine of "conditional immortality" — for it is clear that according to the Pauline ideas only Christians will live again "in Christ," who is the fount of all spiritual vitality [36] — is an intellectual deduction from the fact, which he knows by experience, that real Christians have already that new kind of life which he calls " pneumatic," and which is different in kind from the natural or "psychic" life of other men. It is a vivid,crescent, unconquerable life, "capable de culbuter toutes les resistances,et de franchir bien des obstacles, meme peut-etre la more." [37] "Or life or death or things present or [p.205] things to come," he says to the Christian initiate, "all are yours [38] Jesus of Nazareth was the "first fruits" of this new direction of life, the "new" Adam, the "heavenly" man [39]: and those who really receive His "gospel," turning to follow in His tracks, grow by a process at once biological and spiritual into the heritage of its powers.
This life it is, not the seed whence grew the thorny plant of ecclesiasticism, which Paul "plants and waters" in the hope that God may "give increase." [40]Nevertheless, though he limits "salvation," the attainment of complete and permanent vitality, to those who are initiated into this "mystery" of the Kingdom, incorporated into the "mystical body" of the New Man, he never dwells on the idea of the "lostness" of those who are "not called." He lives, as do all the great mystics, in a positive world; all his attention set upon Reality, all his life a series of responses to it. There lies his interest: in discovering and declaring how men grow in and towards the Real — what the criterion whereby we may judge of their participation in the divine life. This problem he solves — once more by an appeal to pure experience — in the great rhapsody on Charity:[41] there declaring the conditions, and setting the standard, to which the whole of Christian mysticism has since striven to conform.
In the poem of Charity we hear a music which has been beaten out in pain and effort upon the anvil of Paul's own heart. The high conviction which fills it, the lucid knowledge which it represents, had been won at the cost of many battles with arrogant intellect and dominant will. He never had the crystalline simplicity of Jesus. The diversities of gifts which besiege the awakened consciousness and amongst which his travailling personality moved, the many blind alleys down which life may run on her quest of Reality; these were for him true opportunities [p.206] of error. One feels that Paul had at least considered, if he had not tried, the claims of all those kinds of spirituality which he here contrasts with the one all-conquering claim of Heavenly Love. Inspired utterance, prophetic genius, the abnormal powers which are often exhibited by selves which have attained to the illuminated state, we know that he possessed. He was naturally inclined to that deep brooding upon supernal mysteries which is so attractive to the speculative intellect. Practical altruism, untiring industry, high courage in bitter persecution, he had shown abundantly. One after another he reviews them. Prophet, ecstatic, philosopher, philanthropist, even martyr — every "way out" towards the Absolute which seems to the self-deluded human creature to be full of interest and promise, every type of deliberate spirituality — Paul tests and throws away. They are well enough in themselves, gifts which may indeed be "desired earnestly": he was no advocate of a pious stupidity, still less of a tame or indolent religion. But it is not by such means that Life makes her great saltatory ascents to freedom. "A still more excellent way show I unto you."
Radiant Charity, that exquisite, outflowing attitude of mind and heart, at once so gentle and so ardent, which is characteristic of the "self-naughted soul " — the perfect state of balanced response to God and to Creation which appears when the "remora of desire" is done away — this and this only is to be the test of the mystic consciousness, the condition of all real spiritual experience. All else partakes of the character of illusion: "we know in part, and we prophesy in part." Only by heavenly love can man enter into direct communion with Reality; only by its dynamic power will he raise up the temple in which that Reality can make its home. "Knowledge puffeth up — love buildeth up," [42] says Paul the craftsman, with the craftsman's eye for the difference between shoddy and solid work: and here all the great mystics agree with [p.207] him.
"Whoso then will hear angel's song," says Hilton, "and not be deceived by feigning of himself nor by imagination, nor by the illusion of the enemy, him behoveth for to have perfect Charity, and that is when all vain love and dread, vain joy and sorrow, is cast out of the heart, so that it love nothing but God, nor joyeth nor sorroweth nothing but in God, or for God. Whoso might by the grace of God go this way, he should not err." [43]
Amidst the confusions and disappointments of a knowledge and a prophecy that is "in part," the betrayals of an intellect struggling with something that it cannot grasp, the steady onward push of self-surrendered love "never faileth": and progress in it is the only trustworthy sign that man the spiritual creature is "growing straight." Even hope, the convinced and rapturous expectation of the Perfect, even the wide clear vision of faith, gives place to this living spirit of communion; this humble and glad self-mergence in the mighty stream of life. "Now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three, but the greatest of these is charity."
The "new creature," in virtue of his change of mind, is to find all things in God, and God in all things. He is there too, within that divine atmosphere — for him, the primal reality — and, sharing it, seeing all things transfused by it, must necessarily reflect and impart the celestial sunshine which he has received.
Paul put this truth in the forefront of his teaching. From him it has descended through the lives and works of the great mystics; which do but gloss this one declaration of the mighty genius who claimed — not without reason — participation in "the mind of Christ." To all of them the difficult way of their growth is a discipline of love; an education and advancement in it. Love, says Augustine, is the weight of the soul, which draws it to its home in God. The angels who are nearest [p.208] to the One, says Dionysius the Areopagite, are the seraphim, aflame with perfect love. By the four degrees of Burning Charity, says Richard of St. Victor, the soul moves to that Spiritual Marriage in which it gives new life to the world. For St. Bernard, and for the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, the love of God, truly comprehended, embraces the whole activity of man. By the seven steps of ever-growing love, says Ruysbroeck, we mount up to that consummation in which we are burned up like live coals on the hearth of His infinite charity — that Fire of Love which transmuted Richard Rolle to the state of "heavenly song." For Julian of Norwich the revelation of Reality was a "revelation of divine love": for St. John of the Cross, a rapt absorption in love is the goal of spirit's transcendence.[44] "Oh, dear Charity !" says Rolle, "he that on earth, whatever else he may have, has thee not, is made naught. He truly that in thee is busy, to joy is soon lift above earthly things. Thou enterest boldly the bed-chamber of the Everlasting King; thou only art not ashamed to take of Christ. . . . Oh, merry love, strong, ravishing, burning, wilful, stalwart, unquenched, that brings all my soul to thy service and suffers it to think of nothing but thee. Thou claimest for thyself all our life, all that we savour, all that we are." [45]
Not only those who "call themselves Christians," but others who have submitted to this growth, from Plotinus the metaphysician to Blake the artist-seer, share Paul's conviction that Love is enough.[46] "Every moment the voice of Love is coming from left and right," says the Sufi. "'Tis Love and the lover that live to all eternity; set not thy heart on aught else: 'tis only borowed."[47] "They come with their laws and their codes to bind me fast," says the Indian mystic, echoing the Pauline vindication of the supremacy of "faith" over "works," "but I evade them ever; for I am only waiting for Love to give myself up at last into his hands." [48]
All these have felt life's new direction and responded to it; and like Paul, who received that new dower of vitality under forms of intensest radiance, have learned to pass it on to the world which "earnestly expects" its manifestation, as the Love which seeketh not its own.
Notes
1. Eph. iv. 6; Acts xvii. 28.
2. I Corin. xv. 28.
3. Revelations of Divine Love, cap. 6.
4. The Cities of St Paul, p. 12.
5. Gal. v. 16 and vi. 8; I Corin. ii. 14, 15 and xv. 46-49; Rom. viii. 4-9.
6. Eph. iv. 18.
7. Rom. viii.4.
8. The Rod, the Root and the Flower, "Magna Moralia," XXII
9. I Corin. i. 18 (R.V.)
10. I Corin. xv. 10
11. Bergson, L'Evolution creatrice, p. 292
12. Rom. vi. 23
13. Rom. viii. 6 (R.V.)
14. I Corin. i. 18 (R.V.)
15. Rom. viii. 29 (R.V.)
16. I Corin. xv. 45.
17. Rom viii. 19-21
18. Bergson, op cit, p. 293
19. Phil. ii. 13; I Corin, xv. 10.
20. Rom. viii.2
21. Gal. vi. 7
22. Rom. v. 2.
23. "Acquittal" or "release" is perhaps the most exact translation of the Pauline "justification". For an excellent discussion of the whole subject cf Deissmann, St Paul, p. 145.
24. Rom. viii. 19 (Weymouth)
25. I Corin. xiii. 10 "But when," says Theologica Germanica, "doth it come? I say, when as much as may be it is known, felt and tasted of the soul" (Theo. Ger., cap. 1).
26. Cf I Corin. xv. 20 - 28, where current Messianic ideas concerning the setting up of the Kingdom are incorporated into the Christian hope.
27. I Corin. xvi. 22.
28. I Thess. iv. 16.
29. Col. i. 27.
30. Rom xvi. 25, 26 (R.V.)
31. I Corin. iv. 1.
32. Eph. iii. 8
33. The Pauline "Mystery" has been studied in detail by Prof P Gardner in The Religious Experience of St Paul; though with more attention to its Hellenistic than to its mystical aspects.
34. i Cor. ii. 1,7-12, 14-I6 (R.V.). Swete (The Holy Spirit in the New Testament, p.179) reads, "The psychic man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him and he cannot take cognisance of them, because they are scrutinised by spiritual methods. But the spiritual man, whilst he scrutinises everything, is himself scrutinised by none " — a translation which has the advantage of elucidating the mystical character of the passage.
35. Eternal Life, p. 69
36. Rom. viii. 12- 14 and other passages. Cf P. Gardner, op. cit. p.136
37. Bergson, L'Evolution creatrice, p.294
38. I Corin. iii. 22
39. I Corin. xv. 46-49
40. I Corin. iii. 6
41. I Corin. xiii
42. 1 Corin. viii. 1
43. Walter Hilton, The Song of Angels. Printed in The Cell of Self Knowledge, edited by E Gardner, p. 68
44. Canticle. Stanza 26.
45. Richard Rolle, The Mending of Life, cap. 11.
46. Cf supra, Cap. 1 § I
47. Jelalu d'Din, Divan (Nicholson's Translation pp. 33, 151)
48. Rabindra Nath Tagore, Gitanjali, 17
