Section 1: A Gospel of Experience
p.213] The new kind of life, new form of consciousness, which blazed into perfect expression in Jesus of Nazareth, and found another thoroughfare in Paul, can still be studied in both these great examples under the all-revealing circumstances of growth. There we see it germinate and develop.
Differing enormously in power, in circumstances and temperament, each of these shows to us as in a mirror a steady process of organic change taking place; a steady approximation of the human consciousness to perfect union with Spiritual Reality.
Jesus of Nazareth, from the first uniquely aware of huge changes and ascents now begun for the race, and of His own great part in them, objectivised some at least of these changes as external and catastrophic transformations about to take place in the world of things. In the course of His passionate efforts to make plain his unequalled intuition of the External Order, He poured the new wine of perfect experience of God into the old bottles of Jewish Apocalyptic.
Paul, His direct descendant — inheritor, too, of those current apocalyptic and eschatological ideas , the feverish expectations of the time — came before his earthly life was ended to another reading of this new movement of life. He saw it at last, not as a passionate river rushing quickly to the sea; but as a steady, growing, branching stream that should water and fertilise all the earth.
The Christian missionary became for Paul not a herald of the Last Things, but an initiator into the Mystic Way, the parent of a new life. His churches were his spiritual family, for which he "travailed in birth" ; that they might be reborn, as he hoped, into the Kingdom [p.214] of Reality. He is the typical Christian mystic of the second generation, and performed the necessary function of "spreading the news" scattering the seed, that it might reach those capable of receiving it.
[Implication: Not all are capable of receiving it. Question: What makes the difference? DCW]
Plainly, even from the days of Jesus, that seed had most often fallen on sterile ground. Among the first disciples, only a "little flock" were found able to inherit the mystical "Kingdom": and those were held within its atmosphere rather by the superabundant vitality of their Master, the infection of His transcendental consciousness, than by their own inherent power of response to those high rhythms of Reality which he declared to them.
Paul's wide net swept into his churches, along with those rare selves truly and temperamentally "called to be saints", a host of spiritual parasites, hearers and not doers of the "Word"; who lacked the vitality, the peculiar psychic organisation, the power of receptivity, which is necessary to mystical growth.
The energising Spirit of Life cannot be communicated in a sermon. Hence the greater number of Paul's converts quickly degenerated into mere formal believers, once the stimulus of his great personality was withdrawn.[1]
Thus the distinction between the "inner and outer church" so [p.215] strongly marked in the Synoptic gospels, was, if not acknowledged, at once established; the outer church of new creed, the inner church of new creatures, of organic change and growth.
We who are studying, not a "system" but a new movement of the free spirit of life towards the transcendence that it seeks, must — even in the first eager period of its emergence — sharply distinguish "Christian Mysticism", the transcendental yet biological secret of Jesus, from the compromise which was called "Christianity".
[In the context in which she wrote this, it must have been explosive. One wonders that she remained persona grata sufficiently to be invited to assist with the training of Anglican clergymen. DCW]
Within the formal system, the quickly deposited outer shell, that "New Race", the inheritors of the secret, never failed: though often unnoticed and always misunderstood.. The thoroughfare of the spiritual life was tortuous and narrow, but the living water never ceased to flow. No doubt many, perhaps most of those through whom it passed, are unknown to us. But enough are known, through their lives and their writings, to enable us to establish the continuance and ever richer, deeper growth of the mystical life-force at work within humanity: the development of the new "seed" within the world, destined to serve the interests of the Divine Plan.
The ideal of "New Life" was always present, always ready to break out wherever it could cut its way. The Christian prophet had it in his blood: and the prophetic type dominated the early Church. Even for the violently eschatological imagination of the writer who composed the Christian parts of the "Apocalypse of St John", the real Parousia, the consummation towards which all must tend, is the free appropriation of more abundant life.
To this the Spiritual Order and its "bride", the new Christian society, is calling the race. "And he showed me a river of water of life, proceeding out of the throne of God. ... And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And he that heareth, let him say Come. and he that is athirst, let him come: he that will, let him take of the water of life freely."[2]
[p.216] This, says Harnack most justly, and not the warlike operations of the Conquering Messiah, is the "last word" of Christian apocalyptic.[3]
Plainly, from the time of St Paul's last writings the power of that apocalyptic, its credibility as a definite forecast of immediate events, was waning. It began to be clear as the years passed that the "kingdom" was not destined to come with the swiftness and violence which formed part of the old crude Messianic dream.
If the "water of life" were free indeed, it must be outpouredin its fulness in the Here-and-Now. Not some crisis in the external world, but a readjustment within the individual consciousness, must forge the missing link between Appearance and Reality [Is this a nod in the direction of maya? If not, what? DCW]
In the letters of his last period, Paul taught this as well as he could. Thirty or forty years after his death, when the Synoptic gospels, with their emphasis on the local and eschatological side of the vision of Jesus, were already in circulation, a book appeared in which the deepest and richest experience of the Christian mystic found once for all their supreme literary expression, and established themselves as the central facts of the Christian "revelation". That book is the Fourth Gospel of the New Testament canon, traditionally attributed to the Apostle St John; and depending from it, and completing its doctrine, is the short letter called his "First Epistle".
This is no place for a discussion of the so-called "Johannine Problem"; that is to say, the question of the authorship and provenance of these powerful and mysterious writings. It is unlikely that this problem will ever be solved.
But there is a consensus of opinion amongst the best critics to the effect that the Fourth Evangelist must have been a Christian Jew familiar with Alexandrian religious idealism:[4] that he probably lived at Ephesus in [p217] the first years of the second century: and that his gospel is in no sense a historical, but a poetic and devotional book.
It, more than any other writing in the New Testament, bears the mark of prophetic inspiration: but the many proved inaccuracies and impossibilities of its narratives, the wide difference between its portrait of Jesus and that given by the Synoptics, the curiously unearthly atmosphere which pervades it, all tend to contradict the tradition that it was composed by a personal friend of the historic Christ. [5]
The First Epistle, if not written by the author of the Gospel, was certainly the work of a pupil saturated with with his spirit. It may then be regarded as immediately dependent on his teaching, and ultimately upon that inner experience whence that teaching arose.
The fine crop of contradictory theories as to the meaning and aim of this most difficult and fascinating of books tend not to enlightenment, but to mutual destruction.[6] [p.218] From their wreck and from an unprejudiced examination of the book itself, one fact seems to emerge: that its power, that its daring originality, and its unique characteristics can only be explained as the fruit of a profound inward experience, an experience so intense as to seem to the self who had it far more true than any merely external event.[What a politician this woman might have made. DCW]
It is not a tract, it is not a biography, it is not a controversial document. Its author, though his mind was steeped in the theology of St Paul, and perfectly familiar with the Jewish-Hellenistic philosophy popular in his day, was primarily a mystic seer. Incident is only valuable to him in so far as it is the expression of supersensual truth; the past is sacred to him because it foreshadows the present fruition of Reality.
That which he gives to us is no historical "tradition" — Johannine or other — though sometimes he expresses it by means of traditional forms. It is the record of a new kind of life breaking out into the empirical order: a life which this Evangelist knows because he has received it in its fulness, he has been "born again" to a new growth and a new world. In him we see the reaction of a new kind of temperament to the same stimulus which put St Paul on the Mystic Way; the first appearance of certain phenomena destined to be common in the mystical experience of Christendom, but characteristic of the kind of response made by artistic and prophetic natures, rather that those of the active and volitional type, to the impact of spiritual reality.
Paul showed, step by step, almost year by year, the growth that was taking place within his consciousness: the inpouring dower of new vitality received by him, the building of that "top storey" of human personality which touches the transcendant sphere. His letters are revelations [p.219] of interior activity; the difficult cutting of fresh paths, the ecstatic contemplation of fresh landscapes, the breakdown of the old order, the establishment of the new.
In the Fourth Gospel, we see nothing of this "process of becoming", though the life presented is the Pauline life mirrored in a different temperament. [7] This book is written from the standpoint of one in whom the "great work" of readjustment is already accomplished; who has "entered the Kingdom" and knows himself the member of a new order, inhabited by a new life. "Of his fulness we have all received," says John [8] addressing his ideal audience of fellow-mystics: of those who have been reborn "of the Spirit" into the Kingdom of Reality.
Here we have, in fact, not the historical but the eternal "Gospel", seen in vision by a great spiritual genius who had realised in its deepest completest sense — as the Synoptics had not — the meaning of Christianity. This meaning, this secret, he knew — as men know the secrets of love — with a completeness far beyond the fragmentary resources of speech. Only by oblique suggestion could he convey them to us: by evoking in us something of his own intuitive power.
In the fact that he is able to do this, in a degree unique in literature, lies the source of his immortal power and charm. Behind all his artistic imagery, all his prophetic rhapsodies, as behind the music of the poet, we can discern the "pressure of the spirit"; the deeper mind struggling to give utterance to its perception of Reality.
His work is not allegorical, as some critics have maintained, but sacramental: raising to its highest power an essential character of all great art. The difficulty of criticising such a document is the old difficulty which is inherent in all mystical literature. The sword of John's spirit is cutting through experience in a new direction; and he is trying to describe some of its operations, the new tracts of reality it lays bare, in the language which we have invented to serve the ordinary jog-trot piety of the normal man.
Worse, since he wrote, generations of sentimentalists have degraded his vivid phrases to the purposes of their own religion. Hence few of us can now come near any accurate conception of the nature of John's passionate communion with that Reality which he called the "Logos-Christ", or guess the richness and colour of the universe in which such a consciousness as his is immersed.
Every phrase that he uses, every scene which he chooses to represent, is to him a little human symbol which conveys the substance of some divine and eternal fact. Men, fighting over the tendency or the historicity of the incidents in this book, have but fought over the form of the chalice, the composition of the bread, whereby John was concerned to communicate the Body and Vitality of his God.
This he could do only in so far as he had himself partaken of it: as the priest at the Christian altar must first be fed before he gives the Divine Mysteries to other men. Hence, as behind the little vivid tract of consciousness there lies the immense region of our psychic life, so behind the words of the Fourth Gospel, there seems to lie one of the most complete of all experiences of the limitless "Kingdom of Heaven": an experience not only of new birth, of struggle, of attainment, but of that high, permanent life of union, that impassioned and loving self-mergence in the universal life, in which the "new creature" feels himself to be a "branch" of the great tree which Life is building up: humble, yet exalted; though finite, a partaker of the Infinite; energised, not by his own separate strength but by the sap that flows through the Whole.
Notes
1. This is a situation constantly repeated in the history of Christian mysticism. The great mystic, always an imparter of more abundant life, is generally surrounded by a group of spiritual chldren in whom he seems able to evoke something of his own peculiar consciousness of Reality.. We see this in St Francis, St Catherine of Siena, the Friends of God, St Ignatius, St Teresa. But when his immediate influence is removed, this consciousness soon lapses; except in the case of those who themselves possess the "genius for transcendence" and are wiling to endure the pain and stress incidental to its development. thus the early Fransiscans, differing widely in temperament, were "fragrant" one and all, with the exquisite spirituality of Francis, so long as they remained within the field of his personal power; but quickly lost it after his death. Thus, in Teresa's lifetime, her convents were full of true contemplatives, but soon degenerated to the common level of contemporary religion after their founders death. Yet each great wave, though it ebbs, has carried the mounting flood a little higher up the shore.
2. Rev. xxii. 1, 17 (R.V.).
3. Harnack, Militia Christi, p. 11
4. The relations of the Fourth Evangelist to Alexandrian thought have been worked out in great deal by Holtzmann, Neutestamentliche Theologie, Vol II, pp. 409 et seq.
5.Cf H.J. Holtzmann, Neutestamentliche Theologie, 2nd ed., Vol II.; A. Julicher, Introduction to the New Testament; A. Loisy, Le Quatrieme Evangile (Paris 1903); J. Reville, Le Quatrieme Evangile (Paris 1901); F.C. Burkitt, The Gospel History and Its Transmission (Edinburgh 1906); Baron von Hugel in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol XV. pp 452 - 457, and the same writer's Eternal Life (1912) pp. 73 - 80. The best defence of the traditional view is Dr Drummond's brilliant Enquiry into the Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel (London 1903); but even here, though the Apostolic authorship of the book is considered probable, the unhistoric nature of the narrative and discourses is taken for granted, a paradox not easy to accept.
It must be remembered that the attribution of this book to the apostle St John involves not merely his removal from Jerusalem to Ephesus in extreme old age, which is possible, though unauthenticated; but a complete and incredible change of mind at the same advanced period of life, from those narrow Jewish Christian ideas and crude apocalyptic hopes which are attributed to him in the Synoptics and in Acts, to that Pauline universalism which he had always opposed. For John the Apostle, as Paul and the writer of Acts knew him, the Christian Church was a Jewish sect expecting the imminent return of the national Messiah. For the author of the Fourth Gospel it was a community of "twice-born" souls, regenerated by the touch of a metaphysical Reality.
[A little to one side: Dr Grace Brame quotes a senior Anglican cleric, A.M. (Donald) Allchin, as late as 1985, saying of EU: "She brought about an amazing change in the position of women in the Church, and furthermore, she was sane and balanced." I find this an extraordinary comment, despite its obvious admiration. I mean to say one wouldn't normally expect this kind of thing from a woman, really, would you?
If Allchin in Politically Correct 1985 is any type of example of the "old men" EU found herself dealing with in the Anglican Church seventy years before, it is no wonder she is somewhat sceptical of the possibility that the Apostle John could change very much in old age. DCW]
6. For instance, Weizacker thinks that it was written to uphold the authority of St John as against that of St Peter; Wernle, as a "tract for the times" against Gnosticism; Julicher as a Christian apologetic against the anti-Christian propaganda of the Jews; Pfleiderer, to mediate between Catholic and Gnostic theology; Brandt, to oppose the narrow ecclesiasticism of the Petrine Church; Abbott, as a deliberate attempt at "indirect biography."
7. "The greatest monument of most genuine appreciation of St Paul's mysticism," says Deissmann, most justly, "is the Gospel and the Epistles of John" (St Paul, p. 135)
8. I retain for convenience' sake this traditional name, which may well be that of the original author. "John" was a common name in Christian circles. [While it seems correct to me to doubt that the Fourth Gospel was authored by St John the Apostle, it seems strange to me that someone as obviously steeped in the mystic experience, as he was, and called to write this gospel, was not hugely evident and clearly identified acting elsewhere in the history of the early church, as one presumes that he must have held a considerable degree of seniority and influence. DCW]
