p.221] The theme of John's book, then, is the real meaning of the career of Jesus of Nazareth, as felt and known by a soul in closest sympathy with Him.
He saw in that career the clear emergence in the Here-and-Now of the Divine Nature; the sudden and perfect self-expression of the creative Spirit of God, in and through humanity; the path of intensest life mapped out for the race.
For Mark, Jesus represented a national fulfilment; for John the triumph of an eternal principle, latent in the Universe, and now manifested before the eyes of men. As he puts it in the language of the current religious idealism — language which his intellectual equals were bound to understand — "The Logos was made flesh and dwelt among us."
The fluid and poetic notion of the "logos" which he shared with contemporary philosophy, enabled John to present it in his gospel as something which is at once "cosmic" and "personal". For him it is the Creative Principle itself: "all things were made by Him and without Him was not anything made that was made." [1] Yet in the historic Christ this Spirit of Life is seen "in a point": as Julian of Norwich saw God. Hence the Johannine Logos meets the two great demands of the mystical consciousness: which must, as we have seen, find in its Deity both cerchio and imago, the infinite and the definite; an opportunity for intimate and loving communion, and for limitless outgoing expansion — complete self-loss in the All.
The Logos, which is in essence the energetic expression [p.222] of the Divine Nature, creative Spirit ever seeking to penetrate and mould the material world [enter Henri Bergson and vitalism. DCW] he describes as Light struggling with darkness, as the "Life of men" pouring itself out from the fountain of the Godhead like "living water"; as the Bread which feeds man, the Paraclete which perpetually helps and enlightens him, the Door through which finite returns to infinite; the living growing Vine, of which men are but the branches; and at the same time as the personal Son of God, the Saviour and Shepherd of Souls.
This richly-various manifestation of Eternal Reality, he says, broke out through mankind in its perfect and "saving" form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. There the divine energy found its perfect thoroughfare, and appeared "in the flesh". [2]
But the Logos-doctrine which John bequeathed to the Christian family is not, like that of Philo, philosophic and speculative. It has its origin in profound experience, rather than in dialectic: represents knowledge won in those sudden moments of lucidity which are the reward of the mystic's steadfast attention to God. [Small throwaways like this reflect to me my own experience of mystical intuitive revelation, and affirm the personal authority that EU draws on as well as recognises in others. DCW]
It has, then, the quality of a mystical, rather than a metaphysical diagram of Reality, comes to us highly charged with feeling, full of melody, radiant with colour and light. [p.223]
For John, as for Clement after him, the Logos is a principle of gladness, a "new song".[3] Hence, the heart of his mighty vision is the idea, not of impersonal Divine Energy, but of personal Divine Love, the eager, generous outflowing of the Spiritual Order towards man.
Paul knew that love, and responded to it. But John, pioneer of Christian contemplatives, was the first amongst men to display it in its full grandeur, as the very Name of God; the "word of power" operative in all things from the greatest to the least, linking the Transcendant Godhead with His creative spirit, creature with creator, and man with man. A century or more before Plotinus, he knew that only this ardent passion of like for like could lead man from the prison of illusion into all Truth, and "cause the lover to rest in the object of his love" [4]
"He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. Herein was the love of God manifested in us, that God hath sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we migt live through Him ... He that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him.... We love him because He first loved us."[5]
With this vision of all-penetrating love as the substance of Reality, the key to the spiritual world and man's relationship with it, John transmutes idealism into mysticism, and lays the foundations of Christian philosophy. Hardly a mystic who comes after him has escaped the influence of his mighty spirit: and Christendom as a whole, incapable of his deep intuitive communion with Reality, has lived for eighteen centiries on the vision which it inherited from this unknown seer.
He it was who bridged the dreadful gap between history and actuality: who wove together Paul's direct spiritual experience and the traditions of the life of Jesus, into a great poem at once truly human and truly divine. [Rhetoric beginning to emerge once more. DCW] [p.224]
As the Synoptics are the good news" of the new kind of life emerging on the historical plane, the Fourth Gospel is the good news of its eternal existence in God, and its continual emergence in the human soul. This idea of life controls the whole book: the new, vivid, indestructible "Eternal Life which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us" [6] — not merely hoped for as the result of some Parousia, but actually enjoyed by the members of the New Race. [7] As the primitive psalmist says in purely Johannine language, "The dwelling place of the Logos is man, and its truth is Love."[8]
This Life — the Divine elan vital — is an energetic spirit, thrusting itself to expression in and through the world. John has himself experienced it in the strange fresh dower of energy, the "more abundant life" invading the converted self and lifting it in its wholeness to fresh levels of insight and of creative power; a definite psychic fact for the primitive Christians, and called by them, the "reception of the Holy Spirit". "Ye have an anointing from the Holy One," he says to those for whom he writes. "Hereby know we that we abide in Him and He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit." [9]
His possession of this spirit, this grace which makes the soul aware of truth, is directly connected for John with its first and only perfect appearance in Jesus: whose actual career he sees as a brief supreme revelation of Reality and man's kinship to it, the "gift" of eternal life to the race. Hence, and because for the born mystic all outward events tend to become symbols without ceasing to be facts — seem to the contemplative mind to be charged with infinite significance — he finds in the historic tradition concerning Jesus the foreshadowing of all those things which he and all other initiates of Reality experience in their own persons as a result of setting in hand the mystical process of transcendance.
He reviews [p.225] the historical life, its fixed outlines and its legendary accretions, as it was known to Ephesian Christians at the end of the first century, not from the point of view of the historian concerned for outward truth , but from that of the mystic concerned for inward significance. "There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man coming into the world." [10] As he broods upon it, it shines ever brighter; and the biography of the Nazarene is transmuted into the eternal drama of God's wisdom and love.
Absolutely uncritical in his use of material, he is naturally attracted to those things through and by which he can communicate the living secret which he knows, "not by the flesh, but by the spirit." This does not mean that the events described by John are merely symbols. For us they are of varying degrees of credibility, but for him they were doubtless facts and symbols; as they became later for the patristic commentators. They had been the material of his meditation before they became the material of his gospel: and even those least practised in that difficult art know what treasure of significance and beauty the simplest image will yield up when subjected to this still and brooding attentiveness of mind.. Thus it is that whereas the comparitively impersonal narrative of the Synoptics has kept for us the priceless record of a real person who lives and grows within the world of time; here it is a being at once personal and metaphysical — mysterious and remote, yet intimate and dear — whom the genius of John puts before us. It is the fruit of his own vision and meditation, his own first hand experience of the divine which he pours into the evangelical mould.
The watchword of the Johannine Christ is "I am". He is static, because for the Johannine writer He belongs not to the past, but to the present; not to the swift world of Becoming, but to the timeless world of mystical [226] contemplation. In this sublime conception, for the first time in the history of religion, the two great aspects of spiritual Reality are merged in one; and the eternal, unchanging Source of light and life is seen to be the beloved companion of men's soul, the energetic spirit of ascending life, "loving His own to the end." and incarnate in the race.
The drama of the entry of this Logos from Eternity into Time, His fight with "darkness" — the oppositions of matter — and triumphant return to His natural habitation in God, whither He is to be followed by all who, having inherited His life, are in union with Him, constitutes therefore the "plot" of the Fourth Gospel.
[The notion of a "fight" with darkness is one that immediately for me flags necessary caution, unless by darkness is understood both good and evil, in other words, the dualistic "A-not A" mode of awareness. And even then, there appears to me to be no "fight" as such, if Underhill is correct in her assertion that there are some who are capable of mystic vision and others not. Where is the need for any kind of fight? DCW]
This subject is developed partly by means of episodes chosen from current biographies of Jesus, apparently as illustrative of different aspects of the main theme, and partly by the wonderful discourses which are the fruit and expression of John's ecstatic contemplation of God in Christ.
As with other mystics, his intuitive communication with the Spiritual Order, in itself "above all feeling and above all thought," had somehow to be interpreted to the surface-consciousness: and here we may take it as axiomatic, that, however great his inspiration, it would act through, not against, the normal process of our mental life.
[Here again is an area of agreement and difference between EU and myself. She acknowledges that the Spiritual Order is above feeling and thought, as I do, yet insists that it must be apprehended within the limits of these faculties, our "normal process" of mental life — or some natural growth or development of these. She either cannot accept that a faculty capable of apprehending spiritual information directly is also part of the human makeup, or at the very least, is not prepared to risk the credibility of her position by postulating such a faculty. DCW]
Only by means of image and symbol, by casting it into artistic shape, retranslating it into terms of central perception, can the contemplative reduce his apprehension of truth to a form with which his intellect is able to deal.
[This is analogous to saying that we must always view the physical world around us as two dimensional sketches and drawings, aided by such tricks as perspective etc, and that we have no faculty capable of perceiving three dimensionally. (Steiner deals at some length with the problem of how information obtained in the spiritual realm is rendered transportable to the realm of the everyday through what he terms the "draught of remembrance"). DCW]
Such a re-translation on the mystic's part is more often involuntary than voluntary. His creative powers seize on a new universe disclosed to them, and deal with it as well as they can; giving it back to him in the "voice" or the "vision", which seems to "come into the body by the windows of the wits" but has really been made at home.
Mystical literature abounds in examples of this proceeding [p.227]; of the infinitely various ways in which the human mind adapts the rough and ready machinery of sense to the purposes of its spiritual intuitions. In one case at least we see it at work in a form which is not without bearing on the problems which lie behind the Gospel of John. Julian of Norwich, more apt than many of the contemplatives at analysis of her own states, has told us that her revelations came to her in a three fold form: inwardly, as a vivid but ineffable apprehension of Divine Reality; outwardly as a concrete and detailed vision; and — linking together the image and the intuition — as a voice which answered her questions and declared to her in language at once homely and exalted the hidden mysteries of the Love of God.
In the language of later mysticism, Julian's revelation was received by her under the forms of Intellectual Vision, Corporeal Vision, and Distinct Interior Words.[11]"All this was showed me by three ways," she says: "that is to say, by bodily sight and by word formed in my understanding and by ghostly sight. But the ghostly sight I cannot nor may not show it, as openly nor as fully as I would."[12]
Here we have, described by a natural mystic, a simple woman unversed in religious psychology, the complex effort of human consciousness to lay hold of an experience which transcends the normal machinery of perception. The "ghostly sight", says Julian — the direct intuition of Reality — was ineffable, and thwarts all her decriptive efforts. She "cannot nor may not show it".
But that tendency to visualisation which plays so large a part in our mental life, and is specially powerful in minds of artistic or creative cast, here came into play; in spite of the fact that, in common with most real mystics, she had no desire for visionary experiences — "I desired never bodily sight, nor showing of God." — It put before [p.228] her eyes a vividly realistic picture of the Passsion of Christ: for Christians the ultimate symbol of love. "Suddenly I saw the red blood trickle down from under the garland hot and freshly and right plenteously, as it were in the time of His Passion."[13]
This external vision continued side by side with the "ghostly showing" or interior lucidity; and the triple experience was completed by a voice "formed" as she says, "in the understanding," which was yet accepted without question by Julian as the veritable voice of Christ. [14]
In the Fourth Gospel we seem to trace the artistic results of such a complex experience as this, taking place in a mind of great delicacy and power. Many of its peculiarities may well have arisen from the "visionary" and "auditive" form — the picture seen and the discourse heard — into which John's creative imagination crystallised those "imageless facts" of the spiritual universe which were apprehended by his deeper mind ...
[Note here again the refusal/reluctance to go beyond the mind, even the "deeper mind" as a vehicle for apprehension of spiritual information. DCW]
... giving human words to the voice of that Companion who "spoke without utterance" in his soul.
The sense of intimate communion with a Transcendant personality — usually identified with the exalted Christ — is one of the best attested phenomena of Christian mysticism. This vivid "consciousness of the Presence" exists as a rule quite independently of vision, save that intellectual vision which is only another name for intution itself: though it often finds expression in those "divine locutions" and dialogues between God and the soul, reported by Julian, Catherine of Siena, and many others, in which the contemplative — involuntarily translating his direct intuitions into symbolic speech — seems to hear with his inward ear [p.229] the very voice of the Beloved. [15]
"Often," says St Teresa, "when the soul least expects it, and is not even thinking of God, our Lord awakes it, swiftly as a comet or a thunderbolt. It hears no sound, but distinctly understands that its God calls it. ... On one side, the Beloved clearly shows the soul He is with it; on the other, He calls it." [16]
I believe that such an acute "sense of the Presence" is the fundamental fact for the writer of the Fourth Gospel: that upon it his whole superstructure of picture and poetry is built. It is not the memory of the disciple — even the beloved" disciple, whose reminiscences, if he be not a purely symbolic figure, may well have coloured the Ephesian traditions of Jesus death — but the vivid first-hand knowledge, the immoveable certitude of the mystic "in union" with the Object of his adoration, which supplies material for this unearthly picture of the earthly life of Jesus.
Such experiences of vivid personal communion with Transcendental Life, such first-fruits of a regenerate consciousness steadfastly focussed on Reality, had already been described by Paul; and are repeated again and again in the lives of later contemplatives, who declare to us — often, it is true, under symbols which are hard to understand — the responses made by the supernal order to the impassioned attentiveness of man. It is by the comparison and study of such examples that we shall best understand the spiritual adventures reported in the New Testament. [p.230]
Such a comparison suggests to us that we owe to these adventures the beautiful discourses of the Johannine Christ: discourses couched in that exalted and rhythmical language which is characteristic of all "automatic" activity, all involuntary or inspired weaving up of intuitions into words. Poles asunder from the directness and simplicity of the Synoptics, these musical and solemn phrases, this fluid symbolism, this oblique suggestive language — giving us, as St Teresa says, "in few words that which our minds could only express in many" [17] — alone suggests to us the the presence of prophetic or poetic inspiration of a high type.[18]
[Unfortunately, this particular style, or something remarkably close, is not all that difficult to re-create when channelling masterpieces of spiritual cliche from the leader of a of a visiting spacecraft from the planet Bonk, when it comes across as a kind of B-movie King James English. DCW]
These heavenly rhapsodies are not the fruits of any personal or traditional memory of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth: nor are they deliberately composed for purposes of edification. We hear in them the voice of an immediate transcendental Presence; addressing Itself, by means of a sensory automatism familiar to religious psychology, to the consciousness of a great mystic, member of a formed spiritual society, for whom utterances which would have been unintelligible to the followers of the Synoptic Jesus, present no difficulty.
"I am the Bread of Life... I am the Door... I and my Father are one" — these are statements which John's own high and intimate experience has proved to be true; and it is as immediate truth, not merely as poetry or history that he puts them before us. "No prophet," says Tyrell, "allows, or would feel that his utterances are merely poetical or allegorical; he feels that they are not less but more truly representative of reality, as representaive of a truer and deeper reality, than the prose language of historical narrative or philosophical affirmation.[19]" [p.231]
Not otherwise indeed can we reconcile the intense conviction of a first hand experience, "we speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen"[20], the sharp definition of each pictured scene, with reports of sayings which could have no meaning as addressed to the primitive group of apostles, but which presuppose the outward conditions and developed sacramental doctrines of the Church at the beginning of the second century: [Perceptive. DCW] the advanced mystical status of the mind which received them.
Thus, "Other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours": true enough of those who followed St Paul, not of those who preceded him. "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you" — incredible upon the lips of the human Jesus.
"If the world hate you, ye know that it hated Me before it hated you": a direct reference to the first persecutions of the Church. "I am in my Father and ye in Me and I in you": the deeply mystical formula of John's own experience and belief.[21]
Even Resch, who upholds the traditional authorship of the Fourth Gospel, is driven to the conclusion that it must have been written in a sort of ecstacy which caused the author to confuse his visions and his memories.[22]
Moreover, comparison with such known masterpieces of ecstatic composition as the Divine Dialogue of St Catherine of Siena, the Consolations of Angela of Fuligno, or the Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich establish the strong parallels which exist between the sublime discourses of the Johannine Christ and the "divine locutions" in which these and many other mystics heard with the inward ear the revelations which they attributed to the direct communications of that same enduring Presence.
These chapters have in a high degree [p.232] the three qualities which, according to St Teresa, mark the locutions which really "come from God", i.e., represent a genuine intuition of the Transcendant — the accent of power, the atmosphere of intense peace, the unforgettable character. [23]
Did the discourses of the Fourth Gospel come fresh into our hands without history, I cannot think that any religious psychologist would hesitate to put them amongst literature of this class. There we find the same air of authority, the same certitude that the words reported were spoken by a Presence at once intimate yet divine. All have to a marked degree that quality of timelessness, that sense of an Eternal Now, which is a peculiarity of the ecstatic consciousness.
In such experiences, the human spirit seems to be lifted up above the flux of becoming, and tastes the "eternal" aspect of the Divine Life in which it is immersed.
Here it is that we find repeated again and again the solemn I am of the Johannine Christ: the dramatic expression of the mystic's certainty. "Thou didst cry from afar," says Augustine. "I AM THAT I AM. And I heard as the heart heareth, and there was left no room for doubt." [24] "I am Fire, the Accepter of Sacrifice," said the same Presence to St Catherine of Siena.
"Our Lord Jesus oftentimes said," says Julian of Norwich, "I it am, I it am, I it am that is highest, I it am that thou lovest, I it am that thou enjoyest, I it am that thou servest, I it am that thou longest for, I it am that thou desirest, I it am that thou meanest, I it am that is all.." [25]
As Angela of Fuligno walks between the vineyards, "on the narrow road that leadeth upwards to Assisi, and is beyond Spello," it "said" to her — 'I am the Holy Spirit, who am come unto thee to bring thee such consolation as thou hast never before tasted ... I will bear thee company and speak with thee all the way; I will [p. 233] make no end to my speaking and thou will not be able to attend to any save unto Me. ... I have been with the apostles, who did behold me with their bodily eyes, but they did not feel Me as thou feelest Me'. ... And he did expound to me His Passion and the other things which He did for our sake; then he did add, 'Behold now if there be aught in Me save love.'" [26]
"Happy," says Hilton of such experiences as these, "is that soul which is ever fed with feeling of love in His presence ... how that presence is felt may better be known by experience than by any writing, for it is the life and love, the might and the light of a chosen soul."[27]
The rationalist will naturally attribute all these statements to the direct operation of those heavenly twins, Hysteria and Hallucination. But even so, they are reports of veritable and normal occurrences within the mystical field of consciousness; and must therefore be taken into account in the effort to understand the origin and meaning of the literature by which that consciousness seeks to communicate to us its intuitions of Reality.
Moreover, for those who profess a belief in the immortality of the soul, the idea that an influence emanating from the exalted and discarnate spirit of Jesus of Nazareth might be experienced by those — and perhaps only those — who shared in some degree in His transcendental consciousness and had entered into the Kingdom of new life, does not seem outside the bounds of the reasonable.
[Hmmm. There also needs to be a fairly well elaborated spiritual landscape to accommodate, provide a context for, such wanderings. DCW]
Nor on the other hand is it unnatural that those deep intuitions of an Infinite Life and Love companioning and upholding the finite human creature, which are a constant feature of the mystical vision of God, [p.234] should be objectivised by the Christian as due to the abiding companionship of the "author and finisher of his faith".
John's bold identification of the historic Jesus with the metaphysical Logos or self-expression of Deity, made this divine-human concept possible to all later contemplatives. Hence students of Christian mysticism are faced by the fact that nearly all the great Christian mystics claim to have experienced such personal and intimate communications from the spiritual order; and that most of them, from St Paul downwards, somehow identify that Transcendant Personality of whom they are directly conscious with the "exalted Christ".
[My personal experience differs somewhat: I have no experience of the personality of Christ as such, but rather a sense of the surrounding presence of God, principally, but not exclusively, when I am working with a client in pain.DCW]
It is this fact which makes Christian mysticism so human and so complete: the abstract and static contemplation of the Godhead as Eternal rest, to which mystics of every creed naturally tend, being balanced, enriched, and brought back into immediate relationship with life and growth, by that sense of a personal presence for which the doctrine of the Incarnation allows them to find a place.
It is this "sense of the Presence" which is regnant in the Fourth Gospel, as it is in the later Epistles of St Paul. But whilst it seems to have induced in St Paul a profound indifference to the historical life of the human Jesus — which formed for that great mystic only one short episode in the intensely actual and eternal life of the "spiritual" Christ — it induced in the more Hellenistic and philosophical mind of John a conviction that somehow the human and the supernal life must be one.
So he projected the Divine Companion whom he knew, in common with all other contemplatives, by direct experience, onto the temporal background of the historic life: he selected from the huge and quickly-growing Christian legend, those events which seemed to him like the types, the dramatic representations of the great wonders and changes which had been wrought within his soul. For him all was fused together in one poignant and dramatic vision of new life. [p.235]
Now as the discourses in which the Divine Nature discloses itself in relation to man seem to reflect back to "auditive" experiences on the part of the Evangelist; so these incidents — so sharp and realistic in their detail, yet so transfigured by the writers peculiar point of view — suggest to us that another form of automatic activity had its part in the composition of his gospel.
As we read them, we are reminded again and again of those visionary scenes, formed from traditional or historic material , but enriched by the creative imagination, the deep intuition of the seer, in which the fruit of the mystics meditation takes an artistic or dramatic instead of a rhetorical form.
The lives of the later mystics show to us the astonishing air of realism, the bewildering intermixture of history with dream, which may be achieved in visionary experience of this kind; and which can hardly be understood save by those who realise the creative power of the mystical imagination, the solidarity which exists for the mystics consciousness between his intensely actual present and the historical past of his faith.
In his meditations he really lives again through the scenes which history has reported to him: since they are ever present realities in that Mind of God to which his mind aspires. He has a personal interest in doing this, in learning as it were the curve of the life of Christ; for vita tua, via nostra is his motto — "he that saith he abideth in Him ought himself also so to walk as He walked." [28]
Further, his vivid sense of actuality, the artistic powers which are part of his psychic constitution, help to build up and elaborate the picture of the events upon which he broods. He sees this picture, in that strong light and with that sharp definition which is peculiar to visionary states. He has not produced it by any voluntary process: it surges up from his deeper mind, as do the concepts of the artist, invading that field of consciousness which his state of meditation has kept in a mood of tense yet [p.236] passive receptivity.
So real it is to him, so authoritative that the transition is easy from "thus it must have been" to "thus it was".
Those critics who claim that the homely and realistic details in the incidents reported by John are proof of their historical character, will find it hard to defend their position in the face of the many visions of a similar kind reported by the Christian visionaries and saints. There we find repeated the peculiar Johannine fusion of poetry and actuality: the minute and homely detail, and the sense of eternal significance. [29]
This proposition might be illustrated from many sources. From St Bernard, who received in vision and audition the Virgin's own account of her life: from Angela of Fuligno and Julian of Norwich, spectators of the Passion of Christ: from St Teresa who saw him "as He was on the morning of the Resurrection". In all these cases, and probably that of the Fourth Evangelist also, deep meditation on the life of Christ or of Mary seems to have passed over into visualisation so vivid as to impose itself on the mystics mind as a veritable "revelation from God" rather than a pictured dream.
The narrative parts of the little book called the Meditations of St Bonaventura, which so strongly influenced the poetry and art of the later Middle Ages, may well have originated in experiences of this kind: so sharp is the author's visualisation of the scenes that he describes. I choose, however, instead of these well-known examples, the astonishing and well-attested visions of the poor German nun Anne-Catherine Emmerich, who died in 1824. [30]
This woman, whose literary knowledge of Christianity [p.237] was confined to the liturgic gospels, the Church catechism, the imagery of current books of devotion and the legendary history of the Madonna and Christ, exhibited in profusion all the physical and psychical peculiarities of a mystic of the visionary and ecstatic type. During the last years of her life her automatic — particularly her visionary — powers became so highly developed that she would pass involunatrily from meditation on any incident in the life of Christ or the Blessed Virgin to a state of intense dramatic vision, in which she saw the incident which she had placed before her mind re-enacted with every circumstance of realism, and with the addition of countless vivid details unknown either to the gospels or to the legends of the Virgin and the Christ.
The impression given, as we read the reports of these experiences, is that they are the first hand accounts of a spectator, possessed of abnormal powers of observation, who was actually present at the event which she relates. the dress of each personage, the movement of the crowds, the landscape, the state of the weather, innumerable little human details — only significant because they seem so real — are incorporated into the picture that she describes, side by side with ideal and mystical elements.
She sees the Virgin arriving at Bethlehem, and stopping to rearrange her dress as she alights from the ass: Joseph running his eye down the genealogical table exhibited at the census, that he may find his family and tribe on them, and then noticing for the first time that Mary is of the house of David. She goes with the Magi on their pilgrimage: "the camels moving very quietly, with long strides, and placing their feet so carefully that one would think that they were trying to avoid crushing something." She sees Joseph busy preparing the stable at Bethlehem for his distinguished guests; and the gift of fresh roses which St Anne sends to her [p.238] daughter — "not all the same colour: some pale, the colour of flesh, some yellow and some white."[31]
She watches St Anne, the Virgin, and Mary Cleophas playing with the Holy Child — "I said to myself as I watched them," says Anne-Catherine simply, "Why, women with children are always the same.!"
Sometimes this sense of actuality reaches an extraordinarily high pitch. "The night had been extremely cold," she says in her narrative of the trial of Jesus, "and the morning was dark and cloudy. A little hail had fallen, which surprised everyone, but towards twelve o'clock the day became brighter ... and when Jesus after the scourging fell at the foot of the pillar, I saw Claudia Proclus send to the Mother of God a bundle of linen. I do not know whether she thought that Jesus would be acquitted, and would therefore give His mother something to bind up His wounds, or whether this compassionate pagan had a presentiment of that which the blessed Virgin would do with her gift." [32]
Well may Anne Catherine's biographer say that "her descriptions are like a photograph of the mysteries of salvation." Had she been that which the world calls a poet or an artist — had she given these same visions rhythmic or plastic form — the high quality of her imaginative powers would have received general recognition. The point of interest for us — and the point which may possibly throw light on the composition of older and more sacred literature — is just this dramatic quality of her creative genius: this profound sense of actuality.
She saw the things which she set down: saw them with a precision and a vividness which no memory of real events could come near. This is true, not only of those scenes for which Scripture, human life or religious pictures might — and probably did — provide much of the raw material: but also of those which seem to originate in an [p.239] act of pure creation, such as her vision of the Nativity of Christ.
"I saw the light which surrounded Mary become ever more dazzling: the radiance of the lamps ligted by Joseph was eclipsed. And when midnight was nearly come the Most Holy Virgin entered into ecstacy and I saw her raised up above the earth. Her hands were crossed upon her breast, her robe floated about her in billowy folds; the splendour which surrounded her grew without ceasing. the vault, the walls and the floor of the grotto, as if vivified by the divine light, seemed themselves to feel joy.. But soon the vault disappeared from my sight: a torrent of light which grew in splendour spread from Mary to the heights of heaven. In the midst of a wonderful movement of celestial glories, I saw the choirs of angels descending, and taking as they drew near ever greater distinctness of form. The Holy Virgin, lifted up in the air in her ecstacy, looked down upon her God, adoring Him of Whom she had become the Mother, and Who, under the aspect of a fragile, newborn babe, was lying upon the earth before her." [33]
"And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe." [34] These words in which the Fourth Evangelist endorses his sublime vision of Life and Purification flowing from the heart of the crucified Christ, this woman might have taken, with no sense of incongruity, on her lips. Though he was the greatest of Christian seers, and she but a humble and obscure visionary,lacking his philosophic insight, his high poetic genius, his wide imaginative grasp, they speak the same language for they are of the same race.
[ I am fascinated by this concept of mystics as a separate race from the rest of humanity, as a distinctly different biological type, which EU advances throughout her work . DCW]
The Fourth Gospel, then, when it is compared with the writings of other mystics, discloses itself as a profoundly subjective book, which tells us far more of the direct experiences and deep religious passions of its writer than it does of the history of Jesus, or even of the position of the [p.240] second century Church. John, poet, prophet, artist, but above all mystic and lover, here gives us the substance of his ecstatic communion with the Divine Life: his real, yet romantic, vision of the Man who was — is — the veritable expression of that Divine Life thrust into the temporal world.
For his ardent and synthetic vision, there was no sharp line of cleavage between the inward miracle which he had experienced and attributed to the touchof the exalted Christ, and the wonderful stories of new life flowing from the same contact, which were already fixed in the Christian tradition.
He could not but accept the fact of a transmutation, which he had known in intensest form in his own person; the miracle of the "best wine" in the end ministered to him by the divine and all-enriching touch upon the common things of sense. He knew it all: the mysterious power given to his paralysed nature, the illumination poured upon one blind from birth, the new life conferred on one long buried in the sepulchre of sense.
He clothed with lovely and suggestive language, and transferred to this strange epic of the soul the heavenly declarations which he had heard with his inward ear, in those hours of deep absorption, of profound attention, to Reality, when he knew of a Divine Presence, a brooding personal love, that was to him Food and Light, Way, Truth, and Life — Christ, Paraclete, and Logos — a Door by which he had entered on the fruition of Eternity, a Shepherd in whose care he was safe.
The Fourth Gospel, says Loisy, "is above all a personal work, which bears from one end to the other the mark of a powerful genius who conceived it ... all the materials which the author has used have passed through the crucible of his powerful intellect and his mystical soul; and they have come forth from it metamorphosed, intimately penetrated and fused together, by the idea of the eternal Christ, the divine source of light and life." [35]
Notes
1. John i. 3
2. This multiple view of the Logos is found in Philo, and was common in and before his day. The Rev C. Martindale S.J. (in The Month, Jan and Feb, 1912) has collected a number of examples showing how fluid was the notion that lay behind this term. Zeus, Pan, Heracles, "the incarnation of effort", Hermes, "the messenger of God to man", were all, at one time or another regarded as personifications of the Logos. For Philo, the Logos is manifested in the flesh in Moses and Elijah. He is also Truth, Conscience, the Inspirer of all Good, the heavenly Food and Drink, the Initiator into the higher life, the Pneuma, or Divine Spirit. More, the personal Shepherd of Souls, and the Firstborn of the Sons of God (cf Reville, Le Quatrieme Evangile, p.92, where all the references are given). For Plutarch, who was probably contemporary with the Fourth Evangelist, God gives matter life and meaning by impressing it with his own Logos. (Martindale, op cit, p. 26) Thus John found ready to hand a mass of poetic symbolism which he "baptised into Christ" and used almost without alteration as a medium wherewith to tell his message to the world.
3. Clement of Alexandria, Cohort. I
4. Ennead, VI. 9. Vide supra, Cap. I. § II
5. I John iv. 8, 9, 16, 19 (R.V.).
6. I John i. 2.
7. Cf. Baron von Hugel, Eternal Life, p.75
8. Odes of Solomon, XII
9. I John ii. 20. and iv. 13. (R.V.).
10. I John i. 9 (R.V.).
11. For a full and careful study of all these automatisms, see St John of the Cross, Subida del Monte Carmelo, Lib II. cap. 19 - 31
12. Revelations of Divine Love, cap. 8.
13. ibid., caps. 3 and 4
14. "Then said our good Lord Jesus Christ: 'Art thou well pleased that I suffered for thee?' I said,'Yea good Lord, I thank Thee; yea good Lord, blessed mayest Thou be.' Then said Jesus, our kind Lord: If thou art pleasd, I am pleased: it is a joy, a bliss, an endless satisfying to Me that ever suffered I passion for thee; and if I might suffer more, I would suffer more.'" (Ibid., cap. 22)
15. The sense of intimate communion with Divine Personality is not of course peculiar to Christianity, though there seen in all its beauty and power. A personal object of devotion, linking human with divine Reality seems to be a permanent need of the religious consciousness. Hence in India, the worship of Krishna, in Japan, that of Amida, reproduce many of the characteristics of the romantic and personal adoration and love felt by Christian mystics for the deified Jesus: whilst the Sufis have been driven by the same temperamental necessity to apply the language of human passion to their communion with the Absolute God of Islam.
16. El Castillo Interior, Morados Sextas, ii.
17. El Castillo Interior, Morados Sextas, iii.
18. Loisy (Le Quatrieme Evangile, p. 762) and others have remarked on their close resemblance to Jewish prophecy; and their chief peculiarities are found again in the "divine dialogues" of the mediaeval mystics. For the rhythmic character of mystical locutions see von Hugel, The Mystical Element in Religion, Vol. I. p. 189.
19. Tyrrell, Through Scythia and Charybdis, p. 230.
20. John iii. 11.
21. John iv. 38, vi. 53, xv. 18, xiv. 20
22. Ausserkanonische Paralleltexte zu d. Evangelien: IV. Parraleltexte zu Johannes. 1896.
23. El Castillo Interior, loc. cit.
24. Aug., Conf., Bk VII. cap. 10.
25. Revelations of Divine Love, cap. 26.
26. B. Angelae de Fulginio, Visionem et Instructionum Liber, cap. 20 (Eng trans., p. 160) It is interesting to notice that Angela, the orthodox mediaeval Catholic, identifies in experience the Holy Spirit with the exalted Christ, as Paul and the Fourth Evangelist had done before her.
27.The Scale of Perfection, Bk III. cap. 2.
28. I John ii. 6.
29. Such dramatic reconstructions of gospel history, often adorned with original details of great beauty, are common in the mediaeval mystics. See especially Mechthild of Magdeburg, Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit and Angela of Fuligno, Visionem et Instructionum Liber.
30. The best account of her life and visions is contained in the French edition, Visions d'Anne-Catherine Emmerich, cordonnees en un seul tout, selon ordre des faits, par le R Pere Fr Joseph Alvas Dulay, traduits par M. Charles d'Ebeling. 3 tomes, Paris, 1864.
31. Op. cit. Tome I, pp 131 - 141.
32. Op. cit. Tome III, pp 337 - 339.
33. Op. cit. Tome I, p. 112.
34. John xix. 35
35. A. Loisy, Le Quatrieme Evangile, p. 55.
