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IT was no doubt the continued, and genuinely deep and fertile, experience of Novelty — change, conversion, growth into a fresh order of reality — in selves of power and enthusiasm, the occasional attalnment of the Unitive Life in those of an exceptional sanctity, which kept alive the idea of a new life enjoyed by the "twice born" soul: a life of which the essence was participation in the Life of God. We find this idea in most of the earlier fathers; and not only in those who have been subjected to that Neoplatonic influence which is supposed to condition all Christian mysticism. "Ye are imitators of God," savs Ignatius to his fellow Christians. (1) Union and communion with Him, says Irenaeus of Lyons, still more strongly, is the obiect of the inflowing "Spirit" and the enhanced consciousness that it brings. Men are to be lifted up into the Divine Life": (2) and Jesus, born of a woman and ascending to the Father, "recapitulates" the history of the race, "uniting man to the Spirit, and causing the Spirit to dwell in man" (3) These statements are in the direct line of descent from St. Paul and the Fourth Evangelist, and represent the steady continuance of the thin bright stream of Christian mysticism.
Especially by the three great Egyptians, Clement of Alexandria, his pupil Origen, and that almost forgotten genius, St. Macarius the Great,(4) — though only to one of
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them, and that the last, can we ascribe with certainty a pre-eminently mystic consciousness, a true and organic re-mlaking on the levels of Eternal Life — the prirnitive secret of transcendence was preserved, and carried over the three dangerous centuries in which the temporal and intellectual bulwarks of the exterior Church were building: the time, stretching from the Apostolic Fathers to St. Augustine, during which the full flood of Hellenistic thought was poured into the Christian stream. It is largely owing to these three writers that, in this epoch of fluid and abounding theologies, of ceaseless speculation, of bewilderingly various expressions of life, we yet seem able to dlscern the survival of the genuine mystic type; the awakened human spirit, the member of the " New Race " still pressing on towards a veritable participation, in Realitv still trying to understand and to describe its felt experiences.
Those felt experiences, those first-hand communications from the Transcendent Order, those searching readjustments towards the Universal Life, were soon observed to be the privilege of the few. Psychological fact refused to accommodate itself to magical theories of "baptismal grace" which linked the actuality of new birth with the symbolic drama of the font. Of those who changed their faith, only a few were found to have changed their minds. Hence, that primary cleavage of men into two orders which we find in the Synoptics, St. Paul and the Fourth Gospel — those who were susceptible of true organic regeneration, and those who could but receive at second hand the message of Eternal Life — reasserted itself vigorously. This distinction, which is rooted in life and not in philosophy had forced itself in turn upon Jesus, Paul, and the Johannine mystic: each compelled by bitter experience to distinguish between the " little flock" who could receive the "Kingdom," respond to the vital impulse which led them into Truth, and the throng of "believers" to whom that inner family mediated a
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certain measure of happiness and spiritual health, a fugitive experience of Reality. Hence the so-called "Gnostic " element in the New Testament.(5)
This element it is, disguised by its Hellenistic dress, and somewhat adulterated by the new wine of Neoplatonism, which inspires Clement of Alexandria's division of Christendom into those who live the higher life of spiritual Christianity or "knowledge," and those who live the lower life of popular or "somatic" Christianity, conditioned by "obedience and faith." (6) The unfortunate word "gnostic," chosen by Clement to describe the true Christian initiate, and the fact that he appeals to the authority not only of St. Paul, but of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Philo, in support of his theory that a lower and a higher form of spiritual life is a part of the necessity of things, have obscured the fact that his "gnostic" is really a "mystic"; the lineal descendant of the "Beloved Disciple" of the Fourth Evangelist, the portrait of the New Man seen through another temperament.(7) The "higher life," in fact, which Clement describes, is in essence the mystic life: the free transfigured existence of the "children of the bridegroom" as lived and preached by Jesus and Paul. In him the stream of spirit has found a fresh channel: changed somewhat in appearance by the banks between which it flows, but still the same "mounting flood'' which tends to freedom and reality, to the establishment of the regnant human personality within the framework of Time. The double tendency of the mystic — towards an outgoing search of Absolute Perfection, and towards an interior rnoral transformation or sanctification, which shall adjust the self to the goodness, truth and beauty of the Reality that it desires — so strongly
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marked in the ethical and apocalyptic sides of the preaching of Jesus (8) is discoverecl again in Clement's "gnostic," for whom Faith, Hope and Charity are the steps of the upward way. Nor is there any real difference between the "spiritual man'' whom Paul describes as "able to scrutinise all things "(9) because his new life "in'' God has given him a span wider than that of the "psychic man'' and the gnostic who owes his lucid vsion of, and perfect adaptation to, Reality, to the fact that he "is the pupil of that holy spirit dlspensed by God, which is the mind o f Christ." (10)
In contradistinction to the heretical " gnostic " sects , and in strict accordance with the teaching of Paul and John, the knowledge of thls "true gnostic" is the work, not of intellect but of love; of the whole self's tendency and desire. Where the eyes of the mind are vanquished, this outgoing passion, this intuition of the heart, succeeds : Cor ad cor loquitur. "God, who is known to those who love, is love," says Clement, echoing the Fourth Gospel; and proceeds "and we must be allied to Him by divine love, so that by like we may see like. . . . The transcendentally clear and absolutely pure insatiable vision, which is the privilege of intensely loving souls . . . such is the vision attainable by the pure in heart." (11)
For Clement, as for Paul and the Fourth Evangelist, the state of "divine sonship," a union which depends on the upgrowth of a realness, a being, latent in man, is the aim of the spiritual life. To this condition the Logos, the "Instructor" or "hidden Steersman" of the soul, is training adolescent humanity.'' (12) It is achieved by different
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selves in different degrees. The "gnostic," he says, is "made like the Lord up to the measure of his capacity"; he "forms and creates himself." It is his destiny to becorne "a divine image, resembling God": for the Logos, impressing upon hirn the seal of "perfect contemplation " — the permanent consciousness of spiritual realities — makes him, as far as possible, "like the Essential Life through which we live the true life."(13)
Clement introduces into Christian literature the term "deification" to describe this central fact of the uplifting of human life into freedom and reality. In him, too, we find first the "threefold way" of ascent, the threefold division of men into the "slaves, the servants, and the sons" of the Transcendent Order. (14) This classification probably borrowed fram the language of the mysteries, corresponds closely with the purgative, illuminative and unitive states of consciousness successively experienced by the growing self; and became, during the patristic and mediaeval periods, a part of the technical language of Christian mysticism. The believer, he says in one place in profoundly mystical language, ascends through the stages of faith and of hope to that of love; in which he is made like to the Well-Beloved in striving to become that which is the object of his love.(15)
This idea of a growth, an advance, a progressive initiation, as an integral part of Christianity, is deeply planted in Clement's mind. Though his witness to the mystical life-process is rather that of a looker-on than of one who has indeed participated in the fulness of the transcendental life, yet he leaves us in no doubt that the vision which inspires his language is the true mystical vision of an organic growth up into Reality. He sees it, too, in its well-marked psychological stages of ascent: and finds in the mystery-dramas which expressed the religious longings of the Hellenistic worid, an apt image of the Chrlstian mystery of transcendence — an unfortunate fact
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which has greatly confused the subsequent history of mvsticism.
"It is not without reason," he says, "that in themvsteries that obtain amongst the Greeks, purification holds the first place; as also does the laver amongst the Barbarians. After these come the Lesser Mysteries, which have some foundation of instruction and preparation for that which is to come after; and then the Great Mysteries, in which nothing remains to be learned of the universe, but only to contemplate, to apprehend with the eye of the soul, the nature and being of things." (16)
Here the drama of the Pagan mysteries provides Clement with a double image: first, of the discipline of the external Church, moving from penance and baptism through instruction to participation in the "Great Mystery" of the Eucharist: secondly, and perhaps specially, of the interior life of the growing soul, the gradual purification and enhancement of its consciousness as it passes along the purgative and illuminative ways to the heights of unitive contemplation. Such contemplation is to him the spiritual equivalent of the Eucharist. "The food of the full-grown .. . . is mystic contemplation: for this is the flesh and the blood of the Logos, that is, the laying hold of the divine power and essence." (17)
But it is just here, in his way of conceiving of the last phase in Spirit's transcendence, that we touch the weak point in Clement's doctrine. Though for him the true gnosis is still, and definitely, something into which man must grow, which demands the vigorous purgation of his character, its re-making on higher levels, and is the reward of a "union of hearts"; yet the fact that he holds out to the neophyte the promise of a more abundant knowledge rather than a more abundant life, shows that the poison of Neoplatonism has entered his veins. Here, and in many other places in his writings, he makes it clear that
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ecstatic contemplation, the still vision and fruition of Reality, is for him the supreme summit of the "higher life," the end and aim of transcendence; (18) that he looks forward at last, not to the lifting up of man in his wholeness to ever deeper, richer, more various and creative activities, but to the freeing of some spiritual principle in him from the limitations of the flesh. This, rather than the all-round training of the true athlete, is the object of his ascetic discipline. It is to be attained through the gradual acquirement of a "holy indifference," or apathy, a steady progressive rejection of sensual images, a flight from the world. In all this, Clement is anticipating the mighty though one-sided genius of Plotinus, and turning his back on the rich and fertile ideal of Christian mysticism, at once "world-denying" and "world-renewing," with its perpetual movement between contemplation and action, vision and service ; its dual discovery of God in Becoming and Being, in rest and in work.
This dissociation of the two compensating elements of the mystical life, and total concentration on the transcendent aspect of Divine Reality, becomes yet more exaggerated in Clement's greatest disciple; the saintly scholar Origen. Origen, who was the fellow pupil of Plotinus in the Neoplatonic school of Ammonius Saccus (19)
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has been called the ancestor of the rnediaeval mystics (20); but this is only true in a literary and intellectual sense. Though his life was marked by a profound asceticism, he was, as a rnatter of fact, less truly mystical than his master. Love is still with him the means by which the soul is united to its Source, and sternest purification the condition of all heavenly intimacy; but it is again the passion for knowledge, not the humble and generous instinct of self-surrender which drives man's spirit to the heights. We cannot deny that for Origen, in spite of the ardour which often inspires his words, the Christian "gnostic" is essentially a "superior person"; a spiritual individualist, more interested in getting light for hirnself than in giving it back to the world. There is some truth in Harnack's description of his ideal as that of " a self-sufficient sage " who has transcended the evils and oppositions of the world, and lives in a state of supersensual contentment.(21)
Yet his powerful mind, perpetually working on the substance of the Christian "revelation" seized ard gave expression to aspects of that "revelation" which might otherwise have perished. Porphyry said of hirn that he "lived like a Christian, but thought like a Greek.'' Hence, emancipated from the narrow sectarianism, which already obsessed the great mass of believers, he saw the "new life" in its universal aspect: and came nearer than any other writer of the Patristic time — with the single exception of St. Macarius of Egypt — to an understanding of Christianitv as the invasion and exhibition of supersensual forces, an outbirth of Reality, a fresh manifestation of the ascending Spirit of Life. The action of this Spirit, he says, presses all rational creatures towards the state of perfection, that they may finally attain to the Vision of God. But the work of the Spirit is contined to those who are "turned towards the Best": those, that is to say, who are orientated in the right direction, whose "atttention to life'' is concentrated upon the higher, not
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the lower, levels of existence.(22) Moreover, the career of Jesus is for him, as for Paul, the classic exhibition of human possibilities; an earnest of the life attainable by all men. The interweaving of divine and human nature, the participation in Reality, begun in Him, is continued in all those who live His life and grow as He grew: and hence it is the duty of all Christians to "imitate Christ." This, the central truth of Christian mysticism, is stated by Origen in uncompromising terms. " From Him there began the interweaving of divine and human nature, in order that the human, by communion with the divine, might rise to be divine; not in Jesus alone, but in all those who not only believe but enter upon the life which Jesus taught.(23)
"To Origen," says Harnack, "the highest value of Christ's person lies in the fact that the Deity has here condescended to reveal to us the whole fulness of His essence, in the person of a man, as well as in the fact that a man is given to us who shows that the human spirit is capable of becoming entirely God's. . . . As in Christ's case His human soul gradually united itself with the Logos in proportion as it voluntarily subjected its wll to God, so also every man receives grace according to his prayers." (24)
Had the substance of Origen's spirituality always been.
consistent with this sublime intuition, he might indeed have been called the father of the Christian mystics. But the idea of God as the utterlv transcendent and unknowable Absolute, only attainable by the via negativa of a total rejection of the sensual world, which he had learned from the Neoplatonists, coloured too much of his thought; and led to that harsh separation of the active from the contemplative life and of the temporal from the eternal world which is definitely un-Christian — a destruction of the svnthesis achieved by Jesus, an unravelling rather than an interweaving of the "divine" and "human" sides
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of life. "Contemplatives," savs Origen, with more than a touch af arrogance, "are in the house of God: those who lead an active life are only in the vestibule";(25) and the last stage of the perfect soul is that of the dove, fiying from all terrestrial things in order that it may rest in "the treasures of knowledge and wisdom." (26) His theory af contemplation, in fact, is at bottom the theory of negative transcendence, of the attainment of Being by the rejection of Becoming, which attains. its full development in Hindu mvsticism: though his Christian feeling gives to it a certain warmth of tone. It is, says Harnack with some justice, "a joyous ascetic contemplativeness in which the Logos is the friend, associate. and bridegroom of the soul, which now, having become a pure spirit, and being herself deified, ciings in love to the Deity"— one half, in fact, of the total Christian experience. "In this view the thought of regeneration, in the sense of a fundamental renewal of the ego, has no place." (27)
Thus Origen really presents two opposing views of the mystic life and betrays the mixed Christian and Pagan temper of his mind. In him "the brook and river'' meet, but do not merge. In him, as in no other writer, are found side by side, though still unharmonised, all the elements whiich were afterwards characteristic of the developed mysticism of the Middle Ages. He it was who first applied the passionate imagery of the Song of Solomon to the relation of the soul with God. He adopted, and laid stress upon, the Neoplatonic diagram of a "ladder of ascent": the psychological method by which the contemplative stops the wheel of imagination, empties the field of consciousness abstracts himself one by one from visible things, from all that is known and all that may be conceived, until at last by this steady process of reduction he attains to a universe swept clear of all but the Unknowable One who is "above all being and above
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all knowledge." (28) This proceeding is often looked upon as the very essence of Christian mysticism.(29) It is, on the contrary, merely a methcd or discipline, based upon psychological laws which have been formulated as the result of generations of experience, and which is adopted by many Christian mystics to facilitate the diffcult business of readjustment and exclusive attention to Reality, in those hours of contemplation which uphold their active life.
Some such method the mystic type was bound either to appropriate or to invent: and, since our mental machinery is undenorninational, it here followed a true instinct in accepting and turning to new uses the system of mental training already evolved by the race. Whether the supersensual fact on which it is concentrated be called Brahma, the Celestial Venus, the Absolute, Allah, or the Blessed Trinity, consciousness passes through much the same stages, follows the same general laws, obeys the same psychological imperatives, in the course of attending to it. Hence Hindu, Sufi Neoplatonic and Christian contemplatives have much in common, and may and do learn from one another the principles wnich should govern the training af their peculiar powers. Nor can they, as a class, dispense with such training. That which the great spiritual genius, the great natural artist, does by instinct, the many who only possess a talent for Reality must do by the nurture and gradual education of their lesser faculty for God. Jesus lived always in a state of direct and profound communion with the supernal order, "His head in Eternity, His feet in time." Paul and John had little need of the "Celestial Ladder " to help their flight towards the Origin of All that Is. But others, who lacked their power, did require the support of some system which should initiate them into the art of contemplation, show
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them how the machinery of perception might be adjusted to the rhythm of this new universe.
Such a system — such a method — the Christian rnystic of the third century found ready to his hand in Neoplatonism, and adapted to the purposes of his own experience. Hence results one af those confusing cases in which the characteristics of one form of life are found, "to a certain extent," in the other. The mystical philosophy of the Neoplatonists was, like that of Hindiuism — to which it is in all probabalitv indebted — fundamentally negative and sterile. It was directed to the attainment af pure Being by the total rejection of Becoming; its ideal was static absorption in an unconditioned Reaiity, the personal satisfaction of the Vision of the One "whose dwelling-place is darkness."(30) We see it in its best and least forbidding form in the works of Plotinus; for here the ardent soul of a great natural mystic perpetually wars with, and often conquers, the map-making brain of a metaphysician. Baron von Hugel has pointed out that the inconsistencies of Plotinus are largely the result of this war; of the refusal of the intuitive spirit to accept the conclusions of the logical mind. "In spite of the philosopher's insistence upon the emptiness of God, and the corresponding need of ernptiness in the soul that would approach Him, Plotinus's words, where his own mystical ehperience speaks, really convey or imply the very opposite — the unspeakable richness of God in life, love and joy; His ever immediate, protective closeness to man's soul; and this soul's discovery of Him, the Lover, by becoming aware of, and by completely willing, His actual contact, when it freely, heroically turns its whole being, away from the narrow self, to Him, its root and its true, overflowing life." (31)
Thus it is that whilst the brain of the philosopher, struggling to measure infinite Fact by finite image, is driven at last to conceive of God in terms as negative,
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as abstract, and as arid as thcse employed by the most orthodox Hindu, yet the intuitive heart of Plotinus discerns something behind this Pure Being, this impersonal and unconditioned absolute, which evokes in him the same passionate love which the Christian or Sufi mystic offers to his personal Deity. Plainly it is the actual presence of God which Plotinus, the natural mystic, discerns and worships behind the forbidding diagrams invented by his busy intellect. So too his rapturous contemplation of Divine Perfection forces upon him a convinced consciousness of imperfection; and a purifying process, a veritable purgation, becomes as necessarv for him as for the Christian saints. Ordinary human existence "which is without God'' is for him "a vestige of life and an imitation of that life which is real"(32) a position which St. Augustine was able to accept without change.(33) Like another Baptist, he calls on his disciples to "change their minds " and enter on a deliberate asceticism, whereby the soul can detach itself alike from unreality and frorn desire, transcend the senses, and become a spiritual being dwelling in a spiritual world: a state of consciousness which bears a superficial resemblance to the Illuminative Way of the Christian rnystics.
But the difference between the two systems — or rather between the artificial system and the organic life process — becomes clear when we reach the third stage: the objective to which this training tends. Here, instead of the Unitive Life of the Christian, we find the Ecstatic Union of the Neoplatonist. We have seen what the completed life of
union, or sonship, the true participation in the Divine Nature, meant for Paul and John: how far they were from confusing lt with mere "other-worldliness" or with the temporary raptures of ecstatic vision, how deeply it was founded in the principles of self-surrender and heroic love, how closely they identified it with the career of divine fecundity, of glad self-spending in the interests
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of the Universal Life. True, this untiring activity of the deified soul is supported by those ecstatic contemplations in which it enjoys a veritable fruition of God and lives "eternal life in the midst of time ": but this is onlv one half of its completed movement — the outward swing to the Transcendent Order, which conditions the homeward turning swing of love to men. But for Plotinus there is no question of an outflowing gift to others of the vitality that has been received. Here " deification " rneans not the acquisition of a Divine creativeness a participation in the glad travail of Infinite Life and Love, but merely the transitory experience of ecstatic union with God, "alone with the Alone"; the intense assurance of Reality, the attainment of that strange brief "silence in heaven" when the perceiver "seems to be one with the Thing perceived" and "folded about Divinity, has no part void of contact with Him." (34) Such a mysticism as this, however lofty its expression, is yet definitely self-regarding: the satisfaction of a spiritual lust rather than the veritable marriage of the soul. In it the elan vital finds a blind alley, not a thoroughfare: since its highest stage is a condition of static knowledge, not a condition of more abundant life. At its best it mistakes a means for an end : at its worst, it leads directly —and in historic fact did lead — to the soul-destroying excesses of that Quietism, that idle basking in the Presence of God, which all the true mystics unsparingly condemn.
This, then, was the substance of that new influence which the third century brought to bear upon Christian mysticism: with the result which might have been anticipated. For a time the new art of contemplation, with its promise of ecstatic union with God, a direct fruition of Reality, swept all before it: destroying the delicate balance between life temporal and life eternal which constitutes the strength and beauty of the Christian idea. The Christian mystic — still more, the mystically-minded Christian who lacked the vitality, the romantic genius
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needed for the true business of transcendence — seems to have become intoxicated by this art when first it was introduced to him. The old vivid consciousness of a new life lived in closest communian with Reality, which had inspired the collective life of the Church, was fading: and this promise of the attainment of the Unchanging God — a swift yet veritable contact with Eternal Life by the total rejection of all changing things, a deliberate elevation and concentration of the mind, offered him a tempting way of escape from the formalities and disillusions of an ever more highly organised, more ecclesiastical and magical cult.
Moreover, this art was based on psychological experience. Those who practised it found that it worked. The artificial production of ecstacy, one of the oldest of human secrets, was here reduced to a scientific formula, and given a justification half religious, half philosophic. From this deliberate and studied emptying of the mind, "leaving behind both sensible perceptions and intellectual efforts, and all objects of sense and thought, and all that is and all that is not," they did attain that indescribable condition of consciousness which they called the "Divine Dark in which God is said to dwell." (35) All mystics, Christian and non-Christian, agree that such states of pure receptivity, mind, heart and will surrendered to the All, are peculiarly favourable to the spiritual life: that the barriers of sense are then broken, and a veritable fruition of the Infinite is enjoyed by the contemplative soul. W'e know from St. Augustine that such a fruition was experienced by the adepts of Neoplatonism, Christian and Pagan alike. Hence it is not surprising that they accepted the system as it was, with all its elements af exaggerated passivity and "other-worldliness," its arid and exclusively transcendent definition of God, its tendency to supersensual egotism. Hence it is impossible to deny that the art of contemplation
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as it came to be taught at least by some of the Fathers, has a strongly Pagan tone.
The secret of Jesus, His power as the perfect expression of completed human nature, had lain in His steadv alternation af action and contemplation, the interweaving of two orders of Reality; His discovery of the "Kingdom" in the common things of life, His ecstatic fruition of God and unwearied service of man. In the so-called "mysticism" of the Greek Fathers from the time of Origen onwards, we find few traces of this dual consciousness of Reality. What we do find is an imperfectly Christianised version of the exclusively transcendentalist and largely impersonal mysticism of the Pagan Neoplatonists: a view of the universe and of the soul's path to God, founded upon its doctrine of "Emanations." These Fathers have little to say about the true Mystic Way, the vital principle of growth, the total lifting-up of man to the life of Reality. That Eternal Life is for them essentially static; removed by a vast distance from the sensual world, from which it is separated by those intervening worlds, Emanations, or Hierarchies, which mediate the Uncreated Light to created things, decreasing in splendour and reality, increasing in multiplicity, as they recede farther and farther from the One.
"If," says St. Basil the Great, " you would speak worthily of God, or understand that which is said of Him, leave your body, leave your senses, abandon alike both land and sea, tread the air beneath your feet, leave behind you all that is temporal, all the successiveness of things, all the beauty of this world; and rise above the stars and above all that you find admirable therein, their brilliance and their greatness, their happy influence upon this world. . . . Transcend in spirit all this universe, take your flight above the skies, and, soaring at those sublime heights, let the eyes of your soul rest upon the fairest of all beings; look upon the heavenlv armies, the choirs of Angels, consider the might of the Archangels, the glory
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of the Domnations, the seats whereon the Thrones are established, the Virtues, the Principalities, the Powers. Then, transcending even all angelic natures, raising yourself in thought beyond and above all creation, contemplate the Divine Nature, steadfast and immovable, exempt from every vicissitude and every emotion, simple and indivisible, Inaccessible Light, Ineffable Power, Limitless Splendour, Incomparable Glory, the sovereign desirable Good, the Perfect Beauty which inflicts upon the enraptured soul an ineffable wound of love, but of which human language is powerless to tell the Majesty." (36)
The doctrine of the transcendence of God could hardly go further than in this passage; which conatains in germ the central idea of Dante's Paradiso. Dionysius the Areopagite, usually and wrongly credited with the introduction of these doctrines into Christian mysticism, says no more: and St. Basil wrote at least a hundred years before that enigmatic personage.(37)
It is clear that the one-sided development of such a tendency as this was of doubtful benefit to Christian mysticism. Yet on the other hand it rnust not be forgotten that the Christian mystic had rnuch to learn from
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the Neoplatonic specialists, though he paid for his lesson a heavy price. From those "specialists" came the whole discipline in contemplative prayer, the psychological drill, the " degrees of orison," the rules which govern tbe adjustment of our consciousness to the Transcendental World, which now form an integral part of the Mystical Theology of the Church, and have helped and conditioned for centuriies the comrnunion of the contemplative saints with the Infinite Life. The stages of ascent described by Richard of St. Victcr, St. Bonaventura, Ruysbroeck, Hilton; the degrees of orison of St. Bernard or St. Teresa; all these owe much to the acute observation and descriptive genius of the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, and probably through them to the adepts of older "mystic" cults. The ardent souls of the first Christian initiates, their wild, romantic passion for reality, somehow achieved that "contact with God," that immersion in the Spiritual Order which sustained and nourished their organic growth. Just because of this spontaneous quality in it, their life "towards God" had a power and freshness never found again. They were great natural artists who discovered for themselves — though often with great stress and difficulty — the requisite means of espression. Though the machinery of the mind were ill-adjusted to the task laid on it, an untamed ardour upheld them: their deep unconquerable instinct for transcendence, their stormy love found, somehow, the thoroughfare along which it could force a way. "The Spirit," says St. Paul, describing these struggles, "helpeth our infirmity; for we know not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us, with groanings which cannot be uttered." (38)
Such natural and untrained efort could not survive the first ages of enthusiasm. The "new creature" and his new powers must submit to education. The mental discipline elaborated bv the Neoplatonists, the exercises which
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turned the self's attention from the sensual to the supersensual world, that process of detachment whereby the field of consciousness was emptied of all other objects, the mirror made clear for the reflection of the Uncreated Light, here came to the assistance of the Christian type: educated its wild genius, and prevented the shipwreck which might easily have overtaken the New Life in the hour of its necessary but perilous movement from the spontaneous to the organised stage.
It was greatly due to the philosophic language provided by the Neoplatonists, that the ecstatic, outgoing aspect of the Christian life — the fact of its empirical fruition of God — became fixed in the growing Christian tradition. This language it was which provided the means whereby the great intuitions of the contemplative, which would otherwise have remained merely personal experiences, were translated into intellectual concepts and entered into the currency of Christian thought. Hence it is that we know so much more about the transcendental experience of the mediaeval mystics — although the language by which they describe it is largely made up of negations — than about that of Paul or John; who are left inarticulate by their most sublime adventures. Silence wraps round the communion of Jesus with the Father. That he was "caught up into Paradise and heard unspeakable words" (39) is all that Paul can say of his own great adventure — he is unable to reduce his intuition to speech. Compare with this the description of Christian ecstacy given by St. Basil the Great,(40) the classic treatise on "dark contemplation" of Dionysius the Areopagite, that jewel of mediaeval literature, The Cloud of Unknowing, the sublime poetry in which Dante tells of his brief vision of God,(41) the wonderful self-analyses of St. Teresa, or the exact psychology of St. John of the Cross: and you will see the debt which the mystical consciousness of the Church owes to Alexandrian thought.
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Moreover, as the centuries passed, and the first-hand experience of many great mystics worked upon the diagram which they had inherited from the Neoplatonists, a steady Christianisation of that diagram took place. The tendency which it represented became merged in the general process of the spiritual life. Its hard antitheses between action and contemplation, God and the World, Being and Becoming, was softened and humanised by the " fire of love." It is true that we can trace the persistence of its abstract and negative elements in the reports of many mediaeval contemplatives: in Angela of Foligno's ineffable vision of God in "great darkness," where the soul "seems to see nothing, yet sees all things," (42) in Tauler's description of the " Wilderness of the Quiet Desert of Godhead," (43) or — in lovelier shape — in Ruysbroeck's "Abyss of Darkness where the loving spirit dies to itself, and wherein begins the manifestation of God and of Eternal life." (44) These concepts survive because they do no doubt represent the effort of the mind to express in human speech one side of man's ineffable experience of that Transcendent Realitv which is "dark to the intellect and radiant to the heart" : that paradoxical synthesis of the extremes of deprivation and fulfilment which he calls the "rich nought," the "dim silence, where lovers lose themselves," and in which, mysteriously, " the night of thought becames the light of perception." (45)
"Reck thee never," says The Cloud of Unknowing, "if thy wits cannot reason of this nought; for surely, I love it much the better. It is so worthy a thing in itself, that they cannot reason thereupon. This nought may better be felt than seen: for it is full blind and full dark to them that have but little while looked thereupon. Nevertheless,
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if I shall soothlier say, a soul is more blinded in feeling of it for abundance of ghostly light, than for any darkness or wanting of bodily light. What is he that calleth it nought? Surely it is our outer man, and not our inner. Our inner man calleth it All."(46)
But in all the works of true Christian mysticism, though the psychological methods of Neoplatonism are accepted and adapted to the Way of the Cross, these methods are perpetually sweetened and invigorated by the Christian elements of personal love and eager outgoing desire: the "little secret love" speedily springing unto God as a sparkle from the coal";(47) the determined effort of awakened spirit to " be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man." Thus the developed Christian science of contemplation, though its origins are, on the intellectual side, Neoplatonic, is full of an implied appeal to the active will. It too has suffered a "new birth"; received a new dower of vitality, and become a vigorous art, to be practised "stalwartly but listily, with a devout and a pleasing stirring of love."(48) It presses out and up from the known world of sense to the "Cloud of Unknowing"; and there, all intellectual concepts transcended, new worlds of wonder, new eternal opportunities of service, are disclosed to the questing heart.
This "science of the love of God," as some of the saints have called it, has the zest and joy of a living, growing thing: for it is one of the forms under which the Spirit of Life conquers the oppositions of matter," and obtains a foothold in the Transcendent sphere. It is a sign, not of the "higher laziness," but of the movement of human personality in its wholeness to a participation in a greater universe, a closer and more impassioned union with the Deity Who is not only "Eternal Rest" but also "Eternal Work": Who is found not only in the One but in the Many, not only in the Cloud of Unknowing
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but also in the busy, stirring, suffering world of things. "Without our own industry and love," says Ruysbroeck "we cannot be blessed.'' (49) The true contemplative is above all things a worker and a lover who both sees and seeks, possesses and desires. This love it was — romantic , dynamic, self-spending — with which the Christian mystics animated the scientific spirituality of the Neoplatonic schools.
If we wish to see the true difference between such a mysticism and the ecstatic ascent to Reality solus cum solo taught and practised by Plotinus, we have but to go to St.Augustine; who stands at the end of the fourth century, the typical figure which links in experience these two tendencies of life, and transmits them — fused in the crucible of his ardent temperament — to the mediaeval world. A natural mystic, an inveterate seeker for God, he had been an adept of the Neoplatonic ecstacy before his conversion. Possessed of unequalled powers of observation, with a peculiar genius for the description of psychological states, the passages in which he compares Platonic and Christian contemplation are amongst the classics of religious psychology. St. Augustine's Christianity, when at last he attained it, was the complete and vital Christian mvsticism of Paul. A "real life" lived within the Eternal Order as its objective; not a brief experience of Perfect Beauty — a mere glimpse of the Being of God. Movement was of its essence. In the crucial change, the self-surrender of his conversion, he found, as he says, "the road leading to the blessed Countrv which is no mere vision but a home." (50) Hence he looks back upon the sterile satisfactions of his Neoplatonic period, when "for a moment he beheld from a wooded height the land of peace, but found no path thereto." (51)
The literature of mysticism contains no more vivid and realistic description of supernal experience than Augustine's
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report of his Platonic experiment in introversion, his brief Plotinian contemplation of the One. "Being by these books [of the Platonists] admonished to return unto myself, I entered into the secret chamber of my soul, guided by Thee; and this I could do because Thou wast my helper. I entered, and beheld with the mysterious eye of my soul the light that never changes, above the eye of mysoul, above my intelligence, It was not the comrnon light which all flesh can see, nor was it greater yet of the same kind, as if the light of day were to grow brighter and brighter and flood all space. It was not like this, but something altogether different from any earthly illumination. Nor was it above my intelligence in the same way as oil is above water, or heaven above earth, but it was higher because it made me, and I was lower because made by it. He who knows the truth knows that Light, and he who knows that Light knows Eternity. Love knows that Light. . . . Step by step I was led upwards, from bodies to the soul whlch perceives by means of the bodilv senses, and thence to the soul's inward faculty, to which the bodily sense reports external facts, and thence to the reasoning power. And when this power also found itself changeable it withdrew its thoughts from experience, abstracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed. . . . And thus with the flash of one hurried glance it attained to the vision of That which Is. And then at last I saw Thy invisible things, understood by means of the things that are made, but I could not sustain my gaze: my weakness was dashed back, and I was relegated to my ordinary experience, bearing with me nothing but a loving memory, cherishing as it were the fragrance of those meats on which I was not yet able to feed." (52)
In this experience St. Augustine, no less than Plotinus, believed that he had truly enjoyed for an instant the
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beatific Vision of God ; which is one and the same for Christian and for Platonist. (53)That which he saw from the "wooded height" was indeed the promised land: the mighty synthesis of All that Is. But for the Platonic contemplative that land remains a vision, he "sees the end, but not the road thereto." (54) Hence this glimpse af it — this "hurried glance" — could not satisfy Augustine's deep craving for Reality. Had it done so, his conversion need never have taken place. In his own classic phrase, the mystic need is for a Home, not for a Vision. He is not content to balance himself for one giddy moment on the apex of "the sublime pyramid of thought": but dernands of his transfigured universe depth and breadth as well as height — an all-round expression of Reality. His objective is "the participation of Eternity, of all things most delightful and desired, of all things most loved by them who have it"(55):which alone can satisfy the cravings of heart, mind and will; and such a participation means the adjustment of consciousness to a greater rhythm, growth into a new order of Reality — the treading of that Mystic Way which was "built by the care of the Heavenly Emperor." (56) Even the swift flash of thought in which Monica and Augustine "touched the Eternal Wisdom" (57)cannot satisfy this instinct for a completed life lived in the "diviner air." (58) It was not vision which Augustine acclairned as the firstfruits of his conversion, but the power to perform "free acts." (59)
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Hence the Christian mystic can never afford to accept the principle of contemplation divorced fom the principle of growth: never forgets that being, not knowing, is his aim: that he moves, not towards clearer vision, but towards closer and more fruitful identity with the Spirit of Life. "Christian Mysticism," says Delacroix, "substitutes for ecstacy a wider state: where the permanent consciousness of the Divine does not suspend practical activity, where definite action and thought detach themselves from this indefinite ground, where the disappearance of the feeling of selfhood and the spontaneous and impersonal character of the thoughts and motor tendencies inspire the subject with the idea that these acts do not emanate from him but from a divine Source: and that it is God Who lives and acts within him." (60)
Notes
1. 2 Eph., cap 1.
2. Contra haer., I. 2, and IX.1
3. Op. cit., V. 20
4. Clement, c. 150-60 — c. 220. Origen, c. 185 - 253. St Macarius, c. 295 - 386
5. On this New Testament "Gnosticism," see H.J. Holtzmann, Neutestamentliche Theologie, Vol. II, pp. 437 et seq.
6. Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alexandria," pp. 85-97, has an admirable account of the "two lives" in Clement.
7. Cf. Baron von Hugel in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. XV. pp. 452-457
8. Cf. H.J. Holtzmann, Neutestamentliche Theologie, Vol. I pp. 284-295; and von Hugel, Eternal Life, p. 59
9. 1 Cor. ii. 15.
10. Strom., V. 4.
11. Strom., V. 1 and VII. 3
12. Paed., I. 7. Compare also the beautiful Clementine hymn, where the logos is addressed as "Bridle of untamed colts, Wing of unwandering birds, sure Helm of babes, and Shepherd of royal lambs." Given in Warren, The Liturgy and Ritual of the Ante Nicene Church, p. 182.
13. Strom., VII. 3.
14. Strom., I. 27.
15. Strom., V. 3.
16. Strom., V. 2.
17. Strom., V. 10 Cf st. Augustine, Conf., Bk. VII. cap. 10
18. Dr. Bigg (Christian Platonists of Alexandria, p. 98) insists that there is no trace of "ecstacy" in Clement: adding some confused remarks about the identity of "ecstacy" with the "prayer of quiet," with which it has little in common. It is true that Clement's descriptions of the Gnostic's vision lack the passionate realism of Plotinus ; the whole temper of his work is that of the mystically-minded man who sees the summits that he cannot reach. But he leaves us in no doubt that the consummation to which he looks is that state of impassioned attention to Transcendent Reality in which the soul forgets all earthly things and "has fulhead of fruition in the life of peace." Whether this fruition does or does not entail bodily trance, depends wholly on the psycho-physical organisation of the contemplative, whose concentration on the Supernal Order may or may not inhibit his consciousness of and response to, the sensual world.
19. Harnack, History of Dogma, Vol. I. p. 318,
20. Bigg, op. cit., p. 188.
21. Harnack, op. cit., Vol. II. p. 337.
22. De Princ., I. 3, 5.
23. Contra Celsum, III. 28.
24. History of Dogma, Vol. II. pp. 314, 315.
25. In Ps. cxxxiii
26. In Cant. I. 4.
27. Harnack, op. cit., Vol II. p. 376.
28. Dionysius the Areopagite, De Myst. Theo. I. 1. Cf Harnack, History of Dogma, Vol. II, p. 375.
29. Especially by writers of the Ritschlian school. Cf supra, Cap.1, § V.
30. Cf. supra, Cap. I, § II
31. Eternal Life, p. 83
32. Ennead, VI. 9.
33. Aug., Conf., Bk. X. cap. 28
34. Enneads V. 3 and VI. 9.
35. Dionysius the Areopagite, De Myst. Theo., I., and Letter to Dorothy the Deacon.
36. First Homily on Faith.
37. Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500) has obtained a far higher place than he deserves in the history of Christian mysticism. A strange ard subtle thinker rather than a mystic, he fused together Jewish. Christian and Neoplatonic ideas to form a system of theology at once fantastic and profound. But of the really mystical ideas in his works hardly one is original. Writing after the great spiritual experimentalists and speculative thinkers of the first five centuries had done their work, and the tradition of contemplation was consequently fixed, he gathered up from the writings and experiences alike of Christians and Neoplatonists, the elements of his mystical theology. It was chiefly through the preservation of his writings, their false attribution to the disciple of St. Paul, and their translation into Latin in the ninth century, that the Neoplatonic method of contemplation was inherited in its most exaggerated form by the mediaeval Church; but its principles were already antique when Dionysius was born. He did but reduce to intellectual terms a practical science which had already been worked out in life.
38. Rom. viii. 26 (R.V.)
39. 2 Cor. xii.4.
40. Supra, p. 293.
41. Par., XXXIII.
42. Visionum et instructionum liber, cap. 26 (Eng trans., p. 183-185)
43. Third Instruction (The Inner Way, p. 324).
44. L'Ornement des noces spirituelles, Lib. III. cap. 2.
45. Coventry Patmore, The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, "Aurea Dicta,' XIII
46. The Cloud of Unknowing, cap. 68.
47. Op. cit., cap. 4.
48. Op. cit., cap. 6
49. L'Ornement des noces spirituelles, Lib. II. cap. 7
50. Aug., Conf., Bk. VII. cap. 20.
51. Loc. cit., cap. 21.
52. Bk. VII. caps 10 and 17 slightly condensed
53. Cf De Civ. Dei., Bk. X. cap. 2.
54. Aug., Conf., Bk VII. cap. 20.
55. Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, Bk. II. cap. 42.
56. Aug., Conf., Bk. VII. cap. 20.
57. Ibid., Bk. IX. cap. 10.
58. The difference between these two phases in Augustine is well illustrated by the two exactly equivalent phases which Mr Edmund Gardner distinguishes in the development of dante. First the philosophic "apparent mysticism of the Convivio, " "not based upon a true religious experience, but upon an intellectual process." Secondly, the true mysticism of the Divina Commedia, entailing the vital experiences of the conversion and purification of the soul (Dante and the Mystics, p. 19).
59. Aug., Conf., Bk. XI. cap. 1
60. Etudes sur le psychologie du mysticisme, p. xi.
