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It is one thing merely to believe in a reality beyond the senses, and another to have experience of it also; it is one thing to have ideas of “the holy” and another to become consciously aware of it.
RUDOLF OTTO
When thou saidst, Seek ye my face: my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.
PSALM XXVII. 8
The voice, the exceeding great cry, of that unquenchable passion, of that irrepressible aspiration, whereby the soul of man shows forth its truest dignity and highest virtue in seeking the better to know and love and serve its Highest and Invisible Object.
H. P. LIDDON
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AS we look backwards along history, and around us at the social complex of which we form part, we see two distinct kinds of direct witness to a Reality beyond the natural order: two levels at which human religion appears and endures, and must be taken in account. We see first the general and widespread religious cravings and convictions of humanity; cravings and convictions which, however inadequate their immediate objective may be, yet by their existence mark us off from our animal relations, and testify to a compelling passion that contributes nothing to the physical well-being of man. There is the undeniable human capacity for feeling mystery and awe—our ‘sense of otherness’—and the compulsion that
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this double foundation of a corporate and a particular experience. We cannot reasonably regard it either as a vestigial relic of man’s primitive fears and guesses, or as the peculiar aberration of certain distracted minds: because the saints give meaning and precision to the religious instincts of the crowd, and the crowd supports and guarantees the certitude of the saints.
We are further reassured by the fact that here religion seems to follow the same path of development as the other great movements in which the restless mind of man reaches out towards a wider knowledge of his mysterious environment. The secret drive towards artistic creation, the speculations of philosophy, or scientific adventure and research these forms of exploration too, do and must take their departure both from a general and a particular response to some felt attraction and demand; a response on the one hand vague if insistent, on the other more vivid, passionate and precise. Therefore in studying man’s knowledge of, and relation with, the universe, we are justified in giving a large place to the existence and the declarations of spiritual genius. Indeed, we are bound to do so; for here, so to speak, are the laboratory specimens on which our practical work must be done. Here is the only human type which claims to speak from observation and experience, not from deduction and speculation, of the realities beyond sense.
The mystics to give them their short, familiar name are men and women who insist that they know for certain the presence and activity of that which they call the Love of God. They are conscious of that Fact which is there for all, and which is the true subject matter of religion; but of which the average man remains either unconscious or faintly and occasionally aware. They know a spiritual order, penetrating, and everywhere
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conditioning though transcending the world of sense. They declare to us a Reality most rich and living, which is not a reality of time and space; which is something other than everything we mean by ‘nature’, and for which no merely pantheistic explanation will suffice. These men and women therefore give precision and an objective to that more or less vague thirst for the Infinite and Unchanging which, even in the rudimentary form in which most of us yet possess it, is surely the most wonderful of all the possessions of man: that sense of another and unearthly scale of values pressing in on him: that strange apprehension of, and craving for, an unchanging Reality utterly distinct from himself, which is the raw material of all religion. And it is through the work done by spiritual genius, its power of revealing to others at least something of that which it finds and feels, that average men obtain in the long run all their more vivid convictions in respect of the transcendent world ; as through the work done by artistic or scientific genius they learn something of the significance and structure of the physical world.
As only the wide-open aesthetic faculty of the great artist seems able to perceive and exhibit to us a senseworld which is truly adequate to our cravings; and only the profound intellect of the great philosopher can satisfy the insistent demands of reason for a rational universe; so only the intuition of the great mystics seems able to know, and give to others in some measure, a spiritual universe and reality which is convincing, all-demanding, utterly satisfying, in its dimly felt and solemn spacelessness, its thrilling attraction and aliveness. This supernal reality these mystics do truly give, or at least suggest to us not as a possibility of speculation, but as a personally experienced concrete fact, which we are bound to take
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into account when estimating our sources of information about the world. Thus, as from the great poet we learn the full possibilities and the transcendency of Poetry, it is from the saint that we learn the full possibilities and the transcendency of Religion. We cannot say that he ‘understands’ it, any more than the brightest and most devoted dog ‘understands' canine-human relationships. None the less, incarnated in these special personalities, with their singleness of aim and peculiar sensitiveness, are the racial organs as it were, through which humanity has received the greater part of its fragmentary news about God.
'O Thou Supreme’! exclaims St. Augustine. ‘Most secret and most present; most beautiful and strong! Constant, and incomprehensible; changeless, yet changing all! ... What shall I say, my God, my Life, my holy Joy? And what can any man say when he speaks of Thee ?’ (1)
That is surely the voice of the realist, absorbed in the contemplation of a given objective Fact. We do not speak thus of those compensating fantasies which are woven from the stuff of imagination and desire, and which accommodate themselves so obligingly to our human needs.
And again, when St. Catherine of Siena cries ‘I have not found myself in Thee, nor Thee in myself, Eternal God!' we recognize a craving and a capacity for a Reality beyond the bounds of sense. If it had not been for the delighted, reports and declarations of the mystics and saints, their insistence on its overwhelming actuality, and their heroic self-dedications to that which they have seen, we, little half-animal creatures, could never have guessed that this objective Fact was there, and accessible in its richness and delightfulness to men. Still less could we have supposed that the life of conscious and devoted correspon-
(1) St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. I, cap. 4.
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dence with this achieved and all-penetrating Perfection, which is the essence of personal religion, was possible to the human soul.
Those saints and mystics are the great teachers of the loving-kindness and fascination of God. Watching them, we become aware of that mysterious give and take between His Spirit and man, by which human personality is transformed and changed: and of the fundamental fact that, in all such give and take, the Divine action comes first. Since we are finite creatures, those ultimate values which convey to us something of the Infinite and Eternal can never be apprehended by our own efforts. They must be given, or infused; and the mystics, and those who know the secrets of contemplative prayer, have been convinced at first-hand of this great truth. God’s impact on the soul always seems to them to involve, first, a gift, next a demand, and last the response, gradual growth, and ultimate transfiguration of that soul. This profound sense of something really happening, something done to it and to be done by it, sharply marks off all true religious experience, on the one hand from vague spiritual feelings, on the other from those changes in man, and discoveries by man, which merely develop from within—marks off in fact, the work of nature from the work of grace.
We turn, then, from general considerations to see what it is that happens to those men and women in whom the ‘supernatural sense’ has thus developed and become regnant; what it is that they find and feel.
The continued existence in history of a type thus peculiarly sensitive to those spiritual impressions which the majority of men seem unable to receive—persons who have in some degree that which is loosely called the ‘mystical sense’ is a fact which the most hardy naturalist can scarcely deny. Human history has produced the
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religious genius as certainly as it has produced the philosopher or the poet; and the attempt to explain him away in terms of pathology does not get easier as time goes on. Now every other type of human genius is found on analysis to desire, apprehend, enjoy, and reveal a genuine Reality other than himself; and to grow in understanding and creative power through devoted attention to this given Real. The painter and sculptor must maintain a 'selfless and purifying’ contact – with external beauty, if their art is to keep clear of feverish dream. The philosopher seeks to apprehend real Being by means of disinterested and logical thought. The musician is controlled by reverence for really existent rhythms and harmonies. So does the peculiar genius for the Supernatural, considered without prejudice, require for its explanation, a real inciting cause and for its development a real response. If we should know little of the reality of God without the witness of saints, without the Living Absolute we call God it is incredible that those saints could exist at all. Life means correspondence with environment; and no lesser environment could conceivably occasion or give meaning to their characteristic response.
‘I have stilled my restless mind, and my heart is radiant; for in Thatness I have seen beyond Thatness, in Company I have seen the Comrade Himself.’ (2)
‘Thou wilt keep him in peace, peace, whose mind is stayed on thee.’ (3)
‘In thy Presence is fulness of joy; and at thy right hand are pleasures for evermore.’ (4)
"And I said Lord, I have called on Thee inwardly and desired to have my joy in Thee. I am ready to forsake all things for Thee. Thou, verily, stirredst me first to seek Thee.’ (5)
(2) One Hundred Poems of Kabir, p. 54.
(3) Isaiah xxvi. 3.
(4) Psalm xvi.11.
(5) De Imitatione Christi, Bk. III, cap. 23.
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What reason hadst Thou for creating Man in such dignity? Exclaims St. Catherine of Siena: ‘The inestimable love with which Thou sawest Thy creature in Thyself and didst become enamoured of him, for Thou didst create him through love and didst destine him to be such that he might taste and enjoy Thy Eternal Good.’(6)
Does not this strange capacity for supersensual enjoyment and supersensual devotion, pointing so steadily beyond the natural world, mark a fresh stage in the development of human personality? These things have been said by creatures living on this little planet: creatures whose physical ancestry leads back through the swamp and jungle, to the beginnings of animal life. Yet they point beyond the planet and beyond natural life as we know it; and declare another level of existence to be accessible to man. The name we give to individuals who speak and feel thus, and the way we try to account for them, are unimportant. The important thing surely is that they are there; and that their mere existence as a human type, let alone their heroic and selfless activities, witnesses to an independent Object both inciting and answering their other-worldly desires: a God Who ‘secretly initiates what He openly crowns’.(7)
As the fish could not have come into existence without water, and the bird guarantees the supporting through invisible air, so I think we may reasonably claim that the undying fact of sanctity guarantees God. It witnesses to work really done, a give-and-take truly established, at levels beyond the normal conscious field. Labelling can neither add to nor detract from the authority of those in whom this happens: an authority which is founded in the strangely realistic character of their declarations, the fundamental unanimity existing betweenthem, and the fact that they transcend, but do not conflict
(6) Dialogo, cap. 13.
(7) F. von Hügel: Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, Series II, p. 225.
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with the findings of the general religious sense. We may and should find great differences in the quality and extent of their achievement: but the claim to an empirical though never complete knowledge of a transcendental Reality unites them all, Christian and non-Christian alike. They are, in the phrase of Ruysbroeck, not only ghostly but also God-seeing men; and in some this firsthand apprehension is developed to a surprising degree of precision and richness. Thus these experimental theists inevitably furnish much of the raw material with which the philosophy of religion has to deal; and they are so numerous and so distinctive, that no theory of human knowledge which aims at even approximate completeness, can afford to neglect their witness.
That witness is twofold in character. First and chiefly, they testify to the reality of the Supernatural by that which they become under its ‘declared influence; the growth and expansion of their personality. Secondly, by that which they find and feel; and which they try to reveal to us, more or less, in their teaching. So as a second stage in our study of the religious complex, we may well consider in general terms what these two lines of evidence amount to. We review our witnesses; and examine their credentials, and the points in which their, testimonies agree.
From the standpoint of intelligent naturalism, they are strange witnesses enough. The spectacle before us is that of a number of little creatures, apparently conditioned by the sensual world and possessing the same physical outfit and limitations as other men. Yet these little creatures are impelled to seek with ardour and determination and commonly with some success intercourse with a level of reality entirely beyond the reach of the most sublimated sense. We see this intercourse achieved in various ways
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and degrees, along two apparently inconsistent routes; sometimes by a special use of those same senses, and sometimes by a deliberate abstraction from them in other words, by sacramental and by contemplative methods. Moreover this experience has observable results within the natural world. It transforms again in various degrees and ways those who are capable of it. Theology expresses this in its own way, when it says that we have here exhibited to us in a concentrated form the way in which the Creative Spirit of God deals with the individual human spirit; the sort of contact and communion possible between them; the work done upon nature by grace.
A genuine theism is committed to the belief in that living, personal and spaceless Spirit, Who was defined by St. Thomas Aquinas as ‘God Himself inasmuch as He is in all things everywhere and always’; the everywhere-present Reality, secretly and powerfully moulding and conditioning all life. Though our normal human consciousness does not of course include direct awareness of that changeless Presence, Who is the true object of all religion; yet that which we call mystical experience is aware of it, more or less. In particular individuals, specially sensitive to supernatural influences, the field of consciousness appears to be so expanded or so deepened as to include though never steadily, completely and continuously the profound sense of the duality of human life, the mysterious certitude of communion with that God Who is present with His creation ‘in such a way as , to be all in all, whilst remaining absolutely distinct from all’. (8) Plainly the accounts given by those who are thus specially sensitive must be considered with respect: although the material which they give to us is often most clifficult to use. It seldom comes to us in a pure form,
(8) Nicolas of Cusa: The Vision of God, cap. 12.
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but on many counts, racial, traditional and psychological, requires of us careful scrutiny, sifting and comparison—a fine discrimination between rightful criticism and arrogant rejection A constant remembrance of the oblique and partial character of all human knowledge, the history and crudity of human speech, and so a constant refusal to equate Reality even with the best experiences and declarations of men, is called for in those who would understand it; a constant agnosticism, too, as to the apparent certitudes of our neat and normal world, the true causation of that stream of events of which our experience is composed.
This attitude is the more needful because the mystical type shares in the disabilities which characterize other forms of genius. It discerns more than it can comprehend. It cannot, save by allusion, communicate the substance of its knowledge. We have always to remember the relation in which the most widely open of contemplative minds conceivable by us—anchored, as it must be still, to the conditions of physical life—stands to those realities on which its awestruck gaze is turned; and the drastic process of translation which must be needed before any fragment of its supersensual apprehensions can be imparted to other men. Mystical literature is full of this sense of the over-plus, genuinely perceived by intuition but escaping all the resources of speech. ‘Seeing we do not see, understanding we do not understand, penetrating we do not penetrate' exclaims Richard of St. Victor.(9) ‘Brother, I blaspheme! I blaspheme!' says Angela of Foligno to her secretary, as she struggles to find words in which to express her great revelations of God. Such genius stretches human awareness to the utmost. It passes beyond ‘that encircling wall of Paradise where apparent contradictions coincide’, (10)and, because of the
(9) Richard of St. Victor: Benjamin Major.
(10) Nicolas of Cusa: op. cit., cap. 9.
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strain involved in its special apprehensions, suffers from cruel reactions, distresses and obscurities.
Yet we need not feel surprised that the tiny human creature, beset as it ever is by its animal limitations and adjustments, is shaken through and through by the impact of spiritual realities; that its contacts with the eternal world are so tentative and so half-comprehended by it; that sometimes the truth which it lives for may abruptly capture consciousness and sometimes remain obstinately out of reach; that its other-worldly joy sometimes gets translated into the terms of emotions of an unspiritual kind, and its desperate attempts to suggest the inexpressible are not always fortunately conceived. We must expect that the reports of religious genius shall vary widely in detail, colour and proportion, as do the reports of individual explorers concerning other levels of reality. For even were the whole of their claim allowed, it would still remain true that each such explorer shows us reality partially, incompletely, and through a temperament—a temperament, moreover, which is immersed in history and conditioned by it. His instinct for Eternity operates from within the temporal order; and by means of psychic machinery which is accustomed to the stimulus of sense. That which is truly given from a transcendent source, must yet be apprehended and expressed within the historic field.
The contemplative is seldom fully conscious of all that this irreducible duality involves for him; and only in a few rare instances seems able to distinguish, as does Ruysbroeck in a celebrated passage, between ‘God and the light in which we see Him'. Yet his attitude towards Eternity is essentially and inevitably that of the artist, not of the mathematician; and his best declarations and constructions will always have an artistic and approximate
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character, carrying with them a luminous fringe of significance not amenable to speech. We mistake his office if we begin to ask him for explanations. Therefore even the report of the greatest contemplative saint is much like that of the wise shepherd; who can tell us much about the weather, but nothing about meteorology, and often supports his rightful judgments by an appeal to imaginary laws. For here, as in all the things that most truly concern our small, emergent, still half-conscious lives, our knowledge, in its luminous and cloudy mass, far exceeds any exact formulation that our science can make of it. Since that knowledge comes to us through a human consciousness, either our own or that of other men, it is and must be, largely translated into symbols and images and controlled by the machinery of apperception. In proportion as the spiritual genius abandons first the naïve and then the deliberate use of image and symbol and he is tempted to do this, as their inadequacy becomes clear to him so does he abandon the only link between pure intuition (supposing such pure intuition to be possible to men), and our conditioned minds.
Thus when Angela of Foligno says:
'I see all good; and seeing it, the soul . . . delighteth unspeakably therein, yet it beholdeth naught which can be related by the tongue or imagined in the heart. It seeth nothing yet seeth all things, because it beholdeth this Good darkly’. (11)
she succeeds in producing an atmosphere of ineffability, but actually tells us nothing at all. The same is true of her contemporary, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing:
Thou askest me and sayest, “How shall I think on Himself, and what is He?” and to this I cannot answer thee but thus: “I wot not.”‘For thou hast brought me with thy question into that
(11) Book of Divine Consolations: Treatise III, Vision 7.
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same darkness, and into that same cloud of unknowing, that I would thou wert in thyself. For of all other creatures and their works, yea, and of the works of God’s self, may a man through grace have fullhead of knowing, and well he can think of them: but of God Himself can no man think. And therefore I would leave all that thing that I can think, and choose to my love that thing that I cannot think.' (12)
Far nearer to human experience and needs is the more humble and careful transcendentalism of Dionysius the Areopagite; who teaches that ‘the Mystery of Godhead, which exceeds all mind and being’, yet ‘lovingly reveals Itself by illuminations corresponding to each separate creature’s powers, and thus draws upwards holy minds into such contemplation, participation and resemblance of Itself as they can attain’.(13)
Were this wholesome sense of God’s infinitely graded self-communications, and our human disability to receive the supernatural unmixed with some natural alloy, fully assimilated by us; how many of the difficulties and disputes which now stain the surface of religion would fade away!
II
BUT our present concern is neither with divergence of detail nor obliquity of presentation. It is with the massive agreement which underlies the particular and inevitable variations of man’s spiritual experience and expression: the solid witness of the mystics to an actual, living, and enduring world of transcendental realities, and to the relation in which this existent world stands to the spirit of man. As the French mountaineer climbs Mont Cervin, and the German ascends the Matterhorn, yet for both the summit is the same: so we, becoming intimate with them, and learning to penetrate below
(12) Op. Cit., cap. 6.
(13)The Divine Names, cap. I.
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Divergencies of language and outlook, realize more and more clearly that the mystics do all experience in different ways and degrees one and the same sublime Reality. We need not limit this statement to Christians. All experimental theists have something in common. All, in the words of Dionysius, are drawn by one Spirit into such contemplation, participation and resemblance as each can attain: and though their experiences differ widely in depth and value, they do not rule each other out.
It is the intensely objective character of their declarations, their insistence on the complete, inexpressible otherness and yet most vivid actualness of the Real, which makes the mystics the great champions of religious realism. ‘Not how the world is is the mystical, but that it is’,(14) said Wittgenstein most justly; and ‘not how God is, but that He is’, is the central and unanimous declaration of the mystics. In the words of von Hügel, ‘Religion, in proportion to its religiousness, is everywhere profoundly evidential; it affirms real contacts with a Reality which both occasions and transcends—which exists independently of—all these contacts. Presence, Is-ness, as distinct from the Oughtness of Morals; this is the deepest characteristic of all truly religious outlooks’.(15)
And further study of these testimonies, supported perhaps by careful introspection on our own part, drives home the conviction that it is this ‘Is-ness’ and not save in a most limited sense the ‘Whatness' of the Supernatural, which is the essence of such revelation as we are able to receive. For nothing that the mystics contrive to say, however impressive, really prepares us for the unmeasured ‘Otherness’ which characterizes even the smallest and faintest of true religious experiences in ourselves.
The independent pre-existence of the Object of their
(14) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 187.
(15) Essays and Addresses, Series II, p. 248.
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contemplation is, then, essential to the philosophy of the mystics. For, thoroughgoing empiricists though they be, a philosophy, a particular conviction about the nature of Reality and of life, does emerge from and is required by the sum total of their communicated experiences. This philosophy has two terms: the two terms implied in all religious realism God and the Soul. Spirit infinite, perfect, and uncreate; spirit finite, imperfect and created. These are its realities.
As to the assertions which it makes about these realities, I will take six points which confirm and complete one another; distinguishing the universe of religious experience from that of the ‘natural’ man. These great intuitions, facts and experiences must all come up for further exploration and analysis as we go on. Here they are only to be considered in so far as they help us to fix the characteristics of that human type through which so much of our news of the Supernatural has come.
The first three points refer to God, the supreme supernatural Object, and declare:
(1) His Prevenience,
(2) His Perfection,
(3) His Eternity.
The last three refer to the soul’s characteristic experiences over against this Object, and we might call them
(4) Vocation,
(5) Prayer,
(6) Transfiguration.
(1)
I take together those great objective declarations of the mystics which assert the Prevenience, Perfection and Eternity of God. Men and women of spiritual genius all come before
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us, not as the painstaking discoverers of something, but as the astonished receivers of something. Virtually or actually, they insist on the givenness of all man’s apprehensions of Reality; the absolute priority of the action of God over any and every action of the soul. The words of St. John, ‘We love him because he first loved us', sum up, when fully understood, their whole doctrine of mystical experience. This is a position completely opposed to all the speculations of personal idealism, all philosophies of mere development and change; for it requires us to hold that the supreme and living Object of the soul’s desire Himself incites this desire as a part of His scheme of human life, that indeed He is in His immanental aspect the very source and occasion of the creature’s half-conscious drive towards His transcendent aspect. Thus, feeling the power, the sweetness and the wonder that overwhelm ‘our strangely compounded human nature when the sense of God enters the conscious field, the mystics can exclaim with no sense of unreality: ‘O grace inestimable and marvellous worthiness! O love without measure singularly showed unto man.’(16)
That to which they all witness, with what one of them called 'a holy and marvelling delight’, is just this touching condescension of Infinite to finite, this profound concern of Ultimate Reality with individual human life. Their knowledge, they insist, is an ‘infused’ and not an achieved knowledge. It is ‘given’. It enters the soul from beyond themselves; and carries with it the assurance that what really matters is not this little soul’s minute merit or experience, but the being, the boundless ‘grace' of that distinct and supernatural world, which thus reveals some of its secrets to the desiring heart of man.
(16) De Imitatione Christi, Bk. IV, cap. 13.
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'O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen.’(17)
This is the note that sounds in all St. Paul’s letters, and inspires his most passionate outbursts of admiration and love.
Julian of Norwich, in her Revelations of Love, tells us how she was shown in vision ‘a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut’; and how she looked at it with the eye of her understanding and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus ‘It is all that is made’. And she continues: ‘In this little thing, I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second is that God loves it. The third is that God keeps it. But what is to me verily the Maker and Keeper and Lover, I cannot tell’. (18)
In this characteristic mystical experience, we see how the whole emphasis falls on God’s Reality, and not merely on the soul’s personal apprehension; and we see too how chary is the true mystic of claiming definite knowledge. Julian proclaims the vividly felt fact of God’s instant and all-penetrating Reality; His unspeakable richness and wonder, creating, loving and upholding ‘all that is made’—a fact so great, that against this unmeasured love and power and being, the whole visible universe seems ‘the size of a hazel nut'. But when it comes to saying what this tremendous Reality can mean to her own little soul, words fail her.
Indeed that which, beyond all else, spiritual genius
(17) Romans xi, 33-36.
(18) Op. cit, cap. 5.
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never fails to give us, is this realistic sense of the overplus of Reality; a perfection exceeding in its totality and splendour all possible human apprehension. What we find is an experience in which personal and impersonal values are combined within a richly living whole. Hence the soul, struggling to convey its apprehension, uses by turns yet never with complete satisfaction the language of intimacy, the language of concept, and the language of space. Thus God is felt to be a boundless, all inclusive, all penetrating substance—Ocean, Patria, Light. Again He is Life, Joy, Peace; and, equally, a vivid personal Presence—Lover, Father, Friend. We shall not deal fairly with the situation or get any idea of the underlying richness which these stammering and always inadequate terms try to express, unless we bring together all three groups of metaphors; and, keeping ever in mind their allusive and symbolic character, see in them the struggles of the finite mind to suggest its experience of an ineffable Fact.
It is to the writings of the contemplatives, and to the mystical element present in all living theology, that we owe our best conceptions of this richness and distinctness of God; His infinite, spaceless yet vivid personality; the paradoxical union of Unknowable yet intimately known. In the words of Baron von Hiigel, the whole outlook of the mystic requires ‘belief in a Reality not less but more self-conscious than myself a Living One Who lives first and lives perfectly, and Who, touching me, the inferior, derivative life, can cause me to live by His aid and for His sake'.(19) All dwell with awe and worship on the contrast between their own state and this holy Reality of God. All have experienced in some measure an Infinite, an Eternal Life, which is no mere unending-
(19) F. von Hügel: Eternal Life, p. 385.
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ness, has in it no quality of succession, but is felt to be 'the All-inclusive, the Simultaneous, the Perfect, the Utterly-Satisfying’. (20) To say this, is once more to assert givenness: for where, within our poor little temporal experience, could such concepts be discovered by the soul?
Religious genius, then, in all its varieties and fluctuations, stands solidly against any and every merely subjective or psychological explanation of religious facts, and any and every merely immanental and pantheistic conception of God; asserting again and again His Eternal Perfection, independence and otherness. The one point on which definite knowledge seems always to be implied or claimed, is this changeless perfection, distinctness and actualness of God: His rich simplicity and plenitude. Whilst some may struggle to interpret their experience in personal, and others in abstract terms; for both, the ultimate Reality is absolute and complete. The real mystical experience, as St, Augustine put it, seems, always to be of ‘something which is insusceptible of change'.
'It is not enough,' says Gerlac Peterson, 'to know by estimation merely, but we must know by experience, that the soul looketh upon Him who looketh at all things past, present and to come at one glance, and that He thus speaketh to the soul.'
'I stand firm, and remain without changing. If thou couldst look upon Me, and see how unchangeable is My subsistence, and that in Me there is neither before nor after, but only the Selfsame, that I alone am: then wouldst thou too be able to be freed from all unevenness and perverse changeableness, and to be with Me in a certain sense the selfsame.' (21)
(2)
We are thus led to the second group of assertions made by the mystics; assertions which are indeed already involved in their very power of pronouncing upon the nature of Reality. I mean all those which declare that
(20) Ibid., Essays and Addresses, Series II, p. 208.
(21) The Fiery Soliloquy with God of the Rev. Master Gerlac Petersen, cap. II, p. 26.
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the human spirit can and does most directly and vividly experience this infinite, all-sustaining, unchanging and richly living God; though in widely varying ways and degrees.
Here the human passion for the Formula, the Law—the tendency to methodize, and attribute absolute value to the system on which we arrange the observed process of life—becomes peculiarly dangerous. We are dealing with human life, the most plastic, most beautifully various and intricate, least standardized of any kind of life known to us. And we are dealing with it, as it acts and exists on that mysterious shore where the physical and metaphysical meet. Therefore we must expect, and indeed welcome, paradox in our efforts to tell at least the tiny bit we know of this. We must not demand clarity, consistency, surface logic. We must guard against the constant temptation to concentrate on a striking feature of the landscape and forget the great expanse of quiet unimpressive fields. We must observe a due proportion between the solemn background and the lovely detailed foreground; the Eternal, and the human histories that emerge from it. As botany, whilst its entrancing subject matter requires the existence of the world of rock and soil that is dealt with by geology, does not necessarily tell us anything about that world’s ultimate being or ralson d’etre; so the existence and special characters of sanctity require the existence of God, but do not explain Him. Even at the point of apparent intimacy—perhaps most clearly at that point—the over-plus, the incalculable mystery, remains dominant; as Isaiah learnt, when he saw the seraphim who were nearest to God veil their faces before the awful Presence which asked for his personal service and determined his career.
It is only in this, the truly scientific mood of humility
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and reverent agnosticism, that we can safely consider or seek to classify within the three elastic headings of general character, method and result, the experiences which spiritual genius reports to us. Broadly speaking those experiences
(a) have a vocational character:
(b) they introduce the self into a life which is more and more fully controlled by man’s characteristic spiritual activity, prayer:
(c) they effect a fundamental transformation of personality.
‘When,’ says Ruysbroeck, ‘we follow the Radiance that is above reason with a simple sight, and with a willing leaning out of ourselves towards our highest life, then we experience the transformation of our whole selves in God: and thereby we feel ourselves to be wholly enwrapped in God.” (22)
Those few lines tell all that we know about the supernatural life in man. If we remove them from the level of religion to that of psychology—if we regard them as the struggle of a great and sincere mind to tell us something that has really happened to himself—do they not cast a new light on the mysteries and possibilities of our personality, and the nature of the objective which is set before human desire?
They mean that the thing we know so vaguely and tentatively as the human self is a yet unfinished bit of creation. It is emerging from ‘Nature' but destined for something other than Nature; and sometimes it achieves its goaL ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself.' This experience of the Infinite Spirit, in which the finite spirit finds its meaning and therefore its rest, is not achieved but ‘given’; yet being thus given, can be improved. By giving it his attention, and acting in conformity with it, ‘willingly leaning out towards his highest life’, man can change and enhance his whole existence; becoming, as St. Augustine says, more real. This direct though dim
(22) The Sparkling Stone, cap. 10.
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and never full experience—this loving apprehension which is never comprehension—yet answers man’s perpetual craving for a principle of perfection and stability. It is, in its widely differing degrees of penetrative power and richness, ranging between the extremes of abstraction and personal communion, the mystical element found at the heart of all great religions: and belief in its concrete reality involves important consequences for our view of the texture of existence and the higher reaches of human life.
(a) The first character which we note as peculiar to man’s experience of the Supernatural, is that which I have called vocation. This experience in its essence is not merely a revelation of new reaches of reality, an enlargement of the field of consciousness. We might thus describe our aesthetic or philosophic apprehensions; but not our apprehension of God. This appears always to contain, either virtually or actually, an element of demand. The little creature is stirred and called by something over against itself, not only to a new knowledge and intercourse, a new happiness and assurance, but also to a new level of life and of action; a life and action which, whether it fulfil itself in a humble or in a spectacular way, is yet definitely orientated to other-worldly aims and carries other-worldly sanctions. This in itself involves an interference with human history, difficult to explain on naturalistic grounds. The inciting Power requires and obtains from its creature a “definite response, set towards a definite end.
True mystical experience is therefore never self-complete. It occurs at a point of penetration of the historical by the Eternal; a penetration which, whether small or great, sets going a series, always of psychological and often too of physical events. Thus it never leaves
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the human subject at the level at which it found him.
It appears as a transforming energy, which compels the experient to conform to new standards and try to do hard things. Whatever the language, tradition, or symbol through which such a dynamic experience of the supernatural comes to man, whatever its limitations or temperamental form, the effects are always vital effects. The ordinary sequence of natural life may continue; but it is seen, now and ever after, in supernatural regard. The soul suddenly perceives within that natural life further unguessed possibilities opening before it; fresh heights and depths of existence, and fresh opportunities of work and of love, which require, indeed insistently demand, its co-operation at every point.
We could illustrate this from every age of religious history. Thus, in one of the most primitive yet most impressive descriptions in literature of a pure supernatural experience, the appearance to Moses in the burning bush, the revelation of the numinous is immediately followed by the compelling sense of vocation: ‘Go, and I will be with thy mouth and teach thee what thou shalt say’;(23) and the strange history of Israel, at once so natural and so supernatural, begins. Thus, when Isaiah sees the ‘glory of God in his temple' that sudden majestic vision of Reality first brings awe and abasement. He, the faulty human creature, is overwhelmed by a sense of shame and imperfection over against perfect holiness. But this is only the preliminary to a painful, fiery purification, preparing a call to service and an eager response: Here am I. Send me’.(24) Thus St. Paul, suddenly subjugated on the road to Damascus, passes directly from Revelation to command: ‘Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.’(25)
(23) Exodus iv. 12.
(24) Isaiah vi. 1-8.
(25) Acts ix. 6
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The supernatural touch is given, which sets going the chain of historical events that created the Catholic Church. Thus the same revelation compels St. Augustine to ‘take and read’, and presently demands that apparent sacrifice of a promising worldly career which turned a successful and self-indulgent young professor into a Father of the Christian Church.(26) Again, Francis of Assisi, praying in S. Damiano, is ‘smitten by unwonted visitations’, and ‘finds himself another man than he was before’. At once he seems to hear the voice of Christ saying to him : ‘Francis, repair my house’ ; and, ‘trembling and utterly amazed’, he prepares to obey. (27) So too the modern French mystic Lucie-Christine says of her first great religious experience, that she suddenly saw with her inward eye the words: ‘God only!’ and those words were to her ‘a Light, an Attraction and a Power’.(28) She saw truth, she responded to it with delighted love, she received a new dower of energy the power to live that life of devotion in the world to which she was called. Mind, heart and will were all enhanced.
Now take all these together. Take specially “the three young Hebrews, severally destined to be a great lawgiver, prophet, apostle. Take the young African and the young Italian, so decisively called from the world, to vivify, re-spiritualize in different ways, the Catholic Church. Take the young French wife and mother, called to sanctify the simple life of the home through her prayer and love, and exhibit to our generation the normality of the contemplative life. Through each of these souls, something enters human history and changes it. In all, we see clearly beneath superficial differences the working of one power, evoking one general type of
(26) St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. VIII, cap. 8.
(27) Thomas of Celano, Legenda II, cap. 6.
(28) Journal Spirituel de Lucie-Christine, p. 11.
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reaction. In each we have the same sequence of awed apprehension, imperative vocation, generous unhesitating response. The centre of the creature’s interest is removed to fresh levels. A new life, a new career is begun; having at its heart, indeed in its very blood, a new activity, a new ferment, distinct in kind and in intention from all that belongs to the ‘natural’ life of men, but leavening more and more that ‘natural' life.
(b) The working of this ferment—perhaps the most mysterious and universal of all the instinctive processes of human life—the mystics alone show us in its fullest development. It is that special activity of the spirit, so apparently unrelated to the creature’s physical being and needs, which is called, in the most general sense, Prayer. The evolution of prayer, from the naïve petitions of the child and savage to the adoring contemplations of the saint, is surely one of the most curious and significant chapters in the history of man’s consciousness; one of the greatest contributory testimonies to the actualness of the spiritual world. It is indeed so curious and so important that it will require special treatment by itself; and is only introduced here, in order that we may note the fact that this special activity, occasioned by God, directed to God, and having no meaning whatever without God, is developed by the saints and mystics to a surprising richness and power.
(c) The final test of that valid experience of the supernatural which is claimed by the mystics, is never that which they tell us about Reality, but always that which their special experience of Reality causes them to be. It is in his growth, choice, work, sacrifice, endurance all that he does with the raw stuff of his natural life, and mostly in defiance of his natural preferences, in and for the felt and loved Reality, that man proves
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his possession of a spiritual life. That life places the heroic, the unearthly, the absolute, the non-utilitarian love which is fed by prayer, at the very heart of existence; and steadily makes all other interests subservient to this. And the result, when seen in its perfect form, is such a complete sublimation of impulse, such a re-direction of life, as makes, in the crisp language of St. Paul, a 'new creature’ though a new creature for which, as a matter of fact, most of the old material is cleansed and used again.
It is this transformation, accomplished in its fullness, which makes the saint stand out as a special variety of the race. Indeed, only those persons in whom that costly and genuine change has at least begun to take place, have any real idea of what religion means. The new line of growth thus set going, with its increase in love and creative energy—the real power of the saint to help and redeem his fellows, the social radiation of his spiritual force—this seems to result, not from any mere negative sinlessness, but from a certain real though still imperfect sharing in the achieved perfection of Eternal Life. Thus, from the admitted transformation and enhancement of personality worked by a faithful and continued response to Other-worldly demands, we obtain another series of indirect testimonies to the realities of man’s two-fold nature; and a scheme within which to place those isolated heroic acts, those lovely unwitting responses to the secret demands of holiness and love, which redeem the fabric of the common life.
On this dual fact of something virtually or actually perceived and loved beyond the world, and something done because of it—the balance struck between space and tension, faith and works—the soul’s movement in and through history and succession to the transcendent
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yet truly present Goal of history and succession on this rich paradox, the greatest spiritual teachers of the race have insisted again and again. It is this two-fold character of their testimony, which gives to the mystical saints their extraordinary impressiveness. They do not merely enjoy, but incarnate their apprehensions: bringing them, often through desperate purifications and sufferings, into direct relation within the stream of human existence. Dramatizing within nature that which they apprehend beyond nature, they make their very lives a sacrament. We can watch them in history being transformed made, in their own strong language, ‘deiform’ by faitnful response to supernatural influences. It is from them that we have learned what adventures, sufferings and joys, await the human spirit, when it definitely enters upon the supernatural life.
Nor need we go to startling heroisms and asceticisms for demonstrations of the intimate claim and presence of this life. Every recognition of an Absolute is a sort of religious experience, a sort of acknowledgement of supernature ; and this recognition may take the form of spontaneous action, rising from the deeps of personality in apparent defiance of ‘rational beliefs’. So with many sudden heroic acts. So with much patient devotion, done without a clear conception of a ‘Why’, but under the quiet pressure of a secret ‘Must'. Hence it is often the most homely and commonplace which bears most heart-piercing witness to the unceasing pressure, incitement and support of that unearthly love which theologians call ‘grace’. The poor slum mother in her patient and apparently hopeless self-spending, the willing sufferer who transmutes pain into an actual source of spiritual strength and joy, the inconspicuous sacrifices and the seemingly
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unrewarded labours of thousands of men and women, hardly aware of the impulse which controls their lives: these, equally with the specialized disciplines and renunciations to which all fully religious souls are drawn, witness to the concrete reality of the supernatural, and its overwhelming authority for human life.
Thus we are led by diverse routes to the conclusion that religious genius can and does give us special news about metaphysical truth, which is not obtainable from any other type of mind. For those who feel themselves to be wholly enwrapped in God have at least a worldview detached from mere succession, and startlingly different from that of the mass of men. They are poised on a Reality which is no mere subjective satisfaction. It is there first—given, concrete, objective, vividly alive—and for them, and those who come to believe their declarations, its existence must condition all lesser realities. The fact that this Given Truth, so vividly felt in full religious experience, is not present to the average consciousness, is surely no argument against its actualness. For if in the ordinary way, we cannot realize our physical status, flying through space upon a whirling ball; but owe our “very knowledge of it to the observations and deductions of special minds then, surely, it is not strange that the fact of our spiritual status should lie far beyond the common grasp. If we cannot really enter into and appreciate the dim surrounding life of animals and plants, how can we hope to enter into and appreciate the vivid and intense reality of higher levels of being; above all, of that Life within which all condition and comparison cease? Here too we might expect, at least in the first instance, to depend on those who have given all their attention and love to these levels of truth, ‘leaning out
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of themselves towards their higher life' ; and only by attending to their reports and directions, gradually learn to see a little for ourselves.
I do not of course mean by this that we are committed to uncritical acceptance of the reports of the mystics: still less, that religion can safely be based on such reports alone. Here we may and must impose the same tests as those by which reason tests the reports of physical science: namely, substantial unity of witness, the absence of fundamental contradictions, and the power of uniting in one system a large number of observed facts. In their own words, the mystics may transcend reason but they must not contradict it. Neither must they contradict, though they may improve, the general religious and moral sense of the group in which they arise. Moreover, the reality disclosed by these experimental theists must in some measure be valid for all. It must be wide as well as deep: in Ruysbroeck’s phrase, a ‘world that is unwalled,’ not a ring-fenced enclosure marked ‘Saints only'. The relation which they tell us that they experience must be the intense form of a relation already implicit in the spiritual nature of man. If this experience of religious genius has value for us, it must be because it is not a thing apart; but rather represents the highest point reached in the vast upward surge of human consciousness to that which lies beyond and above itself, and for which, nevertheless, it craves.
And surely, as a matter of fact, the experimental certitude of the great contemplative does crown, and is supported by, the whole mass of that transcendental feeling, that insistent refusal to be satisfied with the here and now, the impermanent and the fleeting, which takes sometimes a philosophic, sometimes an aesthetic, and sometimes a religious form. To call this ‘absolute feeling’ is
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to beg a great philosophic question. It seems better to mark its utter distinctness from all our reactions to the sense-world by calling it ‘supernatural feeling’: for I believe most firmly that, if we are ever to achieve a truly fruitful religious philosophy, this will only be done by bringing back into the scheme that deep sense of an independent spiritual world over against us, which this term in spite of its many unhappy associations still implies.
