[p.157] The second stage of any great movement has often a significance as great as, if not greater than the first. Then it is that we begin to know whether life's initial effort is destined to success, whether it is indeed on its way to new creations and new levels; or whether this new movement, this saltatory ascent that seemed so full of possibilities, is only a passing freak, a variation which cannot be transmitted — another eddy of dust in the wind.
Had it been left to the original apostles to carry forward the Christian impulse of new life — to repeat the "fortunate variation" which flamed out in Jesus of Nazareth, and fix it — we can feel little doubt that this fresh creation would have twisted on its tracks, have wavered, sunk and died, when the stimulus of His great presence was withdrawn and the generation which knew Him in the flesh had passed away. Our earnest of the fact that the life of Jesus was no sporadic freak, but a genuine phase in cosmic evolution, a part of the great movement of things — that here life's mightiest, most significant ascent was caught in progress — is the further fact that this did not happen: that a stranger, who "knew Him not after the flesh" yet takes up the forward push where He left it, picked out as it were by the wind of the Spirit to live and grow in the new way.
Paul, who was the first to declare that the essence of the Christian mystery was growth and transmutation, and that the only Christian life was that which followed the curve of the human life of Christ,[1] was himself, so far as we know, the first to exhibit this organic process of [p.158] development in its fulness; and grow "from glory to glory" to man's full stature along the path which Jesus had cut for the race. It is the leading thought of the New Testament," says Dr Matheson, "and it is the specially prominent thought in the writings of St Paul, that the life of the Christian Founder is repeated in the lives of His followers; that the stages of each Christian's experience are designed to be a reproduction of those stages by which the Son of Man passed from Bethlehem to Calvary.
[A further reiteration of the point that perfection lay, and lies, in the process by which Christ came to full stature, the "mystic way" that forms the subject of this book. Christ himself, at least initially, was not "perfect", of "full stature" but exemplified in his life the method by which full spiritual stature was to be attained. (There is also, lurking, something more than a suggestion that it is therefore the only method.) DCW]
Paul has himself declared that the process of Christian development is a process whereby the follower of Christ "is transformed into the same image from glory to glory" No words can more adequately express his view of the nature of this new spiritual order. It is a transformation, not only into an image of the master, but into that progressive form in which the image of the master unfolded itself. The Christian is to ascend by the steps of the same ladder on which the life of the Son of Man climbed to its goal; he is to proceed from "glory to glory" ... No man can read Paul's epistles without being impressed on every page with the predominance of this thought. [2]
It is no new thing to claim St Paul as a mystic; or, at least, as an exponent, amongst other things, of what are called "mystical" ideas. The problem of the part such ideas play in his message has often been attacked; in various ways, leading, as one might expect, to contradictory conclusions. [3] The other and more fundamental problem, [p.159] however, of his relations to the mystic Life, the Mystic Way — the history, that is to say, of his inward growth, his slow development of the transcendental consciousness — has been almost entirely neglected; and those who have come nearest to solving it, notably Matheson in The Spiritual Development of St Paul, and Deissmann in St Paul, have failed to see, or to set out, the many close and significant parallels which his life presents with the experience of the Christian Founder and the Christian saints.
It might be thought that the confused and scanty records which we possess of the life of St Paul were not sufficient to allow us to compare his psychological development with the standard diagram of man's spiritual growth . But by a comparison of the authentic epistles with the fragments of biography embedded in Acts, more can be made out than might at first be supposed. [4] As a matter of fact, he is the supreme example of the Christian mystic: of a "change of mind" resulting in an enormous dower of vitality: of a career of impassioned activity, of "divine fecundity" second only to that of Jesus Himself. In him, the new life breaks out, shows itself in its dual aspect; the deep consciousness of Spiritual Reality which is characteristic of the contemplative nature, supporting a practical genius for concrete things. The Teresian principle that the object of the Spiritual Marriage is the incessant production of work, received in him its most [p.160] striking illustration: he was indeed "to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man." Paul's great family of spiritual children, the train of churches ablaze with his spirit which he left in his wake, are alone enough to demonstrate that he lived upon high levels the mystic life. ["A mystic who has attained the unitive state will be an intensely active and effective person." This, over and over again is urged as a key theme in EU's work, matched only, perhaps by the emotional energy of her distaste for the Quietists. DCW]
The stages through which this great active [!!! DCW] moved to perfect harmony with the Life of God, are plainly marked in the story of his life. His conversion, the experience which lies behind the three rather dissimilar versions given in Acts, [5] was of course characteristically mystical. Those prudent scholars who would explain away the light, the voice, the blindness, the vivid consciousness of a personal and crucial encounter with the spiritual world as picturesque exaggerations due to Luke's "literary and unscientific" attitude of mind, [6] will find little support for their view in the annals of religious psychology. When spiritual intuitions, — more, spiritual imperatives — long submerged and working below the threshold, break their way into the field of consciousness and capture the centres of feeling and of will, the change effected has nothing in common with the mild intellectual acquiescence in new ideas, the sober and judicious weighing of evidence, which may be at the bottom of any less momentous "change of mind".
That which happens is a veritable psychic storm, abrupt and ungovernable; of greater or lesser fury, according to the strength of the nature in which it takes place. When that nature is destined to the career of a great mystic, the volitional element is certain to preponderate. It will oppose, perhaps to the last moment, in growing agony of mind — yet with a fierceness which has in it the germ of the heroic — the steady, remorseless pressure of the transcendental sense; thus inflicting upon itself all the tortures of a hopeless resistance. "How hard it is for thee to kick against the goad!" Hence, [p.161] warded off as it were to the last, the change, when it comes, comes with a catastrophic violence: tearing the old world to pieces, smashing to fragments the old state of consciousness, instantly establishing the new. The sword of the spirit is about to cut its way through to fresh levels of reality; and, turning sharply in the new direction, crushes and wounds the hard tissues of selfhood which have grown closely around it, held it down to its business of serving an individual life.
All those incidents which Luke reports of Paul's conversion — and we must look upon them as fragments remembered and set down, from Paul's own efforts to describe indescribable events — find many parallels in the history of the mystics. The violence and unexpectedness, the irrevocable certitude and prompt submission — "I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision" [7] — the accompanying sensation of intense light, the revelation of transcendant Personality conveyed under the forms of vision and voice as the "triumphing spiritual power" floods and conquers a strong and resistant consciousness: all this is part of the usual machinery by which a change in the direction of life is brought home to the surface intelligence.
Normal, too, is the direct connection between this abrupt change of mind and a profound and permanent change of life: that sense of the influx of novelty, which never left him, and which breaks out again and again in his works. Every great mystic who has passed through this crisis knows himself to be thus "a new creature", dead to his old universe, old interests and old fears. For him, in this sudden moment of readjustment, all values are transvaluated: "old things are passed away: behold, all things are become new." [8]
Thus, St Francis of Assisi, "smitten by unwonted visitations" in the church of St Damiano, "finds himself another man" than the creature he had known as his "self" before. For him, too, as for St Paul, the new and [p162] overwhelming apprehension of Reality is at once crystallised in vision and audition — the speaking crucifix — and in a direct command, an appeal to the active will. [9] Thus, St Catherine of Genoa, when the moment of her spiritual adolescence was come, "suddenly received in her heart the wound of the unmeasured love of God," with so clear an intuition of her own relation to the spiritual world, now laid bare to her lucid vision, that "she almost fell upon the ground." At this point, "if she had possessed a thousand worlds, she would have thrown al of them away." [10] Rulman Merswin, the merchant of Strassburg, bred in orthodox piety like Saul of Tarsus himself, was suddenly turned from it to the Mystic Way. "A brilliant light shone around him; he heard in his ears a divine voice of adorable sweetness; he felt as if he were lifted from the ground and carried several times around the garden." [11] Pascal, caught to his two hours' ecstatic vision of the Fire, obtains like Paul from this abrupt illumination an overwhelming revelation of personality — not the God of philosophers and scholars — and a "certitude" which demands and receives the "total surrender" of his heart, intellect and will. [12]
The reverberations, too, of such an upheaval are often felt through the whole psycho-physical organism: showing themselves in disharmonies of many different kinds. Thus Suso in his conversion, "suffered so greatly that it seemed to him that none, even dying, could suffer so greatly in so short a time." [13] "A deep, rich age of growth," says Baron von Hugel, "is then compressed into some minutes of poor clock-time" [14] — with the resultant wear and tear of a physical body adapted to another, slower rhythm. So it may well be that Paul was [p.163] struck with a physical blindness by the splendour of the Uncreated Light, and "was three days without sight and neither did eat nor drink." [15]
There is, then, at any rate, the strongest of probabilities that his experience "when it pleased God to reveal His Son in me" did conform in its general outlines to the account which is given in Acts. Here there was not, as in the case of Jesus, an easy thoroughfare for the inflowing spirit of life. "As the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth even unto the west," a flash that rends asunder the spiritual sky, it came tearing apart the hard tissues of selfhood, breaking down the old adjustments, and cutting with violence the path of its discharge. How wide the difference between two natures which could dramatise the same experience, one as "Thou art My beloved Son", and the other as "Saul, Saul! Why persecutest thou Me?" Yet how close the identity between the two lines of growth which led one to the surrender of Gesthemane, and the other to "I live, yet not I!" Only this can explain the paradox of Paul's career: the fact that although he "never knew Jesus during His lifetime, nevertheless it was he who understood Him best." [16]
St Paul's proceedings after his conversion are no less characteristic of the peculiar mystic type. His first instinct was an instinct of retreat. "Immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood; neither went I up to Jerusalem to them that were apostles before me." The transcendant fiat that had torn his being asunder did not need to be supported by the reminiscences of those who had known Jesus in the flesh. "But I went into Arabia." [17] — alone into a desert country: a proceeding which at once reminds us of the retreat of Jesus into the wilderness. This phase in Paul's career of course corresponds with that period of solitude and withdrawal from the world which nearly every great mystic has felt to be the essential [p.164] sequel of that mighty upheaval in which their transcendental faculties emerge. The soul then retreats into the "cell of self-knowledge" "cleansing its interior mirror", says Richard of St Victor, from the earth stains which distort its reflection of the Real: a slow and difficult process which cannot be undertaken in the bustle of the world of things. We have seen how generally the need of such a period of seclusion is felt [18]: as in St Anthony's twenty years of self-imprisonment in the ruined fort, St Catherine of Siena's three years of hermit like solitude, Suso's sixteen years of monastic enclosure, the retreat of St Ignatius at Manresa, St Teresa's struggle to withdraw from the social intercourse that she loved, the three years of lonely wandering and inward struggles which prepared the great missionary career of George Fox. Paul, alone in the Arabian desert, "in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often," [19] orienting his whole nature to the new universe disclosed to him, "when he has seen Christ lighten in that dawn," did but submit, like his brothers and sisters, to a necessary phase of all spiritual growth.
It was from this long period of self-discipline and self-adjustment, from deep brooding on the revelation of Damascus, not from any apostolic statement about the human career of Jesus, that the Pauline gospel emerged. It was the "good news" of a new kind of life experienced, not of a prophecy fulfilled. "Grace and faith and power ... this I knew experimentally," says Fox. So, Paul: "I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ."[20]
The whole preparatory experience of Fox, whose character provides so many Pauline parallels, may help us to understand something of this phase in Paul's life — the difficult changes which prepared him for the emergence of the "illuminated consciousness", the personal interior [p.165] "showing" or revelation which became the central fact of his new career.
"I cannot," he says, "declare the great misery I was in, it was so great and heavy upon me, so neither can I set forth the mercies of God unto me in all my misery ... when all my hope in them and in all men was gone so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do; then, O! then I heard a voice which said, 'There is one, even Christ Jesus that can speak to thy condition,' and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy ... though I read the Scriptures that spake of Christ and of God, yet I knew Him not but by revelation." [21]
Dating his conversion AD 33 [22], and the retreat in Arabia and return to Damascus AD 34 - 35, St Paul's first visit as a Christian to Jerusalem took place c AD 36. [23] There, praying in the Temple — a spot charged for his religious and racial consciousness with countless memories and suggestions — he experienced his first ecstacy; a characteristically mystic combination of vision, audition and trance, in which the ferment of his inner life, its paradoxical sense of unworthiness and greatness, swaying between pain-negation and joy-affirmation, found artistic expression. The agony of contrition for the past — "Lord, they know that I imprisoned and beat in every synagogue them that believed on Thee" — is balanced by prophetic knowledge of the future, an abrupt intuition of his amazing destiny — "I will send thee far hence unto the Gentiles." [24]
This vision seems to correspond in time with the ecstacy described in II Corinth. xii. 4; in which Paul, caught up to the third heaven, "heard unspeakable words." Comparison with the lives of the mystics shows how frequently such ecstatic perception — such abrupt and [p.166] temporary emergence of the growing transcendental power, lifting the consciousness to levels of Eternal Life — breaks out in the early part of the "Purgative Way". "Whilst I was wrestling and battling," says Jacob Boehme, "being aided by God, a wonderful light arose in my soul. It was a light entirely foreign to my unruly nature; but in it I recognised the true nature of God and man, and the relation existing between them, a thing which heretofore I had never understood, and for which I would never have sought." [25] "One day," says Fox, "when I had been walking solitarily abroad and was come home, I was taken up in the love of God so that I could not but admire the greatness of His Love; and while I was in that condition, it was opened unto me by the Eternal light and power." [26] So too Henry Suso tells us that "in the first days after his conversion," being alone in the choir, his soul was rapt "in his body or out of his body," and he saw and heard ineffable things, by which his prayers and hopes were all fulfilled. He saw a "Shining Brightness, a manifestation of the sweetness of Eternal Life in the sensations of silence and rest." The ecstacy lasted nearly an hour; and "when he came to his senses, it seemed to him that he returned from another world." [27]
There folowed upon this first visit to Jerusalem a period of ten or twelve years, in which Paul seems to havbe been involved in u seful but inconspicuous work in the Christian cause: a long, quiet time of growth, which is often overlooked by those who are dazzled by the dash and splendour of his missionary career. But the powers that marked that missionary career were not yet developed. The interior instinct which became vocative in his ecstacy, and told him he was "called to the Gentiles" had to conquer many oppositions in his individual and national consciousness before it could become effective for life. During this time Paul's rank was that of an ordinary teacher; not even that of a [p. 167] "prophet", much less an "apostle", a word to which great and definite meaning was attached by the early Church. He goes to Antioch in AD 43 merely as the assistant of Barnabas, [28] who had befriended him when his past record as an agent of persecution made him an object of suspicion to the Church. This long period, then, forms part of the "Purgative Way"; the transmuting of character in the interests of new life, the slow, hard growth and education of the transcendental consciousness. In St Teresa's case, the equivalent period, to the point at which she was impelled to leave her convent and begin her independent career of reform, lasted thirty years; and included, as with Paul, visionary and ecstatic phenomena. [29]
When we consider what Paul's position must have been within the Christian community — that small, strait body, not perhaps very bright-minded, living upon the "Spirit" which a regnant personality had left behind — we begin to realise how great an education in the characteristically mystic qualities of humility, charity, mortification, and detachment the long period of subordinate work at Antioch may have involved. Twelve years submission to one's spiritual and intellectual inferiors, obeying orders upon which one could easily improve: twelve years of loyal service, subject all the while to a certain doubt and suspicion, yet inwardly conscious of huge latent powers, of a vocation divinely ordained — this is no small test of character.
[Pardon me for interrupting, but I have a delightful suspicion that this may also be a record of EU's relationship with the old men of the Anglican Church as she sought to have the status of the mystical element of the Church accorded greater recognition. DCW]
It transformed the arrogant and brilliant Pharisee into a person who had discovered that long-suffering and gentleness were amongst the primary fruits of the Spirit of God. Perhaps we may trace back to this period the origin of his recognition of the supremacy of the "love that seeketh not its own, suffereth long, and is kind," as transcending in importance even the burning faith and hope on which he lived.
The entrance of St Paul on the "Way of Illumination" — the point, that is to say, at which his transcendental [p.168] powers definitely captured the centres of consciousness, and pain and struggle gave way before the triumphant inflow of a new vitality — seems to coincide with the beginning of his first missionary journey, c. 47 - 48. More, this change, this access of power in him, apears to have been felt intuitively, either by the whole community — still living at those high levels of close sympathy and spiritual fervour on which such collective intuitions can be experienced — or by one of those prophetic spirits in whom its consciousness was summed up and expressed. Whether or no Paul had communicated to these his interior knowledge of vocation, now at any rate they realise that the hour for him had struck. "While they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for Me now, at once, Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." [30]
As his Master "went forth in the power of the Spirit," so now this "first fruits of new life." We see by the language of Acts from this point onwards that, in its writer's opinion, the Paul thus separated for a great career was a very different personality from the obscure and industrious teacher, Saul, the protege of Barnabas; whose unfortunate past was no doubt remembered by his fellow Christians, if generously overlooked. No sooner is the work begun than this change becomes obvious. Paul starts upon his travels as the subordinate — at best the equal — of Barnabas, "with John to their minister." But by the time that they reach Cyprus, his transfigured personality has taken command. In primitive Christian language, he is "filled with the Holy Ghost". the "spark of the soul," the growing spiritual man, now irradiates his whole character and inspires his speech. [31]
Soon, psychic automatism manifests itself: not only in the "visions and revelations of the Lord" which from [p.169] this time onwards accompanied and directed his whole career, [32] but in the inspired and ecstatic utterance in which he excelled all his fellow-Christians [33], in gifts of suggestion [34] and healing. [35] The "secondary personality of a superior type" is making ever more successful incursions into the field of consciousness. It fills Paul with a sense of fresh power, "opens doors" on new spheres of activity, overrules his most considered plans, and compels him to declare to others this new-found Reality in which he lives and moves and has his being. This sense of an irresistible vocation, of being a tool in the hands of "the Spirit" is stamped on all his work. "Though I preach the gospel," he says to the Corinthians, " I have nothing to glory of, for necessity is laid upon me: for woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel." [36] It is no common "creed", but a direct intimation of the Transcendent, a life, by which he is possessed; and whose secret he struggles to communicate. "By the grace of God I am what I am." ... "I make known to you, brethren, as touching the gospel which was preached by me, that it is not after man. For neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ." [37]
The way that this inflow of novelty worked in the mind of Paul is peculiarly significant for the subsequent [p. 170] history of the Christian type. This new life that he had, that he felt and experienced, seemed to him so strange, so remote from life as he had known it, that he could not call it his own. "I live, yet not I": something else, something distinct from mere human selfhood, has taken the reins.. He is "possessed" and driven, his whole being enhanced, by somewhat not himself: "by the grace of God I am what I am". From a mingling of this experience with tradition, the two fused together with an intellect of strongly poetic and creative cast, he elaborated his marvellous dream of a mystical and exalted Christ, spiritual yet actual, personal yet omnipresent, of whose body all who shared His life were "Members"; of the believers' existence in Him and His existence in the transmuted soul [38] — the report of concrete fact under the beautiful veils of religious imagination. This presence, this supernal comradeship, was to him so actual that it made all investigation of the records or memories of the life of Jesus seem superfluous. As we do not interrogate the past of our friends in order to make sure that they exist in the present, so, the immediacy of Paul's apprehension obscured for him the interest of historical facts.
[Just butting in a moment with a reminder that EU is in fact imposing on the available evidence an interpretation that is consistent with it, but travels well beyond, and she is, I believe, using her own mystical experience as a likely replica of what it must have been like for Paul. To the extent that my own experience in this area is also consistent with her interpretation, I am happy to accept this surmise, but recognise it for what it is. DCW]
More and more, as growth went on in him, he lived under the direction of that swiftly growing mystic consciousness. The "Spirit" which dwelt in his body as a Presence in a shrine declared itself to be in touch with another plane of being, controlled all his actions, directed the very route by which he must travel, and spoke with an authoritative voice. "They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden of the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. ... the assayed to go into Bythnia; and the Spirit of Jesus suffered them not ... Paul was constrained by the Word." [39]
Even so has many a mystic placed on record the involuntary nature of his most successful activities. Teresa's foundations were [p.171] most often made, in defiance of common sense, in obedience to the mandates of an interior voice; nor had she ever cause to regret her obedience to it [40] "Then was I moved of the Lord to go up unto them," says Fox of one of his less discreet adventures, "and when they had done I spake to them what the Lord commanded to me, and they were pretty quiet ... they asked me why we came thither; I said, God moved us so to do." [41] In such cases as these we see again the action of the same directive consciousness which "opened doors" before Paul the traveller and the seer.
Yet, deliberate mortification, incessant self-discipline, that "wise and noble, warm because ever love-impelled, asceticism," [42] which is the gymnastic of the adolescent soul, persists during the whole of this period of Paul's career . As the athletes who run in games, so this great runner runs on the highway of new life: with a clear consciousness of the need for perpetual self-control, of a latent antagonism between the "flesh" and the "spirit", the old levels of existence and the new.
[This is one aspect of especially Pauline mysticism, but also of Christian mysticism in general, that disturbs me, and it has given rise, directly or indirectly, in the historic Church, to the ongoing horrific persecution of so-called evil in others — for the benefit of their immortal soul, of course —and generated a record of torture and slaughter unparallelled until the racial purification fantasies of the Nazis in Germany.
From my own experience, this seems an almost pathological obsession with a process which is fundamentally separative, working against the experience of unity. Resisting not evil, seeking first the kingdom in and of itself seems to me to deal with the problem. If the kingdom is the focus, what is separative simply falls away, as dark vanishes with the advent of light. (I note that EU elsewhere also tends to regard at least some aspects of the mortification practices as pathological.) DCW]
The secret, ceaseless work of growing, stretching, testing, training, is the background of his marvellous career. "Every competitor in an athletic contest,' he says, "practices abstemiousness in all directions. They do indeed do this for the sake of securing a perishable wreath; but we, for the sake of securing one that will not perish. That is how I run, not being in any doubt as to my goal. I am a boxer who does not inflict blows on the air, but I hit hard and straight at my own body and lead it off into slavery, lest possibly after I have been a herald to others I should myself be rejected." [43]
Here we look deep into Paul's interior life: to find it governed, like the life of all great mystics during their period of development, by the sense of unresolved disharmonies, [p.172] the alternate and conflicting consciousness of perfect spirit and imperfect man. "We have," he says — and a personal conviction, a personal experience, shines in the words — "this treasure in earthen vessels, that the exceeding greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves. We are pressed on every side, yet not straitened; perplexed yet not unto despair; pursued yet not forsaken; smitten down, yet not destroyed." [44]
Once more we see the enormous difference in quality between the nature of Jesus and that of His first and greatest successor. With Him, the stress and effort which is felt behind all Paul's attainments are concentrated into the two swift and furious battles of the wilderness and of Gesthemane. they were enough to make straight the thoroughfare of His ascending life. The consciousness which won each battle and became dominant for the succeeding period of growth, was untainted by that sense of unresolved discords, or "sin" somewhere latent — the perpetual possibility of degeneration — which haunts Paul, and after him the greatest of the Christian mystics; sometimes impelling them to an exaggerated practice of mortification.
As with most illuminatives, however, so with Paul, it is the joyful awareness of enhanced life which prevails: the consciousness of new power and freedom, of adoption into the Kingdom of Real Things.
[Note here that EU characterises Paul's state as "illuminative", not "unitive". For her the difference is crucial. Paul does not attain to unitive consciousness until the period of his last letters, and especially Philippians. DCW]
"Am I not an apostle? am I not free?" he asks, writing to the Corinthians; and claims that on his visit to them (AD 53- 54) "the signs of an apostle were wrought among you in all patience, in signs and wonders and mighty deeds." [45] Taken literally — and there is really no ground for refusing so to take it — this is a stupendous statement; especially when it is compared with the twelve years of subordinate inconspicuous work in a provincial church which had preceded it. When we compare this state of things with the careers of other mystics, we find such a growth of the [p.173] automatic powers, such an enhancement of personality and genius for success, together with the claim of living by "revelation" — profound and life-giving ecstacies upholding the active career — and the experience of the "pressure of the Spirit" to be highly characteristic of the period of illumination.
The self has attained to a state of equilibrium, a condition of interior harmony with, and joyful response to, the constant sense of a Divine Presence which accompanies it, and it floods the consciousness with a certainty of attainment, authority and power: in Eucken's phrase, a "triumphing spiritual life".
This enabling presence Paul of course identifies with the exalted Christ. He speaks of the "power of Christ" which can be "put on", and in many oblique phrases refers to the experience of a supernal companionship — "Christ in me" — as the source of his certitude and strength. So, too, his brothers and sisters in the Spirit: "When the soul doth feel the presence of God more deeply than is customary," says Angela of Foligno, "then doth it certify unto itself that He is within it. It doth feel it, I say, with an understanding so marvellous and so profound, and with such great love and divine fire, that it loseth all love for itself and for the body, and it speaketh and knoweth and understandeth those things which it hath never heard from any mortal whatsoever. And it understandeth with great illumination, and with much difficulty doth hold its peace ... Thus doth the soul feel that God is mingled with it, and hath made companionship with it." [46] "Not to believe that He was present was not in my power," says Teresa of her own experience in this kind, "for it seemed to me that I felt His presence." [47] "The Lord's power brake forth; and I had great openings and prophecies," says Fox. [48] The spiritual man is growing and stretching himself, finding ever new and amazing correspondences with Reality; correspondences which he [p.174] expresses to himself by vision, voice or overpowering intuition, and which condition him in practical as in spiritual affairs: as when Brother Lawrence was helped by this inward presence in the business of buying wine for his convent, a matter in which his naive ignorance was complete. [49]
A more human mark of Paul's thoroughly mystical temperament can be referred to this period, though its first appearance may date from an earlier time; namely the "thorn in the flesh" [50] which has taxed the ingenuity of so many commentators and provided critics of the pathological school with a sufficient explanation of all the abnormal elements in his experience. Epilepsy, malaria and other diseases have all been suggested as the true names of this malady. [51] St Paul, however, links it directly with his mystical powers; "lest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of revelation, there was given unto me a thorn in the flesh."
Here again, lives of later mystics justify Paul as against his biographers: showing there is a definite type of ill health which dogs the possessors of great mystical genius, resulting from the enormous strain which they put upon an organism evolved for very different purposes than that of correspondence with Transcendent Reality.
[If I read this correctly, Underhill is maintaining that the process of evolution has acted on the physical being of mankind to fit it more effectively for dualistic existence and increasingly less effectively as a vehicle for mystic experience. Curious... DCW]
The psychic pain and instability which accompany growth to new levels have their reverberation in the bodily frame. The life which found [p. 175] its perfect thoroughfare in Jesus of Nazareth had to break its way into expression in lesser men. His radiant efficiency, and perfect co-ordination of soul and body, are seldom repeated in the inheritors of His life; and the making of successive stages of that new creation is a matter of turmoil and stress. "Mystic ill-health," then, is the natural result, and not the pathological cause, of the characteristic activities of the mystics.
Baron von Hügel, who has analysed it in connection with St Catherine of Genoa, has clearly exhibited this; and successfully defended its victims from the common charge of hysteria. [52] The lives of Suso, Rulman Merswin, Angela of Foligno, St Catherine of Siena, St Teresa and others, provide well-known examples of this bodily rebellion against growing spiritual stress; which mystical writers accept as an inevitable part of the "Way". "Believe me children," says Tauler, "one who would know much about these high matters would often have to keep to his bed; for his bodily frame could not support it." [53] "In order that I might not feel myself exalted by the magnitude and the number of the revelatuions, visions and conversings with God," says Angela of Foligno, obviously adapting Paul's own words to her not dissimilar case, "and that I might not be puffed up with the delight thereof, the great tempter was sent unto me, who did afflict me with many and diverse temptations; wherefore I was afflicted both in soul and in body The bodily torments were indeed numberless, and were administered by many demons in divers ways; so that I scarce believe the suffering and infirmity of my body could be written down. There was not one of my members which was not grievously tormented, nor was I ever without pain, infirmity or weariness. Always I was weak, feeble and full of pain, so that I was compelled to be almost continually lying down. All my limbs [p.176] were as though beaten, and with many troubles did the demons afflict me. [54]
Paul's "infirmities" and "buffetings of Satan," then, are amply accounted for as the price paid by this type of genius for the mental and physical wear and tear involved in its superhuman activities. For the ordinary animal, transcendence is a dangerous trade; and the cutting of new paths must mean the infliction of new wounds. The mystic temperament, like that of most creative artists, is nervously unstable. Hypersensitiveness is a condition of its power of receiving the high rhythms of reality; hence it swings easily between pain and pleasure, and also between supernormal energy and the psycho-physical exhaustion and ill-health which the spending of so much energy implies.
"One law," says Chandler, "seems fairly clear; namely that bodily suffering is a condition of the highest exaltation of the spirit. ... The powers, mental and physical, of our organisation have come to be so highly specialised, have been, that is, so exclusively directed to the external visible world, that they are "out of practice" with spiritual work, and suffer pain and discomfort in attempting to perform it. The organism that can respond at all readily to spiritual forces will be an "abnormal" one; nerves and fibres which heredity has made slack, will throb with pain when they are, in these abnormal cases, brought into tune with heavenly melodies; and again the abnormality and tension and pain will increase as they are used in this unearthly music." [55]
The usual dates given for St Paul's visits to Galatia and Corinth — according to Ramsay AD 50, according to Sabatier and others AD 52 — suggest that the great visitation of his malady occurred a few years after his full attainment of the Illuminative state; a likely period for psycho-physical reaction of this kind to make itself felt. [56] [p.177] "Ye know," he says to the Galatians, "how through infirmity of the flesh I preached the Gospel unto you at the first."[57] Signs, however, of the fret of physical disability may be discerned in all the epistles of the first group, and the check which such weakness put upon his activities was one of the greatest of his trials.. Yet his inner, deeper mind knew that physical suffering also had its place in the growth towards new liberty which was taking place in him; that the new vitality poured in on him was little hindered in its operations by the weakness and rebellion of the flesh. "I besought the Lord thrice that it might depart from me. And He said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in mine infirmities that the power of Christ may rest upon me. ... For when I am weak, then am I strong." [58] Here we see Paul dramatising his correspondence with the divine; and presenting his deep intuitions to the surface consciousness, as nearly all great mystics have done, in the form of "interior words".[59][p.178]
"My strength is made perfect in weakness." Here is the first appearance in Christian history of that amazing fact which the lives of the saints demonstrate again and again.; the fact that the enormous activities of the mystics are little hindered, their mental lucidity seldom impaired, by the physical suffering which dogs their steps. St Paul, so frail of body, so much opposed by circumstance — stoned, beaten with rods, imprisoned, incessantly exposed to cold, fatigue and famine, the countless discomforts and dangers of a traveller in the antique world [60] — yet created, during years of hard and unresting labour in the teeth of every obstacle and danger, the nucleus of the Catholic Church. Not many of the most stalwart men of action have endured such bitter hardships, achieved such great results; and Paul is here but the first of an undying family, who have proved that no physical conditions can successfully oppose those whose transfigured wills are "with God".
St Teresa, racked by ill-health, yet travelling through Spain under circumstances of discomfort which few healthy women would willingly face, founding convents, dealing with property, directing the spiritual life of her many "families" of nuns; St Catherine of Siena and St Catherine of Genoa, full of bodily sufferings, yet strong and unwearied in philanthropic, political and literary work; St Francis, often sick yet never sad, who rejuvenates by the transmission of his amazing vitality the life of the mediaeval Church; St Ignatius, that little, lame man, yet most formidable soldier of Christ — all these and many others "strong in their weakness" might well "glory in their infirmities," mere signs of the stress endured by that earthen vessel in which they had received the treasure of more abundant life.
We have now come to a period in Paul's career in which [p.179] the earliest of his extant letters, I and II Thessalonians, were written. From this point onwards, then, his surviving correspondence takes its place with — or rather above — our scanty knowledge of his outward acts as evidence of his inward development. These letters, by reason of their very characteristics, their technical peculiarities, are strong and precious evidence of the mystical quality of their writer's mind. "Each," says Deissmann most justly, "is a portrait of St Paul, and therein lies the unique value of St Paul's letters as materials for an historical account of their writer. There is probably not a single Christian of any importance in later times from whom we have received such absolutely honest materials to enable us to realise what his inner life was like." [61] Thanks to the sudden transitions of thought which these epistles exhibit, the wide field over which they play, they have always baffled — always will baffle — those who attempt to extract from them an orderly and watertight system of dogmatic "truth". But approached from the standpoint of a student of mystical literature, able to recognise the presence of a mind "drunk with intellectual vision" and seeking to express itself under the crude symbols of speech, they are not hard to understand.
[Yet another confident statement of the claim that mystical awareness is the key to Christian experience, that mystics are the "real" Christians. DCW]
These letters are the impassioned self-revelations of a great and growing spirit, intensely conscious on the one hand of his communion with Transcendent Reality, on the other of the duty laid upon him to infect others with his vision if he can. Hence the constant rapid alternation of the practical and the poetic; the superb lyrical outbursts, the detailed instructions in church discipline and morality. There is in Paul's rhythmic utterances that strongly marked automatic character, as of an inspiration surging up from the deeps and overpowering the surface mind, which we find, for instance, in the most exalted portions of the Canticle of St John of the Cross, or of the Divine Dialogue of St Catherine of [p. 180] Siena: a book of which many parts are said to have been dictated in the ecstatic state, and which reproduces his balanced combination of stern practical teaching and exalted vision. [62]
There is also a marked development in the Pauline epistles, which also throws light upon their author's growth in the new life. The series of letters from I Thessalonians to Philippians — from AD 50 to AD 60 — clearly reflects the changes taking place in the mind which composed them: its steady process of transcendence, its movement on the Mystic Way. This is shown, curiously enough, by the analysis of Lightfoot; [63] an analysis made without any reference to a possible connection between St Paul and the doctrines of mysticism. I and II Thessalonians, he says, are dominated by the idea of "Christ the Judge" — of penance; the next group in time, I and II Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans, by that of Christ as the Saviour-God; the last group — Philippians, Philemon, and the disputed but probably authentic pair, Ephesians and Colossians — by the concept of Christ as the Indwelling Word. Thus the first group represents the kind of consciousness peculiar to the Purgative Way, the sense of imperfection "judged" in the light of newly received Perfection. the next is governed by that growing dependence on the power and companionship of Divine Personality, which is felt during Illumination; "Not I, but the grace of God which was with me;" [64][p.181] the last by the state of "divine union" between the Logos and the soul, the condition of equilibrium and fruition, which is the goal of the process of transcendence. A comparison of dates shows that this "doctrinal" result of the inward experience works out in literary form one stage later than it appears in the life.
The epistles to the Galatians and the Corinthians, though certainly their general attitude reflects experience obtained during the Illuminative Way, contain statements which suggest that at the time of their composition (c AD 55 - 57) the inevitable breakup of this state of consciousness was already in progress. With Paul, as with other great mystics, psychic disturbances, the emergence of old, unresolved disharmonies, mods of deep depression, a sense of conflict between two natures in him "warring in his members," accompanied this movement towards new levels of consciousness; this "fresh start" upon the way. Reading side by side the story given in Acts, and the self-revealing touches in his writings, we gather that he lived for several years — perhaps from c AD 52, the period of his visit to Athens, to c AD 57, a little before the epistle to the Romans was written — in a state of psychic disequilibrium, swaying between a growing ecstatic consciousness of supernal freedom, a veritable if intermittent "union" with the exalted spirit of Christ, and the misery and depression which are characteristic of the "Dark Night of the Soul". [65] It is probable that the active and volitional cast of his mind saved him from the worst destitutions of that state: from the dull impotence felt by more passive natures, and from the acute emotional despair of such born romantics as Suso and Teresa. Yet thathe suffered, and suffered intensely, in the "Upper School of Perfect Self-Abandonment " [p.182] there can be little doubt. As Jesus Himself paid for His ascent to the Mount of Transfigurations by cruel reactions, so Paul in his turn endured weariness, humiliation and despair. As with so many of the mystics, [66] inner and outer events combined to opress him: the turmoil of his interior life, the natural result of spiritual fatigue, lowering his power of dealing with circumstance. "When we were come in to Macedonia, our flesh had no relief, but we were afflicted on every side: without were fightings; within were fears." [67] The loss of friends, the bitter disappointment of his failure to win intellectual Athens for Christ, poverty, persecution, ill-health, the sharp and growing contrast between his sublime vision of the Perfect and its partial, wavering realisation in the Church; all this went step by step with his deep inward miseries and struggles. Paul's nature had gone back into the melting pot, to be reborn at higher levels; regrouped about those centresw of Love and Humility which dominate the transfigured mystical consciousness in its last and highest stage.
Through the shifting moods, the poetic rhapsodies of the early epistles we catch a glimpse now and then of the struggle that was in progress in this most storm-tossed and powerful of the saints: that recrudescence of the disharmonies and "sinful" tendencies against which the mortifications of the Purgative Way are directed, and which so often re-emerge during these periods of disequilibrium, and torment even the greatest of mystics: [68] the weary hopelessness and humiliations endured by a highly strung nature, whose destiny seems to overpass its powers. "In distress and affliction," he wrote about [p. 183] AD 52 to the Thessalonians.[69] He went to the Corinthians at the same period "in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.[70] Five years later, his letters to those Corinthians still betray affliction and "anguish of heart"; [71] signs, too, that he was bitterly conscious of the contempt with which his intellectual equals regarded his new faith. "We are made as the filth of the world, the off-scouring of all things;" [72] hardest of trials for a proud and sensitive personality. Yet, though "we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened," [73] the conviction of a triumphing spiritual force working in him, an exultant life greater than that of other men, persists through his bitterest pain. "Dying, and behold! we live; chastened, and not killed." [74] "I have been crucified with Christ" — a phrase which still implied intense humiliation as well as agony — "yet I live, yet no longer I but Christ liveth in me."[75]
[As does Underhill herself, here, pay attention to the context of a word's use, we must continually be aware in her work of words which in their immediately post-WW1 context bear meanings which are considerably different from those they bear today. Most especially is this the case in respect of psychological terms. DCW]
"Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be manifested in our body." [76] These, and many other equivalent phrases, imply clear identification on Paul's part of his own necessary sufferings with the passion endured by Jesus. So, too, we can trace a convinced consciousness of that slow transmutation of personality, that process of fresh creation, which the mystics call "New Birth". "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature." [77]
The epistle to the Romans appears to be the literary expression of the last phase in Paul's long struggle for transcendence. In the seventh and eighth chapters of that most wonderful of letters, we seem to see the travail of his interior life coming to its term, the new state towards which his growth was directed established at last.
The helpless consciousness of disharmony, the terrible conviction of sin and impotence, here rises to its height; the upward, outward push of the growing spirit warring [p.184] with the old established habits of life, which "ever tends to turn on its tracks and lag behind". "I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do I know not: for not what I would, that do I practise; but what I hate, that I do. ... For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me, but to do that which is good is not. For the good which I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I practise. ... For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death? [78]
In all the annals of religious psychology we shall find no more vivid presentation than this of the stress and misery which accompanies the last purification of personality: when "the sensual part is purified in aridities, the faculties in emptiness of their powers, and the spirit in thick darkness." [79] We stand here with St Paul at the very frontier of new life, and with the opening of the next section of his letter, that frontier is passed.
"The law of the Spirit of Life ... made me free."[80] The terrible effort to live according to something seen has given away before the advent of something at last possessed. "The billow of largesse hath appeared, the thunder of the sea hath arrived." A new dower of vitality — the Spirit of Life which was brought into time by Jesus — floods his nature, and suddenly transmutes it to the condition of the "children of God", the citizens of the Kingdom of Reality: the Unitive Life. Before this inflow of joy, certainty and power, the miseries and effors of the past fade into the background; and are [p.185] seen in their true light as a part of that process of growth in the likeness of Divine Humanity which is the privilege of those who are "joint heirs with Christ". "If so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him." [81]
In this moment of supreme attainment, Paul seems for the first time to penetrate to the very heart of the secret of Jesus, the "Mystery of the Kingdom"; and applies it, with the sublime optimism of his Master, to the collective consciousness of the Christian Church. "Ye have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father. The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ."[82]
"The glorious liberty of the children of God!" [83]he exclaims in a very passion of joy, intoxicated as it seems with his new and wondrous consciousness of freedom — the freedom of a great swimmer "amidst the wild billows of the Sea Divine." "If God be for us, who is against us" ... I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God." [84]the sudden wild happiness of the spirit caught up in supreme communion with the Absolute has seldom found finer expression than this: here another personality seems to speak than the broken-hearted prisoner who had cried out but a page or two earlier, "Who shall deliver me from this body of death?"
About three or four years separate the composition of Romans — the characteristic epistle of transition — from that of the last group: Philemon, Colossians, Ephesians, and Philippians. This period, of course, includes Paul's arrest at Jerusalem, his long imprisonment at Caesarea and voyage to Rome. [85]During that interval of outward [p.186] inactivity, with its opportunity for those long contemplations on which the growing spirit of the mystic feeds, his interior life seems to have come to perfect maturity. Whereas Corinthians and Galatians provide us with many evidences of the state of mental disequilibrium which mystical writers know by that curious term, "The Game of Love" — the alternate onset and withdrawal of the transcendental consciousness — and we can detect behind the argument of Romans the struggle of a strong nature against heavy gloom, its abrupt emergence into light; we see in Ephesians and Philippians the reflection of a spirit which has come to live naturally and permanently in that state to which the writer of Galatians, Corinthians and Romans ascended in ecstatic moments; and of which he could only speak in terms of wonder and of awe.
Philippians, says Lightfoot, is the mystical and contemporary epistle which is exactly as we might expect it to be if our diagram of its author's spiritual growth be correct. Both in subject and in temper, this, and the contemporary letters to the Colossians and Ephesians [86] are in close and peculiar harmony with the attitude of all the great unitive mystics: the mighty and creative personalities in whom life's "new direction" has come to its own, and whose correspondence with Transcendent Reality is not that of "servants" but of "sons". Not something believed, but something veritably and securely possessed, is the governing idea of these letters: a transmuting power, a supernal life, established in Paul's spirit after long grief and pain, and seen by him as the central secret of creation, "the fulness of Him that filleth all in all".[87]
This new consciousness of his he continues to translate, on the one hand as an inflow of fresh life from [p.187] without — the presence of an indwelling and energising Divine Spirit, "something which is not himself" — on the other, as a growth from within.
The spirit is identified, as always in Paul's mind, with the personal and glorified Christ; like his follower, the Fourth Evangelist, he makes no distinction between those two manifestations of God which theology afterward described as "Son" and "Spirit". The true mystery, he says, is "Christ in you ... it is God which worketh in you. ... I labour also, striving according to His working, which worketh in me mightily ... for me to live is Christ." [88]
All mystics in the unitive state make equivalent declarations. They feel themselves to be God-possessed; are agents of the divine activity. Thus Gerlac Petersen: "Thou art in me and I in Thee, glued together as one and the selfsame thing, which shall never be lost nor broken,"[89] and St Catherine of Genoa: "My me is God, nor do I know my selfhood save in Him."[90] These are plainly reports of that same condition of consciousness, often called by the dangerous name of "deification", to which Paul was now come; the transmuted self's awareness that it participates in, and is upheld by, the great life of the All.
[The "danger" referred to is the insistence by the Church that whatever the nature of mystical experience, God remains separate from Man. The implication in "deification" of "becoming God", while consistent with Christian mystics' statements at incautious moments is directly contradictory of Church convention in the matter. DCW]
On the other hand, Paul never loses hold of his central idea of growth and change, as the secret of all true and healthy life.
[You don't "get there" and relax. The life is in the continuing to grow. The nature of a perfected humanity is that it continue to grow. DCW]
The goal he sets before his converts is the attainment of perfected humanity, "a full-grown man ... the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ ... grow up in all things into Him ... and put on the new man." [91]
There are other peculiarities of these epistles which indicate the high levels of spirituality on which their author moved, the exultant life which now possessed him. Humility, the "full sister of truth" and paradoxical mark of supreme mystical attainment, dominates their [p.188] intellectual attitude: for his smallness in the Kingdom of Real Things has now obscured for Paul all sense of his greatness and unique vocation in the world of men. His deep intuitive vision of perfection discloses to him the unspeakable heights of wisdom and love: and it is against those everlasting hills that the child of the Infinite must measure himself.
[see above. DCW]
The note of assurance and authority so marked in II Corinth. xi. and xii. and other passages of the earlier letters is gone. Instead, "Brethren, I count not myself yet to have apprehended; but one thing I do ... I press on toward the goal, unto the prize of the upward-calling of God," "unto me, who am less than the least of all saints was this grace given."
[Skite!DCW]
[92] Further, written from captivity in a time of much anxiety, not the austere acceptance of suffering, but simple joy, is their emotional note. "I now rejoice in my sufferings for you ... making request with joy ... Christ is preached and I therein do rejoice, yea and will rejoice ... that your rejoicing may be more abundant ... I joy, and rejoice with you all; for the same cause do ye joy, and rejoice with me." Moreover, this rejoicing, this gladness of heart, is dependent on the mystic fact of the mergence of the human consciousness with the Divine Nature; it is the feeling state proper to one dwelling "in God". "Finally my brethren, rejoice in the Lord, rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, Rejoice." [93]
In every mystic who has attained that perfect harmony with the supernal order, that high state of transcendence called "union with God", we find this accent of eager gaiety overpowering the difficulties, sufferings and responsibilities of his active life; this joy, "proper to the children of the Bridegroom" which seems to have been shed by Jesus on that little company of adepts who had learned the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven. The glad heart exults in its own surrender: the little child of the [p.189] Infinite laughs as it runs into its father's arms. "I must rejoice without ceasing,: says Ruysbroeck, "although the world shudder at my joy." [94]
[Skite! DCW]
St Catherine of Siena, prostrate in illness, was "full of laughter in the Lord" [95] The true lover, says Richard Rolle of the soul which has attained its true stature, "Joy of its Maker endlessly doth use".[96]"Good and gamesome play, as father doth with child," says the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, is the reward of the true contemplative. [97] Even the self-tormenting soul of Pascal was flooded with simplest joy by his short and vivid vision of Reality: "Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie!"
So St Paul's injunction to his converts in Colossians and Ephesians, that they should use "psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord" [98]finds many a parallel in the lives of the mystics; for whom music is ever a spiritual thing, an apt symbol of the harmonies which fill the universe. "As the work of the husbandman is the ploughshare: and the work of the steersman is the guidance of the ship," say the early Christian poet, "so also my work is the psalm of the Lord ... For my love is the Lord, and therefore will I sing unto him." [99] The servants of the Lord are his minstrels, says St Francis of Assisi, and the ideal Franciscan is the lark. The "sweet melody of spirit" often possessed him and he urged the duty of song on all the world. [100] Rose of Lima sang duets with the birds, [101] Teresa sang of her love as she swept the convent corridors, [102] Rolle found mystic truth a "sweet ghostly song" and declared that the souls of the perfect no longer pray but sing.[103] Nor [p.190] is this concept of divine melody, and the soul's necessary participation in it, confined to Christian mysticism. It seems to be one of the primal forms assumed by spirit's tendency to Spirit, the self's passion for its Source, Home and Love; and is found as well in the East as in the West, in the modern as well as in the ancient world.
"When thou commandest me to sing it seems that my heart would break with pride; and I look to thy face and tears come to my eyes.
All that is harsh and dissonant in my life melts into one sweet harmony — and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird on its flight across the sea.
I know thou takest pleasure in my singing. I know that only as a singer I come before thy presence.
I touch by the edge of the farspreading wing of my song thy feet which I could never aspire to reach.
Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself, I call thee friend who art my lord." [104]
We have seen that the great theopathetic mystics, the real inheritors of the "new direction of life" have always been concerned not only with "highness of love in contemplation," but with hard and active work. They swing between Time and Eternity: between fruition of God and charity towards men. "These two lives." says the Cloud of Unknowing, "be so coupled together that, although they be divers in some part, yet neither of them may be had fully without some part of the other ... so that a man may not be fully active, but if he be in part contemplative; nor yet fully contemplative, as it may be here, but if he be in part active." [105] This is the pure doctrine of mysticism; and here of course, St Paul is emphatically true to type. The splendid mystic balance of ecstacy and practical ability, of outgoings in charity towards God and man, "the ascent and descent of the ladder of love" is early manifested in him. Inspiring spirit and industrious will, he thinks, are not opposite, but complementary expressions [p.191] of life; and man's will and work are themselves a part of the divine energy. "I laboured more abundantly than they all," he says, "yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me." [106] Prayerful communion and practical work — to be "at home in the body' or "at home with the Lord" — is equally a part of the business of man [107] "Whether we be beside ourselves it is to God, or whether we be of sober mind, it is unto you." [108]
Despite his great contemplative gifts, he was no encourager of dreamy "mysticality": his passion for all round efficiency sometimes made demands which faulty human nature can hardly meet. "Work out your own salvation;" "Whatsoever ye do, work heartily as unto the Lord, and not unto men." [109] Philippians and Philemon reinforce our knowledge of his Teresian Grasp of detail, his interest in ordinary affairs. Here we see the busy missionary who had not "run and laboured in vain" side by side with the peaceful mystic, to whom "to live in Christ and to die is to gain". [110] Paul has put on that "dual character of action and fruition." of joy and work, which is the peculiar mark of "the fulness of the stature" of Jesus; and is found again in every man who has attained "the supreme summit of the inner life." He possesses, too, its paradoxical and Christlike combination of exaltation and humility — "the mind which was also in Christ Jesus." [111] "I can do all things in Him that strengtheneth me:" but "Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect ... I count myself not yet to have apprehended." [112]
This is the psychological state exhibited in St Paul's last writings "being such an one as Paul the aged,"[113] yet the ever young. An ambassador in bonds from Life to [p.192] life, "reflecting as in a glass the glory of the Lord." he had indeed been "transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even from the Lord, the Spirit." [114] yet according to the primal, sacred laws of growth. It is paralleled in the self-revelations of such mystics of genius as St Francis, St Ignatius, St Catherine of Genoa, St Teresa, George Fox. Those who attain to it have developed, not merely their receptive, but their creative powers; are directly responsible for the emergence of new life, new out-births of Reality into the world. it is the condition of "divine fecundity" which Richard of St Victor describes as the consummation of the mystic life: the perfect state, to which the Christian mystic tends. "My little children of whom I travail in birth ... my joy and crown,: said St Paul of those whom he had endowed with his own overpowering spiritual vitality. "My son, whom I have begotten in my bonds," of the runaway slave Onesimus, converted in the prison, for whom he intercedes. [115] These "children", this trail of Christian Churches marking the path of one poor missionary, whose "bodily presence was weak and his speech of no account", [116] — who started his career under a cloud and was dogged by ill-health — are the best of all evidence that Paul had indeed inherited the "mystery" of that kingdom which is not in "word" but in "power", [117] was a thoroughfare through which its life was transmitted, and followed on high levels, the organic process of transcendence which is called the "Mystic Way".
Notes
1. "Be imitators of me, in so far as I in turn am an imitator of Christ ... All of us, with unveiled faces, reflecting like bright mirrors the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same likeness ... that in this mortal nature of ours it may also be clearly shown that Jesus lives ... For those he has known beforehand, He has also predestined to bear the likeness of His son, that He might be the eldest in a vast family of brothers." (I Cor.ix.1; II Cor. iii. 18 and iv. 11; Rom viii. 29. (Weymouth's trans.)
2. Matheson, Spiritual Development of St Paul, p. 6
3. For instance, by Inge in Christian Mysticism; A Sabatier in L'Apotre Paul; Wernle in The Beginnings of Christianity, Vol I; Wienel in St Paul; J.M. Campbell in Paul the Mystic; P. Gardener in The Religious Experience of St Paul, and — with considerable insight — by A. Deissmann in St Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History.
4. Following the example of the majority of recent critics, I reckon Colosians and Ephesians as being in all probability genuine Pauline letters; but do not make use of the epistles to Timothy and Titus, the authenticity of which is open to grave suspicion. Cf Gardner, The Religious Experience of St Paul; W Wrede, Paul; and Deissmann, St Paul. As to the use of Acts, this last authority says that St Luke's representation is "indispensable in supplementing the letters of St Paul; it may be corrected occasionally in some details by the letters, but in many others it rests on good tradition." (Deissmann, op cit, p. 24.)
5. Acts ix. 1 - 9; xxii.6 - 11; xxvi. 12 - 18
6. P. Gardner, The Religious Experience of St Paul, p. 29.
7. Acts xxvi. 19.
8. II Corinth. v. 7
9. Cf Thomas of Celano, Legenda Secunda, V, and P. Sabatier's Life, cap. 2.
10. Vita e dottrina di S. Caterina da Genova, cap. 2.
11. Jundt, Rulman Merswin, p. 19
12. Pensees, fragments et lettres de Pascal, T I, p. 269
13. Leben, cap. 3.
14. The Mystical Element of Religion, Vol. I. p. 107.
15. Acts ix. 9.
16.Wernle, The Beginnings of Christianity, Vol I, p. 159
17.Gal. i. 16, 17.
18. Cf. supra, Cap II § II
19. II Corinth. xi. 27.
20. Gal. i. 12
21. Fox's Journal, Vol I. pp. 80, 83
22. I adopt Ramsay's chronology, excepting his theory as to the early date of Galatians. Sabatier and othersplace the chief events about a year and a half later, but this does not affect my argument.
23. Gal. i. 18
24. Acts xxii. 17 - 22
25. Hartmann, Jacob Boehme, p. 50
26. Fox's Journal, Vol I. p. 85
27. Suso, Leben, cap. 3.
28.Acts xi. 25, 26.
29. Cf G Cunninghame Graham, Santa Teresa
30. Acts xiii. 2 (Weymouth's trans) By 'the Holy Spirit said" we may probably understand an ecstatic or prophetic utterance on the part of some member of the congregation.
31. Acts xiii. 9.
32. II Corinth. xii. 1 Cf. also Gal ii. 2; Acts xvi. 9, xviii. 9
33. "I thank my God I speak with more tongues than ye all" (I Corinth. xiv. 18)
34. "But Saul, who is also called Paul, filled with the Holy Ghost, fastened his eyes on him, and said, O full of all guile and all villainy ... behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thee and thou shalt be blind, not seeing the sun for a season. And immediately there fell on him a mist and a darkness; and he went about seeking some to lead him by the hand" Acts xiii. 9-11, R.V.)
35. As at Lystra, Philippi, Corinth, and Troas (Acts xiv. 10, xvi. 18, xix. 11, 12).
36. I Corinth. ix. 16 (R.V.)
37. I Corinth. xv. 10; gal. i. 12 (R.V.) So, Fox, "These things I did not see by the help of man nor by the letter (though they are written in the letter) but I saw them by the light of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by His immediate Spirit and power." (Journal, Vol I. p. 101)
38. Gal. ii. 20
39. Acts xvi. 6, 7, and xviii. 5 (R.V.)
40. Cf. The Book of the Foundations
41. Journal, Vol I. p. 112.
42. Von Hügel, Eternal Life, p. 65.
43. I Corinth. ix. 25 - 27 (Weymouth's trans.)
44. II Corinth. iv. 7 - 9 (R.V.).
45.I Corinth. ix. 1, and II Corinth. xii. 12
46. B. Angelae de Fulginio, Visionum et Instructionum Liber, cap. 52.
47. Vida, cap. xviii. 20
48. Journal, Vol I. p. 90
49. Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, p. 13
50.Gal. iv. 13; II Corinth. xii. 7
51. Ramsay's argument in favour of Malaria (cf. St. Paul, the Traveller and the Roman Citizen) has gained ground of recent years. There seems however, more probability in Dr Matheson's suggestion that the "thorn" on its physical side was a severe affliction of the eyes, connected perhaps with the results of the temporary blindness which accompanied Paul's conversion (Acts ix. 8) when "new light shone for him out of the darkness". Hence the description of the sympathy shown him by the Galatians, who, "if it had been possible would have plucked out their own eyes and given them to him". Hence the large letters in which he traces the few words of the epistle "written with his own hand" (Gal. iv, 14, 15, and vi. 11) Cf Matheson, The Spiritual Development of St Paul, pp. 54 - 64.
52. The Mystical Element of Religion, Vol II. pp. 14 - 47
53. Sermon for the First Sunday after Easter (Winkworth, p. 302)
54. B. Angelae de Fulginio, Visionum et Instructionum Liber, cap. 19.
55. A. Chandler, Faith and Experience, p. 106.
56. It is impossible, however, to come to any certain conclusion on this point. The researches and deductions of the best Pauline scholars have but led to contradictory results. Thus, Ramsay, who considers the "thorn in the flesh" to be a severe and chronic form of malaria, thinks that the worst attack is connected with the visit to Galatia (St Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen), Baron von Hugel (The Mystical Element of Religion, Vol II. p. 44) and Matheson (Spiritual Development of St paul, caps. 4, 6, and 7) detect the records of three distinct visitations of the malady, "I besought the Lord thrice that it might depart." But whilst the first of these authorities recognises the intimate connection between the illness and Paul's visionary experiences, identifying the thre attacks with (a) the vision of the third heaven, (b) with the Galatian mission, (c) with the period of creative activity in which the first group of epistles were composed, Dr Matheson — who believes the "thorn" to have involved some recurrent affection of the eyes — places the three crises in which Paul besought that it might depart from him (a) in Arabia, (b) in Antioch, (c) in Galatia.
57. Gal. iv. 13
58. II Corinth. xii. 8 - 10
59. Cf Suso, Leben; St Teresa, Vida; Angela de Foligno, op cit; St John of the Cross, Subida del Monte Carmelo.
60. "In journeyings often, in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils from my countrymen, in perils from the Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the widerness, in perils in the sea" (II Corinth. xi. 26. R.V.).
61. A Deissmann, St Paul, p. 23.
62. I Thess. v. 5-10; Rom. viii. 31-39; Eph. ii. 4-10 and vi. 6-17 are good examples of Paul's lyrical outbursts. So marked is their rhythmic structure that Arthur Way (The Letters of St Paul, 3rd ed, pp. xii-xiv) regards these and many other similar passages as true hymns, which may have been in use in the early Church. The frewuent and spontaneous appearance, however, of such abrupt poetic passages in the writings of the great mystics makes this hypothesis entirely unnecessary. Compare the alternate prose and poetry in Mechthild of Magdeburg, Das fliessende Licht der Gottheid, and the mingling of lyrics with the sternest ascetic teaching in the writings of St John of the Cross.
63. Biblical Essays, p. 232.
64. I Corinth. xv. 10
65. Cf Acts xviii. 5-11, where his rejection by the Jews is immediately counterbalanced by a mystical experience, renewing under the forms of voice and vision his consciousness of the inspiring and supporting presence of God.
66. For instance, Suso, (Leben, cap. 22.), Madame Guyon (Vie, Pt I. cap. 20 - 23), St Teresa (Vida, cap 30).
67. II Corinth. vii. 5 (R.V.).
68. Cf E Gardner, St Catherine of Siena, p. 20; Angela of Fuligno, op. cit., cap 19; St Tersa, Vida, cap. 30; Madame Guyon, Vie, Pt. I. cap 25.
69. I Thess. iii. 7 (R.V.).
70. I Corinth. ii. 3 (R.V.).
71. II Corinth ii. 4 (R.V.).
72. I Corinth. iv. 13 (R.V.).
73. II Corinth. v. 4 (R.V.).
74. II Corinth. vi. 9 (R.V.).
75. Gal. ii. 20 (R.V.).
76. II Corinth. iv. 10 (R.V.).
77. II Corinth. v. 17 (R.V.).
78. Rom. vii 14, 15, 18, 19, 22-24 (R.V.).
79. St John of the Cross, Noche Escura del Alma, Lib II cap. 6. Cf. Poulain, Graces d'Oraison, pp 433 et seq.
80. Rom. viii. 2
81. Rom. viii. 17 (R.V.).
82. Rom. viii. 15-17 (R.V.).
83. Rom viii. 21
84. Rom. viii. 31, 38-39
85. Acts xxiii.-xxviii
86. The attribution of these two epistles to St Paul has been much disputed, but the tendency of recent criticism is to restore them to him. Cf P Gardner The Religious Experience of St Paul, pp. 13 - 15. For those who accept the psychological theory here advocated, the developed mysticism of these writings will be strong evidence of their Pauline authorship.
87. Eph. i. 23.
88. Col. i. 27; Phil. ii,13; Col. i. 29; Phil. i. 21 (R.V.).
89. The Fiery Soliloquy With God, cap 15.
90. Vita e Dottrina, cap. 14.
91. Eph. iv. 13, 15, 24 (R.V.).
92. Phil. iii. 13, 14; Eph. iii. 8 (R.V.).
93. Col. i. 24; Phil. i. 4, 18, 26; ii. 17; iii. 1; iv. 4.
94. Canticle 1.
95. E. Gardner, St Catherine of Siena, p. 48.
96. The Fire of Love, Bk II. cap. 7.
97. The Cloud of Unknowing, cap. 47.
98. Eph. v. 19; Col. iii. 16
99. The Odes and Psalms of Solomon, Ode xvi.
100. Speculum, cap. 113 and 100.
101. De Bussierre, Le Perou et St Rose de Lime, p. 415.
102. G. Cunninghame Graham, Santa Teresa, Vol. I. p.304
103. The Fire of Love,Book I. cap. 23.
104. Rabindra Nath Tagore, Gitanjali, 2.
105. The Cloud of Unknowing, cap 8.
106. I Corinth. xv. 10 (R.V.). Cf Phil ii. 13, "It is God which worketh in you both to will and to work."
107. II Corinth. v. 6-8.
108. II Corinth. v. 13.
109. Phil. ii. 12; Col. iii. 23 (R.V.).
110. Phil. ii. 16 and i. 21.
111. Phil. ii. 5
112. Phil. iv. 13 and iii. 12, 13 (R.V.).
113. Philemon 9
114. II Corinth. iii. 18.
115. Gal. iv. 19; Phil. iv. 1; Philemon 10
116. II Corinth. x. 10 (R.V.).
117. I Corinth. iv. 20.
