Mysticism

The homeward journey of man’s spirit, then, may be thought of as due to the push of a divine life within, answering to the pull of a divine life without. 271 It is only possible because there is already in that spirit a certain kinship with the Divine, a capacity for Eternal Life; and the mystics, in undertaking it, are humanity’s pioneers on the only road to rest. Hence that attraction which the Moslem mystic discerned as the traveller’s necessary aid, is a fundamental doctrine of all mysticism: and as a consequence, the symbolism of mutual desire is here inextricably mingled with that of pilgrimage. The spiritual pilgrim goes because he is called; because he wants to go, must go, if he is to find rest and peace. “God needs man,” says Eckhart. It is Love calling to love: and the journey, though in one sense a hard pilgrimage, up and out, by the terraced mount and the ten heavens to God, in another is the inevitable rush of the roving comet, caught at last, to the Central Sun. “My weight is my love,” said St. Augustine. 272 Like gravitation, it inevitably compels, for good or evil, every spirit to its own place. According to another range of symbols, that love flings open a door, in order that the larger Life may rush in and it and the soul be “one thing.”

Here, then, we run through the whole gamut of symbolic expression; through Transcendence, Desire, and Immanence. All are seen to point to one consummation, diversely and always allusively expressed: the need of union between man’s separated spirit and the Real, his remaking in the interests of transcendent life, his establishment in that Kingdom which is both “near and far.”

“In the book of Hidden Things it is written,” says Eckhart, “‘I stand at the door and knock and wait’ . . . thou needst not seek Him here or there: He is no farther off than the door of the heart. There He stands and waits and waits until He finds thee ready to open and let Him in. Thou needst not call Him from a distance; to wait until thou openest is harder for Him than for thee. He needs thee a thousand times more than thou canst need Him. Thy opening and His entering are but one moment .” 273 “God,” he says in another place, “can as little do without us, as we without Him.” 274 Our attainment of the Absolute is not a one-sided ambition, but the fulfilment of a mutual desire. “For our natural Will,” says Lady Julian, “is to have God, and the Good will of God is to have us; and we may never cease from longing till we have Him in fullness of joy.” 275

So, in the beautiful poem or ritual called the “Hymn of Jesus,” contained in the apocryphal “Acts of John” and dating from primitive Christian times, the Logos, or Eternal Christ, is thus represented as matching with His own transcendent, self-giving desire every need of the soul. 276

“‘I would be loosed.’ ‘And I would loose.’ Amen. ‘I would be pierced.’ ‘And I would pierce.’ Amen. ‘I would be born.’ ‘And I would bear.’ Amen. ‘I would eat.’ ‘And I would be eaten.’ Amen. ‘I would hear.’ ‘And I would be heard.’ Amen.” “‘I am a Lamp to thee who beholdest Me, I am a Mirror to thee who perceivest Me, I am a Door to thee, who knockest at Me, I am a Way to thee a wayfarer.’”

“No lover ever seeks union with his beloved, But his beloved is also seeking union with him. But the lover’s love makes his body lean While the beloved’s love makes her fair and lusty. When in this heart the lightning spark of love arises, Be sure this love is reciprocated in that heart. When the love of God arises in thy heart, Without doubt God also feels love for thee.” 277

The mystic vision, then, is of a spiritual universe held within the bonds of love: 278 and of the free and restless human soul, having within it the spark of divine desire, the “tendency to the Absolute,” pnly finding satisfaction and true life when united with this Life of God. Then, in Patmore’s lovely image, “the babe is at its mother’s breast,” “the lover has returned to the beloved.” 279

Whatever their outward sense, all true mystic symbols express aspects of this “secret of the world,” this primal verity. But whereas such great visionary schemes as those of ‘Attar and of Dante show it in its cosmic form, in many symbolic descriptions—particularly those which we meet in the writings of the ecstatic saints—the personal subjective note, the consciousness of an individual relation between that one self and the Supernal Self, overpowers all general applications. Then philosophy and formal allegory must step aside: the sacramental language of exalted emotion, of profoundly felt experience, takes its place. The phases of mutual love, of wooing and combat, awe and delight—the fevers of desire, the ecstasy of surrender—are drawn upon and made to contribute something to the description of the great and secret drama of the soul.

To such symbolic transcripts of intimate experience belongs one amazing episode of the spiritual life-history which, because it has been given immortal expression by the greatest mystical poet of modern times, is familiar to thousands of readers who know little or nothing of the more normal adventures incidental to man’s attainment of the Absolute. In “The Hound of Heaven” Francis Thompson described with an almost terrible power, not the self’s quest of adored Reality, but Reality’s quest of the unwilling self. He shows to us the remorseless, untiring seeking and following of the soul by the Divine Life to which it will not surrender: the inexorable onward sweep of “this tremendous Lover,” hunting the separated spirit, “strange piteous futile thing” that flees Him “down the nights and down the days.” This idea of the love-chase, of the spirit rushing in terror from the overpowering presence of God, but followed, sought, conquered in the end, is common to all the mediaeval mystics: it is the obverse of their general doctrine of the necessary fusion of human and divine life, “escape from the flame of separation.”

“I chased thee, for in this was my pleasure,” says the voice of Love to Mechthild of Magdeburg; “I captured thee, for this was my desire; I bound thee, and I rejoice in thy bonds; I have wounded thee, that thou mayst be united to me. If I gave thee blows, it was that I might be possessed of thee.” 280

“I am true love that fals was nevere, Mi sistyr, mannis soule, I loved hir thus; Bicause we wolde in no wise discevere I lefte my Kyngdom glorious. I purveyde for hir a paleis precious; She fleyth, I folowe, I sought hir so. I suffride this peyne piteous Quia amore langueo,” 281

Meister Eckhart has the same idea of the inexorable Following Love, impossible to escape, expressed under less personal images. “Earth,” he says, “cannot escape the sky; let it flee up or down, the sky flows into it, and makes it fruitful whether it will or no. So God does to man. He who will escape Him only runs to His bosom; for all corners are open to Him.” 282

We find in all the mystics this strong sense of a mysterious spiritual life—a Reality—over against man, seeking him and compelling him to Its will. It is not for him, they think, to say that he will or will not aspire to the transcendental world. 283 Hence sometimes this inversion of man’s long quest of God. The self resists the pull of spiritual gravitation, flees from the touch of Eternity; and the Eternal seeks it, tracks it ruthlessly down. The Following Love, the mystics say, is a fact of experience, not a poetic idea. “Those strong feet that follow, follow after,” once set upon the chase, are bound to win. Man, once conscious of Reality, cannot evade it. For a time his separated spirit, his disordered loves, may wilfully frustrate the scheme of things: but he must be conquered in the end. Then the mystic process unfolds itself: Love triumphs: the “purpose of the worlds” fulfils itself in the individual life.

It was natural and inevitable that the imagery of human love and marriage should have seemed to the mystic the best of all images of his own “fulfilment of life”; his soul’s surrender, first to the call, finally to the embrace of Perfect Love. It lay ready to his hand: it was understood of all men: and moreover, it certainly does offer, upon lower levels, a strangely exact parallel to the sequence of states in which man’s spiritual consciousness unfolds itself, and which form the consummation of the mystic life.

It has been said that the constant use of such imagery by Christian mystics of the mediaeval period is traceable to the popularity of the Song of Songs, regarded as an allegory of the spiritual life. I think that the truth lies rather in the opposite statement: namely, that the mystic loved the Song of Songs because he there saw reflected, as in a mirror, the most secret experiences of his soul. The sense of a desire that was insatiable, of a personal fellowship so real, inward, and intense that it could only be compared with the closest link of human love, of an intercourse that was no mere spiritual self-indulgence, but was rooted in the primal duties and necessities of life—more, those deepest, most intimate secrets of communion, those self-giving ecstasies which all mystics know, but of which we, who are not mystics, may not speak—all these he found symbolized and suggested, their unendurable glories veiled in a merciful mist, in the poetry which man has invented to honour that august passion in which the merely human draws nearest to the divine.

The great saints who adopted and elaborated this symbolism, applying it to their pure and ardent passion for the Absolute, were destitute of the prurient imagination which their modern commentators too often possess. They were essentially pure of heart; and when they “saw God” they were so far from confusing that unearthly vision with the products of morbid sexuality, that the dangerous nature of the imagery which they employed did not occur to them. They knew by experience the unique nature of spiritual love: and no one can know anything about it in any other way.

Thus for St. Bernard, throughout his deeply mystical sermons on the Song of Songs, the Divine Word is the Bridegroom, the human soul is the Bride: but how different is the effect produced by his use of these symbols from that with which he has been charged by hostile critics! In the place of that “sensuous imagery” which is so often and so earnestly deplored by those who have hardly a nodding acquaintance with the writings of the saints, we find images which indeed have once been sensuous; but which are here anointed and ordained to a holy office, carried up, transmuted, and endowed with a radiant purity, an intense and spiritual life.