Mysticism

God, said St. Augustine, is the Country of the soul: its Home, says Ruysbroeck. The mystic in the unitive state is living in and of his native land; no exploring alien, but a returned exile, now wholly identified with it, part of it, yet retaining his personality intact. As none know the spirit of England but the English; and they know it by intuitive participation, by mergence, not by thought; so none but the “deified” know the secret life of God. This, too, is a knowledge conferred only by participation: by living a life, breathing an atmosphere, “union with that same Light by which they see, and which they see.” 859 It is one of those rights of citizenship which cannot be artificially conferred. Thus it becomes important to ask the mystics what they have to tell us of their life lived upon the bosom of Reality: and to receive their reports without prejudice, however hard the sayings they contain.

The first thing which emerges from these reports, and from the choice of symbols which we find in them, is that the great mystics are anxious above all things to establish and force on us the truth that by deification they intend no arrogant claim to identification with God, but as it were a transfusion of their selves by His Self: an entrance upon a new order of life, so high and so harmonious with Reality that it can only be called divine. Over and over again they assure us that personality is not lost, but made more real. “When,” says St. Augustine, “I shall cleave to Thee with all my being, then shall I in nothing have pain and labour; and my life shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee.” 860 “My life shall be a real life” because it is “full of Thee.” The achievement of reality, and deification, are then one and the same thing: necessarily so, since we know that only the divine is the real. 861

Mechthild of Magdeburg, and after her Dante, saw Deity as a flame or river of fire that filled the Universe, and the “deified” souls of the saints as ardent sparks therein, ablaze with that fire, one thing with it, yet distinct. 862 Ruysbroeck, too, saw “Every soul like a live coal, burned up by God on the heart of His Infinite Love.” 863 Such fire imagery has seemed to many of the mystics a peculiarly exact and suggestive symbol of the transcendent state which they are struggling to describe. No longer confused by the dim Cloud of Unknowing, they have pierced to its heart, and there found their goal: that uncreated and energizing Fire which guided the children of Israel through the night. By a deliberate appeal to the parallel of such great impersonal forces—to Fire and Heat, Light, Water, Air—mystic writers seem able to bring out a perceived aspect of the Godhead, and of the transfigured soul’s participation therein, which no merely personal language, taken alone, can touch. Thus Boehme, trying to describe the union between the Word and the soul, says, “I give you an earthly similitude of this. Behold a bright flaming piece of iron, which of itself is dark and black, and the fire so penetrateth and shineth through the iron, that it giveth light. Now, the iron doth not cease to be, it is iron still: and the source (or property) of the fire retaineth its own propriety: it doth not take the iron into it, but it penetrateth (and shineth) through the iron; and it is iron then as well as before, free in itself: and so also is the source or property of the fire.

In such a manner is the soul set in the Deity; the Deity penetrateth through the soul, and dwelleth in the soul, yet the soul doth not comprehend the Deity, but the Deity comprehendeth the soul, but doth not alter it (from being a soul) but only giveth it the divine source (or property) of the Majesty.” 864

Almost exactly the same image of deification was used, five hundred years before Boehme’s day, by Richard of St. Victor; a mystic whom he is hardly likely to have read. “When the soul is plunged in the fire of divine love,” he says, “like iron, it first loses its blackness, and then growing to white heat, it becomes like unto the fire itself. And lastly, it grows liquid, and losing its nature is transmuted into an utterly different quality of being.” “As the difference between iron that is cold and iron that is hot,” he says again, “so is the difference between soul and soul: between the tepid soul and the soul made incandescent by divine love.” 865 Other contemplatives say that the deified soul is transfigured by the inundations of the Uncreated Light: that it is like a brand blazing in the furnace, transformed to the likeness of the fire. “These souls,” says the Divine voice to St. Catherine of Siena, “thrown into the furnace of My charity, no part of their will remaining outside but the whole of them being inflamed in Me, are like a brand, wholly consumed in the furnace, so that no one can take hold of it to extinguish it, because it has become fire. In the same way no one can seize these souls, or draw them outside of Me, because they are made one thing with Me through grace, and I never withdraw Myself from them by sentiment, as in the case of those whom I am leading on to perfection.” 866

For the most subtle and delicate descriptions of the Unitive or Deified State, understood as self-loss in the “Ocean Pacific” of God, we must go to the great genius of Ruysbroeck. He alone, whilst avoiding all its pitfalls, has conveyed the suggestion of its ineffable joys in a measure which seems, as we read, to be beyond all that we had supposed possible to human utterance. Awe and rapture, theological profundity, keen psychological insight, are here tempered by a touching simplicity. We listen to the report of one who has indeed heard “the invitation of love” which “draws interior souls towards the One” and says “Come home.” A humble receptivity, a meek self-naughting is with Ruysbroeck, as with all great mystics, the gate of the City of God. “Because they have abandoned themselves to God in doing, in leaving undone, and in suffering,” he says of the deified souls, “they have steadfast peace and inward joy, consolation and savour, of which the world cannot partake; neither any dissembler, nor the man who seeks and means himself more than the glory of God. Moreover, those same inward and enlightened men have before them in their inward seeing, whenever they will, the Love of God as something drawing or urging them into the Unity; for they see and feel that the Father with the Son through the Holy Ghost, embrace Each Other and all the chosen, and draw themselves back with eternal love into the unity of Their Nature. Thus the Unity is ever drawing to itself and inviting to itself everything that has been born of It, either by nature or by grace.

And therefore, too, such enlightened men are, with a free spirit, lifted up above reason into a bare and imageless vision, wherein lives the eternal indrawing summons of the Divine Unity; and, with an imageless and bare understanding, they pass through all works, and all exercises, and all things, until they reach the summit of their spirits. There, their bare understanding is drenched through by the Eternal Brightness, even as the air is drenched through by the sunshine. And the bare, uplifted will is transformed and drenched through by abysmal love, even as iron is by fire. And the bare, uplifted memory feels itself enwrapped and established in an abysmal Absence of Image. And thereby the created image is united above reason in a threefold way with its Eternal Image, which is the origin of its being and its life. . . . Yet the creature does not become God, for the union takes place in God through grace and our homeward-turning love: and therefore the creature in its inward contemplation feels a distinction and an otherness between itself and God. And though the union is without means, yet the manifold works which God works in heaven and on earth are nevertheless hidden from the spirit. For though God gives Himself as He is, with clear discernment, He gives Himself in the essence of the soul, where the powers of the soul are simplified above reason, and where, in simplicity, they suffer the transformation of God. There all is full and overflowing, for the spirit feels itself to be one truth and one richness and one unity with God.

“When love has carried us above and beyond all things,” he says in another place, “above the light, into the Divine Dark, there we are wrought and transformed by the Eternal Word Who is the image of the Father; and as the air is penetrated by the sun, thus we receive in idleness of spirit the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us and penetrating us. And this flight is nothing else but an infinite gazing and seeing. We behold that which we are, and we are that which be behold; because our thought, life and being are uplifted in simplicity and made one with the Truth which is God.” 868

Here the personal aspect of the Absolute seems to be reduced to a minimum: yet all that we value in personality—love, action, will—remains unimpaired. We seem caught up to a plane of vision beyond the categories of the human mind: to the contemplation of a Something Other—our home, our hope, and our passion, the completion of our personality, and the Substance of all that Is. Such an endless contemplation, such a dwelling within the substance of Goodness, Truth and, Beauty, is the essence of that Beatific Vision, that participation of Eternity, “of all things most delightful and desired, of all things most loved by them who have it,” 869 which theology presents to us as the objective of the soul.

Those mystics of the metaphysical type who tend to use these impersonal symbols of Place and Thing often see in the Unitive Life a foretaste of the Beatific Vision: an entrance here and now into that absolute life within the Divine Being, which shall be lived by all perfect spirits when they have cast off the limitations of the flesh and re-entered the eternal order for which they were made. For them, in fact, the “deified man,” in virtue of his genius for transcendental reality, has run ahead of human history: and attained a form of consciousness which other men will only know when earthly life is past.

In the “Book of Truth” Suso has a beautiful and poetic comparison between the life of the blessed spirits dwelling within the Ocean of Divine Love, and that approximate life which is lived on earth by the mystic who has renounced all selfhood and merged his will in that of the Eternal Truth. Here we find one of the best of many answers to the ancient but apparently immortal accusation that the mystics teach the total annihilation of personality as the end and object of their quest. “Lord, tell me,” says the Servitor, “what remains to a blessed soul which has wholly renounced itself.” Truth says, “When the good and faithful servant enters into the joy of his Lord, he is inebriated by the riches of the house of God; for he feels, in an ineffable degree, that which is felt by an inebriated man. He forgets himself, he is no longer conscious of his selfhood; he disappears and loses himself in God, and becomes one spirit with Him, as a drop of water which is drowned in a great quantity of wine. For even as such a drop disappears, taking the colour and the taste of wine, so it is with those who are in full possession of blessedness. All human desires are taken from them in an indescribable manner, they are rapt from themselves, and are immersed in the Divine Will. If it were otherwise, if there remained in the man some human thing that was not absorbed, those words of Scripture which say that God must be all in all would be false. His being remains, but in another form, in another glory, and in another power. And all this is the result of entire and complete renunciation. . . .

Herein thou shalt find an answer to thy question; for the true renunciation and veritable abandonment of a man to the Divine Will in the temporal world is an imitation and reduction of that self-abandonment of the blessed, of which Scripture speaks: and this imitation approaches its model more or less, according as men are more or less united with God and become more or less one with God. Remark well that which is said of the blessed: they are stripped of their personal initiative, and changed into another form, another glory, another power. What then is this other form, if it be not the Divine Nature and the Divine Being whereinto they pour themselves, and which pours Itself into them, and becomes one thing with them? And what is that other glory, if it be not to be illuminated and made shining in the Inaccessible Light? What is that other power, if it be not that by means of his union with the Divine Personality, there is given to man a divine strength and a divine power, that he may accomplish all which pertains to his blessedness and omit all which is contrary thereto? And thus it is that, as has been said, a man comes forth from his selfhood.” 870

All the mystics agree that the stripping off of the I, the Me, the Mine, utter renouncement, or “self-naughting”—self-abandonment to the direction of a larger Will—is an imperative condition of the attainment of the unitive life. The temporary denudation of the mind, whereby the contemplative made space for the vision of God, must now be applied to the whole life. Here, they say, there is a final swallowing up of that wilful I-hood, that surface individuality which we ordinarily recognize as ourselves. It goes for ever, and something new is established in its room. The self is made part of the mystical Body of God; and, humbly taking its place in the corporate life of Reality, would “fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.” 871 That strange “hunger and thirst of God for the soul,” “at once avid and generous,” of which they speak in their profoundest passages, here makes its final demand and receives its satisfaction. “All that He has, all that He is He gives: all that we have, all that we are, He takes.” 872 The self, they declare, is devoured, immersed in the Abyss; “sinks into God, Who is the deep of deeps.” In their efforts towards describing to us this, the supreme mystic act, and the new life to which it gives birth, they are often driven to the use of images which must seem to us grotesque, were it not for the flame which burns behind: as when Ruysbroeck cries, “To eat and be eaten! this is Union! . . . Since His desire is without measure, to be devour of of Him does not greatly amaze me.” 873

(B) At this point we begin to see that the language of deification, taken alone, will not suffice to describe the soul’s final experience of Reality. The personal and emotional aspect of man’s relation with his Source is also needed if that which he means by “union with God” is to be even partially expressed. Hence, even the most “transcendental” mystic is constantly compelled to fall back on the language of love in the endeavour to express the content of his metaphysical raptures: and forced in the end to acknowledge that the perfect union of Lover and Beloved cannot be suggested in the precise and arid terms of religious philosophy. Such arid language eludes the most dangerous aspects of “divine union,” the pantheistic on one hand, the “amoristic” on the other; but it also fails to express the most splendid side of that amazing experience. It needs some other, more personal and intimate vision to complete it: and this we shall find in the reports of those mystics of the “intimate” type to whom the Unitive Life has meant not self-loss in an Essence, but self-fulfilment in the union of heart and will.

The extreme form of this kind of apprehension of course finds expression in the well-known and heartily abused symbolism of the Spiritual Marriage between God and the Soul: a symbolism which goes back to the Orphic Mysteries, and thence descended via the Neoplatonists into the stream of Christian tradition. But there are other and less concrete embodiments of it, wholly free from the dangers which are supposed to lurk in “erotic” imagery of this kind. Thus Jalalu ‘d Din, by the use of metaphors which are hardly human yet charged with passionate feeling, tells, no less successfully than the writer of the Song of Songs, the secret of “his union in which “heart speaks to heart.”

With Thy Sweet Soul, this soul of mine Hath mixed as Water doth with Wine. Who can the Wine and Water part, Or me and Thee when we combine? Thou art become my greater self; Small bounds no more can me confine. Thou hast my being taken on, And shall not I now take on Thine? Me Thou for ever hast affirmed That I may ever know Thee mine Thy Love has pierced me through and through, Its thrill with Bone and Nerve entwine. I rest a Flute laid on Thy lips; A lute, I on Thy breast recline. Breathe deep in me that I may sigh; Yet strike my strings, and tears shall shine.” 874

What the mystic here desires to tell us is, that his new life is not only a free and conscious participation in the life of Eternity—a fully-established existence on real and transcendental levels—but also the conscious sharing of an inflowing personal life greater than his own; a tightening of the bonds of that companionship which has been growing in intimacy and splendour during the course of the Mystic Way. This companionship, at once the most actual and most elusive fact of human experience, is utterly beyond the resources of speech. So too are those mysteries of the communion of love, whereby the soul’s humble, active and ever-renewed self-donation becomes the occasion of her glory: and “by her love she is made the equal of Love”—the beggar maid sharing Cophetua’s throne.

Thus the anonymous author of the “Mirror” writes, in one of his most daring passages, “‘I am God,’ says Love, ‘for Love is God, and God is Love. And this soul is God by condition of love: but I am God by Nature Divine. And this [state] is hers by righteousness of love, so that this precious beloved of me is learned, and led of Me without her [working]. . . . This [soul] is the eagle that flies high, so right high and yet more high than doth any other bird; for she is feathered with fine love.’” 875

The simplest expression of the Unitive Life, the simplest interpretation which we can put on its declarations, is that it is the complete and conscious fulfilment here and now of this Perfect Love. In it certain elect spirits, still in the flesh, “fly high and yet more high,” till “taught and led out of themselves,” they become, in the exaggerated language of the “Mirror,” “God by condition of love.” Home-grown English mysticism tried as a rule to express the inexpressible in homelier, more temperate terms than this. “I would that thou knew,” says the unknown author of the “Epistle of Prayer,” “what manner of working it is that knitteth man’s soul to God, and that maketh it one with Him in love and accordance of will after the word of St. Paul, saying thus: ‘ Qui adhaeret Deo, unus spiritus est cum illo ’ ; that is to say: ‘Whoso draweth near to God as it is by such a reverent affection touched before, he is one spirit with God.’ That is, though all that God and he be two and sere in kind, nevertheless yet in grace they are so knit together that they are but one in spirit; and all this is one for onehead of love and accordance of will; and in this onehead is the marriage made between God and the soul the which shall never be broken, though all that the heat and the fervour of this work cease for a time, but by a deadly sin.

In the ghostly feeling of this onehead may a loving soul both say and sing (if it list) this holy word that is written in the Book of Songs in the Bible, ‘Dilectus meus mihi et ego illi, ’ that is, My loved unto me, and I unto Him; understanding that God shall be knitted with the ghostly glue of grace on His party, and the lovely consent in gladness of spirit on thy party.” 876

I think no one can deny that the comparison of the bond between the soul and the Absolute to “ghostly glue,” though crude, is wholly innocent. Its appearance in this passage as an alternative to the symbol of wedlock may well check the uncritical enthusiasm of those who hurry to condemn at sight all “sexual” imagery. That it has seemed to the mystics appropriate and exact is proved by its reappearance in the next century in the work of a greater contemplative. “Thou givest me,” says Petersen, “Thy whole Self to be mine whole and undivided, if at least I shall be Thine whole and undivided. And when I shall be thus all Thine, even as from everlasting Thou hast loved Thyself, so from everlasting Thou hast loved me: for this means nothing more than that Thou enjoyest Thyself in me, and that I by Thy grace enjoy Thee in myself and myself in Thee. And when in Thee I shall love myself, nothing else but Thee do I love, because Thou art in me and I in Thee, glued together as one and the selfsame thing, which henceforth and forever cannot be divided.” 877