Mysticism

In Illumination, the soul, basking in the Uncreated Light, identified the Divine Nature with the divine light and sweetness which it then enjoyed. Its consciousness of the transcendent was chiefly felt as an increase of personal vision and personal joy. Thus, in that apparently selfless state, the “I, the Me, the Mine,” though spiritualized, still remained intact. The mortification of the senses was more than repaid by the rich and happy life which this mortification conferred upon the soul. But before real and permanent union with the Absolute can take place: before the whole self can learn to live on those high levels where—its being utterly surrendered to the Infinite Will—it can be wholly transmuted in God, merged in the great life of the All, this dependence on personal joys must be done away. The spark of the soul, the fast-growing germ of divine humanity, must so invade every corner of character that the self can only say with St. Catherine of Genoa, “My me is God: nor do I know my selfhood except in God.” 816

The various torments and desolations of the Dark Night constitute this last and drastic purgation of the spirit; the doing away of separateness, the annihilation of selfhood, even though all that self now claims for its own be the Love of God. Such a claim—which is really a claim to entire felicity, since the soul which possesses it needs nothing more—is felt by these great spirits to sully the radiance of their self-giving love. “All that I would here say of these inward delights and enjoyments,” says William Law, “is only this; they are not holiness, they are not piety, they are not perfection; but they are God’s gracious allurements and calls to seek after holiness and spiritual perfection . . . and ought rather to convince us that we are as yet but babes, than that we are ready men of God. . . . This alone is the true Kingdom of God opened in the soul when, stripped of all selfishness, it has only one love and one will in it; when it has no motion or desire but what branches from the Love of God, and resigns itself wholly to the Will of God. . . . To sum up all in a word: Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God. All the disorder and corruption and malady of our nature lies in a certain fixedness of our own will, imagination, and desire, wherein we live to ourselves, are our own centre and circumference, act wholly from ourselves, according to our own will, imagination, and desires.

There is not the smallest degree of evil in us but what arises from this selfishness because we are thus all in all to ourselves. . . . To be humble, mortified, devout, patient in a certain degree, and to be persecuted for our virtues, is no hurt to this selfishness; nay, spiritual-self must have all these virtues to subsist upon, and his life consists in seeing, knowing and feeling the bulk, strength, and reality of them. But still, in all this show and glitter of virtue, there is an unpurified bottom on which they stand, there is a selfishness which can no more enter into the Kingdom of Heaven than the grossness of flesh and blood can enter into it. What we are to feel and undergo in these last purifications, when the deepest root of all selfishness, as well spiritual as natural, is to be plucked up and torn from us, or how we shall be able to stand in that trial, are both of them equally impossible to be known by us beforehand.” 817

The self, then, has got to learn to cease to be its “own centre and circumference”: to make that final surrender which is the price of final peace. In the Dark Night the starved and tortured spirit learns through an anguish which is “itself an orison” to accept lovelessness for the sake of Love, Nothingness for the sake of the All; dies without any sure promise of life, loses when it hardly hopes to find. It sees with amazement the most sure foundations of its transcendental life crumble beneath it, dwells in a darkness which seems to hold no promise of a dawn. This is what the German mystics call the “upper school of true resignation” or of “suffering love”; the last test of heroic detachment, of manliness, of spiritual courage. Though such an experience is “passive” in the sense that the self can neither enter nor leave it at will it is a direct invitation to active endurance, a condition of stress in which work is done. Thus, when St. Catherine of Siena was tormented by hideous visions of sin, she was being led by her deeper self to the heroic acceptance of this subtle form of torture, almost unendurable to her chaste and delicate mind. When these trials had brought her to the point at which she ceased to resist them, but exclaimed, “I have chosen suffering for my consolation,” their business was done. They ceased. More significant still, when she asked, “Where wast Thou, Lord, when I was tormented by this foulness?” the Divine Voice answered, “I was in thy heart.” 818

“In order to raise the soul from imperfection,” said the Voice of God to St. Catherine in her Dialogue, “I withdraw Myself from her sentiment, depriving her of former consolations . . . which I do in order to humiliate her, and cause her to seek Me in truth, and to prove her in the light of faith, so that she come to prudence. Then, if she love Me without thought of self, and with lively faith and with hatred of her own sensuality, she rejoices in the time of trouble, deeming herself unworthy of peace and quietness of mind. Now comes the second of the three things of which I told thee, that is to say: how the soul arrives at perfection, and what she does when she is perfect. That is what she does. Though she perceives that I have withdrawn Myself, she does not, on that account, look back; but perseveres with humility in her exercises, remaining barred in the house of self-knowledge, and, continuing to dwell therein, awaits with lively faith the coming of the Holy Spirit, that is of Me, who am the Fire of Love. . . . This is what the soul does in order to rise from imperfection and arrive at perfection, and it is to this end, namely, that she may arrive at perfection, that I withdraw from her, not by grace, but by sentiment.

Once more do I leave her so that she may see and know her defects, so that feeling herself deprived of consolation and afflicted by pain, she may recognize her own weakness, and learn how incapable she is of stability or perseverance, thus cutting down to the very root of spiritual self-love: for this should be the end and purpose of all her self-knowledge, to rise above herself, mounting the throne of conscience, and not permitting the sentiment of imperfect love to turn again in its death-struggle, but with correction and reproof digging up the root of self-love with the knife of self-hatred and the love of virtue.” 819

Such a sense of helplessness is really, the mystics say, a mark of progress: of deeper initiation into that sphere of reality to which it is not yet acclimatized, and which brings with it a growing consciousness of the appalling disparity between that Reality, that Perfection, and the imperfect soul.

The self is in the dark because it is blinded by a Light greater than it can bear—that “Divine Wisdom which is not only night and darkness to the soul, but pain and torment too.” “The more clear the light, the more does it blind the eyes of the owl, and the more we try to look at the sun the feebler grows our sight and the more our weak eyes are darkened. So the divine light of contemplation, when it beats on the soul not yet perfectly purified, fills it with spiritual darkness, not only because of its brilliance, but because it paralyses the natural perception of the soul. The pain suffered by the soul is like that endured by weak or diseased eyes when suddenly struck by a strong light. Such suffering is intense when the yet unpurified soul finds itself invaded by this cleansing light. For in this pure light, which attacks its impurities to expel them, the soul perceives itself to be so unclean and miserable that it seems as if God had set Himself against it. . . . Wonderful and piteous sight! so great are the weakness and imperfection of the soul that the hand of God, so soft and so gentle, is felt to be so heavy and oppressive, though merely touching it, and that, too, most mercifully; for He touches the soul, not to chastise it, but to load it with His graces.” 820

The Dark Night then, whichever way we look at it, is a state of disharmony; of imperfect adaptation to environment. The self, unaccustomed to that direct contact of the Absolute which is destined to become the Source of its vitality and its joy, feels the “soft and gentle touch” of the Following Love as unbearable in its weight. The “self-naughting” or “purification of the will,” which here takes place, is the struggle to resolve that disharmony; to purge away the somewhat which still sets itself up in the soul as separate from the Divine, and makes the clear light of reality a torment instead of a joy. So deeply has the soul now entered into the great stream of spiritual life, so dominant has her transcendental faculty become, that this process is accomplished in her whether she will or no: and in this sense it is, as ascetic writers sometimes call it, a “passive purgation.” So long as the subject still feels himself to be somewhat, he has not yet annihilated selfhood and come to that ground where his being can be united with the Being of God.

Only when he learns to cease thinking of himself at all, in however depreciatory a sense; when he abolishes even such selfhood as lies in a desire for the sensible presence of God, will that harmony be attained. This is the “naughting of the soul,” the utter surrender to the great movement of the Absolute Life, which is insisted upon at such length by all writers upon mysticism. Here, as in purgation, the condition of access to higher levels of vitality is a death: a deprivation, a detachment, a clearing of the ground. Poverty leaps to the Cross: and finds there an utter desolation, without promise of spiritual reward. The satisfactions of the spirit must now go the same way as the satisfactions of the senses. Even the power of voluntary sacrifice and self-discipline is taken away. A dreadful ennui, a dull helplessness, takes its place. The mystic motto, I am nothing, I have nothing, I desire nothing, must now express not only the detachment of the senses, but the whole being’s surrender to the All.

The moral condition towards which the interior travail is directed is that of an utter humility. “Everything depends,” says Tauler, on “a fathomless sinking in a fathomless nothingness.” He continues, “If a man were to say, ‘Lord, who art Thou, that I must follow Thee through such deep, gloomy, miserable paths?’ the Lord would reply, ‘I am God and Man, and far more God.’ If a man could answer then, really and consciously from the bottom of his heart. ‘Then I am nothing and less than nothing’; all would be accomplished, for the Godhead has really no place to work in, but ground where all has been annihilated. 821 As the schoolmen say, when a new form is to come into existence, the old must of necessity be destroyed. . . . And so I say: ‘If a man is to be thus clothed upon with this Being, all the forms must of necessity be done away that were ever received by him in all his powers—of perception, knowledge, will, work, of subjection, sensibility and self-seeking.’ When St. Paul saw nothing, he saw God. So also when Elias wrapped his face in his mantle, God came. All strong rocks are broken here, all on which the spirit can rest must be done away. Then, when all forms have ceased to exist, in the twinkling of an eye the man is transformed. Therefore thou must make an entrance.

Thereupon speaks the Heavenly Father to him: “Thou shalt call Me Father, and shalt never cease to enter in; entering ever further in, ever nearer, so as to sink the deeper in an unknown and unnamed abyss; and, above all ways, images and forms, and above all powers, to lose thyself, deny thyself, and even unform thyself.’ In this lost condition nothing is to be seen but a ground which rests upon itself, everywhere one Being, one Life. It is thus, man may say, that he becomes unknowing, unloving, and senseless.” 822

It is clear that so drastic a process of unselfing is not likely to take place without stress. It is the negative aspect of “deification”: in which the self, deprived of “perception, knowledge, will, work, self-seeking”—the I, the Me, the Mine—loses itself, denies itself, unforms itself, drawing “ever nearer” to the One, till “nothing is to be seen but a ground which rests upon itself”—the ground of the soul, in which it has union with God.

“Everywhere one Being, one Life”—this is the goal of mystical activity; the final state of equilibrium towards which the self is moving, or rather struggling, in the dimness and anguish of the Dark Night. “The soul,” says Madame Guyon in a passage of unusual beauty, “after many a redoubled death, expires at last in the arms of Love; but she is unable to perceive these arms. . . . Then, reduced to Nought, there is found in her ashes a seed of immortality, which is preserved in these ashes and will germinate in its season. But she knows not this; and does not expect ever to see herself living again.” Moreover, “the soul which is reduced to the Nothing, ought to dwell therein; without wishing, since she is now but dust, to issue from this state, nor, as before, desiring to live again. She must remain as something which no longer exists: and this, in order that the Torrent may drown itself and lose itself in the Sea, never to find itself in its selfhood again: that it may become one and the same thing with the Sea.” 823

So Hilton says of the “naughted soul,” “the less it thinketh that it loveth or seeth God, the nearer it nigheth for to perceive the gift of the blessed love. For then is love master, and worketh in the soul, and maketh it for to forget itself, and for to see and behold only how love doth. And then is the soul more suffering than doing, and that is clean love.” 824

The “mystic death” or Dark Night is therefore an aspect or incident of the transition from multiplicity to Unity, of that mergence and union of the soul with the Absolute which is the whole object of the mystical evolution of man. It is the last painful break with the life of illusion, the tearing away of the self from that World of Becoming in which all its natural affections and desires are rooted, to which its intellect and senses correspond; and the thrusting of it into that World of Being where at first, weak and blinded, it can but find a wilderness, a “dark.” No transmutation without fire, say the alchemists: No cross, no crown, says the Christian. All the great experts of the spiritual life agree—whatever their creeds, their symbols, their explanations—in describing this stress, tribulation, and loneliness, as an essential part of the way from the Many to the One; bringing the self to the threshold of that completed life which is to be lived in intimate union with Reality. It is the Entombment which precedes the Resurrection, say the Christian mystics; ever ready to describe their life-process in the language of their faith. Here as elsewhere—but nowhere else in so drastic a sense—the self must “lose to find and die to live.”

The Dark Night, as we have seen, tends to establish itself gradually; the powers and intuitions of the self being withdrawn one after another, the intervals of lucidity becoming rarer, until the “mystic death” or state of total deprivation is reached. So, too, when the night begins to break down before the advance of the new or Unitive Life, the process is generally slow, though it may be marked—as for instance in Rulman Merswin’s case—by visions and ecstasies. 825 One after another, the miseries and disharmonies of the Dark Night give way: affirmation takes the place of negation: the Cloud of Unknowing is pierced by rays of light.

The act of complete surrender then, which is the term of the Dark Night, has given the self its footing in Eternity: its abandonment of the old centres of consciousness has permitted movement towards the new. In each such forward movement, the Transcendental Self, that spark of the soul which is united to the Absolute Life, has invaded more and more the seat of personality; stage by stage the remaking of the self in conformity with the Eternal World has gone on. In the misery and apparent stagnation of the Dark Night—that dimness of the spiritual consciousness, that dullness of its will and love—work has been done, and the last great phase of the inward transmutation accomplished. The self which comes forth from the night is no separated self, conscious of the illumination of the Uncreated Light, but the New Man, the transmuted humanity, whose life is one with the Absolute Life of God. “As soon as the two houses of the soul [the sensual and the spiritual],” says St. John of the Cross, “are tranquil and confirmed and merged in one by this peace, and their servants the powers, appetites and passions are sunk in deep tranquillity, neither troubled by things above nor things below, the Divine Wisdom immediately unites itself to the soul in a new bond of loving possession, and that is fulfilled which is written in the Book of Wisdom: ‘While all things were immersed in quiet silence, and the night was in the midway of her course, Thy omnipotent Word sallied out of heaven from the royal seats’ (Wisdom xviii. 14).

So far, we have considered the Dark Night of the Soul from a somewhat academic point of view. We have tried to dissect and describe it: have seen it through the medium of literature rather than life. Such a method has obvious disadvantages when dealing with any organic process: and when it is applied to the spiritual life of man, these disadvantages are increased. Moreover, our chief example, “from the life,” Madame Guyon, valuable as her passion for self analysis makes her to the student of mystic states cannot be looked upon as a satisfactory witness. Her morbid sentimentalism, her absurd “spiritual self-importance” have to be taken into account and constantly remembered in estimating the value of her psychological descriptions. If we want to get a true idea of the Dark Night, as an episode in the history of a living soul, we must see it in its context, as part of that soul’s total experience. We must study the reactions of a self which is passing through this stage of development upon its normal environment the content of its diurnal existence; not only on its intuition of the Divine.

As a pendant to this chapter, then, we will look at this “state of pain” as it expressed itself in the life of a mystic whose ardent, impressionable, and poetic nature reacted to every aspect of the contemplative experience, every mood and fluctuation of the soul. I choose this particular case—the case of Suso—(1) because it contains many interesting and unconventional elements; showing us the Dark Night not as a series of specific moods and events, but as a phase of growth largely conditioned by individual temperament: (2) because, being told at first hand, in the pages of his singularly ingenuous autobiography, the record is comparatively free from the reverent and corrupting emendations of the hagiographer.

From the 22nd chapter onwards, Suso’s “Life” is one of the most valuable documents we possess for the study of this period of the Mystic Way. We see in it—more clearly perhaps than its author can have done—the remaking of his consciousness, his temperamental reactions to the ceaseless travail of his deeper self: so different in type from those of St. Teresa and Madame Guyon. There is a note of virile activity about these trials and purifications, an insistence upon the heroic aspect of the spiritual life, far more attractive than Madame Guyon’s elaborate discourses on resignation and holy passivity, or even St. Teresa’s “dark ecstasies” of insatiable desire.

The chapter in which Suso’s entrance into this “Second Mystic Life” of deprivation is described is called “How the Servitor was led into the School of True Resignation.” Characteristically, this inward experience expressed itself in a series of dramatic visions; visions of that “dynamic” kind which we have noticed as a frequent accompaniment of the crisis in which the mystic self moves to a new level of consciousness. 827 It followed the long period of constant mortification and intermittent illumination which lasted, as he tells us, from his eighteenth to his fortieth year: and constituted the first cycle of his spiritual life. At the end of that time, “God showed him that all this severity and these penances were but a good beginning, that by these he had triumphed over the unruly sensual man: but that now he must exert himself in another manner if he desired to advance in the Way.” 828 In two of these visions—these vivid interior dramas—we seem to see Suso’s developed mystical consciousness running ahead of its experience, reading the hidden book of its own future, probing its own spiritual necessities; and presenting the results to the backward and unwilling surface-mind. This growing mystic consciousness is already aware of fetters which the normal Suso does not feel. Its eyes open upon the soul’s true country, it sees the path which it must tread to perfect freedom; the difference between the quality of that freedom, and the spirituality which Suso thinks that he has attained.