Mysticism

“I could wish,” says St. Augustine, “that men would consider these three things that are in themselves . . . To Be, to Know, and to Will. For I am, and I know, and I will, I am knowing and willing, and I know myself to be and to will; and I will to be and to know. In these three therefore let him who can, see how inseparable a life there is—even one life, one mind, one essence: finally how inseparable is the distinction, and yet a distinction. Surely a man hath it before him: let him look into himself and see and tell me. But when he discovers and can see anything of these, let him not think that he has discovered that which is above these Unchangeable: which Is unchangeably and Knows unchangeably and Wills unchangeably.” 210

In a well-known passage, Julian of Norwich tells us how she saw the Trinity of the Divine Nature shining in the phenomenal as well as in the spiritual world. “He showed me,” she says, “a little thing, the quantity of an hazel nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought, What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. . . . In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third is that God keepeth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover, I cannot tell.” 211

Julian, a simple and deeply human Englishwoman of middle age dwelling alone in her churchyard cell, might well be called the poet of the Trinity. She treats this austere and subtle dogma—of which the mediaeval mystics write with a passion little understood by those who look upon it as “orthodoxy reduced to mathematics”—with an intimacy and vigour which carry with them a conviction of her own direct and personal apprehension of the theological truth she struggles to describe. “I beheld,” she says of a vision which is close to that of St. Teresa in the “Seventh Habitation of the Soul,” and more lucidly if less splendidly expressed, “the working of all the blessed Trinity: in which beholding, I saw and understood these three properties: the property of the Fatherhood, the property of the Motherhood, and the property of the Lordhood, in one God. In our Father Almighty we have our keeping and our bliss as anent our natural Substance, 212 which is to us by our making, without beginning. And in the Second Person in wit and wisdom we have our keeping as anent our Sense-soul: our restoring and our saving; for He is our Mother, Brother, and Saviour. And in our good Lord, the Holy Ghost, we have our rewarding and our meed-giving for our living and our travail, and endless overpassing of all that we desire, in His marvellous courtesy of His high plenteous grace. For all our life is in three: in the first we have our Being, in the second we have our Increasing, and in the third we have our Fulfilling; the first is Nature, the second is Mercy, and the third is Grace. 213 . . .

Again, in a passage of exquisite tenderness, “As verily as God is our Father, so verily God is our Mother; and that shewed He in all [her revelations] and especially in these sweet words where He saith: I it am. That is to say, I it am, the Might and the Goodness of the Fatherhood; I it am, the Wisdom of the Motherhood, I it am the Light and the Grace that is all blessed Love. I it am, the Trinity, I it am, the Unity: I am the sovereign Goodness of all manner of things. I am that maketh thee to love. I am that maketh thee to long: I it am, the endless fulfilling of all true desires. ” 215

Any attempt towards a definition of God which does not account for and acknowledge these three aspects is found in experience to be incomplete. They provide objectives for the heart, the intellect, and the will: for they offer to the Self material for its highest love, its deepest thought, its act of supreme volition. Under the familiar Platonic terms of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, they represent the divine source and end of Ethics, Science, and Art, the three supreme activities of man. Thus the ideals of artist, student, and philanthropist, who all seek under different modes the same reality, are gathered up in the mystic’s One; as the pilgrimage of the three kings ended in the finding of one Star

“What is God?” says St. Bernard. “Length, breadth, height, and depth. ‘What,’ you say, ‘you do after all profess to believe in the fourfold Godhead which was an abomination to you?’ Not in the least. . . . God is designated One to suit our comprehension, not to describe his character. His character is capable of division, He Himself is not. The words are different, the paths are many, but one thing is signified; the paths lead to one Person.” 217

All possible ways of conceiving this One Person in His living richness are found in the end to range themselves under three heads. He is “above all and through all and in you all,” 218 said St. Paul, anticipating the Councils in a flash of mystic intuition and giving to the infant Church the shortest and most perfect definition of its Triune God. Being, which is above all, manifests itself as Becoming; as the dynamic omnipresent Word of Life. The Divine Love immanent in the heart and in the world comes forth from, and returns to, the Absolute One. “Thou, my God, who art Love,” says Nicolas of Cusa, “art Love that loveth, and Love that is loveable, and Love that is the bond between these twain.” 219 Thus is completed “the Eternal Circle from Goodness, through Goodness, to Goodness.” It is true that to these fundamental respects of the perceived Godhead—that Being, Becoming, and Desire whereto the worlds keep time—the mystics have given many and various names; for they have something of the freedom of true intimates in treating of the Reality which they love. In particular, those symbols of the Absolute which are drawn from the great and formless forces of the universe, rather than from the orthodox but necessarily anthropomorphic imagery of human relationship, have always appealed to them. Their intense apprehension of Spirit seems to find freer and more adequate expression in such terms, than in those in which the notion of space is involved, or which suggest a concrete picture to the mind.

Though they know as well as the philosophers that “there must always he something symbolic in our way of expressing the spiritual life,” since “that unfathomable infinite whose spiritual character is first recognized in our human experience, can never reveal itself fully and freely under the limitations of our earthly existence”; 220 yet they ever seek, like the artists they are, some new and vital image which is not yet part of the debased currency of formal religion, and conserves its original power of stinging the imagination to more vivid life.

Thus “the Kingdom of Heaven,” says Law, “stands in this threefold life, where three are one, because it is a manifestation of the Deity, which is Three and One; the Father has His distinct manifestation in the Fire, which is always generating the Light; the Son has His distinct manifestation in the Light, which is always generated from the Fire; the Holy Ghost has His manifestation in the Spirit, that always proceeds from both, and is always united with them. It is this eternal unbeginning Trinity in Unity of Fire, Light, and Spirit, that constitutes Eternal Nature, the Kingdom of Heaven, the heavenly Jerusalem, the Divine Life, the Beatific Visibility, the majestic Glory and Presence of God. Through this Kingdom of Heaven, or Eternal Nature, is the invisible God, the incomprehensible Trinity, eternally breaking forth and manifesting itself in a boundless height and depth of blissful wonders, opening and displaying itself to all its creatures as in an infinite variation and endless multiplicity of its powers, beauties, joys, and glories.” 221

Perhaps an easier, better, more beautiful example of these abstract symbols of the Trinity than Law’s Fire, Light, and Spirit is that of Light, Life, and Love: a threefold picture of the Real which is constantly dwelt upon and elaborated by the Christian mystics. Transcendent Light, intangible but unescapable, ever emanating Its splendour through the Universe: indwelling, unresting, and energizing Life: desirous and directive Love—these are cardinal aspects of Reality to which they return again and again in their efforts to find words which will express something of the inexpressible truth.

( a ) LIGHT, ineffable and uncreated, the perfect symbol of pure undifferentiated Being: above the intellect, as St. Augustine reminds us, but known to him who loves. 222 This Uncreated Light is the “deep yet dazzling darkness” of the Dionysian school, “dark from its surpassing brightness . . . as the shining of the sun on his course is as darkness to weak eyes.” 223 It is St. Hildegarde’s lux vivens, Dante’s somma luce, wherein he saw multiplicity in unity, the ingathered leaves of all the universe 224 : the Eternal Father, or Fount of Things. “For well we know,” says Ruysbroeck “that the bosom of the Father is our ground and origin, wherein our life and being is begun.” 225

( b ) LIFE, the Son, hidden Steersman of the Universe, the Logos, Fire, or cosmic Soul of Things. This out-birth or Concept of the Father’s Mind, which He possesses within Himself, as Battista Vernazza was told in her ecstasy, 226 is that Word of Creation which since It is alive and infinite, no formula can contain. the Word eternally “spoken” or generated by the Transcendent Light. “This is why,” says Ruysbroeck again, “all that lives in the Father unmanifested in the Unity, is also in the Son actively poured forth in manifestation.” 227 This life, then, is the flawless expression or character of the Father, Sapientia Patris. It is at once the personal and adorable comrade of the mystic’s adventure and the inmost principle, the sustaining power, of a dynamic universe; for that which intellect defines as the Logos or Creative Spirit, contemplative love knows as Wonderful, Counsellor, and Prince of Peace.

Since Christ, for the Christian philosopher, is Divine Life Itself—the drama of Christianity expressing this fact and its implications “in a point”—it follows that His active spirit is to be discerned, not symbolically, but in the most veritable sense, in the ecstatic and abounding life of the world. In the rapturous vitality of the birds, in their splendid glancing flight: in the swelling of buds and the sacrificial beauty of the flowers: in the great and solemn rhythms of the sea—there is somewhat of Bethlehem in all these things, somewhat too of Calvary in their self-giving pains. It was this re-discovery of Nature’s Christliness which Blake desired so passionately when he sang—

Here then it is, on this pinnacle of faith, at the utmost boundaries of human speech, that mystical theology suddenly shows herself—not as the puzzle-headed constructor of impossible creeds, but as accepting and transmuting to a more radiant life those two profound but apparently contradictory metaphysical definitions of Reality which we have already discussed. 228 Eternal Becoming, God immanent and dynamic, striving with and in His world: the unresting “flux of things” of Heracleitus, the crying aloud of that Word “which is through all things everlastingly”—the evolutionary world-process beloved of modern philosophers—is here placed once for all in true relation with pure transcendent and unmoved Being; the Absolute One of Xenophanes and the Platonists. This Absolute is discerned by mystic intuition as the “End of Unity” in whom all diversities must cease; 229 the Ocean to which that ceaseless and painful Becoming, that unresting river of life, in which we are immersed, tends to return: the Son going to the Father.

( c ) LOVE, the principle of attraction, which seems to partake at once of the transcendental and the created worlds. If we consider the Father as Supreme Subject—“origin,” as Aquinas says, “of the entire procession of Deity” 230 —and the Son or generated Logos as the Object of His thought, in whom, says Ruysbroeck, “He contemplates Himself and all things in an eternal Now”; 231 then this personal Spirit of Love, il desiro e il velle, represents the relation between the two, and constitutes the very character of God. “The heavenly Father,” says Ruysbroeck, “as a living Ground, with all that lives in Him, is actively turned towards His Son as to His own Eternal Wisdom. And that same Wisdom, with all that lives in it, is actively turned back towards the Father, that is towards that very ground from which it comes forth. And of this meeting is born the third Person, between the Father and the Son, that is the Holy Spirit, their mutual Love.” 232 Proceeding, according to Christian doctrine, from Light and Life, the Father and Son—implicit, that is, in both the Absolute Source and dynamic flux of things—this divine spirit of desire is found enshrined in our very selfhood; and is the agent by which that selfhood is merged in the Absolute Self. “My love is my weight,” said St. Augustine. 233 It is the spiritual equivalent of that gravitation which draws all things to their place.

Thus Bernard Holland says in his Introduction to Boehme’s “Dialogues,” “In a deep sense, the desire of the Spark of Life in the Soul to return to its Original Source is part of the longing desire of the universal Life for its own heart or centre. Of this longing, the universal attraction striving against resistance, towards a universal centre, proved to govern the phenomenal or physical world, is but the outer sheath and visible working.” Again, “Desire is everything in Nature; does everything. Heaven is Nature filled with divine Life attracted by Desire.” 234