Over
and over again in these lectures I have raised points and left them open and
unfinished until we should have come to the subject of Mysticism. Some of you,
I fear, may have smiled as you noted my reiterated postponements. But now the
hour has come when mysticism must be faced in good earnest, and those broken threads
wound up together. One may say truly, I think, that personal religious experience
has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness; so for us, who in
these lectures are treating personal experience as the exclusive subject of our
study, such states of consciousness ought to form the vital chapter from which
the other chapters get their light. Whether my treatment of mystical states will
shed more light or darkness, I do not know, for my own constitution shuts me out
from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand.
But though forced to look upon the subject so externally, I will be as objective
and receptive as I can; and I think I shall at least succeed in convincing you
of the reality of the states in question, and of the paramount importance of their
function. First of all, then, I ask, What does the expression 'mystical states
of consciousness' mean? How do we part off mystical states from other states?
The words 'mysticism' and 'mystical' are often used as terms of mere reproach,
to throw at any opinion which we regard as vague and vast and sentimental, and
without a base in either facts or logic. For some writers a 'mystic' is any person
who believes in thought-transference, or spirit-return. Employed in this way the
word has little value: there are too many less ambiguous synonyms. So, to keep
it useful by restricting it, I will do what I did in the case of the word 'religion,'
and simply propose to you four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify
us in calling it mystical for the purpose of the present lectures. In this way
we shall save verbal disputation, and the recriminations that generally go therewith.
1. Ineffability.- The handiest of the marks by which I classify
a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that
it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in
words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it
cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states
are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make
clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth
of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one
must have been in love one's self to understand a lover's state of mind. Lacking
the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are
even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most
of us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment.
2. Noetic
quality.- Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those
who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight
into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations,
revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they
remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.
These two characters will entitle any state to be called mystical, in the
sense in which I use the word. Two other qualities are less sharply marked, but
are usually found. These are:
3. Transiency.- Mystical states cannot be sustained
for long. Except in rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems
to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day. Often, when
faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory; but when they
recur it is recognized; and from one recurrence to another it is susceptible of
continuous development in what is felt as inner richness and importance.
4.
Passivity.- Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary
voluntary operations, as by fixing the attention, or going through certain bodily
performances, or in other ways which manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when
the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as
if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and
held by a superior power. This latter peculiarity connects mystical states with
certain definite phenomena of secondary or alternative personality, such as prophetic
speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance. When these latter conditions
are well pronounced, however, there may be no recollection whatever of the phenomenon
and it may have no significance for the subject's usual inner life, to which,
as it were, it makes a mere interruption. Mystical states, strictly so called,
are never merely interruptive. Some memory of their content always remains, and
a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject
between the times of their recurrence. Sharp divisions in this region are, however,
difficult to make, and we find all sorts of gradations and mixtures.
These
four characteristics are sufficient to mark out a group of states of consciousness
peculiar enough to deserve a special name and to call for careful study. Let it
then be called the mystical group.
Our next step should
be to gain acquaintance with some typical examples. Professional mystics at the
height of their development have often elaborately organized experiences and a
philosophy based thereupon. But you remember what I said in my first lecture:
phenomena are best understood when placed within their series, studied in their
germ and in their over-ripe decay, and compared with their exaggerated and degenerated
kindred. The range of mystical experience is very wide, much too wide for us to
cover in the time at our disposal. Yet the method of serial study is so essential:
for interpretation that if we really wish to reach conclusions we must use it.
I will begin, therefore, with phenomena which claim no special religious significance,
and end with those of which the religious pretensions are extreme.
The
simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense
of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one.
"I've heard that said all my life," we exclaim, "but I never realized its full
meaning until now." "When a fellow-monk," said Luther, "one day repeated the words
of the Creed: 'I believe in the forgiveness of sins,' I saw the Scripture in an
entirely new light; and straightway I felt as if I were born anew. It was as if
I had found the door of paradise thrown wide open." * This sense of deeper significance
is not confined to rational propositions. Single words, *(2) and conjunctions
of words, effects of light on land and sea, odors and musical sounds, all bring
it when the mind is tuned aright. Most of us can remember the strangely moving
power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways
as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life,
stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere
polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant
only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with
our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or
dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost
this mystical susceptibility.
* Newman's Securus judicat orbis terrarum is
another instance.
*(2) 'Mesopotamia' is the stock comic instance.- An excellent
old German lady, who had done some traveling in her day, used to describe to me
her Sehnsucht that she might yet visit 'Philadelphia,' whose wondrous name had
always haunted her imagination. Of John Foster it is said that "single words (as
chalcedony), or the names of ancient heroes, had a mighty fascination over him.
'At any time the word hermit was enough to transport him.' The words woods and
forests would produce the most powerful emotion." Foster's Life, by RYLAND, New
York, 1846, p. 3.
A more pronounced step forward on the mystical ladder is
found in an extremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling, namely, which
sometimes sweeps over us, of having 'been here before,' as if at some indefinite
past time, in just this place, with just these people, we were already saying
just these things. As Tennyson writes:
"Moreover, something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams- -
"Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where;
Such as no language may declare." *
Sir James Crichton-Browne has given
the technical name of 'dreamy states' to these sudden invasions of vaguely reminiscent
consciousness. *(2) They bring a sense of mystery and of the metaphysical duality
of things, and the feeling of an enlargement of perception which seems imminent
but which never completes itself. In Dr. Crichton-Browne's opinion they connect
themselves with the perplexed and scared disturbances of self-consciousness which
occasionally precede epileptic attacks. I think that this learned alienist takes
a rather absurdly alarmist view of an intrinsically insignificant phenomenon.
He follows it along the downward ladder, to insanity; our path pursues the upward
ladder chiefly. The divergence shows how important it is to neglect no part of
a phenomenon's connections, for we make it appear admirable or dreadful according
to the context by which we set it off.
* The Two Voices. In a letter to Mr.
B.P. Blood, Tennyson reports of himself as follows:
"I have never had any revelations
through anaesthetics, but a kind of waking trance- this for lack of a better word-
I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This
has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at
once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality
itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused
state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words- where
death was an almost laughable impossibility- the loss of personality (if so it
were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble
description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?"
Professor
Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this condition: "By God Almighty!
there is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of
transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind." Memoirs of Alfred
Tennyson, ii. 473.
*(2) The Lancet, July 6 and 13, 1895, reprinted as the
Cavendish Lecture, on Dreamy Mental States, London, Bailliere, 1895. They have
been a good deal discussed of late by psychologists. See, for example, BERNARD-LEROY:
L'Illusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, Paris, 1898.
Somewhat deeper plunges
into mystical consciousness are met with in yet other dreamy states. Such feelings
as these which Charles Kingsley describes are surely far from being uncommon,
especially in youth:- -
"When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then
with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand
it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp amounts
to indescribable awe sometimes.... Have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible
to your mental vision, except in a few hallowed moments?" *
* Charles Kingsley's
Life, i. 55, quoted by INGE: Christian Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 341.
A
much more extreme state of mystical consciousness is described by J.A. Symonds;
and probably more persons than we suspect could give parallels to it from their
own experience.
"Suddenly," writes Symonds, "at church, or in company, or
when I was reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, I felt
the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of my mind and will,
lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappeared in a series of rapid sensations
which resembled the awakening from anaesthetic influence. One reason why I disliked
this kind of trance was that I could not describe it to myself. I cannot even
now find words to render it intelligible. It consisted in a gradual but swiftly
progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors
of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self. In proportion
as these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the sense of an
underlying or essential consciousness acquired intensity. At last nothing remained
but a pure, absolute, abstract Self. The universe became without form and void
of content. But Self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness, feeling the
most poignant doubt about reality, ready, as it seemed, to find existence break
as breaks a bubble round about it. And what then? The apprehension of a coming
dissolution, the grim conviction that this state was the last state of the conscious
Self, the sense that I had followed the last thread of being to the verge of the
abyss, and had arrived at demonstration of eternal Maya or illusion, stirred or
seemed to stir me up again. The return to ordinary conditions of sentient existence
began by my first recovering the power of touch, and then by the gradual though
rapid influx of familiar impressions and diurnal interests. At last I felt myself
once more a human being; and though the riddle of what is meant by life remained
unsolved, I was thankful for this return from the abyss- this deliverance from
so awful an initiation into the mysteries of skepticism.
"This trance recurred
with diminishing frequency until I reached the age of twenty-eight. It served
to impress upon my growing nature the phantasmal unreality of all the circumstances
which contribute to a merely phenomenal consciousness. Often have I asked myself
with anguish, on waking from that formless state of denuded, keenly sentient being,
Which is the unreality?- the trance of fiery, vacant, apprehensive, skeptical
Self from which I issue, or these surrounding phenomena and habits which veil
that inner Self and build a self of flesh-and-blood conventionality? Again, are
men the factors of some dream, the dream-like unsubstantiality of which they comprehend
at such eventful moments? What would happen if the final stage of the trance were
reached?" *
* H.F. BROWN: J.A. Symonds, a Biography, London, 1895, pp. 29-31,
abridged.
In a recital like this there is certainly something
suggestive of pathology. * The next step into mystical states carries us into
a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as
pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry seem
still to bear witness to its ideality. I refer to the consciousness produced by
intoxicants and anaesthetics, especially by alcohol. The sway of alcohol over
mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties
of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms
of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness
expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function
in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant
core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity
do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of
symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and
tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize
as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier
phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness
is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find
its place in our opinion of that larger whole. -
* Crichton-Browne expressly
says that Symonds's "highest nerve centres were in some degree enfeebled or damaged
by these dreamy mental states which afflicted him so grievously." Symonds was,
however, a perfect monster of many-sided cerebral efficiency, and his critic gives
no objective grounds whatever for his strange opinion, save that Symonds complained
occasionally, as all susceptible and ambitious men complain, of lassitude and
uncertainty as to his life's mission.
Nitrous oxide and
ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate
the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth
seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the
moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe
itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound
meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded
that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.
Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide
intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind
at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken.
It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call
it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from
it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely
different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply
the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness,
definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application
and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which
leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them
is the question,- for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet
they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region
though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of
our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge
towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance.
The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of
the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and
troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong
to one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one,
is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself This
is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common logic, but I
cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as if it must mean something,
something like what the hegelian philosophy means, if one could only lay hold
of it more clearly. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear; to me the living
sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind. *
* What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected Being with all
its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his whole philosophy, must
have come from the prominence in his consciousness of mystical moods like this,
in most persons kept subliminal? The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the
mystical level, and the Aufgabe of making it articulate was surely set to Hegel's
intellect by mystical feeling.
I just now spoke of friends who believe in
the anaesthetic revelation. For them too it is a monistic insight, in which the
other in its various forms appears absorbed into the One.
"Into this pervading
genius," writes one of them, "we pass, forgetting and forgotten, and thenceforth
each is all, in God. There is no higher, no deeper, no other, than the life in
which we are founded. 'The One remains, the many change and pass;' and each and
every one of us is the One that remains.... This is the ultimatum.... As sure
as being- whence is all our care- so sure is content, beyond duplexity, antithesis,
or trouble, where I have triumphed in a solitude that God is not above." *
* BENJAMIN PAUL BLOOD: The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy,
Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874, pp. 35, 36. Mr. Blood has made several attempts to adumbrate
the anaesthetic revelation, in pamphlets of rare literary distinction, privately
printed and distributed by himself at Amsterdam. Xenos Clark, a philosopher, who
died young at Amherst in the '80's, much lamented by those who knew him, was also
impressed by the revelation. "In the first place," he once wrote to me, "Mr. Blood
and I agree that the revelation. is, if anything, non-emotional. It is utterly
flat. It is, as Mr. Blood says, 'the one sole and sufficient insight why, or not
why, but how, the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the
vacuity of the future. Its inevitableness defeats all attempts at stopping or
accounting for it. It is all precedence and presupposition, and questioning is
in regard to it forever too late. It is an initiation of the past.' The real secret
would be the formula by which the 'now' keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet never
escapes. What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating? The formal being
of anything, the logical definition of it, is static. For mere logic every question
contains its own answer- we simply fill the hole with the dirt we dug out. Why
are twice two four? Because, in fact, four is twice two. Thus logic finds in life
no propulsion, only a momentum. It goes because it is a-going. But the revelation
adds: it goes because it is and was a-going. You walk, as it were, round yourself
in the revelation. Ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting his own trail.
The more he hunts the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with
his heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is already a foregone
conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand it. But at the moment of recovery
from anaesthesis, just then, before starting on life, I catch, so to speak, a
glimpse of my heels, a glimpse of the eternal process just in the act of starting.
The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set out;
and the real end of philosophy is accomplished, not when we arrive at, but when
we remain in, our destination (being already there),- which may occur vicariously
in this life when we cease our intellectual questioning. That is why there is
a smile upon the face of the revelation, as we view it. It tells us that we are
forever half a second too late- that's all. 'You could kiss your own lips, and
have all the fun to yourself,' it says, if you only knew the trick. It would be
perfectly easy if they would just stay there till you got round to them. Why don't
you manage it somehow?"
Dialectically minded readers of this farrago will
at least recognize the region of thought of which Mr. Clark writes, as familiar.
In his latest pamphlet, 'Tennyson's Trances and the Anaesthetic Revelation,' Mr.
Blood describes its value for life as follows:
"The Anaesthetic Revelation
is the Initiation of Man into the Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being,
revealed as the Inevitable Vortex of Continuity. Inevitable is the word. Its motive
is inherent- it is what has to be. It is not for any love or hate, nor for joy
nor sorrow, nor good nor ill. End, beginning, or purpose, it knows not of.
"It affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of things; but it fills
appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a secular and intimately personal
illumination of the nature and motive of existence, which then seems reminiscent-
as if it should have appeared, or shall yet appear, to every participant thereof.
"Although it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes directly such
a matter of course- so old-fashioned, and so akin to proverbs, that it inspires
exultation rather than fear, and a sense of safety, as identified with the aboriginal
and the universal. But no words may express the imposing certainty of the patient
that he is realizing the primordial, Adamic surprise of Life.
"Repetition
of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it could not possibly be otherwise.
The subject resumes his normal consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember
its occurrence, and to try to formulate its baffling import,- with only this consolatory
afterthought: that he has known the oldest truth, and that he has done with human
theories as to the origin, meaning, or destiny of the race. He is beyond instruction
in 'spiritual things.'
"The lesson is one of central safety: the Kingdom is
within. All days are judgment days: but there can be no climacteric purpose of
eternity, nor any scheme of the whole. The astronomer abridges the row of bewildering
figures by increasing his unit of measurement: so may we reduce the distracting
multiplicity of things to the unity for which each of us stands.
"This has
been my moral sustenance since I have known of it. In my first printed mention
of it I declared: 'The world is no more the alien terror that was taught me. Spurning
the cloud-grimed and still sultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders
boomed, my gray gull lifts her wing against the nightfall, and takes the dim leagues
with a fearless eye.' And now, after twenty-seven years of this experience, the
wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I renew and doubly emphasize
that declaration. I know- as having known- the meaning of Existence: the sane
centre of the universe- at once the wonder and the assurance of the soul- for
which the speech of reason has as yet no name but the Anaesthetic Revelation."-
I have considerably abridged the quotation.
This has the genuine religious
mystic ring! I just now quoted J.A. Symonds. He also records a mystical experience
with chloroform, as follows:- -
"After the choking and stifling had passed
away, I seemed at first in a state of utter blankness; then came flashes of intense
light, alternating with blackness, and with a keen vision of what was going on
in the room around me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that I was near death;
when, suddenly, my soul became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me,
handling me, so to speak, in an intense personal present reality. I felt him streaming
in like light upon me.... I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt. Then, as I gradually
awoke from the influence of the anesthetics, the old sense of my relation to the
world began to return, the new sense of my relation to God began to fade. I suddenly
leapt to my feet on the chair where I was sitting, and shrieked out, 'It is too
horrible, it is too horrible, it is too horrible,' meaning that I could not bear
this disillusionment. Then I flung myself on the ground, and at last awoke covered
with blood, calling to the two surgeons (who were frightened), 'Why did you not
kill me? Why would you not let me die?' Only think of it. To have felt for that
long dateless ecstasy of vision the very God, in all purity and tenderness and
truth and absolute love, and then to find that I had after all had no revelation,
but that I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain.
"Yet,
this question remains, Is it possible that the inner sense of reality which succeeded,
when my flesh was dead to impressions from without, to the ordinary sense of physical
relations, was not a delusion but an actual experience? Is it possible that I,
in that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always felt, the undemonstrable
but irrefragable certainty of God?" *
* Op. cit., pp. 78-80, abridged. I subjoin,
also abridging it, another interesting anaesthetic revelation communicated to
me in manuscript by a friend in England. The subject, a gifted woman, was taking
ether for a surgical operation.
"I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured,
and why I remembered having heard it said that people 'learn through suffering,'
and in view of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of this saying struck me so much
that I said, aloud, 'to suffer is to learn.'
"With that I became unconscious
again, and my last dream immediately preceded my real coming to. It only lasted
a few seconds, and was most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in
words.
"A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was
on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway. The lightning
was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close to one another, and
I was one of them. He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or
flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed
to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life
up out of my pain. Then I saw that what he had been trying with all his might
to do was to change his course, to bend the line of lightning to which he was
tied, in the direction in which he wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness,
and knew that he would succeed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my
hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest
point of this, as he passed, I saw, I understood for a moment things that I have
now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity. The angle
was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right
or acute angle, I should have both suffered and 'seen' still more, and should
probably have died.
"He went on and I came to. In that moment the whole of
my life passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress,
and I understood them. This was what it had all meant, this was the piece of work
it had all been contributing to do. I did not see God's purpose, I only saw his
intentness and his entire relentlessness towards his means. He thought no more
of me than a man thinks of hurting a cork when he is opening wine, or hurting
a cartridge when he is firing. And yet, on waking, my first feeling was, and it
came with tears, 'Domine non sum digna,' for I had been lifted into a position
for which I was too small. I realized that in that half hour under ether I had
served God more distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before,
or than I am capable of desiring to do. I was the means of his achieving and revealing
something, I know not what or to whom, and that, to the exact extent of my capacity
for suffering.
"While regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had
gone so deep, I had seen nothing of what the saints call the love of God, nothing
but his relentlessness. And then I heard an answer, which I could only just catch,
saying, 'Knowledge and Love are One, and the measure is suffering'- I give the
words as they came to me. With that I came finally to (into what seemed a dream
world compared with the reality of what I was leaving), and I saw that what would
be called the 'cause' of my experience was a slight operation under insufficient
ether, in a bed pushed up against a window, a common city window in a common city
street. If I had to formulate a few of the things I then caught a glimpse of,
they would run somewhat as follows:
"The eternal necessity of suffering and
its eternal vicariousness. The veiled and incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings;
the passivity of genius, how it is essentially instrumental and defenseless, moved,
not moving, it must do what it does;- the impossibility of discovery without its
price;- finally, the excess of what the suffering 'seer' or genius pays over what
his generation gains. (He seems like one who sweats his life out to earn enough
to save a district from famine, and just as he staggers back, dying and satisfied,
bringing a lac of rupees to buy grain with, God lifts the lac away, dropping one
rupee, and says, 'That you may give them. That you have earned for them. The rest
is for ME.') I perceived also in a way never to be forgotten, the excess of what
we see over what we can demonstrate.
"And so on!- these things may seem to
you delusions, or truisms; but for me they are dark truths, and the power to put
them into even such words as these has been given me by an ether dream." -
With this we make connection with religious mysticism pure and
simple. Symonds's question takes us back to those examples which you will remember
my quoting in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen, of sudden realization
of the immediate presence of God. The phenomenon in one shape or another is not
uncommon.
"I know," writes Mr. Trine, "an officer on our police force who
has told me that many times when off duty, and on his way home in the evening,
there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization of his oneness with this
Infinite Power, and this Spirit of Infinite Peace so takes hold of and so fills
him, that it seems as if his feet could hardly keep to the pavement, so buoyant
and so exhilarated does he become by reason of this inflowing tide." *
* In
Tune with the Infinite, p. 137.
Certain aspects of nature
seem to have a peculiar power of awakening such mystical moods. * Most of the
striking cases which I have collected have occurred out of doors. Literature has
commemorated this fact in many passages of great beauty- this extract, for example,
from Amiel's Journal Intime:- -
"Shall I ever again have any of those prodigious
reveries which sometimes came to me in former days? One day, in youth, at sunrise,
sitting in the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; and again in the mountains, under
the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the foot of a tree and visited by three
butterflies; once more at night upon the shingly shore of the Northern Ocean,
my back upon the sand and my vision ranging through the milky way;- such grand
and spacious, immortal, cosmogonic reveries, when one reaches to the stars, when
one owns the infinite! Moments divine, ecstatic hours; in which our thought flies
from world to world, pierces the great enigma, breathes with a respiration broad,
tranquil, and deep as the respiration of the ocean, serene and limitless as the
blue firmament;... instants of irresistible intuition in which one feels one's
self great as the universe, and calm as a god.... What hours, what memories! The
vestiges they leave behind are enough to fill us with belief and enthusiasm, as
if they were visits of the Holy Ghost." *(2) -
* The larger God may then swallow,
up the smaller one. I take this from Starbuck's manuscript collection:
"I never
lost the consciousness of the presence of God until I stood at the foot of the
Horseshoe Falls, Niagara. Then I lost him in the immensity of what I saw. I also
lost myself, feeling that I was an atom too small for the notice of Almighty God."
I subjoin another similar case from Starbuck's collection:
"In that time
the consciousness of God's nearness came to me sometimes. I say God, to describe
what is indescribable. A presence, I might say, yet that is too suggestive of
personality, and the moments of which I speak did not hold the consciousness of
a personality, but something in myself made me feel myself a part of something
bigger than I, that was controlling. I felt myself one with the grass, the trees,
birds, insects, everything in Nature. I exulted in the mere fact of existence,
of being a part of it all- the drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the
tree-trunks, and so on. In the years following, such moments continued to come,
but I wanted them constantly. I knew so well the satisfaction of losing self in
a perception of supreme power and love, that I was unhappy because that perception
was not constant." The cases quoted in my third lecture, are still better ones
of this type. In her essay, The Loss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol.
lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that the vanishing of the sense
of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the object, is due to the disappearance,
in these rapturous experiences, of the motor adjustments which habitually intermediate
between the constant background of consciousness (which is the Self) and the object
in the foreground, whatever it may be. I must refer the reader to the highly instructive
article, which seems to me to throw light upon the psychological conditions, though
it fails to account for the rapture or the revelation-value of the experience
in the Subject's eyes.
*(2) Op. cit., i. 43-44.
Here is a similar record
from the memoirs of that interesting German idealist, Malwida von Meysenbug:-
-
"I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating
and reconciling; and now again, as once before in distant days in the Alps of
Dauphine, I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean,
symbol of the Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and
knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of individuation into
the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes
away, and to rise up as one imperishable. Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as
in one vast world-encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all the great
who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and it appeared
as if I heard their greeting: Thou too belongest to the company of those who overcome.'"
*
* Memoiren einer Idealistin, 5te Auflage, 1900, iii. 166. For years she
had been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief.
The well-known passage
from Walt Whitman is a classical expression of this sporadic type of mystical
experience.
"I believe in you, my Soul...
Loaf with me on the grass, loose
the stop from your throat;...
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved
voice.
I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning.
Swiftly
arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument
of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the
men ever born are also my brothers and the women my sisters and lovers,
And
that a kelson of the creation is love." *
* Whitman in another place expresses
in a quieter way what was probably with him a chronic mystical perception: "There
is," he writes, "apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human
identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without
what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education
deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space,
of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe
and general unsettledness, we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue
and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time,
and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the
hand of the hunter. [Of] such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind mere optimism
explains only the surface." Whitman charges it against Carlyle that he lacked
this perception. Specimen Days and Collect, Philadelphia, 1882, p. 174.
I
could easily give more instances, but one will suffice. I take it from the
Autobiography of J. Trevor. *
* My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269,
abridged.
"One brilliant Sunday morning, my wife and boys went to the Unitarian
Chapel in Macclesfield. I felt it impossible to accompany them- as though to leave
the sunshine on the hills, and go down there to the chapel, would be for the time
an act of spiritual suicide. And I felt such need for new inspiration and expansion
in my life. So, very reluctantly and sadly, I left my wife and boys to go down
into the town, while I went further up into the hills with my stick and my dog.
In the loveliness of the morning, and the beauty of the hills and valleys, I soon
lost my sense of sadness and regret. For nearly an hour I walked along the road
to the 'Cat and Fiddle,' and then returned. On the way back, suddenly, without
warning, I felt that I was in Heaven- an inward state of peace and joy and assurance
indescribably intense, accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow
of light, as though the external condition had brought about the internal effect-
a feeling of having passed beyond the body, though the scene around me stood out
more clearly and as if nearer to me than before, by reason of the illumination
in the midst of which I seemed to be placed. This deep emotion lasted, though
with decreasing strength, until I reached home, and for some time after, only
gradually passing away."
The writer adds that having had further experiences
of a similar sort, he now knows them well.
"The spiritual life," he writes,
"justifies itself to those who live it; but what can we say to those who do not
understand? This, at least, we can say, that it is a life whose experiences are
proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him when brought closest
into contact with the objective realities of life. Dreams cannot stand this test.
We wake from them to find that they are but dreams. Wanderings of an overwrought
brain do not stand this test. These highest experiences that I have had of God's
presence have been rare and brief- flashes of consciousness which have compelled
me to exclaim with surprise- God is here!- or conditions of exaltation and insight
less intense, and only gradually passing away. I have severely questioned the
worth of these moments. To no soul have I named them, lest I should be building
my life and work on mere phantasies of the brain. But I find that, after every
questioning and test, they stand out to-day as the most real experiences of my
life, and experiences which have explained and justified and unified all past
experiences and all past growth. Indeed, their reality and their far-reaching
significance are ever becoming more clear and evident. When they came, I was living
the fullest, strongest, sanest, deepest life. I was not seeking them. What I was
seeking, with resolute determination, was to live more intensely my own life,
as against what I knew would be the adverse judgment of the world. It was in the
most real seasons that the Real Presence came, and I was aware that I was immersed
in the infinite ocean of God." *
* Op. cit., pp. 256, 257, abridged.
Even
the least mystical of you must by this time be convinced of the existence
of mystical moments as states of consciousness of an entirely specific quality,
and of the deep impression which they make on those who have them. A Canadian
psychiatrist, Dr. R.M. Bucke, gives to the more distinctly characterized of these
phenomena the name of cosmic consciousness. "Cosmic consciousness in its more
striking instances is not," Dr. Bucke says, "simply an expansion or extension
of the self-conscious mind with which we are all familiar, but the superaddition
of a function as distinct from any possessed by the average man as self-consciousness
is distinct from any function possessed by one of the higher animals."
"The
prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a consciousness of the cosmos,
that is, of the life and order of the universe. Along with the consciousness of
the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment which alone would place
the individual on a new plane of existence- would make him almost a member of
a new species. To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable
feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense,
which is fully as striking, and more important than is the enhanced intellectual
power. With these come what may be called a sense of immortality, a consciousness
of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness
that he has it already." * -
* Cosmic Consciousness: a study in the evolution
of the human Mind, Philadelphia, 1901, p. 2.
It was Dr. Bucke's own experience
of a typical onset of cosmic consciousness in his own person which led him to
investigate it in others. He has printed his conclusions in a highly interesting
volume, from which I take the following account of what occurred to him:- -
"I had spent the evening in a great city, with two friends, reading and discussing
poetry and philosophy. We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to
my lodging. My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions
called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of
quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images,
and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without
warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant
I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city;
the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came
upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately
followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things,
I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed
of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious
in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life,
but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are
immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things
work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the
world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each
and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds
and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught
has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed. I knew that
what the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which
I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say that consciousness,
has never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost." *
*
Loc. cit., pp. 7, 8. My quotation follows the privately printed pamphlet which
preceded Dr. Bucke's larger work, and differs verbally a little from the text
of the latter.
We have now seen enough of this cosmic or mystic consciousness,
as it comes sporadically. We must next pass to its methodical cultivation as an
element of the religious life. Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans, and Christians
all have cultivated it methodically.
In India, training
in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial under the name of yoga.
Yoga means the experimental union of the individual with the divine. It is based
on persevering exercise; and the diet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration,
and moral discipline vary slightly in the different systems which teach it. The
yogi, or disciple, who has by these means overcome the obscurations of his lower
nature sufficiently, enters into the condition termed samadhi, "and comes face
to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know." He learns- -
"That the mind itself has a higher state of existence, beyond reason, a superconscious
state, and that when the mind gets to that higher state, then this knowledge beyond
reasoning comes.... All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us scientifically
to the superconscious state or samadhi.... Just as unconscious work is beneath
consciousness, so there is another work which is above consciousness, and which,
also, is not accompanied with the feeling of egoism.... There is no feeling of
I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless.
Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves- for Samadhi
lies potential in us all- for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed
from the finite, and its contrasts of good and evil altogether, and identical
with the Atman or Universal Soul." *
* My quotations are from VIVEKANANDA,
Raja Yoga, London, 1896. The completest source of information on Yoga is the work
translated by VIHARI LALA MITRA: Yoga Vasishta Maha Ramayana, 4 vols., Calcutta.
1891-99.
The Vedantists say that one may stumble into super-consciousness
sporadically, without the previous discipline, but it is then impure. Their test
of its purity, like our test of religion's value, is empirical: its fruits must
be good for life. When a man comes out of Samadhi, they assure us that he remains
"enlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, his whole character changed, his life
changed, illumined." *
* A European witness, after carefully comparing the
results of Yoga with those of the hypnotic or dreamy states artificially producible
by us, says: "It makes of its true disciples good, healthy, and happy men....
Through the mastery which the yogi attains over his thoughts and his body, he
grows into a 'character.' By the subjection of his impulses and propensities to
his will, and the fixing of the latter upon the ideal of goodness, be becomes
a 'personality' hard to influence by others, and thus almost the opposite of what
we usually imagine a 'medium' so-called, or 'psychic subject' to be." KARL KELLNER:
Yoga: Eine Skizze, Munchen, 1896, p. 21.
The Buddhists use
the word 'samadhi' as well as the Hindus; but 'dhyana' is their special word for
higher states of contemplation. There seem to be four stages recognized in dhyana.
The first stage comes through concentration of the mind upon one point. It excludes
desire, but not discernment or judgment: it is still intellectual. In the second
stage the intellectual functions drop off, and the satisfied sense of unity remains.
In the third stage the satisfaction departs, and indifference begins, along with
memory and self-consciousness. In the fourth stage the indifference, memory, and
self-consciousness are perfected. [Just what 'memory' and 'self-consciousness'
mean in this connection is doubtful. They cannot be the faculties familiar to
us in the lower life.] Higher stages still of contemplation are mentioned- a region
where there exists nothing, and where the meditator says: "There exists absolutely
nothing," and stops. Then he reaches another region where he says: "There are
neither ideas nor absence of ideas," and stops again. Then another region where,
"having reached the end of both idea and perception, he stops finally." This would
seem to be, not yet Nirvana, but as close an approach to it as this life affords.
*
* I follow the account in C.F. KOEPPEN: Die Religion des Buddha, Berlin,
1857, i. 585 ff.
In the Mohammedan world the Sufi sect and
various dervish bodies are the possessors of the mystical tradition. The Sufis
have existed in Persia from the earliest times, and as their pantheism is so at
variance with the hot and rigid monotheism of the Arab mind, it has been suggested
that Sufism must have been inoculated into Islam by Hindu influences. We Christians
know little of Sufism, for its secrets are disclosed only to those initiated.
To give its existence a certain liveliness in your minds, I will quote a Moslem
document, and pass away from the subject.
Al-Ghazzali, a Persian philosopher
and theologian, who flourished in the eleventh century, and ranks as one of the
greatest doctors of the Moslem church, has left us one of the few autobiographies
to be found outside of Christian literature. Strange that a species of book so
abundant among ourselves should be so little represented elsewhere- the absence
of strictly personal confessions is the chief difficulty to the purely literary
student who would like to become acquainted with the inwardness of religions other
than the Christian.
M. Schmolders has translated a part of Al-Ghazzali's autobiography
into French:- *
* For a full account of him, see D.B. MACDONALD: The Life
of Al-Ghazzali, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1899, vol. xx
p. 71.
"The Science of the Sufis," says the Moslem author, "aims at detaching
the heart from all that is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the
meditation of the divine being. Theory being more easy for me than practice, I
read [certain books] until I understood all that can be learned by study and hearsay.
Then I recognized that what pertains most exclusively to their method is just
what no study can grasp, but only transport, ecstasy, and the transformation of
the soul. How great, for example, is the difference between knowing the definitions
of health, of satiety, with their causes and conditions, and being really healthy
or filled. How different to know in what drunkenness consists,- as being a state
occasioned by a vapor that rises from the stomach,- and being drunk effectively.
Without doubt, the drunken man knows neither the definition of drunkenness nor
what makes it interesting for science. Being drunk, he knows nothing; whilst the
physician, although not drunk, knows well in what drunkenness consists, and what
are its predisposing conditions. Similarly there is a difference between knowing
the nature of abstinence, and being abstinent or having one's soul detached from
the world.- Thus I had learned what words could teach of Sufism, but what was
left could be learned neither by study nor through the ears, but solely by giving
one's self up to ecstasy and leading a pious life.
"Reflecting on my situation,
I found myself tied down by a multitude of bonds- temptations on every side. Considering
my teaching, I found it was impure before God. I saw myself struggling with all
my might to achieve glory and to spread my name. [Here follows an account of his
six months' hesitation to break away from the conditions of his life at Bagdad,
at the end of which he fell ill with a paralysis of the tongue.] Then, feeling
my own weakness, and having entirely given up my own will, I repaired to God like
a man in distress who has no more resources. He answered, as he answers the wretch
who invokes him. My heart no longer felt any difficulty in renouncing glory, wealth,
and my children. So I quitted Bagdad, and reserving from my fortune only what
was indispensable for my subsistence, I distributed the rest. I went to Syria,
where I remained about two years, with no other occupation than living in retreat
and solitude, conquering my desires, combating my passions, training myself to
purify my soul, to make my character perfect, to prepare my heart for meditating
on God- all according to the methods of the Sufis, as I had read of them.
"This retreat only increased my desire to live in solitude, and to complete the
purification of my heart and fit it for meditation. But the vicissitudes of the
times, the affairs of the family, the need of subsistence, changed in some respects
my primitive resolve, and interfered with my plans for a purely solitary life.
I had never yet found myself completely in ecstasy, save in a few single hours;
nevertheless, I kept the hope of attaining this state. Every time that the accidents
led me astray, I sought to return; and in this situation I spent ten years. During
this solitary state things were revealed to me which it is impossible either to
describe or to point out. I recognized for certain that the Sufis are assuredly
walking in the path of God. Both in their acts and in their inaction, whether
internal or external, they are illumined by the light which proceeds from the
prophetic source. The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart entirely
of all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative life consists in the
humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul, and in the meditations on God
in which the heart is swallowed up entirely. But in reality this is only the beginning
of the Sufi life, the end of Sufism being total absorption in God. The intuitions
and all that precede are, so to speak, only the threshold for those who enter.
From the beginning, revelations take place in so flagrant a shape that the Sufis
see before them, whilst wide awake, the angels and the souls of the prophets.
They hear their voices and obtain their favors. Then the transport rises from
the perception of forms and figures to a degree which escapes all expression,
and which no man may seek to give an account of without his words involving sin.
"Whoever has had no experience of the transport knows of the true nature of
prophetism nothing but the name. He may meanwhile be sure of its existence, both
by experience and by what he hears the Sufis say. As there are men endowed only
with the sensitive faculty who reject what is offered them in the way of objects
of the pure understanding, so there are intellectual men who reject and avoid
the things perceived by the prophetic faculty. A blind man can understand nothing
of colors save what he has learned by narration and hearsay. Yet God has brought
prophetism near to men in giving them all a state analogous to it in its principal
characters. This state is sleep. If you were to tell a man who was himself without
experience of such a phenomenon that there are people who at times swoon away
so as to resemble dead men, and who [in dreams] yet perceive things that are hidden,
he would deny it [and give his reasons]. Nevertheless, his arguments would be
refuted by actual experience. Wherefore, just as the understanding is a stage
of human life in which an eye opens to discern various intellectual objects uncomprehended
by sensation; just so in the prophetic the sight is illumined by a light which
uncovers hidden things and objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief
properties of prophetism are perceptible only during the transport, by those who
embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is endowed with qualities to which you possess
nothing analogous, and which consequently you cannot possibly understand. How
should you know their true nature, since one knows only what one can comprehend?
But the transport which one attains by the method of the Sufis is like an immediate
perception, as if one touched the objects with one's hand." *
* A. SCHMOLDERS:
Essai sur les ecoles philosophiques chez les Arabes, Paris, 1842, pp. 54-68, abridged.
This incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism.
Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no one
else. In this, as I have said, it resembles the knowledge given to us in sensations
more than that given by conceptual thought. Thought, with its remoteness and abstractness,
has often enough in the history of philosophy been contrasted unfavorably with
sensation. It is a commonplace of metaphysics that God's knowledge cannot be discursive
but must be intuitive, that is, must be constructed more after the pattern of
what in ourselves is called immediate feeling, than after that of proposition
and judgment. But our immediate feelings have no content but what the five senses
supply; and we have seen and shall see again that mystics may emphatically deny
that the senses play any part in the very highest type of knowledge which their
transports yield.
In the Christian church there have always
been mystics. Although many of them have been viewed with suspicion, some have
gained favor in the eyes of the authorities. The experiences of these have been
treated as precedents, and a codified system of mystical theology has been based
upon them, in which everything legitimate finds its place. * The basis of the
system is 'orison' or meditation, the methodical elevation of the soul towards
God. Through the practice of orison the higher levels of mystical experience may
be attained. It is odd that Protestantism, especially evangelical Protestantism,
should seemingly have abandoned everything methodical in this line. Apart from
what prayer may lead to, Protestant mystical experience appears to have been almost
exclusively sporadic. It has been left to our mind-curers to reintroduce methodical
meditation into our religious life.
* GORRES'S Christliche Mystik gives a
full account of the facts. So does RIBET's Mystique Divine, 2 vols., Paris, 1890.
A still more methodical modern work is the Mystica Theologia of VALLGORNERA, 2
vols., Turin, 1890.
The first thing to be aimed at in orison is the mind's
detachment from outer sensations, for these interfere with its concentration upon
ideal things. Such manuals as Saint Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises recommend the
disciple to expel sensation by a graduated series of efforts to imagine holy scenes.
The acme of this kind of discipline would be a semi-hallucinatory mono-ideism-
an imaginary figure of Christ, for example, coming fully to occupy the mind. Sensorial
images of this sort, whether literal or symbolic, play an enormous part in mysticism.
* But in certain cases imagery may fall away entirely, and in the very highest
raptures it tends to do so. The state of consciousness becomes then insusceptible
of any verbal description. Mystical teachers are unanimous as to this. Saint John
of the Cross, for instance, one of the best of them, thus describes the condition
called the 'union of love,' which, he says, is reached by 'dark contemplation.'
In this the Deity compenetrates the soul, but in such a hidden way that the soul-
-
"finds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the sublimity
of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling with which she is filled....
We receive this mystical knowledge of God clothed in none of the kinds of images,
in none of the sensible representations, which our mind makes use of in other
circumstances. Accordingly in this knowledge, since the senses and the imagination
are not employed, we get neither form nor impression, nor can we give any account
or furnish any likeness, although the mysterious and sweet-tasting wisdom comes
home so clearly to the inmost parts of our soul. Fancy a man seeing a certain
kind of thing for the first time in his life. He can understand it, use and enjoy
it, but he cannot apply a name to it, nor communicate any idea of it, even though
all the while it be a mere thing of sense. How much greater will be his powerlessness
when it goes beyond the senses! This is the peculiarity of the divine language.
The more infused, intimate, spiritual, and supersensible it is, the more does
it exceed the senses, both inner and outer, and impose silence upon them.... The
soul then feels as if placed in a vast and profound solitude, to which no created
thing has access, in an immense and boundless desert, desert the more delicious
the more solitary it is. There, in this abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what
it drinks in from the well-springs of the comprehension of love,... and recognizes,
however sublime and learned may be the terms we employ, how utterly vile, insignificant,
and improper they are, when we seek to discourse of divine things by their means."
*(2)
* M. RECEJAC, in a recent volume, makes them essential. Mysticism he
defines as "the tendency to draw near to the Absolute morally, and by the aid
of Symbols." See his Fondements de la Connaissance mystique, Paris, 1897, p. 66.
But there are unquestionably mystical conditions in which sensible symbols play
no part.
*(2) Saint John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul, book ii.
ch. xvii., in Vie et Oeuvres, 3me edition, Paris, 1893, iii. 428-432. Chapter
xi. of book ii. of Saint John's Ascent of Carmel is devoted to showing the harmfulness
for the mystical life of the use of sensible imagery.
I cannot
pretend to detail to you the sundry stages of the Christian mystical life.
* Our time would not suffice, for one thing; and moreover, I confess that the
subdivisions and names which we find in the Catholic books seem to me to represent
nothing objectively distinct. So many men, so many minds: I imagine that these
experiences can be as infinitely varied as are the idiosyncrasies of individuals.
* In particular I omit mention of visual and auditory hallucinations, verbal
and graphic automatisms, and such marvels as 'levitation,' stigmatization, and
the healing of disease. These phenomena, which mystics have often presented (or
are believed to have presented), have no essential mystical significance, for
they occur with no consciousness of illumination whatever, when they occur, as
they often do, in persons of non-mystical mind. Consciousness of illumination
is for us the essential mark of 'mystical' states.
The cognitive aspects of
them, their value in the way of revelation, is what we are directly concerned
with, and it is easy to show by citation how strong an impression they leave of
being revelations of new depths of truth. Saint Teresa is the expert of experts
in describing such conditions, so I will turn immediately to what she says of
one of the highest of them, the 'orison of union.'
"In the orison of union,"
says Saint Teresa, "the soul is fully awake as regards God, but wholly asleep
as regards things of this world and in respect of herself. During the short time
the union lasts, she is as it were deprived of every feeling, and even if she
would, she could not think of any single thing. Thus she needs to employ no artifice
in order to arrest the use of her understanding: it remains so stricken with inactivity
that she neither knows what she loves, nor in what manner she loves, nor what
she wills. In short, she is utterly dead to the things of the world and lives
solely in God.... I do not even know whether in this state she has enough life
left to breathe. It seems to me she has not; or at least that if she does breathe,
she is unaware of it. Her intellect would fain understand something of what is
going on within her, but it has so little force now that it can act in no way
whatsoever. So a person who falls into a deep faint appears as if dead....
"Thus does God, when he raises a soul to union with himself, suspend the natural
action of all her faculties. She neither sees, hears, nor understands, so long
as she is united with God. But this time is always short, and it seems even shorter
than it is. God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a way,
that when she returns to herself, it is wholly impossible for her to doubt that
she has been in God, and God in her. This truth remains so strongly impressed
on her that, even though many years should pass without the condition returning,
she can neither forget the favor she received, nor doubt of its reality. If you,
nevertheless, ask how it is possible that the soul can see and understand that
she has been in God, since during the union she has neither sight nor understanding,
I reply that she does not see it then, but that she sees it clearly later, after
she has returned to herself, not by any vision, but by a certitude which abides
with her and which God alone can give her. I knew a person who was ignorant of
the truth that God's mode of being in everything must be either by presence, by
power, or by essence, but who, after having received the grace of which I am speaking,
believed this truth in the most unshakable manner. So much so that, having consulted
a half-learned man who was as ignorant on this point as she had been before she
was enlightened, when he replied that God is in us only by 'grace,' she disbelieved
his reply, so sure she was of the true answer; and when she came to ask wiser
doctors, they confirmed her in her belief, which much consoled her....
"But
how, you will repeat, can one have such certainty in respect to what one does
not see? This question, I am powerless to answer. These are secrets of God's omnipotence
which it does not appertain to me to penetrate. All that I know is that I tell
the truth; and I shall never believe that any soul who does not possess this certainty
has ever been really united to God." * -
* The Interior Castle, Fifth Abode,
ch. i., in Oeuvres, translated by BOUIX, iii. 421-424.
The kinds of truth
communicable in mystical ways, whether these be sensible or supersensible, are
various. Some of them relate to this world,- visions of the future, the reading
of hearts, the sudden understanding of texts, the knowledge of distant events,
for example; but the most important revelations are theological or metaphysical.
- -
"Saint Ignatius confessed one day to Father Laynez that a single hour
of meditation at Manresa had taught him more truths about heavenly things than
all the teachings of all the doctors put together could have taught him.... One
day in orison, on the steps of the choir of the Dominican church, he saw in a
distinct manner the plan of divine wisdom in the creation of the world. On another
occasion, during a procession, his spirit was ravished in God, and it was given
him to contemplate, in a form and images fitted to the weak understanding of a
dweller on the earth, the deep mystery of the holy Trinity. This last vision flooded
his heart with such sweetness, that the mere memory of it in after times made
him shed abundant tears." *
* BARTOLI-MICHEL: Vie de Saint Ignace de Loyola,
i. 34-36. Others have had illuminations about the created world, Jacob Boehme,
for instance. At the age of twenty-five he was surrounded by the divine light,
and replenished with the heavenly knowledge; insomuch as going abroad into the
fields to a green, at Gorlitz, he there sat down, and viewing the herbs and grass
of the field, in his inward light he saw into their essences, use, and properties,
which was discovered to him by their lineaments, figures, and signatures." Of
a later period of experience he writes: "In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew
more than if I had been many years together at an university. For I saw and knew
the being of all things, the Byss and the Abyss, and the eternal generation of
the holy Trinity, the descent and original of the world and of all creatures through
the divine wisdom. I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds, the external
and visible world being of a procreation or extern birth from both the internal
and spiritual worlds; and I saw and knew the whole working essence, in the evil
and in the good, and the mutual original and existence; and likewise how the fruitful
bearing womb of eternity brought forth. So that I did not only greatly wonder
at it, but did also exceedingly rejoice, albeit I could very hardly apprehend
the same in my external man and set it down with the pen. For I had a thorough
view of the universe as in a chaos, wherein all things are couched and wrapt up,
but it was impossible for me to explicate the same." Jacob Behmen's Theosophic
Philosophy, etc., by EDWARD TAYLOR, London, 1691, pp. 425, 427, abridged. So George
Fox: "I was come up to the state of Adam in which he was before he fell. The creation
was opened to me; and it was showed me, how all things had their names given to
them, according to their nature and virtue. I was at a stand in my mind, whether
I should practice physic for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues
of the creatures were so opened to me by the Lord." Journal, Philadelphia, no
date, p. 69. Contemporary 'Clairvoyance' abounds in similar revelations. Andrew
Jackson Davis's cosmogonies, for example, or certain experiences related in the
delectable 'Reminiscences and Memories of Henry Thomas Butterworth,' Lebanon,
Ohio, 1886.
Similarly with Saint Teresa. "One day, being in orison," she writes,
"it was granted me to perceive in one instant how all things are seen and contained
in God. I did not perceive them in their proper form, and nevertheless the view
I had of them was of a sovereign clearness, and has remained vividly impressed
upon my soul. It is one of the most signal of all the graces which the Lord has
granted me.... The view was so subtile and delicate that the understanding cannot
grasp it." *
* Vie, pp. 581, 582.
She goes on to tell how it was as if
the Deity were an enormous and sovereignly limpid diamond, in which all our actions
were contained in such a way that their full sinfulness appeared evident as never
before. On another day, she relates, while she was reciting the Athanasian Creed,-
-
"Our Lord made me comprehend in what way it is that one God can be in three
Persons. He made me see it so clearly that I remained as extremely surprised as
I was comforted, and now, when I think of the holy Trinity, or hear It spoken
of, I understand how the three adorable Persons form only one God and I experience
an unspeakable happiness."
On still another occasion, it was given to Saint
Teresa to see and understand in what wise the Mother of God had been assumed into
her place in Heaven. *
* Loc. cit., p. 574.
The deliciousness of some
of these states seems to be beyond anything known in ordinary consciousness. It
evidently involves organic sensibilities, for it is spoken of as something too
extreme to be borne, and as verging on bodily pain. * But it is too subtle and
piercing a delight for ordinary words to denote. God's touches, the wounds of
his spear, references to ebriety and to nuptial union have to figure in the phraseology
by which it is shadowed forth. Intellect and senses both swoon away in these highest
states of ecstasy. "If our understanding comprehends," says Saint Teresa, "it
is in a mode which remains unknown to it, and it can understand nothing of what
it comprehends. For my own part, I do not believe that it does comprehend, because,
as I said, it does not understand itself to do so. I confess that it is all a
mystery in which I am lost." *(2) In the condition called raptus or ravishment
by theologians, breathing and circulation are so depressed that it is a question
among the doctors whether the soul be or be not temporarily dissevered from the
body. One must read Saint Teresa's descriptions and the very exact distinctions
which she makes, to persuade one's self that one is dealing, not with imaginary
experiences, but with phenomena which, however rare, follow perfectly definite
psychological types.
* Saint Teresa discriminates between pain in which the
body has a part and pure spiritual pain (Interior Castle, 6th Abode, ch. xi.).
As for the bodily part in these celestial joys, she speaks of it as "penetrating
to the marrow of the bones, whilst earthly pleasures affect only the surface of
the senses. I think," she adds, "that this is a just description, and I cannot
make it better." Ibid., 5th Abode, ch. i.
*(2) Vie, p. 198.
To the medical
mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states,
on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration
and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and
possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for
knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment
upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical talk,
but inquire into their fruits for life.
Their fruits appear to have been various.
Stupefaction, for one thing, seems not to have been altogether absent as a result.
You may remember the helplessness in the kitchen and schoolroom of poor Margaret
Mary Alacoque. Many other ecstatics would have perished but for the care taken
of them by admiring followers. The 'other. worldliness' encouraged by the mystical
consciousness makes this over-abstraction from practical life peculiarly liable
to befall mystics in whom the character is naturally passive and the intellect
feeble; but in natively strong minds and characters we find quite opposite results.
The great Spanish mystics, who carried the habit of ecstasy as far as it has often
been carried, appear for the most part to have shown indomitable spirit and energy,
and all the more so for the trances in which they indulged.
Saint
Ignatius was a mystic, but his mysticism made him assuredly one of the most
powerfully practical human engines that ever lived. Saint John of the Cross, writing
of the intuitions and 'touches' by which God reaches the substance of the soul,
tells us that- -
"They enrich it marvelously. A single one of them may be
sufficient to abolish at a stroke certain imperfections of which the soul during
its whole life had vainly tried to rid itself, and to leave it adorned with virtues
and loaded with supernatural gifts. A single one of these intoxicating consolations
may reward it for all the labors undergone in its life- even were they numberless.
Invested with an invincible courage, filled with an impassioned desire to suffer
for its God, the soul then is seized with a strange torment- that of not being
allowed to suffer enough." *
* Oeuvres, ii. 320.
Saint Teresa is as emphatic,
and much more detailed. You may perhaps remember a passage I quoted from her in
my first lecture. There are many similar pages in her autobiography. Where in
literature is a more evidently veracious account of the formation of a new centre
of spiritual energy, than is given in her description of the effects of certain
ecstasies which in departing leave the soul upon a higher level of emotional excitement?
"Often, infirm and wrought upon with dreadful pains before the ecstasy, the
soul emerges from it full of health and admirably disposed for action... as if
God had willed that the body itself, already obedient to the soul's desires, should
share in the soul's happiness.... The soul after such a favor is animated with
a degree of courage so great that if at that moment its body should be torn to
pieces for the cause of God, it would feel nothing but the liveliest comfort.
Then it is that promises and heroic resolutions spring up in profusion in us,
soaring desires, horror of the world, and the clear perception of our proper nothingness....
What empire is comparable to that of a soul who, from this sublime summit to which
God has raised her, sees all the things of earth beneath her feet, and is captivated
by no one of them? How ashamed she is of her former attachments! How amazed at
her blindness! What lively pity she feels for those whom she recognizes still
shrouded in the darkness!... She groans at having ever been sensitive to points
of honor, at the illusion that made her ever see as honor what the world calls
by that name. Now she sees in this name nothing more than an immense lie of which
the world remains a victim. She discovers, in the new light from above, that in
genuine honor there is nothing spurious, that to be faithful to this honor is
to give our respect to what deserves to be respected really, and to consider as
nothing, or as less than nothing, whatsoever perishes and is not agreeable to
God.... She laughs when she sees grave persons, persons of orison, caring for
points of honor for which she now feels profoundest contempt. It is suitable to
the dignity of their rank to act thus, they pretend, and it makes them more useful
to others. But she knows that in despising the dignity of their rank for the pure
love of God they would do more good in a single day than they would effect in
ten years by preserving it.... She laughs at herself that there should ever have
been a time in her life when she made any case of money, when she ever desired
it.... Oh! if human beings might only agree together to regard it as so much useless
mud, what harmony would then reign in the world! With what friendship we would
all treat each other if our interest in honor and in money could but disappear
from earth! For my own part, I feel as if it would be a remedy for all our ills."
*
* Vie, pp. 229, 200, 231-233, 243.
Mystical conditions may, therefore,
render the soul more energetic in the lines which their inspiration favors. But
this could be reckoned an advantage only in case the inspiration were a true one.
If the inspiration were erroneous, the energy would be all the more mistaken and
misbegotten. So we stand once more before that problem of truth which confronted
us at the end of the lectures on saintliness. You will remember that we turned
to mysticism precisely to get some light on truth. Do mystical states establish
the truth of those theological affections in which the saintly life has its root?
In spite of their repudiation of articulate self-description,
mystical states in general assert a pretty distinct theoretic drift. It is possible
to give the outcome of the majority of them in terms that point in definite philosophical
directions. One of these directions is optimism, and the other is monism. We pass
into mystical states from out of ordinary consciousness as from a less into a
more, as from a smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest
to a rest. We feel them as reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes-function
more than to the no-function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and
peacefully closes the account. Their very denial of every adjective you may propose
as applicable to the ultimate truth,- He, the Self, the Atman, is to be described
by 'No! no!' only, say the Upanishads,- * though it seems on the surface to be
a no-function, is a denial made on behalf of a deeper yes. Whoso calls the Absolute
anything in particular, or says that it is this, seems implicitly to shut it off
from being that- it is as if he lessened it. So we deny the 'this,' negating the
negation which it seems to us to imply, in the interests of the higher affirmative
attitude by which we are possessed. The fountain-head of Christian mysticism is
Dionysius the Areopagite. He describes the absolute truth by negatives exclusively.
* MULLER'S translation, part ii. p. 180.
"The cause of all things is neither
soul nor intellect; nor has it imagination, opinion, or reason, or intelligence;
nor is it reason or intelligence; nor is it spoken or thought. It is neither number,
nor order, nor magnitude, nor littleness, nor equality, nor inequality, nor similarity,
nor dissimilarity. It neither stands, nor moves, nor rests.... It is neither essence,
nor eternity, nor time. Even intellectual contact does not belong to it. It is
neither science nor truth. It is not even royalty or wisdom; not one; not unity;
not divinity or goodness; nor even spirit as we know it," etc., ad libitum. *
* T. DAVIDSON'S translation, in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1893, vol.
xxii. p. 399.
But these qualifications are denied by Dionysius, not because
the truth falls short of them, but because it so infinitely excels them. It is
above them. It is super-lucent, super-splendent, super-essential, super-sublime,
super everything that can be named. Like Hegel in his logic, mystics journey towards
the positive pole of truth only by the 'Methode der Absoluten Negativitat.' *
* "Deus propter excellentiam non immerito Nihil vocatur." Scotus Erigena,
quoted by ANDREW SETH: Two Lectures on Theism, New York, 1897, p. 55.
Thus
come the paradoxical expressions that so abound in mystical writings. As when
Eckhart tells of the still desert of the Godhead, "where never was seen difference,
neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where there is no one at home, yet where
the spark of the soul is more at peace than in itself." * As when Boehme writes
of the Primal Love, that "it may fitly be compared to Nothing, for it is deeper
than any Thing, and is as nothing with respect to all things, forasmuch as it
is not comprehensible by any of them. And because it is nothing respectively,
it is therefore free from all things, and is that only good, which a man cannot
express or utter what it is, there being nothing to which it may be compared,
to express it by." *(2) Or as when Angelus Silesius sings:- -
"Gott ist ein
lauter Nichts, ihn ruhrt kein Nun noch Hier;
Je mehr du nach ihm greiffst,
je mehr entwind er dir." *(3) -
* J. ROYCE: Studies in Good and Evil, p. 282.
*(2) Jacob Behmen's Dialogues on the Supersensual Life, translated by BERNARD
HOLLAND, London, 1901, p. 48.
*(3) Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Strophe 25.
To this dialectical use, by the intellect, of negation as a mode of passage
towards a higher kind of affirmation, there is correlated the subtlest of moral
counterparts in the sphere of the personal will. Since denial of the finite self
and its wants, since asceticism of some sort, is found in religious experience
to be the only doorway to the larger and more blessed life, this moral mystery
intertwines and combines with the intellectual mystery in all mystical writings.
"Love," continues Behmen, is Nothing, for "when thou art gone forth wholly
from the Creature and from that which is visible, and art become Nothing to all
that is Nature and Creature, then thou art in that eternal One, which is God himself,
and then thou shalt feel within thee the highest virtue of Love.... The treasure
of treasures for the soul is where she goeth out of the Somewhat into that Nothing
out of which all things may be made. The soul here saith, I have nothing, for
I am utterly stripped and naked; I can do nothing, for I have no manner of power,
but am as water poured out; I am nothing, for all that I am is no more than an
image of Being, and only God is to me I AM; and so, sitting down in my own Nothingness,
I give glory to the eternal Being, and will nothing of myself, that so God may
will all in me, being unto me my God and all things." *
* Op. cit., pp. 42,
74, abridged.
In Paul's language, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in
me. Only when I become as nothing can God enter in and no difference between his
life and mine remain outstanding. *
* From a French book I take this mystical
expression of happiness in God's indwelling presence:
"Jesus has come to take
up his abode in my heart. It is not so much a habitation, an association, as a
sort of fusion. Oh, new and blessed life! life which becomes each day more luminous....
The wall before me, dark a few moments since, is splendid at this hour because
the sun shines on it. Wherever its rays fall they light up a conflagration of
glory; the smallest speck of glass sparkles, each grain of sand emits fire; even
so there is a royal song of triumph in my heart because the Lord is there. My
days succeed each other; yesterday a blue sky; to-day a clouded sun; a night filled
with strange dreams; but as soon as the eyes open, and I regain consciousness
and seem to begin life again, it is always the same figure before me, always the
same presence filling my heart.... Formerly the day was dulled by the absence
of the Lord. I used to wake invaded by all sorts of sad impressions, and I did
not find him on my path. To-day he is with me; and the light cloudiness which
covers things is not an obstacle to my communion with him. I feel the pressure
of his hand, I feel something else which fills me with a serene joy; shall I dare
to speak it out? Yes, for it is the true expression of what I experience. The
Holy Spirit in not merely making me a visit; it is no mere dazzling apparition
which may from one moment to another spread its wings and leave me in my night,
it is a permanent habitation. He can depart only if he takes me with him. More
than that; he is not other than myself: he is one with me. It is not a juxtaposition,
it is a penetration, a profound modification of my nature, a new manner of my
being." Quoted from the MS. 'of an old man' by WILFRED MONOD: Il Vit: six meditations
sur le mystere chretien, pp. 280-283.
This overcoming of
all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic
achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become
aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition,
hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism,
in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note,
so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to
make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics
have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling
of the unity of man with God, their speech antedates languages, and they do not
grow old. * -
* Compare M. MAETERLINCK: L'Ornament des Noces spirituelles
de Ruysbroeck, Bruxelles, 1891, Introduction, p. xix.
'That art Thou!' say
the Upanishads, and the Vedantists add: 'Not a part, not a mode of That, but identically
That, that absolute Spirit of the World.' "As pure water poured into pure water
remains the same, thus, O Gautama, is the Self of a thinker who knows. Water in
water, fire in fire, ether in ether, no one can distinguish them; likewise a man
whose mind has entered into the Self." * "'Every man,' says the Sufi Gulshan-Raz,
'whose heart is no longer shaken by any doubt, knows with certainty that there
is no being save only One.... In his divine majesty the me, the we, the thou,
are not found, for in the One there can be no distinction. Every being who is
annulled and entirely separated from himself, hears resound outside of him this
voice and this echo: I am God: he has an eternal way of existing, and is no longer
subject to death.'" *(2) In the vision of God, says Plotinus, "what sees is not
our reason, but something prior and superior to our reason.... He who thus sees
does not properly see, does not distinguish or imagine two things. He changes,
he ceases to be himself, preserves nothing of himself. Absorbed in God, he makes
but one with him, like a centre of a circle coinciding with another centre." *(3)
"Here," writes Suso, "the spirit dies, and yet is all alive in the marvels of
the Godhead... and is lost in the stillness of the glorious dazzling obscurity
and of the naked simple unity. It is in this modeless where that the highest bliss
is to be found." *(4) "Ich bin so gross als Gott," sings Angelus Silesius again,
"Er ist als ich so klein; Er kann nicht uber mich, ich unter ihm nicht sein."
*(5) -
* Upanishads, M. MULLER'S translation, ii. 17, 334.
*(2) SCHMOLDERS:
Op. cit., p. 210.
*(3) Enneads, BOUILLIER'S translation, Paris, 1861, iii.
561. Compare pp. 473-477, and vol. i. p. 27.
*(4) Autobiography, pp. 309,
310.
*(5) Op. cit., Strophe 10.
In mystical literature
such self-contradictory phrases as 'dazzling obscurity,' 'whispering silence,'
'teeming desert,' are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech,
but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical
truth. Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions.
"He who would hear the voice of Nada, 'the Soundless Sound,' and comprehend
it, he has to learn the nature of Dharana.... When to himself his form appears
unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams; when he has ceased to
hear the many, he may discern the ONE- the inner sound which kills the outer....
For then the soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear will
speak THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE.... And now thy Self is lost in SELF, thyself unto
THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which thou first didst radiate.... Behold! thou
hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy
God. Thou art THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that resounds
throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in
one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE. Om tat Sat." *
* H.P. BLAVATSKY: The Voice
of the Silence.
These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive
them, probably stir chords within you which music and language touch in common.
Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict,
though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There is a verge of the
mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations
of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves
to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores.
"Here begins the sea
that ends not till the world's end. Where we stand,
Could we know the next
high sea-mark set beyond these waves that gleam,
We should know what never
man hath known, nor eye of man hath scanned....
Ah, but here man's heart leaps,
yearning towards the gloom with venturous glee,
From the shore that hath no
shore beyond it, set in all the sea." *
* SWINBURNE: On the Verge, in 'A Midsummer
Vacation.'
That doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless, that our
'immortality,' if we live in the eternal, is not so much future as already now
and here, which we find so often expressed to-day in certain philosophic circles,
finds its support in a 'hear, hear!' or an 'amen,' which floats up from that mysteriously
deeper level. * We recognize the passwords to the mystical region as we hear them,
but we cannot use them ourselves; it alone has the keeping of 'the password primeval.'
*(2)
* Compare the extracts from Dr. Bucke, quoted earlier in this lecture.
*(2) As serious an attempt as I know to mediate between the mystical region
and the discursive life is contained in an article on Aristotle's Unmoved Mover,
by F.C.S. SCHILLER, in Mind, vol. ix., 1900.
I have now sketched with extreme
brevity and insufficiency, but as fairly as I am able in the time allowed, the
general traits of the mystic range of consciousness. It is on the whole pantheistic
and optimistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti-naturalistic,
and harmonizes best with twice-bornness and so-called other-worldly states of
mind.
My next task is to inquire whether we can invoke it
as authoritative. Does it furnish any warrant for the truth of the twice-bornness
and supernaturality and pantheism which it favors? I must give my answer to this
question as concisely as I can.
In brief my answer is this,- and I will divide
it into three parts:
(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are,
and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom
they come.
(2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty
for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.
(3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness,
based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one
kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth,
in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue
to have faith.
I will take up these points one by one.
1.
As
a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced and emphatic
sort are usually authoritative over those who have them. * They have been 'there,'
and know. It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this. If the mystical truth
that comes to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate have
we of the majority to order him to live in another way? We can throw him into
a prison or a madhouse, but we cannot change his mind- we commonly attach it only
the more stubbornly to its beliefs. *(2) It mocks our utmost efforts, as a matter
of fact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our jurisdiction. Our own
more 'rational' beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that
which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain
states of fact; but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for
those who have them as any sensations ever were for us. The records show that
even though the five senses be in abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational
in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression,-
that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.
* I abstract from weaker states, and from those cases of which the books are
full, where the director (but usually not the subject) remains in doubt whether
the experience may not have proceeded from the demon.
*(2) Example: Mr. John
Nelson writes of his imprisonment for preaching Methodism: "My soul was as a watered
garden, and I could sing praises to God all day long; for he turned my captivity
into joy, and gave me to rest as well on the boards, as if I had been on a bed
of down. Now could I say, 'God's service is perfect freedom,' and I was carried
out much in prayer that my enemies might drink of the same river of peace which
my God gave so largely to me." Journal, London, no date, p. 172.
The mystic
is, in short, invulnerable, and must be left, whether we relish it or not, in
undisturbed enjoyment of his creed. Faith, says Tolstoy, is that by which men
live. And faith-state and mystic state are practically convertible terms.
2.
But I now proceed to add that mystics have no right to claim that we ought
to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we are ourselves outsiders
and feel no private call thereto. The utmost they can ever ask of us in this life
is to admit that they establish a presumption. They form a consensus and have
an unequivocal outcome; and it would be odd, mystics might say, if such a unanimous
type of experience should prove to be altogether wrong. At bottom, however, this
would only be an appeal to numbers, like the appeal of rationalism the other way;
and the appeal to numbers has no logical force. If we acknowledge it, it is for
'suggestive,' not for logical reasons: we follow the majority because to do so
suits our life.
But even this presumption from the unanimity of mystics is
far from being strong. In characterizing mystic states as pantheistic, optimistic,
etc., I am afraid I over-simplified the truth. I did so for expository reasons,
and to keep the closer to the classic mystical tradition. The classic religious
mysticism, it now must be confessed, is only a 'privileged case.' It is an extract,
kept true to type by the selection of the fittest specimens and their preservation
in 'schools.' It is carved out from a much larger mass; and if we take the larger
mass as seriously as religious mysticism has historically taken itself, we find
that the supposed unanimity largely disappears. To begin with, even religious
mysticism itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and makes schools, is much
less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both ascetic and antinomianly
self-indulgent within the Christian church. * It is dualistic in Sankhya, and
monistic in Vedanta philosophy, I called it pantheistic; but the great Spanish
mystics are anything but pantheists. They are with few exceptions non-metaphysical
minds, for whom 'the category of personality' is absolute. The 'union' of man
with God is for them much more like an occasional miracle than like an original
identity. *(2) How different again, apart from the happiness common to all, is
the mysticism of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard Jefferies, and other
naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively Christian sort. *(3) The
fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has
no specific intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of forming
matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies
and theologies, provided only they can find a place in their framework for its
peculiar emotional mood. We have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as
distinctively in favor of any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism,
or in the absolute monistic identity, or in the absolute goodness, of the world.
It is only relatively in favor of all these things- it passes out of common human
consciousness in the direction in which they lie.
* RUYSBROECK, in the work
which Maeterlinck has translated, has a chapter against the antinomianism of disciples.
H. DELACROIX'S book (Essai sur le mysticisme speculatif en Allemagne au XIVme
Siecle, Paris, 1900) is full of antinomian material. Compare also A. JUNDT: Les
Amis de Dieu au XIVme Siecle, These de Strasbourg, 1879.
*(2) Compare PAUL
ROUSSELOT: Les Mystiques Espagnols, Paris, 1869, ch. xii.
*(3) See CARPENTER'S
Towards Democracy, especially the latter parts, and JEFFERIES'S wonderful and
splendid mystic rhapsody, The Story of my Heart.
So much for religious mysticism
proper. But more remains to be told, for religious mysticism is only one half
of mysticism. The other half has no accumulated traditions except those which
the text-books on insanity, supply. Open any one of these, and you will find abundant
cases in which 'mystical ideas' are cited as characteristic symptoms of enfeebled
or deluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they sometimes
call it, we may have a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned
upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the
same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same voices and visions and
leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time
the emotion is pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings
are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. It is evident that from the
point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these
lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal
or transmarginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence,
but of which so little is really known. That region contains every kind of matter:
'seraph and snake' abide there side by side. To come from thence is no infallible
credential. What comes must be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation
with the total context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world
of sense. Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods, so long as we are
not mystics ourselves.
Once more, then, I repeat that non-mystics are under
no obligation to acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred
on them by their intrinsic nature. *
* In chapter i. of book ii. of his work
Degeneration, 'MAX NORDAU' seeks to undermine all mysticism by exposing the weakness
of the lower kinds. Mysticism for him means any sudden perception of hidden significance
in things. He explains such perception by the abundant uncompleted associations
which experiences may arouse in a degenerate brain. These give to him who has
the experience a vague and vast sense of its leading further, yet they awaken
no definite or useful consequent in his thought. The explanation is a plausible
one for certain sorts of feeling of significance; and other alienists (WERNICKE,
for example, in his Grundriss der Psychiatrie, Theil ii., Leipzig, 1896) have
explained 'paranoiac' conditions by a laming of the association-organ. But the
higher mystical flights, with their positiveness and abruptness, are surely products
of no such merely negative condition. It seems far more reasonable to ascribe
them to inroads from the subconscious life, of the cerebral activity correlative
to which we as yet know nothing. -
3.
Yet, I repeat
once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension
of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe.
As a rule, mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary
outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love
or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before
us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life.
They do not contradict these facts as such or deny anything that our senses have
immediately seized. * It is the rationalistic critic rather who plays the part
of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never
can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided
the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open
question whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view,
windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world.
The difference of the views seen from the different mystical windows need not
prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The wider world would in that case
prove to have a mixed constitution like that of this world, that is all. It would
have its celestial and its infernal regions, its tempting and its saving moments,
its valid experiences and its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but
it would be a wider world all the same. We should have to use its experiences
by selecting and subordinating and substituting just as is our custom in this
ordinary naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we are now;
yet the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing with
it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in our approach
to the final fullness of the truth.
* They sometimes add subjective audita
et visa to the facts, but as these are usually interpreted as transmundane, they
oblige no alteration in the facts of sense.
In this shape,
I think, we have to leave the subject. Mystical states indeed wield no authority
due simply to their being mystical states. But the higher ones among them point
in directions to which the religious sentiments even of non-mystical men incline.
They tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and
of rest. They offer us hypotheses, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore,
but which as thinkers we cannot possibly upset. The supernaturalism and optimism
to which they would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be after
all the truest of insights into the meaning of this life.
"Oh, the little
more, and how much it is; and the little less, and what worlds away!" It may be
that possibility and permission of this sort are all that the religious consciousness
requires to live on. In my last lecture I shall have to try to persuade you that
this is the case. Meanwhile, however, I am sure that for many of my readers this
diet is too slender. If supernaturalism and inner union with the divine are true,
you think, then not so much permission, as compulsion to believe, ought to be
found. Philosophy has always professed to prove religious truth by coercive argument;
and the construction of philosophies of this kind has always been one favorite
function of the religious life, if we use this term in the large historic sense.
But religious philosophy is an enormous subject, and in my next lecture I can
only give that brief glance at it which my limits will allow.