III. Mysticism and the Question of Evil

Introductory: Exclusive and Inclusive Mysticism in Relation to Optimism.

The four couples of weaknesses and corresponding strong points characteristic of Mysticism that we have just considered, and the fact that, in each case, they ever spring respectively from an attempt to make Mysticism be the all of religion, and from a readiness to keep it as but one of the elements more or less present in, and necessary for, every degree and form of the full life of the human soul: make one wish for two English terms, as useful as are the German names “Mystik” and “Mystizismus,” for briefly indicating respectively “the legitimate share of Feeling in the constitution of the religious life, and the one-sidedness of a religion in which the Understanding and the Will,” and indeed also the Memory and the Senses, with their respective variously external occasions, vehicles, and objects, “do not come to their rights,” as Prof. Rauwenhoff well defines the matter. I somehow shrink from the term “Mysticality” for his “Mystizismus”; and must rest content with the three terms—of “Mysticism,” as covering both the right and the wrong use of feeling in religion; and of “True” or “Inclusive Mysticism,” and of “Pseudo-” or “Exclusive Mysticism,” as denoting respectively the legitimate, and the (quantitatively or qualitatively) mistaken, share of emotion in the religious life.

Now the four matters, which we have just considered, have allowed us to reach an answer not all unlike that of Nicolas of Coes, Leibniz, and Hegel,—one which, if it remained alone or quite final, would, in face of the fulness of real life, strike us all, nowadays, as somewhat superficial, because too Optimistic and Panlogistic in its trend. The fifth set of difficulties and problems now to be faced will seem almost to justify Schopenhauer at his gloomiest. Yet we must bear in mind that our direct business here is not with the problem of Evil in general, but only with the special helps and hindrances, afforded by Inclusive and by Exclusive Mysticism respectively, towards apprehending the true nature of Evil and turning even it into an occasion for a deeper good. In this case the special helps and hindrances fall under three heads.

1. Mysticism, too optimistic. Evil positive, but not supreme.

(1) First of all, I would strongly insist upon the following great fact to which human life and history bear witness, if we but take and test these latter on a large scale and with a patient persistency. It is, that not the smoother, easier times and circumstances in the lives of individuals and of peoples, but, on the contrary, the harder and hardest trials of every conceivable kind, and the unshrinking, full acceptance of these, as part of the price of conscience and of its growing light, have ever been the occasions of the deepest trust in and love of God to which man has attained. In Jewish History, the Exile called forth a Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and the profound ideal of the Suffering Servant; the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes raised up a Judas Maccabaeus; and the troubles under the Emperor Hadrian, a Rabbi Akiba. And in Christian History, the persecutions from Nero to Robespierre have each occasioned the formation of heroic lovers of Love Crucified. And such great figures do not simply manage to live, apart from all the turmoil, in some Mystic upper region of their own; but they face and plunge into the very heart of the strife, and get and give spiritual strength on occasion of this closest contact with loneliness, outrage, pain, and death. And this fact can be traced throughout history.

Not as though suffering automatically deepens and widens man into a true spiritual personality,—of itself it does not even tend to this; nor as though there were not souls grown hard or low, or frivolous or bitter, under suffering,—to leave madness and suicide unconsidered,—souls in which it would be difficult to find any avoidable grave fault. But that, wherever there is the fullest, deepest, interiority of human character and influence, there can ever be found profound trials and sufferings which have been thus utilized and transfigured. It is doubtless Our Lord’s uniquely full and clear proclamation of this mysterious efficacity of all suffering nobly borne; above all it is the supreme exemplification and fecundity of this deepest law of life, afforded and imparted by His own self-immolation, that has given its special power to Christianity, and, in so doing, has, more profoundly than ever before or elsewhere, brought home to us a certain Teleology here also,—the deepest ever discovered to man. For though we fail in our attempts at explaining how or why, with an All-knowing, All-powerful, and All-loving God, there can be Evil at all, we can but recognize the law, which is ever being brought home to us, of a mysterious capacity for purification and development of man’s spiritual character, on occasion and with the help of trouble, pain, and death itself.

(2) Now all this, we must admit, is practised and noted, directly and in detail, only by the Ascetical and the Outward-going elements in Religion; whereas Mysticism, as such, is optimistic, not only as is Christianity, with respect to the end, but, in practice, with regard to the actual state of things already encircling it as well. For so careful a selection and so rigorous an abstraction is practised by Mysticism, as such, towards the welter of contingencies around it, that the rough shocks, the bitter tonics, the expansive birth-pangs of the spirit’s deeper life, in and by means of the flux of time and sense, of the conflict with hostile fellow-creatures, and of the claimfulness of the lower self, are known by it only in their result, not in their process, or rather only as this process ebbs and fades away, in such recollective moments, into the distance.

No wonder, then, that Mysticism, as such, has ever tended to deny all positive character to Evil. We have already found how strongly this is the case with the prince of Mystic philosophers, Plotinus. But even St. Augustine, with his massive experience, and (in his other mood) even excessive realization, of the destructive force of Evil and of the corrupt inclinations of man’s heart, has one whole large current of teaching expressive of the purely negative character of Evil. The two currents, the hot and concrete, and the cold and abstract one, appear alternately in the very Confessions, of 397 A.D. There, ten years after his conversion, he can write: “All things that are corrupted, are deprived of good. But, if they are deprived of all good, they will cease to exist.… In so far, then, as they exist, they are good.… Evil is no substance.” Notwithstanding such Neo-Platonist interpretations, he had found Evil a terribly powerful force; the directly autobiographical chapters of this same great book proclaim this truth with unsurpassable vividness,—he is here fully Christian. And in his unfinished work against the Pelagianizing Monk Julianus, in 429 A.D., he even declares—characteristically, whilst discussing the Origin of Sin: “Such and so great was Adam’s sin, that it was able to turn (human) nature itself into this evil.” Indeed, already in 418, he had maintained that “this wound” (of Original Sin) “forces all that is born of that human race to be under the Devil, so that the latter, so to speak, plucks the fruit from the fruit-tree of his own planting.”

Pseudo-Dionysius, writing about 500 A.D., has evidently no such massive personal experience to oppose to the Neo-Platonic influence, an influence which, in the writings of Proclus (who died 485 A.D.), is now at its height. “Evil,” he says, “is neither in Demons nor in us, as an existent (positive) evil, but (only) as a failure and dearth of the perfection of our own proper goods.” He says this and more of the same kind, but nothing as to the dread power of Evil. St. Thomas Aquinas (who died in 1271 A.D.) is, as we know, largely under the influence of the Negative conception: thus “the stain of sin is not something positive, existent in the soul.… It is like a shadow, which is the privation of light.”

Catherine, though otherwise much influenced by the Negative conception, as e.g. in her definition of a soul possessed by the Evil Spirit as one suffering from a “privation of love,” finds the stain of sin, doubtless from her own experience, to be something distinctly positive, with considerable power of resistance and propagation.—Mother Juliana of Norwich had, in 1373, also formulated both conceptions. “I saw not Sin, for I believe it hath no manner of substance, nor no part of being”: Neo-Platonist theory. “Sin is so vile and so mickle for to hate, that it may be likened to no pain.… All is good but Sin, and naught is evil but Sin”: Christian experience.

Eckhart had, still further back (he died in 1327 A.D.), insisted much that “Evil is nothing but privation, or falling away from Being; not an effect, but a defect”: yet he also finds much work to do in combating this somehow very powerful “defect.”—Not till we get to Spinoza (who died in 1677) do we get the Negative conception pushed home to its only logical conclusion: “By Reality and Perfection, I mean the same thing.… All knowledge of Evil is inadequate knowledge.… If the human mind had nothing but adequate ideas, it would not form any notion of Evil.”

(3) As regards the Christian Mystics, their negative conception of evil, all but completely restricted as it was to cosmological theory, did those Mystics themselves little or no harm; since their tone of feeling and their volitional life, indeed a large part of their very speculation, were determined, not by such Neo-Platonist theories, but by the concrete experiences of Sin, Conscience, and Grace, and by the great Christian historical manifestation of the powers of all three.—It is clear too that our modern alternative: “positive-negative,” is not simply identical with the scholastic alternative: “substantial-accidental,” which latter alternative is sometimes predominant in the minds of these ancient theorizers; and that, once the question was formulated in the latter way, they were profoundly right in refusing to hypostatize Evil, in denying that there exists any distinct thing or being wholly bad.—Yet it is equally clear how very Greek and how little Christian is such a preoccupation (in face of the question of the nature of Evil) with the concepts of Substance and Accident, rather than with that of Will; and how strangely insufficient, in view of the tragic conflicts and ruins of real life, is all, even sporadic, denial, of a certain obstructive and destructive efficacy in the bad will, and of a mysterious, direct perversity and formal, intentional malignity in that will at its worst.

(4) On these two points it is undeniable that Kant, (with all his self-contradictions, insufficiencies, and positive errors on other important matters), has adequately formulated the practical dispositions and teachings of the fully awakened Christian consciousness, and hence, pre-eminently, of the great Saints in the past, although, in the matter of the perverse will, the Partial Mystics have, even in their theory, (though usually only as part of the doctrine of Original Sin), largely forestalled his analysis. “Nowhere in this our world, nowhere even outside it, is anything thinkable as good without any reservation, but the good will alone.” “That a corrupt inclination to evil is rooted in man, does not require any formal proof, in view of the clamorous examples furnished to all men by the experience of human behaviour. If you would have such cases from the so-called state of nature, where some philosophers have looked for the chief home of man’s natural goodness, you need only compare, with such an hypothesis, the unprovoked cruelties enacted in Tofoa, New Zealand … and the ceaseless scenes of murder in the North-Western American deserts, where no human being derives the slightest advantage from them,—and you will quickly have more than sufficient evidence before you to induce the abandonment of such a view. But if you consider that human nature is better studied in a state of civilization, since there its gifts have a better chance of development,—you will have to listen to a long melancholy string of accusations: of secret falseness, even among friends; of an inclination to hate him to whom we owe much; of a cordiality which yet leaves the observation true that ‘there is something in the misfortune of even our best friend which does not altogether displease us’: so that you will quickly have enough of the vices of culture, the most offensive of all, and will prefer to turn away your look from human nature altogether, lest you fall yourself into another vice,—that of hatred of mankind.”

It is sad to think how completely this virile, poignant sense of the dread realities of human life again disappeared from the teachings of such post-Kantians as Hegel and Schleiermacher,—in other important respects so much more satisfactory than Kant. As Mr. Tennant has well said, in a stimulating book which, on this point at least, voices the unsophisticated, fully awakened conscience and Christian sense with refreshing directness, “for Jesus Christ and for the Christian consciousness, sin means something infinitely deeper and more real than what it can have meant for Spinoza or the followers of Hegel.” Here again we have now in Prof. Eucken, a philosopher who, free from ultimate Pessimism, lets us hear once more those tones which are alone adequate to the painful reality. “In great things and in small, there exists an evil disposition beyond all simple selfishness: hatred and envy, even where the hater’s self-interest is not touched; an antipathy to things great and divine; a pleasure found in the disfigurement or destruction of the Good.… Indeed the mysterious fact of Evil, as a positive opposition to Good, has never ceased to occupy the deepest minds.… The concept of moral guilt cannot be got rid of, try as we may.”

(5) And yet even with regard to this matter, Mysticism represents a profound compensating truth and movement, which we cannot, without grave detriment, lose out of the complete religious life. For in life at large, and in human life and history in particular, it would be sheer perversity to deny that there is much immediate, delightful, noble Beauty, Truth, and Goodness; and these also have a right to the soul’s careful, ruminating attention. And it is the Mystical element that furnishes this rumination.—Again, “it is part of the essential character of human consciousness, as a Synthesis and an organizing Unity, that, as long as the life of that consciousness lasts at all, not only contrast and tension, but also concentration and equilibrium must manifest themselves. Taking life’s standard from life itself, we cannot admit its decisive constituent to lie in tension alone.” And it is the Mystical mood that helps to establish this equilibrium.—And finally, deep peace, an overflowing possession and attainment, and a noble joy, are immensely, irreplaceably powerful towards growth in personality and spiritual fruitfulness. Nothing, then, would be more shortsighted than to try and keep the soul from a deep, ample, recollective movement, from feeding upon and relishing, from as it were stretching itself out and bathing in, spiritual air and sunshine, in a rapt admiration, in a deep experience of the greatness, the beauty, the truth, and the goodness of the World, of Life, of God.

2. Mysticism and the Origin of Evil.

The second hindrance and help, afforded respectively by Exclusive and by Inclusive Mysticism in the matter of Evil, concerns the question of its Origin.

(1) Now it appears strange at first sight that, instead of first directly realizing and picturing the undeniable, profoundly important facts of man’s interior conflict, his continuous lapses from his own deepest standard, and his need of a help not his own to become what he cannot but wish to be, and of leaving the theory as to how man came by this condition to the second place; the Mystics should so largely,—witness Catherine—directly express only this theory, and should face what is happening hic et nunc all but exclusively under the picture of the prehistoric beginnings of these happenings, in the state of innocence and the lapse of the first man. For men of other religious modalities have held this doctrine as firmly as the Mystics, yet have mostly dwelt directly upon the central core of goodness and the weakness and sinfulness to be found in man; whilst the Mystics had even less scruple than other kinds of devout souls in embodying experimental truths in concepts and symbols other than the common ones.

(2) I think that, here again, it was the Neo-Platonist literary influence, so strong also on other points with the Mystics of the past, and a psychological trend characteristic of the Mystical habit of mind, which conjoined thus to concentrate the Mystics’ attention upon the doctrines of Original Justice and of a First Lapse, and to give to these doctrines the peculiar form and tone taken on by them here. We have noted, for instance, in the case of Catherine herself, how powerfully her thought and feeling, as to the first human soul’s first lapse into sin, is influenced by the idea of each human soul’s lapse into a body; and we have found this latter idea to be, notwithstanding its echoes in the Deutero-Canonical Book of Wisdom and in one non-doctrinal passage in St. Paul, not Christian but Neo-Platonist. Yet it is this strongly anti-body idea that could not fail to attract Mysticism, as such.—And the conception as to the plenary righteousness of that first soul before its lapse, which she gets from Christian theology, is similarly influenced, in her theorized emotion and thought, by the Neo-Platonist idea of every soul having already existed, perfectly spotless, previous to its incarnation: a view which could not but immensely attract such a high-strung temperament, with its immense requirement of something fixed and picturable on which to rest. Thus here the ideal for each soul’s future would have been already real in each soul’s past. In this past the soul would have been, as it were, a mirror of a particular fixed size and fixed intensity of lustre; its business here below consists in removing the impurities adhering to this mirror’s surface, and in guarding it against fresh stains.

(3) Now it is well known how it was St. Augustine, that mighty and daring, yet at times ponderous, intellect, who, (so long a mental captive of the Manichees and then so profoundly influenced by Plotinus,) was impelled, by the experiences of his own disordered earlier life and by his ardent African nature, to formulate by far the most explicit and influential of the doctrines upon these difficult matters. And if, with the aid of the Abbé Turmel’s admirable articles on the subject, we can, with a fairly open mind, study his successive, profoundly varying, speculations and conclusions concerning the Nature and Origin of Sin, we shall not fail to be deeply impressed with the largely impassable maze of opposite extremes, contradictions and difficulties of every kind, in which that adventurous mind involved itself.—And to these difficulties immanent to the doctrine,—at least, in the form it takes in St. Augustine’s hands,—has, of course, to be added the serious moral danger that would at once result, were we, by too emphatic or literal an insistence upon the true guiltiness of Original sin, to weaken the chief axiom of all true morality—that the concurrence of the personality, in a freely-willed assent, is necessarily involved in the idea of sin and guilt.—And now the ever-accumulating number and weight of even the most certain facts and most moderate inductions of Anthropology and Ethnology are abolishing all evidential grounds for holding a primitive high level of human knowledge and innocence, and a single sudden plunge into a fallen estate, as above, apparently against, all our physiological, psychological, historical evidences and analogies, (which all point to a gradual rise from lowly beginnings), and are reducing such a conception to a pure postulate of Theology.

Yet Anthropology and Ethnology leave in undisturbed possession the great truths of Faith that “man’s condition denotes a fall from the Divine intention, a parody of God’s purpose in human history,” and that “sin is exceedingly sinful for us in whom it is a deliberate grieving of the Holy Spirit”; and they actually reinforce the profound verities that “the realization of our better self is a stupendously difficult task,” and as to “Man’s crying need of grace, and his capacity for a gospel of Redemption.” But they point, with a force great in proportion to the highly various, cumulatively operative, immensely interpretative character of the evidence,—to the conclusion that “Sin,” as the Anglican Archdeacon Wilson strikingly puts it, “is … the survival or misuse of habits and tendencies that were incidental to an earlier stage of development.… Their sinfulness would thus lie in their anachronism, in their resistance to the … Divine force that makes for moral development and righteousness.” Certainly “the human infant” appears to careful observers, as Mr. Tennant notes, “as simply a non-moral animal,” with corresponding impulses and propensities. According to this view “morality consists in the formation of the non-moral material of nature into character …”; so that “if goodness consists essentially in man’s steady moralization of the raw material of morality, its opposite, sin, cannot consist in the material awaiting moralization, but in the will’s failure to completely moralize it.” “Evil” would thus be “not the result of a transition from the good, but good and evil would” both alike “be voluntary developments from what is ethically neutral.” Dr. Wilson finds, accordingly, that “this conflict of freedom and conscience is precisely what is related as ‘the Fall’ sub specie historiae.” Scripture “tells of the fall of a creature from unconscious innocence to conscious guilt. But this fall from innocence” would thus be, “in another sense, a rise to a higher grade of being.”

(4) It is, in any case, highly satisfactory for a Catholic to remember that the acute form, given to the doctrine of Original Sin by St. Augustine, has never been finally accepted by the Catholic Roman Church; indeed, that the Tridentine Definition expressly declares that Concupiscence does not, in strictness, possess the nature of Sin, but arises naturally, on the withdrawal of the donum superadditum,—so that Mr. Tennant can admit, in strictest accuracy, that “in this respect, the Roman theology is more philosophical than that of the Symbols of Protestant Christendom.” It is true that the insistence upon “Original Sin” possessing somehow “the true and proper nature of Sin” remains a grave difficulty, even in this Tridentine formulation of the doctrine; whilst the objections, already referred to as accumulating against the theory in general, retain some of their cogency against other parts of this decree.—Yet we have here an impressive proclamation of the profoundest truths: the spiritual greatness of God’s plan for us, the substantial goodness of the material still ready to our hand for the execution of that plan, and His necessary help ever ready from the first; the reality of our lapse, away from all these, into sin, and of the effects of such lapse upon the soul; the abiding conflict between sense and spirit, the old man and the new, within each one of us; and the close solidarity of our poor, upward-aspiring, downward-plunging race, in evil as well as in good.

(5) And as to the Christian Mystics, their one particular danger here,—that of a Static Conception of man’s spirit as somehow constituted, from the first, a substance of a definite, final size and dignity, which but demands the removal of disfiguring impurities, is largely eliminated, even in theory, and all but completely overcome in practice, by the doctrine and the practice of Pure Love. For in “Charity” we get a directly dynamic, expansive conception and experience: man’s spirit is, at first, potential rather than actual, and has to be conquered and brought, as it were, to such and such a size and close-knitness of organization, by much fight with, and by the slow transformation of, the animal and selfish nature. Thus Pure Love, Charity, Agape, has to fight it out, inch by inch, with another, still positive force, impure love, concupiscence, Eros, in all the latter’s multiform disguises. Here Purity has become something intensely positive and of boundless capacities for growth; as St. Thomas says, “Pure Love has no limit to its increase, for it is a certain participation in the Infinite Love, which is the Holy Spirit.”—In this utterly real, deeply Christian way do these Mystics overcome Neo-Platonist static abstractions, and simultaneously regain, in their practical theory and emotional perception, the great truth of the deep, subtle force of Evil, against which Pure Love has to stand, in virile guard, as long as earth’s vigil lasts. And the longest and most difficult of these conflicts is found,—here again in utterly Christian fashion,—not in the sensual tendencies proceeding from the body, but in the self-adoration, the solipsism of the spirit. We have found this in Catherine: at her best she ever has something of the large Stoic joy at being but a citizen in a divine Cosmopolis; yet but Love and Humility, those profoundest of the Christian affections, have indefinitely deepened the truth of the outlook, and the range of the work to be done, in and for herself and others.

(6) Yet even apart from Pure Love, Mysticism can accurately be said to apprehend an important truth when, along its static line of thought and feeling, it sees each soul as, from the first, a substance of a particular, final size. For each soul is doubtless intended, from the first, to express a particular thought and wish of God, to form one, never simply replaceable member in His Kingdom, to attain to a unique kind and degree of personality: and though it can refuse to endorse and carry out this plan, the plan remains within it, in the form of never entirely suppressible longings. The Mystic, then, sees much here also.

3. The warfare against Evil. Pseudo-Mysticism.

The third of the relations between Mysticism and the conception and experience of Evil requires a further elucidation of an important distinction, which we have already found at work all along, more or less consciously, between the higher and the lower Mysticism, and their respective, profoundly divergent, tempers, objects, and range.

(1) Prof. Münsterberg discriminates between these two Mysticisms with a brilliant excessiveness, and ends by reserving the word “Mysticism” for the rejected kind alone. “As soon as we speak of psychical objects,—of ideas, feelings, and volitions,—as subject-matters of our direct consciousness and experience, we have put before ourselves an artificial product, a transformation, to which the categories of real life no longer apply.” In this artificial product causal connections have taken the place of final ends. But “History, Practical Life, … Morality, Religion have nothing to do with these psychological constructions; the categories of Psychology,” treated by Münsterberg himself as a Natural, Determinist Science, “must not intrude into their teleological domains. But if,” on the other hand, “the categories belonging to Reality,” which is Spiritual and Libertarian, “are forced on to the psychological system, a system which was framed” by our mind “in the interest of causal explanation, we get a cheap mixture, which satisfies neither the one aim nor the other. Just this is the effect of Mysticism. It is the personal, emotional view applied, not to the world of Reality, where it fits, but to the Physical and Psychological worlds, which are constructed by the human logical will, with a view to gaining an impersonal, unemotional causal system.… The ideals of Ethics and Religion … have now been projected into the atomistic structure” (of the Causal System), “and have thus become dependent upon this system’s nature; they find their right of existence limited to the regions where ignorance of Nature leaves blanks in the Causal System, and have to tremble at every advance which Science makes.” It is to this projection alone that Münsterberg would apply the term “Mysticism,” which thus becomes exclusively “the doctrine that the processes in the world of physical and psychical objects are not always subject to natural laws, but are influenced, at times, in a manner fundamentally inexplicable from the standpoint of the causal conception of Nature.… Yet, the special interest of the Mystic stands and falls here with his conviction that, in these extra-causal combinations,” thus operative right within and at the level of this causal system, “we have a” direct, demonstrable “manifestation of a positive system of quite another kind, a System of Values, a system dominated, not by Mechanism, but by Significance.”

(2) Now we have been given here a doubtless excessively antithetic and dualistic picture of what, in actual life, is a close-knit variety in unity,—that interaction between, and anticipation of the whole in, the parts, and that indication of the later stages in the earlier,—which is so strikingly operative in the order and organization of the various constituents and stages of the processes and growth of the human mind and character, and which appears again in the Reality apprehended, reproduced, and enriched by man’s powers.

Even in the humblest of our Sense-perceptions, there is already a mind perceiving and a Mind perceived; and, in the most abstract and artificial of our intellectual constructions, there is not only a logical requirement, but also, underlying this requirement as this cause’s deepest cause, an ever-growing if unarticulated experience and sense that only by the closest contact with the most impersonal-seeming, impersonally conceived forces of life and nature, and by the deepest recollection within its own interior world of mind and will, can man’s soul adequately develop and keep alive, within itself, a solid degree and consciousness of Spirit, Free-will, Personality, Eternity, and God. Thus, in proportion as he comes more deeply to advance in the true occasions of his spirit’s growth, does man still further emphasize and differentiate these two levels: the shallower, spacial-temporal, mathematico-physical, quantitative and determinist aspect of reality and level of apprehension; and the deeper, alone at all adequate, experience of all the fuller degrees of Reality and effectuations of the spirit’s life, with their overlapping, interpenetrating Succession, (their Duration), and their Libertarianism, Interiority, and Sense of the Infinite. He thus emphasizes both levels, because the determinist level is found to be, though never the source or direct cause, yet ever a necessary awakener and purifier of the Libertarian level.

Strictly within the temporal-spacial, quantitative method and level, indeed, we can nowhere find Teleology; but if we look back upon these quantitative superficialities from the qualitative, durational and personal, spiritual level and standpoint, (which alone constitute our direct experience), we find that the quantitative, causal level and method is everywhere inadequate to exhaust or rightly to picture Reality, in exact proportion to this reality’s degree of fulness and of worth. From the simplest Vegetable-Cell up to Orchids and Insectivorous Plants; from these on to Protozoans and up, through Insects, Reptiles, and Birds, to the most intelligent of Domestic Animals; from these on to Man, the Savage, and up to the most cultured or saintly of human personalities: we have everywhere, and increasingly, an inside, an organism, a subject as well as object,—a series which is, probably from the first, endowed with some kind of dim consciousness, and which increasingly possessed of a more and more definite consciousness, culminates in the full self-consciousness of the most fully human man. And everywhere here, though in indefinitely increasing measure, it is the individualizing and historical, the organic and soul-conceptions and experiences which constitute the most characteristic and important truths and reality about and in these beings. For the higher up we get in this scale of Reality, the more does the Interior determine and express itself in the Exterior, and the more does not only kind differ from kind of being, but even the single individual from the other individuals within each several kind. And yet nowhere, not even in free-willing, most individualized, personal Man do we find the quantitative, determinist envelope simply torn asunder and revealing the qualitative, libertarian spirit perfectly naked and directly testable by chronometer, measuring-rod, or crucible. The spirit is thus ever like unto a gloved hand, which, let it move ever so spontaneously, will ever, in the first instance, present the five senses with a glove which, to their exclusive tests, appears as but dead and motionless leather.

(3) Now we have already in Chapter IX studied the contrasting attitudes of Catherine and her attendants towards one class of such effects,—those attributed to the Divine Spirit,—and hence, in principle, towards this whole question. Yet it is in the matter of phenomena, taken to be directly Diabolic or Preternatural, that a Pseudo-Mysticism has been specially fruitful in strangely materialistic fantasies. As late as 1774 the Institutiones Theologiae Mysticae of Dom Schram, O.S.B., a book which even yet enjoys considerable authority, still solemnly described, as so many facts, cases of Diabolical Incubi and Succubae. Even in 1836-1842 the layman Joseph Görres could still devote a full half of his widely influential Mystik to “Diabolical Mysticism,”—witchcraft, etc.; a large space to “Natural Mysticism,”—divination, lycanthropy, vampires, etc.; and a considerable part of the “Divine Mysticism,” to various directly miraculous phenomenalisms. The Abbé Ribet could still, in his La Mystique Divine, distinguée de ses Contrefaçons Diaboliques, of 1895, give us a similarly uncritical mixture and transposition of tests and levels. But the terrible ravages of the belief in witchcraft in the later Middle Ages, and, only a few years back, the humiliating fraud and craze concerning “Diana Vaughan,” are alone abundantly sufficient to warn believers in the positive character of Evil away from all, solidly avoidable, approaches to such dangerous forms of this belief.

(4) Yet the higher and highest Mystical attitude has never ceased to find its fullest, most penetrating expression in the life and teaching of devoted children of the Roman Church,—several of whom have been proclaimed Doctors and Models by that Church herself. And by a conjunction of four characteristics these great normative lives and teachers still point the way, out of and beyond all false or sickly Mysticism, on to the wholesome and the true.

(i) There is, first, the grand trust in and love of God’s beautiful, wide world, and in and of the manifold truth and goodness present throughout life,—realities which we have already found rightly to be dwelt on, in certain recollective movements and moments, to the momentary exclusion of their positively operative, yet ever weaker, opposites. “Well I wote,” says Mother Juliana, “that heaven and earth, and all that is made, is great, large, fair and good”; “the full-head of joy is to behold God in all,” and “truly to enjoy in Our Lord, is a full lovely thanking in His sight.” This completely un-Manichaean attitude,—so Christian when held as the ultimate among the divers, sad and joyful, strenuous and contemplative moods of the soul,—is as strongly present in Clement of Alexandria, in the Sts. Catherine of Siena and of Genoa, in St. John of the Cross, and indeed in the recollective moments of all the great Mystics.

(ii) There is, next, a strong insistence upon the soul having to transcend all particular lights and impressions, in precise proportion to their apparently extraordinary character, if it would become strong and truly spiritual. “He that will rely on the letter of the divine locution, or on the intellectual form of the vision, will necessarily fall into delusion. ‘The letter killeth, the spirit quickeneth’; we must therefore reject the literal sense, and abide in the obscurity of faith.” “One desire only doth God allow in His presence, that of perfectly observing His law and carrying the Cross of Christ.… That soul, which has no other aim, will be a true ark containing the true Manna, which is God.” “One act of the will, wrought in charity, is more precious in the eyes of God, than that which all the visions and revelations of heaven might effect.” “Let men cease to regard these supernatural apprehensions … that they may be free.” Here the essence of the doctrine lies in the importance attached to this transcendence, and not in the particular views of the Saint concerning the character of this or that miraculous-seeming phenomenon to be transcended.

(iii) And this essential doctrine retains all its cogency, even though we hold the strict necessity of a contrary, alternating movement of definite occupation with the Concrete, Contingent, Historical, Institutional, in thought and action. For this occupation will be with the normal, typical means, duties, and facts of human and religious life; and, whilst fully conscious of the Supernatural working in and with these seemingly but natural materials, will, with St. Augustine, pray God to “grant men to perceive in little things the common-seeming indications of things both small and great,” and, with him, will see a greater miracle in the yearly transformation of the vine’s watery sap into wine, and in the germination of any single seed, than even in that of Cana.

(iv) And then there is, upon the whole, a tendency to concentrate, at these recollective stages, the soul’s attention upon Christ and God alone. “I believe I understand,” says Mother Juliana, “the ministration of holy Angels, as Clerks tell; but it was not shewed to me. For Himself is nearest and meekest, highest and lowest, and doeth all. God alone took our nature, and none but He; Christ alone worked our salvation, and none but He.” And thus we get a wholesome check upon the Neo-Platonist countless mediations, of which the reflex is still to be found in the Areopagite. God indeed is alone held, with all Catholic theologians, to be capable of penetrating to the soul’s centre, and the fight against Evil is simplified to a watch and war against Self, in the form of an ever-increasing engrossment in the thought of God, and in the interests of His Kingdom. “Only a soul in union with God,” says St. John of the Cross, “is capable of this profound loving knowledge: for this knowledge is itself that union.… The Devil has no power to simulate anything so great.” “Self-love,” says Père Grou, “is the sole source of all the illusions of the spiritual life.… Jesus Christ on one occasion said to St. Catherine of Siena: ‘My daughter, think of Me, and I will think of thee’: a short epitome of all perfection. ‘Wheresoever thou findest self,’ says the Imitation, ‘drop that self’: the soul’s degree of fidelity to this precept is the true measure of its advancement.” The highly authorized Manuel de Théologie Mystique of the Abbé Lejeune, 1897, gives but one-sixth of its three-hundred pages to the discussion of all quasi-miraculous phenomena, puts them all apart from the substance of Contemplation and of the Mystical Life, and dwells much upon the manifold dangers of such, never essential, things. The French Oratorian, Abbé L. Laberthonnière, represents, in the Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, a spirituality as full of a delicate Mysticism as it is free from any attachment to extraordinary phenomena. The same can be said of the Rev. George Tyrrell’s Hard Sayings and External Religion. And the Abbé Sandreau has furnished us with two books of the most solid tradition and discrimination in all these matters.

(5) And we should, in justice, remember that the Phenomenalist Mysticism, objected to by Prof. Münsterberg and so sternly transcended by St. John of the Cross, is precisely what is still hankered after, and treated as of spiritual worth, by present-day Spiritualism. Indeed, even Prof. James’s in many respects valuable Varieties of Religious Experience is seriously damaged by a cognate tendency to treat Religion, or at least Mysticism, as an abnormal faculty for perceiving phenomena inexplicable by physical and psychical science.

(6) And finally, with respect to the personality of Evil, we must not forget that “there are drawings to evil as to good, which are not mere self-temptations, … but which derive from other wills than our own; strictly, it is only persons that can tempt us.”