I. Asceticism and Mysticism

Now in the matter of Asceticism, we can again conveniently consider three points.

1. Ordinary Asceticism practised by Mystics.

There is, first, the (generally severe) Asceticism which is ever connected with at least some one phase, an early one, of every genuine Mystic’s history, yet which does not differ essentially from the direct training in self-conquest to which practically all pre-Protestant, and most of the old Protestant earnest Christians considered themselves obliged.

(1) Now it is deeply interesting to note how marked has been, off and on throughout the last century and now again quite recently, the renewal of comprehension and respect for the general principle of Asceticism, in quarters certainly free from all preliminary bias in favour of Medieval Christianity. Schopenhauer wrote in 1843: “Not only the religions of the East but also genuine Christianity shows, throughout its systems, that fundamental characteristic of Asceticism which my philosophy elucidates.… Precisely in its doctrines of renunciation, self-denial, complete chastity, in a word, of general mortification of the will, lie the deepest truth, the high value, the sublime character of Christianity. It thus belongs to the old, true, and lofty ideal of mankind, in opposition to the false, shallow, and ruinous optimism of Greek Paganism, Judaism and Islam.” “Protestantism, by eliminating Asceticism and its central point, the meritoriousness of celibacy, has, by this alone, already abandoned the innermost kernel of Christianity.… For Christianity is the doctrine of the deep guilt of the human race … and of the heart’s thirst after redemption from it, a redemption which can be acquired only through the abnegation of self,—that is, through a complete conversion of human nature.”—And the optimistically tempered American Unitarian, the deeply versed Psychologist, Prof. William James, tells us in 1902: “In its spiritual meaning, Asceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence of the twice-born philosophy.” “The Metaphysical mystery, that he who feeds on death, that feeds on men, possesses life supereminently, and meets best the secret demands of the Universe, is the truth of which Asceticism has been the faithful champion. The folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has, yet, its indestructible, vital meaning.… Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub and sponge-cake in comparison.”

(2) Indeed, the only thing at all special to Mysticism, in its attitude towards this general principle and practice of Asceticism, is that it ever practises Asceticism as a means towards, or at least as the make-weight and safeguard of, Contemplation, which latter is as essentially Synthetic, and, in so far, peaceful and delightful, as the former is Analytic, polemical and painful; whereas non-Mystical souls will practise Asceticism directly with a view to greater aloofness from sin, and greater readiness and strength to perform the various calls of duty. And hence, if we but grant the legitimacy of the general principle of ordinary Asceticism, we shall find the Mystical form of this Asceticism to be the more easily comprehensible variety of that principle. For the Mystic’s practice, as concerns this point, is more varied and inclusive than that of others, since he does not even tend to make the whole of his inner life into a system of checks and of tension. The expansive, reconciling movement operates in him most strongly also, and, where of the right kind, this expansive movement helps, even more than the restrictive one, to purify, humble, and deepen his heart and soul.

2. God’s Transcendence a source of suffering.

There is, however, a second, essentially different source and kind of suffering in some sorts and degrees of Mysticism, and indeed in other attraits of the spiritual life, which is deeply interesting, because based upon a profound Metaphysical apprehension. Although, at bottom, the opposite extreme to Pantheism, it readily expresses itself, for reasons that will presently appear, in terms that have a curiously Pantheistic colour.

(1) St. John of the Cross writes in 1578: “It is a principle of philosophy, that all means must … have a certain resemblance to the end, such as shall be sufficient for the object in view. If therefore the understanding is to be united to God, … it must make use of those means which can effect that union, that is, means which are most like unto God.… But there is no essential likeness or communion between creatures and Him, the distance between His divine nature and their nature is infinite. No creature therefore … nothing that the imagination may conceive or the understanding comprehend … in this life … can be a proximate means of union with God,” for “it is all most unlike God, and most disproportionate to Him.” “The understanding … must be pure and empty of all sensible objects, all clear intellectual perceptions, resting on faith: for faith is the sole proximate and proportionate means of the soul’s union with God.”

Now it is certain, as we have already found, that the awakened human soul ever possesses a dim but real experience of the Infinite, and that, in proportion as it is called to the Mystical way, this sense will be deepened into various degrees of the Prayer of Quiet and of Union, and that here, more plainly than elsewhere, will appear the universal necessity of the soul’s own response, by acts and the habit of Faith, to all and every experience which otherwise remains but so much unused material for the soul’s advance. And it is equally certain that St. John of the Cross is one of the greatest of such contemplatives, and that neither his intuition and actual practice, nor even his sayings, (so long as any one saying belonging to one trend is set off against another belonging to the other trend), contravenes the Christian and Catholic positions.—Yet it cannot be denied that, were we to press his “negative way” into becoming the only one; and especially were we to take, without discount, such a virtual repudiation, as is furnished by any insistence upon the above words, of any essential, objective difference in value between our various apprehensions of Him and approaches to Him: the whole system and rationale of External, Sacramental and Historical Religion, indeed of the Incarnation, in any degree and form, would have to go, as so many stumbling-blocks to the soul’s advance. For the whole principle of all such Religion implies the profound importance of the Here and the Now, the Contingent and the Finite, and of the Immanence of God, in various degrees and ways, within them.

Indications of this incompatibility, as little systematically realized here as in the Areopagite, are afforded by various remarks of his, belonging in reality to another trend. Thus, immediately before his denial of any essential likeness or communion between any creature and God, he says: “It is true that all creatures bear a certain relation to God and are tokens of His being, some more, some less, according to the greater perfection of their nature.” And of Our Lord’s sacred Humanity he says: “What a perfect living image was Our Saviour upon earth: yet those who had no faith, though they were constantly about Him, and saw His wonderful works, were not benefited by His presence.” But even here the immense importance, indeed downright necessity for Faith, of such external and historical stimuli, objects and materials,—in the latter instance all this at its very deepest,—remains unemphasized, through his engrossment in the necessity of Faith for the fructification of all these things.

In other places this Faith appears as though working so outside of all things imageable, as to have to turn rapidly away from all picturings, as, at best, only momentary starting-points for the advanced soul. “Let the faithful soul take care that, whilst contemplating an image, the senses be not absorbed in it, whether it be material or in the imagination, and whether the devotion it excites be spiritual or sensible. Let him … venerate the image as the Church commands and lift up his mind at once from the material image to those whom it represents. He who shall do this, will never be deluded.” Here, again, along the line of argument absorbing the saint in this book, there is no fully logical ground left for the Incarnational, Historical, Sacramental scheme of the Infinite immanent in the finite, and of spirit stimulated in contact with matter, with everywhere the need of the condescensions of God and of our ascensions by means of careful attention to them.

Sören Kierkegaard, that deep solitary Dane, with so much about him like to Pascal the Frenchman, and Hurrell Froude the Englishman, and who, though Lutheran in all his bringing up, was so deeply attracted by Catholic Asceticism, has, in recent times (he died in 1855), pushed the doctrine of the qualitative, absolute difference between God and all that we ourselves can think, feel, will or be, to lengths beyond even the transcendental element,—we must admit this to be the greatly preponderant one,—in the great Spaniard’s formal teaching. And it is especially in this non-Mystical Ascetic that we get an impressive picture of the peculiar kind of suffering and asceticism, which results from such a conviction to a profoundly sensitive, absorbedly religious soul; and here too we can, I think, discover the precise excess and one-sidedness involved in this whole tendency. Professor Höffding, in his most interesting monograph on his friend, tells us how “for Kierkegaard, … the will gets monopolized by religious Ethics from the very first; there is no time for Contemplation or Mysticism.” “To tear the will away,” Kierkegaard himself says, “from all finite aims and conditions … requires a painful effort and this effort’s ceaseless repetition. And if, in addition to this, the soul has, in spite of all its striving, to be as though it simply were not, it becomes clear that the religious life signifies a dedication to suffering and to self-destruction. What wonder, then, that, for the Jew, death was the price of seeing God; or that, for the Gentile, the soul’s entering into closer relations with the Deity meant the beginning of madness?” For “the soul’s relation to God is a relation to a Being absolutely different from Man, who cannot confront him as his Superlative or Ideal, and who, nevertheless, is to rule in his inmost soul. Hence a necessary division, ever productive of new pains, is operative within man, as long as he perseveres in this spiritual endeavour.… A finite being, he is to live in the Infinite and Absolute: he is there like a fish upon dry land.”

Now Prof. Höffding applies a double, most cogent criticism to this position.—The one is religious, and has already been quoted. “A God Who is not Ideal and Pattern is no God. Hence the contention that the Nature of the Godhead is, of necessity, qualitatively different from that of Man, has ever occasioned ethical and religious misgivings.”—And the other is psychological. “Tension can indeed be necessary for the truth and the force of life. But tension, taken by itself, cannot furnish the true measure of life. For the general nature of consciousness is a synthesis, a comprehensive unity: not only contrast, but also concentration, must make itself felt, as long as the life of consciousness endures.”

It is deeply interesting to note how Catherine, and at bottom St. John of the Cross and the Exclusive Mystics generally, escape, through their practice and in some of their most emphatic teachings, from Kierkegaard’s excess, no doubt in part precisely because they are Mystics, since the exclusive Mystic’s contemplative habit is, at bottom, a Synthetic one. Yet we should realize the deep truth which underlies the very exaggerations of this one-sidedly Analytic and Ascetical view. For if God is the deepest ideal, the ultimate driving force and the true congenital element and environment of Man, such as Man cannot but secretly wish to will deliberately, and which, at his best, Man truly wills to hold and serve: yet God remains ever simply incompatible with that part of each man’s condition and volition which does not correspond to the best and deepest which that Man himself sees or could see to be the better, hic et nunc; and, again, He is ever, even as compared with any man’s potential best, infinitely more and nobler, and, though here not in simple contradiction, yet at a degree of perfection which enables Him, the Supreme Spirit, to penetrate, as Immanent Sustainer or Stimulator, and to confront, as Transcendent Ideal and End, the little human spirit, so great in precisely this its keen sense of experienced contrast.

Catherine exhibits well this double relation, of true contradiction, and of contrast, both based upon a certain genuine affinity between the human soul and God. On one side of herself she is indeed a veritable fish out of water; but, on the other side of her, she is a fish happily disporting itself in its very element, in the boundless ocean of God. On the one side, snapping after air, in that seemingly over-rarified atmosphere in which the animal man, the mere selfish individual, cannot live; on the other side, expanding her soul’s lungs and drinking in light, life, and love, in that same truly rich atmosphere, which, Itself Spirit, feeds and sustains her growing spiritual personality. And the Dialogo, in spite of its frequently painful abstractness and empty unity, has, upon the whole, a profound hold upon this great doctrine.

Yet it is in Catherine’s own culminating intuition,—of the soul’s free choice of Purgatory, as a joyful relief from the piercing pain of what otherwise would last for ever,—the vividly perceived contrast between God’s purity and her soul’s impurity, that we get, in the closest combination, indeed mutual causation, this double sense of Man’s nearness to and distance from, of his likeness and unlikeness to God. For only if man is, in the deepest instincts of his soul, truly related to God, and is capable of feeling, (indeed he ever actually, though mostly dimly, experiences,) God’s presence and this, man’s own, in great part but potential, affinity to Him: can suffering be conceived to arise from the keen realization of the contrast between God and man’s own actual condition at any one moment; and can any expectation, indeed a swift vivid instinct, arise within man’s soul that the painful, directly contradictory, discrepancy can and will, gradually though never simply automatically, be removed. And though, even eventually, the creature cannot, doubtless, ever become simply God, yet it can attain, in an indefinitely higher degree, to that affinity and union of will with God, which, in its highest reaches and moments, it already now substantially possesses; and hence to that full creaturely self-constitution and joy in which, utterly trusting, giving itself to, and willing God, it will, through and in Him, form an abidingly specific, unique constituent and link of His invisible kingdom of souls, on and on.

3. Discipline of fleeing and of facing the Multiple and Contingent.

But there is a third attitude, peculiar (because of its preponderance) to the Mystics as such, an attitude in a manner intermediate between that of ordinary Asceticism, and that of the Suffering just described. The implications and effects of, and the correctives for, this third attitude will occupy us up to the end of this book. I refer to the careful turning-away from all Multiplicity and Contingency, from the Visible and Successive, from all that does or can distract and dissipate, which is so essential and prevailing a feature in all Mysticism, which indeed, in Exclusive Mysticism, is frankly made into the one sole movement towards, and measure of, the soul’s perfection.

(1) It is true that to this tendency, when and in so far as it has come so deeply to permeate the habits of a soul as to form a kind of second nature, the name Asceticism cannot, in strictness, be any more applied; since now the pain will lie, not in this turning away from all that dust and friction, but, on the contrary, in any forcing of the soul back into that turmoil. And doubtless many, perhaps most, souls with a pronouncedly mystical attrait, are particularly sensitive to all, even partial and momentary, conflict. Yet we can nevertheless appropriately discuss the matter under the general heading of Asceticism, since, as a rule, much practice and sacrifice go to build up this habit; since, in every case, this Abstractive Habit shares with Ordinary Asceticism a pronounced hostility to many influences and forces ever actually operative within and around the undisciplined natural man; and since, above all, the very complements and correctives for this Abstractiveness will have to come from a further, deeper and wider Asceticism, to be described presently.

(2) As to Ordinary Asceticism and this Abstractiveness, the former fights the world and the self directly, and then only in so far as they are discovered to be positively evil or definitely to hinder positive good; it is directly attracted by the clash and friction involved in such fighting; and it has no special desire for even a transitory intense unification of the soul’s life: whereas the Abstractiveness turns away from, and rises above, the world and the phenomenal self; their very existence, their contingency, the struggles alive within them, and their (as it seems) inevitably disturbing effect upon the soul,—are all felt as purely dissatisfying; and an innermost longing for a perfect and continuous unification and overflowing harmony of its inner life here possess the spirit.

(3) Now we have just seen how a movement of integration, of synthesizing all the soul’s piecemeal, inter-jostling acquisitions, of restful healing of its wounds and rents, of sinking back, (from the glare and glitter of clear, and then ever fragmentary perception, and from the hurry, strain and rapidly ensuing distraction involved in all lengthy external action), into a peaceful, dim rumination and unification, is absolutely necessary, though in very various degrees and forms, for all in any way complete and mature souls.—And we have, further back, realized that a certain, obscure but profoundly powerful, direct instinct and impression of God in the soul is doubtless at work here, and, indeed, throughout all the deeper and nobler movements of our wondrously various inner life. But what concerns us here, is the question whether the complete action of the soul, (if man would grow in accordance with his ineradicable nature, environment, and specific grace and call), does not as truly involve a corresponding counter-movement to this intensely unitive and intuitive movement which, with most men, and in most moments of even the minority of men, forms but an indirectly willed condition and spontaneous background of the soul.

(4) We have been finding, further, that all the Contingencies, Multiplicities and Mediations which, one and all, tend to appear to the Mystic as so many resistances and distractions, can roughly be grouped under two ultimate heads. These intruders are fellow-souls, or groups of fellow-souls,—some social organism, the Family, Society, the State, the Church, who provoke, in numberless degrees and ways, individual affection, devotion, distraction, jealousy, as from person towards person. Or else the intruders are Things and Mechanical Laws, and these usually leave the Mystic indifferent or irritate or distract him; but they can become for him great opportunities of rest, and occasions for self-discipline.

Yet this distinction between Persons and Things, (although vital for the true apprehension of all deeper, above all of the deepest Reality, and for the delicate discrimination between what are but the means and what are the ends in a truly spiritual life), does not prevent various gradations within, and continuous interaction between, each of these two great groups. For in proportion as, in the Personal group, the Individual appears as but parcel and expression of one of the social organisms, does the impression of determinist Law, of an impersonal Thing or blind Force, begin to mix with, and gradually to prevail over, that of Personality. And in proportion as, in the Impersonal group, Science comes to include all careful and methodical study, according to the most appropriate methods, of any and every kind of truth and reality; and as it moves away from the conceptions of purely quantitative matter, and of the merely numerically different, entirely interchangeable, physical happenings, (all so many mere automatic illustrations of mechanical Law), on, through the lowly organisms of plant-life, and the ever higher interiority and richer consciousness of animal life, up to Man, with his ever qualitative Mind, and his ever non-interchangeable, ever “effortful,” achievements and elaborations of types of beauty, truth and goodness in Human History,—does Science itself come back, in its very method and subject-matter, ever more nearly, to the great personal starting-point, standard and ultimate motive of all our specifically human activity and worth.

(5) Indeed, the two great continuous facts of man’s life, first that he thinks, feels, wills, and acts, in and with the help or hindrance of that profoundly material Thing, his physical body, and on occasion of, and with regard to, the materials furnished by the stimulations and impressions of his senses; and again, that these latter awaken within him those, in themselves, highly abstract and Thing-like categories of his mind which penetrate and give form to these materials; are enough to show how close is the pressure, and how continuous the effect, of Things upon the slow upbuilding of Personality.

(6) Fair approximations to these two kinds of Things, with their quite irreplaceable specific functions within the economy of the human mental life,—the intensely concrete and particular Sense-Impressions, and the intensely abstract and general Mental Categories,—reappear within the economy of Characteristic Religion, in its Sacraments and its Doctrine. And conversely, there exists, in rerum natura, no Science worth having which is not, ultimately, the resultant of, and which does not require and call forth, on and on, certain special qualities, and combinations of qualities, of the truly ethical, spiritual Personality. Courage, patience, perseverance, candour, simplicity, self-oblivion, continuous generosity towards others and willing correction of even one’s own most cherished views,—these things and their like are not the quantitative determinations of Matter, but the qualitative characteristics of Mind.

(7) I shall now, therefore, successively take Mysticism in its attitude towards these two great groups of claimants upon its attention, the Personal and the Impersonal, even though any strictly separate discussion of elements which, in practice, ever appear together, cannot but have some artificiality. And an apparent further complication will be caused by our having, in each case, to contrast what Mysticism would do, if it became Exclusive, with what it must be restricted to doing, if it is to remain Inclusive, i.e. if it is to be but one element in the constitution of that multiplicity in unity, the deep spiritual Personality. The larger Asceticism will thus turn out to be a wider and deeper means towards perfection than even genuine Mysticism itself, since this Asceticism will have to include both this Mysticism and the counter movement within the one single, disciplined and purified life of the soul.