II. Social Religion and Mysticism

Introductory: the ruinousness of Exclusive Mysticism.

Prof. Harnack says in his Dogmengeschichte: “An old fairy tale tells of a man who lived in ignorance, dirt and wretchedness; and whom God invited, on a certain day, to wish whatsoever he might fancy, and it should be given him. And the man began to wish things, and ever more things, and ever higher things, and all these things were given him. At last he became presumptuous, and desired to become as the great God Himself: when lo, instantly he was sitting there again, in his dirt and misery. Now the history of Religion,—especially amongst the Greeks and Orientals,—closely resembles this fairy tale. For they began by wishing for themselves certain sensible goods, and then political, aesthetic, moral and intellectual goods: and they were given them all. And then they became Christians and desired perfect knowledge and a super-moral life: they even wished to become, already here below, as God Himself, in insight, beatitude and life. And behold, they fell, not at once indeed, but with a fall that could not be arrested, down to the lowest level, back into ignorance, dirt and barbarism.… Like unto their near spiritual relations, the Neo-Platonists, they were at first over-stimulated, and soon became jaded, and hence required ever stronger stimulants. And in the end, all these exquisite aspirations and enjoyments turned into their opposite extreme.”

However much may want discounting or supplementing here, there is, surely, a formidable amount of truth in this picture. And, if so, is Mysticism, at least in its Dionysian type, not deeply to blame? And where is the safeguard against such terrible abuses?

Now Prof. Harnack has himself shown us elsewhere that there is a sense in which Monasticism should be considered eternal, even among and for Protestants. “Monasticism,” he says plaintively, in his account of the first three centuries of Protestantism, “even as it is conceivable and necessary among Evangelical Christians, disappeared altogether. And yet every community requires persons, who live exclusively for its purposes; hence the Church too requires volunteers who shall renounce ‘the world’ and shall dedicate themselves entirely to the service of their neighbour.”—And again, scholars of such breadth of knowledge and independence of judgement as Professor Tiele and his school, insist strongly upon the necessity of Ecclesiastical Institutions and Doctrines. The day of belief in the normality, indeed in the possibility for mankind in general, of a would-be quite individual, entirely spiritual, quite “pure” religion, is certainly over and gone, presumably for good and all, amongst all competent workers.—Nor, once more, can the general Mystical sense of the unsatisfying character of all things finite, and of the Immanence of the Infinite in our poor lives, be, in itself, to blame: for we have found these experiences to mingle with, and to characterize, all the noblest, most fully human acts and personalities.—But, if so, what are the peculiarities in the religion of those times and races, which helped to produce the result pictured in the Dogmengeschichte?

Now here, to get a fairly final answer, we must throw together the question of the ordinary Christian Asceticism and that of the Abstraction peculiar to the Mystics; and we must ask whether the general emotive-volitional attitude towards Man and Life,—the theory and practice as to Transcendence and Immanence, Detachment and Attachment, which, from about 500 A.D. to, say, 1450 A.D., predominantly preceded, accompanied, and both expanded and deflected the specific ally Christian and normally human experience in Eastern Christendom, were not (however natural, indeed inevitable, and in part useful for those times and races), the chief of the causes which turned so much of the good of Mysticism into downright harm. At bottom this is once more the question as to the one-sided character of Neo-Platonism,—its incapacity to find any descending movement of the Divine into Human life.

1. True relation of the soul to its fellows. God’s “jealousy.”

Let us take first the relation of the single human soul to its fellow-souls.

(1) Now Kierkegaard tells us: “the Absolute is cruel, for it demands all, whilst the Relative ever continues to demand some attention from us.” And the Reverend George Tyrrell, in his stimulating paper, Poet and Mystic, shows us that, as regards the relations between man’s love for man and man’s love for God, there are two conceptions and answers in reply to the question as to the precise sense in which God is “a jealous God,” and demands to be loved alone. In the first, easier, more popular conception, He is practically thought of as the First of Creatures, competing with the rest for Man’s love, and is here placed alongside of them. Hence the inference that whatever love they win from us by reason of their inherent goodness, is taken from Him: He is not loved perfectly, till He is loved alone. But in the second, more difficult and rarer conception, God is placed, not alongside of creatures but behind them, as the light which shines through a crystal and lends it whatever lustre it may have. He is loved here, not apart from, but through and in them. Hence if only the affection be of the right kind as to mode and object, the more the better. The love of Him is the “form,” the principle of order and harmony; our natural affections are the “matter” harmonized and set in order; it is the soul, they are the body, of that one Divine Love whose adequate object is God in, and not apart from, His creatures. Thus we have already found that even the immensely abstractive and austere St. John of the Cross tells us: “No one desires to be loved except for his goodness; and when we love in this way, our love is pleasing unto God and in great liberty; and if there be attachment in it, there is greater attachment to God.” And this doctrine he continuously, deliberately practises, half-a-century after his Profession, for he writes to his penitent, Donna Juana de Pedrazas in 1589: “All that is wanting now, is that I should forget you; but consider how that is to be forgotten which is ever present to the soul.”

But Father Tyrrell rightly observes: “To square this view with the general ascetic tradition of the faithful at large is exceedingly difficult.” Yet I cannot help thinking that a somewhat different reconciliation, than the one attempted by him, really meets all the substantial requirements of the case.

(2) I take it, then, that an all-important double law or twin fact, or rather a single law and fact whose unity is composed of two elements, is, to some extent, present throughout all characteristically human life, although its full and balanced realization, even in theory and still more in practice, is ever, necessarily, a more or less unfulfilled ideal: viz. that not only there exist certain objects, acts, and affections that are simply wrong, and others that are simply right or perfect, either for all men or for some men: but that there exist simply no acts and affections which, however right, however obligatory, however essential to the perfection of us all or of some of us, that do not require, on our own part, a certain alternation of interior reserve and detachment away from, and of familiarity and attachment to, them and their objects. This general law applies as truly to Contemplation as it does to Marriage.

And next, the element of detachment which has to penetrate and purify simply all attachments,—even the attachment to detachment itself,—is the more difficult, the less obvious, the more profoundly spiritual and human element and movement, although only on condition that ever some amount of the other, of the outgoing element and movement, and of attachment, remains. For here, as everywhere, there is no good and operative yeast except with and in flour; there can be no purification and unity without a material and a multiplicity to purify and to unite.

And again, given the very limited power of attention and articulation possessed by individual man, and the importance to the human community of having impressive embodiments and examples of this, in various degrees and ways, universally ever all-but-forgotten, universally difficult, universally necessary, universally ennobling renunciation: we get the reason and justification for the setting apart of men specially drawn and devoted to a maximum, or to the most difficult kinds, of this renunciation. As the practically universal instinct, or rudimentary capacity, for Art, Science, and Philanthropy finds its full expression in artists, scientists, philanthropists, whose specific glory and ever necessary corrective it is that they but articulate clearly, embody massively and, as it were, precipitate what is dimly and intermittingly present, as it were in solution, throughout the consciousness and requirements of Mankind; and neither the inarticulate instinct, diffused among all, would completely suffice for any one of the majority, without the full articulation by a few, nor the full articulation by this minority could thrive, even for this minority itself, were it not environed by, and did it not voice, that dumb yearning of the race at large: so, and far more, does the general religiosity and sense of the Infinite, and even its ever-present element and requirement of Transcendence and Detachment, seek and call forth some typical, wholesomely provocative incorporation,—yet, here, with an even subtler and stronger interdependence, between the general demand and the particular supply.

And note that, if the minority will thus represent a maximum of “form,” with a minimum of “matter,” and the majority a maximum of “matter,” with a minimum of “form”: yet some form as well as some matter must be held by each; and the ideal to which, by their mutual supplementations, antagonisms, and corrections, they will have more and more to approximate our corporate humanity will be a maximum of “matter,” permeated and spiritualized by a maximum of “form.” If it is easy for the soul to let itself be invaded and choked by the wrong kind of “matter,” or even simply by an excess of the right kind, so that it will be unable to stamp the “matter” with spiritual “form”; the opposite extreme also, where the spiritual forces have not left to them a sufficiency of material to penetrate or of life-giving friction to overcome, is ever a most real abuse.

2. Ordinary Ascesis corrected by Social Christianity.

Now it is very certain that Ordinary Asceticism and Social Christianity are, in their conjunction, far less open to this latter danger than is the Mystical and Contemplative Detachment. For the former combination possesses the priceless conception of the soul’s personality being constituted in and through the organism of the religious society,—the visible and invisible Church. This Society is no mere congeries of severally self-sufficing units, each exclusively and directly dependent upon God alone; but, as in St. Paul’s grand figure of the body, an organism, giving their place and dignity to each several organ, each different, each necessary, and each influencing and influenced by all the others. We have here, as it were, a great living Cloth of Gold, with, not only the woof going from God to Man and from Man to God, but also the warp going from Man to Man,—the greatest to the least, and the least back to the greatest. And thus here the primary and full Bride of Christ never is, nor can be, any individual soul, but only this complete organism of all faithful souls throughout time and space; and the single soul is such a Bride only in so far as it forms an operative constituent of this larger whole.—And hence the soul of a Mystical habit will escape the danger of emptiness and inflation if it keeps up some,—as much indeed as it can, without permanent distraction or real violation of its special helps and call,—of that outgoing, social, co-operative action and spirit, which, in the more ordinary Christian life, has to form the all but exclusive occupation of the soul, and which here, indeed, runs the risk of degenerating into mere feverish, distracted “activity.”

I take the right scheme for this complex matter to have been all but completely outlined by Plato, in the first plan of his Republic, and indeed to have been largely derived by Christian thinkers from this source; and the excessive and one-sided conception to have been largely determined by his later additions and changes in that great book, especially as these have been all but exclusively enforced, and still further exaggerated, by Plotinus and Proclus. As Erwin Rhode finely says of this later teaching of Plato: “It was at the zenith of his life and thinking that Plato completed his ideal picture of the State, according to the requirements of his wisdom. Over the broad foundation of a population discriminated according to classes, (a foundation which, in its totality and organization, was to embody the virtue of justice in a form visible even from afar, and which formerly had seemed to him to fulfil the whole function of the perfect State), there now soars, pointing up into the super-mundane ether, a highest crown and pinnacle, to which all the lower serves but as a substructure to render possible this life in the highest air. A small handful of citizens, the Philosophers, form this final point of the pyramid of the State. In this State, ordered throughout according to the ends of ethics, these Philosophers will, it is true, take part in the Government, not joyously, but for duty’s sake; as soon, however, as duty permits, they will eagerly return to that super-mundane contemplation, which is the end and true content of their life’s activity. Indeed, in reality, the Ideal State is now built up, step by step, for the ‘one ultimate’ purpose of preparing an abode for these Contemplatives, of training them in their vocation, the highest extant, and of providing a means for the insertion of Dialectic, as a special form of life and the highest aim of human endeavour, into the general organism of the earthly, civilized life. ‘The so-called virtues’ all here sink into the shade before the highest force of the soul, the mystic Contemplation of the Eternal.… To bring his own life to ripeness for its own redemption, that is now the perfect sage’s true, his immediate duty. If, nevertheless, he has still to bethink himself of acting upon and of moulding the world the virtues will spontaneously present themselves to him: for he now possesses Virtue itself; it has become his essential condition.”

It is truly impressive to find here, in its most perfect and most influential form, that ruinously untrue doctrine of the separation of any one set of men from the mass of their fellows, and of Contemplation from interest in other souls, taking the place, (in the same great mind, in the same great book), of the beautifully humble, rich, and true view of a constant, necessary interchange of gifts and duties between the various constituents of a highly articulated organism, a whole which is indefinitely greater than, and is alone the full means, end and measure of, all its several, even its noblest, parts.—Yet the Christian, indeed every at all specifically religious, reader, will have strongly felt that the second scheme possesses, nevertheless, at least one point of advantage over the earlier one. For it alone brings out clearly that element of Transcendence, that sense and thirst of the Infinite, which we have agreed upon as the deepest characteristic of man. And if this point be thus true and important, then another,—the making of Contemplation into a special vocation,—can hardly be altogether incorrect.

But if this is our judgment, how are we to harmonize these two points of Plato’s later scheme with the general positions of the earlier one. Or, rather, how are we to actuate and to synthesize our complex present-day requirements and duties, Christian and yet also Modern, Transcendental and yet Immanental too? For if we have any delicately vivid sense of, and sympathy with, the original, very simple, intensely transcendental, form and emphasis of the Christian teaching, and any substantial share in the present complex sense of obligation to various laws and conceptions immanent in different this-world organizations and systems: we shall readily feel how indefinitely more difficult and deep the question has become since Plato’s, and indeed since the Schoolmen’s time.

3. Preliminary Pessimism and ultimate Optimism of Christianity.

Now I think it is Prof. Ernst Troeltsch who has most fully explicitated the precise centre of this difficulty, which, in its acuteness, is a distinctly modern one, and the direction in which alone the problem’s true solution should be sought.

(1) “The chief problem of Christian Ethics,” he says, “is busy,” not with the relation between certain subjective means and dispositions, but “with the relation between certain objective ends, which have, in some way, to be thought together by the same mind as so many several objects, and to be brought by it and within it to the greatest possible unity. And the difficulty here lies in the fact, that the sublunar among these ends are none the less moral ends, bearing the full specific character of moral values,—that they are ends-in-themselves, and necessary for their own sakes, even at the cost of man’s natural happiness; and yet that they operate in the visible world, and adhere to historical formations which proceed from man’s natural constitution, and dominate his earthly horizon; whilst the Super-worldly End cannot share its rule with any other end. Yet the special characteristic of modern civilization resides precisely in such a simultaneous insistence upon the Inner-worldly Ends, as possessing the nature of ends-in-themselves, and upon the Religious, Super-worldly End: it is indeed from just this combination that this civilization derives its peculiar richness, power, and freedom, but also its painful, interior tension and its difficult problems.”

(2) The true solution of the difficulty surely is that “Ethical life is not, in its beginnings, a unity but a multiplicity: man grows up amidst a number of moral ends, whose unification is not his starting-point but his problem. And this multiplicity can be still further defined as the polarity of two poles, inherent in man’s nature, of which the two chief types proceed respectively from the religious and from the inner-worldly self-determination of the soul,—the polarity of Religious, and that of Humane Ethics, neither of which can be dispensed with without moral damage, yet which cannot be brought completely under a common formula. On this polarity depends the richness, but also the difficulty, of our life, since the sublunar ends remain, to a large extent, conditioned by the necessities and prerequisites of their own special subject-matters, and since only on condition of being thus recognized as ends in themselves, can they attain to their morally educative power.”

(3) Or, to put the same matter from the point of view of definitely Christian experience and conviction: “The formula, for the specific nature of Christianity, can only be a complex conception,—the special Christian form,” articulation and correction, “of the fundamental thoughts concerning God, World, Man and Redemption which,” with indefinite variations of fulness and worth, “are found existing together in all the religions. And the tension present in this multiplicity of elements thus brought together is of an importance equal to that of the multiplicity itself; indeed in this tension resides the main driving-force of Religion. Christianity” in particular “embraces a polarity within itself, and its formula must be dualistic; it resembles, not a circle with one centre, but an ellipse with two focuses. For Christianity is,” unchangeably, “an Ethics of Redemption, with a conception of the world both optimistic and pessimistic, both transcendental and immanental, and an apprehension both of a severe antagonism and of a close interior union between the world and God. It is, in principle, a Dualism, and yet a Dualism which is ever in process of abolition by Faith and Action. It is a purely Religious Ethic, which concentrates man’s soul, with abrupt exclusiveness, upon the values of the interior life; and yet, again, it is a Humane Ethic, busy with the moulding and transforming of nature, and through love bringing about an eventual reconciliation with it. At one time the one, at another time the other, of these poles is prominent: but neither of them may be completely absent, if the Christian outlook is to be maintained.—And yet the original germ of the whole vast growth and movement ever remains an intensely, abruptly Transcendent Ethic, and can never simply pass over into a purely Immanental Ethic. The Gospel ever remains, with all possible clearness and keenness, a Promise of Redemption, leading us, away from the world, from nature and from sin, from earthly sorrow and earthly error, on and on to God; and which cannot allow the last word to be spoken in this life. Great as are its incentives to Reconciliation, it is never entirely resolvable into them. And the importance of that classical beginning ever consists in continuously calling back the human heart, away from all Culture and Immanence, to that which lies above both.”

(4) We thus get at last a conception which really covers, I think, all the chief elements of this complex matter. But the reader will have noted that it does so by treating the whole problem as one of Spiritual Dynamics, and not of Intellectual Statics. For the conception holds and requires the existence and cultivation of three kinds of action and movement in the soul. There are, first, the various centres of human energy and duty of a primarily This-world character, each of which possesses its own kind and degree of autonomy, laws, and obligations. There is, next, the attempt at organizing an increasing interaction between, and at harmonizing, (whilst never emasculating or eliminating), these various, severally characteristic, systems of life and production into an ever larger ultimate unity. And, lastly, there is as strong a turning away from all this occupation with the Contingent and Finite, to the sense and apprehension of the Infinite and Abiding. And this dynamic system is so rich, even in the amount of it which can claim the practice of the majority of souls, as to require definite alternations in the occupations of such souls, ranging thus, in more or less rhythmic succession, from earth to Heaven and from Heaven back again to earth.

(5) And so great and so inexhaustible is this living system, even by mankind at large, that it has to be more or less parcelled out amongst various groups of men, each group possessing its own predominant attrait,—either to work out one of those immanental interests, say Art, Natural Science, Politics; or to fructify one or more of these relatively independent interests, by crossing it with one or more of the others; or to attempt to embrace the whole of these intra-mundane interests in one preliminary final system; or to turn away from this whole system and its contents to the Transcendent and Infinite; or finally to strive to combine, as far as possible, this latter Fleeing to the Infinite with all that former Seeking of the Finite.—We shall thus get specialists within one single domain; and more many-sided workers who fertilize one Science by another; and philosophers of Science or of History, or of both, who strive to reach the rationale of all knowledge of the Finite and Contingent; and Ascetics and Contemplatives who, respectively, call forth and dwell upon the sense and presence of the Infinite and Abiding, underlying and accompanying all the definite apprehensions of things contingent; and finally, the minds and wills that feel called to attempt as complete a development and organization as possible of all these movements.

4. Subdivision of spiritual labour: its necessity and its dangers.

And yet all the subdivision of labour we have just required can avoid doing harm, directly or indirectly, (by leading to Materialism, Rationalism, or Fanaticism, to one or other of the frequent but ever mischievous “Atomisms”), only on condition that it is felt and worked as such a subdivision. In other words, every soul must retain and cultivate some sense of, and respect for, the other chief human activities not primarily its own. For, as a matter of fact, even the least rich or developed individual requires and practises a certain amount, in an inchoate form, of each and all of these energizings; and he can, fruitfully for himself and others, exercise a maximum amount of any one of them, only if he does not altogether and deliberately neglect and exclude the others; and, above all, if, in imagination and in actual practice, he habitually turns to his fellow-men, of the other types and centres, to supplement, and to be supplemented by, them.

It will be found, I think, that the quite undeniable abuses that have been special to the Ascetic and Contemplative methods and states, have all primarily sprung from that most plausible error that, if these energizings are, in a sense, the highest in and for man, then they can, at least in man’s ideal action and condition, dispense with other and lower energizings and objects altogether. Yet both for man’s practice here and even for his ideal state in the hereafter, this is not so. There is no such thing,—either in human experience or in the human ideal, when both are adequately analyzed and formulated,—as discursive reasoning, without intuitive reason; or clear analysis and sense of contrast, without dim synthesis and a deep consciousness of similarity or continuity; or detachment of the will from evil, without attachment of the higher feelings to things good; or the apprehension and requirements of Multiplicity, without those of Unity; or the vivid experience of Contingency, Mutation, and the Worthlessly Subjective, without the, if obscure yet most powerful, instinct of the Infinite and Abiding, of the true Objective and Valuable Subjective. Thus, for humanity at large entirely, and for each human individual more or less, each member of these couples requires, and is occasioned by, the other, and vice versa.

The maxims that follow from this great fact are as plain in reason, and as immensely fruitful in practice, as they are difficult, though ever freshly interesting, to carry out, at all consistently, even in theory and still more in act. For the object of a wise living will now consist in introducing an ever greater unity into the multiplicity of our lives,—up to the point where this unity’s constituents would, like the opposing metals in an electric battery, become too much alike still to produce a fruitful interaction, and where the unity would, thus and otherwise, become empty and mechanical; and an ever greater multiplicity into the unity,—up to the point where that multiplicity would, seriously and permanently, break up or weaken true recollection; and in more and more expanding this whole individual organism, by its insertion, as a constituent part, into larger groups and systems of interests. The Family, the Nation, Human Society, the Church,—these are the chief of the larger organizations into which the inchoate, largely only potential, organism of the individual man is at first simply passively born, yet which, if he would grow, (not in spite of them, a hopeless task, but by them), he will have deliberately to endorse and will, as though they were his own creations.

5. Mystics and Spiritual Direction.

It is interesting to note the special characteristics attaching to the one social relation emphasized by the medieval and modern varieties of Western Catholic Mysticism; and the effect which a larger development of the other chief forces and modalities of the Catholic spiritual life necessarily has upon this relation. I am thinking of the part played by the Director, the soul’s leader and adviser, in the lives of these Mystics,—a part which differs, in three respects, from that of the ordinary Confessor in the life of the more active or “mixed” type of Catholic.

(1) For one thing, there is here a striking variety and range, in the ecclesiastical and social position of the persons thus providentially given and deliberately chosen. The early German Franciscan Preacher, Berthold of Regensburg, owes his initiation into the Interior Life to his Franciscan Novice-Master, the Partial Mystic, David of Augsburg, whose writings still give forth for us their steady light and genial warmth; the French widowed noblewoman and Religious Foundress, St. Jane Frances de Chantal, is helped on her course to high contemplation by the Secular Priest and Bishop, St. Francis de Sales; the French Jesuit, Jean Nicolas Grou, is initiated, after twenty-four years’ life and training in his Order, by the Visitation Nun, Soeur Pélagie, into that more Mystical spirituality, which constitutes the special characteristic of his chief spiritual books; the great Spaniard, St. Teresa herself, tells us how “a saintly nobleman … a married layman, who had spent nearly forty years in prayer, seems to me to have been, by the pains he took, the beginning of salvation to my soul”—“his power was great”; and the English Anchorite, Mother Juliana of Norwich, “a simple, unlettered creature,” seems to have found no special leader on to her rarely deep, wide, and tender teachings, but to have been led and stimulated, beyond and after her first general Benedictine training, by God’s Providence alone, working through the few and quite ordinary surroundings and influences of her Anchorage at Norwich. It would be difficult to find anything to improve in this noble liberty of these great children of God; nor would a larger influence of the other modalities necessarily restrict this ample range.

(2) Again, the souls of this type seem, for the most part, to realize more fully and continuously than those of the ordinary, simply active and ascetical kind, that the “blind obedience” towards such leaders, so often praised in their disciples and penitents, is, where wholesome and strengthening, essentially a simple, tenacious adherence, during the inevitable times of darkness and perplexity, to the encouragements given by the guide to persevere along the course and towards the truths which this soul itself saw clearly, often through the instrumentality of this leader, when it was in light and capable of a peaceful, deliberate decision. For however much the light may have been given it through this human mediation, (and the most numerous, and generally the most important, of our lights, have been acquired thus through the spoken, written, or acted instrumentality of fellow-souls),—yet the light was seen, and had (in the first instance), to be seen, by the disciple’s own spiritual eye; and it is but to help it in keeping faithful to this light (which, in the first and last instance, is God’s light and its own) that the leader stands by and helps. But, given this important condition, there remains the simple, experimental fact that, not only can and do others often see our spiritual whereabouts and God’s attrait for us more clearly than we do ourselves, but such unselfseeking transmission and such humbly simple reception of light between man and man adds a moral and spiritual security and beauty to the illumination, (all other conditions being equal and appropriate), not to be found otherwise. It is interesting to note the courageous, balanced, and certainly quite unprejudiced, testimony borne to these important points, by so widely read, and yet upon the whole strongly Protestant, a pair of scholars, as Miss Alice Gardner and her very distinguished brother, Professor Percy Gardner.

(3) And finally, the souls of this type have, (at least for the two purposes of the suscitation of actual insight, and for bearing witness to this, now past, experience during the soul’s periods of gloom), often tended,—in Western Christendom and during Medieval and still more in Modern times,—to exalt the office and power of the Director, in the life of the soul of the Mystical type, very markedly beyond the functions, rights and duties of the ordinary Confessor in the spiritual life of the ordinary Catholic.

Indeed they and their interpreters have, in those times and places, often insisted upon the guarantee of safety thus afforded, and upon the necessity of such formal and systematic mediation, with an absoluteness and vehemence impossible to conciliate with any full and balanced, especially with any at all orthodox, reading of Church History. For this feature is as marked in the condemned book of Molinos and of most of the other Quietists, as it is in such thoroughly approved Partial Mysticism as that of Père Lallemant and Père Grou: hence it alone cannot, surely, render a soul completely safe against excesses and delusions. And this feature was markedly in abeyance, often indeed, for aught we know, completely wanting, at least in any frequent and methodic form, in the numerous cases of the Egyptian and other Fathers of the Desert: hence it cannot be strictly essential to all genuine Contemplation in all times and places.

(4) The dominant and quite certain fact here seems to be that, in proportion as the Abstractive movement of the soul is taken as self-sufficient, and a Contemplative life is attempted as something substantially independent of any concrete, social, and devotional helps and duties, the soul gets into a state of danger, which no amount of predominance of the Director can really render safe; whereas, in proportion as the soul takes care to practise, in its own special degree and manner, the outgoing movement towards Multiplicity and Contingency, (particular attention to particular religious facts and particular service of particular persons), does such right, quite ordinary-seeming, active subordination to, and incorporation within, the great sacred organisms of the Family, Society, and the Church, or of any wise and helpful subdivision of these, furnish material, purgation and check for the other movement, and render superfluous any great or universal predominance of Direction. St. Teresa is, here also, wonderfully many-sided and balanced. Just as she comes to regret having ever turned aside from Christ’s Sacred Humanity, so too she possesses, indeed she never loses, the sense of the profoundly social character of Christianity: she dies as she had lived, full of an explicit and deep love for the Kingdom of God and the Church.

6. Mysticism predominantly Individualistic.

Yet it is clear that the strong point of the Mystics, as such, does not lie in the direction of the great social spirituality which finds God in our neighbour and in the great human organizations, through and in which, after all, man in great part becomes and is truly man. They are, as such, Individualistic; the relation between God and the individual soul here ever tends to appear as constituted by these two forces alone. A fresh proof, if one were still wanting, that Mysticism is but one of the elements of Religion,—for Religion requires both the Social and the Individual, the Corporate and the Lonely movement and life.

It is truly inspiring to note how emphatic is the concurrence of all the deepest and most circumspect contemporary Psychology, Epistemology, Ethics, and History and Philosophy of the Sciences and of Religion, in these general conclusions, which find, within the slow and many-sided growth and upbuilding of the spiritual personality, a true and necessary place and function for all the great and permanent capabilities, aspirations and energizings of the human soul. Thus no system of religion can be complete and deeply fruitful which does not embrace, (in every possible kind of healthy development, proportion and combination), the several souls and the several types of souls who, between them, will afford a maximum of clear apprehension and precise reasoning, and of dim experience and intuitive reason; of particular attention to the Contingent (Historical Events and Persons, and Institutional Acts and Means) and of General Recollection and Contemplation and Hungering after the Infinite; and of reproductive Admiration and Loving Intellection, and of quasi-creative, truly productive Action upon and within Nature and other souls, attaining, by such Action, most nearly to the supreme attribute, the Pure Energizing of God.

Thus Pseudo-Dionysius and St. John of the Cross will, even in their most Negative doctrines, remain right and necessary in all stages of the Church’s life,—on condition, however, of being taken as but one of two great movements, of which the other, the Positive movement, must also ever receive careful attention: since only between them is attained that all-important oscillation of the religious pendulum, that interaction between the soul’s meal and the soul’s yeast, that furnishing of friction for force to overcome, and of force to overcome the friction, that material for the soul to mould, and in moulding which to develop itself, that alternate expiration and inspiration, upon which the soul’s mysterious death-in-life and life-in-death so continuously depends.