Purification the necessary corollary of conversion—The Self’s adjustment to Reality—Cleansing of the powers of perception—Acquirement of “goodness”—Self-knowledge—Contrition—St. Catherine of Genoa on Purgatory—Love the agent of purification—Purgation accompanies the whole mystic life; but the Purgative Way is the completion of conversion—Self-simplification—Cleansing and stripping—Detachment—Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience: the fundamental mystic virtues—Spiritual Poverty: the essence of liberty—Jacopone da Todi on Poverty—St. Francis of Assisi—The “Sacrum Commercium”—Eckhart on Detachment—An attitude not an act—Its various forms—St. Teresa—Antoinette Bourignan—St. Douceline—Perverted detachment—Mortification—The positive aspect of Purgation—The remaking of character—Death of the lower nature—Once the new life is established, mortification ends—“The Mirror of Simple Souls”—St. Catherine of Genoa—The psychological aspect of mortification—Active suffering—The heroic side of purification—Tauler—The conquest of fastidiousness—St. Francis of Assisi—Margery Kempe—St. Catherine of Genoa—Madame Guyon—Purgation essential to all mysticism—Its last stages—The Game of Love—The fluctuating transcendental consciousness—Rulman Merswin—The Passage from Purgation to Illumination—The three factors of the Purgative Way—Conclusion
HERE, then, stands the newly awakened self: aware, for the first time, of reality, responding to that reality by deep movements of love and of awe. She sees herself, however, not merely to be thrust into a new world, but set at the beginning of a new road. Activity is now to be her watchword, pilgrimage the business of her life. “That a quest there is, and an end, is the single secret spoken.” Under one symbol or another, that long slow process of transcendence, of character building, whereby she is to attain freedom, become capable of living upon high levels of reality, is present in her consciousness. Those to whom this secret is not imparted are no mystics, in the exact sense in which that word is here used; however great their temporary illumination may have been.
What must be the first step of the self upon this road to perfect union with the Absolute? Clearly, a getting rid of all those elements of normal experience which are not in harmony with reality: of illusion, evil, imperfection of every kind. By false desires and false thoughts man has built up for himself a false universe: as a mollusc, by the deliberate and persistent absorption of lime and rejection of all else, can build up for itself a hard shell which shuts it from the external world, and only represents in a distorted and unrecognisable form the ocean from which it was obtained. This hard and wholly unnutritious shell, this one-sided secretion of the surface-consciousness, makes as it were a little cave of illusion for each separate soul. A literal and deliberate getting out of the cave must be for every mystic, as it was for Plato’s prisoners, the first step in the individual hunt for reality.
In the plain language of old-fashioned theology “man’s sin is stamped upon man’s universe.” We see a sham world because we live a sham life. We do not know ourselves; hence do not know the true character of our senses; hence attribute wrong values to their suggestions and declarations concerning our relation to the external world. That world, which we have distorted by identifying it with our own self-regarding arrangement of its elements, has got to reassume for us the character of Reality, of God. In the purified sight of the great mystics it did reassume this character: their shells were opened wide, they knew the tides of the Eternal Sea. This lucid apprehension of the True is what we mean when we speak of the Illumination which results from a faithful acceptance of the trials of the Purgative Way.
The normal self as it exists in the normal world—the “old Adam” of St. Paul—is wholly incapable of supersensual adventure. All its activities are grouped about a centre of consciousness whose correspondences are with the material world. In the moment of its awakening, it is abruptly made aware of this disability. It knows itself finite. It now inspires to the infinite. It is encased in the hard crust of individuality: it aspires to union with a larger self. It is fettered: it longs for freedom. Its every sense is attuned to illusion: it craves for harmony with the Absolute Truth. “God is the only Reality,” says Patmore, “and we are real only as far as we are in His p. 241 order and He is in us.”1 Whatever form, then, the mystical adventure may take, it must be preceded by a change in the attitude of the subject; a change which will introduce it into the order of Reality, and enable it to set up permanent relations with an Object which is not normally part of its universe. Therefore, though the end of mysticism is not goodness, it entails the acquirement of goodness. The virtues are the “ornaments of the spiritual marriage” because that marriage is union with the Good no less than with the Beautiful and the True.
- 1 “The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” “Magna Moralia,” xxii. p. 241
Primarily, then, the self must be purged of all that stands between it and goodness: putting on the character of reality instead of the character of illusion or “sin.” It longs ardently to do this from the first moment in which it sees itself in the all-revealing radiance of the Uncreated Light. “When once love openeth the inner eye of the soul for to see this truth,” says Hilton, “with other circumstances that attend it, then beginneth the soul to be really humble; for then through the sight of God it feeleth and seeth itself as it is, and then doth the soul forsake the beholding and leaning upon itself.”2
- 2 “The Scale of Perfection,” bk. iii. cap. vii. p. 241
So, with Dante, the first terrace of the Mount of Purgatory is devoted to the cleansing of pride and the production of humility. Such a process is the inevitable—one might almost say mechanical—result of a vision, however fleeting, of Reality; an undistorted sight of the earthbound self. All its life it has been measuring its candlelight by other candles. Now for the first time it is out in the open air and sees the sun. “This is the way,” said the voice of God to St. Catherine of Siena in ecstasy. “If thou wilt arrive at a perfect knowledge and enjoyment of Me, the Eternal Truth, thou shouldst never go outside the knowledge of thyself; and by humbling thyself in the valley of humility thou wilt know Me and thyself, from which knowledge thou wilt draw all that is necessary.... In self knowledge, then, thou wilt humble thyself; seeing that, in thyself, thou dost not even exist.”3
- 3 Dialogo, cap. iv. p. 241
The first thing that the self observes, when it turns back upon itself in that moment of lucidity—enters, as St. Catherine says, into “the cell of self-knowledge,”—is the p. 242 horrible contrast between its clouded contours and the pure sharp radiance of the Real; between its muddled faulty life, its perverse self-centred drifting, and the clear onward sweep of that Becoming in which it is immersed. It is then that the outlook of rapture and awe receives the countersign of humility. The harbinger of that new self which must be born appears under the aspect of a desire: a passionate longing to escape from the suddenly perceived hatefulness of selfhood, and to conform to Reality, the Perfect which it has seen under its aspect of Goodness, of Beauty, or of Love—to be worthy of it, in fact to be real. “This showing,” says Gerlac Petersen of that experience, “is so vehement and so strong that the whole of the interior man, not only of his heart but of his body, is marvellously moved and shaken, and faints within itself, unable to endure it. And by this means, his interior aspect is made clear without any cloud, and conformable in its own measure to Him whom he seeks.”4
- 4 “Ignitum cum Deo Soliloquium,” cap. xi. p. 242
The lives of the mystics abound in instances of the “vehemence of this showing”: of the deep-seated sense of necessity which urges the newly awakened self to a life of discomfort and conflict, often to intense poverty and pain, as the only way of replacing false experience by true. Here the transcendental consciousness, exalted by a clear intuition of its goal, and not merely “counting” but perceiving the world to be obviously well lost for such a prize, takes the reins. It forces on the unwilling surface mind a sharp vision of its own disabilities: its ugly and imperfect life.
The love of Ideal Beauty which is closely bound up with the mystic temperament makes instant response. “No more sins!” was the first cry of St. Catherine of Genoa in that crucial hour in which she saw by the light of love the ugly and distorted nature of her past. She entered forthwith upon the Purgative Way, in which for four years she suffered under a profound sense of imperfection, endured fasting, solitude, and mortification, and imposed upon herself the most repulsive duties in her efforts towards that self-conquest which should make her “conformable in her own measure” to the dictates of that Pure Love which was the aspect of reality that she had seen. It is the p. 243 inner conviction that this conformity—this transcendence of the unreal—is possible and indeed normal, which upholds the mystic during the terrible years of Purgation: so that “not only without heaviness, but with a joy unmeasured he casts back all thing that may him let.”5
- 5 Richard Rolle, “The Mending of Life,” cap. i. p. 243
To the true lover of the Absolute, Purgation no less than Illumination is a privilege, a dreadful joy. It is an earnest of increasing life. “Let me suffer or die!” said St. Teresa: a strange alternative in the ears of common sense, but a forced option in the spiritual sphere. However harsh its form, however painful the activities to which it spurs him, the mystic recognizes in this break-up of his old universe an essential part of the Great Work: and the act in which he turns to it is an act of love no less than an act of will. “Burning of love into a soul truly taken all vices purgeth: ... for whilst the true lover with strong and fervent desire into God is borne, all things him displease that from the sight of God withdraw.”6 His eyes once opened, he is eager for that ordering of his disordered loves which alone can establish his correspondences with Transcendental Life. “Teach me my only joy,” cries Suso, “the way in which I may bear upon my body the marks of Thy Love.” “Come, my soul, depart from outward things and gather thyself together into a true interior silence, that thou mayst set out with all thy courage and bury and lose thyself in the desert of a deep contrition.”7
It is in this torment of contrition, this acute consciousness of unworthiness, that we have the first swing-back of the oscillating self from the initial state of mystic pleasure to the complementary state of pain. It is, so to speak, on its transcendental side, the reflex action which follows the first touch of God. Thus, we read that Rulman Merswin, “swept away by the transports of Divine Love,” did not surrender himself to the passive enjoyment of this first taste of Absolute Being, but was impelled by it to diligent and instant self-criticism. He was ‘seized with a hatred of his body, and inflicted on himself such hard mortifications that he fell ill.”8
- 8 Jundt, “Rulman Merswin,” p. 19. p. 243
It is useless for lovers of healthy-mindedness to resent this and similar examples of self-examination and penance: to label them morbid or mediaeval. The fact remains that only such bitter knowledge of wrongness of relation, seen by the light of ardent love, can spur the will of man to the hard task of readjustment.
“I saw full surely,” says Julian of Norwich, “that it behoveth needs to be that we should be in longing and in penance until the time that we be led so deep into God that we verily and truly know our own soul.”9
- 9 “Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. lvi. p. 244
Dante’s whole journey up the Mount of Purgation is the dramatic presentation of this one truth. So, too, the celebrated description of Purgatory attributed to St. Catherine of Genoa10 is obviously founded upon its author’s inward experience of this Purgative Way. In it, she applies to the souls of the dead her personal consciousness of the necessity of purification; its place in the organic process of spiritual growth. It is, as she acknowledges at the beginning, the projection of her own psychological adventures upon the background of the spiritual world: its substance being simply the repetition after death of that eager and heroic acceptance of suffering, those drastic acts of purification which she has herself been compelled to undertake under the whip of the same psychic necessity—that of removing the rust of illusion, cleansing the mirror in order that it may receive the divine light. “It is,” she says, “as with a covered object, the object cannot respond to the rays of the sun, not because the sun ceases to shine—for it shines without intermission—but because the covering intervenes. Let the covering be destroyed, and again the object will be exposed to the sun, and will answer to the rays which beat against it in proportion as the work of destruction advances. Thus the souls are covered by a rust—that is, by sin—which is gradually consumed away by the fire of purgatory. The more it is consumed, the more they respond to God their true Sun. Their happiness increases as the rust falls off and lays them open to p. 245 the divine ray ... the instinctive tendency to seek happiness in God develops itself, and goes on increasing through the fire of love, which draws it to its end with such impetuosity and vehemence that any obstacle seems intolerable; and the more clear its vision, the more extreme its pain.”11
- 10 I offer no opinion upon this question of authorship. Those interested may consult Von Hügel, “The Mystical Element of Religion,” vol. i., Appendix. Whoever may be responsible for its present form, the Treatise is clearly founded upon first-hand mystic experience: which is all that our present purpose requires. p. 244
- 11 “Trattato di Purgatorio,” caps. ii. and iii. p. 245
“Mostratene la via di gire al monte!” cry the souls of the newly-dead in Dante’s vision,12 pushed by that “instinctive tendency” towards the purifying flames. Such a tendency, such a passionate desire, the aspiring self must have. No cool, well-balanced knowledge of the need of new adjustments will avail to set it on the Purgative Way. This is a heroic act, and demands heroic passions in the soul.
- 12 Purg. ii. 60. p. 245
“In order to overcome our desires and to deny ourselves in all things,” says St. John of the Cross, who is the classic authority upon this portion of the mystic quest, “our love and inclination for which are wont so to inflame the will that it delights therein, we require another and greater fire of another and nobler love—that of the Bridegroom—so that having all our joy in Him, and deriving from Him all our strength, we may gain such resolution and courage as shall enable us easily to abandon and deny all besides. It was necessary, in order to subdue our sensual desires, not only to have this love for the Bridegroom, but also to be on fire therewith, and that with anxiety ... if our spiritual nature were not on fire with other and nobler anxieties—anxieties for that which is spiritual—we should never overcome our natural and sensible satisfactions, nor be able to enter on the night of sense, neither should we have the courage to remain in the darkness, in the denial of every desire.”13
- 13 “Subida del Monte Carmelo,” l. i. cap. xiv. p. 245
“It is necessary to be on fire with love, and that with anxiety.” Only this deep and ardent passion for a perceived Object of Love can persuade the mystic to those unnatural acts of abnegation on which he kills his lesser love of the world of sense, frees himself from the “remora of desire,” unifies all his energies about the new and higher centre of his life. His business, I have said, is transcendence: a mounting up, an attainment of a higher order of reality. Once his eyes have been opened on Eternity, his instinct for the Absolute roused p. 246 from its sleep, he sees union with that Reality as his duty no less than his joy: sees too that this union can only be consummated on a plane where illusion and selfhood have no place.
The inward voice says to him perpetually at the least seasonable moments, “Dimitte omnia transitoria, quaere aeterna.”14 Hence the purgation of the senses and of the character which they have helped to build is always placed first in order in the Mystic Way; though sporadic flashes of illumination and ecstasy may, and often do, precede and accompany it. Since spiritual no less than physical existence is, as we know it, an endless Becoming, it too has no end. In a sense the whole of the mystical experience in this life consists in a series of purifications, whereby the Finite slowly approaches the nature of its Infinite Source: climbing up the cleansing mountain pool by pool, like the industrious fish in Rulman Merswin’s vision, until it reaches its Origin. The greatest of the contemplative saints, far from leaving purgation behind them in their progress, were increasingly aware of their own inadequateness, the nearer they approached to the unitive state: for the true lover of the Absolute, like every other lover, is alternately abased and exalted by his unworthiness and his good fortune. There are moments of high rapture when he knows only that the banner over him is Love: but there are others in which he remains bitterly conscious that in spite of his uttermost surrender there is within him an ineradicable residuum of selfhood which “stains the white radiance of eternity.”
- 14 “De Imitatione Christi,” l. iii. cap. i. p. 246
In this sense, then, purification is a perpetual process. That which mystical writers mean, however, when they speak of the Way of Purgation, is rather the slow and painful completion of Conversion. It is the drastic turning of the self from the unreal to the real life: a setting of her house in order, an orientation of the mind to Truth. Its business is the getting rid, first of self-love; and secondly of all those foolish interests in which the surface-consciousness is steeped.
“The essence of purgation,” says Richard of St. Victor, “is self-simplification.” Nothing can happen until this has proceeded a certain distance: till the involved interests and p. 247 tangled motives of the self are simplified, and the false complications of temporal life are recognized and cast away.
“No one,” says another authority in this matter, “can be enlightened unless he be first cleansed or purified and stripped.”15 Purgation, which is the remaking of character in conformity with perceived reality, consists in these two essential acts: the cleansing of that which is to remain, the stripping of that which is to be done away. It may best be studied, therefore, in two parts: and I think that it will be in the reader’s interest if we reverse the order which the “Theologia Germanica” adopts, and first consider Negative Purification, or self-stripping, and next Positive Purification, or character-adjustment. These, then, are the branches into which this subject will here be split. (1) The Negative aspect, the stripping or purging away of those superfluous, unreal, and harmful things which dissipate the precious energies of the self. This is the business of Poverty, or Detachment. (2) The Positive aspect: a raising to their highest term, their purest state, of all that remains—the permanent elements of character. This is brought about by Mortification: the gymnastic of the soul: a deliberate recourse to painful experiences and difficult tasks.
- 15 “Theologia Germanica,” cap. xiv. p. 247
1. Detachment
Apart from the plain necessity of casting out imperfection and sin, what is the type of “good character” which will best serve the self in its journey towards union with the Absolute?
The mystics of all ages and all faiths agree in their answer. Those three virtues which the instinct of the Catholic Church fixed upon as the necessities of the cloistered life—the great Evangelical counsel of voluntary Poverty with its departments: Chastity, the poverty of the senses, and Obedience, the poverty of the will—are also, when raised to their highest term and transmuted by the Fire of Love, the essential virtues of the mystical quest.
By Poverty the mystic means an utter self-stripping, the casting off of immaterial as well as material wealth, a complete detachment from all finite things. By Chastity he means an p. 248 extreme and limpid purity of soul, virgin to all but God: by Obedience, that abnegation of selfhood, that mortification of the will which results in a complete humility, a “holy indifference” to the accidents of life. These three aspects of perfection are really one: linked together as irrevocably as the three aspects of the self. Their common characteristic is this: they tend to make the subject regard itself, not as an isolated and interesting individual, possessing desires and rights, but as a scrap of the Cosmos, an ordinary bit of the Universal Life, only important as a part of the All, an expression of the Will Divine. Detachment and purity go hand in hand, for purity is but detachment of the heart; and where these are present they bring with them that humble spirit of obedience which expresses detachment of will. We may therefore treat them as three manifestations of one thing: which thing is Inward Poverty. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven,” is the motto of all pilgrims on this road.
“God is pure Good in Himself,” says Eckhart, “therefore will He dwell nowhere but in a pure soul. There He can pour Himself out: into that He can wholly flow. What is Purity? It is that a man should have turned himself away from all creatures and have set his heart so entirely on the Pure Good that no creature is to him a comfort, that he has no desire for aught creaturely, save so far as he may apprehend therein the Pure Good, which is God. And as little as the bright eye can endure aught foreign in it, so little can the pure soul bear anything in it, any stain on it, that comes between it and God. To it all creatures are pure to enjoy; for it enjoyeth all creatures in God, and God in all creatures.”16
- 16 Meister Eckhart, quoted by Wackernagel, “Altdeutsches Lesebuch,” p. 891. p. 248
“To it all creatures are pure to enjoy!” This is hardly the popular concept of the mystic; which credits him, in the teeth of such examples as St. Francis, St. Mechthild of Magdeburg, Rolle, Suso, and countless others, with a hearty dread of natural things. Too many mistaken ascetics of the type of the Curé d’Ars, who would not smell a rose for fear of sin, have supported in this respect the vulgar belief; for it is generally forgotten that though most mystics have practised asceticism as a means to an end, all ascetics are not mystics. Whatever may p. 249 be the case with other deniers of the senses, it is true that the pure soul of the mystic, dwelling on high levels of reality, his eyes set on the Transcendental World, is capable of combining with the perfection of detachment that intense and innocent joy in natural things, as veils and vessels of the divine, which results from seeing “all creatures in God and God in all creatures.” ‘Whoso knows and loves the nobleness of My Freedom,” said the voice of God to Mechthild of Magdeburg, “cannot bear to love Me alone, he must also love Me in the creatures.”17 Such a power is characteristic of the illumination which results from a faithful endurance of the Purgative Way; for the corollary of ‘blessed are the pure in heart” is not merely a poetic statement. The annals of mysticism prove it to be a psychological law.
- 17 “Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit,” pt. vi., cap. 4. p. 249
How then is this contradiction to be resolved: that the mystic who has declared the fundamental necessity of “leaving all creatures” yet finds them pure to enjoy? The answer to the riddle lies in the ancient paradox of Poverty: that we only enjoy true liberty in respect of such things as we neither possess nor desire. “That thou mayest have pleasure in everything, seek pleasure in nothing. That thou mayest know everything, seek to know nothing. That thou mayest possess all things, seek to possess nothing.... In detachment the spirit finds quiet and repose, for coveting nothing, nothing wearies it by elation; and nothing oppresses it by dejection, because it stands in the centre of its own humility. For as soon as it covets anything it is immediately fatigued thereby.”18
- 18 St. John of the Cross, “Subida del Monte Carmelo,’ bk. i. cap. xiii. p. 249
It is not love but lust—the possessive case, the very food of selfhood—which poisons the relation between the self and the external world and “immediately fatigues” the soul. Divide the world into “mine” and “not mine,” and unreal standards are set up, claims and cravings begin to fret the mind. We are the slaves of our own property. We drag with us not a treasure, but a chain. “Behold,” says the “Theologia Germanica,” “on this sort must we cast all things from us and strip ourselves of them: we must refrain from claiming anything for our own. When we do this, we shall have the best, fullest, clearest, and noblest knowledge that a man can have, and also the p. 250 noblest and purest love and desire.”19 “He will not behold the Light who attempts to ascend to the vision of the Supreme whilst he is drawn downwards by those things that are an obstacle to the vision,” says Plotinus, “for he does not ascend alone, but brings with him that which separates him from the One: in a word, he is not made one.”20 Accept Poverty, however, demolish ownership, the verb “to have” in every mood and tense, and this downward drag is at an end. At once the Cosmos belongs to you and you to it. You escape the heresy of separateness, are “made one,” and merged in “the greater life of the All.” Then, a free spirit in a free world, the self moves upon its true orbit undistracted by the largely self-imposed responsibilities of ordinary earthly existence.
This was the truth which St. Francis of Assisi grasped, and applied with the energy of a reformer and the delicate originality of a poet to every circumstance of the inner and the outer life. This noble liberty it is which is extolled by his spiritual descendant, Jacopone da Todi, in one of his most magnificent odes:—
“Poverta alto sapere
a nulla cosa sojacere
en desprezo possedere
tutte le cose create....
Dio non alberga en core strecto
tant’e grande quantai affecto
povertate ha si gran pecto
che ci alberga deitate....
Povertate e nulla havere
et nulla cosa poi volere
et omne cosa possedere
en spirito de libertate.”21
- 21 “Oh Poverty, high wisdom! to be subject to nothing, and by despising all to possess all created things....
God will not lodge in a narrow heart; and it is as great as thy love. Poverty has so ample a bosom that Deity Itself may lodge therein....
Poverty is naught to have and nothing to desire: but all things to possess in the spirit of liberty.”—Jacopone da Todi. Lauda lix. p. 250
“My little sisters the birds,” said St. Francis, greatest adept of that high wisdom, “Brother Sun, Sister Water, Mother Earth.”22 Not my servants, but my kindred and fellow-citizens; who may safely be loved so long as they are not desired. So, in almost identical terms, the dying Hindu ascetic:—
- 22 “Fioretti,” cap. xvi., and “Speculum,” cap. cxx. p. 251
“Oh Mother Earth, Father Sky,
Brother Wind, Friend Light, Sweetheart Water,
Here take my last salutation with folded hands!
For to-day I am melting away into the Supreme
Because my heart became pure,
And all delusion vanished,
Through the power of your good company.”
It is the business of Lady Poverty to confer on her lovers this freedom of the Universe, to eradicate delusion, purify the heart, and initiate them into the “great life of the All.” Well might St. Francis desire marriage with that enchantress, who gives back ten-fold all that she takes away. “Holy poverty,” he said, “is a treasure so high excelling and so divine that we be not worthy to lay it up in our vile vessels; since this is that celestial virtue whereby all earthly things and fleeting are trodden underfoot, and whereby all hindrances are lifted from the soul so that freely she may join herself to God Eternal.”23
- 23 Ibid., cap. xiii. (Arnold’s translation). p. 251
Poverty is the matchmaker between God and the spirit of man. Never will the union to which that spirit tends take place without her good offices, her drastic separation of the unreal from the real. She strips off the clothing which man so often mistakes for himself, transvaluates all his values, and shows him things as they are. Thus, in that beautiful chapter of the “Sacrum Commercium,” which describes how the friars, climbing “the steeps of the hill,” find Lady Poverty at the summit “enthroned only in her nakedness,” we are told that she “preventing them with the blessings of sweetness,” said, “Why hasten ye so from the vale of tears to the mount of light? If, peradventure, it is me that ye seek, lo, I am but as you behold, a little poor one, stricken with storms and far p. 252 from any consolation.” Whereto the brothers answer, “Only admit us to thy peace; and we shall be saved.”24
- 24 “Sacrum Commercium Beati Francisci cum Domina Paupertate,” caps. iv. and v. (Rawnsley’s translation). p. 252
The same truth: the saving peace of utter detachment from everything but Divine Reality—a detachment which makes those who have it the citizens of the world, and enabled the friars to say to Lady Poverty as they showed her from the hill of Assisi the whole countryside at her feet, “Hoc est claustrum nostrum, Domina,”25 is taught by Meister Eckhart in a more homely parable.
- 25 Op. cit., cap. xxii. p. 252
There was a learned man who, eight years long, desired that God would show him a man who would teach him the truth. And once when he felt a very great longing a voice from God came to him and said, “Go to the church and there shalt thou find a man who shalt show thee the way to blessedness.” And he went thence, and found a poor man whose feet were torn and covered with dust and dirt: and all his clothes were hardly worth three farthings. And he greeted him, saying:—
“God give you good day!”
He answered: “I have never had a bad day.”
“God give you good luck.”
“I have never had ill luck.”
“May you be happy! but why do you answer me thus?”
“I have never been unhappy.”
“Pray explain this to me, for I cannot understand it.”
The poor man answered, “Willingly. You wished me good day. I never had a bad day; for if I am hungry I praise God; if it freezes, hails, snows, rains, if the weather is fair or foul, still I praise God; am I wretched and despised, I praise God, and so I have never had an evil day. You wished that God would send me luck. But I never had ill luck, for I know how to live with God, and I know that what He does is best; and what God gives me or ordains for me, be it good or ill, I take it cheerfully from God as the best that can be, and so I have never had ill luck. You wished that God would make me happy. I was never unhappy; for my only desire is to live in God’s will, and I have so entirely yielded my will to God’s, that what God wills, I will.”
“But if God should will to cast you into hell,” said the learned man, “what would you do then?”
“Cast me into hell? His goodness forbids! But if He did cast me into hell, I should have two arms to embrace Him. One arm is true humility, that I should lay beneath Him, and be thereby united to His holy humanity. And with the right arm of love, which is united with His holy divinity, I should so embrace Him that He would have to go to hell with me. And I would rather be in hell and have God, than in heaven and not have God.”
Then the Master understood that true abandonment with utter humility is the nearest way to God.
The Master asked further: “Whence are you come?”
“From God.”
“Where did you find God?”
“When I forsook all creatures.”
“Where have you left God?”
“In pure hearts, and in men of good will.”
The Master asked: “What sort of man are you?”
“I am a king.”
“Where is your kingdom?”
“My soul is my kingdom, for I can so rule my senses inward and outward that all the desires and powers of my soul are in subjection, and this kingdom is greater than a kingdom on earth.”26
- 26 So Ruysbroeck, “Freewill is the king of the soul, he inhabits the highest city of that kingdom: that is to say, the desirous forces of the soul” (“L’Ornement des Noces Spirituelles,” l. i. cap. xxiv.). p. 253
“What brought you to this perfection?”
“My silence, my high thoughts, and my union with God. For I could not rest in anything that was less than God. Now I have found God; and in God have eternal rest and peace.”27
- 27 Meister Eckhart. Quoted in Martensen’s monograph, p. 107. p. 253
Poverty, then, consists in a breaking down of man’s inveterate habit of trying to rest in, or take seriously, things which are “less than God”: i.e., which do not possess the character of reality. Such a habit is the most fertile of all causes of “world-weariness” and disillusion: faults, or rather spiritual diseases, which the mystics never exhibit, but which few who are without all mystic feeling can hope to escape. Hence the p. 254 sharpened perceptions of the contemplatives have always seen poverty as a counsel of prudence, a higher form of common sense. It is not with St. Francis, or any other great mystic, a first principle, an end in itself. It was rather a logical deduction from the first principle of their science—the paramount importance to the soul of a clear view of reality.
Here East and West are in agreement: “Their science,” says Al Ghazzali of the Sūfis, who practised, like the early Franciscans, a complete renunciation of worldly goods, “has for its object the uprooting from the soul of all violent passions, the extirpation from it of vicious desires, and evil qualities; so that the heart may become detached from all that is not God, and give itself for its only occupation meditation upon the Divine Being.”28
- 28 Schmölders, “Essai sur les Écoles Philosophiques chez les Arabes,” p. 54. p. 254
All those who have felt themselves urged towards the attainment of this transcendental vision, have found that possessions interrupt the view, are centres of conflicting interest in the mind. They assume a false air of importance, force themselves upon the attention, and complicate life. Hence, in the interest of self-simplification, they must be cleared away: a removal which involves for the real enthusiast little more sacrifice than the weekly visit of the dustman. “Having entirely surrendered my own free-will,” says Al Ghazzali of his personal experience, “my heart no longer felt any distress in renouncing fame, wealth, or the society of my children.”29
- 29 Ibid., op. cit., p. 58. p. 254
Others have contrived to reconcile self-surrender with a more moderate abandonment of outward things. Possessions take different rank for almost every human soul; and the true rule of poverty consists in giving up those things which enchain the spirit, divide its interests, and deflect it on its road to the Absolute—whether these things be riches, habits, religious observances, friends, interests, distastes, or desires—not in mere outward destitution for its own sake. It is attitude, not act, that really matters; self-denudation would not be necessary were it not for our ineradicable tendency to attribute false value to things the moment they become our own. “What is poverty of spirit but meekness of mind, by which a man knows his own infirmity?” says Rolle, “seeing that to perfect stable p. 255 ness he may not come but by the grace of God, all thing that him might let from that grace he forsakes, and only in joy of his Maker he sets his desire. And as of one root spring many branches, so of wilful poverty on this wise taken proceed virtues and marvels untrowed. Not as some that change their clothes and not their souls; riches soothly it seems these forsake, and vices innumerable they cease not to gather.... If thou truly all thing for God forsake, see more what thou despiseth than what thou forsaketh.”30
- 30 Richard Rolle, “The Mending of Life,” cap. iii. p. 255
From such passages as this it follows that the Poverty of the mystics is a mental rather than a material state. Detachment is the inner reality, of which Franciscan poverty is a sacrament to the world. It is the poor in spirit, not the poor in substance, who are to be spiritually blessed. “Let all things be forsaken of me,” says Gerlac Petersen, “so that being poor I may be able in great inward spaciousness, and without any hurt, to suffer want of all those things which the mind of man can desire; out of or excepting God Himself.”31
- 31 “Ignitum cum Deo Soliloquium,” cap. i. p. 255
“I am not speaking here of the absence of things,” says St. John of the Cross, “for absence is not detachment if the desire remains—but of that detachment which consists in suppressing desire and avoiding pleasure. It is this that sets the soul free, even though possession may be still retained.”32
- 32 “Subida del Monte Carmelo,” l. i. cap. p. 255
Every person in whom the mystical instinct awakes soon discovers in himself certain tastes or qualities which interrupt the development of that instinct. Often these tastes and qualities are legitimate enough upon their own plane; but they are a drain upon the energy of the self, preventing her from attaining that intenser life for which she was made and which demands all her interest and energy. They distract her attention, they fill the field of perception: making of the surface-consciousness so active a thing that it can hardly be put to sleep. “Where can he have that pure and naked vision of unchangeable Truth whereby he see into all things,” says Petersen again, “who is so busied in other things, not perhaps evil, which operate ... upon his thoughts and imagination and p. 256 confuse and enchain his mind ... that his sight of that unique One in Whom all things are is over-clouded?”33
- 33 Gerlac Petersen, op. cit., cap. xi. p. 256
Now the nature of these distracting factors which “confuse and enchain the mind” will vary with almost every individual. It is impossible to predict in any one case what the things will be which the self must give up in order that the transcendental consciousness may grow. “Does it make any difference whether a bird be held by a slender thread or by a rope, while the bird is bound and cannot fly until the cord that holds it is broken? It is true that a slender thread is more easily broken; still notwithstanding, if it is not broken the bird cannot fly. This is the state of a soul with particular attachments: it never can attain to the liberty of the divine union, whatever virtues it may possess. Desires and attachments affect the soul as the remora is said to affect a ship; that is but a little fish, yet when it clings to the vessel it effectually hinders its progress.”34
- 34 St. John of the Cross, op. cit., l. i. cap. xi. p. 256
“One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” is a statement that is peculiarly true in regard to questions of detachment. Here each adventurer must—and does—judge for himself; extirpating all those interests which nourish selfhood, however innocent or even useful they may seem in the eyes of the world. The only rule is the remorseless abandonment of everything which is in the way. “When any man God perfectly desires to love, all things as well inward as outward that to God’s love are contrary and from His love do let, he studies to do away.”35 This may mean the utter self-stripping of St. Francis of Assisi, who cast off his actual clothing in his relentless determination to have nothing of his own:36 or the scarcely less drastic proceedings of Antoinette Bourignan, who found that a penny was enough to keep her from God.
“Being one night in a most profound Penitence,” says the biographer of this extraordinary woman, “she said from the bottom of her Heart, ‘O my Lord! what must I do to please Thee? For I have nobody to teach me. Speak to my soul and it will hear Thee.’” At that instant she heard, as if another had spoken within her, “Forsake all p. 257 earthly things. Separate thyself from the love of the creatures. Deny thyself.” From this time the more she entered into herself the more she was inclined to abandon all. But she had not the courage necessary for the complete renunciation towards which her transcendental consciousness was pressing her. She struggled to adjust herself to the inner and the outer life, but without success. For such a character as hers, compromise was impossible. “She asked always earnestly, When shall I be perfectly thine, O my God? and she thought He still answered her, When thou shalt no longer possess anything, and shalt die to thyself. And where shall I do that, Lord? He answered, In the Desert.” At last the discord between her deeper and her superficial self became intolerable. Reinforced by the miseries of an unsympathetic home, still more by a threat of approaching marriage, the inexorable inner powers got their way. She submitted; and having disguised herself in a hermit’s dress—she was only eighteen and had no one to help or advise her—“she went out of her chamber about Four in the Morning, taking nothing but one Penny to buy Bread for that Day; and it being said to her in the going out, Where is thy Faith? In a Penny? she threw it away.... Thus she went away wholly delivered from the heavy burthen of the Cares and Good Things of this World.”37
- 37 “An Apology for Mrs. Antoinette Bourignan,” pp. 269-70. p. 257
An admirable example of the mystic’s attitude towards the soul-destroying division of interests, the natural but hopeless human struggle to make the best of both worlds, which sucks at its transcendental vitality, occurs in St. Teresa’s purgative period. In her case this state of purification, the war between the real and the superficial self, extended over a long term of years. It ran side by side with the state of Illumination, co-existing with a fully developed contemplative life; and was only brought to an end by that “Second Conversion” which at last unified her scattered interests and set her firmly and for ever on the Unitive Way. The almost virile strength of Teresa’s character, which afterwards contributed to the greatness of her achievement in the unitive state, opposed itself to the invading transcendental consciousness; disputed every inch of territory, resisted every demand made upon it by the growing spiritual self. Bit by bit it was conquered, the sphere of p. 258 her deeper life enlarged; until the moment came in which she surrendered, once for all, to her true destiny.38
- 38 St. Teresa’s mystic states are particularly difficult to classify. From one point of view these struggles might be regarded as he preliminaries of conversion. She was, however, proficient in contemplation when they occurred, and I therefore think that my arrangement is the right one. p. 258
During the years of inward stress, of penance and growing knowledge of the Infinite which she spent in the Convent of the Incarnation, and which accompanied this slow remaking of character, Teresa’s only self-indulgence—as it seems, a sufficiently innocent one—was talking to the friends who came down from Avila to the convent-parlour, and spoke to her through the grille. Her confessors, unaccustomed to the education of mystical genius, saw nothing incompatible between this practice and the pursuit of a high contemplative life. But as her transcendental consciousness, her states of orison grew stronger, Teresa felt more and more the distracting influence of these glimpses of the outer world. They were a drain upon the energy which ought to be wholly given to that new, deep, more real life which she felt stirring within her, and which could only hope to achieve its mighty destiny by complete concentration upon the business in hand. No genius can afford to dissipate his energies: the mystic genius least of all. Teresa knew that so long as she retained these personal satisfactions, her life had more than one focus; she was not whole-hearted in her surrender to the Absolute. But thougn her inward voices, her deepest instincts, urged her to give them up, for years she felt herself incapable of such a sacrifice. It was round the question of their retention or surrender that the decisive battle of her life was fought.
“The devil,” says her great Augustinian eulogist, Fray Luis de Leon, in his vivid account of these long interior struggles, “put before her those persons most sympathetic by nature; and God came, and in the midst of the conversation discovered Himself aggrieved and sorrowful. The devil delighted in the conversation and pastime, but when she turned her back on them and betook herself to prayer, God redoubled the delight and favours, as if to show her how false was the lure which charmed her at the grating, and that His sweetness was the veritable sweetness.... So that these two inclinations warred with each other in p. 259 the breast of this blessed woman, and the authors who inspired them each did his utmost to inflame her most, and the oratory blotted out what the grating wrote, and at times the grating vanquished and diminished the good fruit produced by prayer, causing agony and grief which disquieted and perplexed her soul: for though she was resolved to belong entirely to God, she knew not how to shake herself free from the world: and at times she persuaded herself that she could enjoy both, which ended mostly, as she says, in complete enjoyment of neither. For the amusements of the locutorio were embittered and turned into wormwood by the memory of the secret and sweet intimacy with God; and in the same way when she retired to be with God, and commenced to speak with Him, the affections and thoughts which she carried with her from the grating took possession of her.”39
- 39 Quoted by G. Cunninghame Graham, “Santa Teresa,” vol. i. p. 139. p. 259
Compare with these violent oscillations between the superficial and mystical consciousness—characteristic of Teresa’s strong volitional nature, which only came to rest after psychic convulsions which left no corner of its being unexplored—the symbolic act of renunciation under which Antoinette Bourignan’s “interior self” vanquished the surface intelligence and asserted its supremacy. Teresa must give up her passionate interest in human life. Antoinette, never much tempted in that direction, must give up her last penny. What society was to Teresa’s generous, energetic nature, prudence was to the temperamentally shrewd and narrow Antoinette: a distraction, a check on the development of the all-demanding transcendental genius, an unconquered relic of the “lower life.”
Many a mystic, however, has found the perfection of detachment to be consistent with a far less drastic renunciation of external things than that which these women felt to be essential to their peace. The test, as we have seen, does not lie in the nature of the things which are retained, but in the reaction which they stimulate in the self. “Absolute poverty is thine,” says Tauler, “when thou canst not remember whether anybody has ever owed thee or been indebted to thee for anything; just as all things will be forgotten by thee in the last journey of death.”40 Poverty, in this sense, may be consistent with the p. 260 habitual and automatic use of luxuries which the abstracted self never even perceives. Thus we are told that St. Bernard was reproached by his enemies with the inconsistency of preaching evangelical poverty whilst making his journeys from place to place on a magnificently caparisoned mule, which had been lent to him by the Cluniac monks. He expressed great contrition: but said that he had never noticed what it was that he rode upon.41
Sometimes, the very activity which one self has rejected as an impediment becomes for another the channel of spiritual perception. I have mentioned the case of the Curé d’Ars, who, among other inhibitions, refused to allow himself to smell a rose. Sharply opposed to this is the case of St. Francis, who preached to the flowers,42 and ordered a plot to be set aside for their cultivation when the convent garden was made, “in order that all who saw them might remember the Eternal Sweetness.”43 So, too, we are told of his spiritual daughter, St. Douceline, that “out of doors one day with her sisters, she heard a bird’s note. ‘What a lovely song!’ she said: and the song drew her straightway to God. Did they bring her a flower, its beauty had a like effect.”44 Here we are reminded of Plato. “The true order of going is to use the beauties of Earth as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty.” This, too, is the true order of Holy Poverty: the selfless use, not the selfish abuse of lovely and natural things.
To say that so difficult a counsel of perfection should sometimes have been practised in excess, is but to say that asceticism is a human, not an inhuman art. Such excesses, however, are found most often amongst those saintly types who have not exhibited true mystic intuition. This intuition, entailing as it does communion with intensest Life, gives to its possessors a sweet sanity, a delicate balance, which guards them, as a rule, from such conceptions of chastity as that of the youthful saint who shut himself in a cupboard for fear he should see his mother pass by: from obedience of the type which identifies the voice of the director with the voice of God; from detach p. 261 ment such as that exhibited by the Blessed Angela of Foligno, who, though a true mystic, viewed with murderous delight the deaths of relatives who were “impediments.”45 The detachment of the mystic is just a restoration to the liberty in which the soul was made: it is a state of joyous humility in which he cries, “Nought I am, nought I have, nought I lack.” To have arrived at this is to have escaped from external illusion: to be initiated into the purer air of that universe which knows but one rule of action—that which was laid down once for all by St. Augustine when he said, in the most memorable and misquoted of epigrams: “Love, and do what you like.”
- 45 “In that time and by God’s will there died my mother, who was a great hindrance unto me in following the way of God: my husband died likewise, and in a short time there also died all my children. And because I had commenced to follow the aforesaid Way, and had prayed God that He would rid me of them, I had great consolation of their deaths, albeit I did also feel some grief” (Beatae Angelae de Fulginio, “Visionum et Instructionum Liber,” cap. ix., English translation, p. 5). p. 261
2. Mortification
By mortification, I have said, is to be understood the positive aspect of purification: the remaking in relation to reality of the permanent elements of character. These elements, so far, have subserved the interests of the old self, worked for it in the world of sense. Now they must be adjusted to the needs of the new self and to the transcendent world in which it moves. Their focal point is the old self, the lower centre of consciousness; and the object of mortification is to kill that old self, remove that lower centre, in order that the higher centre, the “new man,” may live and breathe. As St. Teresa discovered when she tried to reconcile the claims of friendship and contemplation, one or other must go: a house divided against itself cannot stand. “Who hinders thee more,” says Thomas à Kempis, “than the unmortified affections of thy own heart? ... if we were perfectly dead unto ourselves and not entangled within our own breasts, then should we be able to taste Divine things, and to have some experience of heavenly contemplation.”46
- 46 “De Imitatione Christi,” l. i. caps. iii. and xi. p. 261
In psychological language, the process of mortification is the process of setting up “new paths of neural discharge.” That is p. 262 to say, the mystic life has got to express itself in action: and for this new paths must be cut and new habits formed—all, in spite of the new self’s enthusiasm, “against the grain.” The energy which wells up incessantly in every living being must abandon the old road of least resistance and discharge itself in a new and more difficult way. The old paths, left to themselves, must fade and at last die. When they are dead, and the new life has triumphed, Mortification is at an end. The mystics always know when this moment comes. An inner voice then warns them to lay their active penances aside.
Since the greater and stronger the mystic, the stronger and more stubborn his character tends to be, this change of life and turning of energy from the old and easy channels to the new is often a stormy matter. It is a period of actual battle between the inharmonious elements of the self, its lower and higher springs of action: of toil, fatigue, bitter suffering, and many disappointments. Nevertheless, in spite of its etymological associations, the object of mortification is not death but life: the production of health and strength, the health and strength of the human consciousness viewed sub specie aeternitatis. “In the truest death of all created things, the sweetest and most natural life is hidden.”47
- 47 Tauler, Sermon on St. Paul (“The Inner Way,” p. 114). p. 262
“This dying,” says Tauler again, “has many degrees, and so has this life. A man might die a thousand deaths in one day, and find at once a joyful life corresponding to each of them. This is as it must be: God cannot deny or refuse this to death. The stronger the death the more powerful and thorough is the corresponding life; the more intimate the death, the more inward is the life. Each life brings strength, and strengthens to a harder death. When a man dies to a scornful word, bearing it in God’s name, or to some inclination inward or outward, acting or not acting against his own will, be it in love or grief, in word or act, in going or staying; or if he denies his desires of taste or sight, or makes no excuse when wrongfully accused; or anything else whatever it may be to which he has not yet died, it is harder at first to one who is unaccustomed to it and unmortified than to him who is mortified.... A great life makes reply to him who dies in earnest even in the least things, a life which strengthens him immediately to die a greater death; a p. 263 death so long and strong, that it seems to him hereafter more joyful, good and pleasant to die than to live, for he finds life in death and light shining in darkness.”48
- 48 Tauler, Second Sermon for Easter Day. (This is not included in either of the English collections.) p. 263
No more than detachment, then, is mortification an end in itself. It is a means to the production of a definite kind of efficiency, a definite kind of vitality: like its physical parallel, the exercises of the gymnasium. Once this efficiency, this vitality, is produced, this training accomplished, mortification ends: often with startling abruptness. After a martyrdom which lasted sixteen years, says Suso—speaking as usual in the third person—of his own experience, “On a certain Whitsun Day a heavenly messenger appeared to him, and ordered him in God’s name to continue it no more. He at once ceased, and threw all the instruments of his sufferings [irons, nails, hair-shirt, &c.] into a river.”49 From this time onward, austerities of this sort had no part in Suso’s life.
- 49 Suso, Leben, cap. xvii. p. 263
The unknown French ecstatic who wrote, and the English contemplative who translated, “The Mirror of Simple Souls,”50 have between them described and explained in bold and accurate language the conditions under which the soul is enabled to abandon that “hard service of the virtues” which has absorbed it during the Purgative Way. The statement of the “French Book” is direct and uncompromising: well calculated to startle timid piety. “Virtues, I take leave of you for evermore!” exclaims the Soul. “Now shall my heart be more free and more in peace than it has been. Forsooth, I wot well your service is too travaillous. Some time I laid my heart in you without any dissevering: ye wot well this. I was in all things to you obedient. O then I was your servant: but now I am delivered out of your thraldom.”
- 50 B.M. Add. 37790. p. 263
To this astounding utterance the English translator has added a singularly illuminating gloss. “I am stirred here,” he says, “to say more of the matter, as thus: First when a soul gives her to perfection, she labours busily day and night to get virtues by counsel of reason, and strives with vices at every thought, at every word and deed that she perceives comes of them, and busily ensearches vices, them to destroy. Thus the p. 264 virtues be mistresses, and every virtue makes her to war with its contrary, the which be vices. Many sharp pains and bitterness of conscience feels the soul in this war.... But so long one may bite on the bitter bark of the nut, that at last he shall come to the sweet kernel: right so, shortly to understand, it fares by these souls that be come to peace. They have so long striven with vices and wrought by virtues that they be come to the nut’s kernel, that is to say to the love of God, which is sweetness. And when the soul has deeply tasted this love ... then the soul is wondrous light and gladsome. Then is she mistress and lady over the virtues, for she has them all within herself.... And then this soul takes leave of virtues, as of the thraldom and painful travail of them that she had before. And now she is lady and sovereign and they be subjects.”
Jacopone da Todi speaks to the same effect:—
“La guerra e terminata
de le virtu battaglia
de la mente travaglia
cosa nulla contende.”51
- 51 “The war is at an end: in the battle of virtues, in travail of mind, there is no more striving” (Lauda xci.). p. 264
So too in the case of St. Catherine of Genoa, after a penitential period of four years, during which she was haunted by a constant sense of sin, and occupied by incessant mortifications, “all thought of such mortifications was in an instant taken from her mind: in such a manner that, had she even wished to continue such mortifications, she would have been unable to do so ... the sight of her sins was now taken from her mind, so that henceforth she did not catch a glimpse of them: it was as though they had all been cast into the depths of the sea.” In other words, the new and higher centre of consciousness, finally established, asserted itself and annihilated the old. “La guerra e terminata,” all the energy of a strong nature flows freely in the new channels, and mortification ceases, mechanically, to be possible to the now unified or “regenerated” self.
Mortification takes its name from the reiterated statement of all ascetic writers that the senses, or body of desire, with the cravings which are excited by different aspects of the pheno52 p. 265 menal world, must be mortified or killed; which is, of course, but the statement of psychological necessities from another point of view. All those self-regarding instincts—so ingrained that they have become automatic—which impel the self to choose the more comfortable part, are seen by the awakened intuition of the embryo mystic as gross infringements of the law of love. “This then must be the travail and labour of a man, to draw his heart and mind from the fleshly love and liking of all earthly creatures, from vain thoughts and from fleshly imaginations and from the love and vicious feeling of himself, so that the soul shall or may find or take no rest in any fleshly thoughts or worldly affections.”53 The rule of Poverty must be applied to all the circumstances of normal consciousness as well as to the tastes and possessions of the self. Under this tonic influence real life will thrive, unreal life will wither and die.
This mortifying process is rendered necessary, not because the legitimate exercise of the senses is opposed to Divine Reality, but because those senses have usurped a place beyond their station; become the focus of energy, steadily drained the vitality of the self. “The dogs have taken the children’s meat.” The senses have grown stronger than their masters, monopolized the field of perception, dominated an organism which was made for greater activities, and built up those barriers of individuality which must one and all be done away before the subject can fulfil its destiny and pass over into the boundless life of the One. It is thanks to this wrong distribution of energy, this sedulous feeding of the cuckoo in the nest, that “in order to approach the Absolute, mystics must withdraw from everything, even themselves.”54 “It is therefore supreme ignorance for any one to think that he can ever attain to the high estate of union with God before he casts away from him the desire of natural things,” says St. John of the Cross,55 “and of supernatural also so far as it concerns self-love, because the distance between them and that which takes place in the state of pure transformation in God is the very greatest.” Again, “until the desires be lulled to sleep by the mortification of sensuality, and sensuality p. 266 itself be mortified in them, so that it shall be contrary to the spirit no more, the soul cannot go forth in perfect liberty to the fruition of the union with the Beloved.”56
The death of selfhood in its narrow obvious sense is, then, the primary object of mortification. All the twisted elements of character which minister to the existence of this unreal yet complex creature are to be pruned away. Then as with the trees of the forest, so with the spirit of man, strong new branches will spring into being, grow towards air and light. “I live, yet not I” is to be the confession of the mystic who has endured this “bodily death.” The self-that-is-to-be will live upon a plane where her own prejudices and preferences are so uninteresting as to be imperceptible. She must be weaned from these nursery toys: and weaning is a disagreeable process. The mystic, however, undertakes it as a rule without reluctance: pushed by his vivid consciousness of imperfection, his intuition of a more perfect state necessary to the fulfilment of his love. Often his entrance upon the torments of the Purgative Way, his taking up of the spiritual or material instruments of mortification, resembles in ardour and abruptness that “heroic plunge into Purgatory” of the newly dead when it perceives itself in the light of Love Divine, which is described in the Treatise of St. Catherine of Genoa as its nearest equivalent. “As she, plunged in the divine furnace of purifying love, was united to the Object of her love, and satisfied with all he wrought in her, so she understood it to be with the souls in Purgatory.”57
- 57 S. Caterina di Genova, “Trattato di Purgatorio,” cap. i. p. 266
This “divine furnace of purifying love” demands from the ardent soul, not only a complete self-surrender and voluntary turning from all impurity, a humility of the most far-reaching kind: but also a deliberate active suffering, a self-discipline in dreadful tasks. As gold in the refiner’s fire, so “burning of love into a soul truly taken all vices purgeth.” Where detachment may be a counsel of prudence, a practical result of seeing the true values of things, the pain of mortification is seized as a splendid opportunity, a love token, timidly offered by the awakened spirit to that all-demanding Lover from Whom St. Catherine of Siena heard the terrible words “I, Fire, the Acceptor of sacrifices, ravishing away from them their p. 267 darkness, give the light.”58 “Suffering is the ancient law of love,” says the Eternal Wisdom to Suso, “there is no quest without pain, there is no lover who is not also a martyr. Hence it is inevitable that he who would love so high a thing as Wisdom should sometimes suffer hindrances and griefs.”59
The mystics have a profound conviction that Creation, Becoming, Transcendence, is a painful process at the best. Those amongst them who are Christians point to the Passion of Christ as a proof that the cosmic journey to perfection, the path of the Eternal Wisdom, follows of necessity the Way of the Cross. That old dreadful law of the inner life, which sounds so fantastic and yet is so bitterly true—“No progress without pain”—asserts itself. It declares that birth pangs must be endured in the spiritual as well as in the material world: that adequate training must always hurt the athlete. Hence it is that the mystics’ quest of the Absolute drives them to an eager and heroic union with the reality of suffering, as well as with the reality of joy.60
- 60 “This truth, of which she was the living example,” says Huysmans of St. Lydwine, “has been and will be true for every period. Since the death of Lydwine, there is not a saint who has not confirmed it. Hear them formulate their desires. Always to suffer, and to die! cries St. Teresa; always to suffer, yet not to die, corrects St. Magdalena dei Pazzi; yet more, oh Lord, yet more! exclaims St. Francis Xavier, dying in anguish on the coast of China; I wish to be broken with suffering in order that I may prove my love to God, declares a seventeenth century Carmelite, the Ven. Mary of the Trinity. The desire for suffering is itself an agony, adds a great servant of God of our own day, Mother Mary Du Bourg; and she confided to her daughters in religion that ‘if they sold pain in the market she would hurry to buy it there’” (J. K. Huysmans, “Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam,” 3rd edition, p. 225). p. 267
This divine necessity of pain, this necessary sharing in the travail of a World of Becoming, is beautifully described by Tauler in one of those “internal conversations” between the contemplative soul and its God, which abound in the works of the mystics and are familiar to all readers of “The Imitation of Christ.” “A man once thought,” says Tauler, “that God drew some men even by pleasant paths, while others were drawn by the path of pain. Our Lord answered him thus, ‘What think ye can be pleasanter or nobler than to be made most like unto Me? that is by suffering. Mark, to whom was ever offered such a troubled life as to Me? And in whom can I better work in accordance with My true nobility than in those who are most p. 268 like Me? They are the men who suffer.... Learn that My divine nature never worked so nobly in human nature as by suffering; and because suffering is so efficacious, it is sent out of great love. I understand the weakness of human nature at all times, and out of love and righteousness I lay no heavier load on man than he can bear. The crown must be firmly pressed down that is to bud and blossom in the Eternal Presence of My Heavenly Father. He who desires to be wholly immersed in the fathomless sea of My Godhead must also be deeply immersed in the deep sea of bitter sorrow. I am exalted far above all things, and work supernatural and wonderful works in Myself: the deeper and more supernaturally a man crushes himself beneath all things, the more supernaturally will he be drawn far above all things.’”61
- 61 Tauler, Sermon on St. Paul (“The Inner Way,” p. 114). p. 268
Pain, therefore, the mystics often court: sometimes in the crudely physical form which Suso describes so vividly and horribly in the sixteenth chapter of his Life, more frequently in those refinements of torture which a sensitive spirit can extract from loneliness, injustice, misunderstanding—above all, from deliberate contact with the repulsive accidents of life.
It would seem from a collation of the evidence that the typical mystical temperament is by nature a highly fastidious one. Its passionate apprehension of spiritual beauty, its intuitive perception of divine harmony, is counterbalanced by an instinctive loathing of ugliness, a shrinking from the disharmonies of squalor and disease. Often its ideal of refinement is far beyond the contemporary standards of decency: a circumstance which is alone enough to provide ample opportunity of wretchedness. This extreme sensitiveness, which appears to form part of the normal psycho-physical make-up of the mystic, as it often does of the equally highly-strung artistic type, is one of the first things to be seized upon by the awakened self as a disciplinary instrument. Then humility’s axiom, “Naught is too low for love” is forced to bear the less lovely gloss, “Naught must be too disgusting.”
Two reasons at once appear for this. One is the innate contempt for phenomena, nasty as well as nice—the longing to be free from all the fetters of sense—which goes with the p. 269 passion for invisible things. Those to whom the attractions of earth are only illusion, are inconsistent if they attribute a greater reality to the revolting and squalid incidents of life. St. Francis did but carry his own principles to their logical conclusion, when he insisted that the vermin were as much his brothers as the birds. Real detachment means the death of preferences of all kinds: even of those which seem to other men the very proofs of virtue and fine taste.
The second reason is a nobler one. It is bound up with that principle of self-surrender which is the mainspring of the mystic life. To the contemplative mind, which is keenly conscious of unity in multiplicity—of God in the world—all disinterested service is service of the Absolute which he loves: and the harder it is, the more opposed to his self-regarding and æsthetic instincts, the more nearly it approaches his ideal. The point to which he aspires—though he does not always know it—is that in which all disharmony, all appearance of vileness, is resolved in the concrete reality which he calls the Love of God. Then, he feels dimly, everything will be seen under the aspect of a cosmic and charitable beauty; exhibiting through the woof of corruption the web of eternal life.
It is told of St. Francis of Assisi, in whom the love of lovely things was always paramount, how he forced himself to visit the lepers whose sight and smell disgusted him: how he served them and even kissed them.62 “Then as he departed, in very truth that which had aforetime been bitter unto him, to wit, the sight and touch of lepers, now changed into sweetness. For, as he confessed, the sight of lepers had been so grievous unto him that he had been minded to avoid not only seeing them, but even going nigh their dwelling. And if at any time he chanced to pass their abodes, or to see them, albeit he were moved by compassion to do them an alms through another person, yet alway would he turn aside his face, stopping his nostrils with his hand. But through the grace of God he became so intimate a friend of the lepers that, even as he recorded in his will, he did sojourn with them and did humbly serve them.”
- 62 Thomas of Celano, Legenda Prima, cap. vii.; 3 Soc. cap. iv. p. 269
Also, after his great renunciation of all property, he, once a prosperous young man who had been “dainty in his father’s p. 270 home,” accustomed himself to take a bowl and beg scraps of food from door to door: and here too, as in the case of the lepers, that which at first seemed revolting became to him sweet. “And when he would have eaten that medley of various meats,” says the legend, “at first he shrank back, for that he had never been used willingly even to see, much less to eat, such scraps. At length, conquering himself, he began to eat; and it seemed to him that in eating no rich syrup had he ever tasted aught so delightsome.”63
- 63 3 Soc. cap. vii. p. 270
The object, then, of this self-discipline is, like the object of all purgation, freedom: freedom from the fetters of the senses, the “remora of desire,” from the results of environment and worldly education, from pride and prejudice, preferences and distaste: from selfhood in every form. Its effect is a sharp reaction to the joy of self-conquest. The very act that had once caused in the enchained self a movement of loathing becomes not merely indifferent, but an occasion of happiness. So Margery Kempe “had great mourning and sorrowing if she might not kiss a leper when she met them in the way for the love of our Lord, which was all contrary to her disposition in the years of her youth and prosperity, for then she abhorred them most.”64
- 64 “A Short Treatise of Contemplation taken out of the boke of Margery Kempe ancresse of Lynne.” London, 1521. This has been reprinted by Mr. E. Gardner in “The Cell of Self-Knowledge,” 1910, p. 49. p. 270
I will spare the sensitive reader a detailed account of the loathsome ordeals by which St. Catherine of Genoa and Madame Guyon strove to cure themselves of squeamishness65 and acquire this liberty of spirit. They, like St. Francis, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and countless other seekers for the Real, sought out and served with humility and love the sick and the unclean: associated themselves at all costs with life in its meanest forms: compelled themselves to contact with the most revolting substances: and tried to suppress the surface-consciousness by the traditional ascetic expedient of deliberately opposing all—even its most natural and harmless—inclinations. “In the first four years after she received the sweet wound from her Lord,” says the Life of Catherine of Genoa, she “made great p. 271 penances: so that all her senses were mortified. And first, so soon as she perceived that her nature desired anything, at once she deprived it thereof, and did so that it should receive all those things that it abhorred. She wore harsh hair, ate no meat nor any other thing that she liked; ate no fruit neither fresh nor dried ... and she lived greatly submitted to all persons, and always sought to do all those things which were contrary to her own will; in such a way that she was always inclined to do more promptly the will of others than her own.” ... “And while she worked such and so many mortifications of all her senses it was several times asked of her ‘Why do you do this?’ And she answered, ‘I do not know, but I feel myself drawn inwardly to do this ... and I think it is God’s will.’”
- 65 The curious are referred to the original authorities. For St. Catherine, chapter viii. of the Vita e Dottrina: for Madame Guyon, Vie, pt. i. ch. x. p. 270
St. Ignatius Loyola, in the world a highly bred Spanish gentleman of refined personal habits, found in those habits an excellent opportunity of mortification. “As he was somewhat nice about the arrangement of his hair, as was the fashion of those days and became him not ill, he allowed it to grow naturally, and neither combed it nor trimmed it nor wore any head covering by day or night. For the same reason he did not pare his finger or toe nails; for on these points he had been fastidious to an extreme.”66
- 66 Testament, cap ii. (Rix’s translation). p. 271
Madame Guyon, a delicate girl of the leisured class, accustomed to the ordinary comforts of her station, seemed impelled to the most primitive and crude forms of mortification in her efforts towards the acquirement of “indifference.” But, owing no doubt to the peculiar psychic constitution which afterwards showed itself in the forms of automatism and clairvoyance, her intense concentration upon the transcendental life produced a partial anæsthesia. “Although I had a very delicate body, the instruments of penitence tore my flesh without, as it seemed to me, causing pain. I wore girdles of hair and of sharp iron, I often held wormwood in my mouth.” “If I walked, I put stones in my shoes. These things, my God, Thou didst first inspire me to do, in order that I might be deprived even of the most innocent satisfactions.”67
- 67 Vie, pt. i. cap. x. p. 271
The developing mystical consciousness made ever sharper and sharper war upon Madame Guyon’s delicate and fastidious 68 p. 272 surface-personality. The impulses from below the threshold, so utterly at variance with her own instincts, imposed themselves upon her with an authority which seemed to her to possess all the marks of divine commands. “Thou wert continually with me, Oh my God! and Thou wert so severe a taskmaster that Thou wouldst not let me pass over the smallest things. When I thought of doing anything, Thou didst stop me abruptly and madest me to do without thinking all Thy desires, and all that was most repugnant to my senses, until they were become so docile that they had no longer either desire or distaste for anything.... I did nothing of myself, but I let myself be led by my King, who ruled me absolutely in all things.”69
The procuring of this ascendancy of the “interior man,” the transcendental consciousness, over the distracted and normal personality which deals with the manifold illusions of daily life, is, as we have seen, the main business of Purgation. It is, then, almost impossible that any mystic—whatever his religion, character or race—should escape its battles: for none at the beginning of their career are in a position to dispense with its good offices. Neoplatonists and Mahommedans, no less than the Christian ascetics, are acquainted with the Purgative Way. They all know the primal secret of the Spiritual Alchemists, that you must tame the Green Lion before you give him wings. Thus in ’Attar’s allegory of the Valleys, the valley of self-stripping and renunciation comes first.70 So too Al Ghazzali, the Persian contemplative of whom I have already spoken, says of the period immediately following his acceptance of the principles of Sūfi-ism and consequent renunciation of property, “I went to Syria, where I remained more than two years, without any other object than that of living in seclusion and solitude, conquering my desires, struggling with my passions, striving to purify my soul, to perfect my character, and to prepare my heart to meditate upon God.” At the end of this period of pure purgation circumstances forced him to return to the world, much to his regret, since he “had not yet attained to the perfect ecstatic state, unless it were in one or two isolated moments.”71
Such sporadic gleams of ecstatic vision, distributed through the later stages of purification, seem to be normal features of p. 273 mystical development. Increasing control of the lower centres, of the surface intelligence and its scattered desires, permits the emergence of the transcendental perceptions. We have seen that Fox in his early stages displayed just such an alternation between the light and shade of the mystic way.72 So too did that least ascetic of visionaries, Jacob Boehme. “Finding within myself a powerful contrarium, namely the desires that belong to the flesh and blood,” he says, “I began to fight a hard battle against my corrupted nature, and with the aid of God I made up my mind to overcome the inherited evil will, to break it, and to enter wholly into the Love of God.... This, however, was not possible for me to accomplish, but I stood firmly by my earnest resolution, and fought a hard battle with myself. Now while I was wrestling and battling, being aided by God, a wonderful light arose within my soul. It was a light entirely foreign to my unruly nature, but in it I recognized the true nature of God and man, and the relation existing between them, a thing which heretofore I had never understood, and for which I would never have sought.”73
In these words Boehme bridges the gap between Purgation and Illumination: showing these two states or ways as co-existing and complementary one to another; forming the light and dark sides of a developing mystic consciousness. As a fact, they do often exist side by side in the individual experience:74 and any treatment which exhibits them as sharply and completely separated may be convenient for purposes of study, but becomes at best diagrammatic if considered as a representation of the mystic life. The mystical consciousness, as we have seen, belongs—from the psychological point of view—to that mobile or “unstable” type in which the artistic temperament also finds a place. It sways easily between the extremes of pleasure and pain in its gropings after transcendental reality. It often attains for a moment to heights in which it is not able to rest: is often flung from some rapturous vision of the Perfect to the deeps of contrition and despair.
- 74 Compare the case of St. Teresa already cited, supra, p. 257. p. 273
The mystics have a vivid metaphor by which to describe p. 274 that alternation between the onset and the absence of the joyous transcendental consciousness which forms as it were the characteristic intermediate stage between the bitter struggles of pure Purgation, and the peace and splendour of the Illuminative Life. They call it Ludus Amoris, the “Game of Love” which God plays with the desirous soul. It is the “game of chess,” says St. Teresa, “in which game Humility is the Queen without whom none can checkmate the Divine King.”75 “Here,” says Martensen, “God plays a blest game with the soul.”76 The “Game of Love” belongs emphatically to that state of imperfection, of struggle, oscillation and unrest which precedes the first unification of the self. Once this event has taken place, the new level of reality has been attained, it is known no more. Thus St. Catherine of Siena, that inspired psychologist, was told in ecstasy, “With the souls who have arrived at perfection, I play no more the Game of Love, which consists in leaving and returning again to the soul; though thou must understand that it is not, properly speaking, I, the immovable GOD, Who thus elude them, but rather the sentiment that My charity gives them of Me.”77 In other terms, it is the imperfectly developed spiritual perception which becomes tired and fails, throwing the self back into the darkness and aridity whence it has emerged.
So with Madame Guyon, periods of “dryness”—the orthodox name for such spiritual fatigue—recurred at intervals during the whole of the Illuminated Life. So we are told of Rulman Merswin78 that after the period of harsh physical mortification which succeeded his conversion came a year of “delirious joy alternating with the most bitter physical and moral sufferings.” It is, he says, “the Game of Love which the Lord plays with His poor sinful creature.” Memories of all his old sins still drove him to exaggerated penances: morbid temptations “made me so ill that I feared I should lose my reason.” These psychic storms reacted upon the physical organism. He had a paralytic seizure, lost the use of his lower limbs, and believed himself to be at the point of death. When he was at his p. 275 worst, however, and all hope seemed at an end, an inward voice told him to rise from his bed. He obeyed and found himself cured. Ecstasies were frequent during the whole of this period. In these moments of exaltation he felt his mind to be irradiated by a new light, so that he knew, intuitively, the direction which his life was bound to take, and recognized the inevitable and salutary nature of his trials. “God showed Himself by turns harsh and gentle: to each access of misery succeeded the rapture of supernatural grace.” In this intermittent style, torn by these constant fluctuations, did Merswin, in whom the psychic instability of the artistic and mystic types is present in excess, pass through the purgative and illuminated states. They appear to have coexisted in his consciousness, first one and then the other emerging and taking control. Hence he did not attain the peaceful condition which is characteristic of full illumination and normally closes the “First Mystic Life.” He passed direct from these violent alternations of mystical pleasure and mystical pain to the state which he calls “the school of suffering love.” This, as we shall see when we come to its consideration, is strictly analogous to that which other mystics have called the “Dark Night of the Soul” and opens the “Second Mystic Life” or Unitive Way.
- 78 Jundt, “Rulman Merswin,” pp. 19 and 20. p. 274
Such prolonged coexistence of pain and pleasure states in the developing soul, such delay in the attainment of equilibrium, is not infrequent, and must be taken into account in all attempts towards analysis of the mystic type. Though it is convenient for the purposes of study to practise a certain dissection, and treat as separate matters which are, in the living subject, hopelessly intertwined, we should constantly remind ourselves that such a proceeding is artificial. The struggle of the self to disentangle itself from illusion and attain the Absolute is a life-struggle. Hence, it will and must exhibit in every case something of the freedom and originality of life: will, as a process, obey artistic rather than scientific laws. It will sway now to the light and now to the shade of experience: its oscillations will sometimes be great, sometimes small. Mood and environment, inspiration and information, will all play their part.
There are in this struggle three factors.
(1) The unchanging light of Eternal Reality: that Pure Being “which ever shines and nought shall ever dim.”
(2) The web of illusion, here thick, there thin, which hems in, confuses, and allures the sentient self.
(3) That self, always changing, moving, struggling—always, in fact, becoming—alive in every fibre, related at once to the unreal and to the real.
In the ever-shifting relations between these three factors, the consequent energy engendered, the work done, we may find a cause of the innumerable forms of stress and travail which are called in their objective form the Purgative Way. One only of the three is constant: the Absolute to which the soul aspires. Though all else may fluctuate, that goal is changeless. That Beauty so old and so new, “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning,” which is the One of Plotinus, the All of Eckhart and St. John of the Cross, the Eternal Wisdom of Suso, the Unplumbed Abyss of Ruysbroeck, the Pure Love of St. Catherine of Genoa—awaits yesterday, to-day, and for ever the opening of Its creature’s eyes.
In the moment of conversion those eyes were opened for an instant: obtained, as it were, a dazzling and unforgettable glimpse of the Uncreated Light. They must learn to stay open: to look steadfastly into the eyes of Love: so that, in the beautiful imagery of the mystics, the “faithful servant” may become the “secret friend.”79 Then it is, says Boehme, that “the divine glimpse and beam of joy ariseth in the soul, being a new eye, in which the dark, fiery soul conceiveth the Ens and Essence of the divine light.”80 So hard an art is not to be acquired abruptly. On the contrary, it is more in accordance with all that we know of the conditions of growth that its perfect development in the individual should be preceded by a partial acquirement; by bewildering moments of lucidity, by splendid glimpses, whose brevity is due to the weakness of the new and still unpractised “eye which looks upon Eternity,” the yet undisciplined strength of the “eye which looks upon Time.” Of such a nature is that play of light and dark, of exaltation and contrition, which bridges the gap p. 277 between the Purgative and the Illuminative states. Each by turn takes the field and ousts the other; for “these two eyes of the soul of man cannot both perform their work at once.”81
To use another and more domestic metaphor, that Divine Child which was, in the hour of the mystic conversion, born in the spark of the soul, must learn like other children to walk alone. Each effort to stand brings with it, first a glorious sense of growth and then a fall: each fall is but the occasion of another struggle towards obtaining the difficult balance which comes when infancy is past. There are many eager trials, many hopes, many disappointments. At last, as it seems suddenly, the moment comes: tottering is over, the muscles have learnt their lesson, they adjust themselves automatically, and the new self suddenly perceives itself—it knows not how—as standing upright and secure. That is the moment which marks the real boundary between the purgative and the illuminative states.
The process of this passage of the “new” or spiritual man from his awakening to the illuminated life, has been set out by Jacob Boehme in language which is at once poetic and precise. “When Christ the Corner-Stone [i.e., the divine principle latent in man] stirreth himself in the extinguished Image of Man in his hearty Conversion and Repentance,” he says, “then Virgin Sophia appeareth in the stirring of the Spirit of Christ in the extinguished Image, in her Virgin’s attire before the Soul; at which the Soul is so amazed and astonished in its Uncleanness that all its Sins immediately awake in it, and it trembleth before her; for then the judgment passeth upon the Sins of the Soul, so that it even goeth back in its unworthiness, being ashamed in the Presence of its fair Love, and entereth into itself, feeling and acknowledging itself utterly unworthy to receive such a Jewel. This is understood by those who are of our tribe and have tasted of this heavenly Gift, and by none else. But the noble Sophia draweth near in the Essence of the Soul, and kisseth it in friendly Manner, and tinctureth its dark Fire with her Rays of Love, and shineth through it with her bright and powerful Influence. Penetrated with the strong Sense and Feeling of which, the Soul skippeth in its Body for great Joy, and in the strength of this Virgin Love exulteth, p. 278 and praiseth the great God for his blest Gift of Grace. I will set down here a short description how it is when the Bride thus embraceth the Bridegroom, for the consideration of the Reader, who perhaps hath not yet been in this wedding chamber. It may be he will be desirous to follow us, and to enter into the Inner Choir, where the Soul joineth hands and danceth with Sophia, or the Divine Wisdom.”82
- 82 Jacob Boehme, “The Way to Christ,” pt. i. p. 23 (vol. iv. of the complete English translation of Boehme’s works). p. 278