THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF 
MYSTICISM 



BY 

EDWARD INGRAM WATKIN 

AUTHOR OF 
"SOME THOUGHTS ON CATHOLIC APOLOGETICS" 



COLL, CHR1STI 
BIB, MAJ, 
TOHONTQH 



LONDON 

GRANT RICHARDS LTD. 

ST MARTIN S STREET 
MDCCCCXX 




PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED 
EDINBURGH 



TO 
MY MOTHER 



O Lord Almighty, my spirit has fainted within me because it has 
forgotten to feed upon Thee. I knew Thee not, O my Lord, when I 
went after vanity. Who can free himself from base and mean ways, 
if Thou, O my God, wilt not lift him up to Thee in pure love ? Thou 
wilt not take away from me, my God, what Thou hast once given me in 
Thine only begotten Son Jesus Christ, in Whom Thou hast given me 
all I desire. I will therefore rejoice, Thou wilt not tarry if I wait for 
Thee. The heavens are mine, the earth is mine, and the nations are 
mine : mine are the just, and the sinners are mine : mine are the 
angels and the Mother of God ; all things are mine, God Himself is 
mine and for me because Christ is mine and all for me. What dost 
thou then ask for, what dost thou seek for, O my soul ? All is thine, 
all is for thee ; do not take less, nor rest with the crumbs that fall from 
the table of Thy Father. Go forth and exult in thy glory, hide thyself 
in it, and rejoice, and thou shalt obtain all the desires of thy heart. 
my love, all for Thee, nothing for me : nothing for Thee, everything 
for me. 

ST JOHN OF THE CROSS. 
(Trs. David Lewis.) 

From the ll Prayer of an Enamoured Soul 
and Aspiration to God." 



PREFACE 

AT a time when so many volumes issue from the Press on the 
subject of mysticism, Western or Oriental, Christian or non- 
Christian, Universal or the mysticism of an individual or School, 
it will be well to indicate the aspect under which mysticism is 
viewed in this Work. Many modern writers confine their treat 
ment of mysticism to its psychological aspect, for they regard 
mystical experience as a wholly subjective state, devoid of objec 
tive validity or intellectual significance. For example, Professor 
Hoffding views this experience as pure feeling whose epistemo- 
logical interpretation is derived ab extra, and Miss Evelyn Under- 
hill, without adopting so extreme a position, emphasises the 
volitional and sentient aspects of mystical experience at the 
expense of the cognitive. To me, however, it is as impossible to 
divorce cognition from experience as it would be impossible with 
Mr Bertrand Russell to banish value from ontology. It is true 
that the categories of discursive reason are inadequate to render 
the knowledge content of mystical experience, as indeed they are 
inadequate to render the knowledge content of any experience not 
given immediately by themselves. Nevertheless they can render 
something of the truth apprehended by the mystic. Otherwise 
we should possess no mystical literature. After all, the mystics 
have not been dumb, though knowing well that anything they can 
tell us falls infinitely short of their experience. All other forms of 
experience are employed as data for the construction of philo 
sophies necessarily stated in terms of discursive reason. The 
highest form of human experience, that of the mystic, must there 
fore provide most valuable data to metaphysics. Historically 
the most satisfactory metaphysic has employed mystical data. I 
have therefore endeavoured in this book to state the metaphysic 
implicit in mystical experience, a philosophy of mysticism. This 
philosophy is the body of truth about the nature of ultimate reality 
and of our relationship to it to be derived from the content of 
mystical experience. 

This metaphysic of mysticism I find to consist in a doctrine of 
ultimate reality, of God, as the Unlimited, and of the consequent 
ii 



12 PREFACE 

relationship between man s limited soul and the Unlimited. Thus 
the philosophy or theology, call it which you will, of mysticism is 
a philosophy of the Unlimited. In my first chapter I vindicate 
the epistemological and transubjective validity of mystical 
experience. I then discuss the nature of its Object as given 
immediately or by implication in this experience. I proceed to 
tieat of the general character of the mystic way, to determine the 
principles which constitute and condition the via mystica. After 
this I describe its stages and discuss their character, causes and 
value. Throughout I have followed as my guide St John of the 
Cross, By general consent he is among the very greatest mystics 
for actual attainment, and in the intellectual exposition of his 
experience he is, I believe, unrivalled for penetration, clarity and 
harmony. Many mystics have been too apt to describe their 
experience in a confused and disordered manner. Magnificent 
passages abound, but there is a lack of coherence and methodical 
exposition. With the Spanish School of mysticism this defect of 
method was, for the first time, largely overcome. In the German 
School, and especially in Eckhart, there is indeed a metaphysic. 
But the Spaniards are the first to provide a methodical description 
and arrangement of the forms and stages of mystical experience 
based on accurate psychological observation and distinction. 
Naturally this scientific treatment is imperfect. Human language 
can never be free from ambiguity and obscurity, when it describes 
an experience so transcendent of the images and concepts of our 
natural life and knowledge. But it is here attempted for the 
first time, and with no small degree of success. After this period 
there is indeed an exaggeration in the opposite direction to the old 
disorder, -an over-systematisation of mystical states and stages of 
union beyond the possibility of real distinction by concepts and 
conceptual terminology. The Spaniards, whose supreme repre 
sentative is St John of the Cross, keep the golden mean between 
these two extreme methods of mystical exposition, lack of system 
and unreal schematisation. Where St John is silent, his silence is 
supplied by Saint Teresa and by another Spanish writer, as yet 
hardly known, a Carmelite nun, Mother Cecilia. In my opinion 
her work is of an extraordinary value, both for her attainment and 
for her exposition. Lest it be objected that the doctrine of these 
mystics is not derived from their experience, but from the dog 
matic teaching of their Church, I have shown in a final chapter 
that Richard Jefferies, despite his intellectual atheism, bears 



PREFACE 13 

witness as a mystic in the same sense. Nevertheless, though I am 
convinced, and hope in this Book to have proved, that there is a 
philosophy or theology derivable from the data of mystical experi 
ence, this theology is too exceptional in its attainment, too obscure 
in its mode and too incomplete in its nature to suffice by itself for 
the religious need of mankind. It requires to be supplemented 
by a metaphysic of natural experience and of discursive reasoning. 
Both these require the further supplement of a Divine revelation. 
As a Catholic I believe that this revelation is given to us in the 
de fide teaching of the Catholic Church, and that this revealed 
doctrine, though it has neither caused nor conditioned the essential 
deliverance of mystical experience, has confirmed and supple 
mented its utterance. Catholic theology has also interpreted 
mystical experience by guarding against false interpretations 
derived from other external sources, and by providing the mystic 
with an accurate vehicle of expression, which he recognises as 
faithful to his experience, and to which, therefore, he in turn lends 
the sanction of his vision. 

For lack of this traditional medium of expression non-Catholic 
mystics have often been driven to speak in idioms peculiar to 
themselves and difficult to interpret. Bdhme was compelled to 
adopt the terminology of alchemy, which has involved his doctrine 
in a very considerable and quite unnecessary obscurity. Blake, 
by employing a language altogether his own, has rendered his 
message well-nigh unintelligible. Moreover, Catholic doctrine 
has shown the application of the data of mystical experience in 
wider spheres than that experience could of itself attain. Thus 
both theologies are confirmed by their mutual harmony. 

My quotations from St John of the Cross are taken from Lewis s 
translation corrected from the Edicion Critica, in which, for the 
first time, we possess the accurate text of the Saint. Those from 
Mother Cecilia are of my own translation from the Spanish. My 
obligations to mystical writers, to theologians, philosophers and 
men of letters are, I think, acknowledged in the course of the 
Book. I will only mention here the name of Baron Von Hiigel, to 
whom, though I do not accept all his positions, my debt is of 
peculiar magnitude. But I cannot leave unmentioned the name 
of a friend, to whom I owe most valuable and most fruitful sug 
gestions. One, indeed, of these has worked itself out in my mind 
among the idees directrices of this Book. I refer to Mr H. C. 
Dawson. In a previous work I had occasion to acknowledge my 



14 PREFACE 

great intellectual debt to Mr Dawson. I am very glad of this 
opportunity to repeat my acknowledgement. 

A final word of personal explanation. I am not a mystic, only 
a mystical philosopher. By temperament I am a book-and- 
garden Epicurean. But the stern truth of the Carmelite mystic 
has, almost against my will, convinced my understanding. For 
truth is determined neither by temperament nor by desire, but by 
facts. Nevertheless, this work is a theoretical exposition. It is 
possible to be a mystical philosopher in an arm-chair, to be a 
mystic only on a cross. Certainly every Christian not wholly self- 
alienated from supernatural union with God is a potential mystic. 
For mysticism is the blossoming of Christianity, 1 the epiphany of 
supernatural life. But this potency cannot be actualised, this 
epiphany cannot come to pass save through the passion and death 
of the lower, earthy, MERELY natural life. Thus the way of Divine 
union, of which the mystical way is but an advanced stage, is 
necessarily a way of the cross. A soul can leave that way or halt 
at its beginning. By study of the mystics I have learned of the 
beauty of this divine way to God, but I have learned also of its 
pain. The mystic, wearied with toil and scorched with heat, is 
climbing Mount Nebo with Moses, to die with him on the summit 
of vision. I linger in a comfortable hotel at Sittim, with a magnifi 
cent view of the Hills of Moab and a shady corner of garden under 
the palms. There I sit in sight of the Holy mountain, its steep 
ascent of crags, its summit red in the rays of the sun. From the 
Mountain of God I cannot turn away my eyes. But I dare not 
leave the garden. Yonder peak every soul must climb to see God. 
For this mountain is also the mount of purgatory. The mystic 
makes the ascent in this life. Blessed is he. He and he alone 
sees the vision. If I did not know that this Book would never 
have been written. But the price of the vision is mortal pain. 
As each is called, each must choose his response. 

SHERINGHAM, October, 1919. 



1 The non-Christian mystic is thereby shown to be a member of Christ an 
implicit unconscious Christian. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER pAQE 

I. INTRODUCTORY . . . . .17 

II. THE DIVINE IMMANENCE . . . .33 

III. UNITY OF GOD . . . . .40 

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER III . . . .54 

IV. THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD . . .56 

INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER V . .85 

V. THE RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD . 96 

VI. VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY . . . 140 

VII. THE NEGATIVE WAY . . . . .182 

VIII. THE ACTIVE NIGHT ..... 207 

IX. MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE PREVIOUS TO THE NIGHT OF 

SPIRIT ...... 241 

X. THE PASSIVE NIGHT OF SPIRIT . . . 264 

XI. PURGATORY AND THE PASSIVE NIGHT OF SPIRIT . 285 

XII. THE TRANSFORMING UNION : OR MYSTICAL MARRIAGE . 299 
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER XII . . . . 357 

XIII. ON THE MYSTICAL INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE . 360 

XIV. THE WITNESS OF NATURE MYSTICISM TO THE TEACHING 

OF CATHOLIC MYSTICISM STUDIED IN THE MYSTICISM 

OF RICHARD JEFFERIES .... 371 

XV. ST JOHN THE POET ..... 389 

EPILOGUE ...... 402 

15 



NOTE. Where an asterisk appears in the text it indicates that a note 
ivill be found at the end of the book. 



CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTORY 

DISILLUSIONED of the past and the present, men are everywhere 
seeking in the future ways to a better life, a life of higher and richer 
values for mankind. But no future can provide these values 
unless they exist somewhere as a present reality. The mystic 
claims that he has found a reality of inexhaustible value. To no 
golden past nor golden future need we chase a mirage of satisfac 
tion. It is an eternal reality which the mystics have seen and 
attained and which they present to us. It is, therefore, of the 
first importance to discover, if we can, whether this claim of the 
mystic is justified, and if this prove to be the case, to learn from 
him the nature of that reality and worth which he has found. To 
set before my readers the mystic s report of the object appre 
hended in his experience and of the manner and way of his pro 
gressive apprehension of that object is the aim of this book I 
have attempted a study of the truth given in mystical experience, 
a philosophy of that experience. This study I have based on the 
principles laid down and explained with unrivalled clearness 
and penetration by St John of the Cross, and applied by him with 
a remorseless severity of logical reasoning, a clearness and severity 
aptly symbolised by the hard contours and sharp outlines of the 
barren, sun-scorched sierras of his own Castile. 

We possess four indubitably genuine works of St John, in 
addition to poems, sayings and a few letters. These four 
works two of which are fragments are treatises of mystical 
theology. Two of these, The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The 
Obscure Night of the Soul, are concerned with the purgation neces 
sary in order to attain the supreme mystical union ; the remaining 
two, The Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and The Living Flame of 
Love, are concerned with that supreme union itself. The teaching 
of these four great books will be the foundation of all I have to 
say in this exposition of the philosophy of mysticism. I shall, 
however, make large use also of three other treatises. One of 
these, The Obscure Knowledge of God, may perhaps be the work of 
St John himself, the remaining two, The Treatise on the Trans 
formation of the Soul in God and The Treatise on the Union of the 
B I7 



18 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

Soul with God, are by a Carmelite nun, Mother Cecilia of the 
Nativity. These treatises belong to the Johannine l school of 
Mysticism, and serve to throw light on certain points left obscure 
in the four authentic treatises of the Saint. 

I have entitled this work The Philosophy of Mysticism." 
I disclaim by the very title any practical scope. Mysticism as 
an art, as a state of prayer, as the practical way to Union with 
God, can only be taught by one himself experienced in this way. 
My concern as an outsider is with the theoretical aspect of the 
matter, with mysticism as a theory, or science, with " mystology," 
if I may coin the expression. Every art presupposes a body of 
theoretical truth on which it is based. The higher the art, the 
greater in depth and scope must the underlying truth be. If 
there be an art or practical way by which the human soul is 
united to God, that art or way must be based on, and must reveal 
to us, truth about God. The philosopher, the student of religion, 
above all the Christian apologist, cannot afford to neglect the body 
of truths about God, the Supreme Reality, which underlies the 
practice of mysticism. Indeed, metaphysics have always tended 
to pass over into mysticism, or at least into the theory of mysti 
cism. For the subject-matter of metaphysics is ultimate reality. 
Hence that art or practice whose end is union with ultimate reality 
must, if it be a true art, a fruitful practice, yield the most valuable 
data for metaphysical knowledge of that reality. A practice 
based on a false view of reality would prove barren in exact 
proportion to the falsehood in its underlying theory. The 
practice of mysticism has, however, been supremely fruitful. Its 
adepts have, as they declare with a unanimity of consent that 
transcends all divergence of philosophy or creed, attained the 
union with the Absolute of which they were in search. Therefore 
at their hands we must expect the fullest and deepest, and there 
fore the truest, knowledge of the ultimate reality that is attain 
able, apart from positive revelation. 2 As we shall see, the practice 
of mysticism is largely passive the reception of an experience 
given from without. Mysticism, or mystical theology in the 
strict sense, is this experience, the philosophy of mysticism, or 
" mystology," is its intellectual interpretation. 

1 The term Johannine is throughout this book, save where the contrary is 
expressly stated, the adjective of St. John of the Cross, not of the Evangelist. 

2 Even that revelation was itself largely given through the medium of 
mystical experience. 



INTRODUCTORY 19 

What then is this mystical experience that is to yield the highest 
knowledge of ultimate reality ? The full answer to this question 
is, of course, the entire teaching of mystical philosophy. Never 
theless, that we may attain at the outset some clear notion of the 
true meaning of a term often most loosely applied, I will define 
mysticism or mystical experience as a union-intuition of God. 
In chap. xvi. of Book II. of The Ascent of Mount Carmel, 
St John of the Cross says : "In the high state of the union of 
love God . . . communicates Himself to the pure and naked 
essence of the soul, through the will." This union, however, 
normally involves a certain direct consciousness of its object. 1 
Mystical union is thus a union of the entire soul through the will, 
involving a consciousness of the object of union. This conscious 
ness is an intuition by which is meant an immediate appre 
hension of reality, as opposed to an axiom or a conclusion of 
discursive reasoning, whose object is reality apprehended mediately 
through concepts abstracted from sensible experience. Intuition, 
on the other hand, being thus an immediate apprehension, is 
essentially not a concept or idea. The intuition that is the con 
scious concomitant of mystical union is, of course, superrational 
above the conceptual understanding of discursive reasoning, not 
an infrarational sensation. There is, however, an intuition or 
instinctive apprehension which is found in animals and indeed 
in man in the inferior regions of his soul life. This lower intuition 
or instinct has been wrongly confused, by M. Bergson, with the 
superrational intuition. 2 It is, on the contrary, essentially in 
frarational. Though it apprehends reality more directly than 
discursive reasoning, it does not penetrate to so deep a level. 

1 As will be seen later, in the" certain phases of mystical union this positive 
consciousness is temporarily replaced by a strange negative consciousness, whose 
character will hereafter be discussed. 

2 On page 339 of L Evolution Creatricice, 8th ed., M. Bergson seems indeed to 
conjoin infrarational intuition in its form of sense-perception with discursive reason 
in opposition to superrational intuition there distinctly recognised. Neverthe 
less even in this passage the former intuition is supposed to pass into the latter as 
violet into red through the colour scale. Moreover reason is unduly opposed here 
also to the superrational intuition. If we consider the general tenor of M. 
Bergson s philosophy, we shall find that it amply bears out the criticism of my 
text. The superrational intuition of the philosophy of the future is to be ob 
tained by a return to the instinct intuition element of the evolutionary nisus 
which has hitherto been most highly developed in certain insects. That the 
higher intuition is rather a development and eminent inclusion of the discursive 
reasoning which it transcends is a truth ignored or almost ignored by the 
Bergsonian philosophy. 



20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

Mystical intuition is the highest form of superrational intuition, 
for it is the consciousness of union with the Infinite Being of God, 
Who, as we shall see, is beyond the definition of the essentially 
limited concepts of the discursive reason. 1 I also name the 
Object of the mystical union-intuition God, not, with Miss 
Evelyn Underbill, Reality with a big R. My reason for so doing 
is not merely that as a theist and as a Catholic I know the ultimate 
reality to be a personal God, but because no other term expresses 
so well the Object of mystical experience, as revealed in that 
experience itself. To use the term Reality is to say too little. 
Everything that is is Real if it were not real it would be 
nothing. Every being, in so far as it is or has being, is or has 
reality. If anything is more real than another, it is because it 
has more being. If we say Supreme or Ultimate Reality our 
definition will indeed be correct, but unnecessarily vague in its 
formulation. The most real is that which has most being. 
Spirit, however, has more being than matter, the personal than 
the impersonal. There is more being and therefore greater 
reality in a living soul than in a lifeless stone ; more in a human 
personality than in an impersonal force ; more in love than in 
hunger ; more in my friend than in my walking-stick. Therefore 
ultimate or absolute reality must have more being than less 
ultimate realities, must be above, and more than the highest 
beings that are but derivative and contingent, not lower and less 
than they. If, however, the ultimate reality, the Absolute Being 

1 Corresponding with these two forms of intuition below and above the level 
of discursive reason are the two passions (Erotes) or non-rational loves. The 
lower is natural desire in its varied forms, the force of life reaching out blindly and 
instinctively. The higher is the love of the will reaching out towards an un 
limited Good beyond the conception of reason. The history of religion often 
shows us mystical or quasi-mystical cults and doctrines taking over or spiritual 
ising as expressions and vehicles of the higher Eros, cults and myths originally 
deifications of the lower Eros. Thus did Orphism adopt the cult of the Wine God 
Dionysus, spiritualising the infrarational impulse set free by intoxication into 
superrational ecstasy. (Cf. also the mythology of the Sirens as explained by 
Miss Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, pp. 197-207.) 
Since, however, such mysticism lacks the guidance of revelation and the elevat 
ing dispensation of sanctifying grace the lower Eros, become in fallen man a per 
verse concupiscence, pollutes and distorts the higher nisus towards spiritual good, 
ever dragging it back to its own level. Hence that unhappy confusion or mingling 
of lower and higher impulses and loves which marks so many forms of non- 
Christian mysticism, a confusion rendered easy, as is the analogous Bergsonian 
confusion of the intuitional aspects, by the common element of divergence from 
discursive reason present alike in the lower Eros of life-instinct and in the reason- 
transcending force of spiritual love. 



INTRODUCTORY 21 

were material or impersonal, an unconscious force for example, 
it would have less being or reality than the human soul. There 
fore, ultimate reality, the Absolute, must be above, not below, 
finite and dependent spirits. It must be supra- not infra-personal. 

We must therefore maintain that the nature of Ultimate 
Reality, though the ground of all being, is such that it is more 
adequately represented by the spiritual and the personal than by 
the material and the impersonal. Moreover, the union between the 
mystic and Ultimate Reality is essentially personal in character a 
union through love, a union moreover more satisfactory of our 
need for personal communion than is any union with a fellow- 
man. If, however, this union-intuition were without a supra- 
personal Object it would be less personal and less satisfactory 
than union through love with a fellow-man. Moreover, as we 
shall see in the course of this book, mystical experience in its 
higher stages does reveal certain characters of its Object, 1 and 
these the characters of a personal Spirit. We have therefore 
good ground, simply as students of mysticism, to affirm that the 
Object of mystical experience is a Being Who is more truly 
represented by and is more akin to the Spiritual and the Personal 
than to the Material and the Impersonal. 

Nor can we with the Monist suppose that Ultimate Reality 
is simply the totality of matter and consciousness, of the personal 
and the impersonal. Such an absolute Monism would involve 
the ascription of equal reality and ultimacy to all its constituent 
elements. We should therefore touch ultimate reality in equal 
measure in each and every portion of our experience. We should 
touch this ultimate reality as truly, and participate in it as fully, 
in eating as in scientific discussion or aesthetic intuition, and as 
truly in all these as in prayer and in mystical intuition. It is, 
however, of the very essence of mystical experience that it is a 
penetration to a deeper level, the attainment of a greater, fuller 
and more ultimate reality than is afforded by any other form of 
human experience. Hence the object of this experience is not 
simply the sum total of all being and experience, but the under 
lying ground of all the lesser realities and more superficial levels 
touched by the other forms of experience. The pantheist will, 
however, urge that this ultimate reality is the true being of the 
less ultimate and is manifested of necessity in and through these. 
But we should then be compelled to admit that it is conditioned 

1 Not, however, as they are in Him. See Chapter IV. 



22 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

and so limited by the limits of these lower forms of being in 
which It is of necessity manifested. But the most complete 
" personality " is the human soul that is least dependent on 
creatures lower than itself. Therefore the suprapersonal Reality 
must be wholly independent of beings lower than Himself. 
Moreover, as we shall see later, the object of the mystical in 
tuition is essentially experienced as transcendent and free from 
all limits, as the wholly Unlimited. Hence the limited cannot 
be its necessary self -manifestation. In vain does Pantheistic 
mysticism seek to evade this difficulty by teaching the complete 
illusoriness or non-reality of the limited, of the relative as opposed 
to the Absolute. 1 Even if this were the case, ultimate Reality, 
the Absolute, would be conditioned and limited by its necessary 
causation of this illusion, that is of the limited appearance, whose 
phenomenal existence at least is undeniable. Moreover this 
denial of reality to the limited or relative contradicts our lower 
experience, whose validity within its own limited sphere is as 
immediately given as is the validity of the mystical experience 
itself. For this lower experience is a real experience of a real 
object. Otherwise it would be non-existent. It follows, there 
fore, that if we would accept, as we must accept, the entire content 
of experience in all its forms, both mystical and non-mystical alike, 
as given immediately in those experiences and mediately through 
their abstraction, comparison and combination, we must grant 
that the finite objects of our ordinary experience are possessed of 
some degree of reality, and also that the ultimate Reality which 
is the object of mystical experience is wholly free from their 
limitations. But the acceptance of these truths demands the 
acceptance of a theistic as opposed to a pantheistic interpretation 
of the nature of ultimate reality. Neither can we identify the 
Object of mystical experience with the duree which, according 
to the system of M. Bergson, underlies and is opposed to the more 
unreal, indeed artificial, time series. If the mystic were en 
rapport with a mere duree or even with an impersonal life therein 
existent, there would be no ground for his exultant certitude of 
communion with a Personal Being infinitely superior to his own 
personality. Moreover, one essential feature of mystical experi 
ence or at least of certain forms of that experience is that it is 
a consciousness or apprehension not of any kind of succession 
or duration but of Eternity the totum simul equally present 

1 So teach certain schools of philosophic idealism. 



INTRODUCTORY 23 

to all time, the Everlasting Now in which all time exists and is 
comprehended, both clocktime and soultime alike. This is well 
brought out by Baron von Hiigel, both in Eternal Life and in 
Mystical Religion. In the Autobiography of Bl. Henry Suso, a 
rapture granted bo that great mystic is described as " a breaking 
forth of the sweetness of eternal life, felt as present in the stillness 
of unvarying contemplation " (Suso s Autobiography, trs. Fr. 
Knox, ed. 1913, p. 10. Burns and Gates). "I have observed," 
writes Lucie Christine, " that during the prayer of passivity and 
especially in the state of union the soul loses all sense of the 
duration of time. . . . There is one single moment only . . . the 
soul being raised to that state lives according to the mode of life 
in Eternity, where time is no more, neither past nor present, but 
one eternal Now " (Spiritual Journal, Eng. trs., p. 52). The well- 
known lines of Henry Vaughan, perhaps based on an actual 
experience, are a most beautiful and at the same time a most 
clear and concise expression of the mystical experience of eternity. 

I saw Eternity the other night, 

Like a great ring of pure and endless light, 

All calm, as it was bright ; 

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years, 

Driven by the spheres 

Like a vast shadow moved. 

VAUGHA.N, The World. 

It is, however, impossible to identify the experience of eternity 
with an experience of a successive duree. Nor yet is the 
Ultimate Reality apprehended in mystical experience a stream 
of Becoming, an elan vital pushing its way onwards and outwards 
whether aimlessly or aimfully through an opposing matter. For 
just as the object of mystical intuition is given as eternal, so is it 
given as absolutely perfect and in complete rest. All the mystics 
are agreed that their experience is of this kind. Moreover, the 
object of mysticism is the infinite, the unlimited, and Becoming 
is essentially limited. The object of mysticism is fulness that is 
perfection of being, whereas Becoming is incomplete and im 
perfect, being constituted by being and not being. Indeed, the 
goal of mysticism has ever been escape from strife to rest, from 
flux to permanence, from becoming to pure Being. Certainly 
the object apprehended by the mystic is an activity but an 
activity that is rest, because it has no obstacle to overcome nor 
deficiency to satisfy a life that is so full, as to need no complement 



24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

for its preservation or increase. Thus does the object of mystical 
experience as given in that experience itself exclude the limita 
tions alike of an external and hostile matter and of any kind of 
becoming. Mysticism, therefore, has not found its philosopher 
in M. Bergson. Enough surely has been said to show that we 
need have no hesitation in terming the object of mystical experi 
ence, not reality nor even ultimate reality, but God. If, however, 
any reader prefer it, let him by all means keep for the present to 
the less definite terminology. The following chapters on the 
nature of the object of mystical experience as revealed in that 
experience will prove it to possess precisely those characters which 
constitute the theistic and Christian understanding of the term 
God, and will, therefore, be a fuller argument for the identity 
of the former with the latter. Till then let him, if he will, define 
the object of mystical experience as the ultimate Reality. I prefer 
to term it from the outset what it will prove in truth to be, God 
the God not of pantheism or semi-pantheism but of Christian 
theism. 

Now, however, I have to face a more fundamental objection 
to my definition, the objection that this mystical intuition or 
experience is false, a delusion from beginning to end. If the 
objector means by this that no man has ever had any such ex 
perience, and that all those who claim it are liars, he is like a blind 
man who should affirm that all those who claim vision are liars. 
As well should the inartistic man deny that the artist perceives 
the beauty and significance that to him are wholly imperceptible. 
Doubtless, however, he will mean that this mystical experience is 
purely subjective due to the physical or psychical condition of 
the recipient. It is urged by many psychologists that the psycho- 
physical condition of the mystic fully explains his experience, 
which has thus no objective validity. This explanation would 
make the experiences of a St Paul and of a St Teresa the fruits 
of a nervous derangement. This materialistic explanation is, 
however, opposed to the axiom that the effect cannot be greater 
than its cause. A psychical phenomenon may be conditioned, 
but cannot be wholly caused, by a physical fact. The more 
common, and assuredly the more powerful attack upon the trans- 
subjective validity of mystical experience proceeds from the 
psychology that would explain mystical experience as simply a 
manifestation of the subconscious, subliminal or subjective mind 
or self. The existence of this subconsciousness has indeed been 



INTRODUCTORY 25 

amply proved by modern psychological research. The evidence 
will be found in such a book as Myers Human Personality, and 
substantially the same teaching is expounded in a more popular 
form by Hudson in his Psychic Phenomena. No candid student 
of these works can doubt the existence of the subconscious or 
subliminal mind, that is to say of a sphere, aspect or function of 
the soul normally hidden from self-conscious observation. More 
over there is every reason to believe that this subliminal sphere 
is the seat of mystical experience. For the central depths of the 
soul are not normally above the threshold of consciousness : 
are, therefore, normally subliminal. But, as we shall see later, 
these depths are the special seat of the Divine Presence and Action 
in the soul, since they are the most remote and the most free from 
the conditions of sense, and are thus the least limited by the 
limitations due to the senses and their material data. Therefore, 
when the Divine Presence and Action enter the field of conscious 
ness, as they do in the mystical union-intuition, the normally 
subliminal depth the subjective mind that is the seat of that 
Presence and Action is also revealed through the Divine Presence 
and Action therein. Thus the subliminal is the special vessel 
and organ of mystical experience. This fact, however, is by no 
means the admission that mystical experience proceeds simply 
and entirely from the subconscious soul, is nothing but a subliminal 
uprush into the field of normal consciousness due to autosuggestion. 
If that were the case it could not present, as it does, the constant 
characteristic of a self-evident experience of a Reality other and 
immeasurably greater than the self revealed in normal consciousness. 
Since mystical experience thus produces, nay, consists in, a self- 
evident conviction of contact with an objective being or reality 
other than the mystic himself, if the mystic be not really in touch 
with a Being outside himself, his entire spiritual life is based upon 
an experience which is essentially illusion and self-deception. 
Can we in reason believe that the lives and work of the mystics are 
thus the fruit of illusion and hallucination ? It were surely as 
reasonable a belief that the achievements of art and science are 
the products of illusion. Moreover, the result of illusion must 
surely be the detriment, indeed the destruction, of the soul s 
higher life, in proportion to the closeness of relationship between 
the illusion and that life. Illusion and unreality must ever pro 
duce emptiness and death, never fulness and life. The result of 
mystical experience, however, has been the growth and elevation 



26 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

of life. Hence that experience cannot be illusory. Moreover, no 
function of the soul can produce wholly ovit of itself anything 
external to the self. The understanding, for instance, cannot 
know any external object which has not first been presented to it 
from without. Therefore the subconscious function or level of 
the soul cannot produce out of itself what it has not received 
either from the conscious level or from stimuli suggestions, if the 
term be preferred received subconsciously from a source external 
to the self. The subliminal mathematician, for example, the 
" mathematical prodigy," is in subliminal contact with an ob 
jective truth, a reality external to his own being whether supra- 
liminal or subliminal (see Myers Human Personality, p. 60 sqq.). 
The subconscious self is no conjurer s hat which can produce out 
of itself a rabbit or a palm-tree. Indeed Myers himself states 
distinctly of the man of genius that " from his subliminal self he 
can only draw what it already possesses." "We must not," he 
continues, " assume as a matter of course that the subliminal region 
of any one of us possesses that particular sensitivity that specific 
transparency which can receive and register definite facts from 
the unseen. That may be a gift which stands as much alone . . . 
in the subliminal region, as, say, a perfect musical ear in the 
supraliminal " (Human Personality, p. 84). The mystic, however, 
receives in and from his experience a satisfaction of consciousness 
and will, a fulness of spiritual life and energy, a certainty of com 
munion with an ultimate and Divine Reality external to himself, 
that is in obvious excess of all that he has obtained by the exer 
tion of his conscious faculties, a reality and life indefinitely superior 
to and quite other than the knowledge of religious truth and the 
force of spiritual life obtained by conscious instruction and re 
ligious exercises. This reality and life must, therefore, have been 
received into the subconscious depths of the soul from a source 
external to the soul. 

Again, if we accept, as we must, the testimony of the mystic 
to the fact of his experience we ought to admit his testimony 
to its nature as being essentially a self-evident experience of a 
transubjective Reality. Just as the fact of sense perception carries 
with it an immediate certainty of the existence of an external 
object of that perception, so also does mystical experience involve 
an immediate certainty of the existence of an external object of 
that experience. There have been, indeed, and at present there 
are, philosophers who deny the transubjective validity of sense 



INTRODUCTORY 27 

perception. Such a scepticism, however, can never be accepted 
by the unsophisticated common-sense of mankind at large. It is 
surely equally irrational to refuse similar validity to the experi 
ence of the mystics, which, despite its comparative rarity, is as un 
deniable as the fact of ordinary sense perception. 1 The objective 
validity of this experience is indeed being realised by modern 
thinkers, and this realisation is making mysticism more popular 
to-day than it has been for a long while past. Thus the late 
Professor William James, despite the great stress he lays on the 
subliminal, distinctly says that " the reference of a phenomenon 
to a subliminal self need not exclude the notion of the direct 
Presence of the Deity. The notion of a subconscious self 
ought not . . . to be held to exclude all notion of a higher penetra 
tion. If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may get 
access to us only through the subliminal doors " (Varieties of 
Religious Experience, pp. 242, 243). Again, in his summary at the 
end of his book, Professor James maintains in principle the truth 
of this objective reference. 

It is true that the term of this reference is in the opinion of 
James a finite being, one of the many gods, or rather demi-gods, 
of pluralism. This interpretation, however, is in contradiction to 
the experience which it professes to interpret. Mystical experi 
ence is, as will be shown later, essentially an experience of com 
munion with the unlimited, the Absolute, the All. 2 So much is 
this the case that, as the history of mysticism abundantly proves, 
it is extremely liable to misinterpretation in a Pantheistic sense. 
Pantheism, however, is the antipodes of pluralism. Hence the 
pluralistic explanation of James is arbitrary in the extreme ; was, 
in fact, not a conclusion reached by his psychological research but 

1 We must, however, beware of Miss Evelyn Underbill s attempt (Mysticism, 
chap.i.) to contrast the objective validity of mystical experience with the mainly 
subjective and illusory character of sense perception. If we must accept St 
Teresa s testimony to the existence of the Divine Being immediately given in her 
mystical intuition, we must equally accept the plain man s testimony to the 
objective existence of the brick wall immediately given in his sensible vision. 
The world of common-sense in which the plain man is at home is real within its 
own narrow limits, and with its own limited degree of reality, although the world 
of the mystic above and beyond the sphere of common-sense is a real world with 
out limit and real with an unlimited reality. Nothing could be more pernicious 
to mysticism than attempts to found it on a basis of philosophic idealism or 
scepticism. 

a For the theistic and Catholic understanding of this term see the following 
chapters. 



28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

a metaphysical "overbelief " violently forced upon his psychological 
conclusion. That conclusion in itself namely, that mystical ex 
perience is transubjective is surely neither invalidated nor even 
weakened by the addition of this alien element introduced from a 
false metaphysic.* Moreover, Hudson also affirms the transub 
jective validity of " subconscious " experience. It is aheady 
evident from the quotation made above that the great pioneer of 
subliminal investigation admitted this transubjective validity. A 
page or two further he explicitly recognises this validity in the 
case of the mystical experience of " a Francis " and " a Teresa " 
(Human Personality, p. 89). Doubtless Myers interpretation of 
the Objective Reality given in their experience was inadequate. 
Nevertheless he does recognise that Reality, as other than the 
subliminal self of the mystic, as " a spiritual Universe " from 
which " the soul can draw strength and grace," " a spirit accessible 
and responsive to the soul of man " (p. 91). Surely enough, 
indeed more than enough, has been said. Both argument and 
the explicit admission of investigators of the subliminal abund 
antly prove that mystical experience cannot be the merely sub 
jective experience of the subconscious self, as certain anti-mystical 
psychologists have affirmed, but is, on the contrary, the apprehen 
sion of an objective spiritual reality. 

Moreover, this reality must be the most fundamental attainable 
by the human soul. For the nobler the instrument of perception 
the higher is the reality perceived. Sight, for instance, gives more 
knowledge of reality than taste. Discursive reason working on 
the data of sense furnishes a still deeper knowledge of reality. 
Surely then the intuition of the soul through its highest and most 
spiritual faculty must constitute a far higher and truer appre 
hension of reality. If the sense-conditioned intuitions of the artist 
or poet penetrate depths of reality hidden from the discursive 
reason, far greater and more ultimate must be the reality attained 
by the intuition of the mystic. We have, however, already seen 
that this Reality must be a Being not devoid of the highest char 
acters of our own spiritual life, that is a personal, or, more strictly, 
a suprapersonal God. I therefore repeat and emphasise with all 
confidence as the starting-point of these studies my definition of 
Mysticism or mystical experience as the union-intuition of God, 
the personal God believed and adored by theists of all ages and 
creeds.* 

We must, however, beware of the prevalent error of supposing 



INTRODUCTORY 29 

that all mystics, whatever their creed, whether Christian, 
Mohammedan or Buddhist, teach one truth wholly identical and 
differ only in a terminology externally adopted. It is true that 
the essential mystical experience is one and the same in all. But 
the Catholic will maintain that (1) since the Christian revelation 
is true, its doctrines interpret the experience of the mystics better 
than any other, and (2) that Christian mysticism is higher and 
more complete than any other. It is higher in that Christian 
mysticism has led its followers to a higher degree of union with 
God than that attained by non-Christian mystics. Such, at least, 
is the general rule, though admitting perhaps of exceptions. 
Moreover the Christian mystic has possessed a personal love of 
God which is often lacking in non-Christian mysticism, a love 
arising out of devotion to the Incarnate Jesus. It is more com 
plete because Christian mystics have often been granted the 
direct intuition of certain distinctively Christian doctrines e.g. 
the intellectual vision of the Blessed Trinity. Nevertheless the 
experience even of non-Christian mystics is, as such, a true ex 
perience of God a union-intuition of Him. 

There are certain principles which should be borne constantly 
in mind while reading the writings of the mystics. The concepts 
of discursive reason, based as they are on the data of sense, are 
inadequate to express the purely spiritual reality apprehended in 
mystical experience. The categories of the reason are too narrow 
to grasp it and break down under the attempt. Any formulation 
of this reality in terms of the discursive reason must therefore be 
taken simply as a signpost to a region beyond clear rational appre 
hension. It is, moreover, of the essence of conceptual thought to 
abstract. The discursive reason cannot make its abstractions 
living realities. But the object of mystical experience is not an 
abstract concept or a system of abstract concepts, but a living 
reality. Hence mystical experience as it is in itself is transcendent 
of all the images and concepts of the understanding, and is, there 
fore, ineffable. Moreover, the Unlimited Godhead cannot be 
expressed by the essentially limited operations of the created 
intelligence. Hence the mystics unanimously tell us that their 
experience can only be understood by those who themselves 
possess it. " It would be foolishness," writes St John, " to think 
that the language of love and the mystical intelligence . . . can 
be at all explained in words of any kind for the spirit of Our Lord 
who helps our weakness . . . dwelling in us makes petitions for 



30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

us with groanings unutterable for that which we cannot well 
understand or grasp so as to be able to make it known. . . . For 
who can describe that which He shows to loving souls in whom 
He dwells ? Who can set forth in words that which He makes 
them feel ? And, lastly, who can explain that for which they 
long ? Assuredly no one can do it ; not even they themselves 
who experience it. That is the reason why they use figures of 
special comparisons and similitudes ; they hide somewhat of that 
which they feel and in the abundance of the Spirit utter secret 
mysteries rather than express themselves in clear words " (Pro 
logue to Spiritual Canticle). After a truly sublime description 
of the supreme mystical union Suso adds : " Now, daughter, 
remember that all these figures and images, with their interpreta 
tions, are as remote from and unlike the formless Truth as a black 
Moor is unlike the beautiful sun " (Autobiography, trs. Knox, 
p. 283). Discursive reason divides truth into partial aspects, and 
those partial and severed aspects cannot by that thought be unified 
into a complete self-consistent whole. The intuition of the mystic, 
however, which is a concomitant of the unifying love of the will, 
apprehends truth in its totality and unity. This intuition cannot, 
therefore, be consistently formulated in terms of discursive thought. 
Hence the concepts and images which the mystics are compelled 
to employ, being essentially partial and incomplete, can never be 
taken exclusively. In so far as they are positive they are true 
for God is eminently all the positive being of creatures (see 
Chapter II). In so far as they are negative, excluding by their 
fmitude other aspects of positive being or reality, they are false. 
Hence we must always so understand and use the images and 
concepts of the mystics as not thereby to deny images and con 
cepts apparently opposed, but really complementary. Rather we 
shall find that the only possible utterance of the ultimate truth 
given in mystical intuition is a series of paradoxes. There is 
much paradox in the teaching of Our Lord, and the teaching of 
the mystics can only be expressed in that form. The reader will 
not be able to peruse the earlier chapters of this book without find 
ing himself in face of such a paradox as that God is all and God is 
also nothing. The discussion of this and the other great para 
doxes of mysticism I leave to their proper place. My present 
object is simply to urge the student of mysticism to bear in mind 
that, as was pointed out* above, its Divine Object cannot be re 
presented by a logically coherent concept or conceptual system. 



INTRODUCTORY 31 

Rather is it the fundamental characteristic of mystical truth to 
be so transcendent of our concepts that it can only be indicated 
expressed it never can be in their terms, by means of statements 
apparently contradictory that is, by paradoxes whose opposition 
is soluble by experience alone, not by discursive reasoning. If we 
remember this we shall not label a mystic pantheist for statements 
which, taken exclusively, would be pantheistic, as, for instance, 
certain statements of St John or St Catherine of Genoa concern 
ing the Divine Immanence, agnostic for statements of the essential 
unintelligibility of God, anti-sacramental or anti-incarnational for 
statements of the necessity of transcending forms and images. 
On the contrary, we shall see in all such statements diverse aspects 
of one infinite truth, as positive, true, as exclusive of complementary 
aspects, false. 

Moreover, the same spiritual fact or process will be described 
by a series of different sense-derived images which regard that 
one fact or process from different points of view. The mystical 
way may, for instance, be regarded as a motion upwards, an 
ascent from creatures to God as a motion downwards into ever- 
increasing depths of increased reality, until God the one absolute 
Reality is reached as a motion outwards away from the finite 
with its narrow limits to the infinite as a motion inwards to 
the depth of the central ego away from the superficial operations 
of the exterior matter handling and sense -conditioned powers. 
It may be conceived positively, as the ever-increasing attainment 
of reality, or negatively, as the ever-increasing denial and rejection 
of the unreal or negative or limiting element in the creature. 
It may be described by means of impersonal images as e.g. 
the consumption of wood by fire ; the impregnation of air by 
light ; a plunge deeper, ever deeper into the sea ; or by means 
of personal imagery such as the passionate human love of bride 
and bridegroom ; the simple confidence and self-abandonment of 
an infant to its mother. All these images are complementary, 
not mutually exclusive, and are true only in their positive being, 
false in their essential limitations, exclusions and negations. In 
such sense is the teaching of the mystics to be understood. 

Indeed the whole of mystical philosophy is an attempt to express 
one inexpressible thing in a variety of wholly inadequate ways. 
Other and lower branches of knowledge have a multitude of 
distinct things to tell us clearly and adequately * ; a multiplicity 
united only at a deeper level than that which these sciences 



32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

attain. " Mystology " has for subject matter one thing 
the unum necessarium the union of the unified soul with the 
absolute unity of God. Its multiplicity is a manifold, appre 
hended as the diverse aspects of an underlying unity, the manifold 
aspects of the One Divine Being, and of a soul life or psychosis 
that is substantially unified in the soul, when fully united to God, 
and made by that union godlike. Do not, therefore, ask of 
mystical theology a series of clear definitions and of distinct 
facts her work is not to express, far less to explain, but simply 
to indicate the One that contains an inexhaustible manifold which 
is mutually inclusive, not mutually exclusive, and in virtue of 
that exclusion discrete and distinct. Never, reader, press her 
images or her similes to the exclusion of contrary images or 
similes, for they are, as we saw above, true only as positive, not as 
negative. Pardon much repetition, for it is no variety of distinct 
ideas or concepts, but one supreme reality of infinite content that 
is to be set within the vision of your soul. Above all remember 
that, when all has been said, nothing has been said. A finger has 
pointed the way to a reality which reason, and much less its verbal 
expression, can never attain. On that dark Reality, the Infinite 
God, fix the will in adoration ; if God so call you, in desire also, 
and veil the eyes of reason before the light unapproachable, the 
hidden Presence, that is the Alpha and Omega of all the truth and 
being made known by philosophy and science, by art and practical 
experience. So shall mysticism indicate to you the first principle 
on which these depend, and falling down you shall adore the God 
Whom on earth you can never know as He is, and shall pray for 
that open revelation in the world to come. 

The preliminary chapters of this book will consist of an attempt 
to expound more fully the matter already touched upon in these 
prolegomena, the teaching of Christian mysticism as represented 
by St John of the Cross and Mother Cecilia as to the nature of 
God as the Object of mystical experience. I shall then discuss 
the essential character of this union-intuition between the soul 
and God, the chief degrees of that union, the principles of its 
action and the way by which the soul is prepared to receive it. 
This preparation will be discussed not with a view to practice, 
but as a part of the theoretical study of the nature of mystical 
experience. I will begin by considering the teaching of mysticism 
in regard to the Divine Immanence as apprehended in the mystical 
union-intuition . 



CHAPTER II 

THE DIVINE IMMANENCE 

The Lord appeared in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush, 
and the bush was on fire and was not burnt. EXODUS iii. 

Ex quo, per quern, in quo sunt omnia. 

Lift the stone and then thou shall find Me : cleave the wood and 
there am I. OXYRHYNCUS, Logion. 

Mi Amado las montanas. 

Los voiles solitarios nemorosos. 

Las insulas extranas. 

Los rios sonorosos. 

El silbo de los aires amorosos. 

ST JOHN OF THE CROSS, 

Spiritual Canticle of the Soul. 

THE doctrine of God as the Object of mystical experience is a 
doctrine of the relation to Him of creatures in general and in par 
ticular of the human soul. Of Himself, as He is in Himself, we 
have, as we shall see, no knowledge that is, no clear, conceptual 
knowledge. Even the doctrine of the Trinity is revealed, so to 
speak, inferentially from the working of the Three Persons in our 
Redemption and Sanctification. Moreover, we know by faith 
that the Godhead is possessed in Three Persons, but not what is 
the nature of the Godhead thus possessed or the nature of that 
triple possession. 

God is the first cause and the immanent ground of all creatures. 
The existence of creatures is essentially dependent. They are 
kept in being by the conserving will of God. " In Him we live 
and move and are." The creature may be regarded under two 
aspects a positive and a negative. By the very fact of its 
creatureliness the creature is finite, exclusive of other beings is 
not as well as is. The positive being of the creature is a copy 
of some aspect of the Infinite Being of God, of some idea of the 
Divine Mind. Whatever positively is in the creature is therefore 

c 33 



34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

in God. God is eminently all created being. Creatures, because 
they are creatures, are essentially distinct from God. But the 
ground of that distinction is the finitude of their being and its 
consequent relativity and dependence, that is their lack of being, 
what they are not. That which differentiates the creature from 
God is thus no positive being non-existent in the Divine Being, 
but the negation-limitation of the creature, whereby its participa 
tion of the Being of God is essentially constituted as a being 
distinct from Him. St John of the Cross insists on this truth 
when he says of certain created beauties : " All that is here set 
forth is in God eminently in an infinite way, or rather, every one of 
these grandeurs is God and all of them together are God. ..." 
The soul " feels all things to be God " (Spiritual Canticle, st. 14). 
It follows that symbolism is not merely an external and arbitrary 
representation of spiritual realities by material figures. It is 
rather that the ultimate reality of the symbol is its participation 
and reflection of the spiritual reality or idea symbolised : and thus 
ultimately of God, of Whom all ideas are aspects. The essence, 
for example, of some beautiful scene in nature is precisely this, 
that it is an external, sensible reflection and presentation of spirit. 
All that is positive in it, as opposed to the negation of its 
materiality, is the participation of a spiritual reality, ultimately 
of a type-idea existent in God, a participation therefore of the 
Divine Being. Thus, for instance, the ascent of a mountain is no 
merely arbitrary emblem of the Godward ascent of the soul. A 
mountain ascent is essentially an elevation and consequently 
the attainment of a wider horizon, no longer bounded by the 
narrow limits of the valley below. This material elevation and 
emancipation of vision themselves embody and thus represent 
and participate in a spiritual elevation and emancipation of vision. 
These spiritual realities constitute the positive being of a mountain 
ascent. Their material embodiment is but a limitation or nega 
tion of being. This spiritual elevation, this spiritual emancipation 
from limits, is an activity of the creature Godward, a relation 
therefore of the finite creature to the infinite God : so finally God 
Himself as essentially constitutive of such an activity and relation 
ship in His creation. Thus in very truth " My beloved is the 
mountains," as St John says in this same stanza. 

It is also clear that the higher the created being, the more fully 
does it reproduce the Divine Being of the Creator. A living soul 
possesses more of God than a mass of lifeless matter. For it is less 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE 35 

limited, less exclusive. A material substance, indeed, differs from 
a spirit by the lesser degree of its being, by its greater exclusion 
of other beings. There is less being in an electric current than in 
thought, and electricity therefore reproduces less of the Divine 
Being than thought. God is therefore more immanent in, more 
present to, creatures possessed of higher and fuller degrees of 
being, 1 than He is immanent in and present to creatures possessed 
only of lower and scantier degrees of being. For the increased 
limitation that is, lack of being of the latter excludes Him to a 
greater degree by its greater defect of being that is, its greater 
exclusion of his boundless plenitude of Being than the lesser 
limitation of the former, constituting as it does a fuller degree of 
being, and therefore a lesser exclusion of His Unlimited Being. 
Hence God is more immanent in spirit than in matter, more in 
reason than in mere sentience, more in life than in the inorganic, 
more immanent also in the more purely spiritual, and therefore 
less limited functions of the human soul than in its more sensible 
and therefore more limited functions. Hence every creature is a 
revelation of God, and the higher in the scale of being that creature 
is, the more fully does it reveal Him. Consider some beautiful 
flower, for example, a peony glowing amidst the tender green of 
May. All its grace of form, all its glory of colour is a representa 
tion, a participation, though infinitely inadequate and scant, of the 
Beauty of God. But the beauty of a loving heart is a far more 
adequate representation, a far ampler participation, albeit still 
infinitely inadequate and scant of that Divine Beauty. Created 
being is thus on its positive side the reproduction of the Divine 
Being, under diverse aspects and in divers degrees, so that there 
is no positive being in them, that is not in God ; that is not their 
participation of God, God in them. The Vulgate used by St John 
of the Cross read, in the first chapter of St John s Gospel : " What 
soever was made, in Him was life." Whether this be the true 
reading or not, 2 it was certainly the classical expression of the 
truth for St John of the Cross, for he recurs several times to this 
text. By it is meant that the true being, the living reality of the 
creature is the Divine Idea, the Aspect of the Godhead which 
it represents, this Idea being no dead concept but one with 
the Divine Life, an Idea moreover whose willed externalisation 

1 Strictly speaking, they are rather present to Him than He to them. See 
Transcendence, chap. iv. 

2 It is the reading accepted by Westcott and Hort. 



36 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

constituted the [creature in being, and conserves it in being. 
Thus the being of the creature is rooted in the Godhead, its 
Creator; its continuance in being is grounded in the Godhead, 
its Conserver. Without the Divine Conservation and Co-operation 
the being and action of the creature would cease. Thus is the 
life of the creature wholly in God. In the fourth stanza of The 
Living Flame of Love, we read : " As St John tells us, all things 
in Him [God] are life, and in Him they live and move and are, as 
saith also the Apostle. Hence it is, that when this mighty Emperor 
moves in the soul ... all things seem to move together, even as 
in the earth s motion all the natural things thereon, move, as if 
they had been nothing. . . . Nor do they only move. They also 
disclose the beauties of their being, their virtue, beauty and 
graces, and the root of their duration and life. The soul now sees 
how all creatures both on high and here below have their life, 
force and duration in Him. . . . Although it is true that the soul 
sees that these things are distinct from God, in that their being 
is created, and sees them in Him with their force, root and strength, 
she also knows that God is in His being in an infinitely pre 
eminent way, all these things." Mother Cecilia repeats this same 
doctrine with particular emphasis. " The Soul," she says, 
" beholds how creatures, although they are dead in themselves, 
in God are life " (Trans., st. 4). In such wise is this " vision of 
God " imprinted on the sight of the soul that in it she beholds all 
things in and through God, and sees Him in them all. She beholds 
them, as it were, bathed and penetrated by their Divine Lord, and 
when she contemplates them as they are in themselves she sees that 
they are like accidents without substance (Transformation of the 
Soul in God, st. 1). She does not indeed say that apart from the 
Divine Being creatures are mere accidents whose substance is 
God. That were sheer pantheism. What she does mean by her 
bold language is that since the substance of creatures is but an 
externalised Aspect of the Godhead, a participation of the Divine 
Being, differentiated from Him by their creaturely limitation, and 
wholly dependent upon, and grounded in His being, it is by 
comparison unreal and accidental. Ruysbroeck expresses this 
same doctrine in another terminology when he speaks of the Divine 
Being as the uncreated superessence of our created essence 
(Sept Degres d* Amour, chap. xiv). Not only is God the positive 
being of all creatures in the sense explained above. He is also 
the agent of all their activity. As Dame Julian tells us : " God 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE 37 

doth all things, be it never so little. . . . There is no Doer but He " 
(Revelations, chap. xi). Every created activity qua positive ac 
tivity is an act of God, for that activity is sustained, moved, kept 
in motion by His co-operative will, and is a finite reproduction of 
His activity. Even the ruthless determinism of natural energies 
veils the beneficent action of Personal love operative therein. 
This activity of God in all Action, as the concomitant of His 
presence in all being, is taught by Bl. Angela of Foligno in the 
following energetic language. " I understand," she says, " that 
He [God] is present ... in everything that hath being, in the 
demon, in the good Angel, in hell, in Paradise, in adultery, in 
murder, in every good work " (Visions and Instructions, chap, xxvii. 
Trs. A Secular Priest). Hence it follows, as Dame Julian points 
out, that every act, even an act that is morally evil, is, as a positive 
act, good. The evil is simply an undue defect of being limiting 
that positive goodness. Moreover, even this undue defect is over 
ruled and supplied by God for the general good of the universe 
indeed the good of every part of the universe in so far as each 
part is capable of good a capacity largely dependent in the case 
of rational spirits on their free choice. The doctrine of im 
manence as apprehended by mystical intuition whereby God 
is perceived as the positive being and activity of all creatures is 
the firm foundation of this further optimism of faith. Because 
God " is the only Doer," " He can and will make all things well." 
The life of every creature is thus rooted in the Divine Life of God 
so that, although the created life is by its creatureliness and 
consequent finitude infinitely distinct from the Divine Being and 
Life of God, the Divine Being is intimately present as the ground 
and ultimate cause of that created life. Moreover, it is by this 
Divine immanence that we can explain satisfactorily the evolu 
tionary phenomena now being discovered by the natural scientist. 
Natural selection can no longer be regarded as an adequate ex 
planation of the evolution of species. The sudden mutations 
discernible, for example, in certain plants, when brought into a 
new environment, mutations whose end is the formation of new 
species, better adapted to that environment than the parent 
species, point to a purposive nisus in organic life as is admitted 
by many modern biologists. But it is surely impossible to regard 
that purpose, which has in view the future welfare and improve 
ment of the species, as something inherent in a life that is 
irrational and, in the case of plants, not even conscious. We 



38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

must see in it therefore the working of a Reason other than the 
organism in question yet intimately present in that organism 
which directs the nisus of the organism in view of a good which 
it is incapable of foreseeing. This immanent Reason or Spirit 
(unless indeed it be an angel, which would justify anew the 
scholastic belief in angelic beings at work behind the phenomena 
of nature) must be God Himself immanent in His creation. The 
intimate immanence of purpose so intimate as to give rise to 
the error that it is inherent in the organism itself points to the 
latter as the true explanation. The view of evolution adopted by 
the Jesuit scientist, Fr. Wassmann, is polyphiletic. He believes 
that our present species have been evolved from a far more 
limited number of species, each the ancestor of a group of species. 
The origin of these type-species he refers to special creation. The 
general consensus, however, of modern scientists is in favour 
of a monophyletic evolution, whereby all species have been evolved 
from one rudimentary form of organic being. I can see nothing 
in the denned teaching of the Church to prevent our acceptance 
of this hypothesis, if the evidence seems to demand it, provided, 
however, we admit the special creation of the immortal soul of 
man, and that in the case of every individual. I am too ignorant 
of natural science to put forward with decision any view of evolu 
tion. It does, however, appear to me that modern scientific 
research has (1) rendered monophyletic evolution extremely 
probable ; (2) laid increasing stress on sudden mutations. The 
great mutations which have brought into being new type forms 
seem to me due not to special creation but to the operation on the 
subject of the mutation of an external stimulus, the stimulus of 
the Divine Spirit immanent in creation. This special operation 
of the immanent Godhead would effect a mutation greater in 
kind and degree than could be effected by the operation of natural 
causes. It would, moreover, be but the intensification at special 
points of the evolutionary process of the continuous co-operation 
of God with the course of evolution, wherein He is immanent for 
its motion and its direction. Thus do the discoveries of modern 
science, which at first occasioned such needless alarm to the 
religious soul, tend to make us realise as never before the im 
manence of God even in His lowest creatures not only to 
sustain them in being and action but to direct that action to the 
common good of the material creation. This good is an ever more 
adequate representation of the Divine Being, and this more 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE 39 

adequate representation is (as we shall see) a closer union with 
Himself. It is then no exaggeration of devotion but a funda 
mental truth that the creature, alike its being and its energy, 
apart from God, is nothing. All created being and activity is 
a partial reproduction of God, and is eminently contained and 
existent in Him. The creature has and is nothing of its own, 
save its creaturely limitation, which is sheer negation of being. 
Nevertheless, that limitation is essentially constitutive of created 
being. Therefore created being is not a limited mode or aspect 
of Uncreated Being. This pantheistic error, as was pointed out 
in the previous chapter, would make the Unlimited necessarily 
manifested by the limited, and would therefore subject the Un 
limited to limitations, a patent self-contradiction. On the con 
trary, created being, in virtue of its essential limitation, is, as 
created being, infinitely apart from the Uncreated Being, of 
Which, as being, it is a participation. A paradox assuredly of 
discursive reason, but the truth of mystic intuition. 



CHAPTER III 

UNITY OF GOD 
Hear, Israel, the Lord Thy God is One God. 

To be, is no other than to be one, in so far, therefore, as anything 
attains unity, in so far it "is." For unity worketh congruity and 
harmony, whereby things composite are, in so far as they are : for 
things uncompounded are in themselves, because they are one ; but 
things compounded, imitate unity by the harmony of their parts, and, 
so far as they attain to unity, they are. Wherefore order and rule 
secure being, disorder tends to not being. 

ST AUGUSTINE, 

De Morib. Manich, chap. vi. Quoted and trs. 
Pusey, in note to Confessions, chap. i. 

BEFORE discussing the complement of the Divine Immanence, the 
Divine Transcendence with its consequence, the unknowableness l 
of God, as He is in Himself, I must speak of the Divine Unity. 
We will approach this from the scale of reality and truth. The 
lower the rank of creatures in the scale of being that is, the less 
they possess of positive being or reality the greater is their mutual 
exclusiveness : that is to say, the more do they exclude other 
creatures, other aspects and kinds of being. One material atom 
or electron is wholly external to another. Matter is indeed a 
principle of exclusion and separation. The higher the being the 
greater is its unity, a unity, however, which is imposed upon an 
ever-increasing multiplicity. Life, and still more, thought, is 
inclusive and unifying. How much greater is the unity of the 
spiritual than the unity of the material is evident from a simple 
example. A stone consists of separable molecules, a perception, 
however many its objects, is one indivisible act. Life unifies in 
one nisus directed to one end a complex manifold of forces, other 
wise divergent, and subordinates to itself a variety of material 
elements. Thus is constituted the unity of the organism whose 
members are united by their essential relation to the whole, and are 

1 By creaturely knowledge that is, the knowledge proceeding from a created 
intelligence as its first principle. 

40 



UNITY OF GOD 41 

so mutually interdependent that in proportion to the perfection of 
the organism the nature or activity of each increasingly demands 
and implies those of the others. When life departs the principle of 
unity is removed. The subordinate elements or forces then work 
independently of each other and corruption sets in. Above sentient 
life is thought, and thought is more unifying than sentience. It 
unifies an indefinitely greater number and diversity of elements, 
and their union is far more intimate. The higher, more powerful 
and more deeply penetrating the thought, the wider is the scope 
and the more intimate the nature of its unification. 

It is said to be the essential characteristic of genius to find 
resemblances between things apparently most unlike in other 
words, to unify diverse phenomena by their reduction under 
general laws. A great scientific hypothesis is such a principle of 
unification. Intuition, however, unifies more completely than 
discursive thought. By intuition I mean the intuition of the 
mystic (and in a secondary sense of the artist), not the lower 
intuition, which is blind instinct. 

In like manner a dominant aim in the will unifies by sub 
ordination the minor aims which would otherwise distract and 
divide and so " corrupt " the higher spiritual life. Thus through 
out creation an increased unification of an increased multiplicity 
denotes an increase of reality and a greater perfection. Lowest 
of all is elemental matter, with its external and mutually exclusive 
multiplicity united solely by external interrelation.* In chemical 
combination there is the same externality of parts, but a higher 
unification has been achieved, by the fusion of diverse elements to 
form a compound, which is qualitatively distinct from its com 
ponents, not merely their external sum total. Above this is 
organic life unifying diverse material elements by subordination 
to one nisus. Above that is consciousness, in which a greater multi 
plicity of forces, desires and subject materials is quasi-consciously 
unified by a direction to one end, through an immediate instinctive 
apperception of their relation to that end. Sentience also unites 
subject and object in the act of sense perception. We then rise in 
succession to discursive reason uniting sensation to sensation, idea 
to idea, fact to fact, and framing unifying hypotheses, to rational 
will unifying minor ends by one supreme aim, to artistic intuition, 
vaguely conscious of an ultimate unity which it cannot grasp, and, 
above all these, to mystical intuition which is at once volitional 
and intuitive, apprehending though without clear comprehension 



42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

the Unity of God, and of all things in Him as their ground and 
cause. Thus as the scale of being and its concomitant activity rises 
upward by its increase of content, and of qualitative level, there 
is discovered an ever-increasing unification of an ever-increasing 
multiplicity. The approach to God, both objectively in the scale 
of being itself and subjectively in the apperception of reality by 
creatures capable of psychical action, is thus the way of an ever 
greater unification of an ever fuller manifold. Hence God must 
be the " Absolute " Unity of an infinite manifold, and the Vision 
of God of which mystical intuition is but the obscure beginning 
the perfectly unified apperception of His All-inclusive Unity. 
This notion of a scale of being ascending upwards to the One God 
in proportion to its increasing unification of an increasing manifold 
is corroborated by the teaching of Mr Bradley s philosophy of the 
Absolute. Mr Bradley finds in this increased unification of an 
increased multiplicity a criterion of greater reality. He regards 
the soul as a more adequate presentation of reality than matter, 
because " the relation of unity and multiplicity is not so external 
in the soul-life as in physical nature." But this unification is 
obviously incomplete in human psychology. " Perfect experi 
ence would consist in an all-comprehensive content, unified 
with full consequence and harmony into a whole." 1 This ideal 
multiplicity-in-unity of Mr Bradley is realised in that perfect 
unification in One Simple Unity of an infinite multiplicity, which is 
the Divine Being of Catholic theology. Mr Bradley concludes that 
since we cannot attain to this ideal unification of multiplicity, we 
cannot attain to reality, and hence that our knowledge is confined 
to appearance. This is a truth falsely expressed. Our natural 
knowledge is not indeed of appearance in the sense of the merely 
phenomenal, but it is of a reality which is but unreality and 
appearance by comparison with God the absolute Reality. It is 
also true that our natural knowledge, confined as it is within the 
limits of the finite, of the external multiplicity of sense images and 
distinctive concepts derived therefrom, can never attain to know 
ledge of the nature of the ultimate or absolute Reality that is, of 
the nature of God. It is only by the supernatural elevation of the 
soul, by the light of glory and in a veiled and imperfect manner 
here, by sanctifying grace that we can receive this knowledge of 
God as He is in Himself. 

Mr Bradley s insistence upon the logical need of unification, and 

1 Professor Hoffding on Mr Bradley. Modern Philosophers, pp. 63-64. 



UNITY OF GOD 48 

his application of the principle that unity in multiplicity is the 
criterion of reality, has thus led him to a view of the Absolute 
which is largely coincident with the doctrine of God taught by the 
Catholic mystic. Unhappily, that view is weakened by a con 
clusion which makes the external imperfectly unified multiplicity 
of " Appearance " a necessary and inherent expression of the 
absolute. If, however, the absolute of necessity expresses itself 
by this external multiplicity, that perfect unification which Mr 
Bradley rightly demands is, after all, lacking in his absolute. 
Nevertheless he has done good service in thus emphasising the 
necessity of this unity, since it is a principle of the first importance 
for mystical theology. 

Since the scale of increasing reality is an increasing unification 
of an increasing manifold, so also must it be with our knowledge 
and practical handling of reality. As that knowledge and handling 
penetrate to greater depths of reality and approach closer to the 
ultimate reality, they are increasingly unified alike in object, mode 
and act. Of this I will now give some examples. 

In internal politics the goal of the true statesman is the unifica 
tion, for the common good of society, by co-ordination in view of 
that good, of the multiple activities of individuals, each freely 
developed. In international politics his goal should be the unifica 
tion under one world-wide authority of a multiplicity of sub 
ordinate societies, each of which makes in complete internal 
freedom its peculiar contribution, a contribution which is the fruit 
of its particular history and character, to the commonwealth of 
the world-state and thus to the common good of the human race. 
We may hope with the authors of a stimulating little book, The War 
and Democracy, that such a unification of a multitude of internally 
autonomous states will be at least the ultimate solution of the 
present European problem. The late war was radically due 
to a false patriotism, which aims at the self-realisation of one 
nationality as independent and exclusive of, and therefore as 
opposed to, the full self-realisation of other nationalities. For no 
single nation or race can possibly be the full expression and 
realisation of a civilisation which can only be adequately expressed 
and realised by all its component nationalities and races together. 
Hence to maintain and to work for the realisation of one national 
or racial ideal or culture or character as exclusive of and in opposi 
tion to the ideals, cultures and characters of other nations or races, 
is to maintain, not only what is positive in that national ideal, 



44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

character or culture, but also its limitation : that is, its negation 
of other ideals, characters and cultures. Even if one national 
culture is better than another, it is not identical with that other, 
and therefore the two cultures are richer and contain more positive 
good than the one alone. The unity of man s common good 
demands, therefore, an inclusive patriotism which expresses itself 
in the desire that the patriot s country shall make the largest 
contribution to the common treasury of mankind, not the exclu 
sive patriotism which seeks the lower material welfare of that 
country at the expense of the well-being of other countries : the 
love of one s country as against other countries. This latter 
patriotism is a mischievous illusion, whose fruits are division, 
ignorance, prejudice, suspicion, hatred and suicidal wars. It is a 
limitation and the parent of limitations. The inclusive unity of 
the unlimited demands the former patriotism and wholly rejects 
the latter. Let us hope that the false patriotism which attaches to 
a system of sovereign states and which is a principle either of 
division, exclusion and mutual destruction, or, if one such state 
acquires world-wide supremacy, of a wasteful and barren unifica 
tion, shall in future give place to a world commonwealth of sub 
ordinate states that will include in its unity the greatest possible 
multiplicity. 

Even a very superficial acquaintance with the fluctuations of 
philosophical systems should suffice to bring home the fact that 
the only final and satisfactory philosophy and by philosophy I 
mean the intellectual presentation of human experience as an 
interconnected whole must be a synthesis of all that is positive 
in every interpretation of experience made by the human soul, 
whether of the totality of experience, or of any partial aspect, or 
portion of experience. That synthesis must, for instance, possess 
the unification of Monism without its limitation of God by the 
limitations proper only to finite beings. It must possess that 
sense of the Divine Transcendence which belongs to Agnosticism 
without the refusal of Agnosticism to satisfy the soul s demand 
for immediate experience of ultimate Reality that is, for personal 
communion with God, which is the essence of religion. For this 
refusal really implies that ultimate Reality is infra- not supra- 
personal, and therefore unable to place the soul in such a relation 
ship with itself as that in which one person stands to another. 
Such a philosophy must also admit the self-evident dualism of 
matter and spirit, and that more fundamental dualism of the 



UNITY OF GOD 45 

unlimited Creator and the essentially limited and hence compara 
tively unreal creature. It must, on the other hand, reject a dual 
ism which denies one principle causal, and therefore explanatory, 
of the totality of experience and (by extension) of being. It must 
insist on the discontinuity of the scale and process of evolution, by 
the introduction of new principles and new beginnings. But it 
must ascribe all these new principles and beginnings to one first 
cause and supreme principle, Who manifests aspects of his one 
infinite being in all these, and Who is immanent in the course of 
evolution to produce these new beginnings and introduce these 
new principles while ever remaining infinitely transcendent of 
His creation. Our philosophy must also lay due stress on the 
uniqueness of the individual and on the free will of the rational 
soul, without losing sight of the dependence of the individual on 
his environment, both present and past, and of the solidarity of 
human society, and guarding always a wider consciousness of the 
universe as a whole. It must accept, not only the data of science 
and the logical deductions of the discursive intellect, but the 
intuitive perceptions of art, and the facts of conscience and of 
religious experience. It must utilise all these manifold data of 
human experience, accepting all that is positive in them and reject 
ing the negations arising out of the inadequacy of each partial 
datum or series of data. It will thus harmonise and unify, as far 
as it is possible to do so. It will, however, accept the obvious 
impossibility of any complete unification by our finite under 
standing, whose accessible subject matter is, moreover, so incom 
plete and so narrowly limited. Therefore it will not attempt a 
false harmony by the rejection of any indubitable datum of 
experience. Moreover, when all these data have been accepted, 
such a philosophy will recognise the inadequacy of human experi 
ence and its philosophic interpretation, even at their richest and 
deepest, to satisfy the need of the human soul, which craves a 
fuller knowledge of God and a closer union with Him than her 
unaided and purely natural understanding and activity can 
supply. It will therefore seek a revealed religion and a dis 
pensation of supernatural grace which will fully satisfy this need, 
while at the same time accepting and unifying all the positive 
truth which this most " positive " and synthetic philosophy the 
philosophy of the unlimited must, as we have seen, accept and 
subsume ; in short, a revelation which is a world religion. Such 
a world religion must clearly possess this inclusive unification of 



46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

the greatest possible multiplicity, which is a reflection of the 
divine unity of God. It cannot, however, be a syncretism of all 
existing and future cults, beliefs and purported revelations. Such 
a syncretism would result in the substitution for a number of 
living beliefs, of a philosophical abstraction which would fail to 
provide those concrete objects and aids, faith and worship and 
grace required by the religious sense of man. Moreover, such a 
syncretism would involve the rejection of that very element which 
transcends the natural theology in which our philosophy con 
cluded, but which it found so inadequate. Therefore our syn 
thetic philosophy must look for its religion to some one definite 
religious system of divine revelation, which contains in itself all 
that is positive in every other creed and worship and rejects only 
their limitations and exclusions. If no such revealed religion 
were forthcoming, we should be obliged to fall back on the in 
adequacy of natural theology. Such a religion does, however, 
exist. It is the Catholic religion, which can be shown to be a 
synthesis of all that is positive in all other creeds and worships, 
and which also necessitates and implies a synthetic philosophy of 
the type which I have outlined above. We find, for example, in 
Catholicism a synthesis of monotheism and polytheism, of the 
pantheism of the Upanishads and the transcendence of Moham 
medanism, of sacerdotalism and personal religion, of sacrament- 
alism and mysticism, of communism and individualism. The 
Catholic synthesis reconciles and unifies all these divergent 
elements by rejecting their mutual negations and accepting what 
is positive in all. Catholic theology is the unification of the mani 
fold of religious beliefs and creeds, as any philosophy wholly 
acceptable in her eyes must be the unification of the manifold of 
philosophic systems, and of the data from which they have been 
built up. It is true that Catholic theology does not propose, any 
more than sound philosophy can propose, to provide a perfect 
rational unification of this manifold of positive truths. It is faith, 
not beatific vision. It does, however, accept all positive truths, 
even when it cannot completely harmonise them, and unifies them 
at least potentially by referring all to the Triune God, Who is the 
Absolute Unity of an infinite multiplicity. In any case an in 
complete unification, with a potency and promise of completion 
hereafter, of the entire manifold, that constitutes the totality of 
experience, is preferable to a complete unification of a lesser mani 
fold that is but a portion of that totality : a unification artificially 



UNITY OF GOD 47 

attained by the acceptance of certain data only of experience, to 
the exclusion of other data. Moreover, as our union with God 
increases, we enjoy an increasing perception of the ultimate unity 
of dogma and of experience in their first principle, the unity of 
God, the revealer of dogma, the cause and ground of experience. 
This synthetic character of the Catholic Faith is surely the most 
cogent proof of its Divine origin and of its faithful representation 
of the absolute unity of infinite variety which is the Being of God. 
This universality of Catholicism has indeed never been perfectly 
actualised, nor can it be until and unless the Church comes into 
vital contact with all the civilisations, philosophies and religions 
of mankind. For the Catholic synthesis, the unification by 
Catholicism and the philosophy which it presupposes, of the entire 
manifold of all religious and metaphysical truths, indeed, of 
experience as a whole, is not a static reality already completed 
once for all. 1 It is, on the contrary, a living, organic growth a 
growth due, not to further revelations, but to an increase of the 
human experience and its scientific explanation which interpret 
and develop the body of truth once for all revealed to the Apostles, 
and which that revelation in turn interprets and unifies. We 
cannot therefore finally acquiesce in the present divorce between 
the Catholic religion and secular thought and culture. It is 
surely undeniable that Catholicism attained in the mediaeval 
synthesis the fullest, widest and richest of presentation hitherto 
achieved. In that synthesis every branch of human knowledge 
and art was made subservient to the understanding and explica 
tion of the Catholic revelation. From the Renaissance onwards 
secular culture speculation and art alike has been increasingly 
dominated by a naturalistic humanist immanental and therefore 
this-worldly, anti-supernatural and anti-religious tendency. This 
tendency is now so far triumphant that transcendental, other 
worldly religion, and especially its most complete representative, 
the Catholic Faith, has been driven from the main current of our 
European civilisation into its backwaters. Every province of 
secular life, speculation and art has been wrested in turn from the 
empire of religion. All branches of human activity and specula 
tion now find their end no longer in eternity, but in time, no longer 

1 Nevertheless there is a very important static element in Catholicism unlike 
in this the trend of modern thought which is one-sidedly dynamic. A revealed 
dogma can never be set aside as false, nor can its fully ratified development be 
rejected. (See my Apologetics, sec. 15.) 



48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

in God, but in man, no longer in the supernatural, but in mere 
nature. On the other hand, the living presentation of Catholi 
cism has lost enormously in scope and wealth through lack of the 
stimulation and material of secular culture. A narrowness of 
outlook, a lack of sympathy for all that is good outside the Church, 
an excessive suspicion of all novelty, even at times a dislike of art 
and speculation as such, have inevitably marked the spirit of 
counter-Reformation as opposed to pre-Reformation Catholicism. 1 
Now it may perhaps be as the late Mgr. Benson imagined it 
in his gloomy novel, The Lord of the World -that the anti- 
supernaturalist tendency will attain an almost complete triumph 
and culminate in the full revelation of Antichrist that is, of pure 
naturalism as opposed to the supernatural in the great apostasy 
and thus in the Second Coming of Our Lord. If, however, this is 
not the case, and many records of past disappointment warn us 
against too confident an expectation of an imminent parousia, 
then the naturalist tide must inevitably turn. The human soul 
can never be finally satisfied with the creature, because the 
creature is essentially limited and the soul needs the unlimited 
the infinite. At the epoch of Our Saviour s birth naturalism was 
also dominant a dominance expressed in the entire structure and 
life of the Roman Empire. Then, as to-day, the achievements 
and possibilities of man, the reality and sufficiency of the material, 
or, at least, of the purely natural, overshadowed and dimmed, 
for the imagination at least, the spiritual and the Divine. Some 
three to four hundred years passed by, and lo ! the emperors and 
the great ones of the earth listen in reverence to the teachings of 
desert hermits and pillar ascetics the extremest representatives 
of the supernatural and the transcendent. But the movement 
did not end with this conquest of the immanental and the natural 
by the transcendental and the supernatural. A higher synthesis 
had yet to be accomplished, wherein the positive truth and value 
of the former should be incorporated into and utilised by the latter. 
Natural philosophy and culture had scarcely been vanquished 
by the supernatural revelation than they were accepted by it as its 
faithful servants, by whose aid alone its own wealth and depth of 
truth could be fully manifested. The Alexandrine fathers first, 
and later the pseudo-Dionysius and St Augustine, who largely 
incorporated Plato and Neoplatonism, began this synthesis, 

1 The fuller mediaeval Catholicism continued in Spain until after the sixteenth 
century, as is evident in St Teresa and St John of the Cross and in Mother Cecilia. 



UNITY OF GOD 49 

which was completed by the scholastic Christianisation of Aristotle 
itself but a part of that wider synthesis of Catholicism and 
Graeco-Roman civilisation which constituted medievalism. Since 
the Renaissance another cycle of history has begun. We have 
again the thesis of pure naturalism. Unless the end come we 
shall assuredly have the antithesis of a reaction to supernatural- 
ism and the final synthesis of both tendencies. 1 Indeed, as before, 
the commencement of the synthesis must be in part concomitant 
with the antithesis. The Alexandrine fathers began their work 
before the second century of Christianity had passed, and a 
century earlier St John had utilised the Platonic-Philonian con 
ception of the Logos. So must it be now at this return of the 
cycle. The stream of secular philosophy and literature must be 
reunited with the stream of Catholic Faith and its development. 
We cannot believe, for example, that Spinoza and Locke, Berkeley 
and Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, Eucken and Bergson, or 
again that Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Wagner, Words 
worth and Shelley, Ibsen and Maeterlinck, or yet again that 
Newton and Laplace, Darwin and Kelvin, Haeckel and Huxley, 
Charcot and Freud have nothing to contribute to the develop 
ment and the enrichment of that increasingly fuller and wider 
presentation of reality, which is utilised and unified by the Catholic 
revelation. It is no doubt true that we cannot substitute Kantism 
or Hegelianism or indeed any other of the post -Renaissance philo 
sophies, for scholasticism, as the most adequate metaphysical 
expression and instrument of Catholicism. Indeed the attempt 
at a " Catholic Kantism " has been officially condemned. The 
reason, however, is that these systems are essentially limited and 
one-sided interpretations of experience harmonised artificially by 
the rejection of indubitable data of that experience. Scholasti 
cism, on the contrary, accepts frankly the totality of experience. 
Hence in principle scholasticism will be permanent, as against 
these later, more limited systems.* The religion of the unlimited 
cannot accept as adequate a philosophy of the limited. But the 
scholastic synthesis will be indefinitely expanded and modified by 
the incorporation of the positive truth contributed by these partial 
philosophies. 

Among the ancient philosophies the monistic system of the 
Stoics could not be accepted by the Church to the degree in which 

1 My use of Hegelian terminology does not imply a Hegelian conception of 
reality as a whole. 



50 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

Aristotelianism, Platonism and Neoplatonism were accepted. 
Nevertheless the presence in scholasticism of an element of Stoic 
provenance is indubitable. May we not expect to find in the neo- 
scholasticism of the future elements similarly derived from the 
philosophies of e.g. Kant and Hegel, although such philosophies 
must ever remain, as a whole, unacceptable, on account of their 
intrinsic limitations. Such elements might conceivably be, in the 
case of Kant, his insistence on the supreme value of the argument 
from conscience to the existence of God, beyond that of the Onto- 
logical, Cosmological and Teleological arguments, though we 
cannot follow him in his denial of all value to these latter. From 
Hegelianism might be accepted the conception I have myself 
utilised above of the cycle of thesis, antithesis and synthesis as a 
law of historical progress. Thus should Neoscholasticism be 
scholastic in its fundamental principles, which are the permanent 
elements, the fundamental constituents of human experience ; in 
its detailed teaching largely affected by modern anti-scholastic 
philosophies. All that there is of positive truth in the phil 
osophies and in the various branches of science developed by the 
naturalist trend of the past few centuries will be built into the 
Catholic philosophy of the future. The new synthesis will doubt 
less owe a far greater debt to the discoveries of modern physical 
science than to the speculations of modern philosophy, since the 
modern age has been the golden age, not of metaphysics, but 
of the natural sciences. So shall we attain a presentation of 
Catholicism that will be indefinitely fuller and richer than was 
even the presentation of the thirteenth century, a synthesis more 
adequate than any yet reached by human thought. Catholicism 
will achieve the unification of a manifold enormously more various, 
more complex and more extensive than that which was unified 
by the schoolmen. 1 In this progressive unification of an ever- 
increasing manifold Catholicism will, both in itself and through 
its subordinate philosophy and culture, ever more and more fully 

1 This can, of course, only be accomplished by the careful maintenance and 
frank teaching of the entire deposit of revealed dogmas. No portion of this 
deposit ^.g. eternal punishment and diabolic possession, and in ethics the 
absolute indissolubility of marriage can be denied, explained away, or practically 
ignored in order to suit the passing exclusions and imitations of contemporary 
thought and feeling, in the name of a false charity. The divinely unlimited 
cannot admit of these human limits. I would add that by eternal punishment I 
understand a final self-exclusion from supernatural union with God, together with 
the consequences that follow of necessity from that exclusion. (For diabolic 
possession see Appendix to Chapter VIII.) 



UNITY OF GOD 51 

manifest the unity of infinite multiplicity which is the nature of 
its Divine Author the unlimited and therefore all-inclusive God. 

Nevertheless the present existence in Catholicism of this 
potential unification indeed, its partial actualisation is a 
conviction which the study of other religious and philosophic 
systems brings home ever more strongly. 

Thus in the development of society, both civil and religious, 
and of philosophy and theology, the law of progress is the increas 
ing unification of an increasing multiplicity. But the law of 
progress is the law of Godward ascent. The most perfect social 
organisation, the most complete philosophic system, and the true 
revelation in its fullest development,, are in their several kinds the 
closest possible approximations to the Divine life and Nature, 
because they contain the maximum of positive being, and that is 
the maximal participation of His Being. Thus the most perfect 
unification possible of the greatest multiplicity is the fullest 
participation and reflection of God. Therefore God the Ultimate 
Reality must be Himself the perfect Unity of an Infinite Multi 
plicity. We have reached this conclusion by the consideration 
both of the scale of created being and of the nature of human 
activity and speculation. In both the same law was found to be 
operative. We shall now attempt to reach the same conclusion 
from a more narrowly ontological standpoint. 

We have already seen that the positive being of the creature is 
in God eminently, being a reproduction of His Being under one 
aspect. As such the positive being of one creature cannot exclude 
the positive being of another, since both are ultimately aspects of 
One Absolutely Simple Being, the Being of God. In proportion, 
therefore, as we perceive the positive being of creatures in its 
ground, apart from the limitations of its finite creaturely embodi 
ment, we see this positive being as one throughout, a representa 
tion and manifestation of the One Divine Being. For the external 
multiplicity of creatures is due to their negative distinction, 
whereby one being is not another ; is constituted, not by their 
positive being, but by their creaturely negation or limitation of 
being. When, therefore, that negation is transcended, their 
positive being is seen as one in God, their mutually exclusive 
distinction disappearing with the limitation which gave it birth 
in that Divine all-positive Ground of their being. Hence in 
mystical intuition the many are seen as one aspects of one, 
positively, not negatively, distinct, the positive being of one not 



52 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

excluding but including the positive being of the others. The 
one is a harmony and the many the notes that compose it. More 
over God, since He is the Fulness of Being, without negation or 
limitation of any kind, must be without the external multiplicity, 
the negative distinction inherent in the creature as such. He is thus 
altogether One, the Absolute Unity, the Perfect unification of an 
infinite manifold that is without negative distinction or mutual 
externality. He is The One in Whom is All, and in Whom All is 
One. This Absolute Unity of the Godhead, embracing in its 
all-inclusive unity the positive being of the external manifold of 
creatures, a manifold thus unified in its Divine Ground and Source, 
has been well expressed by Dante in the Patadiso, when he says 
of the beatific vision : 

Nel suo profondo vidi che s interna 
Legato con amore in un volume 
cio che per 1 universo se squaderna 
Sustenzia ed accident! e lor costume 
quasi conflati insieme per tal modo 
che ci6 ch io dico e un semplice lume. 

Par., xxxiii. 85. 

"Within its depths " (i.e. of the Deity) "I saw ingathered, bound 
by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe ; 
substance and accidents and their relations, as though together 
fused, after such fashion that what I tell of is one simple flame " 
(Trs. Temple Classics). Theologians express this Unity of God by 
saying that He is each of His attributes. St John of the Cross 
dwells on this doctrine in the third stanza*of The Living Flame of 
Love. He there says : " We must remember that God, in His one 
simple Being, is all the virtues and grandeurs of His attributes. 
. . . Since He is all these things in His simple Being, when He is 
united with the soul ... it sees distinctly in Him all these 
virtues and grandeurs, such, for example, as omnipotence, wisdom, 
goodness and mercy. As each one of these is the very Being of 
God in one Person, either Father, Son or Holy Ghost, each attri 
bute is God Himself." Mother Cecilia also speaks, in her treatise 
on the Union of the Soul with God, of the " measureless abyss 
which is Our God, wherein there is no variety or diversity of things 
but a most simple unity in His Divine Being, for the entire 
Being of God is a most pure and infinite substance, in whose unity 
all differences are embraced and in Him are made life and pure 
substance." The Unity of God is thus the Perfect Identity of 



UNITY OF GOD 53 

His attributes. But the Divine attributes themselves include 
their subordinate ideas and forms which, when externalised by 
the Creative Will, are the positive being of creatures. Hence the 
Unity of God unifies, as we have seen, the manifold of created 
being. Moreover, since the Divine Being is infinite, it also 
embraces and unifies a literally infinite multiplicity of possible 
being. The Divine Unity is therefore the very opposite of that 
bare and abstract oneness which the mystics from Plotinus down 
wards have often been accused of substituting for the manifold of 
human experience. (See the following chapter.) The Supreme 
Unity is the unity of infinite multiplicity not the negation of 
multiplicity. The Absolute Being of God is not One because It 
abstracts from differences and is bare, abstract existence, for 
this would be the minimal reality, but because Its Infinite 
Fulness unifies all differences. " The entire Being of God is a 
most pure and infinite substance, in Whose unity all differences 
are embraced and in Him are made life and pure substance." l 
For, as we saw above, the limitations inherent in the created being 
of diverse creatures are absent, so that they are no longer mutually 
exclusive. St John of the Cross expresses this truth by saying 
that in God there are no modes. By mode he means a limited 
aspect or quality of being distinct and ultimately distinguishable 
from other aspects and qualities. For in God all aspects of His 
infinite Being, though distinguished by our inadequate and 
limited concepts, are not really distinct, but are identical with 
His One Simple Essence. Therefore does St John say that in 
God there are no modes that is, separate aspects for such modes 
belong essentially to the external, mutually exclusive multiplicity 
of finite creatures. God the Object of mysticism is thus the One 
Who contains and makes one in His perfect Unity an infinite 
multiplicity, that is only to an infinitesimal degree represented 
in His creation. 

How God is Absolute Unity and Simplicity and nevertheless 
contains in Himself an infinite variety, is beyond our comprehen 
sion. Why it must be so I have attempted to indicate in this 
chapter. The mystic, however, perceives in his intuition the fact 
of this Unity, though not its manner.* 

The Immanence of God may be regarded as the starting-point 
of mysticism, and His Unity as the way. The goal is His Trans 
cendence, to which the following chapter will be devoted. 

1 Mother Cecilia, Union of the Soul with Cod. 



APPENDIX TO CHAPTER III 

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DIVINE 
UNITY AS THE GROUND OF THE UNITY OF CREATION 

SINCE God is the sole unification of created multiplicity, it is clear 
that no created principle will provide that complete unification 
which would be the unitary explanation of experience as a 
whole. We find in experience various planes of being which 
interact and are interrelated, planes constituted by different 
principles of being. There is, for example, the plane of mass and 
energy that is, of mechanism the plane of vegetable life, the 
plane of sentience and the plane of intelligence, with its correlative 
free will. Science and metaphysics have attempted in vain to 
secure a unification of experience by the reduction of these diverse 
planes or principles to one plane or principle e.g. to explain the 
entire cycle of phenomena by mechanical energy, by life or by 
thought. This has proved a failure. One plane cannot be 
explained in terms of another. The existence of more than one 
principle or plane must be admitted. If, however, these planes 
are regarded as ultimate, we are unable to account for their inter 
actions and combinations. To maintain this is to deny the 
possible existence of any ultimate unity and therefore of any 
ultimate intelligibility of experience. We must therefore posit 
an ultimate principle of unity lying beyond and above these 
created principles the common ground and unification of them 
all. This must be either a common being, self -manifested in these 
diverse planes, which are aspects of this being, or a transcendent 
Being containing these principles eminently in Himself. The 
former alternative is taught by Pantheism, the latter by Theism. 
My intention here is not to discuss the arguments for and against 
these rival unifications but, taking theism for the true alterna 
tive to point out that in God alone can we obtain the unification 
necessary to a complete explanation of experience. 1 From this 

1 Science having failed to explain phenomena by one principle alone has no 
ground for denying the possibility that the ultimate principle that transcends and 
causes the others the Divine Creator can intervene in the series of phenomena 

54 



APPENDIX TO CHAPTER III 55 

we conclude (1) that, since the Divine Being as He is in Himself is 
unknowable by our earthly knowledge (see the following chapter), 
we cannot hope to attain a complete rational explanation of 
experience ; (2) that since we can apprehend God by faith or 
mystical intuition, we can obtain a certain knowledge that such a 
unification does exist ; hence that experience is wholly intelligible 
in itself, though only partially intelligible by human reason. We 
can and, as we shall see later, do attain a sense of the ultimate 
unity of experience, although we cannot comprehend that unity. 
Moreover, since God is thus the sole principle of complete unifica 
tion, religion must always possess an epistemological value. God 
is the epistemological unification, because He is the ontological 
Unity. 

among the created principles which there interact, Miracles are therefore possible. 
If in other ages the autonomy of natural science required vindication, to-day the 
most urgent necessity is the vindication of the autonomy of theology, metaphysics, 
ethics, and of certain aspects of psychology menaced with servitude to the prin 
ciples and methods of physical science. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 

/ see a mighty darkness 
Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom 
Dart round, as light from the meridian sun, 
Ungazed upon and shapeless ; neither limit, 
Nor form, nor outline ; yet we feel it is 
A living spirit. 

SHELLEY, 

Prometheus Unbound, Act II., sc. 4. 

Yen el monte nada. 

FINITE being is, as we saw, constituted by two elements, a positive 
element, which is the external reproduction of some aspect of the 
Divine Being, and a negative element, whereby it is finite and 
dependent being. This essential finitude, this negative element, 
renders finite and relative being infinitely distant from the Infinite 
and Absolute Being of God. God infinitely transcends creatures. 
They are related to Him as their cause, ground and conserver. 
He is not related to them, else He would be conditioned by them, 
and to some degree dependent on them. This would involve 
some being possessed in common by Himself and them, the ground 
of this mutual relationship. This common being would be a 
summum genus of which He and they are species a common 
category to which He and they are reducible. Such reduction 
under a common category would mean that God was not Absolute 
and Infinite Being but relative to the creation, as belonging to 
a common category with it, and finite because there would be 
some other being outside Himself that possessed existence as He 
possesses it, and by its existence added to the sum of being. God 
would thus be a part of a larger whole, which whole would be 
greater than He, its part. It would moreover result from such 
relationship of God to creatures that the ground of such relation 
ship the common being or category, uniting both terms, was 
itself the Absolute God but a subordinate deity. We should 

56 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 57 

further have to inquire whether this absolute were Itself related to 
God and the created universe, and should thus be brought to an 
infinite regress. Therefore God cannot be related to creation. 1 
Nor do creatures share with God the common category of being. 
On the contrary, created being, as compared with the Absolute 
Being of God, is sheer not-being, or, if we consider created being 
as being, then in that sense of being God is not, is, as certain 
mystics have said, nothing. From the pseudo-Dionysius on 
wards mystical theology has dwelt much on this Divine Trans 
cendence and on its consequence that our knowledge of God is 
negative, rather than positive, a knowledge rather of what He is 
not than of what He is. Indeed, it is a dictum of theology that 
we can know that God is but not what He is. 2 In his Mystical 
Theology Dionysius takes all the grades of being in order, from 
matter to spirit, and points out that God is none of these. " We 
say, then," he writes, " that the Cause of all, which is above all," 
has not " shape, nor form, nor quality, nor quantity, nor bulk nor 
is in a place nor is seen nor has sensible contact nor perceives, 
nor is perceived, by the senses, nor has disorder and confusion as 
being vexed by earthly passions . . . neither is It, nor has It, 
change or decay, or division, or deprivation, or flux or any other 
of the objects of sense. ... It is neither soul, nor mind, nor has 
imagination, nor opinion, nor reason, nor conception, neither is 
expressed, nor conceived ; neither is number, nor order, nor great 
ness, nor littleness ; nor equality, nor inequality ; nor similarity, 
nor dissimilarity ; neither is standing, nor moving ; nor at rest ; 
neither has power, nor is power, nor light ; neither lives, nor is 
life ; neither is essence, nor eternity, nor time ; neither is Its touch 
intelligible, neither is It science, nor truth ; nor kingdom, nor 
wisdom ; neither one nor oneness ; neither Deity nor Goodness ; 
nor is It Spirit according to our understanding ; nor Sonship nor 
Paternity, nor any other thing of those known to us or to any other 
existing being ; neither is It any of non-existing nor of existing 
things, nor do things existing know It as It is ; ... neither is 
there expression of it, nor name nor knowledge " (Mystical The 
ology, chap. iv. 5. Trs. Parker). This doctrine is not agnosticism 

1 See Hoffding, Philosophy of Religion, p. 42. Professor Hoffding seems to 
regard such relationship as involved in the theistic doctrine of creation and 
attacks the doctrine on the basis of that misconception. 

a This remains true despite qualifications attempted by St Thomas in certain 
passages. 



58 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

because it is based on the knowledge that God is the cause of all 
creatures. The agnostic does not know, if there be a first cause 
distinct from creation. Even if there be such a cause, the agnostic 
is ignorant, whether it may not be more akin to the lower forms of 
created being than to the higher. The mystic knows that the 
first cause must be above, not below " His highest effects." We 
have seen already that by the doctrine of Immanence God is 
affirmed to possess eminently all the positive being of creatures, 
and therefore that the more of positive being they possess the 
closer they resemble God. The doctrine of Transcendence supple 
ments this teaching by pointing out that while the positive being 
of creatures is in God (in the sense explained above), their limita 
tion, which is the ground of their exclusive distinction, of their 
particularity, is not in Him. No created being, therefore, whether 
material or spiritual, can adequately represent God or possess 
being in the sense in which He is. For created being is essentially 
limited and therefore exclusively distinct or particular. The 
higher it is the less limited it is but it is always, and must essenti 
ally be, limited ; and by its limitation exclusive of other beings. 
God, therefore, being unlimited and inclusive of all being, is in 
finitely more unlike any creature than He is like it. He is there 
fore unintelligible because all concepts or images are essentially 
finite and He essentially infinite. Another reason why no concept 
is applicable to God is this. As Professor Hoffding truly points 
out : " It is a fundamental law of all our concepts that they 
express relations . . . and therefore that no concept can be 
formed of a something which stands in no relation to any other 
something" (Philosophy of Religion, p. 69). Therefore the 
Absolute, which is unrelated to anything outside Itself, is beyond 
all concepts. This reason is reducible to the former. What is 
related is limited by its relationship. A relation is a limit. There 
fore our concepts, which always express or imply relationship, are 
inapplicable to the Unlimited. Therefore Ultimate Reality, the 
Unlimited, cannot be represented conceptually by a logically co 
herent concept, or conceptual system, but only by series of para 
doxes. (See pp. 30-31. ) Hence agnostics infer that we can have no 
knowledge whatever of Ultimate Reality. For modern agnosti 
cism and positivism are based on the assumption that it is un 
reasonable to believe that which we cannot show to be logically 
coherent. This assumption is, however, false. We have not, we 
cannot possibly have, sufficient knowledge of Ultimate Reality, 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 59 

nor, indeed, even of ultimate created reality, to give a logically 
coherent account of its nature. We cannot attain a logically 
coherent conception of the nature of matter or force or life or 
knowledge or the human soul indeed, of any pure or elemental 
substance, but only of their effects, compositions 1 and relationships. 
That is to say, we cannot comprehend pure or elemental substances, 
but only their operations, compounds and relations. Thus even 
our own soul is incomprehensible. How then can we expect to 
attain a logically coherent conception of the Divine Being that is 
the Ultimate Reality ? How can we hope to comprehend God ? 
" By what understanding," asks St Augustine, " shall man com 
prehend God when He comprehendeth not his very intellect, 
whereby he would fain comprehend Him ? (Aug. de Trin., v., 
sec. 2. Quoted by Pusey in note 1, Confessions, vii. 2). Never 
theless we have knowledge of created elemental substances and 
of our own soul. For their being is evident, the most evident of 
realities, despite our impotence to comprehend them. In like 
manner we can know that God is, albeit we cannot comprehend at 
all His Nature. Nay, we know of Him that He must necessarily 
be incomprehensible, a Being of whom it is beyond the power of 
our understanding to give a logically coherent account. More 
over, as we have seen, we do know that Ultimate Reality cannot 
be without certain characters, must be above, not below, the 
highest dependent and created being, more, not less, than our 
highest object of knowledge. We know also that it must be free 
from the limits of beings lower and less real than Itself, and that 
since the highest, most spiritual of these is the least limited by the 
others, the Supreme Being must be altogether unlimited, uncon 
ditioned by and independent of aught outside Itself. Therefore 
they can be neither a portion nor a necessary manifestation of 
Ultimate Reality. This knowledge is, however, as was pointed 
out in the introductory chapter, the affirmation of theism in 
opposition to atheism, agnosticism and pantheism. To reject 
this knowledge and its consequent theism because we cannot 
form a logically coherent concept of the Deity thus affirmed is 
unreasonable, and would be unreasonable even if revelation 
and mystical intuition were entirely wanting. The " agnosia " 
of the Christian mystic is far removed from this irrationally 
negative agnosticism or more truly negative gnosticism. The 

1 1 refer to our ability to reduce compounds to their constitutent elements. 
Such analysis is a conception of their character qua composition. 



60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

Unknowable of Dionysius known only in " ignorance " (agnosia) 
is thus by no means identical with the unknowable of modern 
agnostics.* The mystic, unlike the agnostic, knows that every 
created perfection that is, all the positive being of creatures is in 
God that He is infinitely more than they. He knows therefore 
that in Him we shall find not only all the positive content of our 
highest ideals but also an infinite excess. Since our highest ideals 
are essentially limited, their fulfilment would be the limited, the 
exhaustible. But, as we shall see, there is in human nature 
and this is the basis of all true religion a need of the infinite, of 
the inexhaustible. 1 The doctrine of the Divine Transcendence 
guarantees the fulfilment of this desire to all whom God raises to 
that fruition of Himself which is above conceptual knowledge. It 
also involves the practical consequence that the way of approach 
to God is progressive detachment from the limitations of creatures, 
of the particular of images and concepts in naked adherence to 
the unlimited and unintelligible Being of God. This doctrine of 
the Divine Transcendence is taught by St John of the Cross in 
numerous passages. " The whole creation, compared with the 
infinite Being of God, is nothing. . . . All the beauty of the 
creation, in comparison with the infinite beauty of God, is supreme 
deformity. All the goodness of the whole world together, in 
comparison with the infinite goodness of God, is wickedness rather 
than goodness. All the wisdom of the world, and all human 
cunning, compared with the infinite wisdom of God, is simple and 
supreme ignorance " (Ascent of Mount Carmel, Bk I., chap. iv). 
" Among all creatures, the highest and the lowest, there is not one 
that unites us proximately with God, or that bears any likeness 
to His substance. For though it be true that all creatures bear 
a certain relation to God and are tokens of His being, some more, 
some less, according as their being is more or less essential " (i.e. as 
it is less negative and limited), " yet there is no proportion between 
them and Him ; yea, rather the distance between His Divine 
Nature and their nature is infinite. Hence it is impossible for the 
understanding to attain perfectly unto God, by means of created 
things, whether of heaven or of earth, because there is no propor 
tion of similitude between them. ... All that the understanding 
may comprehend, all that the will may be satisfied with, and all 

1 I mean, of course, subjectively. The Christian religion is not, as the modern 
ist would have it, the creation of this need. It is its satisfaction by a special 
Divine interposition from without. 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 61 

that the imagination may conceive, is most unlike unto God, and 
most disproportionate to Him " (Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book II., 
chap. viii). " He that will draw near and unite himself unto God 
must believe that He is. That is saying in effect, he that will 
attain to the union of God must not rely on his own understanding 
nor lean upon his own imagination, sense or feeling " (for these 
are of necessity limited and therefore negative of being, as well as 
positive of it), " but must believe in the Divine Essence (which 
is absolutely positive and therefore) not cognisable by the under 
standing, desire or imagination nor any sense of man " (because 
all these essentially involve limitation or negation). " Yea, in 
this life " (when as yet we lack the peculiar communication of 
God s infinite self-knowledge which is the beatific vision, and are 
dependent on finite modes of knowledge) " our highest knowledge 
and deepest sense, perception and understanding of God is infinitely 
distant from that which He is " (Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book II., 
chap. iv). "All these forms are never represented so as to be 
laid hold of but under certain modes and limitations ; and the 
Divine Wisdom . . . admits of no such particular modes or forms, 
neither can it be comprehended under any limitation or distinct 
particular conception, because it is all pureness and simplicity. . . . 
God is not comprehended under any form or image or particular 
conception " (Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book II., chap. xvi). 

This doctrine is stated more clearly still in the second chapter 
of the Treatise of the Obscure Knowledge of God, a treatise, be it 
remembered, possibly the work of St John of the Cross himself. 
This passage is of the utmost importance and value and, indeed, 
summarises the entire doctrine of mystical negation. " Accord 
ing to the teaching of St Dionysius and other saints, there are two 
different manners of contemplation, for there are two ways of 
attaining knowledge of God. One of these is by affirmation. We 
attribute to God those things which are perfections in the creature." 
That is, we know that all that is positive being in the creature 
is in Him but in another way without the limitations of the 
creature and therefore with an infinite transcendence. " For 
instance we contemplate God as infinitely good, wise, powerful, 
merciful and the like. In the same way we ascribe to Him all the 
other things that are perfections in the creature. In this con 
templation we ascend, as it were, by degrees from the perfection 
of the effects to the perfection of the cause." In this way is 
excluded modern agnosticism, which admits the possibility that 



62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

the cause of personal spirit is an impersonal, unconscious force 
far less positive and less real than the effect. " The other way is 
negative. We set aside the contemplation of the perfections of 
creatures and consider how inferior they are to the Creator. We 
thus ascend to contemplate in God a Being so incomprehensible, 
so superior to and so far excelling all that can be imagined, that 
we can find no created name that will suffice to describe Him." 
Observe that this negative way is the complement of the other 
God is all the positivity of creatures, is not their essential negativity. 
Thus this negative way is really ultra-positive it denies nothing of 
God except limitation which is non-entity. This point cannot be 
urged too strongly, since the failure to understand it is the root of all 
the attacks on mysticism, alike its theory and its practice. " In this 
way we attain indeed to a knowledge of God, but we do not know 
Him as a substance, or as goodness, or as wisdom, or as mercy " 
and so on. " For this way consists in denying of God any attribute 
or perfection whatsoever, to whose knowledge we can attain." * The 
emphasis lies on the qualification. We deny the attribute as 
knowable by our essentially limited knowledge. " This knowledge 
is therefore called knowledge by negation or privation, because we 
proceed by denying of God everything that we attributed to Him 
in the affirmative way." NOT of course in the sense in which 
we affirmed it which w r ould be a contradiction but by denying 
the limitations. The terms employed by mystical writers as in 
this text before us and in the precedent text from Dionysius seem 
indeed to imply absolute negation. This language, however, is 
employed to bring home the fact that the distance between our 
limited concepts even the highest and most spiritual and the 
unlimited Being of God, is infinite. " We say that God is not 
being, because He is more than being, not wisdom, because He is 
more than wisdom, not goodness, because He is more than good 
ness, and more than any other perfection. In fine, we come to 
understand Him as something that exceeds all the sensible, all the 
imaginable and all the intelligible, that is indeed above every 
thing, that has being. The latter way of knowing God is higher 
and more perfect than the former, as St Dionysius tells us, and 
Pope St Gregory also, who says : " Then may we say with truth 
that we have knowledge of God, when we understand that we can 
know nothing of God, and when we realise most clearly His in 
comprehensibility, which, because of its infinite splendour, is 
invisible and impenetrable in this life " (chap. ii). 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 63 

We must remember, however, that while the majority of our 
concepts are essentially limited or closed that is to say, all con 
cepts of material being and concepts essentially expressive of 
created spiritual being there are certain which are not thus closed. 
The primary ideas, such as being, unity, goodness, truth and 
beauty, are not concepts limited and therefore strictly definable. 
They express something absolutely positive, which admits of 
infinite degrees of fulness. They are like clues whose end we hold 
in our hand, but which extend altogether beyond our grasp or 
even vision. When they are understood, or rather used in this 
unlimited manner, as unclosed or incomplete concepts, they are 
predicable of God formally that is, not as merely contained 
eminently in God, but as being true of Him, as they are in them 
selves. But of course, when used thus as unclosed concepts, they 
are themselves transcendent of all limits and created understand 
ing. We have, for example, a considerable knowledge of the 
nature of created goodness. Infinite or absolute goodness is 
transcendent and incomprehensible. These fundamental ideas, 
however, when taken as limited or closed concepts, may be under 
stood in two ways. They may be understood of the maximal 
degree of their presence conceivable by our understanding, or 
they may be understood of their minimal presence as the lowest 
common denominator, so to speak, of all the things that partici 
pate at all in them, a bare minimum attainable by abstraction from 
all these concrete participators. Thus, for instance, goodness 
may be understood of the greatest goodness conceivable by us, or 
of the minimal degree of goodness that is common to all things 
that are in any way good the bare goodness which we obtain by 
abstraction from all good things. In either case they are no more 
predicable of God formally than are the concepts and images of 
material objects, or other essentially closed concepts. Unhappily, 
there has often been a confusion between the unclosed use of these 
ideas, their unlimited fulness, which is predicable formally of God, 
and the abstract minimal that is almost nonentity and is therefore 
all but the opposite pole to the Divine Being. Neoplatonic 
speculation, whether pagan or Christian, never freed itself from 
this confusion, from Plotinus downwards to Marsilio Ficino. It 
has resulted in endless obscurity, self-contradiction and barren 
logomachy. Hence a prejudice has arisen against mysticism as 
substituting an empty abstraction for the fulness of the Divine 
Being and Life. This substitution was never really made by 



64 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

these mystics or mystical philosophers. It is clear that their 
philosophy is based upon and leads up to an intuition of the 
supreme Reality, as the unlimited fulness of the positive being 
contained in ultimate ideas, such as Unity, Goodness and 
Being. They often, however, seek to justify this intuition by 
arguments which are guilty of illicit transition, from the unclosed 
fulness to the abstract minimal, from goodness absolute to abstract 
goodness, from the supreme Unification to barren oneness, from 
fulness of Being to being in the abstract without content, from 
Being unqualifiable, because containing eminently all qualities, 
to being unqualifiable because every quality has been abstracted 
from it. A very good example of this intellectual confusion 
is exhibited by Marsilio Ficino s commentary .on Dionysius. 
Language encourages it and the baneful prejudices thence arising. 
I trust, however, that it is now well out of our way and will no 
longer hinder our appreciation of the true doctrine of trans 
cendence first plainly formulated by this Neoplatonic school of 
" mystology " the doctrine which this chapter attempts to 
explain. Though the ideas which can be used thus unclosed are 
our nearest conceptual approaches to God, and their realisation 
our nearest actual approaches to Him, nevertheless, even when 
they are conceived or realised even in the higher closed manner as 
the maximum conceivable by our thought or practicable by our 
efforts, they are infinitely inadequate to the intuition-union of 
Him in Whom alone the human understanding and will find their 
last end and complete satisfaction. 

It follows from the doctrine of the Divine transcendence that 
theological statements are true rather positively than negatively. 
Every theological term or statement is of necessity finite and 
therefore inadequate to express the Infinite God. " Low, defec 
tive and improper," says St John of the Cross, " are all the words 
and phrases by which in this life we discuss Divine things, and 
utterly impossible (it is) by any natural means ... to know 
and consider of them as they are (Dark Night, ii. 17). Never 
theless, in so far as a statement or term is positive that is, in so far 
as it affirms being and denies limitation, which is absence of being 
it is true. We cannot, however, get rid of the finite and therefore 
limiting and negative element in the statement or term. We 
therefore use it, without thereby binding ourselves to this nega 
tive element, and we posit complementary terms and statements 
which deny the negation of the first term or statement. All 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 65 

heresy is the attempt to insist n the truth of some theological 
statement in an exclusive sense maintaining the truth, not only 
of its positive assertion but of that seeming denial of other aspects 
of the truth which its finite character compels. All statements 
of theological truth in human language are like comets whose 
orbit is not closed. As the path of these comets is distinct and 
clear when it approaches the sun, so are these dogmatic statements 
definite and intelligible while they are within the sphere of human 
reason , that is, in so far as they are concerned with facts falling 
within the sphere of human experience, 1 or employ analogies 
drawn from that experience. When, however, the astronomer 
tracks the comet s departing orbit farther and farther, it is lost in 
the depths of space. In like manner, when we strive to penetrate 
the meaning of these dogmas, it vanishes into the Infinity of God. 
Thus the study of theology should end in the reverential awe of 
adoring ignorance not the ignorance of the agnostic, who knows 
not whether the ultimate reality possesses the highest goodness of 
creatures, but the ignorance that realises how infinitely below the 
Divine Being is the highest created being, how infinitely inadequate 
to the Divine Truth is the highest created truth. The study of 
theology is for the Catholic directed to a fuller realisation of his 
faith. But the author of The Obscure Knowledge is at pains to 
insist on the apparent paradox that the end of the faith is to know 
what God is not ; not the apprehension of positive truths about 
God, but the full and vivid realisation that He is unintelligible 
by concepts and statements intelligible to our finite understand 
ing the realisation of the Divine transcendence and infinite 
excess of any limited being or concept. Later on we shall con 
sider the teaching of St John that faith unites the understanding 
to God by detaching it from all particular images, concepts and 
ideas which as such are essentially limited, in the loving appre 
hension of the infinite and therefore incomprehensible Godhead. 
This is indeed the work of the infused gift of faith. The study of 
theology, however, should- lead us indirectly and externally to the 
state to which infused faith leads directly and internally. " In 
this state," says St John, " they feel so highly of God as to see 
clearly that they know Him not at all, and that perception, that 
His Deity is so immense that it cannot be perfectly understood, is 

1 1 mean within the totality of that experience, possible and actual. A virgin 
conception, for example, is outside the sphere of our actual experience, but as a 
physical act is within the sphere of human sense- conditioned knowledge. 



66 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICIS 

a very lofty understanding." " One of the greatest favours of 
God ... is to enable the soul to see so distinctly and feel so pro 
foundly that it clearly understands it cannot comprehend or feel 
Him at all. Those souls are herein, in some degree, like the saints 
in heaven, where they who know Him most perfectly, perceive 
most clearly that He is infinitely incomprehensible " (Spiritual 
Canticle, st. 7). 

This truly is the goal of the mystic way to God, the rest of the 
human soul to lose itself in the Divine infinity, the Divine in 
comprehensibility. This negative knowledge is neither abstract 
nor empty, but a limitless fulness that the soul can never exhaust 
no, not in infinite eternities. We shall realise better how this 
is so if we consider a few indubitable facts of human experience. 
Those who see no depths in life beyond the superficial aspects 
open to their understanding are necessarily dissatisfied, dull and 
blase. Art or thought confined to the most limited and superficial 
regions of experience is frivolous, and shallow, and soon wearies. 
The perception and suggestion of unfathomed depths of spiritual 
significance is the function of art. There is no beauty where the 
entire meaning is obvious. To understand the entire meaning of 
a work of art is to have spiritually consumed it to have eaten the 
cake and thus to have finished it. Certain colours and forms are 
beautiful, because they are in some inexplicable fashion suggestive 
of spiritual realities beyond the comprehension of sense or reason. 
Others are ugly, because they do not possess this transcendental 
suggestion. In proportion to the presence of this suggestion is 
the degree of beauty ; in proportion to its absence the degree of 
ugliness. Transcendence is thus the criterion of aesthetic worth. 
It is the same with scientific hypotheses and with metaphysical 
conceptions. They are of small value, unless they open out in 
exhaustible vistas of truth. Indeed, this is a universal law of 
truth-values. Those truths that are most particular and most 
limited in their applicability are the superficial truths, which are 
merest rudiments of knowledge. The great depths of truth are 
those general truths not limited to a narrow sphere, but indefinitely 
applicable to the most varied spheres and inexhaustible in their 
suggestiveness. Here then is our measure of beauty and truth. 
The more limited, particular and superficial is the uglier, and the 
more untrue (in the ontological sense, of course) ; the more un 
limited, general and inexhaustible of significance that is to say, 
the more incomprehensible and mysterious is the truer and the 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 67 

more beautiful. All created beauty and truth are, however, 
essentially ugly and false, if regarded as ultimate values, because 
their content is sooner or later exhausted. At best they are 
messengers of Infinity; they cannot qua created notions or 
images impart that infinity. The most perfect created beauty, 
the deepest, widest truth of creatures are, &s finite being, essentially 
limited and negative. They stimulate a spiritual thirst which 
they cannot quench. Sooner or later the soul touches the negative 
element of their essential limitation. Thus with all that is finite 
the soul comes at length to the end. Its thirst remains un- 
appeased ; its blessed gift of wonder is replaced by weariness and 
dissatisfaction. Alexander weeps that there are no more worlds 
to conquer. 

Far other is it with the supernatural grace-mediated fruition 
of God begun here, consummated in eternity. 

In the infinite abyss of the Divine fulness of positive being 
without limit, never to be exhausted, the " good containing in 
itself all good together at once," 1 there is the perfect rest of entire 
and everlasting satisfaction, a rest, however, which is also untir 
ing, eternal energy. This all-satisfying fruition, as we have seen, 
is indescribable. Only the limited can be formulated by limited 
concepts and images. The soul has, however, now transcended 
all the barriers of created limits by full participation in the 
Unlimited Being of God that is transcendent of all limits, and 
therefore of all created being in its essential limitation. The 
only report the mystic can bring us of the Unlimited Object of his 
intuition is that of an ultrapositive nothingness eminently con 
taining all created being and worth, and nevertheless infinitely 
unlike any creature. God is all, therefore He is nothing, for all 
things are essentially finite. God is nothing, nothing finite and 
particular, therefore He is All and the positive being of all. God 
All, therefore Nothing, Nothing therefore All, absolute Being 
uncreated, therefore absolute non-being created, absolute unity, 
therefore the unification of an infinite manifold, unmoved yet 
perfect energy, one perfect and absolute energy, yet unchanging 
and unmoved, possessed of and containing all the virtues and 
qualities of creatures, yet possessed of none as we know them in 
the limitation of the creature, such are the seeming paradoxes that 
bring home to the soul the Infinity and the Transcendent Majesty 
of God, until contemplation is merged in sheer adoration and 

1 St Teresa, Autobiography, chap, xviii. 



68 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

our sole prayer is the cry of the Apostle : " O the depths of the 
riches of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How incompre 
hensible are His judgments, and how unsearchable His ways." 

Truly O God is " Thy way in the sea, and Thy paths in many 
waters, and Thy footsteps shall not be known." 

This doctrine of the Divine transcendence can alone save belief 
in God s finite self-revelations and manifestations from leading to 
a limited and indeed to an anthropomorphic conception of the 
Deity. If the background were removed from a landscape, that 
landscape, now consisting solely of the foreground, would not lead 
the vision out to the far horizon, but would imprison it within the 
narrow compass of the objects nearest at hand and most immedi 
ately visible. In like manner, if the background of this Dionysian 
transcendence were removed from our presentation of the Catholic 
creed and practice which are deeply incarnational and sacra 
mental the Catholic religion would become for us limiting, in 
adequate and anthropomorphic, probably superstitious, and in any 
case opposed to our highest thoughts and intuitions of the Divine. 
The presence of that infinite background, on the contrary, invests 
the more immediately present incarnational and sacramental dis 
pensation the foreground of our faith with its own infinity, 
rendering these incarnational and sacramental doctrines and 
practices avenues to the Unlimited. It is therefore of the first 
importance to the Catholic desirous of a fuller understanding of 
his faith to grasp firmly this background teaching, 1 and to follow 
up the line of thought that is based upon and leads to the Absolute 
Transcendence of God. 

This line of thought has, I know, often issued in grave error. 
In the hands of the Modernists it has led to the doctrine that all 
theological truth is merely symbolic, that every creature, even the 
Sacred Humanity, is simply a symbol of the infinite, incompre 
hensible Reality. The fundamental error of the Modernist is to 
regard Christ crucified as being as wholly and as purely a symbol 
as a crucifix actually is. For the thorough-going Modernist Christ 
crucified is but a living crucifix, and nothing more than that, a 
representation of the Divine love in human life and act, even as 
the crucifix is a representation of that Love in a lifeless work of 
art. It may be urged that the fundamental error of Modernism 

1 As the mystical way is followed this background becomes more and more 
the foreground of religion, though never excluding the other elements of our faith 
and practice. 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 69 

is rather the denial of a supernatural order divinely superimposed 
on the natural as, indeed, in another work, I have myself main 
tained. Both errors, however, are but different aspects of one 
and the same error. The rejection of a distinct supernatural order, 
which enters into and superimposes itself upon the order of nature 
at special times and places, and in special ways, the rejection of a 
special revelation and a fortiori of a Divine Incarnation, is essenti 
ally the rejection of the doctrine that particular concrete persons, 
things and events have been taken into a peculiar relationship to 
God, a relationship of a different and higher order than the relation 
ship of creatures to God in the natural order. This rejection, in 
turn, necessitates the treatment of the Incarnation and its conse 
quences as mere symbols of a spiritual reality, with which they 
possess no special or supernatural relationship or union whatso 
ever. This position leads inevitably to a denial that the Infinite 
God can place a finite being in a peculiar relation and union with 
Himself. 1 Such an assertion is an unwarrantable dogmatism 
and is in absolute opposition not only to the teaching of the 
Catholic faith but to the fact of mystical experience. For 
mystical experience, thus far supporting the revealed dogma of 
the hypostatic Union, proves that God can raise and has raised 
finite beings to a most intimate union with His infinite being. 
To deny the possibility of such a special relationship and union 
logically involves the assertion that all created being is equally 
distant from God the Unlimited, and therefore equally limited. 
This is, however, patently false. Spirit, for example, is less 
limited and therefore nearer to God than matter, and a good than 
a bad man. Moreover, unless certain creatures were in closer 
relationship to God than others, we should be united to God as 
well by eating and drinking as by prayer and meditation, as \vell 
by vocal petition as by the sublimest contemplation. Moreover, 
self-denial and mortification would be useless. This is, however, 
in flagrant contradiction to the universal experience, the practice 
and the teaching of all mystics, whatever their creed. For they 
have all alike found, and taught others to find, God more fully 

1 This Modernism is not all so modern as its name would imply. Already in 
the fifth century B.C. a treatise ascribed to Hippocrates affirms its fundamental 
principle and its logical consequence, sheer pantheism. " Nothing," he says, 
" is more divine or more human than anything else, but all things are alike and 
all divine" (Treatise on Airs, Waters and Sites. Burnet, Greek Philosophy, 
Pt. I., Thales to Plato, pp. 32-33). Moreover, Mr Burnet points out the essenti 
ally irreligious character of this Ionic pantheism. 



70 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

in the more spiritual that is, in the more unlimited than in the 
less spiritual that is, in the more limited have therefore re 
nounced the latter for the former, and have taught their disciples 
the same renunciation. 1 Hence we must conceive of one person or 
thing as related more closely to God than another on account of its 
lesser limitation, and of God as operative and manifest more fully 
in one person or thing than in another. This leaves open the 
possibility of a special revelation in and through particular persons 
and things, and even of a hypostatic union between a created 
being and God. Indeed, the fact that in the natural order God is 
revealed more fully in one person or thing than in another renders 
it probable that this graduated revelation should be crowned and 
completed by a special supernatural revelation through particular 
objects taken from the diverse degrees of natural being, and 
through personages and events of human history. Moreover, we 
should expect that the things, persons and acts thus raised to the 
supernatural order as instruments or recipients of faith and grace 
should be as diverse in their manner and degree of freedom from 
limitation and consequent participation of the Unlimited Deity as 
are the beings of the natural order. This expectation is, of course, 
amply fulfilled in the diverse measure of revealed truth and 
sanctifying grace and consequent union with God, possessed and 
communicated by the instruments and recipients of the Judaeo- 
Christian revelation and economy of grace ranging, as it does, 
from the first gleams of revealed truth vouchsafed to the patri 
archs to the fulness of the Apostolic deposit ; from the grace com 
municated by a devout use of the least of the sacramentals to the 
grace conferred by a fruitful communion ; and from the union 
with God possessed by the most imperfect Christian in the state 
of grace to the hypostatic union of Jesus Christ. I pointed out 
above that the Modernist places crucifixion and crucifix on the 
same level of pure symbolism. Still he would no doubt admit 
that the crucified Jesus, as a living and reason-endowed man, nay, 
more, as a man of supreme holiness, was in closer relation to God 
and more adequately representative of God than the lifeless image. 
In making this concession, how r ever, he would be making an 
illogical return on his own path. For he would have admitted, 

1 A certain qualification seems required in the case of Blake. But (i) what 
was the degree of mystical union attained by Blake ? (2) Certainly it was far 
from the highest. (3) His life was in practice ascetic and involved a severe 
renunciation of lower goods. 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 71 

as all theists must admit, that one creature is nearer to God and 
therefore more closely united to God and more fully representative 
of His Godhead than another. Short of adopting pure pantheism, 
our Modernist must concede this and in the concession he has, as 
we have just shown, conceded the underlying principle of revela 
tion and the Incarnation. The fact of diverse degrees of union 
with God, even in the natural order, pleads in favour of that super 
natural elevation of particular creatures to a higher supernatural 
union with the Godhead, whose affirmation is the fundamental 
distinction between Christianity, with its doctrine of special 
revelation and the Incarnation, and " natural religion," which 
denies this special supernatural union. Mr C. Webb, in his inter 
esting Wilde Lectures on Natural Religion, points out that a 
religion which teaches a special manifestation of God in the 
peculiar relationship to God of a special concrete fact is of 
a higher type than one which rejects any particular concrete 
historical embodiment or manifestation of the Divine. " So 
far," he says, " as by historical element in religion we mean the 
element of sacred history, a belief in which forms an important 
element in some religions, it is a mark of higher development in a 
religion to emphasise this element. For in the recognition of such 
a sacred history religion comes to recognise itself as the most con 
crete and individual form of human experience, concerned, not 
with mere abstract universals, but with concrete individuals, 
those and no others, in which, and not elsewhere, the universals 
with which we have to do are, as a matter of fact, particularised, 
apart from which they possess no actual reality. A religion which 
involves as part of its essence a sacred history is, in this way, at a 
higher level than one which, while setting forth certain universal 
principles, moral or metaphysical, is ready to symbolise them by 
anything that comes to hand, as it were, and is comparatively 
indifferent to the particular symbol chosen " (Nat. Theol., 
pp. 292-300). But this rejection of the particular and concrete 
is the very essence, not only of Modernism but of a certain 
theory of mysticism very popular to-day a theory of mysticism 
such as is exemplified by utterances of Miss Evelyn Underbill, 1 
which treats the dogmas of the historical religions as so many 
more or less indifferent symbols of one purely spiritual reality. 

1 She is not, however, a consistent upholder of this position. The book in 
which this " indifferentism " is most thoroughly maintained is unfortunately her 
latest namely, Practical Mysticism. 



72 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

This is truly, as Mr Webb says, to reduce religion to a lower 
level. 

That the existence of a special revelation, and the recognition 
that God is revealed and possessed more fully by higher grades 
that is, by more unlimited degrees, of being are thus closely con 
nected as manifestations of one and the same principle, is shown 
by the history of modern thought. The rejection of revelation 
has tended with religious temperaments to result in a pantheism 
which deifies all beings alike. It may, indeed, be objected that 
pantheism is the result of a perverted doctrine of immanence and 
cannot therefore be the result of a perverted doctrine of trans 
cendence, and further, that Modernists are hyper-immanent ists 
rather than hyper-transcendentalists. Extremes, however, meet, 
and an exclusive doctrine of transcendence will be found to issue 
in the pantheism to which an equally exclusive doctrine of 
immanence is another passage. Some Modernists, and these the 
mystical-minded, have tended towards pantheism by the former 
route ; others, more naturalist in temper, by the latter. Ultra- 
immanentism, as we have already seen, issues in pantheism by 
exaggerating the participation of finite beings in the Godhead as 
the source and ground of their positive being, into the assertion 
that they are elements and modes of the Godhead. Ultra- 
transcendentalism, on the other hand, reaches the same goal from 
a different starting-point. The truth that the finite does not 
possess Reality and Being in the sense that these are possessed 
by the Infinite Deity is perverted into a denial of all reality and 
being to the former. It is regarded as mere appearance and 
illusion Maya, as the Indians term it. The sole reality under 
lying this appearance is the One Absolute Godhead. This form of 
pantheism, termed specifically acosmism, has been incurred by the 
mystics who have abandoned theism in the interpretation of their 
experience. It is the pantheism of the Upanishads, of the Sufis 
and of Eckhart. 1 Thus do the denial of the reality of creatures 
and their identification with the Deity blend into a common 
pantheism. Indeed ultra-transcendental pantheism, when it 
regards the finite as but a manifestation of an underlying Godhead, 
ipso facto regards the finite as a mode of that Godhead, and be 
comes thus identical with ultra-immanentist pantheism. Catholic 
mysticism bars both passages to this common error. It bars the 
immanentist approach by insisting on the absolute distinction of 

1 Who, however, did not intend to abandon either theism or Catholicism. 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 73 

finite beings from God, in virtue of their essential finitude. It 
bars the transcendentalist approach, and therefore the mystical 
modernism that is taking that way, by its doctrine of special 
relationships, including, as it does, its doctrine of personal identity 
between a created being and God, in the Incarnate Word. If 
we hold fast to this complementary doctrine of special relation 
ship, the doctrine of the Divine transcendence will not lead us 
with the Modernists and mystical undenominationalists to reject 
historic revelation and the Incarnation. 

The best way to secure our firm grasp of special relationship is 
by tenacious adherence to and emphasis of its supreme exemplifi 
cation, the Divine Humanity of Jesus. For God has united Him 
self with and has manifested Himself in the Sacred Humanity of 
Jesus Christ after a fashion immeasurably fuller and more 
intimate than in all His other unions and manifestations with and 
through created beings. In that Humanity dwells bodily the 
fulness of the Infinite Godhead. 1 Hence a truly Christian mysti 
cism, while duly insisting on the Divine transcendence, will never 
lose sight of the Sacred Humanity of Christ as personally one with 
the all-transcendent Deity. 

It is true that the passages in The Ascent of Mount Carmel 
where St John repeats explicitly St Teresa s teaching, that the 
mystic can never transcend the contemplation of the Sacred 
Humanity, are interpolations. Nevertheless we cannot doubt 
that they truly represent his opinion on this point. Mother 
Cecilia devotes a special stanza of her work on The Transformation 
of the Soul in God to the statement that : 

In order to travel in safety 

After a Divine fashion 

The mysteries of Christ have been her [the soul s] path. 

As the entire passage is of the utmost importance I will quote it 
here : " It is impossible that the soul should be safe without this 
foundation of faith, comprising, as it does, the mysteries of Jesus 
Christ Our Lord. It was the Father s will that He should be our 
guide and the means whereby we unite ourselves to Him and 
remain in union with Him. Truly then did our glorious Mother 
Teresa of Jesus say that the soul cannot ascend far save by this 
path, and that we cannot attain any good unless our souls are 
stamped and saturated with these Divine truths, that is, unless 

St Paul, Colossians. 



74 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

we seek the Redeemer, apart from Whom there is no redemption, 
and unless we love the Beloved, for Whose sake God loves us." l 
" We should not regard it as a hindrance to beginners to contem 
plate this Divine Beloved, provided they realise the truth of His 
Godhead and contemplate this Divinity in union with His 
Humanity. Those who travel by the right path know very well 
what assistance they have received towards the attainment of their 
spiritual treasures from this Divine and human Lord. Not only 
is such contemplation no hindrance ; it is a spark whereby the 
soul is kindled, like tinder, with the fire of Divine love, so that 
even if she does not intend it, she loses all thought of self, being 
wholly lost to herself. She has now entered deeper into Christ, 
because she is in Him and in His Father and in the Holy Ghost, 
and abides far more deeply penetrated with His love. Even so was 
it with St Paul the Apostle after he had been in the third heaven 
and had seen Jesus. He was thenceforward penetrated so deeply 
by Jesus Christ that he could say : I live no longer, but Christ 
liveth in me. This exclamation reveals how intimately St Paul 
possessed Christ within himself, since not only his thoughts, but 
his very life, was Christ s and he was another Christ, since he 
possessed Him in himself. No one will feel any great surprise at 
this who knows the capacity of the human soul, capable of con 
taining God, and therefore of containing Christ, Who as man is less 
than God, and also all mysteries and scriptures, in a word an 
infinity of things, for all things are less than God." " Now there 
is nothing so dear to God as the only begotten Son, in Whom 
He loves us, and our human nature thus raised to Himself in the 
very person of the Eternal Word. We cannot, therefore, possess 
truth unless we are united with this Truth, nor can any path be 
the right one which does not lead to Him. The soul that ascends 
highest does so with the aid of this greatness of Divine Truth." 
. . . " The soul that possesses this Truth is united to the Essential 

1 This doctrine, in so far as it demands explicit knowledge of the Sacied 
Humanity in order to every degree of mystical union, is indeed untenable in face 
of the indubitable existence of true mystics outside the pale of Christianity (e.g. 
Plotinus, Richard Jefferies, certain Sufis and possibly Buddha) . This can be 
denied only by a refusal to attach credence to the self-reports of men whose sin 
cerity is unquestionable. Such treatment of their evidence would invalidate all 
appeal to the testimony of Catholic mystics. In the case of Plotinus, Fr. Sharpe 
admits at least the possibility of the genuineness of his experience. It is, how 
ever, certain that any mystical graces granted to non-Christians are granted 
entirely through the merits and for the sake of Jesus our Lord the sole name 
whereby we must be saved. 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 75 

Truth Who is God, Who has taught us the particular truth of His 
mysteries in order to our salvation, and that they may be the 
means and foundation of this supreme transformation. Since it 
is impossible truly to reach this transformation without this 
foundation, nor can the soul travel in safety without it, it is said 
that 

In order to travel in safety 

After a Divine fashion 

The mysteries of Christ have been her path." 

In this important passage it is clearly laid down that God has 
raised certain creatures into a peculiarly close relationship with 
His own Divine Being and in particular has placed Our Lord s 
Sacred Humanity, created though it was out of nothing, in the 
relationship of hypostatic or personal union. We can never dis 
pense with this Incarnational and Sacramental economy, nor 
transcend Jesus or His mysteries. Since Jesus is in this unique 
relationship with the Infinite God, through Him we are united to 
God, and His Sacred Humanity, far from limiting the soul by Its 
limits and particularity, introduces the soul into the Unlimited 
Godhead, with Whom It is personally One. Nevertheless the 
mystic must make this use of the Incarnation. He must find God 
in Jesus, and not rest in the Humanity as such, in a knowledge of 
Christ as man, after the flesh, as St Paul terms it. This is clearly 
explained by Mother Cecilia in the passage immediately following. 
" We must, however, take particular notice of the words, after a 
Divine fashion, because there are many different fashions in 
which we may profit by the mysteries of Christ. From all there 
is great profit to be derived. But there is a certain divine fashion 
or method which enormously exceeds all others in its power to bring 
us speedily to the goal of our journey. . . . This Divine method 
is an immense force and light, whereby the soul knows the 
Divinity of God in the person of the Incarnate Word. The 
Eternal Word has exalted His Most Sacred Humanity in Himself 
with an infinite excellency. The soul contemplates this Humanity 
exalted in God, after a Divine fashion, and apprehends the 
Humanity as existing in the eternal Divinity, in a most sublime 
and most Divine experience, which cannot be explained to anyone 
who has never known it. In this experience the God-Man com 
municates to the soul a Divine virtue of His Divinity and 
Humanity, whereby she knows Him with a knowledge so subtle 



76 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

that it cannot be described by any other name, but must be 
termed His Divinity Itself. It is with this mode of knowledge 
that the soul contemplates and knows Him in all His mysteries ; 
when the soul is penetrated by the contemplation of His wounding 
and blood-shedding, or of any of the other incidents of His life, 
death and resurrection, when she contemplates Him as He is now 
in heaven, and as He will come to judgment in a word, whenever 
she contemplates anything wherein her Beloved has part, she is 
penetrated in conjunction with His Humanity, by His eternal 
Divinity, and that after a fashion unspeakably sublime, which 
is termed Divine because it proceeds from God Himself. . . . 
But these communications differ greatly among themselves, and 
great also is the difference between the communications enjoyed 
by the same soul at different times. For although these truths 
are always the foundation of her prayer, they are understood in 
a manner that is ever more and more spiritualised. . . . The 
fashion of the soul s apprehension of Christ and life in Him 
is now far more spiritual and Divine, for the Divine communica 
tion has now been completely transferred to the most spiritual 
and secret part of the soul. . . . The substance of the soul is pene 
trated by God and His eternal truths after the most sublime and 
spiritual fashion possible. To this great blessing the soul has 
attained by this Divine method, above described, of contem 
plating Christ and His mysteries. It is now evident to what a 
height of glory and bliss the way of this Divine Lord has led the 
soul from the beginning onwards. He went on increasing con 
tinually His love in the soul until she was thus Divinely pene 
trated by Him and was made Divine in His Divinity. As 
the soul has been from the outset grounded in the truth, she 
now possesses the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and 
in this immense and Divine Being of the one true God she abides 
consumed and transformed in Him as in her true and last 
end, having begun to enter into that immensity which has no 
end " (Transformation, st. 7). The way of the soul s progress is 
thus not the rejection of the Incarnational and the Sacramental, 
of the particular creaturely fact, but an ever-increasing spiritual- 
isation of its understanding and reception of the particular, of the 
creature. This spiritualisation is a progressive apprehension of 
the Unlimited Deity, present in and through the creature, due to 
the soul s progressive union with God, to Whom that created 
being has been in a special fashion united. Why, then, does St 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 77 

John bid us reject the particular ? Because by the particular he 
means just that negative element, limited, limiting and exclusive, 
from which the soul must escape. The closer, however, a par 
ticular creature is united to God the unlimited, the less does its 
particularity limit and exclude. When, therefore, the relation 
ship of a created being to God is that of personal or hypostatic 
union, the positive manifestation and representation and posses 
sion of God so infinitely transcend the creaturely limitation and 
exclusion l that the latter becomes practically non-existent for 
the soul that contemplates and loves the positive interior reality. 
That is why the Humanity of Christ and his Human mysteries 
need not and should not be rejected or transcended, even with that 
temporary rejection and transcendence requisite for the mystic in 
the case of other creatures in order to escape their limitations. 
There must be, however, that increasing spiritualisation of his 
contemplation of Christ and His mysteries which is indicated in 
the above quoted passage by Mother Cecilia. This spiritualisation 
involves, indeed, a certain transcendence, in that the soul no 
longer rests in the external and human facts of Our Lord s life 
but penetrates through these to the Infinite Being of God con 
tained therein but it is through them that she always penetrates, 
not beside and apart from them. " We shall," so Ruysbroeck 
summarises the Cecilian teaching, " through the personality of 
Christ transcend . . . the created being of Christ and rest . . . 
in the Divine Being in eternity" (Adornment of the Spiritual 
Marriage, Bk. II., chap, xlvii. Trs. Wynschenk Dom.). Thus 
the Incarnation and mystical negation are not opposed, but 
complementary. We must also remember that this mystical 
spiritualisation is but the continuance of a process visible in every 
Catholic, whose religious education is proportionate to his general 
mental development. (This, unhappily, is by no means always 
the case.) A child conceives, for example, of heaven and hell, of 
the Trinity, of the Resurrection and Ascension by imaging them 
after the fashion of the sensible phenomena of this life. Heaven 
is a palace among the clouds, hell a furnace in the centre of the 
earth. The Trinity is represented by an aged man on a throne, 
a younger man on another throne and a dove above their heads. 
The Resurrection is the revivification of Our Lord s Body, exactly 

1 Though the Sacred Humanity was created and is therefore finite, It must 
not be termed a creature, having received the dignity of the Godhead with Whom 
It is personally one. 



78 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

as It was in His earthly life, and the Ascension His going up 
through the white clouds and blue sky to a gem-built palace, 
where His Father awaits Him on a throne of gold. The religious 
progress of that child consists not in the denial of the positive 
truth of these things but in an increasingly spiritual under 
standing of them. The prayer progress of the mystic is but the 
indefinite continuance of this process, with its progressive 
destruction of limiting concepts and images, and its progressive 
apprehension of the unlimited, and therefore unimaginable and 
unintelligible Being of God present in and through the mysteries 
of faith. Such a progressive spiritualisation by the individual soul 
of the created elements of revealed truth has had its counterpart 
in the development of revelation itself. One very important 
mode of the Judaeo-Christian revelation has been the spiritualisa 
tion of already existent religious ideas. Thus, for instance, Our 
Lord took the notion of a largely material and earthly Messianic 
kingdom and spiritualised it into the teaching of a spiritual 
kingdom of God, beginning in the Church on earth and fulfilled 
in the society of the blessed in heaven. We must, however, 
observe, and it is important to do so, if we would escape the 
Modernism easily incurred by this line of thought, that, alike in 
the giving of the revelation and in its understanding by the 
individual, and in the continuance of that process in mystical 
prayer, the process of spiritualisation works in two distinct ways. 
Sometimes the conception to be spiritualised limited a spiritual 
reality by a material embodiment which was inconsistent with it. 
For example, the child s imagination of the Trinity ascribed 
anthropomorphic limitations to the Divine Being itself. Spiritual 
isation here involves the entire rejection of the material expression. 
Partially, but only partially, within this first category is the case 
of a spiritual reality, which has indeed a certain external and 
material embodiment, which cannot therefore be transcended or 
rejected, but which was originally conceived so externally and 
materially as to be unduly limited and materialised by that con 
ception. For instance, the kingdom of God has its external and 
material aspects in the earthly Church and the future resurrection. 
Nevertheless the original conception of that kingdom so limited 
and materialised the spiritual reality as to destroy its unlimited 
significance and to render it altogether finite. Hence spiritualisa 
tion meant in this case the partial rejection of the concrete material 
embodiment, which belonged to the original conception. To this 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 79 

first category of spiritualisation must be referred the spiritual 
understanding of prophecies false, if taken in their external and 
material form true in their interior and spiritual meaning or 
substance, a spiritualisation which St John discusses in the second 
book of The Ascent of Mount Carrnel. " In the Holy Scriptures," 
he says, " we read that many prophecies and divine locutions 
disappointed in their fulfilment the expectations of many of the 
ancient people, because they understood them too much accord 
ing to the letter and in their own way." " The chief purpose of 
God in sending visions is to express and communicate the spirit 
which is hidden within them. . . . This is much more abundant 
than the letter, more extraordinary and surpasses the limits 
thereof. . . . We must, therefore, reject the letter, which is of 
sense, and abide in the obscurity of faith, which is the spirit, in 
comprehensible to sense" (ii. 19). This gradual discovery of the 
true sense of prophecies, the sense intended by the Holy Spirit, 
is part of that mystical interpretation of Scripture which the 
Church and her doctors have ever used to interpret all scrip 
ture whose surface meaning bears no direct reference to the 
infinite and spiritual Reality of the Divine Being or to the self- 
manifestation, donation and union of that Infinite God to man. 1 
It is otherwise with the central substance of the Christian revela 
tion, the Incarnation and its extensions, which lie outside the sphere 
of this first mode of spiritualisation. For the very essence of the 
Incarnation and its extensions is personal identification or intimate 
union between the limited nature of man, alike in its physical and 
spiritual constituents, and the Infinite Creator, a union of the 
transcendent Being of God with an individual created being. 
The fundamental ground of the dogmas of Our Lord s human life, 
Church and sacraments is the dogma of the Incarnation itself, and 
the inmost significance of the Incarnation is a unique manifesta 
tion of the Infinite through and in the finite, a complete self- 
donation of the Infinite to the finite, a union of personal identity 
between the Infinite and the finite, the Infinite remaining all the 
while in its own illimitable infinity. The Nativity, the Cruci 
fixion and the Resurrection are thus no mere symbols of a spiritual 
Reality that is not bound up in any special manner with the 
external facts. They are rooted in the concrete fact that the Man 
Who was born, crucified and raised from the dead was one person 
with the infinite and incomprehensible God. Moreover, in the 

1 See, for a fuller treatment, Chap. XIII. 



80 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

presentation and conception of these incarnational dogmas by 
Catholic theology, the external and material element has never 
been so conceived as to limit or materialise the inward and spiritual 
significance. In the case of the Incarnational dogmas the material 
element is therefore neither wholly nor mainly symbolic, 1 and 
thus is not such a presentation of spiritual truth as taken literally 
limits the apprehension of that truth, and therefore an element 
to be spiritualised entirely or partially away. Therefore in the 
case of these and similar dogmas, spiritualisation cannot mean (as 
it does in the case of dogmas wholly or partially of the former class) 
the rejection of the particular external and material fact, as a 
limitation of the inward spiritual reality, and that, for the very 
reason that the external and material fact, instead of limiting the 
inward spiritual reality, is itself given an infinite significance by 
its peculiar union with that reality. Spiritualisation can here only 
mean as we have seen the ever-increasing apperception of that 
infinite Divine reality thus so intimately and so indissolubly 
united with the external finite fact. 

The Divine Being is indeed so infinitely transcendent of 
created being that not only is God incomprehensible by any 
creature, indeed unknowable by any created mode of knowledge, 
but, while remaining immutably in that infinite transcendence of 
all creatures, unrelated to any creature, He is able, by the fiat of 
His omnipotent will, to bring a created being into a relationship 
of personal identity with Himself, so that in virtue of that personal 
identity that created being is no longer a pure creature. God 
in His infinite transcendence is unrelated even to the Sacred 
Humanity of Christ, and nevertheless that humanity is so inti 
mately related to God as to be one person with Him. How this can 
be is beyond human conception. It is another insoluble paradox. 
But it is equally a paradox that one finite being can be nearer to 
and participate more fully in the Infinite than another finite being. 
Must not all finites be equally removed from the infinite ? Yet, 
as we have already seen, the latter paradox at least must be 
accepted by all who would not place the material on the same 
level with the spiritual, in defiance of the obvious absurdity of such 
equal valuation. Why, then, need any boggle at the former 
paradox of our faith ? Indeed, both these paradoxes are ulti 
mately reducible to the paradox of the co-existence of the finite and 
the infinite. If we grant this co-existence it follows that some 

1 No doubt there is also present a quite secondary element of symbolism . 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 81 

finites are nearer to the infinite than others. It is undeniable 
that thought is less limited than material mass, life than lifeless 
energy. The less limited must surely be nearer to the unlimited 
than the more limited, and nevertheless both are infinitely distant. 
Moreover, it is equally clear that if the finite and infinite co-exist, 
the former must be related to the latter, but not the latter to the 
former, for the infinite cannot be limited by relationship.* The 
ultimate and basal paradox is therefore the co-existence of finite 
and infinite. Yet this co-existence, however inexplicable, is a 
fact. It cannot be escaped by denying the existence of an infinite. 
Whatever view be adopted of the nature of ultimate reality, there 
must be an infinite. The all, or the totum of reality, cannot be 
in all respects limited. If the universe were not created out of 
nothing by God, it must be everlasting i.e. unlimited or infinite 
in duration. Moreover, we should also have then to admit that 
a thousand years is more akin to and participates more largely in 
that everlasting duration l than one second, because the less 
limited duration must be more akin to and partake more fully of 
the unlimited duration than the more limited duration. 2 The co 
existence of finite and infinite is therefore one of those antinomies 
inevitable whatever metaphysical system be adopted. The 
mystic s philosophy of the Unlimited and All Transcendent is no 
more burdened with such antinomies than any other, and cannot 
fairly, on that account, be rejected. The existence of these final 
antinomies or paradoxes makes us realise that reason cannot 
wholly explain or harmonise experience, cannot solve all its 
problems. If it attempts to do so, it destroys itself and the thinker. 
Reason must recognise its limitations. A culture or a philosophy 
that attempts to obtain a complete rational explanation of experi 
ence is attempting an impossible task, only too likely to end in 
intellectual despair. The existence of paradoxes, such as that 
of the co-existence of the finite and infinite, should not be the 
occasion of an unwarranted scepticism. It should serve rather to 
bring home to us the utter incomprehensibility, the unfathomable 
mystery of the Divine Being Who is the Ultimate Reality. This 
incomprehensible mystery is the meeting-place of two parallel 

1 Not eternity. That is disparate from becoming, which would, however, be 
ultimate in this pantheist universe. 

2 Yet from another point of view both periods are seen to be equally distant 
from the infinite duration. Herein consists the internal self-contradiction of an 
everlasting duration, as opposed to the totum simul of eternity. 

F 



82 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

truths, incapable of union by our finite intelligence. One of 
these is God s complete transcendence of creatures, the other 
His immanence in them, an immanence which culminates in 
the Incarnation. These parallel truths thus meet, as parallel 
lines are said in geometry to meet, in infinity. 

We must, however, always remember that the perversions of 
Modernism and agnosticism are perversions of a great truth, a 
truth of supreme religious value, the truth that the Divine 
Absolute Being is so absolutely transcendent of the essentially 
limited finite being that even when that finite being is in personal 
union with God it is by comparison sheer non-existence. If we 
therefore keep a firm hold on two truths (1) in the sense in which 
God is, every creature is not ; (2) through Christ, His Church and 
His sacraments, human nature has been brought into a most 
intimate relationship with God, we shall avoid the false agnos 
ticism of the agnostic and the Modernist, which is the destruction of 
faith, and we shall at the same time maintain the true agnosticism 
of the mystic which is the perfection of faith. We shall realise 
that all that is revealed to us of God in Christ and His mysteries 
is absolutely and eternally true but that it is also infinitely in 
adequate to exhaust or express the Divine Being as It is in Itself. 
We shall then perceive that of sheer necessity the dogmas of 
theology cannot be grasped or harmonised by human reason, that 
any religious system which is completely harmonious and in 
telligible is ipso facto proved to be false, and that rationalism in 
religion is supremely irrational, because it limits God by the con 
cepts and images of our finite intelligence, just as agnosticism is 
irrational, because it does not see that God the first cause must 
infinitely transcend the highest categories of dependent being, and 
therefore cannot be infraspiritual or infrapersonal. Like the 
transcendence the unity and the immanence of God are ultimately 
reducible to the fact that Infinite Being, as unlimited, excludes all 
negation and exclusive distinction. " I Am that I Am " was the 
Divine title revealed to the Jews by God Himself. In this I Am 
are constituted the Divine Immanence, as the ground of all created 
being which is essentially relative and dependent on the Divine 
Being of which it is but a reflection and participation, the Divine 
Unity, for absolute positivity admits of no mutually exclusive 
differences, and the Divine Transcendence, for the Unlimited 
Being must be infinitely distinct from being which is essentially 
limited and as limited negative. As Moses of old beheld Jahwe 



THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD 83 

in the bush burnt yet unconsumed by His Presence, so to the 
Christian mystic is revealed this Absolute and Divine " I Am," 
burning through the universe of finite being which nevertheless is 
not, as pantheism falsely teaches, consumed by His Indwelling. 
Let us therefore who draw nigh to behold with him this Divine 
Vision put off the shoes of human reason l and adore the Mystery 
of Infinite Godhead Immanent in all things, yet of all transcend 
ent, that makes this world of creatures wherein we live in very 
truth a holy ground. 

Note 1. The Divine Purity 

The Divine Purity is a subordinate aspect of the Divine 
Transcendence of all limits. In chap. ix. of the first section 
of vol. ii. of Modern Painters., Ruskin maintains that purity is 
essentially energy unimpeded. Theology teaches that God is 
perfect energy essential and absolute energy, the actus purus. 
By this actus purus is meant that the Divine Being is always one 
fulness of act without any potentiality as yet unactualised. 
Unactualised potentiality in creatures arises from their limitations, 
which give rise to division and opposition. Pure energy is 
absolute positivity, without that defect of being which constitutes 
the unrealised potentialities of creatures. Created substances are 
pure in so far as they possess their fulness, their completion of 
being and energy, unalloyed and unimpeded by alien substances. 
Pure wine, for instance, has not its vinous properties and effects 
impeded by the presence of non-vinous liquids. Pure love is 
not impeded in its operation towards its object by the presence 
of hostile or even neutral will aims. 

God therefore is essential purity because a Being unaffected 
by the presence and action of any alien nature, a fulness of energy 
unimpeded by any limitations. St John of the Cross has stated 
this in a passage already quoted from The Ascent of Mount Carmel, 
ii. 16. " The Divine Wisdom . . . admits of no such particular 
ways [modes], neither can it be comprehended under any limita 
tion or distinct particular knowledge, because it is all pureness 
and simplicity." God s purity is thus His perfect energy ; that 
is, His absolute positivity without the negative element involved 
in the finite and relative being of creatures. God s purity is 
therefore His Absolute Being, the I Am under another aspect. 

1 Like shoes, necessary in its own lower sphere. 



84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

Mother Cecilia says : " The Divine Being is termed pure on 
account of the simplicity of His most pure substance." God is 
here termed pure, " not only because He is most clean and free 
from all stain, but from the nature of His essence which trans 
cends all that can be attributed to it, and because He is a pure 
act working in Himself, through Himself, and for Himself " 
(Transformation, st. 1). 

Note 2. Personal and Impersonal Representations of the Godhead 

Personal finite spirits, human spirits at least, lack certain 
positive characters of material and impersonal forces. A human 
soul does not, for instance, possess the power and scope of an 
elemental force of nature, though higher far in the scale of being. 
Now, as has been already pointed out, the Infinite Being of God is 
eminently all that is positively existent in creatures. Therefore 
the vastness of an impersonal force represents an aspect of His 
being, not represented by the human soul. For this reason mystics 
are obliged to use images taken from impersonal forces and 
elements, to indicate the Divine Being, side by side with intimately 
personal images. The philosopher of mysticism will perhaps 
incline more to the impersonal images the practical mystic will 
be attracted to the more personal. 1 Both are true positively, both 
false negatively, true in their affirmations, false in their limitations. 
As the personal images or categories have more positive being 
than the impersonal, they are more adequate representations of 
God than the latter, though ever infinitely inadequate. 

1 Nevertheless it is largely a matter of individual temperament. St John of 
the Cross prefers personal, Mother Cecilia impersonal, imagery. 



INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER V 

1. Relation of the Infrarational Creation to God. Before we 
consider the relation between the human soul and God, it would be 
well to say a little as to the relation of the infrarational creature 
to the Creator. One great purpose of the infrarational creation 
is certainly the service of man, and that in two ways by minister 
ing to his material being and well-being, and by ministering to his 
spiritual well-being. This latter ministry itself falls under two 
heads. The infrarational creation ministeis to man s spiritual 
good, by giving him occasion to glorify God in thanksgiving for 
the use he has of creatures but far more by man s knowledge and 
praise of Him as the first cause and eminent possessor of all their 
perfections that is, of their positive being. Material creatures 
are sacraments of spiritual realities, the Divine attributes which 
they represent. To use nature as a sacrament is to be brought 
into contact with its underlying ground, the Divine Being in His 
various aspects. This is the noblest use of the visible creation. 
Since the fall the infrarational creation subserves also man s 
spiritual well-being as an obstacle to be overcome that is, as a 
more or less recalcitrant matter, to be moulded with great toil to 
human and spiritual ends, a task which brings into play the moral 
virtues. It subserves man in this office by way of temptations to 
sensual pleasure, the resistance to which purges and perfects his 
spiritual life. It subserves him also as a scourge for his discipline 
and chastisement. But this ministry to rational creatures cannot 
exhaust the significance of the infrarational creation no, not if 
every planet and star in space were populated with rational beings. 
The investigations of modern science bring home to us with ever- 
increasing force the incalculably immense amount of inorganic 
elements and forces and the incalculably vast multitude of living 
beings, vegetable and animal, that have only the most accidental 
reference often none at all to man and his needs. But we have 
seen already that all created being is a representation of the Divine 
Being under various aspects. As such it is not only sacramental 
to man of that Being but is in itself an external manifestation of 

85 



86 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

God, which is His accidental glory. A difficulty arises in the case 
of certain creatures for example, the octopus which seem to 
possess ugliness in the sense of a privation of due form not its 
mere absence, which would be a foil to the beauty of other 
creatures. Such ugliness seems sacramental rather of spiritual 
evil than of spiritual good. This privative, and therefore repellent, 
ugliness is emphasised by Richard Jefferies, not, I think, without 
exaggeration, in The Story of my Heart. We should remember 
that the liturgy and tradition of the Church seem to presuppose a 
certain power of the evil spirits over the lower creation. For the 
reality of this power there is ample warrant. It is presupposed 
by the forms of benediction employed by the Church, also by 
certain scriptural expressions for example, " the powers of the 
air," " the rulers of this darkness," " the prince of this world 
cometh." We may also compare many well-attested incidents 
in the lives of saints. Its exact nature and extent are 
altogether indefinite and unknown. Might it not extend to an 
interference with the course of evolution, introducing into it an 
element of privative ugliness ? If we admit this explanation we 
are surely compelled by the discoveries of geology to postulate 
with Mr Webb the existence and activity of this evil power in the 
world before man fell or, indeed, had any existence. Whether or 
no the evil spirits have thus interfered with evolution, the strife 
and waste so obvious, alike in the present condition of the earth, 
as in the course of its past history, are, to a very great degree at 
least, due to the very nature of the limited, to the limit inherent 
in every creature not emancipated by supernatural union with 
God. Though it is doubtful whether the actual suffering and 
ugliness existent in the extrahuman creation be explicable without 
the operation of the privative limit of moral evil, it is surely un 
deniable that the limit as such involves defect, and therefore a 
certain degree of inevitable physical evil. Moreover, the limit 
involves exclusion and consequent division, and therefore strife. 1 
Nevertheless, despite all this waste, strife, suffering and ugliness, 
creatures are essentially representations and sacraments of the 
Godhead, and that to the degree of their positive being. 

Moreover God is the end of creation. Every created being 
tends to become as like to God as it can. This is true, alike of the 

1 In the new heaven and earth of the Resurrection this defect arising from the 
limit will, in so far as it involves ugliness, pain or strife, be remedied by a special 
dispensation of supernatural power. 



INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER V 87 

individual, of the species, of the class and of the entire Universe. 
The course of evolution is no blind and aimless striving, but is a 
purposive progress. This progress is a gradual perfecting of the 
subject of evolution. The effect and aim of this evolutionary 
progress is the actualisation of the latent possibilities of its subject 
being. But we have seen already that the more of positive being 
there is in any creature, and therefore the more its potentiality is 
actualised, the better does it represent the Divine Being, for the 
more being a creature possesses the closer does it approach (though 
always infinitely distant from) the fulness of Absolute Being. 
Moreover the greater the multiplicity of forms of being and life 
harmonised in the unity of the specific character, and of the 
individual life, the fuller is the revelation of God, Whose attributes 
and their unity are manifested thereby. No one has more strongly 
insisted on the onward striving energy of life than M. Bergson. 
He has, however, treated this striving as blind and aimless. 
Certainly it is so in the individuals who partake of it in various 
grades. To treat it as in itself aimless is, however, the abandon 
ment of explanation the acknowledged bankruptcy of philosophy. 
How infinitely rich, on the contrary, is the Christian conception 
outlined above. All the marvellous contrivances and adaptations, 
far exceeding any possible conscious intention of their subjects, 
which are revealed to us by science, and whose immediate end is 
the conservation and reproduction of the species and whose more 
indirect end is its evolution, are seen to be a progressive mani 
festation of God, an increasing approach to His Divine Being. 
On a polyphyletic view of evolution this manifestation of God and 
approach to His Being will be bounded by the essential limitation 
of certain fundamental types. When this limitation is reached the 
capacity of each type is exhausted and God s being has been shown 
forth and represented to the utmost extent possible to that type. 
If, however, we accept a monophyletic view of evolution, not only 
will the potentialities of each type form be thus actualised but 
new potentialities will be added in the course of evolution. For 
we surely cannot believe that all the high and complex forms of 
life and sentience to be found in the vegetable and animal kingdoms 
were present potentially in the most rudimentary organism. They 
must therefore have been added by the stimulus and operation 
of the Divine Spirit immanent in the evolutionary process. These 
new elements, however, like the actualisation of potencies con 
tained already in the type forms, only to a far greater degree than 



88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

the latter, are additions of being, the removal of limits and accord 
ingly an increasing representation of God and a closer approach to 
His Infinite Being. This manifestation of the Godhead through 
the ordered hierarchy and pushful life of creatures has never been 
expressed more clearly than by Dante in the first canto of the 
Paradiso. 

Le cose tutte e quante 

Hann ordine tra loro ; e questo e forma 

Che 1 universo a Dio fa simigliante. 

[All things whatsoever observe a mutual order ; 
And this is the form that maketh the universe 
Like unto God.] 

We know far more of this order, its incalculably vast extent and 
variety, than did Dante and his contemporaries, and the result of 
this new knowledge should be a fuller realisation of the Divine 
glory shown forth therein. 

Qui veggi-on Palte creature I orma 
Dell eterno valore, il quale e fine 
Al quale e fatta la toccata norma. 

[Herein the exalted creatures trace the impress 
of the Eternal Worth, which is the goal whereto 
was made the norm now spoken of.] 

Not for the consideration of man alone, with his narrow know 
ledge, has the order of the universe been decreed, but for the 
adoring contemplation of the angelic intelligences. 

Nell ordine ch io dico sono accline 

Tutte nature, per diverse sorti 

piu al principio loro e men vicine ; 

onde si movono a diversi porti 

per lo gran mar dell essere, e ciascuna 

con istinto a lei dato che la porti. 1 

[In the order of which I speak all things incline by 
diverse lots, more near or less unto their principle ; 
wherefore they move to diverse ports o er the great 
sea of being, and each one with instinct given it 
to bear it on.] 

1 That the means of this progress should be so largely a remorseless com 
petition .a struggle for existence is part of the mystery of evil unfathomable 
to the understanding, even when illuminated by faith and further by mystical 
intuition. See, however, above. 



INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER V 89 

Upward ever upward to God, such is the law of created being 
and life. In the light of modern knowledge we are able to realise 
this law more fully than was possible to the men of the fourteenth 
century. It is ours to behold with clearer vision than theirs the 
order of created energy and life, its striving and evolution, as 
a moving stairway ascending from story to story of diversely 
graded being till it reaches at length the steps of its Creator s 
throne. 

2. A Few Words on Psychology. The discussion of the relation 
ship between the human soul and God must be prefaced by a 
few words as to human psychology. The psychology adopted by 
St John cannot be regarded as an adequate scientific system for 
the time for such a complete and wholly scientific psychology had 
not yet arrived. Indeed, such a psychology is still in its infancy. 
The scholastic psychology employed by St John seems to me to be 
rather a description of the general features of human life and con 
sciousness, expressed in clear and definite formulae. As such it 
can no more be overthrown by the fuller and more scientific 
psychology of the future than the obvious facts of our physical 
constitution, as known by simple observation and common-sense, 
can be discredited by the more radical explanations of medical 
science. All the psychologies other than the scholastic, hitherto 
adopted, have been defective in every sense even as descriptive, 
because they have tried to explain man s psychical life by the 
denial of some essential factor or element. Since the scholastic 
psychology is thus fundamentally sound in its acceptance of all 
the known facts or aspects of our psychical experience, I will 
adhere to its principles in this work. Such adherence, however, 
will not commit me to the adoption either of its details or of its 
exact terminology. Wlierever I feel that I can bring home my 
meaning more forcibly to the modern reader by the use of terms 
unknown to or otherwise employed by the schoolmen, I shall not 
hesitate to do so. Moreover, I accept in substance the modern 
psychology of the subconscious. 

The human soul has a twofold function in two diverse planes. 
It is in the first place the form of the body by which we mean 
this, at least, that the soul is the principle of organic life and 
growth and of bodily sentience. So far as this function is con 
cerned it is identical with the soul of brute beasts. But the 
rational soul has another function on a higher plane namely, the 
spiritual or rational life. As such the soul transcends the limita- 



90 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

tions of physical existence, and attains to a knowledge of abstract 
or spiritual ideas general ideas as also to self-knowledge, and 
in the rational will it transcends the necessary motions of sensible 
desire. This higher life is divided by the schoolmen and by St 
John into three chief functions, called faculties or powers under 
standing, memory and will. Modern psychology, it is true, dis 
likes the term faculties as implying distinct entities, whereas these 
so-called " faculties " are but different functions of one activity, 
different aspects of one entity. Nevertheless a certain distinction 
must be admitted. Thought is not the same as volition, though it 
is the one indivisible soul that wills and thinks. Therefore that 
one soul has in it a power of willing and a power of thinking. To 
these we may surely apply the term faculty, without implying 
entities substantially distinct from each other and from the soul. 
In this book I will retain the old faculty terminology employed by 
St John, understanding by a faculty a distinct function of the soul. 
I will therefore speak indifferently of " faculty " and " function." 
St John s three faculties of understanding, memory and will may, 
I think, be reduced with profit to two supreme faculties, the cogni 
tive and the conative faculties or functions. By the cognitive 
function we are conscious of general ideas and notions, as also of 
spiritual beings, whether apprehended by discursive reasoning or 
by intuition. 

Throughout these chapters this cognitive faculty or spiritual 
consciousness will often be termed understanding since that is 
the name given to it by St John and the schools. Nevertheless 
the term, if understood strictly, is somewhat misleading. It 
suggests discursive reasoning and the apprehension of distinct 
concepts. The spiritual consciousness, however, while inclusive 
of these activities, transcends them, botn naturally, in a super- 
rational intuition of truths not distinctly grasped by discursive 
reason, and supernaturally in the intuition of God through faith 
and the crown of faith, the veiled intuition of the Divine presence, 
which is a constitutive element of mystical experience. Some 
may object to the use of the term intuition as indicative of the un 
veiled intuition of the beatific vision, and prefer to regard the 
faith-intuition of mysticism as an idea supernaturally impressed. 1 
This objection is, however, ill-founded and misleading. It is surely 
undeniable that the mystical consciousness of God independent, 

1 As in an interesting study of mysticism in The Journal of Ecclesiastical 
Studies. 



INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER V 91 

as it is, of sense data and transcendent of the clear concepts of 
reason is what is generally understood by the term intuition. 
Attached to the spiritual consciousness is the memory of the ideas 
and beings of which it is conscious, and a certain element of 
spiritual as opposed to sensible feeling ; for example, spiritual joy 
and sorrow. The conative faculty or function is the will, stretch 
ing out to good, as apprehended by the cognitive function, together 
with the spiritual emotion, which is attendant in greater or lesser 
degree on the act of will. Spiritual feeling, in so far as it is affec 
tion, is subsumed under the conative or volitional element, as heat 
under energy. Both functions, however, the cognitive and the 
conative, are concomitant. We cannot will without some con 
sciousness of the object willed, nor know without attention of the 
will to the object known. These two functions are aspects of one 
indivisible soul, as also are the lower or sensible functions. All the 
functions of the soul, sensible and spiritual alike, are united by 
proceeding from one centre the central, fundamental ego or self. 
In strict terminology the ego or self is the entire man, the complex 
of soul and body. The body, however, and the psychic functions 
conditioned by and dependent upon the body are parts of the ego 
only in virtue of their union with the central selfhood. Therefore 
I think it justifiable and tending to greater clarity to use the 
term ego of this central selfhood which is the source of the 
individual unity of the entire person. 1 This centre, from which 
all the separate functions of the soul proceed as rays from the sun, 
is termed by the mystics the centre of the soul, or the ground of the 
soul, or synderesis. 2 Since this centre is the least conditioned by 
the limitations of sense, it is nearest to the Unlimited Being of God. 
Hence it is the special seat of the Divine Being and Action, in which 
He is most immanent. It is in the centre that He dwells in an 
especial fashion, because there are fewer limits of non-being to bar 
Him out. It is in and from the centre that He acts in the soul. 
Of this centre or synderesis our knowledge is mainly indirect. 

1 Here I must part company with the schoolmen who regarded the body as 
the principle of individuation. This doctrine makes it very difficult to believe in 
the individual survival of the disembodied spirit. 

8 It is, however, but fair to point out that I depart from the scholastic 
understanding of the synderesis in two points: (i) I regard it as normally 
subliminal ; the scholastic philosophers and theologians did not. (2) They 
regarded it as identical with the intellectual faculty or function by which 
axioms are apprehended. I cannot admit this identity. (Cj. Scheeben, Dogmalik, 
Fr. trs., vol. ii., p. 13.) 



92 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

The inmost ego is normally known only in and through its 
functions. All our psychical functions are largely subconscious, 
as modern psychology has clearly demonstrated. Mainly sub 
conscious are the deeper, more fundamental and more purely 
spiritual energies of the cognitive and conative faculties namely, 
intuition and radical will. As intuition underlies the conscious 
cognition of discursive reason, so the radical will is the fundamental 
disposition of the will, the orientation of the entire self, which 
underlies particular volitions which are not thus completely 
expressive of the soul. At comparatively rare intervals this 
fundamental will emerges in a conscious decision, as also the sub 
conscious intuition becomes on occasion a conscious perception. 
Most fully subconscious, however, is the centre or ground from 
which these cognitive and conative functions proceed. Hence 
the conscious manifestation of the Divine Being and Activity in 
the soul involves as its concomitant its " epi phenomenon," the 
entrance into consciousness of depths and functions normally 
subconscious an upmsh from the subliminal, as modern psy 
chologists term it. Therefore the subject of mystical experience 
is that portion of the soul which is normally subliminal, though by 
no means always entirely subconscious, even in man s normal and 
purely natural life. We must, however, remember that the 
opposite pole of the psychical life, the most extremely superficial 
functions those, namely, that pertain to the vegetive life of the 
body are also normally subconscious or subliminal. There is, as 
Miss Evelyn Underbill aptly remarks (Mysticism, chap, iii), no 
special faculty or function of subconsciousness, no distinct entity, 
such as the " subjective mind " of Hudson. It follows that when 
we term a state of consciousness an uprush from the subliminal we 
really mean only that it is the consciousness of functions, faculties 
or energies, whether superficial, medial or central, of which we 
are normally unconscious, whether or not there is also the con 
sciousness of a transubjective reality apprehended by or active in 
the " emergent " functions. Moreover, the assertion does not tell 
us what functions they are of which the soul has thus become 
conscious. Hence " subliminal uprush " is an exceedingly 
inadequate explanation of any psychological phenomenon. 
Certainly there is a subliminal uprush in mystical experience 
since this involves a consciousness of the central depths through 
which the Divine Being and Action are manifested. But there is 
also a. subliminal uprush from the opposite pole in an attack of 



INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER V 93 

indigestion. We have already discussed the modern error which 
identifies the Divine Being and Action manifested in and through 
the central depths that are normally subliminal with a simple 
consciousness of those normally subliminal depths and their 
natural content the error which regards mystical experience as 
simply subjective. I need not, therefore, say more here on this 
point. There is, then, in the soul a normally subconscious central 
ego, and proceeding from this central ego a fundamental, spiritual 
consciousness or cognitive faculty, which, as it comes to the surface 
of consciousness, produces the increasingly limited and increas 
ingly sense-conditioned forms of consciousness and a funda 
mental, spiritual will or conative faculty, which, as it comes to the 
surface in like manner, produces the increasingly limited and the 
increasingly sense-conditioned forms of volition and desire. Con 
comitant with these faculties, especially with the conation, is a 
spiritual feeling which, when it accompanies more limited, more 
superficial and more sensible forms of consciousness and volition, 
becomes the sensible feeling that is so narrowly limited and so 
transitory. Thus there is, in the centre of the soul, as Ruysbroeck 
points out (Mirror of Eternal Salvation, chap, ix), an image of 
the most Holy Trinity. For him, as for many mystics and fathers, 
from St Augustine downwards, this created trinity of the human 
soul consists of memory, understanding and will. Without in 
any way desiring to reject or belittle this venerable image, I find 
myself better aided by a modified form of it, since the memory 
does not seem to me so fundamentally distinct a function or 
faculty as are the understanding and the will. The created trinity 
in the central soul consists, in my view, of the central ego the 
ground of the soul, the synderesis and the cognitive and the cona 
tive faculties the understanding and the will. The synderesis or 
the ground of the soul is an image of the Father, for from it pro 
ceed the two fundamental properties or functions of the soul, 
cognition or understanding and conation or will. The under 
standing is an image of the Son, the Eternal Wisdom, the will 
of the Holy Ghost, the Eternal Love. The procession of both 
from the ground is an image of the procession of the Divine 
Persons. 

Now it is clear, I think, that a man s will is the most funda 
mental expression of himself. This primacy of will in the psychical 
life, the fact that conative activity is the most fundamental of all 
our psychical activities, has been greatly stressed by modern 



94 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

psychologists. Wundt, for example, regards " will as the central 
point of the psychical life " (Hoffding, Modern Philosophers., trs. 
Mason, p. 6). According to Professor Hoffding "there is an element 
of will in all psychic states " (Modern Philosophers, p. 282). He, of 
course, understands by will every kind of purposive or conative 
activity. But of these conations, will, in the usual sense of the 
term, especially the decision and orientation of the radical will, is 
the highest, most interior and most spiritual form. Therefore in 
all the highest, most interior and most spiritual activities of the 
soul, which are those with which mystical theology is concerned, 
there is doubtless present an element of will in the strictest sense. 
It follows, therefore, that of all our psychical functions or faculties 
the will penetrates farthest into, and is most deeply rooted in, the 
central ego ; or, if you prefer a less metaphorical expression, that 
will is the most fundamental and most representative aspect of the 
ego, M. Bergson supports this psychology when he teaches that 
it is " in an energetic decision of the will that the basal ego finds 
self expression, and that in such volition the ego of the depths 
rises to the surface and asserts itself " (Hoffding, Modern Phil 
osophers, p. 282). That is the reason that certain mystics term 
the centre the apex of the will. 

All our knowledge in this life that is to say, all our natural 
knowledge is conditioned by the images received from sense. 
Not natural but supernatural is the intuition or realisation of God 
as present in and intimately united with the apex, which is given 
in mystical experience. But although all our other knowledge is 
thus sense-conditioned, it is not so conditioned to an equal degree. 
We can, even in the natural order, live an interior life, spiritualis 
ing our knowledge by the contemplation of spiritual ideas, whence 
the particular images of sense are abstracted as far as may be and 
bringing into play our most interior and self-expressing faculties 
both cognitive and conative. 

These preliminary remarks will, I hope, be sufficient to outline 
the psychology of the human soul as the subject of mystical 
experience. Further light and more detailed information will be 
supplied by our consideration of the mystical way itself which is, 
from first to last, dependent upon and conditioned by the essential 
nature of the soul and on its consequent relationship to God. 
Nothing is laid down by St John of the Cross which is not logically 
consequent on his doctrine of God and the soul, and the under 
standing of the mystical way will therefore throw the clearest light 



INTRODUCTION TO CHAPTER V 95 

on its Object and subject in their mutual relationship or, to speak 
more accurately, on the relationship of the latter to the Former. 
The Being of God is the fixed and changeless, because Absolute, 
Reality, immanent in yet transcendent of the soul, with Whom the 
soul of man is in relation, and towards Whom that soul progresses 
in the mystical way. 



CHAPTER V 

THE RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 
THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF THE MYSTICAL WAY 

Jacob being, departed from Bersabee went towards Haran. And 
when he would rest after sunset he took of the stones, and putting 
them under his head he slept. And he saw in his sleep a ladder 
standing upon the earth, and the top thereof touching heaven, the 
angels also of God ascending and descending by it : and the Lord 
leaning upon the ladder, saying unto him : " / am the Lord 
God." And when Jacob awaked out of sleep, he said : " Indeed 
the Lord is in this place and I knew it not. How terrible is 
this place ! This is no other but the house of God and the gate 
of heaven." GENESIS xxviii. 

O world invisible we view thee, 
O world intangible we touch thee, 
O world unknowable we know thee, 
Inapprehensible we clutch thee. 

The angels keep their ancient places : 
Turn but a stone, and start a wing ! 
Tis ye, tis your estranged faces 
That miss the many splendouted thing. 
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder) 
Cry ! and upon thy so sore loss 
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob s ladder 
Pitched between heaven and Charing Cross. 

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 

" There are different roads by which this end (apprehension of the 
Infinite) may be reached. The love of beauty, which exalts the poet ; 
that devotion to the One, and that ascent of Science which makes the 
ambition of the philosopher ; and that love and those prayers by 
which some devout and ardent soul tends in its moral purity to 
wards perfection. These are the great highways conducting to that 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 97 

height above the actual and the particular, where we stand in the 
immediate presence of the Infinite, who shines out as from the 
deeps of the soul. 9 

PLOTINUS, 

Letter to Flaccus. Quoted by Miss Spurgeon, 
Mysticism in English Literature, p. 33. 

MAN S relation to God differs fundamentally from that of infra- 
rational creatures. He is no longer the blind slave of the life 
impulse, or of instinct, though these play a far greater part in his 
life than psychology has, until lately, been prepared to admit. 
His soul is not merely the principle of his animal life, but a rational 
spirit. As such the human soul is not bound by the limits of the 
particular object, but is capable of generalisation. Man can, 
moreover, criticise his own impulses and desires and frame his own 
ends, rationally chosen, his free will being thus grounded in his 
rationality. Furthermore, his reason makes known to him the 
inadequacy of any finite object. His reason cannot, indeed, form 
any concept of the infinite being essentially finite. It can only 
lead him to a negative knowledge of the infinite, as that which lacks 
the limitations inherent in every finite image and concept. To 
this good, however, he can reach out by his will. For the object 
of the will is good, and since reason apprehends the inadequacy of 
finite goods, the will cannot ultimately rest in such, but stretches 
out to infinite good. This infinite good is God, conceived 
in the negative-positive manner discussed in the preceding 
chapters. Therefore in this life the will is the supreme means of 
union between the human soul and God. The author of The 
Obscure Knowledge states this very clearly. " It is most certain," 
he says, " that in this life the union of the will is far more ex 
cellent and of higher worth than the union of the understanding, 
and it is better to love God than to know Him, because that which 
we can love with the will is much more than that which we can 
attain with the understanding. The reason of this may be 
gathered from a consideration of the respective modes of opera 
tion of the understanding and the will. They are completely 
different. When the understanding understands, it attracts to 
itself the object understood and forms an idea of it within itself, 
which idea it contains within itself. Since its capacity is finite, it 
reduces within its own limitations the object understood, even if 
in itself that object be infinite, even as the ocean is reduced and 
narrowed when it enters the Straits of Gibraltar. The will, on the 



98 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

contrary, when it loves goes out of itself and is transformed into 
the object loved and is made one thing with it. The object loved 
is not therefore limited by it. From this we can see how different 
is our understanding of God in this life from our love of Him. We 
understand Him according to our own capacity ; we love Him 
as He is in Himself " (Obscure Knowledge, chap. x). Similar is 
the teaching of Mother Cecilia. " From the limitation inherent 
in everything external there is," she writes, " no escape, unless 
the Divine communication find an abiding place in the heart, by 
which is meant the intimate part of the will or the essence of the 
soul. Since this was created by God after His own image and 
likeness, it possesses an immensity so profound that it is like a 
bottomless well, or rather an ocean in the which the deeper the soul 
sinks the farther is she from touching bottom, for she has a life 
grounded in the very life and essence of her Creator. . . . The 
will alone is permitted to love the soul s lord with a certain 
infinity in its love, due to the infinity of the object of its love, 
in Whom it loses itself completely" (Transformation, st. 1). 
" Love gives the soul . . . more of God than any other means " 
(Transformation, st. 11). 

If man lived wholly or chiefly by reason, he would reach out 
to this supreme good. I do not mean that he would attain to the 
beatific vision of God, or even to mystical union with Him, for 
that is essentially beyond the capacity of unaided nature, but he 
would have a certain will union with God a union such as we 
may suppose to be enjoyed by the souls of unbaptized infants. 
It is certain that man has no real satisfaction short of the attain 
ment of infinite good. All lower satisfaction is merely seeming. 
Along every line of human activity there is this striving after the 
infinite an ascent from the more to the less limited. Such is the 
way of knowledge, rising from a merely practical colligation and 
generalisation of the sense-presented facts of everyday life, to the 
apprehension of scientific laws and metaphysical principles. It is 
the same with the way of love never to be satisfied with any 
limited object. Hence the cry of the mighty lover, St Augustine : 
" Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it 
repose in Thee." l The infinite good that is God is indeed the sole 
true happiness, and therefore the sole end of the human heart. 

But we have already seen that God is not only the trans 
cendent goal of creatures but is also immanent in the human 

1 Confessions, I. i. Trs. Pusey. 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 99 

soul, as the ultimate ground of the psychic life of man. As this life, 
being spiritual, is immeasureably higher than infrarational being 
and life, it is, to use a spatial metaphor, more deeply grounded 
and rooted in the Divine Being because more fully participant 
of that Being. Most deeply grounded in the Godhead, since 
it is most fully possessed and most fully representative of God, 
is the higher or spiritual life of the human soul, especially its root, 
the synderesis or centre. For that central life is freest of limits, 
and in it therefore the Unlimited is peculiarly present. Thus 
God dwells especially in the centre of the soul. Moreover, the 
powers of the soul are its instruments for dealing with creatures 
and with the images and concepts derived therefrom. Hence the 
powers and the more so in proportion to their distance from 
the centre that is, the more sensible and superficial they are 
are farther removed from God than the centre and the highest 
powers that are most intimately rooted in it. Moreover we have 
seen that the will reaches deepest into this central ground. There 
fore the will is for this reason also the chief means to union with 
God within the centre. Just now we saw that this was the case, 
because the will most completely transcended the particular in 
its outgoing search of unlimited good. But it is also true because 
the will reaches innermost into the central life, away and free from 
the superficial life that is conditioned and limited, immediately or 
mediately by sense images. This is, of course, the same fact 
regarded from different points of view, the same reality under 
two aspects. I will now quote the words of St John and his 
school on the presence of God in the centre of the soul. " We 
must remember," he says, in the Spiritual Canticle, " that the 
Word, the Son of God, together with the Father and the Holy 
Ghost, is hidden in essence and in presence, in the inmost being 
of the soul. That soul therefore that will find Him, must go out 
from all things in will and affection and enter into the profoundest 
self-recollection. ..." Hence St Augustine saith : "I found 
Thee not without, O Lord ; I sought Thee without in vain, for 
Thou art within." (God is indeed immanent in external creatures 
but as their being is less representative of His participating 
less fully in His Being on account of their greater limitation 
He is not so fully present in them as in the human soul that is 
capable of apprehending and willing an Infinite Good, and is as 
such made in His own image and likeness.) " God is therefore 
hidden within the soul, and the true contemplative will seek Him 



100 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

there in love." . . . " O thou soul . . . thou knowest now that 
thou art thyself that very tabernacle where He dwells, the secret 
chamber of His retreat where He is hidden. Rejoice, therefore, 
and exult, because all thy good and all thy hope is so near thee 
as to be within thee, or to speak more accurately that thou canst 
not be without it, for, lo, the kingdom of God is within you. . . . 
What more canst thou desire, what more canst thou seek without, 
seeing that within thou hast thy riches, thy delights, thy satis 
faction, thy fulness and thy kingdom ; that is, thy Beloved, 
Whom thou desirest and seekest ? Rejoice, then, and be glad 
in thy interior recollection with Him, seeing that thou hast Him 
so near. There love Him, there desire Him, there adore Him, 
and go not to seek Him out of thyself, for that will be but dis 
traction and weariness, and thou shalt not find Him, because 
there is no fruition of Him more certain, more ready, or more 
nigh than that which is within " (Spiritual Canticle, st. 1). 
"We must remember that in every soul God dwells secretly and 
veiled in their substance, for were it otherwise they could not 
endure in existence. There is, however, a difference as regards 
this inhabitation between one soul and another, and a great 
difference it is. In some souls He dwells alone, in others not alone, 
in some pleased, in others displeased, in some as in His house, 
commanding and directing everything, and in others as a stranger 
in a house not His own, where He is not permitted to order or to 
do anything " (Living Flame of Love, st. 4). " By saying 
that the flame of love [i.e. God s infused love] strikes the deepest 
centre of the soul, it is implied that there are other centres in the 
soul not so deep. I must explain how this is so. We must 
realise, first of all, that the soul, being a spirit, has in its being 
neither height nor depth, neither a deeper nor a less deep portion, 
as have bodies that are possessed of quantity. Moreover, since 
it has no parts, there is no distinction of outer and inner, but the 
entire soul is uniform. Neither has the soul a centre more or 
less profound in a quantitative sense. It cannot be more 
illuminated in one part than in another, as are physical bodies, 
but uniformly in whatever degree of illumination it may possess, 
even as the air is uniformly illuminated whether in greater or 
lesser degree. In the case of material objects we term that their 
deepest centre which is the farthest to which their being and 
virtue and the force of their activity and motion extend, the 
point beyond which they cannot pass, nor can they be kept away 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 101 

from thence save by some obstacle which forcibly impedes them. 
We say, for example, of a stone when it is inside the earth, although 
not in the greatest depth thereof, that it is in some sense in its 
centre, because it is in the sphere of its centre, activity and motion. 
We do not, however, say that it is in its deepest centre, for that 
is the mid-point of the earth. That stone, therefore, still possesses 
virtue, force and inclination to descend until it reaches this 
ultimate and deepest centre, if only the obstacle be removed. 
When the stone reaches that centre, and no longer possesses in 
itself the capacity or inclination for further movement, we say 
that it is in its deepest centre. 

" The centre of the soul is God. When the soul shall have 
attained to God to the utmost of its capacity it will have attained 
its ultimate and deepest centre in Him, which will be when it 
understands, loves and tastes God with all its powers " (Living 
Flame of Love, st. 1). We note, indeed, in this passage a 
change of idea God being now regarded as the centre of the soul. 
The reason is that the centre or ground of the soul is itself grounded 
in Him, and that in the most intimate manner. It is therefore 
easy to pass from one concept to the other. In fact certain 
unorthodox mystics e.g. Eckhardt have actually confused 
the created centre or ground where God dwells, and where we find 
Him in mystical experience, with God Himself. The existence of 
this confusion should make us realise how intimately the centre 
of the soul, the very ego, is grounded in the Divine Being, though, 
of course, as a creature, infinitely distant from Him. I have 
already warned the reader against an exclusive understanding of 
the statements of the mystics, and our subsequent consideration 
of the transcendence of God has explained and stressed that 
warning. The mystic feels so intensely and so intimately the 
presence of God in the centre of his soul as the very ground 
of his selfhood that he is driven to use language which might 
suggest to the unwary the notion that the centre is itself 
divine. The Spanish mystics, however, are more careful to 
guard against such misunderstanding than were the German 
and Flemish mystics before them. Perhaps the clearest state 
ment of the Divine immanence in the centre, or ground, of 
the soul, is the following passage from Mother Cecilia, in her 
comment on the lines : 

She (the soul) ascendeth to the empyrean heaven 
And lifteth the veil from her secret centre. 



102 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

" We are to understand," she says, " by these words the force 
wherewith the soul is raised above all her faculties superior and 
inferior to her centre, which is meant by the empyrean heaven, 
where God dwells within her and where she has the fruition of Him 
as if in heaven. Hence some have termed the centre the heaven 
of the spirit. . . . Only he who has had the experience can believe 
the immensity of blessings that are revealed or hidden in this 
Divine heaven. He who knows only the grossness of man s 
exterior will never be able to understand that within the soul 
hidden beneath this shabby veil of mortal flesh there is contained 
an immense centre of boundless riches and glory. The senses 
cannot perceive nor the human intellect understand, nor can our 
reason judge how God dwells there. . . . This most profound and 
most sacred depth of the soul is the dwelling-place of God. In 
this Divine centre we are made in His likeness. Nothing can fill 
or satisfy this centre save God Himself. Until the soul loses 
herself in the immensity of God, she does not know or understand 
the wealth that she possesses within herself, nor does she obtain 
even an inkling of what this Divine centre really is in its substance 
and true nature. Verily, no living man exists, or has existed, 
who has comprehended the nature of this centre." . . . "The 
words And lifteth the veil from her secret centre are intended 
to make us realise how different is the state of such a soul from 
the condition of those who have not attained to the revelation 
of this centre. From these latter this centre is hidden by a veil so 
thick and dark that it not only hides the centre itself, but even the 
knowledge that they possess within themselves that hidden place. 
... If however a soul empties and purifies herself, she will be 
able to discover her centre and to plunge in the Divine immensity 
the emptiness of her very essence which none can fill or satisfy 
save God Himself. I am . . . treating here, of those who have 
wholly plunged themselves into their God and have discovered 
this immense place which they possess in themselves and in Him 
and have attained the riches aforesaid, and the other ineffable 
immensities. . . . They have discovered this empyrean heaven 
which is their most profound centre, whereon God fully smote and 
from which He has removed the dark veil of all that hindered this 
Divine communication " (Transformation of the Soul in God, 
st. 4). 

Cardinal Newman, who realised so intensely the immanence of 
God in the centre of the soul as to term God " the true self, that 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 103 

better part of our being, of whom our very self is but the im 
personal instrument and the servant," and who bade his hearers 
regard God " as enthroned within us at the very springs of thought 
and affection," termed this centre conscience. I cannot but feel 
this to be a misnomer. Conscience is surely but the discursive 
reason as perceptive of ethical truth. The possession of this 
perception is indeed a strong argument for the existence of God 
but it is not therefore to be identified either with the intuitive 
perception of God or with the central ego. Both of these are 
deeper and wider than the ethical judgment. We cannot regard 
ethical perception as the sole or even as the supreme avenue of 
communication between the soul and God Who is revealed to us 
alike in His historical revelation and in our personal experience 
not only as Absolute Goodness but also as Absolute Beauty and 
Truth. It is indeed true that our closest union with God is 
effected through love, and that love is an ethical activity. The 
love of God, however, is far more than a morally good will. Still 
less is it identical with ethical perception which pertains to reason 
not to will. 

God is therefore the end and goal of the human spirit, and 
He is immanent in the centre of that spirit as the ground of its 
being. Why then is man not in closer and more actual union 
with Him ? Why are we not normally conscious of God s Presence 
within our souls ? On account, it may be replied, of the limitations 
of human nature. There is much truth in this answer, but it is 
inadequate. The only answer that is fully adequate is that given 
by the Catholic Church. That answer is simple it is contained 
in one word : sin. Original sin, actual sin and their consequences : 
these and these alone separate the human soul from God. I will 
first discuss the theory of this separation and will then point out 
how it is realised in actual life. Original sin consists in the loss 
of a supernatural elevation of the soul (the state of original justice) 
whereby the essential limitation of created being was so removed 
by a supernatural being and life infused by God 1 and named by 
theology habitual or sanctifying grace that the soul was capable 
of a superhuman union with Unlimited Godhead, in emancipation 
from the creaturely limits that naturally exclude such union. 
When through Christ we are restored in baptism to the super 
natural order of sanctifying grace, the potentiality together with a 
radical actualisation of this superhuman union with God is once 

1 Strictly speaking, a quality or habit. 



104 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

more ours and continues ours until we wilfully lose it by grave 
actual sin. Actual sin is a deliberate turning of the will from 
God to creatures aversion from God, conversion to creatures. 
When this aversion is complete, the sin is mortal, when partial, 
it is venial. Every sinful act is then the deliberate preference of 
some finite good to the infinite good. By this preference we erect 
that finite good into a barrier whose finitude shuts out from us 
the infinite good. It is not that God can ever cease to be actually 
present in the soul but that the wrong will averts the soul from 
Him, cuts it off from will-union with Him. If through a truly 
invincible ignorance a man does not know God, he will be guilty 
of sin or imperfection whenever he deliberately prefers in his 
ethical choices the more limited to the less limited good. But 
it may be urged that it is impossible for any man knowingly to 
prefer a lesser to a greater good, much less a finite to an infinite 
good ; and that therefore sin is nothing but ignorance, as Plato 
maintained. Certainly there is an element of ignorance in all sin. 
It is true that nobody can choose a lesser good to a greater with 
attention fixed on this fact. He can, however, shut his eyes to 
the difference of value, because the lesser good is more pleasant 
for the moment. Furthermore, there is in fallen man a rooted 
tendency to prefer his immediate but limited pleasure as a separ 
ate individual to the universal or absolute good with which, 
or rather with Whom, he ought in reason to identify his own good. 
This tendency shows us that actual sin arises out of an infirm, 
indeed a depraved condition of human nature the result, so 
the faith teaches us, of the fall, that is of original sin, and its con 
sequences, still abiding even in the regenerate. This depravity 
may be reduced under two heads. There is, first, the rebellion 
of the lower and sensual desires against the spirit the law of the 
flesh fighting against the law of the mind. " The flesh lusteth 
against the spirit." The soul is, as we saw, the principle of 
physical life and of bodily desires. These lower functions of the 
soul are in fallen man at variance with the higher, and are ever 
dragging him downwards and imprisoning him within the limits 
of the unspiritual, narrowly limited and therefore comparatively 
unreal creatures and their images, which are the proper objects 
of sensible life and desires. There is, however, a yet deeper 
deordination in the higher soul itself, the above-mentioned ten 
dency to isolate the self from the Absolute and Universal good. 
This more spiritual deordination leads man to place his happiness 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 105 

in creatures of a more spiritual and therefore less limited char 
acter than the objects of the sensible desires though still wholly 
finite for example, the gratification of intellectual or spiritual 
pride or ambition. Both these evils are manifestations of con 
cupiscence. Concupiscence in the widest sense of the term is 
the limited and the selfish desire or volition due to the sense 
dependence of the embodied soul, working freely and limiting 
the soul. But for original sin this operation and potency of con 
cupiscence would have been destroyed by the presence of super 
natural grace uniting the soul with God. Original sin, " the lack 
of this superadded gift," has enabled concupiscence to bind the 
soul within the limits of selfish and sense-conditioned desires 
and apprehensions by which bondage and limitations it has been 
separated from the Divine Union. This loss of supernatural 
elevation and its concomitant deordination are due to the sin of 
the first man in virtue of the mysterious solidarity of mankind 
founded in their common humanity. Although the fact of an 
historic fall can be known by faith alone, lacking as it does all 
other evidence, the principle of solidarity through which that fall 
has operated as original sin is an undeniable fact of experience, 
and pre-eminently of mystical experience. 

To the ultra-individualism of nineteenth-century speculation, 
whereby the individual was treated as a circle wholly closed, the 
doctrine of original sin was of necessity radically unintelligible. 
That ultra-individualism has, however, received mortal blows 
from every quarter. M. Bergson, for instance, insists on reproduc 
tion as a breach of that circle (V Evolution Creatrice, 8th edition, 
p. 14). An exaggerated insistence on racial solidarity indeed of 
the solidarity of man with the rest of creation has succeeded 
the opposite exaggeration. Such an exaggerated solidarity is 
one of the dominant motifs of Remain Holland s Jean Christophe 
that novel so faithfully and so fully reflective of the modern 
Zeitgeist. Yet it is, as we have seen, in this fact of human solid 
arity a solidarity constituted, moreover, by reproduction that 
original sin is grounded. It is indeed the inherited nature of 
man, as fallen from and exclusive of its supernatural elevation 
by the grace-union with God. Considered in this light, the 
doctrine is in harmony with the conception of solidarity so 
dominant in modern speculation, is indeed its application in the 
religious sphere. 
Moreover the deordination of human nature, its bondage to 



106 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

concupiscence, are data of all truly religious experience, especially, 
therefore, of the experience of the mystic. 

Concupiscence is idolatry in the strictest sense. For it is, essenti 
ally, the making of some limited good the end of life. It may 
indeed be that this limited good is of an altruistic nature the 
good of one s family, country, or of mankind. If God be without 
personal fault unknown, and if these altruistic goods be chosen 
as the highest good known this is an imperfect grasping after 
God. This service of other creatures as the final end of man is, 
however, always essentially irrational, because at the end of all 
a limit still remains. It is only rendered possible by an ignor 
ance of God, which is itself the result of sin in others. Altruism 
is therefore an irrational and transitory compromise between the 
love of concupiscence, which prefers the limited good of the creature 
to the unlimited Divine Good, and the love of charity, which unites 
the soul* to God by removing the barriers of self-will present in 
all love which rests in the limited creature as its end. 

Even the briefest contemplation of mankind suffices to reveal 
how radical and how widely extended is this perversion of our will. 
Almost all men to the end of their lives, even if their will be 
radically united to God in the state of supernatural grace are 
bound in undue bondage within the limitations of creatures. 
Vast multitudes live almost entirely on the surface of life in the 
gratification of the desires of sense. Many have never unified their 
life at all by deliberate choice of any one good deliberately willed 
as the supreme end of life, but live, as it were, from hand to 
mouth, following in turn each narrowly limited desire. Of their 
higher spiritual faculties they know little, and are never, or hardly 
ever, recollected in themselves. Their life is most literally summed 
up by the words of the Preacher, " Vanity of vanities ; all is vanity." 
Others perhaps have unified their life more or less completely 
by one aim, but that aim is very superficial and limited. It 
therefore only serves to bind them the closer within the limited. 
Of course there are moments of dissatisfaction, vague longings 
for something better. But the chains of habit bind fast dis 
tractions are many example is plentiful there is little time for 
thought in the press of business or dissipation. The desire rises. 
It is put away. The cords are tightened around the soul. Others 
are on a higher plane, have chosen a spiritual and therefore 
more unlimited and more real good. These are happier, for there 
is more fulness in their life, greater reality in the object of their 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 107 

love, and its possibilities are not exhausted so quickly. Never 
theless the greater reality, and the more unlimited nature of their 
idol, roots that idol the deeper in their heart. Such souls 
ambitious men, lovers of military fame, political power, literary 
or artistic success are harder to convert and more likely to 
have fundamentally and deliberately averted their will from 
God than the former class. Then again, there are those whose 
idol is a fellow-being a wife or child or a group of fellow-beings, 
a party or a nation. These have indeed broken through a very 
strong barrier, have achieved a very large measure of emancipa 
tion from limits, for they have identified their good with a good 
higher, wider and more real than their individual selfhood namely, 
the good of other spiritual beings. But there is always a limit, 
and with that limit disappointment. Nevertheless, souls who 
make human love their end are the readiest to turn to the love 
of God. 

Since God is in the truest sense the natural end of the human 
soul, and since in the fundamental Divine Intention every soul 
was intended for supernatural union with God, there are, I think, 
few, if indeed there be any, who do not at some time or other 
feel at least a vague craving for an infinite good, that is in reality 
for Him, though they know it not themselves. Even in the most 
sinful, in the most self and sense-limited souls, in the depths below 
the threshold of consciousness, the central ego still craves for the 
Unlimited God. This central craving emerges into consciousness 
at times, as at least an indefinable yearning, an apprehension of, 
a craving after an unknown Reality that will satisfy the emptiness 
of the heart created for the Infinite. Souls gifted intellectually 
or spiritually feel this craving and apprehension most often and 
most keenly. This craving often involves an intuition of the 
Divine Presence not the supernatural intuition of the mystic, 
which is an immediate fruition of His Presence, but the perception 
that there is an Unlimited Being other than the limited creatures 
in which the soul cannot rest. This intuitive perception may not 
be, usually is not, explicitly present in consciousness. It is rather 
the subconscious background of the craving for the Unlimited. 
It is the presupposition and the stimulus of that craving. Were 
not the presence of the Unlimited in some way manifest to the 
soul, the limited would not be thus felt as vain and unsatisfying. 
Moreover, this Presence is undeniably apprehended in and through 
that craving. Dissatisfaction with the limited is a search after the 



108 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

Unlimited, and that search of the central conation involves a 
certain apprehension of its Object as existent. In many men 
this background intuition of the Presence of the Divine Being 
tends to become more or less explicitly conscious, an intuition 
concomitant upon or causing the will act. This intuition is, 
however, still indirect, the apprehension of the existence of an 
unknown Somewhat immanent in external creation or in the soul 
itself. It is often confused with some creature through whom 
Its presence has been revealed. Next to the man whose natural 
bent is religious who has a religious temperament the artist and 
the poet both are fundamentally one, the media of expression 
alone being different enjoy most strongly and most often this 
sense or intuition of God. But we all have some share of the 
religious temperament, and most of us some share also of the 
artistic or poetical temperament. For this reason the master 
pieces of religious thought, of poetry and of art, so often seem to 
us like the realisation of vaguely apprehended potencies in 
ourselves. 

This sense of the Divine presence in its lower and purely 
natural forms is so common that its reality has been, and is, 
admitted by many who are far from any faith that could adequately 
interpret its nature in terms of reason. Even such a stalwart 
sceptic as Professor Gilbert Murray has to admit its existence ; 
and is driven to explain it as a result of inherited herd-instinct ! 
(Lecture on Stoicism, concluding pages.) This intuition of the 
Divine Presence immanent in creatures appears in higher, clearer 
and more direct forms. Often it is an apprehension of a Presence 
that far exceeds the creatures wherein It is manifested as im 
manent, and is nevertheless not clearly distinguished from them. 
Hence it is often misinterpreted intellectually in a pantheistic 
or quasi-pantheistic sense. At other times it is a clearer and 
a direct intuition of a Being wholly distinct from and infinitely 
transcendent of creatures, and Who is usually thus apprehended 
rather in the centre of the soul than in external nature. In this 
clearer and more transcendent intuition there is present, I believe, 
a supernatural element, an operation of grace, so that it is indeed 
the dawn of the truly mystical intuition of God. The lowest, 
most obscure and purely immanental intuition, on the other hand, 
I regard as wholly natural. In proportion as the immanental 
perception becomes a clear consciousness of the Divine Being 
present in, but other than, nature I am inclined to trace an 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 109 

increasing presence and working of grace as I trace it, for instance, 
in much that is often termed nature-mysticism (see Chapter XIV). 
The progress from purely natural to purely supernatural intuition 
will thus correspond with the progress from the purely immanental 
to the clearly transcendental apprehension of God. This progress 
will be, of course, incapable of accurate determination from the 
external and empirical standpoint to which we are of necessity 
confined. Nevertheless there is an absolute distinction. There 
is a definite point, though we can never fix it, where the super 
natural that is Divine grace supervenes on the natural operation 
of the soul, when a new principle is introduced. In the intro 
duction of this new principle the transition from natural to 
supernatural differs essentially from the gradual increase and 
revelation of grace in mystical experience. 

A passage of Lucie Christine s Spiritual Journal, truly remark 
able for its clarity and beauty, describes this gradual rise of intuition 
from God immanent to God transcendent, from the purely natural 
level to the purely supernatural level. We have first a purely 
natural intuition, when her soul was filled with natural beauty 
in itself, when, as she tells us, " The first glimpse of the sea from the 
cliffs drew tears from my eyes. I often remained whole hours 
contemplating its immensity without being able to express what 
I felt." Then followed a level when the intuition was still that 
of the nature mystic the perception of God immanent. But 
that apprehension was so clear that it surely postulated a co 
operative working of supernatural grace. " I sought Thee, my 
God, in all things beautiful and in all things I found Thee. I 
asked Thee of the sea . . . Thou wast reposing in its depths . . . 
I met Thee in the impenetrable gloom of forests. I have felt 
Thee in the hidden travail of nature." Finally followed a purely 
supernatural intuition of God transcendent of His creation. 
" As the stars fade away in the light of the sun, so everything 
grew pale in the glance of God upon my soul ; / gazed on 
sea and land and saw only God" (Spiritual Journal, Eng. Trs., 
pp. 130-134). ! 

Concomitantly with the intuitional progress is the progress of 
the will-union which accompanies it, the volitional nisus towards 

1 Of course Lucie s soul was throughout in the supernatural order. The 
intuition was nevertheless simply natural in its earlier stages and could have 
been possessed by a soul in the order of mere nature. Not so with the higher 
levels. 



110 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

God a progress from a merely natural craving for unlimited good 
to the supernatural love of God. 

I wish now to consider some of the forms of purely natural 
intuition and corresponding volition of the Unlimited. I will 
endeavour to point out their incapacity to admit the soul to the 
fruition of that Unlimited Good that in them is apprehended and 
desired. 1 When this has been made clear, I will pass on to the 
life of supernatural grace and show how, through that life of grace, 
this fruition is truly and fully obtained, a fruition which is manifest 
to the soul even in this world, in that higher form of the grace-life 
which is mystical experience. This discussion cannot fail to 
illuminate the positive relationship or union of the human soul 
with God of which mystical experience is the most intimate 
degree possible on earth and the prelude of the perfect union of 
heaven. 

Before, however, I speak further of the natural intuitions of 
God and volitions towards Him, that are manifested in the 
spiritual life of man, I must mention the more usual way by which 
theism and its consequent will attitude towards God are attained 
by the normal man who lacks supernatural faith. This is the 
way of discursive reason, of the rational arguments or proofs of 
theism. Such is the reasoning of the plain man, who from his 
knowledge of creatures argues the existence of a Divine Creator. 
A higher and more complete form of this reasoning is the intellectual 
or philosophic theism of the student and thinker who is led upward 
from generalisation to generalisation, till he catches a glimpse of the 
ultimate Unity. These theistic proofs of the discursive reason serve 
also to interpret the more obscure intuitions which would other 
wise lack definite significance. Without this rational interpretation 
the lower intuitions would be of scant value. Moreover, whereas 
God grants the intuition of His Presence to those only Whom He 
chooses, the proofs of discursive reason lie open to all sane men of 
good will. The natural theology reached by the scientific or 
metaphysical ladder of discursive reason is often the precursor 
and occasion of supernatural faith. For this intellectual or 
philosophic theism arouses the will to seek union with God, 
since all knowledge carries with it the possibility of corresponding 
volition. This volition is often transformed by grace into true 
charity, as the natural knowledge of God is similarly trans- 

I 1 will also take occasion to point out this incapacity of all kinds of higher 
spiritual life other than the religious. 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 111 

formed into faith. But surely, despite their sovereign importance, 
I need speak no further of this rational knowledge of God and 
of the will-union arising therefrom. For the matter is amply 
treated in countless text-books and is obvious to Christian common- 
sense. Moreover, mysticism has little to do with discursive 
reasoning. It lies rather in the province of intuition, and to 
intuition I will therefore return. Of a nature different altogether 
from those conclusions of discursive reasoning, which it confirms 
and by whose aid it is itself often interpreted, is the intuition of 
the Divine Presence wholly or partially natural, which in various 
degrees of clearness and obscurity is an experience by no means 
uncommon. 

Indeed all true lovers of nature possess some degree of this 
intuition, if only in its lowest and purely natural form. Perhaps 
the Divine Presence is less often felt at high noon, in the blazing 
light and scorching heat of a midsummer day, when the very 
multiplicity and wealth of natural phenomena and activities 
fill the soul, though then, indeed, it was that Richard Jefferies 
felt it most of all. It is perhaps felt least of all in winter, when the 
vital force of earth is fast bound, as within bars of iron, by cold 
and barrenness. But there are other moments when we are 
more intimately in touch with the life of nature. There is the 
early morning of spring, when the new-risen sun bathes the world 
with clear and cool light, when the birds are singing, and a soft 
breeze stirs the young leaves whose green is so exquisitely delicate. 
The grass is starred with bright flowers, the blue dome of sky is 
trellised around the borders with interlacing boughs of trees, 
woodland and hedgerow trees in new leaf, orchard trees bright 
with the splendour of pale pink and snow-white blossom, a scene 
such as that imaged by Dante for the earthly paradise. There 
is a bathe in the sea in the early morning, when the fresh sunlight 
glows on the white foam of the breaking billows whose energy 
seems to penetrate the body and fill the soul with the very life 
of nature, that life which is the luxuriant growth of the vegetation 
and the strength and swiftness of the untamed beasts of the field. 
Every detail of the scene is rich with a beauty that is sacramental 
of something beyond. 1 The white- or brown-sailed fishing-boats 
put out to sea one after the other and glide swiftly over the blue 
waters, violet horizoned, beneath a sky of paler and clearer blue 

1 Nevertheless on this purely natural level that farther something is still un 
known. The sacraments of nature cannot as yet be fruitfully received. 



112 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

hung richly with white and purple clouds. The subtle grace of 
their motion and form, their fresh colouring is in perfect harmony 
with the scene to which they lend that touch of specifically 
human significance which crowns and points the natural beauty, 
like a windmill or church spire in a landscape of fields and wood 
land. At such moments as these the soul is taken back into that 
primitive world when the entire life of man was in such harmony 
with Nature that every act, however simple, of human life was a 
communion with her life, and an expression of that life, and was 
invested thereby with a mysterious beauty, for it was a symbol of 
the Spiritual Reality of which Nature is at once a revelation and 
a veil. In that world of natural poetry Nature seemed sufficient 
for man, and his awful and irretrievable l loss of the supernatural 
was scarce felt. To that world, the world of Homer and the 
sagas, does the soul now return. At such moments physical 
nature is enough, for the soul is filled with beauty and life. 

Indeed, Nature is then felt as a mighty aspiration after a life of 
unlimited fulness, an aspiration which bursts all bonds in a new 
freedom of unimpeded energy, as a prayer so ecstatic that it seems 
its own fulfilment. In that aspiration and prayer our heart also 
is rapt it becomes our aspiration, our prayer, our hope, our 
striving and our present satisfaction. But reason intervenes, 
asking the question wherefore, inquiring the significance and the 
end of this rapture. Is it simply the life of nature ? Is the object 
of this prayer, this largely physical activity which passes so swiftly 
away ? No ; it is not that ; it is an unlimited good, an eternal 
good the everlasting satisfaction of our entire being it is God. 
It is, however, so far as this natural experience is concerned, the 
unknown God ignorantly worshipped. The experience cannot 
answer clearly the questioning of the mind. Ignorant even of its 
own true nature the intuition, for all its might, can find no way to 
its enduring fulfilment. On a spring evening, when the softness of 
the waning light on the fresh green, the pleasant mildness of the 
air, the delicate fragrance of the flowers and grass fill the soul with 
peace, it is rather a sense of an infinite presence behind these veils 
that is ours. Gently, almost passively, we long after an unlimited, 
all-satisfying Reality whose presence is dimly apprehended. But 
this gentler yearning is but the aspiration of the morning, mellowed 
and chastened. The prayer is the same ; the underlying presence 
vaguely felt is the same. The same presence and the same prayer 
1 I.e. by man s unaided powers. 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 113 

are in the sound of the wind among the pines, in the murmur of the 
waves as they roll shoreward on a summer s day. They are in the 
light of the moon and stars, reflected in the river on a summer 
night, when the black leaves are rimmed by a margin of bright 
silver, when the willows cast strange shadows and the slender 
shapes of the poplars rise against a background of silver cloud. 
They are in the brilliant colours of sunset, in its gold, its flame, 
its emerald and in its rose-bloomed sky. They are in the still, 
turquoise lake of hyacinths that lies outspread beneath a heaven 
of chrysoprase, the new-born foliage of the beeches. The 
prayer, if articulated at all, is articulated as a longing to secure 
and possess eternally the reality underlying and manifested by 
these fair forms an unending life, suggested by the young life of 
spring, an eternal peace veiled in the peaceful radiance of evening 
and moonlight in a word, the God immanent in the becoming of 
natural life. This reality seems so near at such hours as to be all 
but in our grasp. We reach out to it. We imagine, perhaps, 
that it is itself the beauty presented to the senses. But we cannot 
lay hold on it. It is no visible loveliness. We clutch at phantoms, 
which vanish from the grasp of the soul as Casella in Purgatory 
from the hand of the living poet. As the Reality fades from our 
spiritual vision, keen is our realisation of the vanity and fleeting 
ness of the sensible beauties that revealed to us Its presence. We 
know that the splendour and the rich life of spring and summer 
will yield to the barrenness of winter, that the tints will fade from 
the clouds, that the cherry blossom will die. We know, too, that 
our power to enjoy these things will soon pass away. A satiety 
of these sensible images will destroy it, exhausting our limited 
capacity with the multiplicity of diverse forms. The cares and 
business of life will snatch us from this contemplation, and before 
many years are past old age will make the renewed youth of spring 
and nature a mockery, until death blots it out for ever. Is not 
tliis the secret of the Nietzsche tragedy the attempt to satisfy a 
longing for the infinite life of the spirit by that lower life of nature 
which first revealed the presence of the higher, unlimited life ? 
Nietzsche sought to perpetuate the first moment of the Godward 
aspiration of the human soul that moment of pure naturalism 
with which Greek literature began, but which cannot afford abid 
ing satisfaction to the human heart. This attempt to satisfy his 
hunger for life eternal and infinite by the life and energy of pure 
nature, and thus to go back on the spiritual progress of humanity, 



114 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

resulted in a fruitless antagonism alike to the intellectual move 
ment which had rendered this naive naturalism impossible, and 
to that revelation of the true spiritual life which is the essence 
of Christianity. The attempt to find the unlimited life in the 
essentially limited life of nature was a self-contradiction. To 
seek the Superman was right, was indeed a spiritual necessity. 
Since, however, the true Superman is the supernatural man who 
has been raised by grace to partake of the life of God, to seek him 
in a glorification of the natural man was to render his attainment 
an impossibility. The outgoing of Nietzsche after the fulness of 
life was checked by the barrier which his own naturalistic concep 
tion of that life had set up. The consequent struggle rent his soul 
asunder. This tragedy of Nietzsche is the inevitable tragedy of a 
neo- paganism which would turn back to Homer, a world that has 
known Dante, to Dionysus, a world that has known Christ. This 
inadequacy of naturalism has been stated with great force, clarity 
and beauty by St John of the Cross. In the fifth and sixth stanzas 
of the Spiritual Canticle St John shows how creatures can only 
point out a God Whom they cannot bestow. " In the contem 
plation," he says, " and knowledge of created things the soul be 
holds such a multiplicity of graces, powers and beauty wherewith 
God has endowed them, that they seem to it to be clothed with 
admirable beauty and natural virtue, derived and communicated 
from the infinite supernatural beauty of the face of God, Whose 
beholding of them clothed the heavens and the earth with beauty 
and joys. Hence the soul, wounded with love of that beauty of 
the Beloved which it traces in created things, and anxious to be 
hold that beauty which is the source of this visible beauty, sings : 

Oh, who can heal me ? 
Give me perfectly Thyself. 
Send me no more 

A messenger 
Who cannot tell me what I wish. 

As created beings furnish to the soul traces of the Beloved, and 
exhibit the impress of His beauty and magnificence, the love of 
the soul increases and consequently the pain of his absence. . . . 
As it sees that there is no remedy for this pain except in the 
personal vision of the Beloved ... it prays for the fruition of 
His presence, saying : " Entertain me no more with any know 
ledge or communications or impressions of Thy grandeur, for 
these do but increase my longing and the pain of Thy absence : 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 115 

Thy presence alone can satisfy my will and desire." This fruition 
lies not in nature for it infinitely transcends Nature. We can 
not apprehend and detain the Reality of which we are vaguely 
conscious, for it is wholly other than the outward forms that sug 
gest and symbolise it. It is certainly true that the nature mystics 
have received an experience of God through nature, mystics 
such as Wordsworth and Richard Jefferies. This was, however, 
either a purely external apperception of a Reality not inwardly 
apprehended, or else, as I believe was certainly the case with 
Richard Jefferies, supernatural grace bore a part in the experi 
ence, which was thus raised to the rank of true supernatural 
mysticism. 1 To those, indeed, who are in a state of grace, and 
who are seeking God supernaturally in prayer, these passing 
intuitions of God s immanence in nature are, as it were, the occa 
sion of an inward union with Him by the will union of prayer to 
which such experiences give rise. Apart from the working of 
grace, this sense of the Divine immanence only occasions vague 
and vain longings for an unknown God. 

To the artist and the poet the sacrament alism of material 
nature as a manifestation and symbol of spiritual ideas, and 
ultimately of some incomprehensible spiritual good, is more 
apparent than to other men, and it is more deeply realised by 
them than it is by ordinary lovers of natural beauty. By the 
exercise of intuitive imagination, termed by Ruskin imagination 
penetrative, they seize on these inner spiritual realities, and so 
present their rendering of corporeal forms as to bring out this 
underlying spiritual and ideal significance. Of the vast multitude 
of detail, which in the actual phenomena of nature and human life 
distracts and overcrowds the mind of the observer, they select 
those features which are suggestive of the particular idea or 
spiritual reality which they desire to present. Hence the poetic 
description of a scene, or its pictorial representation, often moves 
us more strongly than the actual scene described or depicted. We 
see more in it than we ever did before, enter more deeply into its 
soul or spiritual significance, and receive suggestions of an infinite 
spiritual good or Being underlying and unifying all that we see 
and feel. Thus it is that art in its various forms, as also that 
unconscious art which constitutes mythology, conveys a higher, 
though a more indefinable and obscure, truth than is contained in 
the more definite teaching of physical science. Indeed, it is just 

1 See Chapter XIV. 



116 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

because the truth of art, of poetry, of mythology is more spiritual, 
and therefore less limited, than the truth of physical science, that 
it is less susceptible of exact formulation. Hence the destruction 
of a myth, if it be not replaced by some truer presentation of 
spiritual reality, entails a loss of truth. Take, for instance, the 
case of a child taught to believe that the woods and fields around 
his home are peopled with fairies. When he grows older that 
belief is shattered, those woods and fields are henceforth empty of 
their unseen inhabitants and he no longer feels himself surrounded 
in his walks abroad by the presence of these kindly and protecting 
spirits. Suppose this vanished belief to be replaced, not by know 
ledge of the immanence of God in nature, and of the presence of 
the angelic hosts watching over the lives of men perhaps also 
guiding the physical forces but by the mere knowledge of the 
physical causes, principles and laws which are the subject-matter 
of natural science. Such an one has lost truth by the exchange. 
He has, it is true, discarded a childish error, but with that error he 
has parted with a fundamental truth of immense significance, the 
truth that material nature is the habitation and expression of 
spirit. His view of the Universe is now confined to its lower 
and material aspect, 1 that which is least real, because most 
narrowly limited and consequently most lacking in being. Suppose 
that child to become a learned botanist. He knows less of the 
trees and flowers now, when he can explain all the physical con 
stituents and forces which have gone to their making, than he did 
when he believed that the fairies danced in the shade of the trees 
and watered the flowers with drops of dew. He can now explain 
the mechanism of plants, but he has lost the knowledge he once 
possessed (expressed though it was in an inadequate and therefore 
erroneous form) of the spiritual reality which is their true soul, 
the ground of their life. A more extensive and a more accurate 
understanding of the body is poor compensation for ignorance of 
the soul. The botanist s knowledge of chlorophyll and carbon, of 
the laws of growth and reproduction, and of the classification of 
orders and genera is abstract and unreal by comparison with that 
knowledge of the spiritual immanent in physical nature which 
was contained in the child s belief that the flowers feel and sym 
pathise with its own feeling, and are the dwelling-places of friendly 
elves or beautiful fairies. It was for this reason that Our Lord 
told us that we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven except we 

1 Blake s " single vision." 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 117 

become as little children that is, unless we return to the child s 
simple faith and personal apprehension of the spiritual reality 
underlying, indwelling and operative in the material universe. 
Our spiritual progress must therefore possess a somewhat 
circular character from faith through scientific and logical reason 
ing to a deeper faith, from a personal but narrowly limited 
apprehension of the spiritual, through theoretical study and 
practical handling of the material and its impersonal mechanism, 
to an even more personal but increasingly less limited apprehen 
sion of the spiritual. (Cf. Baron von Hiigel, Mystical Element of 
Religion, vol. i., pp. 60-70.) This cycle is exemplified in the 
spiritual history of European civilisation. The Greeks began 
with a childish belief in Divine presences that indwelt the forces of 
nature. The universe was full of gods, their palace, nay, their 
very garment. The clear air was the abode of Zeus the All-Father, 
the sapphire waters of the sea were the realm of Poseidon, and in 
its waves, crested with white foam and penetrated with the bright 
sunlight, danced the graceful forms of the sea nymphs. Divine 
presences dwelt in the cool fountain and in the river swollen with 
the winter rains. In the green silence of the forest glade might be 
heard the soft footfall of the dryads, and in the wild passes of the 
hills the lonely traveller might meet, as did Philipides, the day 
runner, the awful yet kindly Pan. Such was the world of Homer, 
and such was still, in great measure, the world of Herodotus. 1 But 
this inadequate and crude expression of the spiritual was self- 
doomed, despite its exquisite beauty. It could not endure the 
light of a more mature reason. The moralist made short work of 
its immoralities, the natural philosopher discarded its anthropo 
morphic explanation of physical phenomena. Euripides and 
Anaxagoras replaced Homer and Hesiod. But the soul of man 
could not rest there. The new physical and mechanical explana 
tion of reality was less true than the mythology which it had 
destroyed. It failed to account for just that which is most real 
and most ultimate in human experience. Hence a spiritualistic 
reaction was inevitable. Nor was it slow in coming. It began to 
make itself felt in Orphism and a little later in Socrates, 2 the first 

1 It must not, however, be forgotten that there was another and a very im 
portant aspect of Greek religion that of the Cthonic deities and cults. The 
aspect emphasised above was pre-eminently the religion of the Achaeans. 

2 Professor Burnet (Greek Philosophy, vol. i.) seems to establish successfully 
his thesis that the mystical element in the Platonic dialogues is essentially Socratic. 
He maintains, moreover, that Socrates was himself an initiate of Orphism. 



118 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

great mystic of Europe. Though after his death it was checked 
for some centuries by the materialistic development of secular 
civilisation, it was never wholly destroyed. It was chiefly kept 
alive in the Dionysic-Orphic cults and in the mysteries of the more 
official Hellenic religion. At length the Christian revelation came, 
with its fulness of spiritual truth, and was received by all that was 
deepest in the soul of the ancient world. It was no longer loss 
but gain to disbelieve in nereid and hamadryad, in mighty god 
and beauteous goddess, when these crude beliefs were replaced by 
the doctrine of angelic powers at work behind the phenomena of 
nature, by the knowledge of Jesus, the all-perfect Man Who is also 
God Almighty, and of His immaculate Mother, so ineffably 
beautiful in the spotless purity of her soul and in the unimaginable 
splendour of its physical expression her assumed body, and above 
and in all these by the knowledge of God goodness absolute, 
beauty absolute and truth absolute, present in all His creatures, 
material and spiritual alike, sustaining them in their being, co 
operating in their working and manifesting in and through them 
His beauty and His truth, His wisdom and His love. 

Although the truth of physical science and the truth of art are 
alike aspects of the Absolute Truth that is, of God the latter is 
the higher, deeper and fuller truth, and therefore far nearer to the 
Divine Truth and Being, which contains both eminently. We are 
beginning now to see this. We are coming to learn that the 
destruction of even the crudest superstition is not gain but loss, 
unless the spiritual truth conveyed thus crudely and inadequately 
by that superstition is preserved in a more adequate expression. 
We are beginning to realise that poetry and symbolism, music and 
painting, legend and parable contain more truth, tell us more of 
ultimate reality, bring us into a closer contact with that reality 
in a word, give us more knowledge of God than do the exact 
definitions and clear concepts of mathematics and physical 
science. Indeed it is only in the light of the spiritual and sacra 
mental vision of the universe which is reflected by art, though, as 
we shall see, adequately given and secured by religion alone, that 
scientific knowledge can possess its full value. It is only when we 
realise that all the principles and laws of matter are sacramental 
of a spiritual reality, are manifestations and operations of spirit, 
that we appreciate their true significance. As a result of that 
knowledge science itself becomes assimilated to poetry no longer 
confining the soul within the limits of matter, but opening new 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 119 

avenues to knowledge and worship of the Divine Author of the 
facts and laws, which it is her province to discover and expound. 
Art, however, always retains her pre-eminence, for her apprehension 
and presentation of spiritual reality is fuller and more direct, her 
truth deeper and less limited, and her message is therefore a more 
adequate vehicle of the Infinite Reality and Truth that is God. 

Nevertheless the artist cannot altogether free himself from 
the limited. He is unable to transcend the material image or 
symbol in which he must of necessity embody and present the 
spiritual and apprehend in its purity and immateriality the Divine 
Idea, underlying that material image, and, through that idea, the 
infinite Being of God, of Whom even the ultimate spiritual ideas 
are but aspects. Unless grace unite him to God, his soul is bound 
fast within the limitations of the corporeal images which he em 
ploys and he can never wholly transcend their physical beauty. 
The necessity for its perpetual mediation between his soul and the 
Divine Beauty debars him from the fruition of the latter. Art 
draws aside the curtains that veil the windows of man s sense- 
limited and self-limited experience. Through the windows thus 
unveiled by art the artist looks out over the wide spaces of the 
spiritual universe, bathed in the sunlight of God s creative and 
sustaining love, and over the storm-tossed waters of the deep and 
" perilous seas " of his own soul, lit by the soft moonlight of God s 
secret Presence. But Art is powerless to do more than this. She 
cannot open those windows so that the soul may go forth in 
freedom. The will is still imprisoned within the limits of the 
creature bound with the chain of its natural self-seeking, self- 
centred and self-impelled activity. So long as the picture is 
shown, and the music heard, the artist feels himself one with 
Infinite love, and the universe that It made, a freeman of infinity. 
The picture is left, the music is still. He goes home and torments 
his wife because the dinner has been badly cooked. Despite 
Blake, art is not religion. Not by art can man obtain the fruition 
of God, for which he was created. Hence is born " the pain that 
the sight of great beauty brings " (Pearse, The Singer). 1 

Blind and barren intuitions of God are also abundantly present 
in human love, in its passion and its sacrifice. The lower forms of 
love are, of course, simply instinctive and animal, but I do not 

1 Need I say that I am speaking only of the artist qua artist, the artist apart 
from religion. Far from excluding or hindering the effective union of religion, 
art often prepares the way to its reception. 



120 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

refer to these. In the higher forms of love the instinctive and 
animal elements are felt to be insufficient and are idealised more 
or less consciously. The higher the love the greater is the idealisa 
tion. Commonest and most typical is the idealisation of that love 
which is normally the only absorbing and passionate love in human 
life, the love of man and woman. This idealisation is at root the 
transference to a created object, to a human beloved, of the soul s 
love of a perfect and by implication of an unlimited Goodness and 
Beauty, that are realised only in God. Therefore this idealising 
love involves a certain intuition of a Perfect Object of Love a 
Being Wholly and therefore Unlimitedly lovable. This outgoing 
of the soul through the will to a perfect and therefore Absolute 
Goodness, to the Absolute Beauty is, however, deflected to the 
narrowly limited goodness and beauty of a fellow-creature. The 
wholly lovable, vaguely apprehended is sought in a necessarily 
imperfect creature. The Absolute and Altogether lovely Loveli 
ness is sought in the beloved, to whom it is unwarrantably trans 
ferred by the lover in the idolatry of his love. In vain is it sought 
thus. The end of this search for the Unlimited in the limited is, 
of necessity, disillusion and disaster. For the love of the Infinite 
cannot be satisfied by aught that is finite. No created love can 
fill the boundless craving of the human heart for a love that is 
boundless. If indeed the intuition and love of the Unlimited 
were self-conscious as such, this illicit transference of that intuition 
and that love to a human being could not be effected. As, how 
ever, it is not thus fully self-conscious, the mistaken transference 
is made and bears in due season its bitter fruit. Moreover, the 
greater the capacity and intensity of love in the lover, the more 
inadequate is the beloved, however noble and fair, to correspond 
with it and to satisfy it. The higher, moreover, the notion or 
ideal formed by the lover of the Absolute Perfection that he seeks, 
the greater is his idealisation of the beloved, and the more, there^ 
fore, does the beloved fall short of that ideal and disappoint the 
expectation of the lover. Truly is it said that love is blind, and 
blindest is the love of the noblest and deepest hearts. This is the 
reason that poets and other artists are usually so unhappy in their 
loves and marriages. They are really in love with infinite good 
ness and beauty. Though they do not consciously identify 
absolute and infinite goodness with the goodness of a creature 
which would be a self-evident absurdity, they do this in practice 
by directing to the beloved their love of infinite goodness and by 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 121 

investing the beloved with that most lofty and most far-reaching 
indeed, potentially limitless ideal of goodness which they have 
formed. Ignorant that this is to be found and enjoyed in a 
personal self-communicating God, they seek it in a creature 
clothed by their love with perfections that belong only to the 
Infinite Creator. Of course the essential limits of the beloved 
soon disillusion them. But they repeat the error and replace the 
fallen idol by another. This is the profoundest idolatry and 
therefore the most cruel tragedy of the human heart. Sooner or 
later, indeed, the lover realises to his cost that human love cannot 
satisfy the soul s need. Either the beloved proves unworthy, or 
external circumstances prevent or cut short the fruition of their 
love. " The lover is unloved. The beloved does not love. The 
lover who is loved is sooner or later torn from his love." 1 
It is in truth only the barrier of opposing circumstances 
that renders possible any long-continued illusion. Romeo and 
Juliet could not have remained at their height of idealising passion 
had not death overtaken them almost immediately. 2 But even 
then these poets and artists do not perceive the cause of their 
failure and they ascribe it to the essential tragedy and vanity of 
human life. Think only of Wagner s Tristan und Ysolde. The 
absolute mutual surrender of the entire being in love which 
dominates that opera is obviously such as no human being is 
adequate in himself or herself to inspire and return. The aspira 
tion and need of the lovers for a Beloved wholly and everlastingly 
lovable, ignorant of its true object, took occasion from physical 
passion to idolise the object of that passion by its identification 
with that absolute Goodness and Beauty. In this case the 
tragedy arose out of the external limitations of circumstance ; but 
its coming was inevitable. Either the internal limitations of the 
beloved, or the external limitations imposed by circumstances, 
satiety or mutability must sooner or later shatter the idol into 
dust, dissolve the mirage that hid for a moment the desert waste 
and arouse the dreamer from his fair vision of bliss to a bitter 
awakening of disillusionment and tears. Hence the universal 
wail of lamentation that ascends from the pages of literature, that 
love cannot endure, that it perishes in the very hour of fruition. 
Why need I quote the poets in proof of this ? To cite innumerable 
passages would be a useless weariness. For the expression of this 

1 Romain Holland, Jean Christophe, Eng. trs., vol. ii., p. 93. 

2 Compare Ibsen s treatment of " the law of change " in Little Eyolf. 



122 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

sorrow I would but refer to Keats odes on the Nightingale and the 
Grecian Urn particularly to the latter, for its expression of the 
hopeless longing for eternal possession that dwells in the heart of 
love s most fervent rapture. To the operation of this idolatry in 
actual life there is the eloquent testimony afforded by the life of 
Shelley. Having caught a glimpse of " intellectual," that is of 
spiritual, of divine beauty, he vainly sought to embody it in the 
woman he loved. For the inevitable result let us rather pity than 
condemn. Dante, on the contrary, being a Catholic, indeed, a 
mystic, as well as a poet, learnt that no earthly woman can be 
the adequate embodiment of Perfect Beauty and Worth. He 
therefore changed his Beatrice into a symbol of the Christian 
revelation and its grace, through which our love reaches its true 
goal. Hence it is that his great poem, almost alone among the 
supreme achievements of literature, is not a tragedy of infinite 
aspiration, thwarted by limits and change, but a Divine Comedy 
of its eternal satisfaction in God. Plato, indeed, had already ex 
pressed and explained the essential vanity of limited and mutable 
creatures, and had risen beyond them to the eternal ideas. Most 
poets and artists, however, have preferred the lower way, as indeed 
has the modern age as a whole. Hence it is that modern life and 
literature are so sorrowful, so disillusioned, so world-weary. 

Neither can alt rustic endeavour for the betterment of human 
life on earth avail to satisfy the soul s need, to provide it with a 
way of escape from the limits of creatures to the Unlimited, which 
it has dimly apprehended and for which it obscurely but deeply 
yearns. It must, perforce, lack the intensity of individual human 
love, and like that love is wrecked by limit and its consequent 
mutability. Even if these altruistic schemes were to succeed on 
a large scale which they can never do in a world where the vast 
majority are self-seekers they could not satisfy the soul hunger 
for the infinite. Mill, with a fearless honesty deserving of the 
highest praise, confessed this bitter truth. To anyone who has in 
the least felt that hunger for the bread of angels which religion 
alone can satisfy, the naive belief of writers like Mr Bernard Shaw 
in this worldly progress, in socialism, in the universal diffusion of 
a purely intellectual enlightenment, is at once so pathetic, so 
ludicrous and so exasperating that the reader scarce knows 
whether to weep, to laugh or to be angry. Nor. again, can our 
need of the unlimited be satisfied by pure ethics without religion. 
If non-religious morality breaks through some limits, it imposes 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 123 

others far more destructive of the soul s true liberty. It binds the 
love impulse with the iron chains of a loveless legalism and 
respectability. It either confines the soul within the limits of 
purely external duty or imposes a task which it can never perform. 
The barrier set by this external and legal ethics is often harder to 
remove than the more superficial and narrower limits of many 
sins especially those carnal sins of all kinds, which this legalistic 
ethic treats as the worst of all, because the most obvious, and 
therefore the most opposed to external propriety. In reality the 
Bohemian, "the publican," often possesses a love and aspiration 
however perverted and deformed after infinite Goodness, 
which is wholly non-existent in the highly respectable Pharisee 
who condemns him. Modern philosophers and men of letters are 
apt to reject, even to make mock of, conventional morality. For 
instance, conventional morality is the object of attack and derision 
throughout the plays of such typical modern dramatists as Bernard 
Shaw, Galsworthy and Hankin. Am I, then, a Catholic, in agree 
ment with this " advanced thought " ? Do I also desire the 
destruction of conventional morality ? Here a careful distinction 
is necessary, a distinction whose observance would enable Catholics 
to answer clearly and effectively the anti-moral teaching of many 
representatives of modern thought. Conventional morality is an 
equivocal term by which two distinct things may be understood. 
It may mean either the moral standard which is maintained by 
convention or moral practice motived by obedience to convention. 
In the former sense conventional morality, though grossly inade 
quate and to a large* extent actually false, does indubitably con 
tain a valuable element of ethical truth. To attack conventional 
morality thus understood is to attack truth as well as falsehood, 
to root up the wheat together with the tares. Conventional 
morality, however, when understood in the second sense, is sheer 
evil, a thing that is intrinsically base and mean, worse in many 
respects than immorality itself. The modern opponents of con 
ventional morality have confounded the former with the latter in 
one indiscriminate condemnation. By investing conventional 
morality in the former sense with the odium justly due to con 
ventional morality in the latter sense, they have confused the 
issues and won a cheap but empty victory. We therefore must 
keep clearly before us the distinction which our adversaries ignore. 
We must maintain strictly the moral standard of Christianity with 
which the standard of popular morality to some degree though 



124 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

but partially coincides. On the other hand we must wage un 
remitting warfare against morality motived by convention, by 
mere regard for good appearances in the eyes of our neighbours. 
Such a morality is the bondage of the human soul within extremely 
narrow limits. It is the positive exclusion of the supernatural, 
whereby our moral action and life are rendered a way of escape 
from the limited to the Unlimited, from the human to the Divine. 
Such respectable morality is therefore the destruction of Divine 
love. It is a form of the law of dead works opposed to grace, that 
law from whose bondage we were freed by Christ. For Christians 
to act morally from a motive of conventional respectability is 
simply to exchange the freedom of the Gospel, the liberty of the 
unlimited Godhead with Whom we are united by grace, for the old 
servitude of the merely natural and creaturely. As Scheeben 
points out (Dogmatik, French translation, vol. iii., p. 537), " the 
moral ends " of "a creature raised to the dignity of a child of 
God " i.e. to the supernatural order of grace beyond the limits 
of nature " are quite different to the moral ends of a mere 
creature." It follows from this that moral conduct motived by 
these lower and merely natural ends, and therefore conventional 
morality in the sense of morality motived by regard to conven 
tion, is transcended and abolished by the grace of Christ. The 
fulfilment of charity, which is a boundless energy, an unlimited 
fulness of life, not the limited and limiting obedience to the 
demands of convention and respectability, is the ethical principle 
of the true Christian, who is thus in the infinity of the former freed 
from the narrow limits of the latter, limits justly odious to the 
greater souled and wider minded among the pagans, who, how 
ever, are unhappily ignorant of the true way to their removal. 
But surely I need not labour the point. We have but to read the 
Epistles of St Paul, remembering that conventional morality 
indeed all morality practised from a merely natural motive -of 
which morality motived by respectability is the most limited and 
limiting and therefore the lowest species is the modern representa 
tive of the Pauline law. Then we shall fully realise that irreligious 
morality above all, the hypocritical sham which is the modern 
social substitute for lost Christianity is one of the closest and 
darkest dungeons wherein the human soul can be confined and 
debarred from the Divine infinity. For it is, as was said above, 
more limited and more limiting than many forms of positive sin 
and therefore more removed from and more opposed to God even 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 125 

than they. From this narrow confinement, from this spiritual 
dungeon we can be freed and brought into true liberty, not by the 
moral anarchy of the " emancipated " freethinker, which would be 
but an exchange of prisons though an exchange from a narrower 
to a wider prison-house but by the grace of God through Christ 
Our Lord, whereby we are made free of the Infinite and the 
Eternal in " that freedom in which Christ hath made us free." ! 

It may indeed be that by non-religious ethics is understood a 
striving after an infinite goodness, in w r hich case it is the worship 
of the unknown God and is not really secular in character. But 
truly secular ethics, even in its noblest forms, must, as we have 
seen, be limited and therefore unable to satisfy the deepest craving 
of the human heart. This love must be directed to its true end 
and find its true goal, and no natural means can avail to effect this. 
No natural experience or activity is therefore able to render the 
human soul truly happy. It cannot free the soul from the limits 
of the creature to unite it to the infinite Good, the Creator. In 
other words, ideals divorced from God and treated as ultimates 
are thereby transformed into idols. Bernard Shaw, regarding 
ideals as ends in themselves apart from God, of Whom they are 
partial aspects and to Whom they are ways, recognises this and 
becomes an iconoclast (except indeed for the one remaining idol 
of social democracy). In this attack on ideals he is quite logical. 
Ultimately and logically a man must regard life from the stand 
point of one of two Bernards of Bernard Shaw, who believes in 
nothing, 2 or of St Bernard, who believed in God, in nothing apart 
from God and in everything in and for God, and to the extent 
in which it reflects God and leads to God. To ascribe absolute 
value to a creature, however noble, is to make that creature an 
idol, and sooner or later idols are discovered to be what they are 
lifeless caricatures of the living God. If, however, the created 
ideal be regarded as a reflection of God, and a means to God, it is 
no longer an idol, but an image, for it is no longer regarded as 

1 For this ethical anarchism, while aiming at the transcendence of fixed 
ethical standards, succeeds in effect but in substituting for them a bondage 
within the highest desires or loves realised by the individual soul. Since the 
loves of the majority are selfish, the more limited good of individuals in this 
life is thus preferred to the wider good of society, and to the unlimited good of 
the fruition of God. 

2 Again except socialism. This exception is, however, inconsistent with his 
own point of view. It is arbitrary to overthrow all idols except one. Moreover, 
by nothing I mean here nothing of objective value apart from the desire or 
life impulse of the subject. 



126 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

something Divine in itself, but as a symbol of the one true 
God, to Whom it points a way. Against the veneration of 
images there is no sound objection, but idolatry stands self- 
condemned. The superficial resemblance between the two is 
great, but the reality is poles asunder. 

It is not, of course, meant that all natural experiences and 
activities are equally remote from God, equally limited. Indeed, 
this is obviously untrue. The less limited their scope and object, 
and the more interior and spiritual the psychical operations in 
volved, the nearer do they approach to God, and the more of His 
Being they represent and mediate. Indeed in the higher activities 
discussed above there is often present, as we have seen, the 
intuition of an unknown God and an aspiration towards Him. 
But all are ineffectual and ultimately unsatisfactory. For the 
limit is always there, the centre of the soul is never fully actuated 
and the intuition of an infinite reality is but a passing glimpse of 
an unattainable good. 

The will, indeed, always preserves its intrinsic capacity for the 
apprehension of an infinite good that is, of God, because this is 
essentially consequent on the possession of a rational spirit. 
Nevertheless this potential capacity can never be actualised 
in the natural condition of fallen men that is, in the purely 
natural man not elevated by sanctifying grace. The lower 
functions of the embodied soul dependent as it is for knowledge 
on the essentially limited data of sense bind the spirit within the 
limits of the creature and drag down the will on its upward course 
to God. 1 Before the fall, as was pointed out earlier in this chapter, 
this was remedied by a supernatural quality in man, superadded 
to his natural gifts (the donum superadditum), whereby his will 
was so united to God that he was enabled to adhere to God and to 
be united to Him with his entire being, and that with a conscious 
ness of his union. 2 The lower sense-conditioned knowledge and 
the lower desires were in complete subordination to this supreme 
activity of unitive love. This superadded quality was sanctifying 
grace, whose end is perfect union with God and full fruition of God 
in the beatific vision and the participation of the proper activity 

1 It is also true that even a disembodied spirit is naturally incapable of sharing 
the life of God or of possessing the beatific vision. Such a spirit would, however, 
naturally possess (except for the consequences of sin) a very high fruition of God. 

2 I presume that in the sinless soul of unfallen man the grace union with God 
amounted to the mystical union and was therefore conscious. 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 127 

of God Himself. It has, however, pleased the infinite mercy of 
God to restore this sanctifying grace to vast numbers of the human 
race. The solidarity of mankind indeed entailed the common 
participation of all in its loss. This was, however, remedied by 
Our Lord s Incarnation and Redeeming death, which substituted 
among His members a new solidarity with Himself, for that 
solidarity with Adam, which was the ground of original sin. 
Through this solidarity we partake of His Spirit through the 
possession of sanctifying grace. As we have seen already, God is 
always substantially immanent in the soul and present in special 
manner to the centre. But the barrier of the soul s natural and 
sense-conditioned activities indeed, the essential limitation of its 
creatureliness prevented the fruition of that Presence. This 
fundamental limitation has been, however, destroyed by sanctify 
ing grace. Thus the supreme barrier between the soul and God, 
indestructible by natural means, has been removed, so that, as 
long as the soul remains in grace and its concomitant charity 
its ultimate fruition of God and union with Him is secure. The 
possession of this restored grace has united to God by super 
natural charity the ultimate and most fundamental will, and 
through that will the central ego or ground. In virtue of this new 
relationship and special union with God of the central self, God 
indwells or inhabits the soul after a peculiarly intimate manner, 
in which He does not and cannot inhabit souls in the natural order 
whose central selves are bound fast within the limits of their 
creatureliness, and in the almost inevitably consequent limits of a 
will actually averse from God. 1 

But the work of union is only begun, the Divine indwelling is 
still largely potential. The radical healing of the will and its 
radical union with God release indeed the soul from irremediable 
bondage to the limited, so that the limits of its love of creatures 
and occupation with creatures, above all, of its essential limitation 
as a created being, which is the ground of all other limits, are no 
longer an insurmountable barrier between it and God, debarring 
it wholly from supernatural will-union with Him and rendering 
the complete union, which is the true end of man, an intrinsic 
impossibility. Nevertheless, the soul is still actually occupied 
for the most part with the finite creature. Its activities are 

1 Still there may be, and doubtless are, souls in a state of pure nature whose 
will is united to God as far as is consistent with the limits of a creature not 
elevated to the supernatural union. 



128 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

extremely external and limited, being still for the most part 
sensible or sense-conditioned. Its life is superficial. The soul 
has not turned its operations and its gaze inwards to the higher 
faculties and their centre, where it is united to God immanent. 
Moreover, the mainspring of its actions is still some limited end, 
usually selfish that is, something more limited than its Divine 
End the immediate pleasure of self as an independent entity, or 
something referred to that self as its end. All that habitual grace 
and charity have done is to subordinate these superficial and selfish 
volitions and occupations to a radical determination of the will 
not to defy and lose God by mortal sin in order to gratify them. 
Far other is the goal to be reached the perfection to which the 
soul is called. Its gaze is to be wholly fixed on God recollected 
in Him from the view of creatures except as seen in Him as mani 
festations and participations of His Being. It is thus to be, in 
Father Baker s phrase, wholly introverted. The will is to be so 
intimately united with God that it wills nothing except for His 
sake and because He moves it to that volition. It is true that 
each soul is called to a different degree of union in this sense, that 
the capacity of vision and will-union differs in every case, but that 
capacity, be it great or small, is to be wholly occupied by God and 
by creatures only as in and for Him. This goal is, of course, only 
attained fully in the beatific vision. Mystic union is a stage on the 
way a stage in which, at its highest perfection, the perfect will -union 
is in substance already accomplished, and there is a veiled (not an 
open) constant or quasi-constant intuition of God s presence. 1 

Mystical union is essentially a high degree of sanctifying 
grace, involving its correspondingly elevated operation of actual 
grace, which degree and operation are normally manifested to the 
consciousness of their possessor, the grace being the mystical 
union, its conscious manifestation the concomitant intuition. 
As we shall see hereafter, mystical experience may be divided into 
transient operations and habitual states. The latter are high 
degrees and manifestations of habitual or sanctifying grace, the 
former correspondingly elevated operations of actual grace. The 
loftiest form of mystical experience, the transforming union 
essentially consists of habit and act. The habit of this union is 

1 This is the nature of the transforming union, the highest degree of mystical 
experience. The further discussion and explanation of this, as described by St 
John of the Cross and the interpreting treatises of Mother Cecilia, will be given 
later 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 129 

thus habitual grace in its fullest and highest earthly manifestation 
before it passes into glory at death, its act, the operation of that 
supreme degree of habitual grace, is the supreme operation of actual 
grace. Mystical experience is thus an essential constituent of 
the economy of grace as revealed to us in the Bible and in the 
teaching of the Church, an economy which may be summarised 
as a progress of grace through mystical union to glory. 1 The way 
from sanctifying grace to beatific glory is one continuous road of 
increasing supernatural union between the soul and God. Glory, 
the lumen glorice, as it is termed in theology, is thus but sanctifying 
grace in its fully unfolded flower sanctifying grace the germinat 
ing seed of the lumen glorice. The Mystical union-intuition in its 
various degrees is the foliage and finally the opening bud of the 
same plant. 2 

In stanza 23 of the Spiritual Canticle, St John says : "It 
is not the betrothal of the Cross that I am speaking of now that 
takes place, once for all, when God gives the first grace to every 
soul in baptism, I am speaking of the betrothal in the way of 
perfection, it is a progressive work. And though both are but one 
yet there is a difference between them. The latter is effected 
in the way of the soul and therefore slowly, the former in the 
way of God and therefore at once." Here St John teaches the 
essential unitv of the way of grace. Only the first step, he says, 
is wholly God s work to which we can contribute nothing 
for God places us in the state of grace without any previous merit 
on our part. The perfection, however, of the supernatural work, 
begun without our co-operation, requires our co-operation, and is, 
therefore, a gradual process. Of this gradual process the mystical 
intuition-union is an essential part a necessary stage of the 
supernatural growth of the soul, or, to speak more accurately, the 
union is so for the conscious element of the union, the intuition, 
may perhaps in certain instances be dispensed with. 3 We have 
seen that the central depths of the soul with the roots of her 
spiritual functions are normally subliminal. Subliminal also is 
the ordinary supernatural union of the central ego and its radical 
functions with God through sanctifying grace. The ordinary 
soul in a state of grace has no direct consciousness of the special 

1 Cj. Scheeben, Dogmatik, French trs., vol. iii., p. 542. 

2 For the essential continuity of grace and glory see Fr. Terrien, La Grace et 
la Gloire, vol. i., pp. 99-101. 

3 I.e. By a special dispensation the mystic union would remain entirely sub 
liminal as are the earlier stages of the union of sanctifying grace. 

I 



130 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

union with God thus constituted. 1 Only at a certain stage of this 
grace-union does the Divine Presence and Operation in the central 
depths emerge with and through these into consciousness. The 
process of grace-union in the mystics is therefore from ordinary 
subliminal grace-union, through the conscious union-intuition of 
mystical experience to the beatific union and open vision of 
heaven. In the case of ordinary souls that is, of the vast majority 
the second stage is absent, and is replaced by purgatory. 

There is thus but one and the same way by which all the 
saved must reach the fulness of Divine Union, one and the same 
progressive union of love through the operation of one and the 
same indwelling Spirit, a union which when it has reached a 
certain stage is the mystical union, normally revealed to con 
sciousness in mystical intuition. The superficial diversity be 
tween the spiritual experience of different souls only emphasises 
the underlying unity of the path to God. The general principles 
of the way from ordinary grace to glory through mystical union 
or purgatory are identical for every soul that shall be saved. 
Far greater is the fundamental identity of the way of grace in 
the case of those who enjoy on earth mystical union. For all the 
mystics the chief stages or degrees of the Godward ascent are the 
same. There is but one summit to which the diverse ways of 
the spirit lead, and they pass through the same zones. Though the 
mount of perfection may be climbed in this life by innumerable 
paths, they all begin in the tropical zone of vocal prayer and 
sensible sweetness, pass on through the temperate zone wherein 
lie the quiet pastures of affective prayer, 2 traverse the shady forest 
of infused contemplation, simple, loving and obscure, wind 
upwards across the barren soil and among the stern crags of the 
mystical desolation, until they reach finally the summit, clad in 
the perpetual snow of absolute purity, where there is nothing to 
impede the traveller s vision of the boundless firmament of the 
Triune Godhead. 

But I feel that the reader must be rushing forward with 
objections objections which are, I think, reducible to two a 

1 Even the mystic below the final union of spiritual marriage, though conscious 
of the Divine union through grace, cannot be more than morally certain that he 
is in a state of grace, for the experience might be a purely transitory union effected, 
so to soeak, from without by actual grace alone. Still he is morally sure that it 
is more than this. 

a Usually this prayer is reached by way of discursive meditation . This may, 
however, be replaced by a more affective continuance of vocal prayer. 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 131 

lesser and a greater. I will take the lesser first. It may be urged 
that there is no uniform road to the Divine union. Are not all 
souls different ? Do not the various stages of prayer occur in 
varying order ? Did not, for example, St Teresa experience the 
prayer of quiet at the very commencement of her religious life, 
before she had yet acquired the habit of meditation ? But I 
have already admitted this obvious diversity of spiritual life 
between soul and soul. St John of the Cross fully recognises that 
every soul is led by a different path. " Devout souls," he tells us, 
" run in many ways and in various directions, each according 
to the spirit which God bestows, and the vocation which He has 
given, in the diversified forms of spiritual service on the road 
of everlasting life, which is evangelical perfection, where they 
meet the Beloved in the union of love, after spiritual detachment 
from all things " (Spiritual Canticle, st. 25). Indeed, in The 
Living Flame of Love, he even says : " God raises every soul 
by different paths. Scarcely shall you find one soul that in 
half its way agrees with that of another " (Living Flame, st. 
3, 12). This variety, however, does not involve a fundamental 
divergency. The many ways lie along one " road of evangelical 
perfection " ; the road of " spiritual detachment " and con 
sequent " union of love." There may be many paths by which a 
peak in the Andes may be climbed yet all will lead from zone 
to zone in due order from the tropical zone of the valley to the 
Arctic zone of perpetual snow. That the zones of the spiritual 
ascent are not entered and left at the same point does not in 
validate this fundamental principle. All paths up a mountain 
do not ascend as high in an equal distance. If the path is steep, 
the ascent is very rapid. If it winds much, or lies along a gradual 
slope, it takes a long journey to ascend an equal height. Natural 
temperament enables some souls to follow God s grace by a more 
direct way to contemplation, or to fuller union, than that taken by 
others whose radical will is as good as, perhaps better than, their 
own. Some souls have fewer obstacles than others to overcome 
and can reach full union with a lesser degree of passive purgation, 
or after a shorter stay in all or certain of the intermediate stages 
of the way, than is necessary for other souls. Moreover the 
zones of the spiritual life are no more sharply severed than are 
the zones of the mountain ascent. One zone passes gradually, 
often imperceptibly, into another. The zones are not regularly 
marked off at certain altitudes, as if drawn by compasses. At 



132 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

particular places, owing to some local accident, one zone may 
push into another and continue at an altitude chiefly occupied by 
a higher zone, or a higher zone may occur at an altitude chiefly 
occupied by a lower zone. If his path lie in that direction, the 
traveller s stay in a particular zone is unusually long or unusually 
short. So is it with the degrees of mystical prayer union. More 
over, in the spiritual life, God the all-powerful dispenser of His 
graces may, by anticipation, raise a soul temporarily into a higher 
zone of mystical intuition or contemplation than corresponds! with 
its degree of will-union. In other words, a peculiar actual grace 
places the soul, so to speak, externally, above its state of sanctify 
ing grace. This would seem to have been the case with St Teresa s 
first prayer of quiet. Such also I believe to be the explanation 
of the special illuminations, occasionally even ecstasies, that often 
accompany the first entrance into the mystical way, graces of 
prayer far in excess of the soul s degree of grace-union. We must 
also bear in mind that the souls in heaven do not possess equal 
degrees of glory, because their sanctifying grace is unequal. It 
follows, therefore, that grace does not become openly manifest 
as beatific glory at one and the same degree in all souls unlike, 
e.g., water which always boils at one and the same degree of heat 
and barometric pressure. But it follows from this that the veiled 
manifestation of the life of grace, which is mystical experience, 
does not presuppose an identical degree of sanctifying grace, 
in all who first receive this experience. In other words, union 
does not become conscious as intuition at one and the same degree 
in every soul. The occurrence of mystical experience, though 
not arbitrary, but the manifestation of grace in a particular soul 
at a particular degree, presupposes different degrees of grace in 
different souls. It is like the line of perpetual snow which occurs 
at different altitudes in different climates. 

Now, however, I have to face the greater difficulty, a difficulty 
divided into two heads. Have not souls reached the perfection 
of canonised sanctity without mystical graces ? Are not the 
majority of souls who are saved, saved without passing through 
the stages of the mystical union ? How then can it be maintained 
that these stages of mystical union are the necessary path of 
sanctifying grace on its way to glory ; the one way by which 
all must reach the beatific vision ? To the second objection I am 
but partially open. For I confined the progressive order of zones 
to the ascent of perfection in this life. When perfection is not 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 133 

attained in this life the zones of prayer union omitted on earth 
are not simply supplied beyond the grave. They are indeed 
traversed aftc r death in the substance of their progressive will- 
union and progressive detachment from the limits of the creature. 
This substantial identity is, however, presented under a diverse 
form. The same work is effected by partially different means. 
Nevertheless, I do maintain the substantial identity of the way 
of perfection whether in this life or in the next, the one indis 
pensable ascent from the hidden life of sanctifying grace through 
the mystic purgation and union, ever substantially the same, to 
the beatific vision. In so far, however, as I am thus open to the 
objection that salvation is attained by the majority of the saved 
without the mystical union, I have already answered that objection 
by saying that purgatory is the equivalent of that union. For 
purgatory is essentially the mystical purification of the will from 
adherence to the finite, which with the mystics takes place more 
or less perfectly in this life in certain negative stages of the mys 
tical union. It is, indeed, true that sanctifying grace does not 
positively increase by the post-mortem purification, as it does in 
the purification of this life. Therefore it is that souls who have 
had their purgatory here possess a higher degree of sanctifying 
grace and, therefore, of heavenly glory, than those purged after 
death, where there is no more temptation and therefore no more 
merit. But the purification itself is essentially the same. 1 How 
this is the case I will discuss at length when I speak in detail of 
the nights of the soul. Moreover, the supreme degree of mystic 
union, the spiritual marriage, is, as we shall see, but a foretaste 
on earth of the beatific vision, and to the overwhelming majority, 
including the majority of mystics, who have never reached it, 
it is given eminently in that vision. Thus must all who are saved 
tread the mystic way to union, the few here, the many hereafter. 
The mystics are but the advance guard of the army of the elect. 
They are the spies who have gone on ahead and entered before 
death the promised land, to report somewhat of its bliss to their 
fellow-travellers in the desert. For proof of their journey and 
vision they bring us back a cluster of grapes such as never grew 
in the vineyards of Egypt. 

1 To avoid misunderstanding I would point out that both death itself and the 
vision of God in the particular judgment must be regarded as essential elements 
of purgatory if it be thus identified with the mystical purgatory of earth. 

2 See Chapter XL, passim. 



134 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

A certain modification of this statement is clearly required 
in the case of baptized infants, indeed of all who have not attained 
before death the full use of reason. These souls are not at all, 
or but little, bound by the limits of a will-activity deliberately 
anti-supernatural and self -principled, averse from God and unduly 
converted to creatures. This however it is that requires the 
painful purgation. Therefore none or little purgation of this kind 
must be endured by such souls after death. Must we therefore 
conclude that the mystic way, in its character of a gradual removal 
of limits, will be wanting. Does a baby behold God s open vision 
the moment it passes from this life ? I should myself be inclined 
to conjecture that such a soul will be exalted to that vision without 
pain, by a gradual unveiling of God with a concomitant removal 
of limits, attaining, for example, the knowledge and vision of 
Christ in His humanity before passing on to the vision of the 
Unlimited Godhead and to the unlimited life in Him. If this be 
the case, my principle will hold good even of these souls although 
in a greatly modified form. I confine myself, however, in this 
discussion to the case of adult souls enjoying the complete use of 
reason and speak solely of these, whose psychology is in some 
degree open to our understanding. 

Since the mystic experience and way is thus a manifestation 
in this life of the principles which determine and constitute the 
condition of the saved after death, the study of mysticism should 
be of engrossing interest to every Christian soul. Since life is so 
short and death so certain, we cannot but long for some knowledge 
of the life to come, beyond the bare statement of the revealed 
truth. Or rather, we cannot but desire to attach some fuller and 
more concrete significance to the brief eschatological definitions 
of the Church. We cannot take at its surface value the corporeal 
imagery of Scripture and religious art. In fact, the educated 
modern Catholic finds this imagery far less helpful than his fore 
fathers seem to have found it. The conventional pictures of 
purgatory as a crowd of nude persons in a blast furnace, and of 
heaven as an assembly of white-robed persons seated on clouds 
and engaged in a perpetual sacred concert, 1 though consecrated by 

1 1 do not mean to mock at these pictures, as artistic symbols, if they are de 
picted in sufficiently good taste, which indeed they never are in modern religious 
art, but only to consider their appearance to one who is not quite sure how far 
the Church intends them as a true representation of purgatory and heaven, and 
who, regarding them as such, is justly irritated and amused. 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 135 

traditional symbolism, are altogether inadequate for our meditation. 
In fact such picturing, if taken seriously, is in danger of causing 
a sense of unreality, and hence a feeling, if no more, of scepticism 
in regard to the life beyond the grave. Nothing is more helpful 
to rid us of such feelings than the knowledge that purgatory and 
heaven, especially the former, are not states wholly without 
analogue in this life. To know, for example, that St Catherine 
of Genoa while living and working in our human body, eating, 
drinking, sleeping and tending the sick, in a particular city many 
of us have seen, at a particular epoch of history of which all may 
read in the most prosaic history, experienced in its essential 
character the state of purgatory, and that St Teresa, also a human, 
indeed a very human, person, living in a Spanish convent about a 
century later, by entering into the mystical marriage, enjoyed, 
under a veil, that eternal union and fruition of God, which, unveiled, 
is heaven renders purgatory and heaven realities, as they could 
never have been before. 

The objector, however, will now fall back on the first part of 
the greater objection and will say : " According to you every 
canonised saint must have reached in this life the state of mystical 
marriage, that supreme state of union which you say follows the 
endurance of purgatory on earth. How then is it that there 
have been canonised saints who never enjoyed mystical prayer 
at all ? " Pere Poulain, in his important text-book of mystical 
theology, Les Graces d Oraison, maintains that almost all the 
canonised saints apart from the martyrs enjoyed mystical 
prayer, and in this judgment he follows Pope Benedict XIV. 
He also proves that this was so in the case of certain saints whose 
prayer is popularly supposed to have been ordinary. Therefore 
I should myself conclude from this weight of historical evidence 
that there is nothing to disprove the essentiality and the 
necessity of mystical union. Hence these saints whose inner 
life is unknown may be presumed also to have been mystics, 
and thus all canonised saints other than martyrs have been 
mystics. As for the martyrs, who have not previously attained 
heroic sanctity, was not their martyrdom itself their self-destroying 
purgation, especially if it was accompanied or preluded by interior 
desolation ? Moreover we may suspect that in a great many 
cases the martyrs, having once sacrificed themselves wholly for 
God by offering themselves to die, and having thus entirely 
detached their will from the limited, received in return the mystical 



136 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

union intuition of God. If the life of any saint in the calendar 
might seem to have been active rather than contemplative, full 
of reasoning and images, and thus very unmystical indeed, it would 
be the life of Blessed Thomas More. Yet he in early life had a 
great longing which never entirely left him for the Carthusian 
life, and when imprisoned in the solitary confinement of the Tower 
he told his daughter : " Methinketh God maketh me a wanton 
[i.e. a spoiled child] and setteth me on His lap and dandleth me " 
(Bridgett, Life of Sir T. More, p. 367). If this saying be not an 
allusion to mystical experience, I do not know what it can mean. 
Nevertheless it cannot be plausibly maintained that all the saints 
have passed through the full purgation of the second night and 
reached mystical marriage. To this difficulty I reply with a 
question. Did all the canonised saints reach heaven directly 
without any passage through purgatory ? We know by the 
infallible teaching of the Church that when beatified they are 
already in heaven. Can we say more than that ? Certainly 
St Ambrose held that every soul passes through a purgatorial fire 
before entering heaven, 1 and although we cannot adopt this 
extreme position, we may, I think, hold it true of saints who have 
not in this life passed through the second night. 

Neither need we be disturbed by the statement in the seventh 
colloquy of The Thorns of the Spirit, a treatise written possibly 
by St John of the Cross himself, that some souls are led all their 
life long to God by vocal prayer and through vocal prayer attain 
perfection and will-union. For I gather from the context that 
such vocal piayer is so full of aspirations as to be in truth a form 
of affective prayer, a simple contemplation. In fact, their vocal 
prayer becomes in the end a vehicle of mystical prayer-union. 
It is a question here of the machinery rather than of the substance 
of prayer. 

There is every reason to believe that those souls alone whom 
God will raise to a high degree of beatific glory are effectively 
called to perfection here on earth. Countless souls have grace to 
see and reject fully deliberate sins, who are left without light in a 
life full of imperfections, to be purged hereafter. Such will reach 
their lower goal in the end, and were never intended for a higher 
one. The only real evil and loss is the deliberate refusal to corre- 

1 P6re Tixeront, Histoire des Dogmes, vol. ii., p. 345. Saint Ambrose, however 
seems to have admitted in another place that certain perfect souls would find iii 
this fire refreshment rather than pain. 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 137 

spond with light given, grace received, perfection proposed. Even 
among those called to aim at perfection, there is an indefinite 
difference of degree according to the capacity of each. Of these 
latter St John of the Cross (The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Bk. II., 
chap, v.) says : " Though certain souls in this life enjoy equal 
peace and tranquillity in their state of perfection, everyone being 
satisfied, nevertheless some of them may be more advanced than 
the rest, in a higher degree of union, and yet all equally satisfied 
because their capacity is satisfied. But that soul which does not 
attain to that degree of purity corresponding with its capacity 
(which I take to mean the complete abandonment of its will to do 
the will of God as far as it perceives that will) will never attain 
true peace and contentment. " In the opening chapter of Book II. 
of The Obscure Night, St John speaks of a proportion between the 
purgation of the soul and the degree of love (will-union) to which 
it is to be raised. Whether in his opinion souls raised to inferior 
degrees of love will have a further purgatory to undergo after 
death is not clear. I should be inclined to the view that however 
low a degree of glory be predestined to any soul, if that soul 
wholly submits its will to God s known will without voluntary 
imperfection, its purgation is complete. It is ready to be filled by 
God according to its utmost capacity, however scant. Such a 
constant obedience to the Divine will would, however, involve an 
earthly purgatory of detachment, and thus the mystical purgation, 
at least in a milder form. It would also leave that soul at death 
in achieved perfection in fact, a saint, however unsuited for 
canonisation. Souls, however, who have not seriously aimed at 
perfection, though perhaps they never received a call to it, and are 
therefore exculpated by ignorance, must in reality fall constantly 
into voluntary resistance to God s known will in matters not com 
manded under pain of grave sin. Such souls would require a 
purgatory after death. 1 

We must observe also that the essential matter is not the con 
scious fruition of mystical marriage but the completion of the 
purgation, the perfect detachment of the will from limits by union 
with the Unlimited Godhead. The proposition which I maintain 
amounts, therefore, to this, that before a soul enters heaven it must 
have passed through a complete purgation from all selfish attach 
ment to the finite, to creatures a proposition which, far from 
being doubtful, is of faith. This complete purgation involves, 
1 For a further discussion, see Chapter XI. 



138 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

however, either a purgatorial detachment and desolation on earth 
01 a martyrdom such that it is its equivalent, or an equivalent 
purgatory after death. But this earthly purgation is, as we shall 
see, a mystical state a special manifestation of grace at a certain 
stage on the way to glory. In it, however, the soul is not directly 
conscious of the Presence and Action of God. Were it otherwise 
there would be no purgation. Therefore it is clear that the 
essential and indispensable element of mystical union, as the way 
to beatific vision, is not the consciousness of God as the object of 
union but the union itself. This union, when it reaches a certain 
stage, is usually conscious when fully actualised, although not 
directly so in the desolations. Therefore the normal order, I 
should be inclined to think, the universal order, is that no soul 
reaches the second night or the full mystic purgatory without 
previous conscious union with God in the lower stages of mystical 
prayer. This consciousness, however, is not the essential part of 
the mystical union and, even if He has not actually done so, God 
could dispense with it. However this may be, we must be quite 
clear that the psycho-physical phenomena normally attendant on 
the earlier stages of mystical prayer are in no sense essential, and 
may indeed be completely absent. As for visions and revelations, 
these, as we shall see, constitute no intrinsic part whatever of the 
mystical union. They are purely adventitious graces, either 
given for the benefit of others or, as it were, ornamental concomit 
ants of the mystical prayer-union itself. But the gradually in 
creasing will-union supernaturally infused, with its correspondent 
decrease and destruction of will attachment to the finite, is the 
one intrinsically necessary road to the beatific vision in every 
soul that is saved. As the limits of our natural and selfish 
attachments and activities are progressively destroyed by the 
process of purgation, the Divine Action in the soul and God s in 
dwelling Presence in and through that Action increases with the 
increase of sanctifying grace whose function it is to remove the 
limits of nature and sin and so to unite the soul in special union 
with God. Thus does the Action of God in the soul through grace 
increase and the natural self-principled activity of the soul pro 
portionately decrease. When this process is completed and all 
limits have been destroyed, God through grace wholly possesses 
and moves the soul. When the soul is thus wholly possessed and 
moved by God, the purgation is ended and the beatific vision is 
reached, or at least its earthly foretaste, the mystical marriage. 



RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND GOD 139 

Mystical union (involving normally the consciousness of it) is 
therefore not an extraordinary grace beside the ordinary way to 
God, but an essential stage of that way. The only extraordinary 
characteristic of this mystical union and concomitant purgation is 
that it is given in this life, instead of in the next, when the vast 
majority of the elect will attain to it. A progressive supernatural 
union with God, begun in the first regeneration to the life of grace, 1 
continued in the growth of that supernatural life, a growth hidden 
at first, later made manifest in mystical purgation and union, 
whether here in this life or beyond the grave, completed at last in 
the beatific vision of heaven this is the common substance of the 
Christian life and of the mystic way, the fundamental principle, 
alike of Christianity 2 and of mysticism. 



1 Normally effected in baptism. 

2 Equally fundamental to Christianity is, of course, the accomplishment of 
this grace-union by incorporation into the mystical body of Christ the Incarnate 
Word of God, an incorporation effected by the indwelling of His Holy Spirit. 



CHAPTER VI 

VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 

TWELVE ASPECTS OR CHARACTERS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 

(1) Emancipation from Limits. I ascend to my Father and to your 

Father, to my God and to your God. I will come again and 
will receive you to myself that where I am you also may be. 

(2) Conversion from Creatures to God. Every one that hath left 

house or brethren or sisters or father or mother or lands for 
my name s sake shall receive a hundredfold and life ever 
lasting. Blessed are the poor in spirit : for theirs is the 
kingdom of heaven. 

(3) Introversion. When thou shalt pray, having shut the door, pray 

to thy Father in secret. The kingdom of God is within you. 

(4) Detachment from Self. If any man will come after me, let him 

deny himself. For he that will save his life shall lose it, 
and he that will lose his life for my sake shall find it. 

(5) Conversion from Matter to Spirit. That which is born of the 

flesh is flesh : and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 
The hour cometh, and now is, when the true adorers shall 
adore the Father in spirit. God is a spirit, and they that 
adore him, must adore him in spirit. 

(6) Increase of Delicacy or Subtlety. Be ye wise as serpents and 

simple as doves. Blessed are the eyes that see the things 
that you see. Think not that I am come to destroy the 
law or the prophets ; I am not come to destroy but to fulfil. 
For I tell you that unless your justice exceed that of the 
scribes, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. 

(7) Liberation. You shall know the truth and the truth shall 

make you free. The Spirit breatheth where he will. So 
is everyone born of the Spirit. 

(8) Unification. Martha, Martha, thou art careful and art troubled 

about many things. But one thing is necessary. 

(9) Purification. Blessed are the clean of heart for they shall see 

God. Now, you are clean by reason of the word that I 
have spoken to you. 

140 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 141 

(10) The Attainment of Peace. Peace I leave with you, My peace I 

give unto you. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me 
and you shall find rest to your souls. 

(11) Will Identification with the Will of God. I camejiot to do 

my own will but the will of him that sent me. Thy will 
be done on earth as it is in heaven. Not as I will but 
as Thou wilt. 

(12) Progressive Attainment of Reality. Not by bread alone man 

lives. Labour not for the meat that perisheth, but for that 
which endureth unto life everlasting. I am the bread of 
life. Give us this day our daily bread. 

The ever-increasing and in its later stages more or less conscious 
will-union with God affected positively by the increase of sancti 
fying grace and negatively by the gradual destruction of all limits 
within which the will and understanding are by their natural 
operation bound, the soul s escape " from every limit of nature 
and reason " l in its union with the Unlimited Godhead, may, as 
I remarked at the outset of this book, be regarded from various 
points of view. A few of these general aspects I will now discuss 
before dealing in detail with the chief stages of the mystic way as 
explained by St John of the Cross. 

(1) Emancipation from Limits. 

All the various aspects of the mystical way are grounded in 
its fundamental character as the way from the limited to the 
unlimited or infinite, a gradual emancipation from limits. Each 
separate aspect is simply an aspect or result of that escape from 
the limited to the unlimited. That fundamental character has 
already been discussed. We have seen how the soul of man by 
its reason and rationally directed will has a natural capacity for 
the infinite, even a certain need of the infinite and consequent 
aspiration thereafter. 2 This capacity was fulfilled by his first 
supernatural union with God, an elevation which more than 
satisfied the natural need and aspiration of the soul. Sin 
and its results have, however, confined man within the limits 
of creatures as the ends of his will and the conditions of his 
understanding. These limits must be and by grace are, and by 
grace alone can be, transcended. Thus the life of grace is a gradual 

1 Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book II., Introductory Chapter. 

2 It has an exigency for a certain union with and knowledge of the Infinite 
God, though not for the beatific vision and union. 



142 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

escape from limits. Hence the mystical union-intuition in which 
that life issues is this emancipation in an enormously higher degree. 
This freedom from limits by full union with the Unlimited is often 
spoken of by St John and Mother Cecilia as an immensity. 

But a difficulty must now be faced. It will be asked : "Is not 
such a progress essentially impossible to the created soul of man ? 
How can a creature which is as such essentially limited escape all 
limits ? " The answer is that man s reason and rational will 
enable him to apprehend the existence of an unlimited good, and 
to strive after its attainment. The centre essentially possessed of 
this direction towards, and capacity foi unlimited good, is thereby 
in an especial sense grounded in the Divine Being. This capacity 
and the grounding in God that is its cause endows the soul with 
a certain potential infinity. " The heart," says Mother Cecilia, 
" by which I mean the root of the will or the essence of the soul 
was created by God in His image and likeness. It possesses in 
consequence an immensity so profound that it is like a sea or 
bottomless well, wherein the deeper we plunge the less do we find 
bottom, and this immensity is due to the fact that the soul is 
grounded and lives in the very life and essence of its Creator " 
(Transformation of Soul, st. 1). " The soul, though clothed 
in a veil of miserable, mortal flesh, possesses in itself an immense 
centre, containing infinite riches and glory. In this divine centre 
we are like God and nothing can fully satisfy it save God Himself " 
(Transformation, st. 4). This centre is, as we have already 
seen, the root of the will and it is as such that it is thus unlimited. 
" The will," says the writer of The Obscure Knowledge of God, " goes 
out of itself and is transformed into the object of its love, so as to 
become one thing with that object, and therefore it does not limit 
that object " (chap. x). St John of the Cross speaks of this 
potential infinity of the soul when he says, in The Living Flame, 
st. 3 : " The capacity of these caverns " the powers of the 
soul " is profound because the object of which they are capable, 
namely God, is profound and infinite. Hence the capacity of the 
soul is, in a certain sense, infinite, and its hunger profound and 
infinite." When the union with God is complete, the soul is at 
once finite and infinite. " God," says Mother Cecilia, " has willed 
to communicate His Divine Being in such wise that His creatures 
are able to receive Him without limit, though not with the measure 
of His immensity as He knows it in Himself alone." " Blessed is 
the soul that possesses in itself the immensity of God through 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 143 

participation and union with Him." Though still indeed finite 
in its own essence, it is infinite in its eternal participation of the 
Unlimited, in its union with God. It is like a vessel closed at 
the bottom and sides, open at the top. Finite in itself, in its 
union with God and apprehension of God it is infinite. This 
mystery, this seeming paradox, is strictly parallel with the para 
dox that the soul created in time should be able GO participate in 
eternity, and both paradoxes spring from the ultimate mystery of 
the co-existence of the creature with the Creator, of the finite with 
the infinite, of time with eternity, of the relative with the absolute. 
Any attempt to solve the mystery to the conceptual reason in 
volves the rejection of one of its component elements, a solution 
that denies one of the factors of the problem to be solved. As we 
cannot comprehend God, neither can we comprehend this mystery. 
We can, however, have an intuitive perception of the two co 
existent elements in the life of the soul, the finite and the infinite, 
the temporal and the eternal, and to reject this immediate per 
ception because we cannot state it with entire conceptual intel 
ligibility would be folly. Those therefore who possess mystic 
union or beatific vision are free from all limits and thus are 
infinite, while ever remaining in their essential finitude as creatures, 
because while remaining creatures they are united with God in 
the most intimate union and thus participate in His Unlimited 
Being. Moreover, the finite activities of the blessed, while still 
existing, and even the activities arising out of the Resurrection 
body, will, though limited, be no longer limiting, for they will be 
but an appanage and instrument of the unlimited Divine life, of 
which the blessed to the utmost measure of their capacity partake. 
This emancipation of the soul, from limits by the reception of the 
Infinite Being of God, constitutes the mystic way, whose goal is its 
perfect achievement in heaven. 

(2) Conversion from Creatures to God. 

When God grants sanctifying grace to the soul, He does not 
change or move so as to come and dwell where He did not dwell 
before. This would be an intrinsic impossibility, for the Divine 
Nature is changeless and immutable. When, therefore, Our Lord 
said : " We will come and take up our abode," He was using the 
language of appearances, as we do when we speak of the sun rising 
and setting. The entire progress in the way of grace, from the 
first infusion of sanctifying grace to the entrance into glory, is a 



144 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

change in our relation to God. Gradually the confining barriers, 
concepts and limited will aims and images, which separate our 
soul life from the infinite Godhead ever immanent in all creatures, 
are removed and destroyed. Since, however, where there are the 
fewest limits of non-being there is the greater participation of the 
Divine Being, God is most especially present when the limits are 
least. Hence He is especially present in souls emancipated from 
the limits of nature by sanctifying grace, and the greater the degree 
of this emancipation the fuller is the Divine Presence. Thus the 
increasingly full and increasingly intimate Presence of God in the 
soul, as the mystic path of perfection is ascended, is constituted 
by a progressive emancipation of the soul from the limits of 
creaturely attachment. The soul gradually turns towards God, 
first in the general direction of the will alone, later in all its volitions 
and in a conscious though obscure perception of His Presence. 
Sin and imperfection which are essentially aversion from God and 
conversion to creatures are destroyed, to be replaced by a life of 
communion with God and aversion from creatures, except in and 
for Him. This gradual conversion of the soul towards God 
present in its centre may be fitly imaged by a comparison drawn 
from the theatre. Until a few minutes before the curtain rises the 
stage is in complete darkness. The curtain alone is visible. The 
attention of the playgoer is therefore occupied by the orchestra, 
by the fittings of the auditorium and by the dress, the looks and 
the behaviour of the audience. These are far more interesting 
and more real than the monotonous curtain and the darkness 
behind it. This represents the ordinary knowledge of the soul in 
this life. The Divine Reality is hidden in darkness and apparent 
unreality, behind the curtain of a dogmatic system that seems a 
dreary and chillingly abstract system of merely verbal propositions 
and formulae and of meaningless distinctions. The soul is occupied 
by the external world and its visible inhabitants. They appear 
so undeniably real, and religion so unreal. They are living, religion 
is dead. Interest centres in the beauties of nature, the decking 
of the world theatre, in a science that is practically useful, its 
warmth and comfort, in an art whose appeal is more or less con 
fined to the senses, the music of the orchestra, in the superficial 
character and conduct of individuals and the fashions and current 
views of society, the audience around, their features and coiffures, 
their gowns and jewels. Later on, however, just before the play 
commences, the auditorium is darkened and the curtain alone 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 145 

stands out in brilliant light. The attention is turned by this from 
the auditorium and audience to the bright curtain, and through 
that to the stage beyond, with its approaching scenery and drama. 
In this altered condition is represented mystical experience, 
and most especially that most perfect mystical experience which 
is the transforming union. All the light of the soul now pro 
ceeds from the mystical intuition, which, however, is also the 
darkness of faith in a Divine Reality still veiled from open vision. 
The natural light of the soul s self -principled knowledge, the light 
derived from creatures, is now but obscurity. The false brilliance 
of the world, of its art and literature, its science and philosophy, 
its luxuries and amusements, its fashions and views, its codes and 
conventions, just now so dazzling and so inevitable, has faded into 
darkness before the approach of this Divine light, which, however, 
reveals nothing distinct. The illuminated curtain does not dis 
close the scenery behind it. There is now an entire conversion or 
reorientation of the entire psychical life, as there is of the attention 
of our theatre audience. The curtain of dogma and moral pre 
cept, formerly so dull and so uninspiring, alone glows with light in 
the darkness, and that radiant curtain is the portal of another 
world, a world of surpassing beauty and wonder. Soon the 
curtain rises in the theatre, the scene is disclosed and the drama 
begins. So is it with the mystic when he passes out of this 
life. Death lifts the curtain of the faith and discloses the open 
vision of Reality, at once the One and the All, God Himself. 

Keep in mind those intermediate moments when the curtain 
is still lowered, but is alone brilliant with a light that draws the 
attention in expectant concentration to the stage beyond it, 
and to its approaching drama. They are an image of the veiled 
knowledge of the Divine Being which is mystical intuition, 1 and 
of the total conversion of the soul from the emptiness of creatures 
as they are in their limiting limitations to the fulness of the Divine 
Reality presented thus in the intuition which at once cloaks and 
reveals It. 

(3) Introversion. 

Another aspect of the mystical way is its progressive intro- 

1 Of course the comparison, like most other similes, is incomplete. The 
illuminated curtain discloses nothing of the scenery and actors of the play ; the 
mystical intuition which is the perfection of infused faith does reveal the Presence, 
though not the nature, of God. 



146 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

version. As we have already seen, God indwells and manifests 
Himself in a special manner in the central depths of the soul 
on account of their extreme freedom from limitation. Therefore 
the infusion of sanctifying grace is pre-eminently the constitution 
of a new relationship to God of these central depths, of a special 
union with God of the central ego, so that He is present, operates 
and manifests Himself in that centre after a new and peculiarly 
intimate fashion. Hence the process of conversion to God, which 
is, as we have seen, one aspect of the way of sanctifying grace 
and therefore pre-eminently of the mystical way, is also a process 
of introversion from the external world to those central depths 
wherein He is thus found. The attention, indeed the very life 
of the soul must be gradually detached from all things without 
and concentrated on itself (recollected in itself, as it is often said), 
this, however, not in egoism for the sake of the self, but for the 
sake of God there present and operative. Moreover, since the 
most superficial that is, the peripheral activities of the soul are 
the most limited, they cannot be so immediately the subject and 
sphere of the Divine Working through grace as are the most central 
and least limited activities. For they are through their greater 
limitation intrinsically incapable of so full a reception of the Divine 
Being and Operation. Hence as the soul advances in the mystical 
way its activities become ever less peripheral and more central. 
The superficial activities with their correspondingly superficial 
objects continuously decrease. Thus the entire soul life, at the 
outset almost wholly peripheral, becomes increasingly central a 
conscious life of the centre increasingly united with the centrally 
present Godhead and increasingly controlled by that immanent 
Deity. As a result, prayer becomes ever more free from the 
surface activities and attentions conditioned by sensible images 
and becomes a contemplation of the unimaged Presence in the 
central depths. This is the gradual introversion of the way of 
grace through the continuous stages of mystical union. A certain 
introversion is indeed possible apart from grace by the use of 
natural reason. The most ignorant are the most superficial. 
The scientist and philosopher, and still more the artist, will and 
know at deep psychical levels with many limits removed. But the 
inner barriers remain as closely barred as ever. Grace alone can 
so introvert the soul as to free the central trinity, the ground of 
the soul, the radical cognition and the radical will from bondage, 
within the creaturely limits constituted by the ultimately sense- 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 147 

conditioned objects of natural knowledge and desire. Grace 
alone can set free the innate Godward tendency of the centre, 
so that it may become effectual and may reach its goal. I have 
already quoted from the first stanza of the Spiritual Canticle 
passages in which this introversion is described. 1 It is one of the 
most fundamental aspects of the mystical way. 

(4) Detachment from Self. 

Another aspect of the mystical process is the increasing destruc 
tion of selfishness. This does not mean that we are to seek the 
fulfilment of God s will, wholly prescinding from our own posses 
sion of the Divine union a specious error condemned in Fenelon. 
It is true that certain saints have expressed a willingness to be 
deprived of God by eternal damnation, if it were to His greater 
glory. Such a supposition is, however, an intrinsic impossibility. 
The essence of damnation is the eternal separation of the will 
from God, the will s eternal rejection of God. But that rejection 
or separation is, of course, the absolute disjunction of our good, 
our will s end, from the will of God a state of will intrinsically 
incompatible with a will to be damned for his glory i.e. for the 
perfect fulfilment of His will. Thus true love of God is incom 
patible with willingness for the eternal will aversion from God 
which constitutes hell. Why then have the saints used language 
implying readiness to be damned for Christ s sake ? The answer 
surely is that they were thinking, not of the essence of damnation 
the eternal aversion from God but of its secondary character 
of eternal suffering.* That they were ready to endure if only they 
might be united to God the closer by this supreme self-surrender. 
That, however, is not the condemned pure love that is willing to 
lose union with its object. For indeed it is of the very nature 
of love to seek union with the Beloved. No lover either in the 
natural or in the supernatural order can be satisfied with pleasing 
a Beloved absent and unpossessed. He demands the closest 
possible union, the most entire possession of the Beloved. The 
folly of a love so " pure " that it rejects union with its object for 
the joy that union would bring has been brilliantly exposed in 
the case of human love in that delightful, well-known comic opera, 
Patience. One could not find a more striking reductio ad 
dbsurdum of this false principle, a more convincing exposition of 

1 See Chapter V. 



148 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

its incompatibility with the essential character of love. But the 
essential character of love is the same in the supernatural and 
the natural orders. It is equally incompatible with a saint s 
love of God not to will union with Him as it is with an earthly 
lover s love of a woman not to will to have her, if possible, in 
marriage. 1 Therefore it is of the nature of divine love, when 
pure in the true sense, to will the possession of God its Object by 
the closest possible union and, therefore, to will the beatific vision 
of heaven as being essentially that union. On the other hand, 
when love is perfectly pure, it is free from all selfish aim, because 
it seeks nothing outside of God, not even the joy which is inevitably 
concomitant upon conscious union with God ; therefore, not even 
the bliss which necessarily attaches to the beatific vision. Pure 
love loves God, not for the eternal joy of His eternal possession, 
but for Himself, and therefore for His eternal possession prescind 
ing from the joy possession cannot but bring with it. If by an 
impossibility that possession brought torment instead of joy, pure 
love would will it notwithstanding. This is the true " pure love " 
as opposed to its condemned perversion ; this is the true unselfish 
ness which is gradually acquired in the mystic way. Its nature 
can be abundantly illustrated from the sayings of the Saints. 
Dame Julian expressed it clearly when she said : "I choose Jesu 
to my heaven," St Catherine of Genoa voiced pure love when she 
thus addressed her Lord, when after communion He filled her 
with sensible sweetness : " I do not want that which proceedeth 
from Thee ; I want Thyself alone, O tender Love . . . O Love, 
art Thou perhaps intending to draw me to Thee by means of these 
sensible consolations ? I want them not : I want nothing except 
Thee alone " (Baron von Hiigel, Mystical Element of Religion, 
vol. i., p. 280). Lucie Christine accustomed to express willingness 
to be deprived of glory for eternity, heard the Divine Voice saying : 
* I Myself am the glory " (Spiritual Journal, Eng. trs., p. 24). 
St Bernard said of love : " Habet praemium sed id quod amatur " 
[Its reward is the possession of the object loved] (De Diligendo 
Deo, chap, vii., pp. 72-73. Ed. and trs. by Edmund Gardner). 
The desire for this reward is essentially involved in the love itself. 
This true doctrine of pure love was summarised by St Augustine 
in the following words : " Whoso seeks from God any other 
reward but God " (not any reward but any reward out of God 

1 Unless indeed a higher love supervene, or the marriage union would injure 
the beloved, neither of which is possible in the case of the love of God. 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 149 

Himself), " and for it would serve God, esteems what he wishes to 
receive, more than Him from Whom he would receive it. What 
then ? Hath God no reward ? None, save Himself. This the soul 
loveth. If it love aught else, it is no pure love " (St Augustine 
on Psalm Ixxii. Quoted by Pusey in note to Confessions, iv. 4). 

The true sense, therefore, in which love must be disinterested 
is that the soul must make this complete identification of its own 
good, its end, if you will, its reward, with God, not with any 
consolation or other gift received from God, but with Him 
in Himself alone. This "pure love " identifies the lover s good 
wholly and solely with its Object, and therefore must will the 
possession of its Object as its good and nothing beside that Object. 
This entire identification of the soul s good with God the absolute 
unlimited good is St Bernard s fourth degree of love, when self 
is loved solely for God s sake. This is a disinterested and pure 
love indeed, not, therefore, a love which excludes the desire of 
the beatific vision, but a love which involves that desire. 1 

The attainment of an entirely pure love, of perfect detachment 
from self-love, is the gradual change of isolated acts of pure love, 
into a continuous state in which no selfish activity of the soul 
continues to exist. This can only be attained at the close of the 
mystic way when the soul has been detached, not only from self 
as the end, but from self as the principle of her activity. This 
final and most radical detachment from self, involving the re 
placement of the self by God, as the ground and principle of the 
soul life will be explained later, when I discuss the second night 
and spiritual marriage. Here let it suffice to have indicated this 
goal of the mystic way under its aspect of complete detachment 
from self. Enough has been said to emphasise the fundamental 
importance of this aspect without which any activity directed 
towards the attainment of the more unlimited and therefore more 
real realities that lie beyond the ordinary scope of our psychical 
life is not only barren but positively dangerous. 

(5) Conversion from Matter to Spirit. 

The mystic way is a gradual emancipation of the soul from 
the limitations of matter, by a progressive spiritualisation of its 
life. Matter, in its ultimate analysis, probably an electric energy, 

1 Nevertheless St Bernard thinks that this love will not be perfect till heaven 
is gained nay more, the Resurrection of the body past since these desires, right 
as they are, in some sense distract from the love of God (De Diligendo Deo). 



150 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

differs from spirit by the lack of certain properties, or, from another 
point of view, by its reproduction and representation of the Divine 
Being under certain fundamental limitations which are absent 
from spirit. Therefore the process from the limited to the un 
limited involves the ever-increasing transcendence of the limita 
tions arising from^ matter. I do not mean by this that matter 
is itself finally abandoned. The entire Incarnational and Sacra 
mental system, with its corollary, the Resurrection of the Body, 
affirms the unsoundness of this Platonic belief. But it does mean 
that the material ceases to confine with its limitations. In the 
Resurrection the material body will be the perfectly docile in 
strument of the spirit. It will not, like our present body, condi 
tion or limit the activity of the spirit. Now the spirit is incarnate. 
Then the flesh will be inspirited. This transformation is indeed 
the final and most perfect triumph of the soul, the third stage of 
its progress. First, the spirit is in bondage, though never wholly 
enslaved to the limitations of the flesh, unable to know or will 
anything that has not first been presented by the bodily senses. 
Under the action of grace, it attains an ever-increasing freedom 
from these bodily limitations, until at death it becomes wholly 
discarnate. It is true that even the most sensual, body-enslaved 
souls are freed from the body at death. We may, however, 
conjecture that their life beyond the grave is of a very feeble and 
semi-dormant nature. They have actualised their spiritual 
powers so little, have reduced the soul to so close a dependence 
on the body, that the spirit is now left in darkness of understand 
ing and feebleness of will-energy, an all but empty shade, as the 
Greeks imagined the ghosts in Hades, and the earlier Jews, the 
dead in Sheol. The soul is indeed essentially immortal, and this 
involves some exercise of the spiritual powers, but that exercise 
is reduced to a minimum. If this condition endures only for a 
time it is the purgatory of sensual souls saved at the last if for 
ever, their damnation. 1 This second stage, wherein the spirit 
is wholly separated from the flesh, was erroneously regarded by 
Plato as the highest and final stage. Last and highest of all is 
the third stage, when the body is restored, but the spirit is in such 

1 This is, of course, mere speculation well grounded, I believe. All the 
damned receive back their bodies. In the case of these sensual souls we may 
believe that their bodies are left without power to supply due food subject matter 
to the spirit, which remains, therefore, in its impotence and inanity. And still 
less can the soul inspirit the body as in the Resurrection of the just. 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 151 

full actualisabion that its operation wholly dominates and, so to 
speak, absorbs the sensible operations and consciousness of the 
body. The mystic way on earth is, of course, essentially the way 
from the first to the second stage, the gradual escape of the soul 
from bondage to the limitations of matter and sense, the sub 
stitution of the spiritual for the carnal man. 1 For St Paul terms 
the natural life of the soul, the life of the old man, carnal, and its 
possessor the carnal man : its opposite, the supernatural life, 
the life that is manifested in mystical experience, the life of the 
new, man spiritual, and its possessor the spiritual man. He does 
so because the natural soul life of man is essentially bound by 
material conditions transcended only by the new " creature " 
of grace. The soul can only become a free and matter- 
transcendent spirit by its elevation and possession by the 
Holy Spirit through grace. Hence St Paul speaks indifferently 
of " carnal " and " psychic " for the matter-conditioned life of 
the unregenerate and reserves the appellation " spiritual " for the 
Spirit-quickened and therefore matter-emancipated life of the 
regenerate. 

In its gradual emancipation from the limits of matter, the 
soul transcends first the limitations of the bodily senses and 
desires. Then it transcends in the understanding the image- 
conditioned concepts and discourse due ultimately to sensible 
data, and in the will, attachment to those more spiritualised goods, 
which are, nevertheless, ultimately generalisations from the more 
external goods of sense for example, ambition, desire of sensible 
consolations in religion and the like. These attachments to less 
immediately material goods are classified by St John of the Cross 
under seven heads, which he terms the seven spiritual sins. They 
are the spiritual counterparts of the seven capital vices. Though 
many of these sins appear at first sight desires of spiritual goods, 
closer examination reveals them to be desires containing a material 
element, limitations of material origin. These limitations are 
desires for particular selfish pleasures sensibly felt, pleasures of 
the lower sensible functions of the soul. 

Of course certain spiritual sins have less of the material than 
others. Spiritual pride may seem far indeed removed from sense 
and its pleasure. Nevertheless spiritual pride is essentially a love 
and esteem for the ego as a limited being, apart from the universal 

1 There is, however, as we shall see later, a certain foretaste in the mystic way 
of the third or Resurrection stage. 



152 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

good. But this limitation by the self and by its selfish good 
for example, individual pre-eminence above others is largely 
rooted in the material and sensible, in images and in image- 
derived concepts. Pride, though the sin of discarnate devils, 
is in man carnal in the widest sense. We must not confuse the 
psychology of the angels and devils, of which we know practically 
nothing, with the psychology of man in his bodily life on earth. 

The progress of the understanding and of the will are parallel. 
While the will is being gradually detached from all limitations 
in its object, limitations due directly or indirectly to matter, 
the understanding, having first transcended the limits of images 
corporeal or imaginary, proceeds to free itself, or rather to allow 
itself to be freed from the limitations of even the most general 
ideas ; for even these most general and most spiritual ideas, in 
so far as they are distinct notions, are generalisations from ultimate 
sense data, and as such are rooted in the material, are limited by 
matter. Indeed, in human psychology the distinct and the 
limited are ultimately deducible to the material. Pure spirituality 
is the entire actuation of the soul to and in God, the one sole 
Unlimited. But it may be urged, though God is indeed pure 
spirit, is not this true of many creatures also namely, the angels, 
even the fallen angels ? There may, therefore, be pure spirituality 
without union with God. All spirituality, I would reply, that is 
truly pure, is in closest union with God, as are the angels in heaven. 
Although the diabolic nature is indeed wholly immaterial, it is 
in many ways subject to, conditioned and limited by the material. 
Indeed, may not this limitation and confinement by matter, 
which must be agony to a discarnate intelligence, constitute one 
of the chief sufferings of the evil spirits ? To me this seems 
very probable. Thus is the mystic way an increasing emancipa 
tion of the spirit from the matter which conditions and confines 
its natural life on earth. 

(6) Increase of Delicacy or Subtlety (Delgadez). 

A subordinate aspect of this gradual dematerialisation of the 
soul is its increasing subtlety or delicacy (delgadez, as St John 
terms it). This epithet is employed by St John, both of the soul 
in its highest state of union and of the Divine Being, Who then 
consciously operates within it, having penetrated and taken 
possession of its central substance and its functions. (See 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 153 

Mystical Marriage, chap .xii.) The meaning of this somewhat 
strange term is perhaps a little obscure at first sight, and its 
elucidation will amply repay careful study. The principle 
underlying the use of the epithet is, I believe, that the coarse is 
always the most limited and the most material. A coarse soul 
is conversant entirely or almost entirely with matter and material 
phenomena as such, not as embodiments of spirit, and therefore 
perceives only the most material and superficial aspect of experi 
ence, and is always arrested at the surface of things. Coarse 
humour, for instance, differs from refined or delicate humour by 
its greater limitation and externality. It does not penetrate so 
deeply below the surface. It is true that in ordinary usage the 
term " coarse " is confined to those who know and love only those 
absolutely material facts and aspects of life which are perceptible 
and lovable by the irrational beasts. If, and in so far as, a soul 
penetrates below these absolutely material and utterly exterior 
aspects, it ceases to be termed coarse. Such a soul, however, may 
still be confined to the more superficial regions of experience, 
without penetrating deeply in any direction and never attaining 
the trulv spiritual. This soul is still essentially a vulgar soul, 
for coarseness is simply the highest degree of vulgarity, vulgarity 
in its greatest intensity. Coarseness is that condition of soul in 
which the will and perception are most narrowly limited and least 
penetrative. But there are other degrees to which the term coarse 
is not applied, where the limits are still exceedingly narrow. 
These lesser, but still very great, degrees of limitation constitute, 
if not coarseness, vulgarity. Vulgar souls of this kind are con 
versant only with pleasures and perceptions but one degree 
superior to those of the beasts. They still perceive and love 
only those things which belong to the surface of experience, which 
are almost wholly material, the obvious hard and brutal facts 
which possess an exceeding small degree of reality because so 
limited and exterior. If the coarse man judges all things by their 
direct relationship to sensual pleasure, the vulgar man applies 
the same standard somewhat more indirectly. His thought and 
will move within a narrow circle and they never pierce far below 
the surface. His psychical activities are essentially coarse, because 
essentially matter-bound, in their inability to escape these super 
ficial limits and to attain the deeper reality that is farther removed 
from the senses. 

In fact the essence of vulgarity, which is, after all, but another 



154 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

term for coarseness of soul, is extreme limitation and externality. 
To be very narrow-minded and shallow-minded is to be vulgar. 
If a man s soul is narrow in its sympathy and knowledge, but 
deep, he will be a bigot, but cannot be a vulgarian. Or again, 
if a man s sympathy and knowledge are wide, but more or less 
superficial if they are really wide, they cannot be extremely 
superficial such a man is not entirely vulgar, though still vulgar 
in proportion to his lack of depth. It is the union of narrowness 
with shall owness which constitutes perfect vulgarity. The vulgar 
man is incapable of any true intellectual or artistic activity or 
perception, for such perceptions and activities transcend the 
limitations of the immediately sensible. On such matters his 
views are but a parrot -like repetition of those current in his social 
environment. For the vulgar man science is valuable only as a 
means to tangible results and profit-making inventions. His 
notion of art is the provision of gaudy colours and jingling tunes 
for the grossest delight of the outer senses. To the beauty of 
nature he is blind, or at best he sees it but as a superficial pretti- 
ness, the utmost attainable by the physical senses alone. In 
religion, a man may indeed be saved by grace from vulgarity, 
while remaining vulgar in all other departments of life. True 
devotion pierces below the limits that constitute vulgarity. 
Otherwise his religion is but the utterance of resonant catchwords 
and the intoxication of hymn -singing. 1 Thus is vulgarity the 
confinement of the soul in the prison of the external aspects and 
the material objects that are immediately perceptible by sense. 
Refinement or subtlety, St John s delgadez, penetrates below the 
surface by transcending the particularity and limitations of the 
superficial and sensible fact, or appearance, or of the concept, 
thence derived. It reaches either by intuition or by thought, 
the more unlimited because more spiritual reality that underlies 
the immediate sense datum, the surface appearance, the particular 
and sense-derived concept. Refined and subtle souls are quick, 
therefore, to perceive the underlying identity of various particulars 
which are superficially different. If they effect this by intuition, 
they are men or women of delicate and subtle sympathies ; if by 
reasoning, they are quick-witted, acute, clever. This identity 
perceived by the subtle soul is not primarily one of material 
elements. The identities apprehended by the penetration of 
sensibility, talent and, in a higher degree, of genius, are spiritual 

1 And what hymns ? Consult our popular hymnals. 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 155 

identities of principles and ideas. From the perception of spiritual 
identity arises that wide and comprehensive sympathy which ac 
companies delicacy of soul. Even the senses of the subtle soul are 
disciplined to perceive details, whether similarities or differences, 
that do not appear in the broad outlines and large characters 
which alone are perceived by the senses of grosser souls. This 
more acute sense-perception is due in such souls to their fuller 
perception of the significance and beauty of material objects 
that is, to the deeper penetration which pierces below their super 
ficial aspects. Subtlety or refinement is, therefore, essentially 
an aspect of insight, opposed to the spiritual blindness of those 
who can only see the superficial phenomena discernible by the 
senses. Genius is but a supreme degree of this subtlety or penetra 
tion, for the genius is a genius essentially because he perceives 
more clearly than others the inner likeness and kinship, the 
underlying identity of superficially unlike objects. This is the 
explanation of the fact, often remarked, that the supreme genius 
sums up his age, that his work is the full and final expression of all 
the forces which constitute his epoch, its aims, conscious or un 
conscious, its religious beliefs, its dominant ideas and interests, 
its moral preferences, its aesthetic canons, even its limitations, 
its ignorances, its prejudices in short, that in him his age becomes 
fully self-conscious. Thus does Homer sum up the heroic age 
of Hellenic migration ; Euripides the rationalism and the newly 
awakened humanity of fifth-century Athens. Virgil is the voice 
of the Roman Empire, the Divina Commedia of the Catholic and 
feudal civilisation of the Middle Ages, Shakespeare of the Humanist 
Renaissance, while Monsieur Rolland s Jean Christophe represents 
the immanentism and natural vitalism of the present day. For 
the genius by his penetrative vision has more than any other 
broken through the barriers between himself and the general life 
of his epoch. Indeed his genius is essentially his free receptivity 
of the complexus offerees composing the " time spirit " that below 
the surface of divergent and conflicting individualties invisibly 
fashions, unites and directs the life and thought of his contem 
poraries. For these forces of which they imprisoned within the 
limits of the superficial, the individual, the local, are not at all 
or but partially conscious, are apprehended by this delicate, 
sensitive instrument, his subtle, and therefore widely perceiving 
and deeply penetrating, insight. 

Delicacy or subtlety is thus clearness and penetration of 



156 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

spiritual vision " insight " ; vulgarity or coarseness is dimness of 
spiritual vision, a dimness which amounts in many cases to an 
almost total blindness. This blindness of vulgarity is at the 
opposite pole to mystical intuition, as indeed the vulgar man 
is of all men the farthest removed from the mystic. For the 
vulgar soul is the most limited, the mystic soul the freest from 
limits. 

It may be objected that the most vulgar man, the bestial man 
of Aristotle and St Thomas * is not so guilty as the man or angel 
who uses his higher faculties, his less limited being, to exclude 
God by deliberate malice. Therefore on account of his greater 
guilt or aversion of will the malicious man, and even more, the 
fallen angel, is further removed from God and therefore from the 
mystic than the vulgar or bestial man. We need here a careful 
distinction. Since the soul of the vulgar man is confined within 
narrower limits, he participates less in God s Unlimited Being than 
the malicious sinner and a fortiori than Satan,* and is therefore 
further removed from God. Since, however, his will has not been 
so deliberately averted from God in despite of knowledge, he 
does not adhere so fully and so firmly to the more limited good 
of his choice, as do the malicious sinner and Satan to their less 
limited goods. Although his prison is narrower, he is not bound 
so fast within it. He has de facto less of God, but that greater 
lack is not so much his own fault. Hence he has a greater capacity 
and more prospect of release from his narrower limitations and of 
future union with God than has the malicious sinner on earth, 
whereas Satan and a damned soul have no capacity for this release 
and union. Thus although those latter are not so far removed 
in being from God as the former, their removal is in another sense 
more complete, for their fuller being is more actively exclusive 
of the Divine Being than the scantier being of the vulgar soul, 
which does not oppose an equal resistance to fulfilment by God s 
self-donation. This is surely the ground of Gregory s dictum that 
"carnal sins are less guilty but more infamous than spiritual." 2 
For guilt is the measure of a soul s deliberate self-confinement, 
disgrace the measure of the limitation within which the soul is 
confined. Therefore although in guilt that is in the intensity 

1 1 regard this " bestiality " as the supreme degree of vulgarity beyond coarse 
ness. What is said of vulgarity at its maximum is applicable in due proportion 
to lesser degrees. 

2 Quoted by Reade, Moral System of Dante s Inferno. 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 157 

of bondage an evil spirit and among men a malicious sinner is 
the antithesis of the mystic, in the limitation itself, that is, in the 
scope of confinement the lack of actual participation of God, 
the bestial or vulgar man is the antithesis of the mystic. From 
the cognitional standpoint with which we are at present con 
cerned the field of vision of the vulgar man is narrower than that 
of the malicious, although it is less indisposed for possible future 
enlargement. Hence the vision of the vulgar man rather than 
that of the malicious soul or the evil spirit is antithetic to the 
vision of the mystic. 

It is true that insight in one direction must usually be pur 
chased by a temporary sacrifice of insight in other directions. 
To attain depth the soul must become less broad. In the end, 
however, the breadth is restored at a deeper level, attained not 
by wide knowledge of facts at a more or less superficial level, as 
in the case of the typical broad-minded man, but by apprehension 
of the spiritual unity underlying the superficial manifold. The 
real bigot, on the other hand, stops short too soon. He reaches 
indeed a deeper level and therefore a more unlimited reality than 
the more superficial, broad-minded man. But he is arrested by a 
spiritual pride and selfishness which prevent him from going 
deeper and reaching an even more unlimited reality and there 
fore exclude from his spiritual vision the true generality of the 
spiritual fact or principle which he has attained. When therefore 
the world abuses a religious soul as narrow-minded and bigoted, 
we have to discover whether that soul is really bigoted that is, 
narrowed by the limitations of self-satisfaction or has simply 
concentrated its activity in order to attain a deeper level, a 
principle of wider scope, at and by which it will be able to unify 
and embrace the manifold, superficially embraced by the broad- 
minded man of the world. We must, however, remember that in 
this life a truly religious soul nay, even a saint may only grasp 
potentially this universal character of spiritual reality. Seeing 
that various departments of more or less superficial activity or 
knowledge tend in practice to exclude souls from the depths of 
the spirit, he may on that account ruthlessly condemn them as 
essentially and necessarily limiting and therefore evil in them 
selves. Such an one fails to realise, though he must admit it 
theoretically, that even these superficial activities and spheres 
are in their positive being good. He equally fails to realise that 
vast multitudes are in the present order so ignorant of divine 



158 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

truth and so temperamentally disposed as to be quite unable to 
transcend them save, of course, in the general will aim necessary 
to supernatural charity. For these souls, much occupation with 
these activities and spheres, despite their inevitable limitation, 
is the best course possible, and, in proportion as the activities and 
knowledge is question are more spiritual and unlimited, is in 
creasingly good. This want of realisation and consequent narrow 
ness is not, however, due to any defect in the saint s principles 
or way of life, or to any deficiency or limitation in the object 
attained by him, but simply to the inability of any soul while in 
this mortal flesh to actualise fully all potencies, to grasp all aspects 
of truth, to draw all the logical inferences, to see the full signifi 
cance of a truth attained. This necessary limitation, which is 
least existent in the greatest saints, does not alter the fact that the 
saint and the mystic have grasped the one Unlimited Reality, 
which gives its meaning and value to every activity and appre 
hension of any human soul whatsoever, however superficial and 
limited that meaning or value may be. 

Hitherto I have spoken of delicacy in its cognitional aspect 
as penetrative insight free from the narrow limits of superficial 
vision. It has, of course, its corresponding conational aspect, 
the delicacy of will, that loves and seeks the deep spiritual values 
apprehended by the subtle understanding. Thus delicacy or 
subtlety (delgadez) is the state of soul, whether manifested in 
knowledge or love, that penetrates deepest beyond the most 
limited surface appearance or sphere of being, and attains bhe 
more unlimited reality which underlies it. The freer our psychical 
operations are of limits the more are they conversant with the 
interior and spiritual realities that underlie the complex manifold 
of the external and material, the more delicate and more subtle, 
therefore, are they, since they are not hindered, blunted and 
diminished, and therefore coarsened, by the limitations of the 
most superficial and the most particular objects. "We must 
bear in mind," writes St John, u that a thing is wide and capacious 
in proportion to its delicacy, and the more subtle and delicate it is, 
the more extensively does it diffuse and communicate itself" 
(Living Flame, st. 2). When finally the psychical operations 
are immediately conversant with God, not apprehended under 
any particular image or concept, but as the incomprehensible 
Being infinitely transcending all created objects and yet in 
timately present to and immanent in them all in porportion to 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 159 

their freedom from limitation, these operations are most subtle 
and delicate, fitly imaged by some very subtle, physical force, 
which by reason of its subtlety penetrates other substances, and 
is not confined by grossness of bulk or nature to a very limited l 
sphere of being and activity. 

As we shall see later, the activities of a soul in the highest 
state of union are receptions of the Divine activity. Therefore 
in describing the operation of such a soul St John speaks of the 
Divine activity or operation in that soul. But it is plain that if 
delicacy or subtlety increases with increased freedom from limita 
tions, the activity of God must be infinitely delicate or subtle, 
being excluded or confined by no limitation. Everything, there 
fore that I have said of delicacy applies pre-eminently to the 
Divine operation, and indeed it is only by participation in 
that operation that the activities of the soul can attain to the 
perfect subtlety of entire freedom from limits. " O thou delicate 
touch, thou Word the Son of God," writes St John, " that through 
the delicacy [subtlety] of thy divine Being dost subtly penetrate 
the substance of my soul and touching it delicately throughout 
dost absorb it wholly in Thyself in divine ways of delights and 
sweetness never heard in the land of Canaan nor seen in Teman. 
... Oh my God and my life, they only shall see Thee and shall 
feel Thy subtle touch who have made themselves alien to the 
world, and have made themselves subtle, for the subtle fits the 
subtle, and so shall they be able to feel and to enjoy Thee. Such 
as those dost Thou touch with a subtlety proportionate to their 
condition seeing that the substance of their soul hath now been 
purged, purified and rendered subtle." (All the natural limits 
of its activity have been destroyed that hitherto excluded it from 
the unlimited reception of the all-penetrating Unlimited.) . . . 
" Oh, once again and many times over delicate touch, Thou art 
the more strong and powerful, the more delicate Thou art, for 
with the force of Thy delicacy Thou dost undo the soul and 
alienate it from all touches of things created and dost appropriate 
it to Thyself and unite it to Thyself alone. Thou dost leave 
within it an effect so delicate, that every touch of aught, high or 
low, seems coarse and impure " (because its essential limit is felt, 
excluding and debarring the soul s activity). ..." The Word, 
that is the touch that toucheth the soul, is infinitely subtle and 

1 1 mean limited qualitatively not quantitatively. Grosser substances 
obviously occupy more space. 



160 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

delicate. The soul is a wide and capacious vessel on account of 
the great purity and subtlety possessed in this state " (of supreme 
mystical union). " Ah then, O thou delicate touch, Thou dost 
infuse Thyself into my soul with such plenty and abundance 
proportionate to Thy subtlety and to the purity of my soul. . . . 
This divine touch possesses no bulk nor volume, for the Word that 
effects it is devoid of all mode or fashion, and free from all volume, 
form, figure or accident, whose nature it is to confine and limit 
substance. . . . Ah then, in fine, how ineffably delicate is this 
Thy touch, O Thou Word, seeing it is effected in the soul with 
Thy most simple substance and with Thy intimate Being, that 
is infinitely delicate, because it is infinite " (without limits) 
(Living Flame, st. 2). Thus in proportion as the soul is united 
to the unlimited Being of God by its reception and participa 
tion of His unlimited activity, the activity of that soul becomes 
delicate or subtle, for it penetrates and transcends all the limits 
of creatures passing through and beyond them to the Unlimited 
present in, through and beyond them all. This is well expressed 
by Mother Cecilia when she says that one of the effects of the 
mystical union is that " God renders increasingly subtle all the 
properties and activities of the soul ... so that all things that 
might hinder it seem now devoid of substance " (Transformation, 
st. 16). 

(7) Liberation. 

Patrata sunt haec mystice 
Paschae peracto tempore 
Sacro dierum circulo 
Quo lege fit remissio. 

[These things were done in type that day 
When Paschal tide had passed away. 
The number told which once set free 
The captive in the jubilee.] 

These words are sung by the Church in her Whitsun lauds 
to commemorate the first indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the souls 
of her children. In remarking this numerical coincidence between 
the Jewish liberation of slaves in the Sabbatical year that is, 
every fiftieth year and the advent of the Spirit on the fiftieth day 
after Easter, she insinuates that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit 
and His work in the soul is essentially an emancipation of the 
soul from spiritual bondage. The mystical union-intuition is, 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 161 

as we have seen, but a manifestation of the life of grace and 
therefore of that Presence and Work of the Holy Spirit in the 
soul that is constituted by sanctifying grace. If, therefore, the 
ordinary life of grace with its secret indwelling of the Spirit be 
essentially a liberation of the soul, the mystical union must be 
the attainment of a far more complete liberty. Thus the mystical 
way is under another aspect a gradual emancipation. 

No age has boasted a greater devotion to freedom than our own. 
We are impatient of all control, whether of Church, of State or of 
family, except, indeed, in war-time, when no servitude seems too 
great, no yoke too hard for the patient endurance of the peoples 
of Europe, who rush gladly in their millions to be butchered at the 
command of irresponsible cliques of statesmen. Such a slavery 
is indeed the fitting Nemesis of the false liberty of modern thought 
and life. But what then is true liberty ? The prevalent con 
fusion of thought, the strange mixture of anarchy and slavery, 
show the need of an answer, and our account of the mystical way 
urges me to attempt it. In its more superficial aspect, liberty is 
freedom to follow reason unhindered by external violence. In a 
deeper sense it is this same freedom to follow reason unhindered 
by the force of our own lower passions and desires. Bondage 
to the latter is, of course, a far worse slavery than any slavery 
to the former, since it confines the inner life of the soul, not merely 
its external manifestation. Everything, therefore, that enables 
us to follow reason l sets us free, everything that hinders us from 
following reason enslaves. No fallen man, however, can follow 
reason without the help of an external law and authority. 
Freedom from law and authority means slavery, for it involves 
more or less of inability to follow reason, an inability due in part 
to ignorance of what right reason prescribes, in part to the innate 
tendency of the fallen will to follow irrational affections. But 
every state being merely human, an assemblage of more or less 
sinful and ignorant men is in greater or lesser degree divergent 
from right reason, and may therefore, indeed often does, prescribe 
what is opposed to it. Such laws and commands truly enslave 
the subject who submits to them by hindering him from following 
in his conduct the dictates of reason. Nevertheless the slavery 
so incurred is far less than the slavery which would result from 
anarchy. Therefore the authority of the State must be main 
tained and obeyed, save where it plainly conflicts with the law 

1 When I say reason, I include superrational intuition. 
L 



162 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

of God or deprives the individual of some inalienable right 
that is, some power or possession necessary for the due operation 
of a rational soul life. Nevertheless this necessary evil may and 
should be minimised by restricting the power and scope of the 
State to such authority over the individual, as shall prevent one 
individual from injuring another (the police and judicial function), 
and shall secure to every individual equal opportunity to develop 
his capacities in the fulfilment of his particular office (a limited 
function of social reform and regulation). Higher, less limited 
authority can safely be entrusted to that society alone which has 
been instituted by God Himself and endowed by Him with in 
fallibility namely, the Catholic Church a society, moreover, 
whose authority is based not on brute force, but upon the free 
obedience of conscience. By submission to the State the individual 
soul is, or should be, freed from the bondage of irrational inter 
ference by his fellows, whether positive by aggression on his 
rights, or negative by the refusal of the due opportunity which he 
requires to follow out the vocation which his reason assigns him. 
By submission to the Church, so that it be internal that is, of 
the free will not merely external, for some natural end, or under 
legal compulsion, the soul is freed from the imprisonment of a 
radical aversion of will from the Unlimited God to the limited 
creature. This is, however, but a beginning. If the soul wills 
the close union with God which is the end of the mystic way, it 
is not sufficient merely to perform or omit those acts whose 
performance or omission the Church prescribes under pain of sin. 
That soul must submit its will in all things to the will of God. 
Thus alone can it be freed from all the limitations of creaturely 
attachment. In proportion as the soul effects this submission 
or will-union it becomes ever freer to follow the voice of con 
science illuminated by grace and later by mystical intuition, 
a voice which tells her plainly that the infinite and Absolute 
Divine Goodness is the only true end of her actions and life. But 
we have now traced freedom to a deeper source than that reached 
by our definition of freedom as the unimpeded following of reason. 
For we have shown that this following of right reason leads to 
perfect will-union with God, and that this perfect will-union is 
perfect freedom, because it is the complete emancipation of the 
soul from the bondage of the limitations necessarily inherent in 
creatures. Wholly to submit, to inone the will with the will of 
God is to become perfectly free, because it is the destruction 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 163 

of all limits. For the will-union of love frees, in proportion as it 
releases the will from limited ends. The lowest and most limited 
are, of course, the animal desires, and the sensual man is therefore 
the greatest slave, or, to speak more exactly, his prison is the 
narrowest. Those whose will is set on more unlimited because 
more spiritual objects have a far more spacious prison-house. 
They are like a dethroned monarch allowed the range of an entire 
estate or island. Nevertheless their slavery is often more intense, 
their prison far more difficult of escape. For the very fact that 
the object of the will is now less limited makes it more satisfactory 
and more attractive to the entire soul. Hence the will of such a 
man is often more firmly attached to his less limited good than 
the will of the sensual man to his more narrowly limited good. 
Divine charity alone gives true freedom to the will, detaching it 
ever more completely from any and every limited good, and fixing 
it ever more closely on the unlimited Good. This is the freedom 
of the sons of God, led by the Holy Spirit of God Who is the 
eternal love of Absolute Goodness for Absolute Goodness. It is 
a freedom which is perfect obedience, obedience indeed to the 
dictates of reason, but essentially and primarily obedience to the 
Personal Will of God which the understanding supernaturally 
enlightened by grace and later by mystical intuition, recognises 
as the Supreme Good and End of creatures. In this life this 
higher and more complete obedience which is the supreme freedom 
is greatly assisted by obedience to earthly superiors and directors 
whose guidance on the mystic way is therefore most valuable. 
Even if these should err in the matter of their command, so long 
as sin is not involved, should order what is not in itself in most 
perfect accord with God s will, it is His will that the soul should 
obey for the sake of the general good thereby obtained of the 
destruction of the essentially limited and limiting self-will of the 
soul. Even tyranny and oppression are often used by God as 
instruments to effect the liberation of the soul from this inner 
bondage to limiting desires, and limiting self-will, a bondage in 
calculably closer and more powerful than any external slavery. 1 
For self-will is the choice of a limited good which is immediately 
pleasurable to the soul, or more radically its own supposed good 
as apart from the Absolute Good. God s will which is identical 
with His being is the sovereign good of all, and therefore of the 

1 Nevertheless we ought to oppose tyranny because (i) it often does enslave 
the soul of its victims ; (2) it is always the spiritual ruin of those who practise it. 



164 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

individual soul. Therefore when self-will is destroyed, and God s 
will is perfectly chosen, the will is wholly free to attain its true 
good and end, which it has perversely sought from the outset. 
In the possession of this boundless Good it enjoys perfect freedom. 
As mystical will-union through love thus emancipates the will 
from limited ends, mystical intuition emancipates the spiritual 
consciousness or understanding from limited apprehensions. 
That intuition reveals the Unlimited as the ultimate and the solely 
adequate, the one complete and wholly evident Object of know 
ledge. Thus in the highest sense is Our Lord s promise fulfilled 
when this sovereign truth revealed in mystical intuition makes 
us free. The understanding that accepts as ultimate the par 
ticulars of sense is the most completely enslaved. Understand 
ings that are conversant with far-reaching hypotheses, first 
principles and spiritual ideas are in various degrees freer. The 
understanding that enjoys direct intuition of God is truly free, 
for it has attained the Absolute Truth, the source and ground of 
all the more or less limited truths of created being. In this life 
we cannot comprehend this Absolute Truth, for we cannot attain 
clear knowledge of the Godhead. Therefore the understanding is 
not wholly free as it will be free in the beatific vision. Faith, 
even in its highest degree and most complete infusion, the veiled 
intuition of the mystic, apprehends Absolute truth obscurely 
under a veil. This veiled intuition is, however, an intellectual 
freedom beyond that possessed by any other man, even by the 
philosopher, who is bound by distinct concepts ultimately sense- 
derived and therefore limited, limited, moreover, in proportion to 
their distinctness. By this double emancipation of the radical 
will and understanding the centre of the soul is set free to possess 
that perfect union and fruition of God for which it was created 
and sanctified, undetained by the limits of creaturely attachments 
and ideas. Thus is the mystic way, the way, the only way, to 
perfect freedom. 

(8) Unification : Increasing Simplicity. 

We have seen that God is absolute unity and simplicity, because 
His infinite multiplicity is not exclusive but inclusive. It was 
pointed out at the same time that as the scale of created being 
mounts Godward the unity increases, the internal organic unity 
which harmonises, subordinates and, so to speak, absorbs an ever- 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 165 

increasing complexity or multiplicity. The same law holds good 
of the spiritual life of the individual soul. The need for unifica 
tion both in practice and in theory, unification alike of will aims 
and of knowledge, is imperiously insistent in the soul of man. It 
exists even in the natural order when the mystic way is altogether 
unknown. In practical life a man must have one dominant aim, 
one dominant affection, if his life is to possess any degree of 
stability, if his work is to attain any degree of successful achieve 
ment. It is the same with speculation. The aim and achieve 
ment of the sciences is the unification of the data which constitute 
its subject matter. Philosophy attempts l to unify the first 
principles of all the subordinate sciences in one harmonious self- 
consistent view of reality as a whole. Art creates such sensible 
harmonies that is, unifications of form, colour or sound as will 
convey to souls duly attuned the spiritual and therefore more 
perfect harmony or unification which underlies the sensible and 
therefore more imperfect, because more exterior, unifications and 
harmonies. But it is only in the order of grace and in its sovereign 
manifestation, mystical experience, that this need of unification 
can attain full satisfaction. For in mystical experience the soul 
attains a supernatural union with the Absolute Unity of an 
infinite manifold, from Whom all multiplicity proceeds and in 
Whom it is all made one. Moreover, as the soul draws nearer to 
God and this union increases, its operations become more unified, 
because their subject matter is increasingly simple. In the 
earlier stages of the life of grace the soul s strength is not com 
pletely focused on God. The will is divided among many objects, 
not willed in order to God ; the consciousness is similarly dis 
tracted by a multiplicity of divers objects, unharmonised and 
mutually competing for the soul s attention. Even the soul s 
prayer-energy is divided among various images, by whose aid 
alone it approaches God, Who is now envisaged under one image, 
now under another. It is true that from the first there exists in 
the central trinity, the centre and the radical consciousness and 
the radical will proceeding from the centre, a unity of direction 
towards the unlimited, towards God. This unity, however, is not 
carried into act, but remains an unfulfilled potency, a beginning 
never carried out. The life of the soul is thus like the water of a 
fountain, which begins indeed to rise in one jet from the pipe, but 

1 An attempt which, as we saw, can never be completely successful (see 
Chapter III). 



166 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

is soon dissipated into a shower of separate streams and drops 
pursuing each its own independent course. The energy of the 
soul, instead of ascending undivided to God, is distracted among 
the variety of creatures known and willed in and for themselves. 
The mutually exclusive limits of these created ends and objects 
split up the soul life and dissipate its force. All this ununified 
and consequently distracting multiplicity gradually disappears 
as the soul draws closer to God, as its union with Him becomes 
more intimate and more continuous. Finally, nothing is willed 
save in order to God, nothing contemplated by the understanding 
in which He is not beheld. The soul s prayer is unified in one 
direct obscure contemplation of God, and in one immediate direc 
tion and union of the will to and with Him. This principle is 
plainly stated by St John in the sixteenth chapter of the second 
book of The Ascent of Mount Carmel. " I say, therefore," such 
are his words, " with respect to all these apprehensions and 
imaginary visions, and other forms or species of whatever kind 
they may be or images or particular apprehensions of any kind " 
(i.e. distinct intellectual concepts about God), " whether false as 
coming from the devil, or known to be true as coming from God, 
that the understanding is not to perplex itself about them, nor 
feed itself upon them ; the soul must not willingly accept them 
nor cleave to them in order that it may be detached and naked, 
pure and simple without particular mode or fashion of any kind, 
which is the condition of the divine union. The reason of this is 
that all these forms are never represented so as to be laid hold of, 
but under certain ways and limitations ; and the divine wisdom 
to which the understanding is to be united admits of no such 
particular ways or forms, neither can it be comprehended under 
any limitation or distinct and particular concept, because it is all 
pureness and simplicity. However, if two extremes are to be 
united together, such as the soul and the divine Wisdom, it is 
necessary that they should meet under a certain kind of mutual 
resemblance ; and hence the soul must also be pure and simple, 
not limited by, nor adhering to any particular concept and un 
modified by any limited form, species or image. As God is not 
comprehended under any form or image or particular concept, so 
the soul also, if it is to be united to Him, must not be under the 
power of any particular or distinct concept." In short, the mani 
fold of distinct and particular apprehensions must give place to a 
unified though obscure apprehension of the God Who is Absolute 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 167 

Unity. Thus is the mystical process a process from multiplicity 
to unity. This unity, however, is not a barren unity a unity 
attained by the cutting away of all the constituents of experience 
save one, a unity like the unity of almost contentless units. The 
enemies of the mystical life regard its unity in this light, but that 
is their calumny. Within the unity there is an infinite variety of 
acts of will and of apprehensions, perfectly blended in one. As 
Baron von Hugel points out, the more wholly an object occupies 
and absorbs the attention of the soul, the more are all the soul s 
powers unified in a unity composed of a multiplicity of operations 
so subtle as to be subconscious. 1 When the Object is Absolute 
Goodness and therefore all-satisfying and all-absorbing, Absolute 
Unity, focusing in that unity all that is positive in the incalcul 
able variety of created things, this unification of the soul is 
complete. Limits divide. Hence occupation with the limited 
is divided or externally multiple. The unlimited unites. There 
fore concentration on the Infinite harmonises in one act all the 
multiplicity of the soul. On the other hand, the one act preached 
by the Quietists was a contentless or bare unity. That is why it 
was condemned by the Church. Here, as elsewhere, Quietism is 
the ape of true mysticism. For the Quietist imitates the external 
phraseology of mysticism, but fails to understand her inner spirit, 
to follow her real practice. 

It is true that in the case of the individual soul the multiplicity 
of different interests and functions of which our soul life is com 
posed is usually diminished as the soul draws nearer to God. The 
reason of this, however, is that this multiplicity was by reason of 
its externality exclusive, dividing and distracting. The inner 
substance, however, of these multiple external activities is not 
lost but fused in the interior unity of the mystical life. If, for 
example, a soul loses its love of art or natural beauty, it is because 
the inner substance or spiritual significance of these has been 
abstracted from the external form in which it was first conveyed, 
whose limits excluded other psychical activities, and is now 
possessed in a more spiritual and interior manner, in which the 
substance of each distinctive activity is one with that of the others, 
while subsisting in full unimpaired being. For the more spiritual 
is the more purely positive, though God alone is pure positivity, 
and therefore one spiritual being does not exclude another in the 
same way that one material unit excludes another material unit. 

1 Mystical Religion. 



168 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

I cannot contemplate a beautiful painting and a beautiful land 
scape in one and the selfsame contemplation. The mystic can 
have the fruition of the spiritual realities, of which the picture and 
the landscape are the respective embodiments or sacraments, in 
one and the same contemplation, for both are but aspects of one 
spiritual or ideal reality, and only exclude one another when 
externalised on the lower plane of mutually exclusive material 
objects. Since God is Absolute Unity, the activity of the God- 
possessing and God-possessed soul is unified in proportion to the 
degree of , the divine possession. Thus is the mystical way essenti 
ally a Unitive way, and most completely unitive is that final stage 
known by this name. 

(9) Purification. 

The operations of the soul in mystical union are increasingly 
pure energisings to God, undistracted and undiluted by created 
images and ends. This purity is a concomitant aspect of the soul s 
unification and of its release from limits, even as the Divine Purity 
is a concomitant aspect of the Divine Unity and the Divine 
Infinity. The gradual purification of the soul will occupy us at 
great length hereafter. Here I would but point out the general 
law that the increasing unification of the soul life and activity, 
together with their increasing emancipation from limits, involves 
their increasing purification from the multiple and limiting 
attachments to creatures that sullied the purity of the soul s 
concentrated force of Godward love. In the second volume of 
Modern Painters Ruskin maintains that purity is essentially 
energy or life unimpeded. 1 Spiritual purity is thus the energy or 
life of the soul unimpeded in its outgoing to God by the limits 
of created attachments immediately or mediately derived from 
sensible objects. St John regards purity from this point of view 
in the twenty-fifth chapter of the third book of The Ascent of Mount 
Cavmel. Purity is there treated as the free actuation of the soul 
in and to God in a fulness of spiritual life not repressed and dis 
persed by sensible attachments. These attachments repress this 
Godward life and energy of the spirit by confining our psychical 
activities and life within the limits of the sensible and the created. 
They disperse that fulness of life by dissipating its energy among 
a multiplicity of objects. The intention of the will and the appre 
hension of the understanding, pure in source owing to their 

1 Vol. ii., chap. ix. 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 169 

primitive unity, in man s innate Godward outgoing and need, 1 are 
denied in their outward flow by attachments to creatures and to 
particular images and concepts which limit the will so that it no 
longer wills the Divine Union, and in which the understanding 
rests, so that it is held back on its onward course to the Absolute 
all-explanatory truth it would fain apprehend. This is the 
double impurity of sin and its consequences, in their twofold result 
of blindness of understanding and powerlessness of will. The 
work of grace in the entire mystic way is to get rid of these stains, 
not of sins alone, but of all undue will attachments and irrational 
acceptance of images and distinct concepts, as sufficient principles 
of knowledge. Of this present impurity of the soul in its undue 
attachment to the limited, and in its exclusive multiplicity thence 
resulting, and of the essential purity of its central being, we have a 
beautiful image in the tenth book of Plato s Republic. " Would 
you see the soul as she really is, not as we now behold her, marred 
by communion with the body and other miseries ? " 2 (Plato 
was, indeed, wrong in regarding this bodily incarnation as an evil 
or the cause of evil. The true cause is that the particular know 
ledge and desires due to the senses have through our lack of grace 
more or less closely imprisoned the soul in their limits so that it 
cannot as it ought, and in sanctified souls does, transcend these 
limits.) " You must contemplate her with the eye of reason, in 
her original purity, and then her beauty will be revealed. We 
must remember that we have seen her only in a condition which 
may be compared to that of the sea-god Glaucus, whose original 
image can hardly be discerned because his natural members are 
broken off, and crushed and damaged by the waves in all sorts of 
ways, and encrustations have grown over them of seaweed and 
shells and stones, so that he is more like some monster than he is 
to his own natural form. And the soul which we behold is in a 
similar condition, disfigured by a thousand ills. But not there, 
not there must we look. What then ? At her love of wisdom. 
Let us see whom she affects, and what society and converse she 
seeks in virtue of her near kindred with the immortal and eternal 
and divine " (that is, let us consider that inmost will-apprehension 

1 An outgoing and need completed and superabundantly gratified by super 
natural grace and glory. 

2 On account of the long parenthesis I have taken the liberty of slightly 
altering the wording of Plato and his translator. But I have, of course, scrupu 
lously respected his sense. 



170 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

of man, rooted in his central self, wherein God is especially im 
manent, which is especially made after His image, and which, 
therefore, is ever directed to absolute truth and unlimited good 
ness that is, to God though in sinful souls out of grace this nisus 
is rendered ineffectual by the soul s bondage to the lower desires 
and images that are essentially limited). " How different she 
would become if wholly following this superior principle " (i.e. 
living an interior life, following reason and the will for absolute 
good) " and borne by a divine impulse " (this surely is fulfilled in 
sanctifying grace, and its consequence the indwelling and sanctifi- 
cation of the Holy Ghost) " out of the stream in which she now is, 
and disengaged from the stones and shells and things of earth and 
rock which in wild variety spring up around her because she feeds 
upon earth, and is overgrown by the good things of this life, as 
they are termed " (the sense-given particulars and desires). 
" Then you would see her as she is, and know w r hether she has one 
shape only or many, or what her nature is." The soul impure in 
its division among mutually exclusive, because essentially limited, 
attachments becomes pure in its unified actuation to and in the 
Unlimited Godhead, detached and therefore pure from all re 
straining and distracting limits. This gradual purification is, 
then, a fundamental aspect of the mystical way the result of the 
progressive unification of the soul by its increasing union with 
God, Who is Absolute Purity, because He is One Simple Act 
unlimited and therefore indivisible. 

(10) The Attainment of Peace. 

An aspect of the mystical way grounded primarily in its unifi 
cation, the aspect whose abuse has given its very name to Quiet 
ism, is a gradual attainment of interior peace, repose or quiet. In 
mysticism this repose or quiet is understood in two senses. There 
is first of all the repose that is the direct result of unity, and is 
opposed to the restlessness of divided aims and attention. If 
there is no unity of aim in life there can be no peace in that life 
except a false and short-lived peace, when for a time the activity 
of the soul is concentrated on some one object. God, however, is 
the one only end that is wholly satisfying to the human soul. 
Therefore the soul that does not make God the supreme end of its 
life cannot have perfect and perpetual peace. If, indeed, a created 
end be a wide and lofty end an object rich in content, and spiri ual 
in nature its deliberate pursuit as the supreme end of life, in- 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 171 

volving, as it must, the subordination to that end of all other ends 
and activities, will produce great and often long-continued peace, 
because it will so largely unify life, and the peace will be in propor 
tion to the unity achieved. It may indeed be that, if that end of 
life is very high and wide, the soul may achieve a very great and 
on the whole permanent peace. Nevertheless its peace can never 
be perfect or wholly secure, because the end cannot be entirely 
satisfactory nor can the soul be sure of attaining it. Indeed the 
loftier the end is the surer the soul may be of its non-attainment. 
Moreover, if the end were attained, the soul could not enjoy for 
ever the prize of its struggle. Death at least would take it away. 
Those, on the other hand, who know that God is the supreme and 
sole satisfying end, and yet do not choose Him as the supreme end 
of their life, but will created ends irreconcilable with His will, can 
never achieve any measure of true internal peace. They cannot 
unify their lives by an end known to reason to be unsatisfactory. 
It is indeed a practical impossibility to achieve a complete unifi 
cation of life around a created end, prevented as it is by its inher 
ent limitations from affording satisfaction to all the desires and 
aspects of the soul. Hence there is a corresponding lack of com 
plete repose or peace in all save those whose will is wholly fixed 
upon God. "The main cause," says Professor Hoffding, "of 
fatigue and exhaustion in life is unrest and distraction of mind. 
We are influenced on so many sides that it is difficult for us to 
collect our thoughts ; we are drawn in so many directions that we 
find it difficult to focus our will on any one aim ; so many different 
and changing feelings are aroused that the inner harmony of the 
mind is exposed to the danger of dissolution " (Philosophy of 
Religion, II. iii., p. 120). We can see this truth writ large 
in states and civilisations. Only in proportion as there is one 
national aim is there national peace. A striking instance of this 
was seen at the outbreak of the late war. Such a unified aim is, 
however, never realised completely, seldom even partially. Hence 
a permanent state of internal strife, strife of classes and strife of 
parties. In proportion as a civilisation has before it one supreme 
end, or harmony of ends, it enjoys a satisfaction and a peace which, 
if perfect, would express it itself outwardly in external peace and 
union between the states who share in that civilisation, and which 
when present in any large degree expresses itself in the predomi 
nant peace and satisfaction and successful achievement of the 
individuals who partake in that civilisation. Mediaeval civilisa- 



172 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

tion possessed this unity in a very high degree. Hence the high 
degree of inward peace, of spiritual certainty, security and satis 
faction, and of unhesitating, joyous and mutually co-operative 
achievement attained by its members. Because modern civilisa 
tion lacks this unity of end, or harmony of ends, Matthew Arnold s 
complaint is bitterly true of it : 

This strange disease of modern life 
With its sick hurry, its divided aims. 

Strong the infection of our mental strife 
Which though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest, 
And we should win thee from thy own fair life, 
Like us distracted and like us unblest. 

The Scholar Gipsy. 

It was for this reason that Plato was so insistent on the need of 
unity both in the state and in the individuals composing it. 

In the conception of Plato unity that is the organic unification 
of a multiplicity of functions is the principle of stability and 
internal peace. The justice of this view is borne out not alone in 
the social organism, but in the life of the individual soul, especially 
in that spiritual grace-life with which we are here concerned. As 
the soul unifies ever more completely its spiiitual life and its 
prayer, that life is the achievement of an inward peace, and that 
prayer a prayer of quiet. The soul is in a state of peace in so far 
as the will is unified by will-union with God. 

Thus as the soul progresses in the way of grace and reaches 
mystical union, with that union increases her peace, for peace and 
union increase pari passu. Moreover, the attention of the soul in 
prayer is progressively unified by increasing freedom from the 
distraction of limited and therefore diverse images and concepts. 
In proportion as this unification of attention is accomplished, and 
prayer becomes a simple attention of the will to God as the Un 
limited Good, prayer becomes a prayer of peace and repose, peace 
from the mental strife and distraction of diverse apprehensions. 
In this sense, therefore, is the mystical way a growth in peace 
an increasing absence of distracting desires and thoughts. The 
consummation of the mystical way is also the perfection of peace, 
because it is the perfect union with the Eternal and the Unmoved. 
We can never rest in creatures because they all pass away, save 
indeed those found finally in and through God. Since mutability 
is the universal law of this lower world, those who set their love 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 173 

on things here below set their love on things that pass or fail. For 
such there can be no true peace. As, however, the soul s union 
with God becomes closer and its will is fixed on Him alone, it is 
delivered from the dominion of change by this union and love of 
the Eternally Unchanging. Even sufferings, trials and aridities 
cannot deprive the soul in the supreme mystical union of the in 
ward peace that is the result of a central union fruition of the 
Immutable Deity. In this state of perfect union the soul is like 
the ocean. Whatever storms vex the surface, in the depths there 
is perpetual calm. In this sense also is the mystic way a way of 
increasing peace. 

The mystics, however, understand peace in another sense, that 
of passivity as opposed to action. Here it is that Quietism erred 
by urging the soul to do nothing whatever in prayer, but simply to 
wait on God in absolute passivity. But the orthodox mystics * use 
very strong language about the passivity of the soul in mystical 
prayer, one of whose stages is thence designated the Prayer of 
Quiet. Their language is indeed so emphatic that at first sight 
it seems simply Quietistic. It bears, however, a very different 
sense. The orthodox mystics bid us cease to act only when God 
acts in our souls. The Quietists tend, in proportion as they are 
complete Quietists, to bid every soul adopt passivity from the 
outset. What is meat to the mystic may well be poison to the 
ordinary soul. The Quietist position amounts to saying that 
because when your food is cooked you have but to eat it, there 
fore you must not cook it. When the soul acting through and in 
obedience to grace has broken down to a certain degree the barriers 
of undue adherence to and occupation with the finite, when it has 
attained by simplifying its spiritual attention a certain degree of 
the unitary peace spoken of above, the peace due to absence of 
distracting multiplicity in prayer, it becomes conscious of God s 
grace at work in itself, of God s Presence in its centre. It has 
then, of course, but to attend to that grace and Presence. But 
until that time arrives, which is when God wills for His grace 
works at no uniform or calculable rate it must prepare for it by 
its own activity. Moreover, this manifestation in the soul of the 
Divine Presence is but intermittent, at least until the highest 
stages are reached. In the intervals activity even in prayer is as 
necessary as ever. When, however, God speaks the soul must do 
nothing but listen, when He appears the soul must simply behold, 
When He gives the soul must do nothing save receive. This is 



174 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

surely obvious, and this is the true meaning of the seemingly 
Quiet istic passages of St John and other mystical writers. Far 
different is the Quietist teaching that the soul, at least in prayer, 
must never do anything save listen, behold and receive, even when 
there is nothing to be heard, beheld and received. This false 
generalisation of the mystical teaching on passivity makes common- 
sense into absurdity, truth into the deadliest of falsehoods. Let 
us not be surprised, therefore, if sayings of St John of the Cross are 
condemned on the lips of Molinos, since Molinos applies them with 
a scope and sense which St John, indeed any orthodox mystic, 
would have entirely repudiated. 

Nevertheless, however we restrict the application of St 
John s teaching of passivity, it still requires careful attention if 
it is not to be misunderstood. If I am absorbed by complete 
attention to an object externally presented, I am in a state of 
passive receptivity, and the more completely absorbed my attention 
is, the more complete is the receptivity or passivity. 1 But that 
receptivity is itself an intense actuation or activity of the soul, 
a forceful exercise of attention. Indeed the greater and more 
complete the absorption of the entire soul by the object presented 
to it, the more intense is this psychical activity, of which, however, 
for that very reason the soul has no reflex consciousness. If, 
therefore, the soul is absorbed in the contemplation of God and in 
the reception of His divine action, it is then most intensely and 
completely actuated or active in its entire being, and has, never 
theless, no consciousness of that activity. We may indeed say, 
the greater the passivity the more intense the action. Moreover, 
in the earlier stages of the action of grace, when that action was 
as yet imperceptible, at least not immediately perceptible, God s 
Presence and action were therefore unperceived. This left the 
soul free to perceive its own action. When, however, God and 
His action become manifest, this manifestation so occupies the 
attention of the soul that it is increasingly unconscious of its own 
activity, though that activity has been in fact increased in the 
very attention that renders it imperceptible. 2 The progress from 

1 Throughout this discussion I owe much to Baron von Hiigel, Mystical 
Element. 

2 This conception of an activity so intense and so interior that it is rest from 
motion, understood as change even intellectual, is ultimately due to Aristotle, 
who posits it of the Godhead and terms it tvepyeia aKivijdias. Its incom 
prehensibility by our discursive reason, which is of its nature mobile, has led to 
its widespread but unjustifiable rejection. 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 175 

activity to passivity is, therefore, to a great extent a change of 
consciousness, a change from consciousness of the soul s normal, 
more or less superficial activity with unconsciousness of the action 
of God in the central depths to a consciousness of the action of 
God in those central depths with a resultant unconsciousness of 
the soul s own activity. Consciousness of the soul s own activity 
at the surface has yielded to consciousness of a reception of God s 
action in the depths. For this change of consciousness is indeed 
due to a change in the character of the soul s activity itself. 
Before, that activity was a reaching out or search after a God 
wholly absent from perception. Now it is a reception of God 
present to consciousness. There is in the latter activity the repose 
and apparent passivity of fruition, in the former the restless 
activity of search. The change that has taken place is analogous 
to the change from the activity of hunting or cooking food to 
the comparative passivity of eating it. Alike in the obtaining 
and in the eating of the food there is activity, but of this activity 
we are more conscious when we are seeking or preparing the food, 
yet untasted, than at the time of the actual eating, when the food 
itself absorbs the attention, 1 rather than our activity in its regard, 
whereas before the contrary was the case. So is it in this mystical 
prayer in which the conscious activity of the search after the 
hidden God is replaced by the fruition of His revealed Presence. 
The consequent sense of passivity is heightened by the concomitant 
peace or repose in the former sense, the peace arising from the 
unity and freedom of the soul s action, when thus borne Godward 
by this lofty action of grace, indeed of God Himself through grace. 
The increasing passivity of the mystical way must not, therefore, 
be regarded, as it was favourably by the Quietist and is unfavour 
ably by the Philistine, as an increasing idleness. It was only the 
limits which barred the conscious fruition of God from the former 
activity that rendered that activity conscious, and it is the con 
sciousness of His Unlimited Being that now renders it partially 
at first, later wholly unconscious, since the soul is in this un 
limited good wholly unified and absorbed. Therefore when the 
mystic union is fully achieved the soul is established in peace, 
and that for the three reasons that have just been mentioned. 
There is repose from distracting multiplicity, freedom from 
mutability, and the peace of unselfconscious reception of the 

1 For the purpose of this illustration I suppose the food to be the engrossing 
object of our desire and thought ! 



176 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

Divine influx. St Catherine of Genoa has well expressed this 
achieved peace of the supreme union. " The state of this soul," 
she says, " is then a feeling of such utter peace and tranquillity 
that it seems to her that her heart and all her bodily being, and all 
both within and without is immersed in an ocean of utmost peace, 
from whence she shall never come forth for anything that can 
befall her in this life, and she stays immovable, imperturbable, 
impassible. So much so that it seems to her in her human and her 
spiritual nature both within and without, she can feel no other thing 
than sweetest peace. And she is so full of peace that though she 
press her flesh, her nerves, her bones, no other thing comes forth 
from them than peace. " 1 Thus does the mystic way establish the 
soul in peace, the fulness of that peace promised to men of good 
will, the peace which the world can neither give nor take away. 

(11) Will Identification with the Will of God. 

If we would consider the mystical way from a point of view 
simpler, more personal and more practical, we should regard it 
as the ever-increasing identification of our will with the will of 
God, which is itself but the more personal way of expressing the 
gradual identification of our good with the Absolute Good. To 
break through the limits attaching to all created activities and 
ends and to make the unlimited that is the infinite and absolute 
goodness our end is to identify our soul life and our will with the 
Divine life and will. All who are in a state of grace have made 
a fundamental choice of the Divine Will as their supreme end, 
but the mystic carries this out actually in every activity, interior 
or exterior, however unimportant it may seem. To identify 
our will, our good, our very life with God involves a participation 
in the Divine will, good and life that is, in God Himself, Who is 
His will, His good and His life. The mystic is secure from failure, 
for his will is a Will that cannot fail. He is in harmony with all 
things save sin, because all except sin is the product of God s 
will, and the operations and mutual interventions of creatures 
are ordered by His will. Therefore all these are now in perfect 
accord with the will of the mystic, working together for his good, 
who wholly loves God. Even the sin of others, as he well knows, 
is powerless to harm him, for it cannot frustrate God s Almighty 

1 Vitae Dottrina, xviii., quoted by Miss Evelyn Underbill (Mysticism, p. 518), 
who believes it to be authentic. 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 177 

Will. His entire will identification with the will of God is itself 
the destruction and reparation of his own sins. It is, moreover, 
universal charity, for God s will, now by participation his, is love 
of His entire creation. The mystic realises his unity with all 
creatures in his union with God their one source and ground. 
Hence he feels himself in love with them all, a note in their 
universal harmony, their fellow-member of one Divine kingdom 
which is an ext equalisation of God s Will and Being. All creatures, 
even the soulless elements, are his brothers and sisters, and all 
things are his indeed, his because they are God s and he is now 
wholly of and in God. Moreover, this will identification is un 
troubled peace, because it involves perfect and joyful resignation 
and acceptance of God s dispositions for himself and others. It 
is unity, because there is no longer distraction in his ends and 
activities. It is power, because God now works unopposed 
through him, and the feeblest instrument, if an unresisting instru 
ment, in His hands can accomplish wonderful things. It raises 
his soul above the dominion of change, of care, of loss, of injury 
from others. This ever-increasing participation in, and union 
with, the Divine Will and Life is spoken of by St John as a trans 
formation of the soul in God and a deification of the soul. This 
language I will discuss later when I deal specifically with the 
final stage of mystical union as taught by St John. All that I 
wish to insist on here is that the very essence and the sole test of 
progress in grace, and later in the mystical way, is the identifica 
tion of the will and hence of the activities and the life of the soul 
with God s will, activity and life that is, with God Himself. 

(12) Progressive Attainment of Reality. 

We may finally envisage the mystic way as a gradual attain 
ment of Reality. It is here that great caution is required. Many 
modern writers on mysticism misinterpret the doctrine, that God 
is the ultimate reality, in a pantheistic sense, as if created things 
were merely unsubstantial phenomena of one underlying Divine 
Substance, and therefore unreal in the sense of being an empty 
illusion, maya, as the Hindus term it. The ordinary non-mystical 
Christian, however, is apt to fly to the opposite extreme, and to 
regard creatures as fully real and all creatures as equally real. 
The truth lies between these two extremes. All creatures are 
certainly real, for they exist. Any attempt to deny this is self- 



178 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

condemned. So far we must go with the plain workaday man. 
But they are not real in the sense that God is real. For their 
being is not self-subsistent, but rooted in His being and Will. 
Therefore their being compared to the fulness of His absolute 
self-dependent Being is not being. Regarded as ultimately self- 
sufficient or self -existent entities, they are indeed illusion and 
vanity. Moreover, though they are all real, they are not all 
equally real. Even the plain man will admit that dreams and 
fancies and optical illusions have existence, therefore reality, but 
that compared with the objects of the normally working and 
correctly functioning senses they are unreal, because they have 
so much less being. The closer a creature approaches to God 
the more being it possesses, because its being is less narrowly 
limited. Here we are, then, back at the old refrain of the entire 
chapter I might say of the entire book Unlimited Being 
Absolute Reality, fulness of Being self -existent : more limits 
less being, less reality : fewer limits more being, more reality. 
What ultimately differentiates matter from spirit ? Matter has 
more limits, therefore less being, less reality : spirit has fewer 
limits, therefore more being, more reality. Hence the Eastern 
doctrine of maya, false as a philosophy, is the inaccurate transcript 
of a profound truth underlying the entire mystical way. Created 
being though not simply illusion, sheer unreality, when compared 
with God and therefore in regard to the exigencies of the rational 
soul capable through grace of the fruition of God, is illusion, 
is unreal. Catholic mysticism that is, simply Catholic faith 
in its highest intensity links together the West and the East. 
It touches with one hand the hard-headed, practical, but some 
what philistine Western, the man of affairs who prides himself on 
his full recognition and successful manipulation of plain facts, 
the obvious realities of this world in which he lives. With the 
other hand it touches the Buddhist devotee who kneels on the 
pagoda steps to recite his rosary of disillusionment, a rosary whose 
paters and aves are the repeated condemnation of all earthly 
experience as nothing but " sorrow, misery and trouble." 1 The 
Western man of business rejects or misunderstands, the Buddhist 
wholly rejects the mediating truth of Catholicism with its message 
to both and its proffered satisfaction to the spiritual needs of 
both. The narrowness of the human mind will not contain an 
all-comprehending truth, unless circumstances peculiarly favour 

1 See Fielding, The Soul of a People, p. 157. 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 179 

and a special grace be granted. But the truth is comprehensive 
all the same. 

If an important function of mysticism be thus a realisation 
of the comparative unreality of the creature, its lack of being 
when being is understood as the Divine fulness of being without 
lack or limit, and especially of the unreality of the more narrowly 
limited, superficial and sensible spheres of creation, it is the 
function of common-sense to insist on the realry of creatures, 
and especially of the more limited and more immediately sensible 
creatures. Catholicism, as we have seen above, insists on full 
acceptance of the reality demanded by common-sense and also 
of the comparative unreality discovered by mystical intuition, 
and it is in virtue of this twofold acceptance that Catholicism 
mediates between the " pure " mysticism of the Buddhist that 
denies the dicta of common-sense, and the "pure " common-sense 
of the Western philistine that rejects mysticism as a mischievous 
absurdity. Castlereagh once characterised the Holy Alliance as 
44 sublime mysticism and nonsense." Catholicism may be aptly 
described as sublime mysticism and common-sense." 1 In this 
combination of mysticism and common-sense, of the denial and the 
affirmation of the reality of creatures , and consequently of their 
rejection and acceptance lies the peculiar genius of Catholic 
Christianity. Hence also the double attitude of the Church 
towards this worldly knowledge and endeavour, towards 44 en 
lightenment and progress " whereby she seems at once to bless 
them and to ban them, because in truth she receives and re 
jects them receives them as positively good because real, rejects 
them in so far as they exclude by their comparative unreality 
the attainment of fuller and higher degrees of reality, and above 
all, the attainment of the Absolute Reality of God. Outside the 
Church we find to-day mysticism running riot in the denial 
of all validity to the common-sense beliefs of mankind, of all 
reality to the objects of sense perception and of discursive reason. 
We have already discussed an instance of this denial of common- 
sense in Miss Evelyn Underbill s 44 superior " attitude to the un 
enlightened plain man who believes that if he sees a brick wall 
he really is in contact with such an object existing outside his 
own perception. Thus does non-Catholic mysticism seek to 

1 Hence the welcome of Aristotelianism in the Middle Ages, for of all philos 
ophies that of Aristotle shows the greatest and the most openly avowed regard 
for the dicta of universal common-sense. 



180 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

transcend common-sense and its sphere by the rejection of both. 
It would fain reach heaven by denying the existence of earth. For 
lack of support it falls and lies prostrate on the despised ground, 
absorbed in the contemplation of "dissipated tabbies " and "sooty 
trees " (Miss Evelyn Underbill, Practical Mysticism).* Catholic 
mysticism, on the other hand, transcends common-sense and the 
world of common-sense by the acceptance of both as real and 
valuable in their own place and degree, as the starting-point of 
the soul s journey to God. With her feet thus firmly planted 
on the earth, her eyes endure to look upon the sun, and her view 
is among the stars. At the other extreme are innumerable 
multitudes who explicitly or implicitly deny the reality, or at 
least the superior reality, of the spiritual. Both extremes are 
offended by the Catholic Weltanschauung. Both can find in 
Catholicism acceptance and reconciliation. But in the meanwhile 
the " mystic " is apt to disdain Catholicism as crude and material 
istic, the " plain man " to regard it as fantastic and superstitious, 
an obstacle to the material progress of mankind. I cannot here 
illustrate this point, and must be content with asking my readers 
to test for themselves whether this double acceptance of mysticism 
and common-sense, of the reality and the comparative unreality 
of creatures (the latter varying in degree according to their 
limitation and consequent distance from the unlimited Godhead), 
be not the fundamental characteristic of Catholicism determining 
the Catholic attitude to human experience and conduct in all 
their manifold aspects. 1 

Surely I have now removed all danger of pantheistic mis 
apprehension of my thesis, that the progress from union with 
creatures as they are in themselves and from activity bounded 
by creatures to union with God and activity in God, is a progress 
from non-reality to Reality, to the ultimate Reality, which in the 
created non-realities is the source and ground of whatever degree 
of reality they possess, to the Reality, that is so real, that all else 
by comparison is unreal. This, therefore, is the mystic scale of 

1 Hence it is that the Church s attitude seems under certain aspects and to 
certain temperaments so brutally realist and even materialistic ^e.g. in her wide 
use of Roman law, her stern and suspicious examination of all claims to special 
sanctity or supernatural favours, and in a " somewhat business-like " dispensa 
tion of the sacraments ; under other aspects and to other temperaments so 
" fantastically " other-worldly e.g. in her preference for the material overthrow 
of a nation to the commission of sin, her thronged pilgrimages to the place where 
a peasant girl saw a vision. 



VIEWS OF THE MYSTIC WAY 181 

values : the nearer to God that is, the more of His being there is 
represented in any creature the greater its reality, therefore 
the greater its value ; the further from God that is, the less of 
His Being there is represented in any creature (as matter repre 
sents less of God than spirit), the less its reality and therefore the 
less its value. Thus in The Ascent of Mount Carmel St John 
maintains the superior value of sense impressions to imaginary 
pictures constructed by the combination of sense data, on the 
ground that the former possess more reality than the latter 
(Ascent, II. xii.). The truth of the mystic way is thus the 
direct opposite of the popular notion of it. Far from being 
a progress from the more to the less real, from the concrete 
thing to the empty abstraction, it is a progress in the opposite 
direction, ever adding degrees of reality, greater fulness of being, 
as limits, which are negations of reality that is, of being are 
gradually transcended, in the ascent to the infinite. There is 
nothing ultimately negative in the mystical way, which is a 
process of ever-increasing positivity, as God the all Positive 
without any negation, because without any limit, is ever more 
fully attained. Nevertheless this positive process has of necessity 
its negative aspect. The elimination of limits involves the 
elimination of much that is positive in which those limits inhere. 
Later, all that is positive in creatures is indeed restored in a 
higher way, when their limits no longer come between the soul 
and God. Till, however, that stage is reached, a stage on which 
the soul enters when the night of purgation is passed, and which 
is fully completed in the resurrection of the body, the negative 
process is essential. It constitutes the dominant characteristic 
of the beginning of the mystical way, reappears later with far 
greater intensity, and is never wholly transcended in this mortal 
life. It is the subject matter of two of St John s treatises both 
unhappily incomplete The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The 
Dark Night of the Soul. This negative way, therefore, will require 
a very close study. Such a study, however, could not have been 
profitably undertaken until the positive character of the mystical 
way had been made clear. Otherwise the reader could hardly 
have failed to receive the false impression that St John s negative 
way is ultimately negative or nihilistic. It is, on the contrary, 
the destruction of the limits which kept the soul from the fruition 
of unlimited good, temporary rejection in the interest of possession, 
No as the inevitable way to the perfect Yes. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE NEGATIVE WAY 

Jy> jy- There is nothing, nothing . . . 
Oh infinite happiness. 

JEAN CHRISTOPHE, 

English Translation, vol. i., p. 90. 

Hark to the Alleluia of the bird 

For those that found the dying way to life. 

FRANCIS THOMPSON. 
Where is the land of Luthany ? 
Where is the tract ofElenore ? 
I am bound therefor. 

" Pierce thy heart to find the key ; 

With thee take 

Only what none else would keep ; 

Learn to dream when thou dost wake, 

Learn to wake when thou dost sleep. 

Learn to water joy with tears, 

Learn from fears to vanquish fears ; 

To hope, for thou dar st not despair, 

Exult, for that thou dar st not grieve ; 

Plough thou the rock until it bear ; 

Know, for thou else couldst not believe ; 

Lose, that the lost thou may st receive ; 

Die, for none other way canst live. 

When earth and heaven lay down their veil, 

And that apocalypse turns thee pale ; 

When thy seeing blindeth thee 

To what thy fellow-mortals see ; 

When their sight to thee is sightless ; 

Their living, death ; their light, most lightless ; 

Search no more 

Pass the gate of Luthany, tread the region Elenore." 

FRANCIS THOMPSON, 

The Mistress of Vision. 

THE verses of Francis Thompson, so hauntingly beautiful, but at 
first sight so obscure, with which I have prefaced this chapter are 

182 



THE NEGATIVE WAY 183 

but the poetical expression of that Via Negativa of mysticism of 
which St John of the Cross is the clearest and most uncompromis 
ing exponent. St John has devoted to the negative way two 
treatises, or rather, as he intended and regarded them, two 
portions of one treatise namely, The Ascent of Mount Carmel and 
The Dark Night of the Soul. His teaching on this subject has often 
been grossly misunderstood, as also has its ground, already dis 
cussed, the negative knowledge of God. The misapprehension 
has been in both cases to regard what is relatively negative as 
absolutely negative. In order the better to avoid this misappre 
hension I have emphasised already the essentially positive char 
acter of mysticism. I have pointed out that the mystical way 
or rather the way of sanctifying grace of which the mystical 
union-intuition is a stage is a progress from less to greater 
positivity, from the comparatively unreal to an ever fuller reality. 
For the creature contains qua creature a negative or unreal 
element, and it is for this very reason that the Uncreated Being of 
God cannot be known through any created concept, since every 
such concept involves a limitation and therefore a negation which 
is infinitely distant from pure positivity. But it plainly follows 
from this that union with God must involve the progressive rejec 
tion of creaturely limitations, and that alike in the cognitive and 
volitional aspects of the soul s activity. Until the soul is wholly 
free from the limitations of finite aims and concepts, it cannot 
fully receive the unlimited Being of God. This gradual process of 
detachment from the limited is called by St John the Night of the 
Soul. " I call," he says, " this detachment the night of the soul 
. . . which consists in suppressing desire and avoiding pleasure : 
it is this that sets the soul free, even though possession may be 
still retained " (Ascent, I. iii). " The soul must of necessity 
if we would attain to the divine union with God pass 
through the dark night of mortification of the desires and self- 
denial in all things. The reason is this : all the love we bestow on 
creatures is in the eyes of God mere darkness, and while we are 
involved therein, the soul is incapable of being enlightened and 
possessed by the pure and simple light of God, unless we first cast 
that love away. . . . The affection and attachment which the 
soul feels for the creature renders the soul its equal and its like 
the greater the affection the greater will be the likeness. . . . He 
who loves the creature becomes vile as that creature itself, and in 
one sense even viler, for love not only levels, but subjects also the 



184 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

lover to the object of his love." l Both these reasons amount to 
this, that attachment to the limited for its own sake involves the 
limitation of our love with the limits of its object, and this limita 
tion debars the soul from free and full love-union with God, the 
Unlimited Good. This is perhaps stated somewhat more clearly 
in the immediately following paragraphs. " He who loveth any 
thing beside God " (i.e. not in order to God) " renders his soul 
incapable of the pure divine union and transformation in God, for 
the vileness of the creature is further removed from the greatness of 
the Creator than darkness is from light. All things in heaven and 
earth are nothing in comparison with God. . . . All created 
things with the affections bestowed upon them are nothing, because 
they are a hindrance, and the privation of our transformation in 
God, just as darkness is nothing, and less than nothing, being the 
absence of light. And as he who is in darkness comprehends not 
the light, so the soul, the affections of which are given to the 
creature, shall never comprehend God. Until our soul is purged 
of these affections we shall not possess God in this life in the pure 
transformation of love, nor in the life to come in clear vision. . . . 
The whole creation, compared with the infinite being of God, is 
nothing, and so the soul, the affections of which are set on created 
things, is nothing, and even less than nothing before God, because 
love begets equality and likeness and even inferiority to the object 
beloved. Such a soul, therefore, cannot by any possibility be 
united to the infinite being of God, because that which is not can 
have no communion with that which is " (Ascent, I. iv). That 
is to say, a soul bound by the negation-limits of the creature, 
and thus deprived of being by its lack of being, and that in the 
exact measure of that lack of being cannot be united with the 
Unlimited, cannot receive the fulness of Absolute Being. 

This doctrine is expressed in a later chapter in a series of appar 
ent paradoxes which sum up St John s teaching on the negative 
way. The student of mysticism will do well to bear them in mind 
for they go to the root of the matter. 

" That thou mayest have pleasure in the All, seek pleasure in 
nothing. That thou mayest know the All, seek to know nothing. 

" That thou mayest possess the All, seek to possess nothing. 

" That thou mayest be the All, seek to be nothing. 

" When thou dwellest upon anything, thou hast ceased to cast 
thyself upon the All. 

1 Ascent, I. iv. 



THE MOUNT WHEREON 



HE RICH BANQU 



SF ^ ,,^ ^CVVNX-- . <TO^ 

DIVINE SILENCE DIVINE WISDOM; 

>N \v ^Xs. rUAOITX/ >: - x - ^N"^ 



WISDOM 
KNOWLEDGE 
FORTITUDE, 
COUNSEL. * 

UNDERSTANDING 
PIETY 

FEAR O 




PATH OFAN IMPERFECT SPIRIT NARROW PATH OF PERFECTION PATH OF AN ERRING SPIRIT. 

NARROW IS THE WAY THAT LEADETH TO LIFE MATT. 7.14. 



186 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

" Because in order to arrive wholly at the All, thou hast to 
deny thyself wholly in all. 

" And when thou comes t to attain the All, thou must keep it 
without desiring anything. 

" Because, if thou wilt keep anything with the All, thou hast 
not thy treasure simply in God." 

These lines, with some others to the same effect, were placed 
also by the saint below a curious diagram with which he prefaced 
The Ascent of Mount Carmel. I reproduce this diagram here as it 
stands in the original, save that I have translated the Spanish and 
Latin into English. 

We remark first that there are three ways set before the soul. 
Of these the right-hand path, that of the goods of earth, leads 
wholly away from the ascent of the mountain that is, from God. 
The left-hand way, that of the goods of heaven, 1 does indeed lead 
to the summit, but by a slow and circuitous route. The central 
way the narrow path leads thither directly and speedily. It 
is marked by one significant word oft repeated nada nada 
nada nada nada nothing nothing nothing nothing 
nothing. It is the path of utter rejection. But is not this sheer 
nihilism ? Does not this terrible nada fully justify St John s 
severest critics ? This is too hasty. Before rushing at conclu 
sions, let us consider the matter in the light of what has been 
already discussed and quoted. 

First note well that nada is but the way not the goal. The 
goal is, as the above -quoted verses emphasised, the very opposite 
pole to nothingness namely, the All, that which is the positive 
being of all things, God Who is eminently all that creatures are, 
without the negation inherent in creatureliness. The goal of 
St John is not a negative Nirvana. 2 How infinitely positive and 
rich is the goal to which St John would bring us will be better 
realised when we come to discuss in detail the higher stages of the 
mysbical union. But at least we know already that it is the very 
opposite of nonentity. 

The next point to which attention must be called is that Our 
Lord teaches in substance the same doctrine of the negative way 
that is expressed with such terrifying force by St John. " Blessed 
are the poor in spirit " i.e. those detached from worldly goods 

1 I.e. spiritual things that are not God Himself. 

2 Whether Buddha s Nirvana was negative or positive is a vexed question 
which I do not wish to discuss here. The probability is that it was negative. 



THE NEGATIVE WAY 187 

the " goods of the earth " of St John s right-hand path. " Blessed 
are the meek," those who have utterly rejected self -aggrandise 
ment in opposition to and at the expense of the universal good. 
" Blessed are they that mourn." " Blessed are they that suffer 
persecution." " Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth." 
" If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and 
wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life 
also, he cannot be my disciple." " Every one of you that doth 
not renounce all that he possesseth cannot be my disciple." " For 
he that will save his life shall lose it : and he that shall lose his life 
for my sake [that is, for God s sake since Christ s sovereign claim 
is the consequence of His Divinity] shall find it." "He that 
findeth his life shall lose it, and he that shall lose his life for me 
shall find it. If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, 
and take up his cross and follow me." " Amen, Amen, I say to 
you, unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die ; itself 
remaineth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He 
that loveth his life shall lose it ; and he that hateth his life in this 
world keepeth it unto life eternal." Nor can it be said that we are 
reading into these words of Our Lord a later asceticism. It is 
present in their obvious meaning. It may also be remarked that 
the most modern and most independent of higher critics, Dr 
Schweitzer, insists on this " world negation " in the teaching of 
Jesus, a negation which is, he points out, in conflict with the 
" world acceptance," forced into the Gospel by Protestant 
theology. 1 St Paul echoes the hard sayings of his Divine 
Master. 

" It remaineth that they also who have wives be as if they had 
none : and they that weep, as though they wept not : and they 
that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not : and they that buy, as 
though they possessed not : and they that use this world, as 
though they used it not." " The things that were gain to me, 
the same I have counted loss for Christ. Furthermore, I count all 
things to be but loss for the excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ 

1 See his The Quest of the Historical Jesus, especially the concluding pages 
(pp. 400-401, English translation). The author s one-sided emphasis on eschat- 
ology does not invalidate the force of this testimony to the evangelical character 
of Catholic renunciation of the world. 

Dr Schweitzer has since given practical testimony to his conviction of this 
"world-negation" in the teaching of Jesus. For he has abandoned his position 
in the world of European scholarship to become a medical missionary in Africa. 
He has thus, indeed, left all to follow a Christ whose Divinity he disbelieves, 



188 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

my Lord : for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and 
count them but as dung, that I may gain Christ." It is therefore 
evident that we cannot reject the teaching of St John of the Cross 
without at the same time rejecting the teaching of Christ, the 
doctrine of the Cross. St John has but worked out the significance 
and the logical necessity of the Gospel teaching. Human nature 
may and does shrink from the cross. But we cannot, therefore, 
deny the force of St John s reasoning. If we wish to be made one 
with God, we must be detached from the finite. The life of 
grace is the progress from the life of nature self-centred and 
bounded by the limitations of the creature to the full supernatural . 
participation (to the utmost measure of our capacity) of the un 
limited Being of God, a participation that is a life God-centred 
and God-principled. To draw near to one terminus is of necessity 
to depart from the other. If our life is to be supernatural, it 
cannot be merely natural. If it is to be for God, in God and of 
God, it cannot be for self, in self, or of self, for the creature, in the 
creature, or of the creature. If it is to be a participation of the 
unlimited, it cannot be confined and conditioned by the limits of 
creatures. The vessel that is bound for the ocean cannot remain 
in the harbour or even in the estuary. The butterfly cannot come 
forth into the freedom of the air until the caterpillar, with its 
earth-bound life, has been destroyed and buried in the tomb of 
the chrysalis. So long as we are attached to some finite idea or 
image, or to some finite aim, so as to adhere to that idea, image or 
aim for its own sake as a final value in our spiritual life we are 
not free to pass beyond it to the infinite life of God. We must 
remember also that ib is not the enjoyment of created goods, but 
the adherence of the will to those goods, not the use of created 
images and concepts, but the resting of the soul in them, that is 
condemned. Only in so far as possession and use inevitably cause 
adherence of will or understanding are such possession and use 
to be rejected. When and in so far as attachment is destroyed, 
the soul may safely use and enjoy created goods and ideas. They 
will then help it to pass through and beyond them to the infinite 
and will themselves be rightly valued and used. " He has greater 
joy," says St John, " and comfort in creatures if he detaches him 
self from them ; and he can have no joy in them if he considers 
them as his own. For selfish attachment is a bond that chains the 
soul to earth and suffers not breadth of heart. He acquires also 
in this detachment from creatures a clear comprehension of them. 



THE NEGATIVE WAY 189 

. . . For this reason his joy in them is widely different from 
his who is attached to them and far nobler. The former re 
joices in their truth, the latter in their deceptiveness ; the former 
in their best, the latter in their worst conditions ; the former 
in their substantial worth, and the latter in their seeming and 
accidental nature through his senses only. For sense cannot 
grasp or comprehend more than the accidents, but the mind, 
purified from the clouds and species of the accidents, penetrates 
to the interior truth and worth of things, for that is its proper 
object. Now joy as a cloud darkens the judgment, for there 
can be no rejoicing in created things without the attachment of 
the will, just as joy cannot exist as a passion without habitual 
selfish attachment of heart. The negation and purgation of this 
joy leaves the judgment clear as the sky when the mists are 
scattered. The former, therefore, has joy in all things, since he has 
no proprietary pleasure in them, and it is as if all were his own : 
and the latter, in so far as he regards particular things as his own, 
loses that universal joy in all things. The former, whilst his heart 
is set upon none of them, possesses them all. . . . The latter, 
while in will attached to them, neither has nor possesses anything ; 
yea, rather created things have possession of his very heart, for 
which cause he suffers pain as a prisoner " (Ascent, III. xix). 
In this passage we have a clear exposition of the true meaning 
and of one important value of detachment. To be detached 
from creatures is to possess their positive being without 
bondage within their negative element, their limitation, and to 
pass in and through this to the infinite ground of their being. It 
is also to apprehend the spiritual reality externalised and sym 
bolised in the material object. 1 In the twenty-third chapter of 
the third book of The Ascent St John tells us that the use and 
enjoyment of sensible things is profitable to the mystic if he rise 
from them to God, and he emphasises this teaching in the twenty- 
fifth chapter. " As to the eye," he says, " now purged from all 
joy in seeing, the soul receives joy, directed to God, in all that is 
seen. ... As to the ear, purged from all joy in hearing, the soul 
receives joy a hundredfold, and that most spiritual, directed to 
God in all that is heard, whether human or divine. The same 
observation applies to the other senses when purged." 2 In other 

1 Material in the widest sense. A distinct idea is material in so far as it is an 
abstraction from material images. 

2 Cf. St Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises, Fourth Week, A. 7. 



190 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

words, the true function of creatures is sacramental. They are 
to lead us inwards or upwards (as you choose to symbolise the soul 
movement) to their Divine ground and source. If we follow this 
attraction, the soul finds rest and joy ; if we remain attached to 
the external and the particular, satiety and weariness will be our 
portion. To be attached to or to desire creatures, not as channels 
to God, but as ends in themselves, is to be bound in and by their 
creaturely limitations. For the love of the will rests in a limited 
object and thus is, as we have seen, impeded or altogether pre 
vented from passing onward to the perfect will-union with God 
that is the goal of the mystical way, indeed of the life of grace. 
The cognitive function of the soul is bound in like manner within 
their limitations, within distinct ideas, and cannot escape to the 
free intuition of the Unlimited God unknowable by distinct ideas. 
Moreover, any one desire delibeiately entertained, however slight 
its subject matter that is,the adherence of the will to any creature, 
however trifling in worth as apart from God is sufficient to effect 
this bondage within the limited which prevents the soul from pass 
ing onward to full union with God. The will is not wholly directed 
to God, wholly made one with His will, for it wills some object 
other than and besides God and His Will. Therefore the perfect 
union with God, which is the end of the mystic way, can never be 
attained so long as any delibeiate desire remains, however insig 
nificant be its object. " All voluntary desires," says St John, 
" whether of mortal sins ... or of venial sins ... or of im 
perfections only must be banished away, and the soul that would 
attain to perfect union must be delivered from them all, however 
slight they may be. The reason is this : the state of divine union 
consists in the total transformation of the will into the will of God, 
so that there is in the soul nothing contrary to the divine will. 
But if the soul cleaves to any imperfection contrary to the will of 
God, His will alone is not done, for the soul wills that which God 
wills not. It is clear, therefore, that if the soul is to be united in 
love and will with God, every desire of the will must first of all be 
cast away, however slight it may be ; that is, we must not deliber 
ately, and knowingly, assent with the will to any imperfection. . . . 
Does it make any difference whether a bird be held by a slender 
thread or by a rope ? Although the cord be slender the bird 
will be just as bound, as by the rope, so that it cannot fly. . . . 
This is the state of the soul with particular attachments, it 
never can attain to the liberty of the divine union, whatever 



THE NEGATIVE WAY 191 

virtues it may possess. Desires and attachments effect the soul 
as the remora is said to effect a ship, that is but a little fish, 
yet when it clings to a vessel it effectually hinders its progress " 
(Ascent, I. xi). 

In the opening chapters of the first book of The Ascent St 
John analyses with great psychological skill the effects of desire, 
desire for creatures as ends in themselves. He shows how such 
desires fatigue, torment, darken, pollute and enfeeble the soul. 
He calls these effects the positive evils of the desires. The desires 
fatigue the soul because they demand first one thing, then another, 
and yet are never satisfied. They torment the soul by the keen 
cravings they awake and by robbing it of its strength. They 
darken the soul in several ways. They overcloud the perception 
so that the soul cannot attain a true view of reality nor receive 
the supernatural wisdom of God. They deprive the soul of clear 
judgment, leading it blindly in the wrong direction. Finally, 
they so dazzle the soul with the false glamour they cast upon 
their objects, that the spiritual vision cannot penetrate beyond 
these objects to the true Object of Love. They pollute the soul 
by staining the purity of its life, of its Godward nisus with the 
multiple stains of their unworthy objects, whose images are im 
pressed on the understanding. They enfeeble the soul because 
they divide the unity of its life and will among a manifold of 
" trifles," and this distraction of spiritual energy is, of course, its 
diminution (Ascent, Book I., chaps, vi-xi). In all these respects, 
some of which have been discussed in detail in the last chapter, 
their action is diametrically opposed to that of the Divine Love 
which is the substance of mystical union. The evil effects of the 
desires have indeed been fully realised outside the pale of Christi 
anity. The evil of desire, the commonplace of Buddhism, the 
basis of the pessimism of Schopenhauer, and strange as it may 
seem, was a fundamental principle of the practical philosophy of 
Epicurus. It is, how r ever, plain that desire is of the very essence 
of life. Activity must always be motived by desire for some end. 
Hence it was that Schopenhauer, together with that school of 
Buddhism whose Nirvana is extinction, denounces life itself as 
evil. Christian mysticism, on the contrary, sees that the evil lies 
not in desire as such, but in desire for particular objects, for 
creatures which cannot, owing to their essential limitations, satisfy 
the need of the soul for perfect that is, unlimited happiness. 
We have already seen that there is more of positive being in some 



192 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

creatures than in others. Therefore desire for the creatures that 
have more positive being is less harmful than desire for those that 
possess less positive being, because in the former there is more 
positive good to satisfy the soul. 1 Those creatures, however, 
which have the least positive being are those whose enjoyment 
and use involves the most exclusive possession. As their positive 
being increases, the exclusiveness of possession necessary for their 
enjoyment tends to decrease in proportion. The better goods, 
those possessed of a high degree of positive being intellectual 
truths, moral qualities, friendship and love, the beauties of nature 
and art 2 do not thus depend on exclusive possession. My know 
ledge of a truth in no way excludes others from knowledge of the 
same truth. My possession of moral qualities helps instead of 
hindering the possession of these qualities by others. My enjoyment 
of a landscape or of a work of art does not prevent its enjoyment 
by others. Many persons can read the same book, see the same 
picture, enjoy the friendship of the same friend. Love indeed 
does involve a large element of exclusive possession. That 
element, however, is grounded in, and attached to, the lower or 
physical constituent of love. None but the father and mother 
can share their love of their children, because the physical relation 
ship of parenthood is absent. The mutual love of husband and 
wife excludes the participation of a third party for a similar 
reason. These physical conditions, however, are but temporary 
limitations limitations confined to human life on earth. They 
do not belong to the essence of love. Love when it is full grown 
to the maturity of the spiritual and the eternal, knows no more 
the exclusions which are but the swaddling clothes of its earthly 
infancy. In heaven the mutual love of the elect infinitely sur 
passes the deepest earthly love of man and wife, or mother and 
child. Nevertheless "they do not marry nor are given in 
marriage." * Therefore the more of positive being, the less the 
limitation, and consequently the less the exclusion. Therefore 
also the greater and the deeper that is, the more spiritual our 
love, our charity, the more universal will it be, and the more 

1 This supposes the force oi desire to be equal in both cases. If, as often 
happens, the desire for the less limited goods is stronger than desire for the more 
limited goods, the former desire is the more harmful, because more exclusive of 
charity. 

2 Yet these latter require more exclusion than the former goods. A particular 
work of art can only be accessible to a comparative few. The beauties of nature 
are often visible solely to those who can afford time and money to visit them. 



THE NEGATIVE WAY 193 

complete will be its rejection of the exclusiveness which springs 
from the limitations of the finite. 

Exclusive possession is, however, obtained by money and 
measured by money. There are goods that are entirely or almost 
entirely to be obtained for money, goods, therefore, which are 
wholly, or almost wholly, dependent for their use on exclusive 
possession. Such, for instance, are articles of food and clothing, 
houses, estates, motors, horses, yachts and the like. Of such 
goods, there are those that are necessary and those that are super 
fluous, luxuries. The former cost so little that they are, or 
rather could be and should be, within the reach of all men. They 
are also the goods that Our Lord has promised to those who seek 
first His Kingdom. The latter, though capable of good use, 
have on the whole an evil effect on their possessor, by binding 
him in the chains of their exclusiveness. There are other goods 
which cannot be obtained without money, but cannot be obtained 
by money alone. Such goods are, for instance, works of art, 
which require for their right use and choice good taste as well as 
the means to purchase them ; friends whom we cannot buy for 
money and whose society nevertheless we often cannot enjoy 
unless we have sufficient means to afford them hospitality; a 
happy marriage, which is indeed beyond all price of gold, and 
nevertheless requires a certain income. One sure test of a vulgar 
man is his attitude towards this second class of goods. The vulgar 
man only values works of ait for their price, and friends as proofs 
of wealth and means to further wealth, and he measures matri 
monial success by the income of the bride. I have pointed out 
already that the vulgar man, the opposite pole to the mystic, 
is the man who lives entirely on the surface, entirely captive to 
the most external and material, and therefore the most limited, 
objects of desire. Now it is just these objects that are valuable 
by a money value, because of their complete exclusion of common 
possession, an exclusiveness which itself is constituted by their 
extreme limitation. Hence the vulgar man is the man who 
measures everything by money and who therefore aims primarily 
at the first class of goods and at the second class only in so far as 
they are dependent on money and reducible to a monetary standard. 
These goods of the second class vary indefinitely in the degree of 
their dependence on money for their enjoyment, and the measure 
of their independence of money is the measure of their true value 
because it is the measure of their freedom from limits and therefore 



I 



194 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

of their positive reality and of their spiritual significance. As 
they ascend in this scale, they approach ever more closely the 
goods of the third and highest class, those that are altogether 
independent of money for their enjoyment. Such are intellectual 
and artistic capacities, moral virtues and, above all, religion. 
"The gift of God cannot be purchased with money," nor will 
money help us to possess it. The poorest may be a saint. It is 
indeed true that there is a degrading poverty which hinders the 
knowledge of religious truth and the attainment of virtue. This 
is the poverty that is neither holy nor blessed, the poverty that 
is directly caused by sin, 1 and which God hates. The poverty 
of the East End slum is not the poverty of Nazareth nor of the 
saints, but an abomination to be abhorred, and to the measure 
of their opportunities eradicated, by all good men. That moral 
and spiritual goods are not as much in the reach of the labourer 
as of the prince is due, in so far as it is the case, to a social disease 
arising directly from the sinful materialism of a godless civilisation. 
Poverty of the type lauded by Christ and the saints, far from 
being an obstacle to the possession of the highest goods, is, at 
least in the will, an essential prerequisite for their acquisition. 

Thus to the mystic, as well as to the vulgar man or the com 
plete materialist they are two different names for the same 
person money is the measure of values, but in the reverse way. 
The vulgar man values goods in proportion to their dependence 
on money that is, in proportion to the exclusiveness of their 
possession, and that in turn is in proportion to their externality 
and materiality, to their limitation. The mystic values them in 
proportion to their independence of money that is, in proportion 
to the inclusiveness or community of their possession, and that in 
turn is in proportion to their inwardness and spirituality, to their 
freedom from limitation. 

Hence it is that the saints felt the need to get rid of possessions 
by a voluntary poverty. Only thus could they free themselves 
from the limits of particular things and particular desires, and 
from the evils resultant on those limits, to find God the infinite 
Good in all things, and to possess and enjoy the positive being 
or goodness of all things as sacraments of Him. Such was the 
joyous poverty of St Francis. 

Hence also the mystic replaces the desire for those creatures 

1 1 mean by the sin of society, and especially of the plutocrats who organise 
society. 



THE NEGATIVE WAY 195 

whose possession by one is in greater or lesser degree exclusive 
of their possession by others, by the supernatural love-longing 
for the Unlimited God, Whose possession is rather increased than 
diminished by the participation of other souls. Dante in the 
Purgatorio has expressed very beautifully this inclusive character 
of the love of God, having especially in mind the love of the 
blessed in Heaven. He has asked Virgil why a certain spirit 
had bidden men fix their desire where there was no need of ex 
clusion of partnership. Virgil replies : 

Perche s appuntan li vostri desiri 
Dove per compagnia parte si scema, 
Invidia move il mantaco ai sospiri. 
Ma se 1 amor della spera suprema 
Torcesse in suso il desiderio vostro, 
Non vi sarebbe al petto quella tema ; 
Che per quanti si dice piu li nostro 
Tanto possiede piu di ben ciascuno, 
E piu di caritate arde in quel chiestro. 

(Because your aspirations are directed thither 
(to worldly advantages) where by participation 
some part is lost, envy sets in motion 
its bellows upon your sighs. But if love 
for the most exalted sphere turned your 
desires upwards, you would not have in your 
breasts that fear (of diminution of portion) ; 
for the more persons there are by whom 
"Ours" is said up there, so much the more 
of good does each one possess and so much 
the more is there of holy Love burning 
in that cloister.) 

Dante demands further explanations which Virgil proceeds 
to give : 

Quello infinito ed ineffabil bene 
Che e lassu, cosi corre ad amore 
Come a lucido corpo raggio viene. 
Tanto si da, quanto trova d ardore : 
Si che quantunque caritk si estende 
Cresce sopressa 1 eterno valore 
E quanta gente piu lassu s intende, 
Piu v e da bene amare, e piu vi s ama, 
E come specchio 1 uno all altro rende. 

(That infinite and ineffable Good, 
which is yonder on high, speeds to love 
(i.e. to unite Himself with the souls that 



196 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

are filled with it) even as a sunbeam is drawn 
to a translucent body. It bestows itself 
in proportion to the warmth (of love) : 
so that in whatever measure Love extends, 
the more does the Eternal Worth increase 
upon it. And the more spirits there are 
on high yonder who love, the more there are 
to love perfectly and the more do they love 
each other, and as a mirror one reflects 
back (the love) to the other.) 

Purgatorio, xv. 49-75. 

The mystic in proportion as he has climbed the mystic ladder 
has already attained this heavenly love whose freedom from 
limit rejects all exclusiveness. 

Another effect of attachment to particular goods, or of ex 
clusive possession, is the reference of these goods to self as an 
altogether independent centre, hostile at least in potency to all 
other individuals. It builds up a wall around the soul whereby 
it is cut off from other souls and from God. Detachment from 
this exclusive possession and from desire for such possession unites 
the soul with others in a common charity and with God who is 
sought, known and loved in all things. St John, however, goes 
further and demands of the mystic detachment even from moral 
and spiritual goods as ends in themselves. It is here that mystical 
theology demands a higher asceticism than is required of those 
not called to the mystical union. The reason is that these highest 
goods, though not valuable by money, nor exclusive of a common 
possession, contain as creatures a finite element by which the 
soul is limited so long as they are regarded as ultimate values 
or ends in themselves. So long as the understanding and will 
are bound by this finite element they cannot pass onward to the 
mystical union with the infinite Being of God. But, it will be 
urged, all cannot solely seek the Uncreated Good, nor even the 
highest created goods, all cannot be detached even from exclusive 
possession and from desire of the lower goods. The order and 
well-being of society demand not only attachment to the higher 
creatures, but also private ownership and a pursuit of material 
aims. This is true, and for that very reason St John addresses 
his book to the friars and nuns of the Carmelite reform. The 
majority of mankind cannot be actually free in this life from the 
love and desire of created goods for their own sake, or even from 
the exclusive possession of such goods. They can, however, 



THE NEGATIVE WAY 197 

and indeed should, be potentially or radically free by making 
a constant choice of God before all things and by a constant 
rejection of any and every created good that cannot be pos 
sessed, not only without positive sin, but without any degree 
or kind of opposition to His known will in their regard. 
Moreover, they must aim, in proportion as God by His grace 
gives the requisite light and strength, at a progressive detach 
ment of will from all created goods and at a correct valuation 
of such goods. They should prefer the more unlimited, more 
real and more spiritual, and therefore less money-valuable 
goods, to the more limited, less real and less spiritual, and 
therefore more money-valuable goods, and should increasingly 
love all and every creature because and in the degree of its relation 
to God. 

St John recognises differences of vocation based on differences 
of spiritual capacity. " That soul," he says, " which does not 
attain to that degree of purity corresponding with its capacity will 
never obtain true peace and contentment, because it has not 
attained to that detachment and emptiness of its powers which 
are requisite for pure union with God." l " Note," he says, as 
he enters on the discussion of the active night of spirit, " that I 
now address myself principally to those who have already begun 
to enter into the state of contemplation, since in dealing with 
beginners a somewhat laxer treatment of this matter is requisite " 
(Ascent, Book II., chap, vi). 2 Elsewhere he bids his readers bear 
in mind that the negation of spiritual goods demanded in the 
second and third books of The Ascent is not applicable to beginners 
who have need of such (Ascent, Book III., chaps, xii., xxxviii). 
By beginners are meant all who have not yet entered into mystical 
contemplation. The majority of souls, however, are not intended 
to attain on earth to mystical union with God, and they therefore 
do not require, and are indeed incapable of, the detachment in 
dispensable to mystics. Even those who have this vocation are 
not called to an equally high degree of union, and therefore, not 
to an equally high degree of detachment. It is, I think, true that 
St John, like most spiritual writers, failed to realise sufficiently 
the spiritual incapacity and the narrow limitations of the average 
man. He would not, I think, have agreed that vocations to 

1 Ascent, Book II., chap. v. 

2 This is my own translation and understanding of the passage, which, I must 
warn my readers, differs from that adopted by David Lewis. 



198 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

mystical union are few and rare. 1 Nevertheless he does explicitly 
recognise the principle of vocation. Only the few are called 
here I think St John would probably have taken an erroneously 
optimistic view to the detachment requisite for mystical union, 
or at least for its more advanced and continuous degrees. The 
majority, though they must be fundamentally detached, are 
rather called to serve and find God in scantier measures and by 
more indirect ways which involve secular activities, and the posses 
sion and desire of creatures. St John tells us that we must not 
abandon meditation till we have obtained its positive substance. 
Then only do its limitations hinder our ascent to God. This 
principle holds good universally. Until and unless grace enables 
us to dispense with creatures 2 and to rise above their limitations 
to a more immediate union with God and that as our continuous 
life exercise and but few 3 are so called we must not reject, 
but use aright the creatures God has given us as His vestiges and 
ministers ; we must not eradicate but subordinate desires and 
loves for particular objects. A due proportion must, however, 
be observed. None should fix his choice on the creatures that 
are lowest in the scale of being, on the most superficial activities, 
on the most exclusive and material, and therefore the least real 
goods. A life absorbed or dominated by such goods and activities 
is the vocation of none. It would, for instance, be clearly irrational 
for a merchant to bestow such love on his trade as an artist might 
legitimately bestow on his art, for art is more spiritual and there 
fore more real and more God-like than trade. As Baron von Hugel 
says truly, there is need both for detachment and for attachment. 
The higher, however, the spiritual life, the greater the proportion 
of detachment, the less the proportion of attachment. It is 
simply a matter of vocation, and, as we have seen, St John admits 
vocation in principle, though probably failing to realise the full 
consequences of his admission. A time must, however, come when 
all the saved will be wholly detached from creatures by death 
and purgatory. Then, however, there will be no merit in the 
detachment, because we cannot help being detached. Attach- 

1 Nevertheless they are, I am sure, far more plentiful than is commonly 
thought, and will be increasingly common in the future. Everything points to a 
coming " age of the spirit " in the sense of a wide diffusion of mystical graces 
and calls (see Lucie Christine). 

2 As ends in themselves as apart from God and actually to a very large 
extent. 

3 I mean few by comparison with those who have no such vocation. 



THE NEGATIVE WAY 199 

ment will be no longer in our power. Hence those who do not 
detach themselves while they still have the power of attachment 
will not attain the same high degree of beatific union in heaven 
as the saintly few who detach themselves from creatures while 
yet on earth. Nor need we suppose that the ultimate actual 
detachment from creatures will be equal in all who enjoy the 
beatific vision. It must, however, reach a very high degree to 
render that vision possible, a degree so high that no deliberate 
desire remains for any creature taken apart from God. Only 
the pure in heart shall see God. Therefore the souls who die 
unduly attached to the particular, to the limited that is, to the 
creature qua creature cannot reach heaven till they have passed 
through the night of detachment, in death which strips from them 
all their possessions, even to the very body ; and in purgatory 
which purifies with its searching pain the denuded and lonely 
soul that now possesses nothing but God and nevertheless cannot 
yet possess Him. Therefore the principle of the mystical night 
holds good of every soul that is saved, but is not fully applicable 
to all in this life. I do not mean that even in death and purgatory 
the detaching loss and suffering are equal in all souls, or necessarily 
equal to that endured by the saints on earth. They are, however, 
identical in essence and, up to a certain degree, that requisite for 
the lowest grade of beatific vision, equivalent in amount. But, 
it may be urged, the suffering of purgatory expiates positive sin, 
and there is no sin in failing to go beyond our spiritual capacities. 
To this I reply that every soul in grace is by that very fact 
capable of sufficient detachment in this life to live primarily for 
God, and to choose on the whole the better part in dealing with 
and valuing creatures. It is capable of refusal to fix so strong a 
desire on any creature as to choose that creature before the known 
will of God on its behalf, even if that will bind not under sin. 
Suppose any soul perfectly faithful to conscience, however un 
enlightened. It would infallibly be led onward in ever-increasing 
light and strength to a degree of spirituality and detachment 
which, if not that of the saints, would at least be that of truly 
religious, unworldly people, whose enjoyment of creatures never 
involves bondage to the desire of any, and who seek God before 
and in all lesser aims. In communities where faith is strong, as in 
mediaeval Europe and in modern Ireland, Brittany and the Tyrol, 
the general level of unworldliness that is, of detachment from 
creatures and attachment to God as the supreme end of life is 



200 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

enormously higher than any conceivable by those acquainted 
only with the materialistic civilisation of Western Europe to-day. 1 
What will be the ultimate fate of souls who have lived without 
God in the world, total slaves to creatures, but who have appar 
ently lacked all opportunity of doing otherwise, is an unrevealed 
secret. Perhaps such never attain the beatific vision. If they 
do, they will surely pass through a purgatorial detachment of 
great severity. The purgatorial and the satisfactory aspects of 
purgatory need not be inseparable. Souls that die in bondage 
to the finite cannot be united to God without a process of detach 
ment involving suffering, and that even if their state of undue 
attachment was the fault rather of their environment than of 
themselves. And after all, would not the witness even of their 
extremely unenlightened conscience have been sufficient, if heeded, 
to carry them far beyond the point they actually reached ? How 
ever this may be, it is surely clear that either in this life or beyond 
the grave every soul must be detached from all adherence of will 
and understanding to the essentially finite creature if it is to be 
united in supernatural union of love and knowledge to the infinite 
God. All the souls that are deified by the beatific union and vision 
of God must reach this infinitely superhuman goal by the negative 
way, must pass to the Divine dawn through the dark night. 

This process of detachment must always involve keen suffer 
ing. Pleasure is the inevitable accompaniment of the unimpeded 
exercise of our natural activities, of the free action of the life- 
impulse. Bodily pleasure accompanies the unimpeded activity 
of bodily functions, spiritual pleasure the unimpeded activity of 
psychical functions. Disordered activity, whether actually sinful 
or merely imperfect, is a going forth of the soul to a limited object, 
to the rejection total or partial of God, the unlimited Good, and 
this going forth is accompanied by pleasure. But the repression 
of a natural activity is accompanied by pain physical or psychical 
according to the nature of the activity repressed or impeded. 
Therefore the deliberate repression of an activity by the will, in 
order to the avoidance of undue adherence to the limited, is accom 
panied by pain, or, rather, pain is an inseparable aspect of such 
repression. It is true that the limitation of this undue adherence 
must itself cause pain, pain far greater because far more interior 
and spiritual than the pain involved in the repression of the adher- 

1 Catholic Ireland though geographically part of Western Europe is, thank 
God, spiritually poles asunder. Long may it remain so. 



THE NEGATIVE WAY 201 

ing activity. Nevertheless, unlike the latter, the former pain is 
not felt immediately, because the limit involved in the undue 
adhesion is not reached immediately, whereas the soul is immedi 
ately sensible of the instrumental limit of its repression. Nor 
only is the repression painful ; the pain itself is often a further 
repression of outgoing activity. For pain renders the sufferer 
wholly or partially impotent to energise physically or psychically, 
as he otherwise would. The process of detachment or mortifica 
tion is therefore essentially painful. Often, as, for example, in 
disease, the pain-repression is not willed. If, however, the will 
accepts submissively the involuntary pain-repression, that pain- 
repression is thereby rendered voluntary. The pain-repression in 
which mortification consists, whether freely caused or freely ac 
cepted, is a destruction of the superficial activities that hindered 
the free activity of the inner self, of the limited activities directed 
to creatures that impeded the unlimited activity directed to God. 
Pain purifies, because, when freely caused or accepted, it destroys 
the barrier of superficial and selfish activities that the soul may be 
free to find God in its central depths. If man were sinless, purga 
tive pain would be unnecessary for him. His lower and more 
superficial activities would not then interfere with or exclude, but 
would wholly subserve, the central activity of communion with God. 
So it was with Our Lady on earth ; so is it and so will it be with 
the saints in heaven. It is indeed true that Our Lady suffered, 
and, above all, supreme was the suffering endured by the All 
perfect and infinitely Holy humanity of Her Divine Son. But 
voluntary suffering has another function than that of individual 
purgation. It expiates the sins of other men. The sinful going 
forth of a man s will to the limited brought a disharmony into 
creation and offended against that extrinsic glory of God which 
creation should by its goodness set forth. This Harmony could 
not be restored, and creation duly show forth God s glory, save by 
a voluntary repression by man of his will activity, when such 
repression was not of itself necessary to avoid sin or to purify the 
individual soul. Such service of pain-repression man must render. 
But he could not by himself do this, since any such repression that 
a sinful individual or race might make must fall short of his or 
their sinful volitions against the will of God. Even a sinless man 
could not have repaired the disorder of his fallen nature, could not 
have balanced the sinful rebellion of the human nature of which he 
partook. Only the God-man could make such redeeming expia- 



202 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

tion by becoming himself the Head of the human race. In person 
sinless, in nature one with sinful humanity, indeed its Head, He 
bore our sins. He could thus expiate sins not His own in virtue 
of the spiritual solidarity of mankind, whereby the sin of one 
member can be balanced and redressed by the voluntary pain- 
repression of another. Through this expiation made by Him Who 
alone could make it was restored the prefect balance of God s 
satisfied justice in regard to the human race and the full measure 
of His extrinsic glory for which that race was created. Our Lady 
and the saints in virtue of their mystical solidarity with Christ, 
their head, have been able to partake in some measure of His 
expiatory suffering, to share His victimhood. Since expiatory 
suffering is grounded in two fundamental mysteries, the essential 
opposition between sin and sinful humanity and the Divine 
holiness, an opposition not to be removed by a merely extrinsic 
pardon, and the solidarity of mankind with our sinful first parent 
on the one hand, and with the sinless Humanity of Christ on the 
other, 1 its nature and operation are beyond the investigation 
of human reason. It is thus a truth rather to be believed by 
Christian faith, felt by religious experience and seen by mystical 
intuition, than to be explained and justified by reason. This 
expiation effected by suffering, while connected with its function 
as the purgation of the individual soul, transcends that function. 
In this discussion of the negative or purgative way, it is the 
more individual purgative aspect of suffering with which we are 
concerned. This purificatory suffering is aptly symbolised by the 
figure of the cross. The upright of the cross figures the central 
motion of the soul to God the supreme good. The cross beam 
figures the superficial activities directed towards creatures that 
cross and thwart this Godward motion. On the cross of their 
conflict is nailed the soul that persists in the search after God. 
For this contradiction results inevitably from the internal dis 
harmony of man s fallen nature, in conjunction with its external 
disharmony with its environment, a disharmony also due, as 
faith teaches, to the effects of sin. But this very conflict 
becomes the means of sanctification. If the soul persist in the 

1 This solidarity with Christ, though possessed by all men in so far as all men 
are intrinsically capable of sharing the redemption of Calvary, is, unlike our 
physical solidarity with Adam, fully effected or actualised in those who are re 
generate into the order of supernatural grace, a regeneration by which we are in 
corporated, whether we know it or not, into the mystical body of Christ, redeemed 
humanity, and thus are, in Pauline phrase, "in Christ." 



THE NEGATIVE WAY 203 

Gochvard movement, despite the constant efforts of the lower 
selfish desires, aided as they are by its external environment, that 
movement is strengthened by the opposition endured and over 
come, until at length it forces all the lower motions into subservi 
ence to itself. The pain-repression involved in the process purifies 
the soul of its limited activities and desires and sets it wholly free 
for perfect union with God. I do not mean that this conflict 
exhausts the significance of the cross in the soul s life. As we saw 
above, it does not. It is, however, one, and that a fundamental, 
aspect of the cross. 

We must, however, always bear in mind that no activity or 
desire is sacrificed as bad in itself, but only as impeding the higher 
life and love. When union with God has been fully achieved, all 
that was positive in the lower desires and activities of human life 
is achieved with and in it. Then, also, much may be safely 
restored that had in the process towards union been rejected. 
This restoration will be complete with the bodily resurrection, and 
its correlative the new heavens and earth. Then the lower, even 
the physical, activities and their accompanying pleasures will 
subserve the Divine union, and God, being all in all, will be found 
in all the activities that will make up the complete life of glorified 
humanity. From these will indeed be absent the lowest, most 
limited functions of this life, such as eating, sleeping and repro 
duction. For these activities are essentially relative to this 
earthly life, too essentially limited to co-exist with the beatific 
union with the Unlimited. Those physical activities and pleasures 
will, however, persist which even on earth are channels of spiritual 
values for example, the activities and pleasures of sight and 
hearing. There are thus three stages on the way from the limited 
to the unlimited, in Hegelian language, a thesis, an antithesis and 
a synthesis. 1 The thesis is the positive use and enjoyment of 
creatures as good in themselves ; the antithesis the destruction 
of their limits by a temporary detachment from them ; the synthesis 
is the recovery of the limited in the unlimited no longer limiting 
by its limits. The thesis is represented by naturalism, or pagan 
ism; the antithesis is represented by asceticism and by Christianity 
as manifested on earth, when the supernatural is destroying the 
bonds that nature would impose on its free action ; the synthesis 

1 Here, as in vol. i., chap, iii., I find this terminology of great practical 
utility. Indeed the thesis, antithesis and synthesis in question is substantially 
identical in both passages. Need I repeat, I am no Hegelian for all that ! 



204 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

is the completely triumphant supernaturalism that receives and 
subsumes the natural as its instrument and receptacle. This 
final stage begins indeed on earth, but its fulness is reserved for 
the world to come. I have termed it the Resurrection stage. We 
may perhaps understand the process better if we consider it under 
one aspect alone, the aesthetic. The thesis is then physical beauty, 
the beauty of Greek sculpture, of the Venus of Milo and the 
Hermes of Olympia. The antithesis is spiritual beauty, achieved 
at the expense of physical, the beauty of the saintly soul burning 
in a body marred, often crippled, by asceticism. It is the beauty 
that radiates from the worn countenance of a desert hermit, the 
beauty of early stained glass. 1 The synthesis is spiritual beauty 
united with a physical beauty which is wholly the expression of the 
spiritual, the beauty of the Resurrection. It is the beauty of our 
assumed Mother and Queen. In that beauty the flesh is glorified 
beyond our utmost dreams in the stainless purity of entire sub 
servience to the spirit. The beauty of the Hellenic Aphrodite 
as expressed by the supreme sculpture of ancient Greece is sheer 
ugliness by comparison with that unimaginable beauty which 
adorns the Immaculate Mother of God. 

The Resurrection stage, which is the synthesis of flesh and 
spirit, of natural and supernatural, of created and Divine, is partly 
manifested even here on earth in certain concomitants and conse 
quences of mystical union, which are an earthly foretaste of heaven. 
Fragrant odours emanate from the bodies of saints miraculously 
incorrupt, melodies are heard sweeter than our sw r eetest music, 
visions are seen wherein are landscapes of ravishing beauty, 
garments of exquisite shape and tint, jewels burning with a glow 
of rich colour beyond that of earthly gems, and wherein walk 
the forms of saints, even of friends, arrayed in superhuman 
loveliness. 2 St John has, I believe, this Resurrection synthesis 
in mind I mean its first beginnings on earth in the passages 
such as that where he speaks of the pre-eminent enjoyment of all 
things seen or heard possessed by the truly detached (Ascent, 
III. xxix). 
No positive being of the creature is, therefore, finally lost by 

1 Christian art fluctuated between antithesis and synthesis, and finally relapsed 
at the Renaissance into the mere thesis and became pagan once more. 

2 See St Teresa, A utobiography. Doubtless the proximate cause or means of 
all these phenomena is purely subjective and natural, not, therefore, their first or 
ultimate cause.* 






THE NEGATIVE WAY 205 

detachment. It will be restoied later, now no longer a barrier 
between the soul and the infinite, but a door wide open to the In 
finite. In and through the limited the unlimited will be manifest. 
God will be All in all. For the mystic this begins even in this life. 
He finds God in the beauties of nature and art, instead of being 
detained and barred from Him by their limits. The soul, there 
fore, possesses all things, because it possesses Him in Whom are all 
things, and, as St John points out in the Canticle, is all things, since 
He is eminently their positive being. "When the soul," says 
Mother Cecilia. " truly possesses and knows God and is transformed 
in Him, she possesses eminently all things, just because she is not 
attached to any of them, in so far as it is a creature, and in particular, 
as are the souls who have not tasted the immensity of God." 
" The soul, by her possession of God, possesses all things after the 
fashion most similar to Him." "Having nothing, yet possessing 
all things." Thus does St Paul describe souls truly detached. It 
is but the creaturely limitations of creatures that such souls have 
rejected though the process has required much rejection of 
creatures themselves for that end. Now they possess all creatures 
again in a higher and altogether positive way. " All things are 
yours " that is, theirs who have nothing in and for its own 
limited and limiting self apart from God ; all things received in 
and with Him Who is the All. Now dawns that morning know 
ledge of creatures in God spoken of by St John. For now the 
mystic realises the truth discussed in a previous chapter that the 
positive Being of creatures is God reflected in them, and their 
creatureliness a negation of being ; so that apart from him they 
are like accidents without a substance. The attachment that is 
opposed to detachment once fully destroyed, a new attachment 
which is compatible with detachment, because it is attachment to 
the positive substance of creatures alone that is, to God in them, 
and not to their creaturely limits comes into being to be per 
fected with the perfection of Divine love and therefore of detach 
ment itself in the beatific vision and its complement the resurrec 
tion. The imperfect law of Sinai, the stone engraven ministry 
of death, proclaimed Thou shalt not. The perfect law of Christ, 
the ministry of life written in the heart, is no longer Thou shalt 
not, but thou shalt, thou shalt love with thine entire being. 

1 It is true that this positive precept is found even verbally in the old law. 
The new law is not without its anticipation in the old. It has, moreover, retained 
the negative decalogue of Sinai. But the emphasis has been completely reversed. 



206 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

In this difference is shown the imperfection and transience of 
denial and rejection, the perfection and finality of affirmation and 
acceptance. Sacrifice, mortification, detachment, this is the way, 
not the goal. The goal is the achievement of fulness of life, of 
entire reality. How negation is the way, the only way, to this 
goal I have sought to indicate. Such indication is all that is 
possible. In the deep things of the soul experience alone gives 
true knowledge. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE ACTIVE NIGHT 

To the deep, to the deep, 

Down, down 

Through the shade of sleep, 

Through the cloudy strife 

Of Death and of life; 

Through the veil and the bar 

Of things which seem and are, 

Even to the steps of the remotest throne, 

Down, down. 

Through the grey, void abysm, 

Down, down 

Where the air is no prism, 

And the moon and the stars are not 

And the cavern-crags wear not 

The radiance of Heaven, 

Nor the gloom to Earth given 

Where there is one pervading, one alone, 

Down, down. 

SHELLEY, 

Prometheus Unbound, Act II., scene iii. 

The flight of the alone to the Alone. PLOTINUS. 

THE night of purgation is divided by St John into parts. In the 
second chapter of the first book and in the second chapter of the 
second book of The Ascent of Mount Carmel he speaks of three 
nights. The first night is detachment from the things of the world 
of which I have already spoken at length in the preceding chapter. 
St John calls it the night of sense. It is the Active Night of sense. 
The second night he calls the night of faith. It is the detachment 
from all spiritual realities less than God Himself the Active Night 
207 



208 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

of the Spirit. The third night is evidently a passive communica 
tion of God to the soul, and therefore part of the mystical process. 
I believe that by this third night is meant the Passive Night, 
chiefly but not exclusively the Passive Night of the Spirit. 1 Im 
mediately after this night follows "union with the bride which 
is the wisdom of God." In the second passage where three nights, 
or more strictly three parts of one night, are mentioned, he says : 
" When these three parts of the night have been passed . . . God 
illuminates the soul supernatural! y with the ray of His Divine 
Light . . . which is the beginning of the perfect union which ensues 
when the third night is over." Are the three nights finished before 
the beginning of the supreme union, or is only the perfection of 
that union deferred till then ? Is this perfect union, spoken of as 
the union with the Divine bride, the beatific vision, or the highest 
degree of mystical union, termed the transforming union, and 
spiritual marriage ? I believe that no absolutely certain answer 
can be given. St John s language is extremely obscure, perhaps 
not altogether consistent. Indeed there was, I think, a fluctua 
tion in his own mind. In one sense the night lasts till death so 
that even the transforming union is included in the third night. 
On the other hand, the " beginning " at least of the " perfect 
union " and therefore part of the " union with the bride " takes 
place in this life, and thus at least the beginning of that union is 
the transforming union on earth. Yet we are told that the union 
in general and in the second passage that even its beginning takes 
place when the three nights are passed. Therefore the trans 
forming union is in some sense at least not part of the third night. 
Indeed elsewhere St John distinctly terms the transforming union 
day. 2 Moreover, as we shall see, the passive night is essentially 
constituted by a beginning of the perfect mystic union. Therefore 
I think that it is most conducive to clearness if we identify the 
passive night with the third night, and regard the transforming 
union as the dawn of the supernatural day following. On the 
other hand, we must not forget that it is but the dawn, with its 
dim lights and lingering shadows, and that it theiefore belongs 
also to the night. Here as elsewhere we need to bear in mind 
that our clear divisions cannot adequately represent the imper 
ceptibly graduated process which constitutes the mystical way. 

1 Bride is here used, not bridegroom, on account of a reference to the story 
of Tobias. 

8 Ascent, Book II., chap. xiv. ad Jin. 



THE ACTIVE NIGHT 209 

Hence the obscurity and hesitation of Sfc John s language. In 
these two chapters alone does St John speak of three nights, and 
they arc therefore somewhat anomalous. Elsewhere he speaks 
consistently of two nights the night of Sense and the night of 
Spirit. If, however, we consider his actual teaching rather than 
his terminology, it is plain that there are four distinct nights 
discussed by St John namely, the Active Night of Sense, the 
Active Night of Spirit, the Passive Night of Sense, the Passive 
Night of Spirit. The Active Nights constitute the purgation 
accomplished by the soul s own will, of course with the assistance 
of Divine grace. The two Passive Nights constitute the deeper 
purgation effected in the soul by the mystical experience itself 
that is, by immediate Divine action in the soul that has reached a 
certain degree of sanctifying grace ; the effect on the soul of the 
special relationship with God constituted by certain stages of the 
mystical union. The Passive, unlike the Active, Nights are not 
an ascetical preparation for, or accompaniment of, the mystical 
union, but are themselves constituent parts of that union. It was 
apparently the intention of St John to treat of the four nights 
in a work composed of four books. The title of the work was to 
be The Ascent of Mount Carmel, and the two later books, whose 
subject would be the passive purgation, were to receive the sub 
title of The Dark Night of the Soul. As it is, the work has come 
down to us in the form of two distinct treatises both unfinished. 
Both, however, take the form of a comment on one and the same 
mystical poem the exquisite lyric beginning " En una noche 
escura " (" In a dark night "). Moreover, in the work as it stands 
we have references to the first book of The Dark Night as the third 
book of The Ascent of Mount Carmel. The original plan has on 
the whole been adhered to. The Ascent of Mount Carmel deals 
with the active night or purgation, The Dark Night of the Soul 
with the passive night or purgation. The first book of The Ascent 
treats of the Active Night of Sense ; the first book of The Dark 
Night, of the Passive Night of Sense ; and the second book of The 
Dark Night, of the Passive Night of Spirit. The discussion, how 
ever, of the active night of spirit is not confined to the second book 
of The Ascent, but occupies also an unfinished third book, which, 
moreover, includes matter belonging strictly to the Active Night of 
Sense. St John s treatment of the active night of spirit required 
the discussion not only of the purification of the understanding by 
faith, the subject of the second book of The Ascent, but also of the 



210 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

purification of the memory by hope and of the will by charity, 
the subjects of the third book. But the purification of the will 
includes its purification from the desire of worldly goods, and thus 
the saint was led to return upon his discussion of the active night 
of sense. Moreover, the treatment of the active night of spirit 
includes a discussion of the position to be adopted by the mystic 
towards the phenomena of the passive night of sense, and thus a 
treatment of that night from the active standpoint. Hence certain 
chapters of the second book of The Ascent cover the same ground as 
certain chapters of the first book of The Dark Night (chaps, xii., 
xiii., xiv. and xv. of The Ascent, Book II., and chaps, ix. and x. 
of The Dark Night, Book I). There is clearly a certain confusion 
in the arrangement of St John s treatises, owing to a conflict and 
overlapping of the principles on which that arrangement is based. 
Nothing is harder than to arrange a treatise on mysticism where 
there is such a lack of sharply defined boundaries. 

St John says of the three nights of chap. ii. of The Ascent 
that they are parts of one night. By this is meant that they are 
aspects of one fundamental principle, that of purgation or detach 
ment, the principle discussed in the previous chapter. It should 
also be noticed that the nights do not follow in chronological order. 
It is, of course, obvious that the active night of sense is the first 
to occur in the spiritual life. Every Christian must be to some 
extent in that night if he is even attempting to lead a Christian 
life. For this night is simply the practice of mortification with 
regard to the things of earth. It is also obvious that this night 
cannot entirely end till death. So long as man possesses his 
earthly body he is in some danger, however slight, of yielding un 
duly to the desire of bodily and worldly goods and pleasures. " I 
chastise my body," wrote the Apostle who had ascended to the 
third heaven, " lest, having preached to others, I myself should 
become a reprobate." Nevertheless, when a certain stage in the 
spiritual life has been reached, the mortification of worldly and 
sensual desires becomes secondary in the Christian life. The soul 
is so eager for spiritual satisfaction that it has almost wholly 
ceased to value the goods of earth. Henceforward the purgation 
is primarily a spiritual purgation, the detachment of will and 
understanding from adherence to spiritual and supernatural goods 
that are not God Himself, and which the soul is tempted to seek 
and value for their ow T n sake. What these are we shall consider 
when we come to discuss in greater detail the Active Night of 



THE ACTIVE NIGHT 211 

Spirit. This Active Night of Spirit also continues of necessity to 
the end of life, for there are always secondary spiritual goods in 
tended by God as means to union with Himself in which the soul 
is tempted to rest as ends in themselves. Prominent among these 
are certain phenomena concomitant upon the mystical union. 
Hence the active night of spirit is, in its later stages, contem 
poraneous with the mystic union, and therefore with the two 
passive nights which are stages of that union. Only when this 
union has reached its final earthly stage does the active night of 
spirit fall into the background of the spiritual life, since its main 
work has been accomplished. Since, however, this final stage is of 
extreme rarity even among those who attain to mystical prayer, 
the active night of spirit is one of the predominant features of 
the spiritual life of the majority of mystics. 

That portion of the mystical experience which constitutes the 
first passive purgation known as the passive night of sense occurs 
at a stage in the spiritual life when the active night of spirit is pre 
dominant. In dealing with it the mystic needs to practise the 
principles of the active night of spirit. Therefore St John treats 
of it from this point of view in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, when 
he is discussing the active night in detail. The second passive 
night, that of the spirit, begins far later in the mystical way and is 
of far rarer occurrence. Its working is such as to leave the soul 
powerless to do aught but endure in passivity and patience. It 
occurs, therefore, when the active night of the spirit has achieved 
already the greater part of its work. Hence it finds no place in 
The Ascent of Mount Carmel. The two passive nights will be dis 
cussed in their place in the mystical way. The remainder of this 
chapter will be devoted to a discussion of the active night of 
spirit as treated by St John in the second and third books 
of The Ascent. 

Of the Active Night of Sense that is, detachment from all 
sensible and material goods, and the mortification and rejection of 
all desire for such nothing further need be said. I have already 
discussed it in the last chapter when explaining the principle of 
detachment. 

The Active Night of Spirit depends essentially on the Negative 
knowledge of God, which has been already discussed in my chapter 
on the Divine Transcendence. It is the detachment of the soul 
from all spiritual objects and concepts that are distinctly appre 
hensible by its natural or supernatural activities in this life, and 



212 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MYSTICISM 

which are therefore essentially limited, and in virtue of this 
essential limitation infinitely distant from the unlimited Being of 
God. We have, however, already seen that this detachment does 
not apply in the same sense to the mysteries of Christ, since the 
Sacred Humanity and its mysteries are in personal union with 
the Infinite Godhead. By this detachment from the limited the 
substance of the soul and its fundamental powers are set free to 
receive the Being and Operation of God. The manner in which 
this is to be effected in the understanding forms the subject of the