MYSTICISM (Complete Edition). Evelyn Underhill
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of Reality.”40 All his difficulties and triumphs are grounded in this. The whole question for him is, which world shall be central for him — the real, vital, all-embracing life we call spirit, or the lower life of sense? Shall “Existence,” the superficial obvious thing, or “Substance,” the underlying verity, be his home? Shall he remain the slave of the senses with their habits and customs, or rise to a plane of consciousness, of heroic endeavour, in which — participating in the life of spirit — he knows reality because he is real?
The mystics, one and all, have answered this question in the same sense, and proved in their own experience that the premises of “Activism” are true. This application of the vitalistic idea to the transcendental world, does in fact fit the observed facts of mysticism far more closely even than it fits the observed facts of man’s ordinary mental life.
(1) The primary break with the sense-world. (2) The “new” birth and development of the spiritual consciousness on high levels — in Eucken’s eyes an essential factor in the attainment of reality. (3) That ever closer and deeper dependence on and appropriation of the fullness of the Divine Life; a conscious participation, and active union with the infinite and eternal. These three imperatives, as we shall see later, form an exact description of the psychological process through which the mystics pass. If then this transcendence is the highest destiny of the race, mysticism becomes the crown of man’s ascent towards Reality; the orderly completion of the universal plan.
The mystics show us this independent spiritual life, this fruition of the Absolute, enjoyed with a fullness to which others cannot attain. They are the heroic examples of the life of spirit; as the great artists, the great discoverers, are the heroic examples of the life of beauty and the life of truth. Directly participating, like all artists, in the Divine Life, they are usually persons of great vitality: but this vitality expresses itself in unusual forms, hard of understanding for ordinary men. When we see a picture or a poem, hear a musical composition, we accept it as an expression of life, an earnest of the power which brought it forth. But the deep contemplations of the great mystic, his visionary reconstructions of reality, and the fragments of them which he is able to report, do not seem to us — as they are — the equivalents, or more often the superiors of the artistic and scientific achievements of other great men.
Mysticism, then, offers us the history, as old as civilization, of a race of adventurers who have carried to its term the process of a deliberate and active return to the divine fount of things. They have surrendered themselves to the life-movement of the universe, hence have lived with an intenser life than other men can ever know; have transcended the “sense-world” in order to live on high levels the spiritual life. Therefore they witness to all that our latent spiritual consciousness, which shows itself in the “hunger for the Absolute,” can be made to mean to us if we develop it; and have in this respect a unique importance for the race. It is the mystics, too, who have perfected that method of intuition, that knowledge by union, the existence of which philosophy has been driven to acknowledge. But where the metaphysician obtains at best a sidelong glance at that Being “unchanging yet elusive,” whom he has so often defined but never discovered, the artist a brief and dazzling vision of the Beauty which is Truth, they gaze with confidence into the very eyes of the Beloved.
The mystics, again, are, by their very constitution, acutely conscious of the free and active “World of Becoming,” the Divine Immanence and its travail. It is in them and they are in it: or, as they put it in their blunt theological way, “the Spirit of God is within you.” But they are not satisfied with this statement and this knowledge; and here it is that they part company with vitalism. It is, they think, but half a truth. To know Reality in this way, to know it in its dynamic aspect, enter into “the great life of the All”: this is indeed, in the last resort, to know it supremely from the point of view of man — to liberate from selfhood the human consciousness — but it is not to know it from the point of view of God. There are planes of being beyond this; countries dark to the intellect, deeps into which only the very greatest contemplatives have looked. These, coming forth, have declared with Ruysbroeck that “God according to the Persons is Eternal Work, but according to the Essence and Its perpetual stillness He is Eternal Rest.”41
The full spiritual consciousness of the true mystic is developed not in one, but in two apparently opposite but really complementary directions: —
“. . . io vidi
Ambo le corte del ciel manifeste.”42
On the one hand he is intensely aware of, and knows himself to be at one with that active World of Becoming, that immanent Life, from which his own life takes its rise. Hence, though he has broken for ever with the bondage of the senses, he perceives in every manifestation of life a sacramental meaning; a loveliness, a wonder, a heightened significance, which is hidden from other men. He may, with St. Francis, call the Sun and the Moon, Water and Fire, his brothers and his sisters: or receive, with Blake, the message of the trees. Because of his cultivation of disinterested love, because his outlook is not conditioned by “the exclusive action of the will-to-live,” he has attained the power of communion with the living reality of the universe; and in this respect can truly say that he finds “God in all and all in God.” Thus, the skilled spiritual vision of Lady Julian, transcending the limitations of human perception, entering into harmony with a larger world whose rhythms cannot be received by common men, saw the all-enfolding Divine Life, the mesh of reality. “For as the body is clad in the cloth,” she said, “and the flesh in the skin and the bones in the flesh and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God and enclosed. Yea, and more homely: for all these may waste and wear away, but the Goodness of God is ever whole.”43 Many mystical poets and pantheistic mystics never pass beyond this degree of lucidity.
On the other hand, the full mystic consciousness also attains to what is, I think, its really characteristic quality. It develops the power of apprehending the Absolute, Pure Being, the utterly Transcendent: or, as its possessor would say, can experience “passive union with God.” This all-round expansion of consciousness, with its dual power of knowing by communion the temporal and eternal, immanent and transcendent aspects of reality — the life of the All, vivid, flowing and changing, and the changeless, conditionless life of the One — is the peculiar mark, the ultimo sigillo of the great mystic, and must never be forgotten in studying his life and work.
As the ordinary man is the meeting-place between two stages of reality — the sense-world and the world of spiritual life — so the mystic, standing head and shoulders above ordinary men, is again the meeting-place between two orders. Or, if you like it better, he is able to perceive and react to reality under two modes. On the one hand he knows, and rests in, the eternal world of Pure Being, the “Sea Pacific” of the Godhead, indubitably present to him in his ecstasies, attained by him in the union of love. On the other, he knows — and works in — that “stormy sea,” the vital World of Becoming which is the expression of Its will. “Illuminated men,” says Ruysbroeck, “are caught up, above the reason, into naked vision. There the Divine Unity dwells and calls them. Hence their bare vision, cleansed and free, penetrates the activity of all created things, and pursues it to search it out even to its height.”44
Though philosophy has striven since thought began — and striven in vain — to resolve the paradox of Being and Becoming, of Eternity and Time, she has failed strangely enough to perceive that a certain type of personality has substituted experience for her guesses at truth; and achieved its solution, not by the dubious processes of thought, but by direct perception. To the great mystic the “problem of the Absolute” presents itself in terms of life, not in terms of dialectic. He solves it in terms of life: by a change or growth of consciousness which — thanks to his peculiar genius — enables him to apprehend that two-fold Vision of Reality which eludes the perceptive powers of other men. It is extraordinary that this fact of experience a central fact for the understanding of the contemplative type — has received so little attention from writers upon mysticism. As we proceed with our inquiry, its importance, its far-reaching implications in the domains of psychology, of theology, of action, will become more and more evident. It provides the reason why the mystics could never accept the diagram of the Vitalists or Evolutionists as a complete statement of the nature of Reality. “Whatever be the limits of your