Christian Mysticism | Page 9

In
such cases the highest intuitions or revelations, which the soul can in its
best moments just receive, but cannot yet grasp or account for, make a
language for themselves, as it were, and claim the sanction of external

authority, until the mind is elevated so far as to feel the authority not
less Divine, but no longer external. We may find fairly close analogies
in other forms of that "Divine madness," which Plato says is "the
source of the chiefest blessings granted to men"--such as the rapture of
the poet, or (as Plato adds) of the lover.[29] And even the philosopher
or man of science may be surprised into some such state by a sudden
realisation of the sublimity of his subject. So at least Lacordaire
believed when he wrote, "All at once, as if by chance, the hair stands
up, the breath is caught, the skin contracts, and a cold sword pierces to
the very soul. It is the sublime which has manifested itself![30]" Even
in cases where there is evident hallucination, e.g. when the visionary
sees an angel or devil sitting on his book, or feels an arrow thrust into
his heart, there need be no insanity. In periods when it is commonly
believed that such things may and do happen, the imagination, instead
of being corrected by experience, is misled by it. Those who honestly
expect to see miracles will generally see them, without detriment either
to their truthfulness or sanity in other matters.
The mystic, then, is not, as such, a visionary; nor has he any interest in
appealing to a faculty "above reason," if reason is used in its proper
sense, as the logic of the whole personality. The desire to find for our
highest intuitions an authority wholly external to reason and
independent of it,--a "purely supernatural" revelation,--has, as Recejac
says, "been the cause of the longest and the most dangerous of the
aberrations from which Mysticism has suffered." This kind of
supernaturalism is destructive of unity in our ideas of God, the world,
and ourselves; and it casts a slur on the faculties which are the
appointed organs of communication between God and man. A
revelation absolutely transcending reason is an absurdity: no such
revelation could ever be made. In the striking phrase of Macarius, "the
human mind is the throne of the Godhead." The supremacy of the
reason is the favourite theme of the Cambridge Platonists, two of whom,
Whichcote and Culverwel, are never tired of quoting the text, "The
spirit of man is the candle of the Lord." "Sir, I oppose not rational to
spiritual," writes Whichcote to Tuckney, "for spiritual is most rational."
And again, "Reason is the Divine governor of man's life: it is the very
voice of God.[31]" What we can and must transcend, if we would make

any progress in Divine knowledge, is not reason, but that shallow
rationalism which regards the data on which we can reason as a fixed
quantity, known to all, and which bases itself on a formal logic, utterly
unsuited to a spiritual view of things. Language can only furnish us
with poor, misleading, and wholly inadequate images of spiritual facts;
it supplies us with abstractions and metaphors, which do not really
represent what we know or believe about God and human personality.
St. Paul calls attention to this inadequacy by a series of formal
contradictions: "I live, yet not I"; "dying, and behold we live"; "when I
am weak, then I am strong," and so forth; and we find exactly the same
expedient in Plotinus, who is very fond of thus showing his contempt
for the logic of identity. When, therefore, Harnack says that "Mysticism
is nothing else than rationalism applied to a sphere above reason," he
would have done better to say that it is "reason applied to a sphere
above rationalism.[32]"
For Reason is still "king.[33]" Religion must not be a matter of feeling
only. St. John's command to "try every spirit" condemns all attempts to
make emotion or inspiration independent of reason. Those who thus
blindly follow the inner light find it no "candle of the Lord," but an
_ignis fatuus_; and the great mystics are well aware of this. The fact is
that the tendency to separate and half personify the different
faculties--intellect, will, feeling--is a mischievous one. Our object
should be so to unify our personality, that our eye may be single, and
our whole body full of light.
We have considered briefly the three stages of the mystic's upward path.
The scheme of life therein set forth was no doubt determined
empirically, and there is nothing to prevent the simplest and most
unlettered saint from framing his conduct on these principles. Many of
the mediaeval mystics had no taste for speculation or philosophy;[34]
they accepted on