 17. Mysticism In the Christian Church there have always been mystics. Although many of them have been viewed with suspicion, some have gained favor in the eyes of the authorities. The experiences of these have been treated as precedents, and a codified system of mystical theology has been based upon them, in which everything legitimate finds its place. The basis of the system is orison, or meditation, the methodical elevation of the soul towards God. Through the practice of orison, the higher levels of mystical experience may be attained. It is odd that Protestantism, especially evangelical Protestantism, should seemingly have abandoned everything methodical in this line. Apart from what prayer may lead to, Protestant mystical experience appears to have been almost exclusively sporadic. It has been left to our mind to recures to reintroduce methodical meditation into our religious life. The first thing to be aimed at in orison is the mind's detachment from outer sensations, for these interfere with its concentration upon ideal things. Such manuals as St. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises recommend the disciple to expel sensation by a graduated series of efforts to imagine holy scenes. The acme of this kind of discipline would be a semi-hallucinatory monoideaism, an imaginary figure of Christ, for example, coming fully to occupy the mind. Sensorial images of this sort, whether literal or symbolic, play an enormous part in mysticism. But in certain cases, imagery may fall away entirely, and in the very highest raptures it tends to do so. The state of consciousness becomes then insusceptible of any verbal description. Mystical teachers are unanimous as to this. St. John of the Cross, for instance, one of the best of them, thus describes the condition called the Union of Love, which, he says, is reached by dark contemplation. In this, the deity compenetrates the soul, but in such a hidden way that the soul, quote, finds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling with which she is filled. We receive this mystical knowledge of God clothed in none of the kinds of images, in none of the sensible representations which our mind makes use of in other circumstances. Accordingly, in this knowledge, since the senses and the imagination are not employed, we get neither form nor impression, nor can we give any account or furnish any likeness, although the mysterious and sweet-tasting wisdom comes home so clearly to the inmost parts of our soul. Fancy a man seeing a certain kind of thing for the first time in his life. He can understand it, use, and enjoy it, but he cannot apply a name to it, nor communicate any idea of it, even though all the while it be a mere thing of sense. How much greater will be his powerlessness when it goes beyond the senses? This is the peculiarity of the divine language. The more infused, intimate, spiritual, and super sensible it is, the more does it exceed the senses, both inner and outer, and impose silence upon them. The soul then feels as if placed in a vast and profound solitude to which no created thing has access. In an immense and boundless desert, desert the more delicious the more solitary it is. There, in this abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in from the wellsprings of the comprehension of love, and recognizes, however sublime and learned may be the terms we employ, how utterly vile, insignificant, and improper they are when we seek to discourse of divine things by their means. Close quote. I cannot pretend to detail to you the sundry stages of the Christian mystical life. Footnote. In particular, I omit mention of visual and auditory hallucinations, verbal and graphic automatisms, and such marvels as levitation, stigmatization, and the healing of disease. These phenomena, which mystics have often presented, or are believed to have presented, have no essential mystical significance, for they occur with no consciousness of illumination whatever, when they occur, as they often do, in persons of non-mystical mind. Consciousness of illumination is for us the essential mark of mystical states. End footnote. Our time would not suffice for one thing, and moreover I confess that the subdivisions and names which we find in the Catholic books seems to me to represent nothing objectively distinct. So many men, so many minds, I imagine that these experiences can be as infinitely varied as are the idiosyncrasies of individuals. The cognitive aspects of them, their value in the way of revelation, is what we are directly concerned with, and it is easy to show by citation how strong an impression they leave of being revelations of new depths of truth. St. Teresa is the expert of experts in describing such conditions, so I will turn immediately to what she says of one of the highest of them, the Orison of Union, says St. Teresa, quote, In the Orison of Union, the soul is fully awake as regards God, but wholly asleep as regards things of this world and in respect of herself. During the short time the Union lasts, she is, as it were, deprived of every feeling, and even, if she would, she could not think of any single thing. Thus she needs to employ no artifice in order to arrest the use of her understanding. It remains so stricken with inactivity that she neither knows what she loves nor in what manner she loves nor what she wills. In short, she is utterly dead to the things of the world and lives solely in God. I do not even know whether in this state she has enough life left to breathe. It seems to me she has not, or at least that if she does breathe she is unaware of it. Her intellect would feign understanding something of what is going on within her, but it has so little force now that it can act in no way whatsoever. So a person who falls into a deep faint appears as if dead. Thus does God, when he raises a soul to Union with himself, suspend the natural action of all her faculties. She neither sees, hears nor understands so long as she is united with God. But this time is always short, and it seems even shorter than it is. God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a way that when she returns to herself it is wholly impossible for her to doubt that she has been in God and God in her. This truth remains so strongly impressed on her that, even though many years should pass without the condition returning, she can neither forget the favor she received nor doubt of its reality. If you, nevertheless, ask how it is possible that the soul can see and understand that she has been in God since, during the Union, she has neither sight nor understanding. I reply that she does not see it then, but that she sees it clearly later, after she has returned to herself, not by any vision, but by a certitude which abides with her, and which God alone can give her. I knew a person who was ignorant of the truth that God's mode of being in everything must be either by presence, by power, or by essence. But who, after receiving the grace of which I am speaking, believed this truth in the most unshakable manner? So much so that, having consulted a half-learned man who was as ignorant on this point as she had been before she was enlightened, when he replied that God is in us only by grace, she disbelieved his reply. So sure was she of the true answer, and when she came to ask wiser doctors they confirmed her in her belief, which much consoled her. But how, you will repeat, can one have such certainty in respect to what one does not see? This question I am powerless to answer. These are secrets of God's omnipotence which it does not appertain to me to penetrate. All that I know is that I tell the truth, and I shall never believe that any soul who does not possess this certainty has ever been really united to God. Close quote. The kinds of truth communicable in mystical ways, whether these be sensible or super-sensible, are various. Some of them relate to this world, visions of the future, the reading of hearts, the sudden understanding of texts, the knowledge of distant events, for example, but the most important revelations are theological or metaphysical. Quote. St. Ignatius confessed one day to Father Lynes that a single hour of meditation at Menresa had taught him more truths about heavenly things than all the teachings of all the doctors put together could have taught him. One day in Orison, on the steps of the choir of the Dominican Church, he saw, in a distinct manner, the plan of divine wisdom in the creation of the world. On another occasion, during a procession, his spirit was ravished in God, and it was given him to contemplate, in a form and images fitted to the weak understanding of a dweller on the earth, the deep mystery of the Holy Trinity. This last vision flooded his heart with such sweetness that the mere memory of it, in after times, made him shed abundant tears. Close Quote. Footnote. Bartoli Miquel. Others have had illuminations about the created world. Jacob Bemwy, for instance. At the age of twenty-five, he was, quote, surrounded by the divine light and replenished with the heavenly knowledge, in so much as going abroad into the fields to a green, at Gorlitz. He there sat down, and viewing the herbs and grass of the field, in his inward light, he saw into their essences, use, and properties, which was discovered to him by their lineaments, figures, and signatures. Close Quote. Of a later period of experience, he writes, quote. In one quarter of an hour, I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at a university. For I saw and knew the being of all things, the bis and the abyss, and the eternal generation of the Holy Trinity, the descent and original of the world, and of all creatures through their divine wisdom. I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds, the external and visible world being of a procreation or external birth from both the internal and spiritual worlds, and I saw and knew the whole working essence in the evil and in the good, and the mutual original and existence, and likewise, how the fruitful bearing womb of eternity brought forth. So that I did not only greatly wonder at it, but did also exceedingly rejoice. Albeit, I could very hardly apprehend the same in my external man and set it down with a pen. For I had a thorough view of the universe as in a chaos, wherein all things are couched and wrapped up, but it was impossible for me to explicate the same. Close Quote. So George Fox. Quote. I was come up to the state of Adam in which he was before he fell. The creation was opened to me, and it was showed me how all things had their names given to them, according to their nature and virtue. I was at a stand in my mind, whether I should practice physics for the good of mankind, seeing the nature and virtues of the creatures were so opened to me by the Lord. Close Quote. Contemporary clairvoyance abounds in similar revelations. Andrew Jackson Davis's Cosmogenes, for example, or certain experiences related in the delectable reminiscences and memories of Henry Thomas Butterworth. End Footnote. Similarly with St. Teresa. She writes, Quote. One day, being in Orison, it was granted me to perceive in one instant how all things are seen and contained in God. I did not perceive them in their proper form, and nevertheless the view ahead of them was of a sovereign clearness, and has remained vividly impressed upon my soul. It is one of the most signal of all the graces which the Lord has granted me. The view was so subtle and delicate that the understanding cannot grasp it. Close Quote. She goes on to tell how it was as if the deity were an enormous and sovereignly limpid diamond in which all our actions were contained in such a way that their full sinfulness appeared evident as never before. On another day, she relates, while she was reciting the Athanasian Creed, Quote, Our Lord made me comprehend in what way it is that one God can be in three persons. He made me see it so clearly that I remained as extremely surprised as I was comforted. And now, when I think of the Holy Trinity, or hear it spoken of, I understand how the three adorable persons form only one God, and I experience an unspeakable happiness. Close Quote. On still another occasion, it was given to Saint Teresa to see and understand in what ways the mother of God had been assumed into her place in heaven. The deliciousness of some of these states seems to be beyond anything known in ordinary consciousness. It evidently involves organic sensibilities, for it is spoken of as something too extreme to be born, and as verging on bodily pain. Footnote. Saint Teresa discriminates between pain in which the body has a part, and pure spiritual pain. As for the bodily part in these celestial joys, she speaks of it as, penetrating to the marrow of the bones, whilst earthly pleasures affect only the surface of the senses. She adds, I think that this is a just description, and I cannot make it better. And Footnote. But it is too subtle and piercing a delight for ordinary words to denote. God's touches, the wounds of his spear, references to ebriety, and to the nuptial union, have to figure in the phraseology by which it is shadowed forth. Intellect and senses both swoon away in these highest states of ecstasy. Says Saint Teresa, quote, if our understanding comprehends, it is in a mode which remains unknown to it, for it can understand nothing of what it comprehends. For my own part, I do not believe that it does comprehend, because, as I said, it does not understand itself to do so. I confess that it is all a mystery in which I am lost. In the condition called raptus, or ravishment by theologians, breathing and circulation are so depressed that it is a question among the doctors whether the soul be or be not temporarily desevered from the body. One must read Saint Teresa's descriptions and the very exact distinctions which she makes to persuade oneself that one is dealing not with imaginary experiences, but with phenomena which, however rare, follow perfectly definite psychological types. To the medical mind, these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but inquire into their fruits for life. Their fruits appear to have been various. Stupification, for one thing, seems not to have been altogether absent as a result. You may remember the helplessness in the kitchen and schoolroom of poor Margaret Mary Alacook. Many other ecstatics would have perished but for the care taken of them by admiring followers. The other worldliness encouraged by the mystical consciousness makes this over-abstraction from practical life peculiarly liable to befall mystics in whom the character is naturally passive and the intellect feeble. But in natively strong minds and characters we find quite opposite results. The Spanish mystics, who carried the habit of ecstasy as far as it is often been carried, appear for the most part to have shown indomitable spirit and energy, and all the more so for the trances in which they indulged. St. Ignatius was a mystic, but his mysticism made him assuredly one of the most powerfully practical human engines that ever lived. St. John of the Cross, writing of the intuitions and touches by which God reaches the substance of the soul, tells us that, quote, They enrich it marvelously. A single one of them may be sufficient to abolish at a stroke certain imperfections of which the soul, during its whole life, had vainly tried to rid itself, and to leave it adorned with virtues and loaded with supernatural gifts. A single one of these intoxicating consolations may reward it for all the labors undergone in its life, even were they numberless. Invested with an invincible courage, filled with an impassioned desire to suffer for its God, the soul then is seized with a strange torment, that of not being allowed to suffer enough. St. Teresa is as empathic and much more detailed. You may perhaps remember a passage I quoted from her in my first lecture. There are many similar passages in her autobiography. Where in literature is a more evidently voracious account of the formation of a new center of spiritual energy, then is given in her description of the effects of certain ecstasies, which in departing leave the soul upon a higher level of emotional excitement. Often in firm and wrought upon with dreadful pains before the ecstasy, the soul emerges from it full of health and admirably disposed for action, as if God had willed that the body itself, already obedient to the soul's desires, should share in the soul's happiness. The soul, after such a favor, is animated with a degree of courage so great that if at that moment its body should be torn to pieces for the cause of God, it would feel nothing but the liveliest comfort. Then it is that promises and heroic resolutions spring up in profusion in us, soaring desires, horror of the world, and the clear perception of our proper nothingness. What empire is comparable to that of a soul who, from this sublime summit to which God has raised her, sees all the things of earth beneath her feet, and is captivated by no one of them? How ashamed she is of her former attachments! How amazed at her blindness! What lively pity she feels for those whom she recognizes still shrouded in the darkness! She groans at having ever been sensitive to points of honor, at the illusion that made her ever see as honor what the world calls by that name. Now she sees in this name nothing more than an immense lie of which the world remains a victim. She discovers, in the new light from above, that in genuine honor there is nothing spurious. That to be faithful to this honor is to give our respect to what deserves to be respected really, and to consider as nothing, or as less than nothing whatsoever perishes and is not agreeable to God. She laughs when she sees grave persons, persons of orison, caring for points of honor for which she now feels profoundest contempt. It is suitable to the dignity of their rank to act thus. They pretend, and it makes them more useful to others. But she knows that in despising the dignity of their rank for the pure love of God they would do more good in a single day than they would affect in ten years by preserving it. She laughs at herself that there should ever have been a time in her life when she made any case of money when she even desired it. Oh, if human beings might only agree together to regard it as so much useless mud, what harmony would then reign in the world? With what friendship we would all treat each other if our interest in honor and in money could but disappear from the earth? For my own part I feel as if it would be a remedy for all our ills. Mystical conditions may, therefore, render the soul more energetic in the lines which their inspiration favors. But this could be reckoned an advantage only in case the inspiration were a true one. If the inspiration were erroneous, the energy would be all the more mistaken and misbegotten. So we stand once more before that problem of truth which confronted us at the end of the lectures on saintliness. You will remember that we turned to mysticism precisely to get some light on truth. Do mystical states establish the truth of these theological affections in which the saintly life has its root? In spite of their repudiation of articulate self-description, mystical states in general assert a pretty distinct theoretic drift. It is possible to give the outcome of the majority of them in terms that point in definite philosophical directions. One of these directions is optimism and the other is monism. We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel them as reconciling unifying states. They appeal to the yes function more than to the no function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and peacefully closes the account. Their very denial of every adjective you may propose as applicable to the ultimate truth, he, the self, the atman, is to be described by no no only, say the Aponoshads. Though it seems on the surface to be a no function, is a denial made on behalf of a deeper yes, who so calls the absolute anything in particular, or says that it is this, seems implicitly to shut it off from being that. It is as if he lessened it. So we deny the this negating the negation, which it seems to us to imply, in the interests of the higher affirmative attitude by which we are possessed. The fountainhead of Christian mysticism is Dionysius, the Aeropagite. He describes the absolute truth by negatives exclusively. Quote, the cause of all things is neither soul nor intellect, nor has it imagination, opinion or reason or intelligence, nor is it reason or intelligence, nor is it spoken or thought. It is neither number nor order, nor magnitude nor littleness, nor equality nor inequality, nor similarity nor dissimilarity. It neither stands nor moves nor rests. It is neither essence nor eternity nor time. Even intellectual contact does not belong to it. It is neither science nor truth. It is not even royalty or wisdom, not one, not unity, not divinity or goodness, nor even spirit as we know it. Close quote. But these qualifications are denied by Dionysius not because the truth falls short of them, but because it so infinitely excels them. It is above them. It is super lucent, super splendid, super essential, super sublime, super everything that can be named. Like Hegel in his logic, mystics journey towards the positive pull of truth only by the methora der absoluten negativitat. Thus come the paradoxical expressions that so abound in mystical writings, as when Eckhart tells of the still desert of the Godhead, quote, where never was seen difference, neither father, son, nor holy ghost, where there is no one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than in itself. Close quote. As when Bohme writes of the primal love, that, quote, it may fitly be compared to nothing, for it is deeper than anything and is as nothing with respect to all things, for as much as it is not comprehensible by any of them. And because it is nothing respectively, it is therefore free from all things, and it is that only good, which a man cannot express or utter what it is, there being nothing to which it may be compared to express it by. Close quote. Or, as when Anglos Celesios sings, God ist ein lauter Nix, im Rutkein nunach hier, je mir dunach im Greifz, je mir entvind ihr dir. To this dialectical use, by the intellect of negation as a mode of passage towards a higher kind of affirmation, there is correlated the subtlest of moral counterparts in the sphere of personal will. Since denial of the finite self and its wants, since asceticism of some sort is found in religious experience to be the only doorway to the larger and more blessed life, this moral mystery intertwines and combines with the intellectual mystery in all mystical writings. Continues Bachmann. Quote. Love is nothing, for when thou art gone forth wholly from the creature and from that which is visible and art become nothing to all that is nature and creature, then thou art in that eternal one, which is God himself, and then thou shalt feel within thee the highest virtue of love. The treasure of treasures for the soul is where she goeth out of the somewhat into that nothing out of which all things may be made. The soul here sayeth, I have nothing, for I am utterly stripped and naked. I can do nothing, for I have no manner of power and am as water poured out. I am nothing, for all that I am is no more than an image of being, and only God is to me I am. And so, sitting down in my own nothingness, I give glory to the eternal being, and will nothing of myself, that so God may will all in me, being unto me my God and all things. Close quote. In Paul's language, I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. Only when I become as nothing can God enter in, and no difference between his life and mine remain outstanding. Footnote. From a French book, I take this mystical expression of happiness in God's indwelling presence. Quote. Jesus has come to take up his abode in my heart. It is not so much a habitation, an association as a sort of fusion. O new and blessed life, life which becomes each day more luminous. The walls before me, dark a few moments since, is splendid at this hour because the sun shines on it. Wherever its rays fall, they light up a conflagration of glory. The smallest speck of glass sparkles. Each grain of sand emits fire. Even so, there is a royal song of triumph in my heart because the Lord is there. My days succeed each other. Yesterday a blue sky. Today a clouded sun. A night filled with strange dreams. But as soon as the eyes open and I regain consciousness and seem to begin life again, it is always the same figure before me, always the same presence filling my heart. Formally the day was dulled by the absence of the Lord. I used to wake invaded by all sorts of sad impressions, and I did not find him on my path. Today he is with me, and the light cloudiness which covers things is not an obstacle to my communion with him. I feel the pressure of his hand. I feel something else which fills me with a serene joy. Shall I dare to speak it out? Yes, for it is the true expression of what I experience. The Holy Spirit is not merely making me a visit. It is no mere dazzling apparition which may from one moment to another spread its wings and leave me in my night. It is a permanent habitation. He can depart only if he takes me with him. More than that, he is not other than myself. He is one with me. It is not a juxtaposition. It is a penetration, a profound modification of my nature, a new manner of my being. This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states, we both become one with the absolute, and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of climb or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech anti-dates languages, and they do not grow old. That art thou, say the Upanishads, and the Vendantists add, not a part, not a mode of that, but identically that, that absolute spirit of the world. As pure water poured into pure water remains the same, thus, O Gautama, is the self of a thinker who knows. Water in water, fire in fire, ether in ether, no one can distinguish them. Likewise, a man whose mind has entered into the self, says the Sufi Gulshan Raz, quote, every man whose heart is no longer shaken by any doubt, knows with certainty that there is no one being save only one. In his divine majesty, the me, the we, the thou, are not found, for in the one there can be no distinction. Every being who is annulled and entirely separated from himself hears resound outside of him this voice and this echo. I am God. He has an eternal way of existing and is no longer subject to death. Close quote. In the vision of God, says Plotinus, quote, what sees is not our reason, but something prior and superior to our reason. He who thus sees does not properly see does not distinguish or imagine two things. He changes. He ceases to be himself, preserves nothing of himself. Absorbed in God, he makes but one with him, like a center of a circle coinciding with another center. Close quote. Writes Suso, quote, here the spirit dies and yet is all alive in the marvels of the Godhead and is lost in the stillness of the glorious dazzling obscurity and of the naked simple unity. It is in this moldless wear that the highest bliss is to be found. Engelos Silesios sings again, Ich bin so groß als Gott, ihr ist als ich so klein, ihr kann ich über mich, ich unter ihm nicht sein. In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as dazzling obscurity, whispering silence, teaming desert are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth. Many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions. Quote. He who would hear the voice of Nada, the soundless sound and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dahana when to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees and dreams. When he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the one, the inner sound which kills the outer, for then the soul will hear and will remember, and then to the inner ear will speak the voice of the silence. And now, thyself is lost in self, thyself unto thyself, merged in that self from which thou first didst radiate. Behold, thou hast become the light, thou hast become the sound, thou art thy master and thy God, thou art thyself the object of thy search, the voice unbroken that resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, the voice of the silence, om tatsat. Close quote. These words, if they do not awaken laughter, as you receive them, probably stir chords within you which music and language touch in common. Music gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict, though it may laugh at our foolishness in minding them. There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt, and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores. Quote. Here begins the sea that ends, not till the world's end. Where we stand, could we know the next high sea-mark set beyond these waves that gleam? We should know what never man hath known, nor eye of man hath scanned. Ah, but here the man's heart leaps, yearning towards the gloom with adventurous glee, from the shore that hath no shore beyond it, set in all the sea. Quote. That doctrine, for example, that eternity is timeless, that our immortality, if we live in the eternal, is not so much future as already now and here, which we find so often expressed today in certain philosophic circles, finds its support in a here-here or an amen, which floats up from that mysteriously deeper level. We recognize the passwords to the mystical region as we hear them, but we cannot use them ourselves. It alone has the keeping of the password primeval. I have now sketched with extreme brevity and insufficiency, but as fairly as I am able in the time allowed, the general traits of the mystic range of consciousness. It is, on the whole, pantheistic and optimistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti-naturalistic and harmonizes best with twice-bornness and so-called otherworldly states of mind. My next task is to inquire whether we can invoke it as authoritative. Does it furnish any warrant for the truth of the twice-bornness and supernaturality and pantheism which it favors? I must give my answer to this question as concisely as I can. In brief, my answer is this, and I will divide it into three parts. One, mystical states, when well-developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative, over the individuals to whom they come. Two, no authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically. Three, they break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith. I will take up these points one by one. One, as a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced and emphatic sort are usually authoritative over those who have them. Footnote, I abstract from weaker states and from those cases of which the books are full where the director, but usually not the subject, remains in doubt whether the experience may not have proceeded from the demon. End footnote, they have been there and no. It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this. If the mystical truth that comes to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the majority to order him to live in another way? We can throw him into a prison or a madhouse, but we cannot change his mind. We commonly attach it only the more stubbornly to its beliefs. Footnote, example, Mr. John Nelson writes of his imprisonment for preaching Methodism. Quote, My soul was as a watered garden and I could sing praise to God all day long, for he turned my captivity into joy, and gave me to rest as well on the boards as if I had been on a bed of down. Now could I say, God's service is a perfect freedom, and I was carried out much in prayer that my enemies might drink of the same river of peace which my God gave so largely to me. Close quote, end footnote. It mocks our utmost efforts as a matter of fact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our jurisdiction. Our own more rational beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of fact, but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were for us. The records show that even though the five senses be an abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression. That is, they are face-to-face presentations of what seems immediately to exist. The mystic is, in short, invulnerable, and must be left, whether we relish it or not, in undisturbed enjoyment of his creed. Faith, says Tolstoy, is that by which men live, and faith, state, and mystic state are practically convertible terms. Two. But I now proceed to add that mystics have no right to claim that we ought to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we are ourselves outsiders, and feel no private call there too. The utmost they can ever ask of us in this life is to admit that they establish a presumption. They form a consensus and have an unequivocal outcome, and it would be odd, mystics might say, if such a unanimous type of experience should prove to be altogether wrong. At bottom, however, this would only be an appeal to numbers, like the appeal of rationalism the other way, and the appeal to numbers has no logical force. If we acknowledge it, it is for suggestive, not for logical reasons. We follow the majority, because to do so suits our life. But even this presumption from the unanimity of mystics is far from being strong. In characterizing mystic states as pantheistic, optimistic, etc., I am afraid I oversimplified the truth. I did so for expository reasons, and to keep the closer to the classic mystical tradition. The classic religious mysticism, it now must be confessed, is only a privileged case. It is an extract kept true to type by the selection of the fittest specimens and their preservation in schools. It is carved out from a much larger mass, and if we take the larger mass as seriously as religious mysticism has historically taken itself, we find that the supposed unanimity largely disappears. To begin with, even religious mysticism itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and makes schools, is much less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both ascetic and antinomianly self-indulgent within the Christian church. It is dualistic in Sankhya, and monistic in Vendanta philosophy. I called it pantheistic, but the great Spanish mystics are anything but pantheists. They are, with few exceptions, non-metaphysical minds, for whom the category of personality is absolute. The union of man with God is for them much more like an occasional miracle than like an original identity. How different again, apart from the happiness common to all, is the mysticism of Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Richard Jefferies, and other naturalistic pantheists, from the more distinctively Christian sort. The fact is that the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own. It is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only they can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood. We have no right, therefore, to invoke its prestige as distinctively in favor of any special belief, such as that in absolute idealism, or in the absolute monistic identity, or in the absolute goodness of the world. It is only relatively in favor of all these things. It passes out of common human consciousness in the direction in which they lie. So much for religious mysticism proper, but more remains to be told, for religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half has no accumulated traditions, except those which the textbooks on insanity supply. Open any one of these and you will find abundant cases in which mystical ideas are cited as characteristic symptoms of enfeebled or deluded states of mind. The delusional insanity, paranoia as they sometimes call it, we may have a diabolical mysticism. A sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous powers. Only this time the emotion is pessimistic. Instead of consolations we have desolations. The meanings are dreadful and the powers are enemies to life. It is evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that which great subliminal or trans-marginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known. That region contains every kind of matter. Seraph and snake abide there side by side. To come from thence is no infallible credential. What comes must be sifted and tested and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience just like what comes from the outer world of sense. Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods so long as we are not mystics ourselves. Once more then I repeat that non-mystics are under no obligation to acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred on them by their intrinsic nature. Footnote In his work on Degeneration, Max Nordow seeks to undermine all mysticism by exposing the weakness of the lower kinds. Mysticism for him means any sudden perception of hidden significance in things. He explains such perception by the abundant, uncompleted associations which experiences may arouse in a degenerate brain. These give to him who has the experience a vague and vast sense of its leading further. Yet they awaken no definite or useful consequent in his thought. The explanation is a plausible one for certain sorts of feeling of significance, and other alienists have explained paranoic conditions by a laming of the association organ. But the higher mystical flights, with their positiveness and abruptness, are surely products of no such merely negative condition. It seems far more reasonable to ascribe them to inroads from the subconscious life of the cerebral activity correlative to which we as yet know nothing. Footnote 3 Yet, I repeat once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states merely add a super sensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and to make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized. Footnote They sometimes add subjective audita et visa to the facts, but as these are usually interpreted as transmundane, they oblige no alteration in the facts of sense. End Footnote It is the rationalistic critic, rather, who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never can be states of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world. The difference of the views seen from the different mystical windows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The wider world would, in that case, prove to have a mixed constitution like that of this world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal regions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them, but it would be a wider world all the same. We should have to use its experiences by selecting and subordinating and substituting, just as is our custom in this ordinary naturalistic world. We should be liable to error just as we are now, yet the counting in of that wider world of meanings and the serious dealing with it might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in our approach to the final fullness of the truth. In this shape, I think, we have to leave the subject. Mystical states indeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states, but the higher ones, among them, point in directions to which the religious sentiments, even of non-mystical men, incline. They tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest. They offer us hypotheses, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which, as thinkers, we cannot possibly upset. The supernaturalism and optimism to which they would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be, after all, the truest of insights into the meaning of this life. Oh, the little more, and how much it is, and the little less, and what worlds away. It may be that possibility and permission of this sort are all that the religious consciousness requires to live on. In my last lecture, I shall have to try to persuade you that this is the case. Meanwhile, however, I am sure that for many of my readers, this diet is too slender. If supernaturalism and inner union with the divine are true, you think, then not so much permission as compulsion to believe ought to be found. Philosophy has always professed to prove religious truth by coercive argument, and the construction of philosophies of this kind has always been one favorite function of the religious life, if we use this term in a large historic sense. But religious philosophy is an enormous subject, and in my next lecture, I can only give that brief glance at it, which my limits will allow. End of lecture 17