Evelyn Underhill · 25 of 40

VI. Introversion. Part I: Recollection and Qui · Part 2

It is the object of contemplative prayer, as it is the object of all education, to discipline and develop certain growing faculties. Here, the faculties are those of the “transcendental self,” the “new man”—all those powers which we associate with the “spiritual consciousness.” The “Sons of God,” however, like the sons of men, begin as babies; and their first lessons must not be too hard. Therefore the educative process conforms to and takes advantage of every step of the natural process of growth: as we, in the education of our children, make the natural order in which their faculties develop the basis of our scheme of cultivation. Recollection, Quiet, and Contemplation, then, answer to the order in which the mystic’s powers unfold. Roughly speaking, we shall find that the form of spiritual attention which is called “Meditative” or “Recollective” goes side by side with the Purification of the Self; that “Quiet” tends to be characteristic of Illumination; that Contemplation proper—at any rate in its higher forms—is most fully experienced by those who have attained, or nearly attained, the Unitive Way. At the same time, just as the self in its “first mystic life,” before it has passed through the dark night of the spirit, often seems to run through the whole gamut of spiritual states, and attain that immediate experience of the Absolute which it seeks—though as a fact it has not reached those higher levels of consciousness on which true and permanent union takes place—so too in its orison. At any point in its growth it may experience for brief periods that imageless and overpowering sense of identity with the Absolute Life—that loving and exalted absorption in God—which is called “passive union,” and anticipates the consciousness which is characteristic of the unitive life. Over and over again in its “prayerful process” it recapitulates in little the whole great process of its life. It runs up for an instant to levels where it is not yet strong enough to dwell: “seeks God in its ground” and finds that which it seeks. Therefore we must not be too strict in our identification of the grades of education with the stages of growth.

This education, rightly understood, is one coherent process: it consists in a steady and voluntary surrender of the awakened consciousness, its feeling, thought, and will, to the play of those transcendental influences, that inflowing vitality, which it conceives of as divine. In the preparative process of Recollection, the unruly mind is brought into subjection. In “Quiet” the eager will is silenced, the “wheel of imagination” is stilled. In Contemplation, the heart at last comes to its own— Cor ad cor loquitur . In their simplest forms, these three states involve the deliberate concentration upon, the meek resting in, the joyous communing with, the ineffable Object of man’s quest. They require a progressive concentration of the mystic’s powers, a gradual handing over of the reins from the surface intelligence to the deeper mind; that essential self which alone is capable of God. In Recollection the surface-mind still holds, so to speak, the leading strings: but in “Quiet” it surrenders them wholly, allowing consciousness to sink into that “blissful silence in which God works and speaks.” This act of surrender, this deliberate negation of thought, is an essential preliminary of the contemplative state. “Lovers put out the candles and draw the curtains when they wish to see the god and the goddess; and in the higher communion the night of thought is the light of perception.”

The education of the self in the successive degrees of orison has been compared by St. Teresa, in a celebrated passage in her Life, to four ways of watering the garden of the soul so that it may bring forth its flowers and fruits. The first and most primitive of these ways is meditation. This, she says, is like drawing water by hand from a deep well: the slowest and most laborious of all means of irrigation. Next to this is the orison of quiet, which is a little better and easier: for here soul seems to receive some help, i.e. , with the stilling of the senses the subliminal faculties are brought into play. The well has now been fitted with a windlass—that little Moorish water-wheel possessed by every Castilian farm. Hence we get more water for the energy we expend: more sense of reality in exchange for our abstraction from the unreal. Also “the water is higher, and accordingly the labour is much less than it was when the water had to be drawn out of the depths of the well. I mean that the water is nearer to it, for grace now reveals itself more distinctly to the soul.” In the third stage, or orison of union, we leave all voluntary activities of the mind: the gardener no longer depends on his own exertions, contact between subject and object is established, there is no more stress and strain. It is as if a little river now ran through our garden and watered it. We have but to direct the stream. In the fourth and highest stage, God Himself waters our garden with rain from heaven “drop by drop.” The attitude of the self is now that of perfect receptivity, “passive contemplation,” loving trust. Individual activity is sunk in the “great life of the All.”

The measure of the mystic’s real progress is and must always be his progress in love; for his apprehension is an apprehension of the heart. His education, his watering of the garden of the soul, is a cultivation of this one flower—this Rosa Mystica which has its root in God. His advance in contemplation, then, will be accompanied step by step by those exalted feeling-states which Richard of St. Victor called the Degrees of Ardent Love. Without their presence, all the drill in the world will not bring him to the time contemplative state; though it may easily produce abnormal powers of perception of the kind familiar to students of the occult.

Thus our theory of mystic education is in close accord with our theory of mystic life. In both, there is a progressive surrender of selfhood under the steady advance of conquering love; a stilling of that “I, Me, and Mine,” which is linked by all the senses, and by all its own desires, to the busy world of visible things. This progressive surrender usually appears in the practice of orison as a progressive inward retreat from circumference to centre, to that ground of the soul, that substantial somewhat in man, deep buried for most of us beneath the great rubbish heap of our surface-interests, where human life and divine life meet. To clear away the rubbish-heap so that he may get down to this treasure-house is from one point of view the initial task of the contemplative. This clearing away is the first part of “introversion”: that journey inwards to his own centre where, stripped of all his cleverness and merit, reduced to his “nothingness,” he can “meet God without intermediary.” This ground of the soul, this strange inward sanctuary to which the normal man so seldom penetrates, is, says Eckhart, “immediately receptive of the Divine Being,” and “no one can move it but God alone.” There the finite self encounters the Infinite; and, by a close and loving communion with and feeding on the attributes of the Divine Substance, is remade in the interests of the Absolute Life. This encounter, the consummation of mystical culture, is what we mean by contemplation in its highest form. Here we are on the verge of that great self-merging act which is of the essence of pure love: which Reality has sought of us, and we have unknowingly desired of It. Here contemplation and union are one. “Thus do we grow,” says Ruysbroeck, “and, carried above ourselves, above reason, into the very heart of love, there do we feed according to the spirit; and taking flight for the Godhead by naked love, we go to the encounter of the Bridegroom, to the encounter of His Spirit, which is His love; and thus we are brought forth by God, out of our selfhood, into the immersion of love, in which we possess blessedness and are one with God.”

The beginning of the process of introversion, the first deliberate act in which the self turns towards the inward path, will not merely be the yielding to an instinct, the indulgence of a natural taste for reverie; it will be a voluntary and purposeful undertaking. Like conversion, it entails a break with the obvious, which must, of necessity, involve and affect the whole normal consciousness. It will be evoked by the mystic’s love, and directed by his reason; but can only be accomplished by the strenuous exercise of his will. These preparatory labours of the contemplative life—these first steps upon the ladder—are, says St. Teresa, very hard, and require greater courage than all the rest. All the scattered interests of the self have here to be collected; there must be a deliberate and unnatural act of attention, a deliberate expelling of all discordant images from the consciousness a hard and ungrateful task. Since the transcendental faculties are still young and weak, the senses not wholly mortified, it needs a stern determination, a “wilful choice,” if we are to succeed in concentrating our attention upon the whispered messages from within, undistracted by the loud voices which besiege us from without.

“How,” says the Disciple to the Master in one of Boehme’s “Dialogues,” “am I to seek in the Centre this Fountain of Light which may enlighten me throughout and bring my properties into perfect harmony? I am in Nature, as I said before, and which way shall I pass through Nature and the light thereof, so that I may come into the supernatural and supersensual ground whence this true Light, which is the Light of Minds, doth arise; and this without the destruction of my nature, or quenching the Light of it, which is my reason?

“Master. Cease but from thine own activity, steadfastly fixing thine Eye upon one Point. . . . For this end, gather in all thy thoughts, and by faith press into the Centre, laying hold upon the Word of God, which is infallible and which hath called thee. Be thou obedient to this call, and be silent before the Lord, sitting alone with Him in thy inmost and most hidden cell, thy mind being centrally united in itself, and attending His Will in the patience of hope. So shall thy Light break forth as the morning, and after the redness thereof is passed, the Sun himself, which thou waitest for, shall arise unto thee, and under his most healing wings thou shalt greatly rejoice: ascending and descending in his bright and health-giving beams. Behold, this is the true Supersensual Ground of Life.”

In this short paragraph Boehme has caught and described the psychological state in which all introversion must begin: the primary simplification of consciousness, steadfastly fixing the soul’s eye upon one point, and the turning inwards of the whole conative powers for a purpose rather believed in than known, “by faith pressing into the centre.”

The unfortunate word Recollection, which the hasty reader is apt to connect with remembrance, is the traditional term by which mystical writers define just such a voluntary concentration, such a first collecting or gathering in of the attention of the self to its “most hidden cell.” That self is as yet unacquainted with the strange plane of silence which so soon becomes familiar to those who attempt even the lowest activities of the contemplative life, where the self is released from succession, the noises of the world are never heard, and the great adventures of the spirit take place. It stands here between the two planes of its being; the Eye of Time is still awake. It knows that it wants to enter the inner world, that “interior palace where the King of Kings is guest”: but it must find some device to help it over the threshold—rather, in the language of psychology, to shift that threshold and permit its subliminal intuition of the Absolute to emerge.

This device is as a rule the practice of meditation, in which the state of Recollection usually begins: that is to say, the deliberate consideration of and dwelling upon some one aspect of Reality—an aspect most usually chosen from amongst the religious beliefs of the self. Thus Hindu mystics will brood upon a sacred word, whilst Christian contemplatives set before their minds one of the names or attributes of God, a fragment of Scripture, an incident of the life of Christ; and allow—indeed encourage—this consideration and the ideas and feelings which flow from it, to occupy the whole mental field. This powerful suggestion, kept before the consciousness by an act of will, overpowers the stream of small suggestions which the outer world pours incessantly upon the mind. The self, concentrated upon this image or idea, dwelling on it more than thinking about it—as one may gaze upon a picture that one loves—falls gradually and insensibly into the condition of reverie; and, protected by this holy day-dream from the more distracting dream of life, sinks into itself, and becomes in the language of asceticism “recollected” or gathered together. Although it is deliberately ignoring the whole of its usual “external universe,” its faculties are wide awake: all have had their part in the wilful production of this state of consciousness: and this it is which marks off meditation and recollection from the higher or “infused” degrees of orison.

Such meditation as this, says Richard of St. Victor, is the activity proper to one who has attained the first degree of ardent love. By it, “God enters into the mind,” and “the mind also enters into itself”; and thus receives in its inmost cell the “first visit of the Beloved.” It is a kind of half-way house between the perception of Appearance and the perception of Reality. To one in whom this state is established consciousness seems like a blank field, save for the “one point” in its centre, the subject of the meditation. Towards this focus the introversive self seems to press inwards from every side; still faintly conscious of the buzz of the external world outside its ramparts, but refusing to respond to its appeals. Presently the subject of meditation begins to take on a new significance; to glow with life and light. The contemplative suddenly feels that he knows it; in the complete, vital, but indescribable way in which one knows a friend. More, through it hints are coming to him of mightier, nameless things. It ceases to be a picture, and becomes a window through which the mystic peers out into the spiritual universe, and apprehends to some extent—though how, he knows not—the veritable presence of God.

In these meditative and recollective states, the self still feels very clearly the edge of its own personality: its separateness from the Somewhat Other, the divine reality set over against the soul. It is aware of that reality: the subject of its meditation becomes a symbol through which it receives a distinct message from the transcendental world. But it is still operating in a natural way—as mystical writers would say, “by means of the faculties.” There is yet no conscious fusion with a greater Life; no resting in the divine atmosphere, as in the “Quiet”; no involuntary and ecstatic lifting up of the soul to direct apprehension of truth, as in contemplation. Recollection is a definite psychic condition, which has logical psychic results. Originally induced by meditation, or absorbed brooding upon certain aspects of the Real, it develops in the Self, by way of the strenuous control exercised by the will over the understanding, a power of cutting its connection with the external world, and retreating to the inner world of the spirit.

“True recollection,” says St. Teresa, “has characteristics by which it can be easily recognized. It produces a certain effect which I do not know how to explain, but which is well understood by those who have experienced it. . . . It is true that recollection has several degrees, and that in the beginning these great effects are not felt, because it is not yet profound enough. But support the pain which you first feel in recollecting yourself, despise the rebellion of nature, overcome the resistance of the body, which loves a liberty which is its ruin, learn self-conquest, persevere thus for a time, and you will perceive very clearly the advantages which you gain from it. As soon as you apply yourself to orison, you will at once feel your senses gather themselves together: they seem like bees which return to the hive and there shut themselves up to work at the making of honey: and this will take place without effort or care on your part. God thus rewards the violence which your soul has been doing to itself; and gives to it such a domination over the senses that a sign is enough when it desires to recollect itself, for them to obey and so gather themselves together. At the first call of the will, they come back more and more quickly. At last, after countless exercises of this kind, God disposes them to a state of utter rest and of perfect contemplation.”

This description makes it clear that “recollection” is a form of spiritual gymnastics; less valuable for itself than for the training which it gives, the powers which it develops. In it, says St. Teresa again, the soul enters with its God into that Paradise which is within itself, and shuts the door behind it upon all the things of the world. “You should know, my daughters,” she continues, “that this is no supernatural act, but depends upon our will, and that therefore we can do it with that ordinary assistance of God which we need for all our acts and even for our good thoughts. For here we are not concerned with the silence of the faculties, but with a simple retreat of these powers into the ground of the soul. There are various ways of arriving at it, and these ways are described in different books. There it is said that we must abstract the mind from exterior things, in order that we may inwardly approach God: that even in our work we ought to retire within ourselves, though it be only for a moment: that this remembrance of a God who companions us within, is a great help to us; finally, that we ought little by little to habituate ourselves to gentle and silent converse with Him, so that He may make us feel His presence in the soul.”

Quiet

More important for us, because more characteristically mystical, is the next great stage of orison: that curious and extremely definite mental state which mystics call the Prayer of Quiet or Simplicity, or sometimes the Interior Silence. This represents the result for consciousness of a further degree of that inward retreat which Recollection began.

Out of the deep, slow brooding and pondering on some mystery, some incomprehensible link between himself and the Real, or the deliberate practice of loving attention to God, the contemplative—perhaps by way of a series of moods and acts which his analytic powers may cause him “nicely to distinguish”—glides, almost insensibly, on to a plane of perception for which human speech has few equivalents. It is a plane which is apparently characterized by an immense increase in the receptivity of the self and by an almost complete suspension of the reflective powers. The strange silence which is the outstanding quality of this state—almost the only note in regard to it which the surface-intelligence can secure—is not describable. Here, as Samuel Rutherford said of another of life’s secrets, “Come and see willtell you much: come nearer will say more.” Here the self passes beyond the stage at which its perceptions are capable of being dealt with by thought. It can no longer “take notes”: can only surrender itself to the stream of an inflowing life, and to the direction of a larger will. Discursive thought would only interfere with this process: as it interferes with the vital processes of the body if it once gets them under its control. That thought, then, already disciplined by Recollection, gathered up, and forced to work in the interests of the transcendental mind, is now to be entirely inhibited.

As Recollection becomes deeper, the self slides into a certain dim yet vivid consciousness of the Infinite. The door tight shut on the sensual world, it becomes aware that it is immersed in a more real world which it cannot define. It rests quietly in this awareness: quite silent, utterly at peace. In the place of the struggles for complete concentration which mark the beginning of Recollection, there is now “a living, somehow self-acting recollection—with God, His peace, power, and presence, right in the midst of this rose of spiritual fragrance.” With this surrender to something bigger, as with the surrender of conversion, comes an immense relief of strain. This is “Quiet” in its most perfect form: this sinking, as it were, of the little child of the Infinite into its Father’s arms. The giving up of I-hood, the process of self-stripping, which we have seen to be the essence of the purification of the self, finds its parallel in this phase of the contemplative experience. Here, in this complete cessation of man’s proud effort to do somewhat of himself, Humility, who rules the Fourth Degree of Love, begins to be known in her paradoxical beauty and power. Consciousness loses to find, and dies that it may live. No longer, in Rolle’s pungent phrase, is it a “Raunsaker of the myghte of Godd and of His Majeste.” Thus the act by which it passes into the Quiet is a sacrament of the whole mystic quest: of the turning from doing to being, the abolition of separateness in the interests of the Absolute Life.

The state of “Quiet,” we have said, entails suspension of the surface-consciousness: yet consciousness of the subject’s personality remains. It follows, generally, on a period of deliberate and loving recollection, of a slow and steady withdrawal of the attention from the channels of sense. To one who is entering this state, the external world seems to get further and further away: till at last nothing but the paramount fact of his own existence remains. So startling, very often, is the deprivation of all his accustomed mental furniture, of the noise and flashing of the transmitting instruments of sense, that the negative aspect of his condition dominates consciousness; and he can but describe it as a nothingness, a pure passivity, an emptiness, a “naked” orison. He is there, as it were poised, resting, waiting, he does not know for what: only he is conscious that all, even in this utter emptiness, is well. Presently, however, he becomes aware that Something fills this emptiness; something omnipresent, intangible, like sunny air. Ceasing to attend to the messages from without, he begins to notice That which has always been within. His whole being is thrown open to its influence: it permeates his consciousness.

There are, then, two aspects of the Orison of Quiet: the aspect of deprivation, of emptiness which begins it, and the aspect of acquisition, of something found, in which it is complete. In its description, all mystics will be found to lean to one side or the other, to the affirmative or negative element which it contains. The austere mysticism of Eckhart and his followers, their temperamental sympathy with the Neoplatonic language of Dionysius the Areopagite, caused them to describe it and also very often the higher state of contemplation to which it leads—as above all things an emptiness, a divine dark, an ecstatic deprivation. They will not profane its deep satisfactions by the inadequate terms proper to earthly peace and joy: and, true to their school, fall back on the paradoxically suggestive powers of negation. To St. Teresa, and mystics of her type, on the other hand, even a little and inadequate image of its joy seems better than none. To them it is a sweet calm, a gentle silence, in which the lover apprehends the presence of the Beloved: a God-given state over which the self has little control.

In Eckhart’s writings enthusiastic descriptions of the Quiet, of inward silence and passivity as the fruit of a deliberate recollection, abound. In his view, the psychical state of Quiet is preeminently that in which the soul of man begins to be united with its “ground,” Pure Being. It marks the transition from “natural” to “supernatural” prayer. The emptying of the field of consciousness, its cleansing of all images—even of those symbols of Reality which are the objects of meditation—is the necessary condition under which alone this encounter can take place.

“The soul,” he says, “with all its powers, has divided and scattered itself in outward things, each according to its functions: the power of sight in the eye, the power of hearing in the ear, the power of taste in the tongue, and thus they are the less able to work inwardly, for every power which is divided is imperfect. So the soul, if she would work inwardly, must call home all her powers and collect them from all divided things to one inward work. . . . If a man will work an inward work, he must pour all his powers into himself as into a corner of the soul, and must hide himself from all images and forms, and then he can work. Then he must come into a forgetting and a not-knowing. He must be in a stillness and silence, where the Word may be heard. One cannot draw near to this Word better than by stillness and silence: then it is heard and understood in utter ignorance. When one knows nothing, it is opened and revealed. Then we shall become aware of the Divine Ignorance, and our ignorance will be ennobled and adorned with supernatural knowledge. And when we simply keep ourselves receptive, we are more perfect than when at work.”

The psychic state of Quiet has a further value for the mystic, as being the intellectual complement and expression of the moral state of humility and receptivity: the very condition, says Eckhart, of the New Birth. “It may be asked whether this Birth is best accomplished in Man when he does the work and forms and thinks himself into God, or when he keeps himself in Silence, stillness and peace, so that God may speak and work in him; . . . the best and noblest way in which thou mayst come into this work and life is by keeping silence, and letting God work and speak. When all the powers are withdrawn from their work and images, there is this word spoken.”

Eckhart’s view of the primary importance of “Quiet” as essentially the introverted state is shared by all those mediaeval mystics who lay stress on the psychological rather than the objective aspect of the spiritual life. They regard it as the necessary preliminary of all contemplation; and describe it as a normal phase of the inner experience, possible of attainment by all those who have sufficiently disciplined themselves in patience, recollection, and humility.

In an old English mystical tract by the author of “The Cloud of Unknowing” there is a curious and detailed instruction on the disposition of mind proper to this orison of silence. It clearly owes much to the teaching of the Areopagite, and something surely—if we may judge by its vivid and exact instructions—to personal experience. “When thou comest by thyself,” says the master to the disciple for whom this “pystle” was composed, “think not before what thou shalt do after: but forsake as well good thoughts as evil thoughts, and pray not with thy mouth, but lift thee right well. . . . And look that nothing live in thy working mind but a naked intent stretching unto God, not clothed in any special thought of God in thyself, how He is in Himself or in any of His works, but only that He is as He is. Let Him be so, I pray thee, and make Him on none otherwise speech, nor search in Him by subtilty of wit: but believe by thy ground. This naked intent freely fastened and grounded by very belief, shall be nought else to thy thought and thy feeling but a naked thought and a blind feeling of thine own being. . . . That darkness be thy mirror and thy mind whole. Think no further of thyself than I bid thee do of thy God, so that thou be oned with Him in spirit as in thought, without departing and scattering, for He is thy being and in Him thou art that thou art: not only by cause and by being, but also He is in thee both thy cause and thy being. And therefore think on God as in this work as thou dost on thyself, and on thyself as thou dost on God, that He is as He is, and thou art as thou art, and that thy thought be not scattered nor departed but privied in Him that is All.”

“Let Him be so, I pray thee!” It is an admonition against spiritual worry, an entreaty to the individual, already at work twisting experience to meet his own conceptions, to let things be as they are, to receive and be content. Leave off doing, that you may be. Leave off analysis, that you may know. “That meek darkness be thy mirror”—humble receptivity is the watchword of this state. “In this,” says Eckhart finely, “the soul is of equal capacity with God. As God is boundless in giving, so the soul is boundless in receiving. And as God is almighty in His work, se the soul is an abyss of receptivity: and so she is formed anew with God and in God. . . . The disciples of St. Dionysius asked him why Timotheus surpassed them all in perfection. Then said Dionysius, ‘Timotheus is receptive of God.’ And thus thine ignorance is not a defect but thy highest perfection, and thine inactivity thy highest work. And so in this work thou must bring all thy works to nought and all thy powers into silence, if thou wilt in truth experience this birth within thyself.”