Evelyn Underhill · 26 of 40

VI. Introversion. Part I: Recollection and Qui · Part 3

It is interesting to contrast these descriptions of the Quiet with St. Teresa’s subjective account of the same psychological state. Where the English mystic’s teaching is full of an implied appeal to the will, the Spanish saint is all for the involuntary, or, as she would call it, the “supernatural” actions of the soul. “This true orison of quiet,” she says, “has in it an element of the supernatural. We cannot, in spite of all our efforts, procure it for ourselves. It is a sort of peace in which the soul establishes herself, or rather in which God establishes the soul, as He did the righteous Simeon. All her powers are at rest. She understands, but otherwise than by the senses, that she is already near her God, and that if she draws a little nearer, she will become by union one with Him. She does not see this with the eyes of the body, nor with the eyes of the soul. . . . It is like the repose of a traveller who, within sight of the goal stops to take breath, and then continues with new strength upon his way. One feels a great bodily comfort, a great satisfaction of soul: such is the happiness of the soul in seeing herself close to the spring, that even without drinking of the waters she finds herself refreshed. It seems to her that she wants nothing more: the faculties which are at rest would like always to remain still, for the least of their movements is able to trouble or prevent her love. Those who are in this orison wish their bodies to remain motionless, for it seems to them that at the least movement they will lose this sweet peace . . . they are in the palace close to their King, and they see that He begins to give them His kingdom. It seems to them that they are no longer in the world, and they wish neither to hear nor to see it, but only God. . . . There is this difference between the orison of quiet and that in which the whole soul is united to God; that in this last the soul has not to absorb the Divine Food. God deposits it with her, she knows not how. The orison of quiet, on the other hand, demands, it seems to me, a slight effort; but it is accompanied by so much sweetness that one hardly feels it.”

“A slight effort,” says St. Teresa. “A naked intent stretching,” says the “Pystle of Private Counsel.” These words mark the frontier between the true and healthy mystic state of “Quiet” and its morbid perversion in “Quietism”: the difference between the tense stillness of the athlete and the limp passivity of the sluggard, who is really lazy, though he looks resigned. True “Quiet” is a means, not an end: is actively embraced, not passively endured. It is a phase in the self’s growth in contemplation; a bridge which leads from its old and uncoordinated life of activity to its new unified life of deep action—the real “mystic life” of man. This state is desired by the mystic, not in order that consciousness may remain a blank, but in order that the “Word which is Alive” may be written thereon. Too often, however, this fact has been ignored; and the Interior Silence has been put by wayward transcendentalists to other and less admirable use.

“Quiet” is the danger-zone of introversion. Of all forms of mystical activity, perhaps this has been the most abused, the least understood. Its theory, seized upon, divorced from its context, and developed to excess, produced the foolish and dangerous exaggerations of Quietism: and these, in their turn, caused a wholesale condemnation of the principle of passivity, and made many superficial persons regard “naked orison” as an essentially heretical act. The accusation of Quietism has been hurled at mystics whose only fault was a looseness of language which laid them open to misapprehension. Others, however, have certainly contrived, by a perversion and isolation of the teachings of great contemplatives on this point, to justify the deliberate production of a half-hypnotic state of passivity. With this meaningless state of “absorption in nothing at all” they were content; claiming that in it they were in touch with the divine life, and therefore exempt from the usual duties and limitations of human existence. “Quietism,” usually, and rather unfairly, regarded as the special folly of Madame Guyon and her disciples, already existed in a far more dangerous form in the Middle Ages: and was described and denounced by Ruysbroeck, one of the greatest masters of true introversion whom the Christian world has known.

“Such quietude,” he says, “is nought else but idleness, into which a man has fallen, and in which he forgets himself and God and all things in all that has to do with activity. This repose is wholly contrary to the supernatural repose one possesses in God; for that is a loving self-mergence and simple gazing at the Incomprehensible Brightness; actively sought with inward desire, and found in fruitive inclination. . . . When a man possesses this rest in false idleness, and all loving adherence seems a hindrance to him, he clings to himself in his quietude and lives contrary to the first way in which man is united with God; and this is the beginning of all ghostly error.”

There can be no doubt that for selves of a certain psychical constitution, such a “false idleness” is only too easy of attainment. They can by wilful self-suggestion deliberately produce this emptiness, this inward silence, and luxuriate in its peaceful effects. To do this from self-regarding motives, or to do it to excess—to let “peaceful enjoyment” swamp “active love”—is a mystical vice: and this perversion of the spiritual faculties, like perversion of the natural faculties, brings degeneration in its train. It leads to the absurdities of “holy indifference,” and ends in the complete stultification of the mental and moral life. The true mystic never tries deliberately to enter the orison of quiet: with St. Teresa, he regards it as a supernatural gift, beyond his control, though fed by his will and love. That is to say, where it exists in a healthy form, it appears spontaneously, as a phase in normal development; not as a self-induced condition, a psychic trick.

The balance to be struck in this stage of introversion can only be expressed, it seems, in paradox. The true condition of quiet according to the great mystics, is at once active and passive: it is pure surrender, but a surrender which is not limp self-abandonment, but rather the free and constantly renewed self-giving and self-emptying of a burning love. The departmental intellect is silenced, but the totality of character is flung open to the influence of the Real. Personality is not lost: only its hard edge is gone. A “rest most busy,” says Hilton. Like the soaring of an eagle, says Augustine Baker, when “the flight is continued for a good space with a great swiftness, but withal with great stillness, quietness and ease, without any waving of the wings at all, or the least force used in any member, being in as much ease and stillness as if she were reposing in her nest.”

“According to the unanimous teaching of the most experienced and explicit of the specifically Theistic and Christian mystics,” says Von Hügel, “the appearance, the soul’s own impression, of a cessation of life and energy of the soul in periods of special union with God, or of great advance in spirituality, is an appearance only. Indeed this, at such times strong, impression of rest springs most certainly from an unusually large amount of actualized energy, an energy which is now penetrating, and finding expression by ever pore and fibre of the soul. The whole moral and spiritual creature expands and rests, yes; but this very rest is produced by Action, ‘unperceived because so fleet, so near, so all-fulfilling.’”

The great teachers of Quietism, having arrived at and experienced the psychological state of “quiet”: having known the ineffable peace and certainty, the bliss which follows on its act of complete surrender, its utter and speechless resting in the Absolute Life, believed themselves to have discovered in this halfway house the goal of the mystic quest. Therefore, whilst much of their teaching remains true, as a real description of a real and valid state experienced by almost all contemplatives in the course of their development, the inference which they drew from it, that in this mere blank abiding in the deeps the soul had reached the end of her course, was untrue and bad for life.

Thus Molinos gives in the “Spiritual Guide” many unexceptional maxims upon Interior Silence: “By not speaking nor desiring, and not thinking,” he says justly enough of the contemplative spirit, “she arrives at the true and perfect mystical silence wherein God speaks with the soul, communicates Himself to it, and in the abyss of its own depth teaches it the most perfect and exalted wisdom. He calls and guides it to this inward solitude and mystical silence, when He says that He will speak to it alone in the most secret and hidden part of the heart.” Here Molinos speaks the language of all mystics, yet the total result of his teaching was to suggest to the ordinary mind that there was a peculiar virtue in doing nothing at all, and that all deliberate spiritual activities were bad.

Much of the teaching of modern “mystical” cults is thus crudely quietistic. It insists on the necessity of “going into the silence,” and even, with a strange temerity, gives preparatory lessons in subconscious meditation: a proceeding which might well provoke the laughter of the saints. The faithful, being gathered together, are taught by simple exercises in recollection the way to attain the “Quiet.” By this mental trick the modern transcendentalist naturally attains to a state of vacant placidity, in which he rests: and “remaining in a distracted idleness and misspending the time in expectation of extraordinary visits,” believes—with a faith which many of the orthodox might envy—that he is here “united with his Principle.” But, though the psychological state which contemplatives call the prayer of quiet is a common condition of mystical attainment, it is not by itself mystical at all. It is a state of preparation: a way of opening the door. That which comes in when the door is opened will be that which we truly and passionately desire. The will makes plain the way: the heart—the whole man—conditions the guest. The true contemplative, coming to this plane of utter stillness, does not desire “extraordinary favours and visitations,” but the privilege of breathing for a little while the atmosphere of Love. He is about that which St. Bernard called “the business of all businesses”: goes, in perfect simplicity, to the encounter of Perfection, not to the development of himself.

So, even at this apparently “passive” stage of his progress, the mystic’s operations are found on analysis to have a dynamic and purposive character: his very repose is the result of stress. He is a pilgrim that still seeks his country. Urged by his innate tendency to transcendence, he is on his way to higher levels, more sublime fulfilments, greater self-giving acts. Though he may have forsaken all superficial activity, deep, urgent action still remains. “The possession of God,” says Ruysbroeck, “demands and supposes active love. He who thinks or feels otherwise is deceived. All our life as it is in God is immersed in blessedness: all our life as it is in ourselves is immersed in active love. And though we live wholly in ourselves and wholly in God, it is but one life, but it is twofold and opposite according to our feeling—rich and poor hungry and fulfilled, active and quiet.” The essential difference between this true “active” Quiet and Quietism of all kinds has been admirably expressed by Baron von Hügel. “Quietism, the doctrine of the One Act; passivity in a literal sense, as the absence or imperfection of the power or use of initiative on the soul’s part, in any and every state; these doctrines were finally condemned, and most rightly and necessarily condemned, the Prayer of Quiet and the various states and degrees of an ever-increasing predominance of Action over Activity—an action which is all the more the soul’s very own, because the more occasioned, directed and informed by God’s action and stimulation—these and the other chief lines of the ancient experience and practice remain as true, correct, and necessary as ever.”

The “ever-increasing predominance of Action over Activity”—the deep and vital movement of the whole self, too utterly absorbed for self-consciousness, set over against its fussy surface-energies—here is the true ideal of orison. This must inform all the soul’s aspiration towards union with the absolute Life and Love which waits at the door. It is an ideal which includes Quiet, as surely as it excludes Quietism.

As for that doctrine of the One Act here mentioned, which was preached by the more extreme quietists; it, like all else in this movement, was the perversion of a great mystical truth. It taught that the turning of the soul towards Reality, the merging of the will in God, which is the very heart of the mystic life, was One Act, never to be repeated. This done, the self had nothing more to do but to rest in the Divine Life, be its unresisting instrument. Pure passivity and indifference were its ideal. All activity was forbidden it, all choice was a negation of its surrender, all striving was unnecessary and wrong. It needed only to rest for evermore and “let God work and speak in the silence.” This doctrine is so utterly at variance with all that we know of the laws of life and growth, that it hardly seems to stand in need of condemnation. Such a state of indifference—which the quietists strove in vain to identify with that state of Pure Love which “seeketh not its own” in spiritual things—cannot coexist with any of those “degrees of ardent charity” through which man’s spirit must pass on its journey to the One: and this alone is enough to prove its non-mystical character.

It is only fair to Madame Guyon to say that she cannot justly be charged with preaching this exaggeration of passivity, though a loose and fluid style has allowed many unfortunate inferences to be drawn from her works. “Some persons,” she says, “when they hear of the prayer of quiet, falsely imagine that the soul remains stupid, dead, and inactive. But unquestionably it acteth therein, more nobly and more extensively than it had ever done before, for God Himself is the Mover and the soul now acteth by the agency of His Spirit. . . . Instead, then, of promoting idleness we promote the highest activity, by inculcating a total dependence on the Spirit of God as our moving principle, for in Him we live and move and have our being. . . . Our activity should therefore consist in endeavouring to acquire and maintain such a state as may be most susceptible of divine impressions, most flexile to all the operations of the Eternal Word. Whilst a tablet is unsteady, the painter is unable to delineate a true copy: so every act of our own selfish and proper spirit is productive of false and erroneous lineaments, it interrupts the work and defeats the design of this Adorable Artist.”

The true mystics, in whom the Orison of Quiet develops to this state of receptivity, seldom use in describing it the language of “holy indifference.” Their love and enthusiasm will not let them do that. It is true, of course, that they are indifferent to all else save the supreme claims of love: but then, it is of love that they speak. Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat . “This,” says St. Teresa, “is a sleep of the powers of the soul, which are not wholly lost, nor yet understanding how they are at work. . . . To me it seems to be nothing else than a death, as it were, to all the things of this world, and a fruition of God. I know of no other words whereby to describe it or explain it; neither does the soul then know what to do—for it knows not whether to speak or be silent, whether it should laugh or weep. It is a glorious folly, a heavenly madness wherein true wisdom is acquired; and to the soul a kind of fruition most full of delight. . . . The faculties of the soul now retain only the power of occupying themselves wholly with God; not one of them ventures to stir, neither can we move one of them without making great efforts to distract ourselves—and, indeed, I do not think we can do it at all at this time.”

Here, then, we see the Orison of Silence melting into true contemplation: its stillness is ruffled by its joy. The Quiet reveals itself as an essentially transitional state, introducing the self into a new sphere of activity.

The second degree of ardent love, says Richard of St. Victor, binds , sothat the soul which is possessed by it is unable to think of anything else: it is not only “insuperable,” but also “inseparable.” He compares it to the soul’s bridal; the irrevocable act, by which permanent union is initiated. The feeling-state which is the equivalent of the Quiet is just such a passive and joyous yielding-up of the virgin soul to its Bridegroom; a silent marriage-vow. It is ready for all that may happen to it, all that may be asked of it—to give itself and lose itself, to wait upon the pleasure of its Love. From this inward surrender the self emerges to the new life, the new knowledge which is mediated to it under the innumerable forms of Contemplation.