Evelyn Underhill · 27 of 40

VII. Introversion. Part II: Contemplation · Part 1

W e must now consider under the general name of Contemplation those developed states of introversion in which the mystic attains somewhat: the results and rewards of the discipline of Recollection and Quiet. If this course of spiritual athletics has done its work, he has now brought to the surface, trained and made efficient for life, a form of consciousness—a medium of communication with reality—which remains undeveloped in ordinary men. Thanks to this faculty, he is now capable of the characteristic mystic experience: temporary union with “that spiritual fount closed to all reactions from the world of sense, where, without witnesses of any kind, God and our Freedom meet.”

The degrees of Recollection trained the self in spiritual attention: and at the same time lifted it to a new level of perception where, by means of the symbol which formed the gathering-point of its powers, it received a new inflow of life. In the degrees of Quiet it passed on to a state characterized by a tense stillness, in which it rested in that Reality at which, as yet, it dared not look. Now, in Contemplation, it is to transcend alike the stages of symbol and of silence; and “energize enthusiastically” on those high levels which are dark to the intellect but radiant to the heart. We must expect this contemplative activity to show itself in many different ways and take many different names since its character will be largely governed by individual temperament. It appears under the forms which ascetic writers call “ordinary” and “extraordinary,” “infused” or “passive” Contemplation; and as that “orison of union” which we have already discussed. Sometimes, too, it shows itself under those abnormal psycho-physical conditions in which the intense concentration of the self upon its transcendental perceptions results in the narrowing of the field of consciousness to a point at which all knowledge of the external world is lost, all the messages of the senses are utterly ignored. The subject then appears to be in a state of trance, characterized by physical rigidity and more or less complete anaesthesia. These are the conditions of Rapture or Ecstasy: conditions of which the physical resemblances to certain symptoms of hysteria have so greatly reassured the enemies of mysticism.

Rapture and Ecstasy differ from Contemplation proper in being wholly involuntary states. Rapture, says St. Teresa who frequently experienced it, is absolutely irresistible; we cannot hinder it. Whereas the orison of union, which is one of the forms in which pure Contemplation appears at its highest point of development, is still controlled to a large extent by the will of the subject, and “may be hindered, although that resistance be painful and violent.” There is thus a sharp distinction—a distinction both physical and psychical—between the contemplative and the ecstatic states: and we shall do well to avail ourselves of it in examining their character.

First, then, as to Contemplation proper: what is it? It is a supreme manifestation of that indivisible “power of knowing” which lies at the root of all our artistic and spiritual satisfactions. In it, man’s “made Trinity” of thought, love, and will, becomes a Unity: and feeling and perception are fused, as they are in all our apprehensions of beauty, our best contacts with life. It is an act, not of the Reason, but of the whole personality working under the stimulus of mystic love. Hence, its results feed every aspect of that personality: minister to its instinct for the Good the Beautiful, and the True. Psychologically it is an induced state, in which the field of consciousness is greatly contracted: the whole of the self, its conative powers, being sharply focussed, concentrated upon one thing. We pour ourselves out or, as it sometimes seems to us, in towards this over-powering interest: seem to ourselves to reach it and be merged with it. Whatever the thing may be, in this act it is given to us and we know it, as we cannot know it by the ordinary devices of thought.

The turning of our attention from that crisp and definite world of multiplicity, that cinematograph-show, with which intelligence is accustomed and able to deal, has loosed new powers of perception which we never knew that we possessed. Instead of sharply perceiving the fragment, we apprehend, yet how we know not, the solemn presence of the whole. Deeper levels of personality are opened up, and go gladly to the encounter of the universe. That universe, or some Reality hid between it and ourselves, responds to “the true lovely will of our heart.” Our ingoing concentration is balanced by a great outgoing sense of expansion, of new worlds made ours, as we receive the inflow of its life. So complete is the self’s absorption that it is for the time unconscious of any acts of mind or will; in technical language, its “faculties are suspended.” This is the “ligature” frequently mentioned by teachers of contemplative prayer, and often regarded as an essential character of mystical states.

Delacroix has described with great subtlety the psychological character of pure contemplation.

“When contemplation appears,” he says: “( a ) It produces a general condition of indifference, liberty, and peace, an elevation above the world, a sense of beatitude. The Subject ceases to perceive himself in the multiplicity and division of his general consciousness. He is raised above himself. A deeper and a purer soul substitutes itself for the normal self. ( b ) In this state, in which consciousness of I-hood and consciousness of the world disappear, the mystic is conscious of being in immediate relation with God Himself; of participating in Divinity. Contemplation installs a method of being and of knowing. Moreover, these two things tend at bottom to become one. The mystic has more and more the impression of being that which he knows, and of knowing that which he is.” Temporally rising, in fact, to levels of freedom, he knows himself real, and therefore knows Reality.

Now, the object of the mystic’s contemplation is always some aspect of the Infinite Life: of “God, the one Reality.” Hence, that enhancement of vitality which artists or other unselfconscious observers may receive from their communion with scattered manifestations of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, is in him infinitely increased. His uniformly rapturous language is alone enough to prove this. In the contemplative act, his whole personality, directed by love and will, transcends the sense-world, casts off its fetters, and rises to freedom: becoming operative on those high levels where, says Tauler, “reason cannot come.” There it apprehends the supra-sensible by immediate contact, and knows itself to be in the presence of the “Supplier of true Life.” Such Contemplation—such positive attainment of the Absolute—is the whole act of which the visions of poets, the intuition of philosophers, give us hints.

It is a brief act. The greatest of the contemplatives have been unable to sustain the brilliance of this awful vision for more than a little while. “A flash,” “an instant,” “the space of an Ave Maria,” they say. “My mind,” says St. Augustine, in his account of his first purely contemplative glimpse of the One Reality, “withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed. . . . And thus with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is. And then at last I saw Thy invisible things understood by means of the things that are made, but I could not sustain my gaze: my weakness was dashed back, and I was relegated to my ordinary experience, bearing with me only a loving memory, and as it were the fragrance of those desirable meats on the which as yet I was not able to feed.”

This fragrance, as St. Augustine calls it, remains for ever with those who have thus been initiated, if only for a moment, into the atmosphere of the Real: and this—the immortal and indescribable memory of their communion with That Which Is—gives to their work the perfume of the “Inviolate Rose,” and is the secret of its magic power. But they can never tell us in exact and human language what it was that they attained in their ecstatic flights towards the thought of God: their momentary mergence in the Absolute Life.

“That Which Is,” says St. Augustine; “The One,” “the Supplier of true Life,” says Plotinus; “the energetic Word,” says St. Bernard; “Eternal Light,” says Dante; “the Abyss,” says Ruysbroeck; “Pure Love,” says St. Catherine of Genoa—Poor symbols of Perfection at the best. But, through and by these oblique utterances, they give us the assurance that the Object of their discovery is one with the object of our quest.

William James considered “ineffability” and “noetic quality” to be the constant characteristics of the contemplative experience. Those who have seen are quite convinced: those who have not seen, can never be told. There is no certitude to equal the mystic’s certitude: no impotence more complete than that which falls on those who try to communicate it. “Of these most excellent and divine workings in the soul, when God doth manifest Himself,” says Angela of Foligno, “we can in no wise speak, or even stammer.” Nevertheless, the greater part of mystical literature is concerned with the attempts of the mystics to share their discoveries. Under a variety of images, by a deliberate exploitation of the musical and suggestive qualities of words—often, too, by the help of desperate paradoxes, those unfailing stimulants of man’s intuitive power—they try to tell others somewhat of that veritable country which “eye hath not seen.” Their success—partial though it be—can only be accounted for upon the supposition that somewhere within us lurks a faculty, a spark, a “fine point of spirit” which has known this country from its birth; which dwells in it, partakes of Pure Being, and can under certain conditions be stung to consciousness. Then “transcendental feeling,” waking from its sleep, acknowledges that these explorers of the Infinite have really gazed upon the secret plan.

Contemplation is not, like meditation, one simple state, governed by one set of psychic conditions. It is a general name for a large group of states, partly governed—like all other forms of mystical activity—by the temperament of the subject, and accompanied by feeling-states which vary from the extreme of quietude or “peace in life naughted” to the rapturous and active love in which “thought into song is turned.” Some kinds of Contemplation are inextricably entwined with the phenomena of “intellectual vision” and “inward voices.” In others we find what seems to be a development of the “Quiet”: a state which the subject describes as a blank absorption, a darkness, or “contemplation in caligine.” Sometimes the contemplative tells us that he passes through this darkness to the light: sometimes it seems to him that he stays for ever in the “beneficent dark.” In some cases the soul says that even in the depths of her absorption, she “knows her own bliss”: in others she only becomes aware of it when contemplation is over and the surface-intelligence reassumes the reins.

In this welter of personal experiences, it becomes necessary to adopt some basis of classification, some rule by which to distinguish true Contemplation from other introversive states. Such a basis is not easy to find. I think, however, that there are two marks of the real condition: (A) The Totality and Givenness of the Object. (B) Self-Mergence of the subject. These we may safely use in our attempt to determine its character.

(A) Whatever terms he may employ to describe it, and however faint or confused his perceptions may be, the mystic’s experience in Contemplation is the experience of the All, and this experience seems to him to be given rather than attained. It is indeed the Absolute which is revealed to him: not, as in meditation or vision, some partial symbol or aspect thereof.

(B) This revealed Reality is apprehended by way of participation, not by way of observation. The passive receptivity of the Quiet is here developed into an active, outgoing self-donation, which is the self’s response to the Divine initiative. By a free act, independent of man’s effort, God is self-disclosed to the soul; and that soul rushes out willingly to lose itself in Him. Thus a “give and take”—a divine osmosis—is set up between the finite and the Infinite life. That dreadful consciousness of a narrow and limiting I-hood which dogs our search for freedom and full life, is done away. For a moment, at least, the independent spiritual life is achieved. The contemplative is merged in it “like a bird in the air, like a fish in the sea”: loses to find and dies to live.

“We must,” says Dionysius the Areopagite, “be transported wholly out of ourselves and given unto God.” This is the “passive union” of Contemplation: a temporary condition in which the subject receives a double conviction of ineffable happiness and ultimate reality. He may try to translate this conviction into “something said” or “something seen”: but in the end he will be found to confess that he can tell nothing, save by implication. The essential fact is that he was there: as the essential fact for the returning exile is neither landscape nor language, but the homely spirit of place.

“To see and to have seen that Vision,” says Plotinus in one of his finest passages, “is reason no longer. It is more than reason, before reason, and after reason, as also is the vision which is seen. . . . And perhaps we should not here speak of sight: for that which is seen is not discerned by the seer—if indeed it is possible here to distinguish seer and seen as separate things. . . .Therefore this vision is hard to tell of: for how can a man describe as other than himself that which, when he discerned it, seemed not other, but one with himself indeed?”

Ruysbroeck, who continued in the mediaeval world the best traditions of Neoplatonic mysticism, also describes a condition of supreme insight, a vision of Truth, which is closely related to the Plotinian ecstasy. “Contemplation,” he says, “places us in a purity and a radiance which is far above our understanding . . . and none can attain to it by knowledge, by subtlety, or by any exercise whatsoever: but he whom God chooses to unite to Himself, and to illuminate by Himself, he and no other can contemplate God. . . . But few men attain to this divine contemplation, because of our incapacity and of the hiddenness of that light in which one sees. And this is why none by his own knowledge, or by subtle consideration, will ever really understand these things. For all words and all that one can learn or understand in a creaturely way, are foreign to the truth that I mean and far below it. But he who is united to God, and illumined by this truth—he can understand Truth by Truth.

This final, satisfying knowledge of reality—this understanding of Truth by Truth—is, at bottom, that which all men desire. The saint’s thirst for God, the philosopher’s passion for the Absolute; these are nothing else than the crying need of the spirit, variously expressed by the intellect and by the heart. The guesses of science, the diagrams of metaphysics, the intuitions of artists; all are pressing towards this. “Adam sinned when he fell from Contemplation. Since then, there has been division in man.”

Man’s soul, says Hilton, “Feeleth well that there is somewhat above itself that it knoweth not nor hath not yet, but it would have it, and burningly yearneth for it. And that is nought else but the sight of Jerusalem without-forth, the which is like to a city that the prophet Ezechiel saw in his visions.

“He saith that he saw a city set upon an hill sloping to the south, that to his sight when it was measured was no more of length and of breadth than a rood, that was six cubits and a palm of length; but as soon as he was brought into the city and looked about him, then thought him that it was wonder mickle, for he saw many halls and chambers both open and privy, he saw gates and porches, outward and inward, and mickle more building than I say now, on length and on breadth many hundred cubits. Then was this wonder to him, how this city within was so long and so large, that was so little to his sight when he was without. This city betokeneth the perfect love of God, set in the hill of contemplation; the which unto the sight of a soul that is without the feeling of it and travaileth in desire toward, seemeth somewhat, but it seemeth but a little thing, no more than a rood, that is six cubits and a palm in length. By six cubits is understood the perfection of man’s work, by the palm a little touching of contemplation. He seeth well that there is such a thing, that passeth the desert of all working of man a little, as the palm passeth over the six cubits, but he seeth not within what that is. Nevertheless, if he may come within the city of contemplation, then seeth he mickle more than he saw first.”

As in the case of vision, so here, all that we who “without the feeling travail in desire” can really know concerning Contemplation—its value for life, the knowledge it confers—must come from those who have “come within the city”: have, in the metaphor of Plotinus, “taken flight towards the Thought of God.” What, in effect, can they tell us about the knowledge of reality which they attained in that brief communion with the Absolute?

They tell us chiefly, when we come to collate their evidence, two apparently contradictory things. They speak, almost in the Same breath, of an exceeding joy, a Beatific Vision, an intense communion, and a “loving sight”: and of an exceeding emptiness, a barren desert, an unfathomable Abyss, a nescience, a Divine Dark. Again and again these pairs of opposites occur in all first-hand descriptions of pure contemplation: Remoteness and Intimacy, Darkness and Light. Bearing in mind that these four metaphors all describe the same process seen “through a temperament,” and represent the reaction of that temperament upon Absolute Reality, we may perhaps by their comparison obtain some faint idea of the totality of that indescribable experience at which they hint.

Note first that the emotional accompaniments of his perceptions will always and necessarily be the stuff from which the mystic draws suggestive language, by which to hint at his experience of supernal things. His descriptions will always lean to the impressionistic rather than to the scientific side. The “deep yet dazzling darkness,” the “unfathomable abyss,” the Cloud of Unknowing, the “embrace of the Beloved,” all represent, not the Transcendent but his relation with the Transcendent; not an object observed, but an overwhelming impression felt, by the totality of his being during his communion with a Reality which is One.

It is not fair, however, to regard Contemplation on this account as pre-eminently a “feeling state”; and hence attribute to it, as many modern writers do, a merely subjective validity. It is of course accompanied, as all humanity’s supreme and vital acts are accompanied, by feeling of an exalted kind: and since such emotions are the least abnormal part of it, they are the part which the subject finds easiest to describe. These elusive combinations of Fear, Amazement, Desire, and Joy are more or less familiar to him. The accidents of sensual life have developed them. His language contains words which are capable of suggesting them to other men. But his total experience transcends mere feeling, just as it transcends mere intellect. It is a complete act of perception, inexpressible by these departmental words: and its agent is the whole man, the indivisible personality whose powers and nature are only partially hinted at in such words as Love, Thought, or Will.

The plane of consciousness, however—the objective somewhat—of which this personality becomes aware in contemplation, is not familiar to it; neither is it related to its systems of thought. Man, accustomed to dwell amongst spatial images adapted to the needs of daily life, has no language that will fit it. So, a person hearing for the first time some masterpiece of classical music, would have no language in which to describe it objectively; but could only tell us how it made him feel. This is one reason why feeling-states seem to preponderate in all descriptions of the mystic act. Earthly emotions provide a parallel which enables the subject to tell us by implication something of that which he felt: but he cannot describe to us—for want of standards of comparison—that Wholly Other which induced him thus to feel. His best efforts to fit words to this elusive but objective experience generally result in the evaporation alike of its fragrance and of its truth. As St. Augustine said of Time, he knows what it is until he is asked to define it.

How symbolic and temperamental is all verbal description of mystical activity, may be seen by the aspect which contemplation took in the music-loving soul of Richard Rolle; who always found his closest parallels with Reality, not in the concepts of intimate union, or of self-loss in the Divine Abyss, but in the idea of the soul’s participation in a supernal harmony—that sweet minstrelsy of God in which “thought into song is turned.” “To me,” he says, “it seems that contemplation is joyful song of God’s love taken in mind, with sweetness of angels’ praise. This is jubilation, that is the end of perfect prayer and high devotion in this life. This is that mirth in mind, had ghostily by the lover everlastingly, with great voice outbreaking. . . . Contemplative sweetness not without full great labour is gotten, and with joy untold it is possessed. Forsooth, it is not man’s merit but God’s gift; and yet from the beginning to this day never might man be ravished in contemplation of Love Everlasting, but if he before parfitely all the world’s vanity had forsaken.”

We must, then, be prepared to accept, sift, and use many different descriptions of evoked emotion in the course of our inquiry into the nature of the contemplative’s perceptions of the Absolute. We find on analysis that these evoked emotions separate themselves easily into two groups. Further, these two groups answer to the two directions in which the mystic consciousness of Reality is extended, and to the pairs of descriptions of the Godhead which we have found to be characteristic of mystical literature: i.e. , the personal and spatial, immanental and transcendental, indwelling Life and Unconditioned Source; ( a ) the strange, dark, unfathomable Abyss of Pure Being always dwelt upon by mystics of the metaphysical type, and ( b ) the divine and loved Companion of the soul, whose presence is so sharply felt by those selves which lean to the concept of Divine Personality.

A. The Contemplation of Transcendence.— The first group of feeling-states, allied to those which emphasize the theological idea of Divine Transcendence, is born of the mystic’s sense of his own littleness, unworthiness, and incurable ignorance in comparison with the ineffable greatness of the Absolute Godhead which he has perceived, and in which he desires to lose himself; of the total and incommunicable difference in kind between the Divine and everything else. Awe and self-abasement, and the paradoxical passion for self-loss in the All, here govern his emotional state. All affirmative statements seem to him blasphemous, so far are they from an ineffable truth which is “more than reason, before reason, and after reason.” To this group of feelings, which usually go with an instinctive taste for Neoplatonism, an iconoclastic distrust of personal imagery, we owe all negative descriptions of supreme Reality. For this type of self, God is the Unconditioned, the Wholly Other for whom we have no words, and whom all our poor symbols insult. To see Him is to enter the Darkness, the “Cloud of Unknowing,” and “know only that we know nought.” Nothing else can satisfy this extreme spiritual humility; which easily degenerates into that subtle form of pride which refuses to acquiesce in the limitations of its own creaturely state.

“There is none other God but He that none may know, which may not be known,” says this contemplative soul. “No, soothly no! Without fail, No, says she. He only is my God that none can one word of say, nor all they of Paradise one only point attain nor understand, for all the knowing that they have of Him.”

When they try to be geographically exact, to define and describe their apprehension of, and contact with, the Unconditioned One who is the only Country of the Soul, contemplatives of this type become, like their great master the Areopagite, impersonal and remote. They seem to have been caught up to some measureless height, where the air is too rarefied for the lungs of common men. When we ask them the nature of the life on these summits, they are compelled as a rule to adopt the Dionysian concept of Divine Darkness, or the parallel idea of the fathomless Abyss, the Desert of the Godhead, the Eckhartian “still wilderness where no one is at home.”

Oddly enough, it is in their language concerning this place or plane of reality, in which union with the Super-essential Godhead takes place—this “lightsome darkness and rich nought”—that they come nearer to distinct affirmation, and consequently offer more surprises to sentimental and anthropomorphic piety, than in any other department of their work. Unquestionably this language, with its constant reference to a “still desert,” a “vast sea,” an “unplumbed abyss” in which the “emptiness,” the “nothing,” the “Dark” on which the self entered in the Orison of Quiet is infinitely increased, yet positive satisfaction is at last attained, does correspond with a definite psychological experience. It is not merely the convention of a school. These descriptions, incoherent as they are, have a strange note of certainty, a stranger note of passion, an odd realism of their own: which mean, wherever we meet them, that experience not tradition is their source. Driven of necessity to a negation of all that their surface-minds have ever known—with language, strained to the uttermost, failing them at every turn—these contemplatives are still able to communicate to us a definite somewhat; news as to a given and actual Reality, an unchanging Absolute, and a beatific union with it, most veritably attained. They agree in their accounts of it, in a way which makes it obvious that all these reporters have sojourned in the same land, and experienced the same spiritual state. Moreover, our inmost minds bear witness for them. We meet them half-way. We know instinctively and irrefutably that they tell true; and they rouse in us a passionate nostalgia, a bitter sense of exile and of loss.

One and all, these explorers of the Infinite fly to language expressive of great and boundless spaces. In their withdrawal from the busy, fretful sense-world they have sunk down to the “ground” of the soul and of the apparent universe: Being, the Substance of all that Is. Multiplicity is resolved into Unity: a unity with which the perceiving self is merged. Thus the mystic, for the time of this “union with the Divine,” does find himself, in Tauler’s words, to be “simply in God.”

“The great wastes to be found in this divine ground,” says that great master, “have neither image nor form nor condition, for they are neither here nor there. They are like unto a fathomless Abyss, bottomless and floating in itself. Even as water ebbs and flows, up and down; now sinking into a hollow, so that it looks as if there were no water there, and then again in a little while rushing forth as if it would engulf everything, so does it come to pass in this Abyss. This, truly, is much more God’s Dwelling-place than heaven or man. A man who verily desires to enter will surely find God here, and himself simply in God; for God never separates Himself from this ground. God will be present with him, and he will find and enjoy Eternity here. There is no past nor present here, and no created light can reach unto or shine into this divine Ground; for here only is the dwelling-place of God and His sanctuary.

“Now this Divine Abyss can be fathomed by no creatures; it can be filled by none, and it satisfies none, God only can fill it in His Infinity. For this abyss belongs only to the Divine Abyss of which it is written: Abysses abyssum invocal . He who is truly conscious of this ground, which shone into the powers of his soul, and lighted and inclined its lowest and highest powers to turn to their pure Source and true Origin, must diligently examine himself, and remain alone, listening to the voice which cries in the wilderness of this ground. This ground is so desert and bare that no thought has ever entered there. None of all the thoughts of man which, with the help of reason, have been devoted to meditation on the Holy Trinity (and some men have occupied themselves much with these thoughts) have ever entered this ground. For it is so close and yet so far off, and so far beyond all things, that it has neither time nor place. It is a simple and unchanging condition. A man who really and truly enters, feels as though he had been here throughout eternity, and as though he were one therewith.”

Many other mystics have written to the same effect: have described with splendour the ineffable joys and terrors of the Abyss of Being “where man existed in God from all Eternity,” the soul’s adventures when, “stripped of its very life,” it “sails the wild billows of the sea divine.” But their words merely amaze the outsider and give him little information. The contemplative self who has attained this strange country can only tell an astonished and incredulous world that here his greatest deprivation is also his greatest joy; that here the extremes of possession and surrender are the same, that ignorance and knowledge, light and dark, are One. Love has led him into that timeless, spaceless world of Being which is the peaceful ground, not only of the individual striving spirit, but also of the striving universe; and he can but cry with Philip, “ It is enough.”