Evelyn Underhill · 28 of 40

VII. Introversion. Part II: Contemplation · Part 2

“Here,” says Maeterlinck, “we stand suddenly at the confines of human thought, and far beyond the Polar circle of the mind. It is intensely cold here; it is intensely dark, and yet you will find nothing but flames and light. But to those who come without having trained their souls to these new perceptions, this light and these flames are as dark and as cold as if they were painted. Here we are concerned with the most exact of sciences: with the exploration of the harshest and most uninhabitable headlands of the divine ‘Know thyself’: and the midnight sun reigns over that rolling sea where the psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God.”

On one hand “flames and light”—the flame of living and creative love which fills the universe—on the other the “quiet desert of Godhead,” transcending all succession and dark to the single sight of earth-born men. Under these two metaphors, one affirmative, one negative, resumed in his most daring paradox nearly the whole of man’s contemplative experience of the Absolute can be and is expressed. We have considered his negative description of Utmost Transcendence: that confession of “divine ignorance” which is a higher form of knowledge. But this is balanced, in a few elect spirits, by a positive contemplation of truth; an ecstatic apprehension of the “secret plan.”

Certain rare mystics seem able to describe to us a Beatific Vision experienced here and now: a knowledge by contact of the flaming heart of Reality, which includes in one great whole the planes of Being and Becoming, the Simultaneous and the Successive, the Eternal Father, and His manifestation in the “energetic Word.” We saw something of this power, which is characteristic of mystical genius of a high order, in studying the characteristics of Illumination. Its finest literary expression is found in that passage of the “Paradiso” where Dante tells us how he pierced, for an instant, the secret of the Empyrean. Already he had enjoyed a symbolic vision of two-fold Reality as the moving River of Light and the still white Rose. Now these two aspects vanished, and he saw the One.

“. . . la mia vista, venendo sincera e più e più entrava per lo raggio dell’ alta luce, che da sè è vera. Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio che il parlar nostro ch’ a tal vista cede, e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio. Qual è colui che somniando vede, chè dopo il sogno la passione impressa rimane, e l’ altro alla mente non riede; cotal son io, che quasi tutta cessa mia visione, ed ancor mi distilla nel cor lo dolce che nacque da essa. . . . . Io credo, per l’ acume ch’ io soffersi del vivo raggio, ch’ io sarei smarrito, se gli occhi miei da lui fossero aversi. E mi ricorda ch’ io fui più ardito per questo a sostener tanto ch’ io giunsi l’ aspetto mio col valor infinito. Così la mente mia, tutta sospesa, mirava fissa, immobile ed attenta, e sempre del mirar faceasi accesa. A quella luce cotal si diventa, che volgersi da lei per altro aspetto è impossibil che mai si consenta. Però che il Ben, ch’ è del volere obbietto, tutto s’accoglie in lei, e fuor di quella è difettivo cio che lì è perfetto.”

Intermediate between the Dantesque apprehension of Eternal Reality and the contemplative communion with Divine Personality, is the type of mystic whose perceptions of the suprasensible are neither wholly personal nor wholly cosmic and transcendental in type. To him, God is pre-eminently the Perfect—Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, Light, Life, and Love—discovered in a moment of lucidity at the very door of the seeking self. Here the symbols under which He is perceived are still the abstractions of philosophy; but in the hands of the mystic these terms cease to be abstract, are stung to life. Such contemplatives preserve the imageless and ineffable character of the Absolute, but are moved by its contemplation to a joyous and personal love.

Thus, in a striking passage of her revelations, Angela of Foligno suddenly exclaims, “I saw God!” “And I, the writing brother,” says her secretary, “asked her what she saw, how she saw, and if she saw any bodily thing. She replied thus: ‘I beheld a fullness and a clearness, and felt them within me so abundantly that I cannot describe it, or give any likeness thereof. I cannot say I saw anything corporeal. It was as though it were in heaven: a beauty so great that I can say nought concerning it, save that it was supreme Beauty and sovereign Good.’” Again, “I beheld the ineffable fullness of God: but I can relate nothing of it, save that I have seen in it the Sovereign Good.”

B. The Contemplation of Immanence.— The second group of contemplatives is governed by that “Love which casteth out fear”: by a predominating sense of the nearness, intimacy, and sweetness, rather than the strangeness and unattainable transcendence, of that same Infinite Life at whose being the first group could only hint by amazing images which seem to be borrowed from the poetry of metaphysics. These are, says Hilton, in a lovely image, “Feelingly fed with the savour of His invisible blessed Face.” All the feelings which flow from joy, confidence, and affection, rather than those which are grouped about rapture and awe—though awe is always present in some measure, as it is always present in all perfect love—here contribute towards a description of the Truth.

These contemplatives tell us of their attainment of That which Is, as the closest and most joyous of all communions; a coming of the Bridegroom; a rapturous immersion in the Uncreated Light. “Nothing more profitable, nothing merrier than grace of contemplation!” cries Rolle, “that lifts us from this low and offers to God. What is grace of contemplation but beginning of joy? what is parfiteness of joy but grace confirmed? In such “bright contemplation” as this, says “The Mirror of Simple Souls,” “the soul is full gladsome and jolly.” Utter peace and wild delight, every pleasure-state known to man’s normal consciousness, are inadequate to the description of her joy. She has participated for an instant in the Divine Life; knows all, and knows nought. She has learnt the world’s secret, not by knowing, but by being: the only way of really knowing anything.

Where the dominant emotion is that of intimate affection, and where the training or disposition of the mystic inclines him to emphasize the personal and Incarnational rather than the abstract and Trinitarian side of Christianity, the contemplative of this type will always tend to describe his secret to us as above all things an experience of adorable Friendship. Reality is for him a Person, not a State. In the “orison of union” it seems to him that an actual communion, a merging of his self with this other and strictly personal Self takes place. “God,” he says, then “meets the soul in her Ground”: i.e. , in that secret depth of personality where she participates in the Absolute Life. Clearly, the “degree of contemplation,” the psychological state, is here the same as that in which the mystic of the impersonal type attained the “Abyss.” But from the point of view of the subject, this joyful and personal encounter of Lover and Beloved will be a very different experience from the soul’s immersion in that “desert of Deity,” as described by Eckhart and his school. “In this oning,” says Hilton, “is the marriage made betwixt God and the soul, that shall never be broken.”

St. Teresa is the classic example of this intimate and affective type of contemplation: but St. Gertrude, Suso, Julian, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and countless others, provide instances of its operation. We owe to it all the most beautiful and touching expressions of mystic love. Julian’s “I saw Him and sought Him: and I had Him, I wanted Him” expresses in epigram its combination of rapturous attainment and insatiable desire: its apprehension of a Presence at once friendly and divine. So too does her description of the Tenth Revelation of Love, when “with this sweet enjoying He showed unto mine understanding in part the blessed Godhead, stirring then the poor soul to understand, as it may be said; that is, to think on the endless Love that was without beginning, and is, and shall be ever. And with this our good Lord said full blissfully, Lo, how that I loved thee, as if He had said, My darling, behold and see thy Lord, thy God that is thy Matter, and thine endless joy.”

“The eyes of her soul were opened,” says the scribe to whom Angela of Foligno dictated her revelations. “And she saw Love advancing gently towards her; and she saw the beginning, but not the end, for it was continuous. And there was no colour to which she could compare this Love; but directly it reached her she beheld it with the eyes of the soul, more clearly than she might do with the eyes of the body, take as towards her the semblance of a sickle. Not that there was any actual and measurable likeness, but this love took on the semblance of a sickle, because it first withdrew itself, not giving itself so fully as it had allowed itself to be understood and she had understood it; the which caused her to yearn for it the more.”

It is to Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose contemplation was emphatically of the intimate type, that we owe the most perfect definition of this communion of the mystic with his Friend. “Orison,” she says, “draws the great God down into the small heart: it drives the hungry soul out to the full God. It brings together the two lovers, God and the soul, into a joyful room where they speak much of love.”

We have already seen that the doctrine of the Trinity makes it possible for Christian mystics, and, still more, for Christian mysticism as a whole, to reconcile this way of apprehending Reality with the “negative” and impersonal perception of the ineffable One; the Absolute which “hath no image.” Though they seem in their extreme forms to be so sharply opposed as to justify Eckhart’s celebrated distinction between the unknowable totality of the Godhead and the knowable personality of God, the “image” and the “circle” yet represent diverse apprehensions of one whole. All the mystics feel—and the German school in particular have expressed—Dante’s conviction that these two aspects of reality, these two planes of being, however widely they seem to differ, are One . Both are ways of describing man’s partial contacts with that Absolute Truth, “present yet absent, near, yet far,” that Triune Fact, di tre colori e d’ una continenza , which is God. Both are necessary if we are to form any idea of that complete Reality, imperfect as any such idea must be: as, when two men go together to some undiscovered country, one will bring home news of its great spaces, its beauty of landscape, another of its geological formation, or the flora and fauna that express its life, and both must be taken into account before any just estimate of the real country can be made.

Since it is of the essence of the Christian religion to combine personal and metaphysical truth, a transcendent and an incarnate God, it is not surprising that we should find in Christianity a philosophic and theological basis for this paradox of the contemplative experience. Most often, though not always, the Christian mystic identifies the personal and intimate Lover of the soul, of whose elusive presence he is so sharply aware, with the person of Christ; the unknowable and transcendent Godhead with that eterna luce, the Undifferentiated One in Whom the Trinity of Persons is resumed. Temperamentally, most practical contemplatives lean to either one or other of these apprehensions of Reality: to a personal and immanental meeting in the “ground of the soul,” or to the austere joys of the “naughted soul” abased before an impersonal Transcendence which no language but that of negation can define. In some, however, both types of perception seem to exist together: and they speak alternately of light and darkness, of the rapturous encounter with Love and of supreme self-loss in the naked Abyss, the desert of the Essence of God. Ruysbroeck is the perfect example of this type of contemplative; and his works contain numerous and valuable passages descriptive of that synthetic experience which resumes the personal and transcendental aspects of the mystic fact.

“When we have become seeing,” he says—that is to say, when we have attained to spiritual lucidity—“we are able to contemplate in joy the eternal coming of the Bridegroom; and this is the second point on which I would speak. What, then, is this eternal coming of our Bridegroom? It is a perpetual new birth and a perpetual new illumination: for the ground whence the Light shines and which is Itself the Light, is life-giving and fruitful: and hence the manifestation of the Eternal Light is renewed without interruption in the hiddenness of the spirit. Behold! here all human works and active virtues must cease; for here God works alone at the apex of the soul. Here there is nought else but an eternal seeing and staring at that Light, by the Light and in the Light. And the coming of the Bridegroom is so swift, that He comes perpetually, and He dwells within us with His abysmal riches, and He returns to us anew in His Person without interruption; with such new radiance, that He seems never to have come to us before. For His coming consists, outside all Time, in an Eternal Now, always welcomed with new longing and new joy. Behold! the delights and the joys which this Bridegroom brings in His coming are fathomless and limitless, for they are Himself: and this is why the eyes by which the spirit contemplates the Bridegroom, are opened so widely that they can never close again. . . . Now this active meeting, and this loving embrace, are in their essence fruitive and unconditioned; for the infinite Undifferentiation of the Godhead is so dark and so naked of all image, that it conceals within itself all the divine qualities and works, all the attributes of the Persons, in the all-enfolding richness of the Essential Unity, and brings about a divine fruition in the Abyss of the Ineffable. And here there is a death in fruition, and a melting and dying into the nudity of Pure Being; where all the Names of God, and all conditions, and all the living images which are reflected in the mirror of divine truth, are absorbed into the Ineffable Simplicity, the Absence of image and of knowledge. For in this limitless Abyss of Simplicity, all things are embraced in the bliss of fruition; but the Abyss itself remains uncomprehended, except by the Essential Unity. The Persons and all that which lives in God, must give place to this. For there is nought else here but an eternal rest in the fruitive embrace of an outpouring love: and this is the wayless Being that all interior souls have chosen above all other things. This is the dim silence where all lovers lose themselves.”

Here Ruysbroeck, beginning with a symbol of the Divine Personality as Bridegroom of the Soul, which would have been congenial to the mind of St. Catherine of Siena, ends upon the summits of Christian metaphysics; with a description of the loving immersion of the self in that Unconditioned One who transcends the Persons of theology and beggars human speech. We seem to see him desperately clutching at words and similes which may, he hopes, give some hint of the soul’s fruition of Reality: its immeasurable difference in kind from the dreams and diagrams of anthropomorphic religion. His strange statements in respect of this Divine Abyss are on a par with those which I have already quoted from the works of other contemplatives, who, refusing to be led away by the emotional aspect of their experience, have striven to tell us—as they thought—not merely what they felt but what they beheld. Ruysbroeck’s mystical genius, however, the depth and wholeness of his intuition of Reality, does not allow him to be satisfied with a merely spatial or metaphysical description of the Godhead. The “active meeting” and the “loving embrace” are, he sees, an integral part of the true contemplative act. In “the dim silence where lovers lose themselves,” a Person meets a person: and this it is, not the philosophic Absolute, which “all interior souls have chosen above all other thing.”

We must now look more closely at the method by which the contemplative attains to his unique communion with the Absolute Life: the kind of activity which seems to him to characterize his mergence with Reality. As we might expect, that activity, like its result, is of two kinds; personal and affirmative, impersonal and negative. It is obvious that where Divine Perfection is conceived as the soul’s companion, the Bridegroom, the Beloved, the method of approach will be very different from that which ends in the self’s immersion in the paradoxical splendour of the Abyss, the “still wilderness where no one is at home.” It is all the difference between the preparations for a wedding and for an expedition to the Arctic Seas. Hence we find, at one end of the scale, that extreme form of personal and intimate communion—the going forth of lover to beloved—which the mystics call “the orison of union”: and at the other end, the “dark contemplation,” by which alone selves of the transcendent and impersonal type claim that they draw near to the Unconditioned One.

Of the dim and ineffable contemplation of Unnameable Transcendence, the imageless absorption in the Absolute, Dionysius the Areopagite of course provides the classic example. It was he who gave to it the name of Divine Darkness: and all later mystics of this type borrow their language from him. His directions upon the subject are singularly explicit: his descriptions, like those of St. Augustine, glow with an exultant sense of a Reality attained, and which others may attain if they will but follow where he leads.

“As for thee, dear Timothy,” he says, “I counsel that in the earnest exercise of mystical contemplation thou leave the senses and the operations of the intellect and all things that the senses or the intellect can perceive, and all things in this world of nothingness or that world of being; and that, thine understanding being laid to rest, thou ascend (so far as thou mayest) towards union with Him whom neither being nor understanding can contain. For by the unceasing and absolute renunciation of thyself and all things, thou shalt in pureness cast all things aside, and be released from all, and so shalt be led upwards to the Ray of that Divine Darkness which exceetedth all existence.” Again, “The Divine Dark is nought else but that inaccessible light wherein the Lord is said to dwell. Although it is invisible because of its dazzling splendours and unsearchable because of the abundance of its supernatural brightness, nevertheless, whosoever deserves to see and know God rests therein; and, by the very fact that he neither sees nor knows, is truly in that which surpasses all truth and all knowledge.”

It has become a commonplace with writers on mysticism to say, that all subsequent contemplatives took from Dionysius this idea of “Divine Darkness,” and entrance therein as the soul’s highest privilege: took it, so to speak, ready-made and on faith, and incorporated it in their tradition. To argue thus is to forget that mystics are above all things practical people. They do not write for the purpose of handing on a philosophical scheme, but in order to describe something which they have themselves experienced; something which they feel to be of transcendent importance for humanity. If, therefore, they persist—and they do persist—in using this simile of “darkness” to describe their experience in contemplation, it can only be because it fits the facts. No Hegelian needs to be told that we shall need the addition of its opposite before we can hope to approach the truth: and it is exactly the opposite of this “dim ignorance” which is offered us by mystics of the “joyous” or “intimate” type, who find their supreme satisfaction in the positive experience of “union,” the “mystical marriage of the soul.”

What, then, do those who use this image of the “dark” really mean by it? They mean this: that God in His absolute Reality is unknowable—is dark—to man’s intellect: which is, as Bergson has reminded us, adapted to other purposes than those of divine intuition. When, under the spur of mystic love, the whole personality of man comes into contact with that Reality, it enters a plane of experience to which none of the categories of the intellect apply. Reason finds itself, in a most actual sense, “in the dark”—immersed in the Cloud of Unknowing. This dimness and lostness of the mind, then, is a necessary part of the mystic’s ascent to the Absolute. That Absolute—the Mysterium tremendum et fascinans —willnot be “known of the heart” until we acknowledge that It is “unknown of the intellect”; and obey the Dionysian injunction to leave “the operations of the understanding” on one side. The movement of the contemplative must be a movement of the whole man: he is to “precipitate himself, free and unfettered,” into the bosom of Reality. Only when he has thus transcended sight and knowledge, can he be sure that he has also transcended the world with which these faculties are competent to deal; and is in that Wholly Other which surpasses all image and all idea.

“This is Love: to fly heavenward, To rend, every instant, a hundred veils, The first moment, to renounce life; The last step, to fare without feet. To regard this world as invisible, Not to see what appears to oneself.”

This acknowledgment of our intellectual ignorance, this humble surrender, is the entrance into the “Cloud of Unknowing”: the first step towards mystical knowledge of the Absolute. “For Truth and Humility are full true sisters,” says Hilton, “fastened together in love and charity, and there is no distance of counsel betwixt them two.”

“Thou askest me and sayest,” says the author of “The Cloud of Unknowing,” “How shall I think on Himself and what is He? and to this I cannot answer thee but thus: I wot not.

“For thou hast brought me with thy question, into that same darkness and into that same cloud of unknowing that I would thou wert in thyself. For of all other creatures and their works, yea and of the works of God’s self may a man through grace have fulhead of knowledge, and well he can think of them; but of God Himself can no man think. And therefore I will leave all that thing that I can think, and choose to my love that thing that I cannot think. For why; He may well be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden, but by thought never. . . . Smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love; and go not thence for thing that befalleth.”

So long, therefore, as the object of the mystic’s contemplation is amenable to thought, is something which he can “know,” he may be quite sure that it is not the Absolute; but only a partial image or symbol of the Absolute. To find that final Reality, he must enter into the “cloud of unknowing”—must pass beyond the plane on which the intellect can work.

“When I say darkness,” says the same great mystic, “I mean thereby a lack of knowing. . . . And for this reason it is not called a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing, that is between thee and thy God.”

The business of the contemplative, then, is to enter this cloud: the “good dark,” as Hilton calls it. The deliberate inhibition of discursive thought and rejection of images, which takes place in the “orison of quiet,” is one of the ways in which this entrance is effected: personal surrender, or “self-naughting,” is another. He who, by dint of detachment and introversion, enters the “nothingness” or “ground of the soul,” enters also into the “Dark”: a statement which seems simple enough until we try to realize what it means.

“O where,” says the bewildered disciple in one of Boehme’s dialogues, “is this naked Ground of the Soul void of all Self? And how shall I come at the hidden centre, where God dwelleth and not man? Tell me plainly, loving Sir, where it is, and how it is to be found of me, and entered into?

“Master. There where the soul hath slain its own Will and willeth no more any Thing as from itself. . . .

“Disciple. But how shall I comprehend it?

“Master. If thou goest about to comprehend it, then it will fly away from thee, but if thou dost surrender thyself wholly up to it, then it will abide with thee, and become the Life of thy Life, and be natural to thee.”

The author of “The Cloud of Unknowing” is particularly explicit as to the sense of dimness and confusion which overwhelms the self when it first enters this Dark; a proceeding which is analogous to that annihilation of thought in the interests of passive receptivity which we have studied in the “Quiet.”

“At the first time when thou dost it,” he says of the neophyte’s first vague steps in contemplation, “thou findest but a darkness, and as it were a cloud of unknowing thou knowest not what, saving that thou feelest in thy will a naked intent unto God. This darkness and this cloud is, howsoever thou dost, betwixt thee and thy God, and letteth thee, that thou mayest neither see Him clearly by light of understanding in thy reason, nor feel Him in sweetness of love in thine affection. And therefore shape thee to bide in this darkness as long as thou mayest, evermore crying after Him that thou lovest. For if ever thou shalt feel Him or see Him as it may be here, it behoveth always to be in this cloud and this darkness.”

From the same century, but from a very different country and temperament, comes another testimony as to the supreme value of this dark contemplation of the Divine: this absorption, beyond the span of thought or emotion, in the “substance of all that Is.” It is one of the most vivid and detailed accounts of this strange form of consciousness which we possess; and deserves to be compared carefully with the statements of “The Cloud of Unknowing,” and of St. John of the Cross. We owe it to that remarkable personality, the Blessed Angela of Foligno, who was converted from a life of worldliness to become not only a Franciscan, but also a Platonic mystic. In it we seem to hear the voice of Plotinus speaking from the Vale of Spoleto.

“Whilst I was questioning her,” says her secretary, “Christ’s faithful one was suddenly rapt in spirit and seemed not to understand my words. And then was given her a wondrous grace. After a short time . . . she began to tell me what follows. ‘My soul has just been rapt to a state in which I tasted unspeakable joy. I knew all I longed to know, possessed all I longed to possess. I saw all Good.’ She said further: ‘In this state the soul cannot believe that this Good will ever depart from her, or that she will depart from it, or that she will again be separated from it. But she delights herself in that Sovereign Good. My soul sees nothing whatever that can be told of the lips or the heart, she sees nothing, and she sees All . . . No good that can be described or conceived is now the object of my hope; for I have put all my hope in a secret Good, most hid and secret, which I apprehend in great darkness.’ And as I, the brother, could not receive or understand this dark, Christ’s faithful one wishing to explain said: ‘If I see it in the dark, it is because it surpasses all good. All, all the rest is but darkness. All which the soul or heart can reach is inferior to this Good. That which I have told hitherto, namely, all the soul grasps when she sees all creatures filled with God, when she sees the divine power, and when she sees the divine will, is inferior to this most secret Good; because this Good which I see in the darkness is the All, and all other things are but parts.’ And she added, ‘Though inexpressible, these other things bring delight; but this vision of God in darkness brings no smile to the lips, no devotion or fervour of love to the soul. . . . All the countless and unspeakable favours God has done to me, all the words He has said to me, all you have written are, I know, so far below the Good I see in that great darkness that I do not put in them my hope’ . . . Christ’s faithful one told me that her mind had been uplifted but three times to this most high and ineffable mode of beholding God in great darkness, and in a vision so marvellous and complete. Certainly she had seen the Sovereign Good countless times and always darkly; yet never in such a high manner and through such great dark.”

These words, and indeed the whole idea which lies at the bottom of “dark contemplation,” will perhaps be better understood in the light of Baron von Hügel’s deeply significant saying “Souls loving God in His Infinite Individuality will necessarily love Him beyond their intellectual comprehension of Him; the element of devoted trust, of free self-donation to One fully known only through and in such an act, will thus remain to man for ever.” Hence, the contemplative act, which is an act of loving and self-forgetting concentration upon the Divine—the outpouring of man’s little and finite personality towards the Absolute Personality of God—will, in so far as it transcends thought, mean darkness for the intellect; but it may mean radiance for the heart. Psychologically, it will mean the necessary depletion of the surface-consciousness, the stilling of the mechanism of thought, in the interests of another centre of consciousness. Since this new centre makes enormous demands on the self’s stock of vitality its establishment must involve, for the time that it is active, the withdrawal of energy from other centres. Thus the “night of thought” becomes the strictly logical corollary of the “light of perception.”