Evelyn Underhill · 29 of 40

VII. Introversion. Part II: Contemplation · Part 3

No one has expressed this double character of the Divine Dark—its “nothingness” for the dissecting knife of reason, its supreme fruitfulness for expansive, active love—with so delicate an insight as St. John of the Cross. In his work the Christian touch of personal rapture vivifies the exact and sometimes arid descriptions of the Neoplatonic mystics. A great poet as well as a great mystic, in his poem on the “Obscure Night,” he brings to bear on the actual and ineffable experience of the introverted soul all the highest powers of artistic expression, all the resources of musical rhythm, the suggestive qualities of metaphor.

“Upon an obscure night Fevered with Love’s anxiety (O hapless, happy plight!) I went, none seeing me, Forth from my house, where all things quiet be. By night, secure from sight And by a secret stair, disguisedly, (O hapless, happy plight!) By night, and privily Forth from my house, where all things quiet be. Blest night of wandering In secret, when by none might I be spied, Nor I see anything: Without a light to guide Save that which in my heart burnt in my side. That light did lead me on, More surely than the shining of noontide Where well I knew that One Did for my coming bide; Where He abode might none but He abide. O night that didst lead thus O night more lovely than the dawn of light; O night that broughtest us, Lover to lover’s sight, Lover to loved, in marriage of delight! Upon my flowery breast Wholly for Him and save Himself for none, There did I give sweet rest To my beloved one: The fanning of the cedars breathed thereon.”

Observe in these verses the perfect fusion of personal and metaphysical imagery; each contributing by its suggestive qualities to a total effect which conveys to us, we hardly know how, the obscure yet flaming rapture of the mystic, the affirmation of his burning love and the accompanying negation of his mental darkness and quiet—that “hapless, happy plight.” All is here: the secrecy of the contemplative’s true life, unseen of other men his deliberate and active abandonment of the comfortable house of the senses, the dim, unknown plane of being into which his ardent spirit must plunge—a “night more lovely than the dawn of light”—the Inward Light, the fire of mystic love, which guides his footsteps “more surely than the shining of noon-tide”: the self-giving ecstasy of the consummation “wholly for Him, and save Himself for none,” in which lover attains communion with Beloved “in marriage of delight.”

In his book, “The Dark Night of the Soul,” St. John has commented upon the opening lines of this poem; and the passages in which he does this are amongst the finest and most subtle descriptions of the psychology of contemplation which we possess.

“The soul,” he says, “calls the dim contemplation, by which it ascends to the union of love, a secret stair; and that because of two properties of this contemplation which I shall explain separately. First, this dark contemplation is called secret, because it is, as I have said before, the mystical theology which theologians call secret wisdom, and which according to St. Thomas is infused into the soul more especially by love. This happens in a secret hidden way, in which the natural operations of the understanding and the other powers have no share. . . . The soul can neither discern nor give it a name, neither desires so to do; and besides, it can discover no way nor apt comparison by which to make known a knowledge so high, a spiritual impression so delicate and infused. Sothat even if the soul felt the most lively desire to explain itself, and heaped up explanations, the secret would remain a secret still. Because this interior wisdom is so simply, general, and spiritual, that it enters not into the understanding under the guise of any form or image perceptible to sense. Therefore the senses and the imagination—which have not served as intermediaries, and have perceived no sensible form or colour—cannot account for it, nor form any conception of it, so as to speak about it; though the soul be distinctly aware that it feels and tastes this strange wisdom. The soul is like a man who sees an object for the first time, the like of which he has never seen before; he perceives it and likes it, yet he cannot say what it is, nor give it a name, do what he will, though it be even an object cognisable by the senses. How much less, then can that be described which does not enter in by the senses. . . . Inexpressible in its natures as we have said, it is rightly called secret. And for yet another reason it is so called; for this mystical wisdom has the property of hiding the soul within itself. For beside its ordinary operation, it sometimes happens that this wisdom absorbs the soul and plunges it in a secret abyss wherein it sees itself distinctly as far away, and separated from, all created things; it looks upon itself as one that is placed in a profound and vast solitude whither no creature can come, and which seems an immense Wilderness without limits. And this solitude is the more delicious, sweet, and lovely, the more it is deep, vast, and empty. There the soul is the more hidden, the more it is raised up above all created things.

“This abyss of wisdom now lifts up and enlarges the soul, giving it to drink at the very sources of the science of love. Thereby it perceives how lowly is the condition of all creatures in respect to the supreme knowledge and sense of the Divine. It also understands how low, defective, and, in a certain sense, improper, are all the words and phrases by which in this life we discuss divine things; that they escape the best efforts of human art and science, and that only the mystical theology can know and taste what these things are in their reality.”

In this important passage we have a reconciliation of the four chief images under which contemplation has been described: the darkness and the light, the wilderness and the union of love. That is to say, the self’s paradoxical sense of an ignorance which is supreme knowledge, and of a solitude which is intimate companionship. On the last of these antitheses, the “wilderness that is more delicious, sweet, and lovely, the more it is wide, vast, and empty,” I cannot resist quoting, as a gloss upon the dignified language of the Spanish mystic, the quaint and simple words of Richard Rolle.

“In the wilderness . . . speaks the loved to the heart of the lover, as it were a bashful lover, that his sweetheart before men entreats not, nor friendly-wise but commonly and as a stranger he kisses. A devout soul safely from worldly business in mind and body departed . . . anon comes heavenly joy, and it marvellously making merry melody, to her springs; whose token she takes, that now forward worldly sound gladly she suffers not. This is ghostly music, that is unknown to all that with worldly business lawful or unlawful are occupied. No man there is that this has known, but he that has studied to God only to take heed.”

Doubtless the “dark transcendence” reported and dwelt upon by all mystics of the Dionysian type, is nearest the truth of all our apprehensions of God: though it can be true only in the paradoxical sense that it uses the suggestive qualities of negation—the Dark whose very existence involves that of Light—to hint at the infinite Affirmation of All that Is. But the nearer this language is to the Absolute, the further it is from ourselves. Unless care be taken in the use of it, the elimination of falsehood may easily involve for us the elimination of everything else. Man is not yet pure spirit, has not attained the Eternal. He is in via and will never arrive if impatient amateurs of Reality insist on cutting the ground from under his feet. Like Dante, he needs a ladder to the stars, a ladder which goes the whole way from the human to the divine. Therefore the philosophic exactitude of these descriptions of the dark must be balanced, as they are in St. John of the Cross, by the personal, human, and symbolic affirmations of Love, if we would avoid a distorted notion of the Reality which the contemplative attains in his supreme “flights towards God.” Consciousness has got to be helped across the gap which separates it from its Home.

The “wilderness,” the dread Abyss, must be made homely by the voice of “the lover that His sweetheart before men entreats not.” Approximate as we know such an image of our communion with the Absolute to be, it represents a real aspect of the contemplative experience which eludes the rule and compass of metaphysical thought. Blake, with true mystic insight, summed up the situation as between the two extreme forms of contemplation when he wrote:—

“God appears, and God is Light To those poor souls who dwell in night: But doth a human form display To those who dwell in realms of day.”

In the “orison of union” and the “Spiritual Marriage,” those contemplatives whose temperament inclines them to “dwell in realms of day” receive just such a revelation of the “human form”—a revelation which the Christian dogma of the Incarnation brings to a point. They apprehend the personal and passionate aspect of the Infinite Life; and the love, at once intimate and expansive, all-demanding and all-renouncing, which plays like lightning between it and the desirous soul. “Thou saidst to me, my only Love, that Thou didst will to make me Thyself; and that Thou wast all mine, with all that Thou hadst and with all Paradise, and that I was all Thine. That I should leave all, or rather the nothing; and that (then) thou wouldst give me the all. And that Thou hadst given me this name—at which words I heard within me ‘dedi te in lucem gentium’—not without good reason. And it seemed then, as though I had an inclination for nothing except the purest Union, without any means, in accordance with that detailed sight which Thou hadst given me. So then I said to Thee: These other things, give them to whom Thou wilt; give me but this most pure Union with Thee, free from every means.”

“Our work is the love of God,” cries Ruysbroeck. “Our satisfaction lies in submission to the Divine Embrace.” This utter and abrupt submission to the Divine Embrace is the essence of that form of contemplation which is called the Orison of Union. “Surrender” is its secret: a personal surrender, not only of finite to Infinite, but of bride to Bridegroom, heart to Heart. This surrender, in contemplatives of an appropriate temperament, is of so complete and ecstatic a type that it involves a more or less complete suspension of normal consciousness, an entrancement; and often crosses the boundary which separates contemplation from true ecstasy, producing in its subject physical as well as psychical effects. In this state, says St. Teresa, “There is no sense of anything: only fruition, without understanding what that may be the fruition of which is granted. It is understood that the fruition is of a certain good, containing in itself all good together at once; but this good is not comprehended. The senses are all occupied in this fruition in such a way, that not one of them is at liberty so as to be able to attend to anything else, whether outward or inward. . . . But this state of complete absorption, together with the utter rest of the imagination—for I believe that the imagination is then wholly at rest—lasts only for a short time; though the faculties do not so completely recover themselves as not to be for some hours afterwards as if in disorder. . . . He who has had experience of this will understand it in some measure, for it cannot be more clearly described, because what then takes place is so obscure. All I am able to say is, that the soul is represented as being close to God; and that there abides a conviction thereof so certain and strong that it cannot possibly help believing so. All the faculties fail now, and are suspended in such a way that, as I said before, their operations cannot be traced. . . . The will must be fully occupied in loving, but it understands not how it loves; the understanding, if it understands, does not understand how it understands. It does not understand, as it seems to me, because, as I said just now, this is a matter which cannot be understood.” Clearly, the psychological situation here is the same as that in which mystics of the impersonal type feel themselves to be involved in the Cloud of Unknowing, or Divine Dark.

“Do not imagine,” says St. Teresa in another place, “that this orison, like that which went before [ i.e. , the quiet] is a sort of drowsiness: (I call it drowsiness, because the soul seems to slumber being neither thoroughly asleep, nor thoroughly awake). In the prayer of union the soul is asleep; fast asleep as regards herself and earthly things. In fact, during the short time that this state lasts she is deprived of all feeling, and though she wishes it, she can think of nothing. Thus she needs no effort in order to suspend her thoughts; if the soul can love—she knows not how or when she loves, nor what she desires . . . she is, as it were, entirely dead to the world, the better to live in God.”

It may be asked, in what way does such contemplation as this differ from unconsciousness. The difference, according to St. Teresa, consists in the definite somewhat which takes place during this inhibition of the surface-consciousness: a “somewhat” of which that surface-consciousness becomes aware when it awakes. True contemplation, as the mystics are constantly assuring us, must always be judged by its fruits. If it be genuine, work has been done during the period of apparent passivity. The deeper self has escaped, has risen to freedom, and returns other than it was before. We must remember that Teresa is speaking from experience, and that her temperamental peculiarities will modify the form which this experience takes. “The soul,” she says, “neither sees, hears, nor understands anything while this state lasts; but this is usually a very short time, and seems to the soul even shorter than it really is. God visits the soul in a way that prevents it doubting when it comes to itself that is has been in God and God in it; and so firmly is it convinced of this truth that, though years may pass before this state recurs, the soul can never forget it nor doubt its reality. . . . But you will say, how can the soul see and comprehend that she is in God and God in her, if during this union she is not able either to see or understand? I reply, that she does not see it at the time, but that afterwards she perceives it clearly: not by a vision, but by a certitude which remains in the heart which God alone can give.”