Evelyn Underhill · 34 of 40

X. The Unitive Life · Part 1

W hat is the Unitive Life? We have referred to it often enough in the course of this inquiry. At last we are face to face with the necessity of defining its nature if we can. Since the normal man knows little about his own true personality and nothing at all about that of Deity, the orthodox description of it as “the life in which man’s will is united with God,” does but echo the question in an ampler form, and conveys no real meaning to the student’s mind.

That we should know, by instinct, its character from within—as we know, if we cannot express, the character of our own normal human lives—is of course impossible. We deal here with the final triumph of the spirit, the flower of mysticism, humanity’s top note: the consummation towards which the contemplative life, with its long slow growth and costly training, has moved from the first. We look at a small but ever-growing group of heroic figures, living at transcendent levels of reality which we immersed in the poor life of illusion, cannot attain: breathing an atmosphere whose true quality we cannot even conceive. Here, then, as at so many other points in our study of the spiritual consciousness, we must rely for the greater part of our knowledge upon the direct testimony of the mystics; who alone can tell the character of that “more abundant life” which they enjoy.

Yet we are not wholly dependent on this source of information. It is the peculiarity of the Unitive Life that it is often lived, in its highest and most perfect forms, in the world; and exhibits its works before the eyes of men. As the law of our bodies is “earth to earth” so, strangely enough, is the law of our souls. The spirit of man having at last come to full consciousness of reality, completes the circle of Being; and returns to fertilize those levels of existence from which it sprang. Hence, the enemies of mysticism, who have easily drawn a congenial moral from the “morbid and solitary” lives of contemplatives in the earlier and educative stages of the Mystic Way, are here confronted very often by the disagreeable spectacle of the mystic as a pioneer of humanity, a sharply intuitive and painfully practical person: an artist, a discoverer, a religious or social reformer, a national hero, a “great active” amongst the saints. By the superhuman nature of that which these persons accomplish, we can gauge something of the super-normal vitality of which they partake. The things done, the victories gained over circumstances by St. Bernard or St. Joan of Arc, by St. Catherine of Siena, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Teresa, George Fox, are hardly to be explained unless these great spirits had indeed a closer, more intimate, more bracing contact than their fellows with that Life “which is the light of men.”

Use have, then, these two lines of investigation open to us: first, the comparison and elucidation of that which the mystics tell us concerning their transcendent experience, secondly, the testimony which is borne by their lives to the existence within them of supernal springs of action, contact set up with deep levels of vital power. In the third place, we have such critical machinery as psychology has placed at our disposal; but this, in dealing with these giants of the spirit, must be used with peculiar caution and humility.

The Unitive Life, though so often lived in the world, is never of it. It belongs to another plane of being, moves securely upon levels unrelated to our speech; and hence eludes the measuring powers of humanity. We, from the valley, can only catch a glimpse of the true life of these elect spirits, transfigured upon the mountain. They are far away, breathing another air: we cannot reach them. Yet it is impossible to over-estimate their importance for the race. They are our ambassadors to the Absolute. They vindicate humanity’s claim to the possible and permanent attainment of Reality; bear witness to the practical qualities of the transcendental life. In Eucken’s words, they testify to “the advent of a triumphing Spiritual Power, as distinguished from a spirituality which merely lays the foundations of life or struggles to maintain them”: to the actually life-enhancing power of the Love of God, once the human soul is freely opened to receive it.

Coming first to the evidence of the mystics themselves, we find that in their attempts towards describing the Unitive Life they have recourse to two main forms of symbolic expression, both very dangerous, and liable to be misunderstood, both offering ample opportunity for harsh criticism to hostile investigators of the mystic type. We find also, as we might expect from our previous encounters with the symbols used by contemplatives and ecstatics, that these two forms of expression belong respectively to mystics of the transcendent-metaphysical and of the intimate-personal type: and that their formulae if taken alone, appear to contradict one another.

(1) The metaphysical mystic, for whom the Absolute is impersonal and transcendent, describes his final attainment of that Absolute as deification, or the utter transmutation of the self in God. (2) The mystic for whom intimate and personal communion has been the mode under which he best apprehended Reality speaks of the consummation of this communion, its perfect and permanent form, as the Spiritual Marriage of his soul with God. Obviously, both these terms are but the self’s guesses concerning the intrinsic character of a state which it has felt in its wholeness rather than analysed: and bear the same relation to the ineffable realities of that state, as our clever theories concerning the nature and meaning of life bear to the vital processes of men. It is worth while to examine them but we shall not understand them till we have also examined the life which they profess to explain.

The language of “deification” and of “spiritual marriage,” then, is temperamental language: and is related to subjective experience rather than to objective fact. It describes on the one hand the mystic’s astonished recognition of a profound change effected in his own personality —the transmutation of his salt, sulphur, and mercury into Spiritual Gold—on the other, the rapturous consummation of his love. Hence by a comparison of these symbolic reconstructions, by the discovery and isolation of the common factor latent in each, we may perhaps learn something of the fundamental fact which each is trying to portray.

Again, the mystics describe certain symptoms either as the necessary preliminaries or as the marks and fruits of the Unitive State: and these too may help us to fix its character.

The chief, in fact the one essential, preliminary is that pure surrender of selfhood, or “self-naughting,” which the trials of the Dark Night tended to produce. “This,” says Julian of Norwich, “is the cause why that no soul is rested till it is naughted of all things that are made. When it is willingly made naught for love to have Him that is all, then is it able to receive spiritual rest.” Only the thoroughly detached, “naughted soul” is “free,” says “The Mirror of Simple Souls,” and the Unitive State is essentially a state of free and filial participation in Eternal Life. The capital marks of the state itself are (1) a complete absorption in the interests of the Infinite, under whatever mode It is apprehended by the self; (2) a consciousness of sharing Its strength, acting by Its authority, which results in a complete sense of freedom, an invulnerable serenity, and usually urges the self to some form of heroic effort or creative activity; (3) the establishment of the self as a “power for life,” a centre of energy, an actual parent of spiritual vitality in other men. By assembling these symptoms and examining them, and the lives of those who exhibit them, in the light of psychology, we can surely get some news—however fragmentary—concerning the transcendent condition of being which involves these characteristic states and acts. Beyond this even Dante himself could not go:

‘Transumanar significar per verba non si poria.”

We will then consider the Unitive Life (1) As it appears from the standpoint of the psychologist. (2) As it is described to us by those mystics who use (a) the language of Deification, (b) that of Spiritual Marriage. (3) Finally, we will turn to those who have lived it; and try, if we can, to realize it as an organic whole.

(1) From the point of view of the pure psychologist, what do the varied phenomena of the Unitive Life, taken together, seem to represent? He would probably say that they indicate the final and successful establishment of that higher form of consciousness which has been struggling for supremacy during the whole of the Mystic Way. The deepest, richest levels of human personality have now attained to light and freedom. The self is remade, transformed, has at last unified itself; and with the cessation of stress, power has been liberated for new purposes.

“The beginning of the mystic life,” says Delacroix, “introduced into the personal life of the subject a group of states which are distinguished by certain characteristics, and which form, so to speak, a special psychological system. At its term, it has, as it were, suppressed the ordinary self, and by the development of this system has established a new personality with a new method of feeling and of action. Its growth results in the transformation of personality: it abolishes the primitive consciousness of selfhood, and substitutes for it a wider consciousness, the total disappearance of selfhood in the divine, the substitution of a Divine Self for the primitive self.” We give a philosophic content to this conception if we say further that man, in this Unitive State, by this substitution of the divine for the “primitive” self, has at last risen to true freedom; “entered on the fruition of reality.” Hence he has opened up new paths for the inflow of that Triumphing Power which is the very substance of the Real; has remade his consciousness, and in virtue of this total regeneration is “transplanted into that Universal Life, which is yet not alien but our own.” From contact set up with this Universal Life, this “Energetic Word of God, which nothing can contain”—from those deep levels of Being to which his shifting, growing personality is fully adapted at last—he draws that amazing strength, that immovable peace, that power of dealing with circumstance, which is one of the most marked characteristics of the Unitive Life. “That secret and permanent personality of a superior type” which gave to the surface-self constant and ever more insistent intimations of its existence at every stage of the mystic’s growth—his real, eternal self—has now consciously realized its destiny: and begins at last fully to be. In the travail of the Dark Night it has conquered and invaded the last recalcitrant elements of character. It is no more limited to acts of profound perception, overpowering intuitions of the Absolute: no more dependent for its emergence on the psychic states of contemplation and ecstasy. Anima and Animus are united. The mystic has at last resolved the Stevensonian paradox; and is not truly two, but truly one.

(2) The mystic, I think, would acquiesce in these descriptions, so far as they go: but he would probably translate them into his own words and gloss them with an explanation which is beyond the power and province of psychology. He would say that his long-sought correspondence with Transcendental Reality, his union with God, has now been finally established: that his self, though intact, is wholly penetrated—as a sponge by the sea—by the Ocean of Life and Love to which he has attained. “I live, yet not I but God in me.” He is conscious that he is now at length cleansed of the last stains of separation, and has become, in a mysterious manner, “that which he beholds.”

In the words of the Sufi poet, the mystic’s journey is now prosecuted not only to God but in God. He has entered the Eternal Order, attained here and now the state to which the Magnet of the Universe draws every living thing. Moving through periods of alternate joy and anguish, as his spiritual self woke, stretched, and was tested in the complementary fires of love and pain, he was inwardly conscious that he moved towards a definite objective. In so far as he was a great mystic, he was also conscious that this objective was no mere act of knowing, however intense, exultant, and sublime, but a condition of being, fulfilment of that love which impelled him, steadily and inexorably, to his own place. In the image of the alchemists, the Fire of Love has done its work: the mystic Mercury of the Wise—that little hidden treasure, that scrap of Reality within him—has utterly transmuted the salt and sulphur of his mind and his sense. Even the white stone of illumination, once so dearly cherished, he has resigned to the crucible. Now, the great work is accomplished, the last imperfection is gone, and he finds within himself the “Noble Tincture”—the gold of spiritual humanity.

(A) We have said that the mystic of the impersonal type—the seeker of a Transcendent Absolute—tends to describe the consummation of his quest in the language of deification. The Unitive Life necessarily means for him, as for all who attain it, something which infinitely transcends the sum total of its symptoms: something which normal men cannot hope to understand. In it he declares that he “partakes directly of the Divine Nature,” enjoys the fruition of reality. Since we “only behold that which we are,” the doctrine of deification results naturally and logically from this claim.

“Some may ask,” says the author of the “Theologia Germanica” “what is it to be a partaker of the Divine Nature, or a Godlike [ vergottet , literally deified] man? Answer: he who is imbued with or illuminated by the Eternal or Divine Light and inflamed or consumed with Eternal or Divine Love, he is a deified man and a partaker of the Divine Nature.”

Such a word as “deification” is not, of course, a scientific term. It is a metaphor, an artistic expression which tries to hint at a transcendent fact utterly beyond the powers of human understanding, and therefore without equivalent in human speech: that fact of which Dante perceived the “shadowy preface” when he saw the saints as petals of the Sempiternal Rose. Since we know not the Being of God, the mere statement that a soul is transformed in Him may convey to us an ecstatic suggestion, but will never give exact information: except of course to those rare selves who have experienced these supernal states. Such selves, however—or a large proportion of them—accept this statement as approximately true. Whilst the more clear-sighted are careful to qualify it in a sense which excludes pantheistic interpretations, and rebuts the accusation that extreme mystics preach the annihilation of the self and regard themselves as co-equal with the Deity, they leave us in no doubt that it answers to a definite and normal experience of many souls who attain high levels of spiritual vitality. Its terms are chiefly used by those mystics by whom Reality is apprehended as a state or place rather than a Person: and who have adopted, in describing the earlier stages of their journey to God, such symbols as those of rebirth or transmutation.

The blunt and positive language of these contemplatives concerning deification has aroused more enmity amongst the unmystical than any other of their doctrines or practices. It is of course easy, by confining oneself to its surface sense, to call such language blasphemous: and the temptation to do so has seldom been resisted. Yet, rightly understood, this doctrine lies at the heart, not only of all mysticism, but also of much philosophy and most religion. It pushes their first principles to a logical end. Christian mysticism, says Delacroix with justice, springs from “that spontaneous and half-savage longing for deification which all religion contains.” Eastern Christianity has always accepted it and expressed it in her rites. “The Body of God deifies me and feeds me,” says Simeon Metaphrastes, “it deifies my spirit and it feeds my soul in an incomprehensible manner.”

The Christian mystics justify this dogma of the deifying of man, by exhibiting it as the necessary corollary of the Incarnation—the humanizing of God. They can quote the authority of the Fathers in support of this argument. “He became man that we might be made God,” says St. Athanasius. “I heard,” says St. Augustine, speaking of his pre-converted period, “Thy voice from on high crying unto me, ‘I am the Food of the fullgrown: grow, and then thou shalt feed on Me. Nor shalt thou change Me into thy substance as thou changest the food of thy flesh, but thou shalt be changed into Mine.’” Eckhart therefore did no more than expand the patristic view when he wrote, “Our Lord says to every living soul, ‘I became man for you. If you do not become God for me, you do me wrong.’”

If we are to allow that the mystics have ever attained the object of their quest, I think we must also allow that such attainment involves the transmutation of the self to that state which they call, for want of exact language, “deified.” The necessity of such transmutation is an implicit of their first position: the law that “we behold that which we are, and are that which we behold.” Eckhart, in whom the language of deification assumes its most extreme form, justifies it upon this necessity. “If,” he says, “I am to know God directly, I must become completely He and He I: so that this He and this I become and are one I.”

God, said St. Augustine, is the Country of the soul: its Home, says Ruysbroeck. The mystic in the unitive state is living in and of his native land; no exploring alien, but a returned exile, now wholly identified with it, part of it, yet retaining his personality intact. As none know the spirit of England but the English; and they know it by intuitive participation, by mergence, not by thought; so none but the “deified” know the secret life of God. This, too, is a knowledge conferred only by participation: by living a life, breathing an atmosphere, “union with that same Light by which they see, and which they see.” It is one of those rights of citizenship which cannot be artificially conferred. Thus it becomes important to ask the mystics what they have to tell us of their life lived upon the bosom of Reality: and to receive their reports without prejudice, however hard the sayings they contain.

The first thing which emerges from these reports, and from the choice of symbols which we find in them, is that the great mystics are anxious above all things to establish and force on us the truth that by deification they intend no arrogant claim to identification with God, but as it were a transfusion of their selves by His Self: an entrance upon a new order of life, so high and so harmonious with Reality that it can only be called divine. Over and over again they assure us that personality is not lost, but made more real. “When,” says St. Augustine, “I shall cleave to Thee with all my being, then shall I in nothing have pain and labour; and my life shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee.” “My life shall be a real life” because it is “full of Thee.” The achievement of reality, and deification, are then one and the same thing: necessarily so, since we know that only the divine is the real.

Mechthild of Magdeburg, and after her Dante, saw Deity as a flame or river of fire that filled the Universe, and the “deified” souls of the saints as ardent sparks therein, ablaze with that fire, one thing with it, yet distinct. Ruysbroeck, too, saw “Every soul like a live coal, burned up by God on the heart of His Infinite Love.” Such fire imagery has seemed to many of the mystics a peculiarly exact and suggestive symbol of the transcendent state which they are struggling to describe. No longer confused by the dim Cloud of Unknowing, they have pierced to its heart, and there found their goal: that uncreated and energizing Fire which guided the children of Israel through the night. By a deliberate appeal to the parallel of such great impersonal forces—to Fire and Heat, Light, Water, Air—mystic writers seem able to bring out a perceived aspect of the Godhead, and of the transfigured soul’s participation therein, which no merely personal language, taken alone, can touch. Thus Boehme, trying to describe the union between the Word and the soul, says, “I give you an earthly similitude of this. Behold a bright flaming piece of iron, which of itself is dark and black, and the fire so penetrateth and shineth through the iron, that it giveth light. Now, the iron doth not cease to be, it is iron still: and the source (or property) of the fire retaineth its own propriety: it doth not take the iron into it, but it penetrateth (and shineth) through the iron; and it is iron then as well as before, free in itself: and so also is the source or property of the fire. In such a manner is the soul set in the Deity; the Deity penetrateth through the soul, and dwelleth in the soul, yet the soul doth not comprehend the Deity, but the Deity comprehendeth the soul, but doth not alter it (from being a soul) but only giveth it the divine source (or property) of the Majesty.”

Almost exactly the same image of deification was used, five hundred years before Boehme’s day, by Richard of St. Victor; a mystic whom he is hardly likely to have read. “When the soul is plunged in the fire of divine love,” he says, “like iron, it first loses its blackness, and then growing to white heat, it becomes like unto the fire itself. And lastly, it grows liquid, and losing its nature is transmuted into an utterly different quality of being.” “As the difference between iron that is cold and iron that is hot,” he says again, “so is the difference between soul and soul: between the tepid soul and the soul made incandescent by divine love.” Other contemplatives say that the deified soul is transfigured by the inundations of the Uncreated Light: that it is like a brand blazing in the furnace, transformed to the likeness of the fire. “These souls,” says the Divine voice to St. Catherine of Siena, “thrown into the furnace of My charity, no part of their will remaining outside but the whole of them being inflamed in Me, are like a brand, wholly consumed in the furnace, so that no one can take hold of it to extinguish it, because it has become fire. In the same way no one can seize these souls, or draw them outside of Me, because they are made one thing with Me through grace, and I never withdraw Myself from them by sentiment, as in the case of those whom I am leading on to perfection.”

For the most subtle and delicate descriptions of the Unitive or Deified State, understood as self-loss in the “Ocean Pacific” of God, we must go to the great genius of Ruysbroeck. He alone, whilst avoiding all its pitfalls, has conveyed the suggestion of its ineffable joys in a measure which seems, as we read, to be beyond all that we had supposed possible to human utterance. Awe and rapture, theological profundity, keen psychological insight, are here tempered by a touching simplicity. We listen to the report of one who has indeed heard “the invitation of love” which “draws interior souls towards the One” and says “Come home.” A humble receptivity, a meek self-naughting is with Ruysbroeck, as with all great mystics, the gate of the City of God. “Because they have abandoned themselves to God in doing, in leaving undone, and in suffering,” he says of the deified souls, “they have steadfast peace and inward joy, consolation and savour, of which the world cannot partake; neither any dissembler, nor the man who seeks and means himself more than the glory of God. Moreover, those same inward and enlightened men have before them in their inward seeing, whenever they will, the Love of God as something drawing or urging them into the Unity; for they see and feel that the Father with the Son through the Holy Ghost, embrace Each Other and all the chosen, and draw themselves back with eternal love into the unity of Their Nature. Thus the Unity is ever drawing to itself and inviting to itself everything that has been born of It, either by nature or by grace. And therefore, too, such enlightened men are, with a free spirit, lifted up above reason into a bare and imageless vision, wherein lives the eternal indrawing summons of the Divine Unity; and, with an imageless and bare understanding, they pass through all works, and all exercises, and all things, until they reach the summit of their spirits. There, their bare understanding is drenched through by the Eternal Brightness, even as the air is drenched through by the sunshine. And the bare, uplifted will is transformed and drenched through by abysmal love, even as iron is by fire. And the bare, uplifted memory feels itself enwrapped and established in an abysmal Absence of Image. And thereby the created image is united above reason in a threefold way with its Eternal Image, which is the origin of its being and its life. . . . Yet the creature does not become God, for the union takes place in God through grace and our homeward-turning love: and therefore the creature in its inward contemplation feels a distinction and an otherness between itself and God. And though the union is without means, yet the manifold works which God works in heaven and on earth are nevertheless hidden from the spirit. For though God gives Himself as He is, with clear discernment, He gives Himself in the essence of the soul, where the powers of the soul are simplified above reason, and where, in simplicity, they suffer the transformation of God. There all is full and overflowing, for the spirit feels itself to be one truth and one richness and one unity with God. Yet even here there is an essential tending forward, and therein is an essential distinction between the being of the soul and the Being of God; and this is the highest and finest distinction which we are able to feel.”

“When love has carried us above and beyond all things,” he says in another place, “above the light, into the Divine Dark, there we are wrought and transformed by the Eternal Word Who is the image of the Father; and as the air is penetrated by the sun, thus we receive in idleness of spirit the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us and penetrating us. And this flight is nothing else but an infinite gazing and seeing. We behold that which we are, and we are that which be behold; because our thought, life and being are uplifted in simplicity and made one with the Truth which is God.”

Here the personal aspect of the Absolute seems to be reduced to a minimum: yet all that we value in personality—love, action, will—remains unimpaired. We seem caught up to a plane of vision beyond the categories of the human mind: to the contemplation of a Something Other—our home, our hope, and our passion, the completion of our personality, and the Substance of all that Is. Such an endless contemplation, such a dwelling within the substance of Goodness, Truth and, Beauty, is the essence of that Beatific Vision, that participation of Eternity, “of all things most delightful and desired, of all things most loved by them who have it,” which theology presents to us as the objective of the soul.

Those mystics of the metaphysical type who tend to use these impersonal symbols of Place and Thing often see in the Unitive Life a foretaste of the Beatific Vision: an entrance here and now into that absolute life within the Divine Being, which shall be lived by all perfect spirits when they have cast off the limitations of the flesh and re-entered the eternal order for which they were made. For them, in fact, the “deified man,” in virtue of his genius for transcendental reality, has run ahead of human history: and attained a form of consciousness which other men will only know when earthly life is past.

In the “Book of Truth” Suso has a beautiful and poetic comparison between the life of the blessed spirits dwelling within the Ocean of Divine Love, and that approximate life which is lived on earth by the mystic who has renounced all selfhood and merged his will in that of the Eternal Truth. Here we find one of the best of many answers to the ancient but apparently immortal accusation that the mystics teach the total annihilation of personality as the end and object of their quest. “Lord, tell me,” says the Servitor, “what remains to a blessed soul which has wholly renounced itself.” Truth says, “When the good and faithful servant enters into the joy of his Lord, he is inebriated by the riches of the house of God; for he feels, in an ineffable degree, that which is felt by an inebriated man. He forgets himself, he is no longer conscious of his selfhood; he disappears and loses himself in God, and becomes one spirit with Him, as a drop of water which is drowned in a great quantity of wine. For even as such a drop disappears, taking the colour and the taste of wine, so it is with those who are in full possession of blessedness. All human desires are taken from them in an indescribable manner, they are rapt from themselves, and are immersed in the Divine Will. If it were otherwise, if there remained in the man some human thing that was not absorbed, those words of Scripture which say that God must be all in all would be false. His being remains, but in another form, in another glory, and in another power. And all this is the result of entire and complete renunciation. . . . Herein thou shalt find an answer to thy question; for the true renunciation and veritable abandonment of a man to the Divine Will in the temporal world is an imitation and reduction of that self-abandonment of the blessed, of which Scripture speaks: and this imitation approaches its model more or less, according as men are more or less united with God and become more or less one with God. Remark well that which is said of the blessed: they are stripped of their personal initiative, and changed into another form, another glory, another power. What then is this other form, if it be not the Divine Nature and the Divine Being whereinto they pour themselves, and which pours Itself into them, and becomes one thing with them? And what is that other glory, if it be not to be illuminated and made shining in the Inaccessible Light? What is that other power, if it be not that by means of his union with the Divine Personality, there is given to man a divine strength and a divine power, that he may accomplish all which pertains to his blessedness and omit all which is contrary thereto? And thus it is that, as has been said, a man comes forth from his selfhood.”