Evelyn Underhill · 35 of 40

X. The Unitive Life · Part 2

All the mystics agree that the stripping off of the I, the Me, the Mine, utter renouncement, or “self-naughting”—self-abandonment to the direction of a larger Will—is an imperative condition of the attainment of the unitive life. The temporary denudation of the mind, whereby the contemplative made space for the vision of God, must now be applied to the whole life. Here, they say, there is a final swallowing up of that wilful I-hood, that surface individuality which we ordinarily recognize as ourselves. It goes for ever, and something new is established in its room. The self is made part of the mystical Body of God; and, humbly taking its place in the corporate life of Reality, would “fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.” That strange “hunger and thirst of God for the soul,” “at once avid and generous,” of which they speak in their profoundest passages, here makes its final demand and receives its satisfaction. “All that He has, all that He is He gives: all that we have, all that we are, He takes.” The self, they declare, is devoured, immersed in the Abyss; “sinks into God, Who is the deep of deeps.” In their efforts towards describing to us this, the supreme mystic act, and the new life to which it gives birth, they are often driven to the use of images which must seem to us grotesque, were it not for the flame which burns behind: as when Ruysbroeck cries, “To eat and be eaten! this is Union! . . . Since His desire is without measure, to be devour of of Him does not greatly amaze me.”

(B) At this point we begin to see that the language of deification, taken alone, will not suffice to describe the soul’s final experience of Reality. The personal and emotional aspect of man’s relation with his Source is also needed if that which he means by “union with God” is to be even partially expressed. Hence, even the most “transcendental” mystic is constantly compelled to fall back on the language of love in the endeavour to express the content of his metaphysical raptures: and forced in the end to acknowledge that the perfect union of Lover and Beloved cannot be suggested in the precise and arid terms of religious philosophy. Such arid language eludes the most dangerous aspects of “divine union,” the pantheistic on one hand, the “amoristic” on the other; but it also fails to express the most splendid side of that amazing experience. It needs some other, more personal and intimate vision to complete it: and this we shall find in the reports of those mystics of the “intimate” type to whom the Unitive Life has meant not self-loss in an Essence, but self-fulfilment in the union of heart and will.

The extreme form of this kind of apprehension of course finds expression in the well-known and heartily abused symbolism of the Spiritual Marriage between God and the Soul: a symbolism which goes back to the Orphic Mysteries, and thence descended via the Neoplatonists into the stream of Christian tradition. But there are other and less concrete embodiments of it, wholly free from the dangers which are supposed to lurk in “erotic” imagery of this kind. Thus Jalalu ‘d Din, by the use of metaphors which are hardly human yet charged with passionate feeling, tells, no less successfully than the writer of the Song of Songs, the secret of “his union in which “heart speaks to heart.”

With Thy Sweet Soul, this soul of mine Hath mixed as Water doth with Wine. Who can the Wine and Water part, Or me and Thee when we combine? Thou art become my greater self; Small bounds no more can me confine. Thou hast my being taken on, And shall not I now take on Thine? Me Thou for ever hast affirmed That I may ever know Thee mine Thy Love has pierced me through and through, Its thrill with Bone and Nerve entwine. I rest a Flute laid on Thy lips; A lute, I on Thy breast recline. Breathe deep in me that I may sigh; Yet strike my strings, and tears shall shine.”

What the mystic here desires to tell us is, that his new life is not only a free and conscious participation in the life of Eternity—a fully-established existence on real and transcendental levels—but also the conscious sharing of an inflowing personal life greater than his own; a tightening of the bonds of that companionship which has been growing in intimacy and splendour during the course of the Mystic Way. This companionship, at once the most actual and most elusive fact of human experience, is utterly beyond the resources of speech. So too are those mysteries of the communion of love, whereby the soul’s humble, active and ever-renewed self-donation becomes the occasion of her glory: and “by her love she is made the equal of Love”—the beggar maid sharing Cophetua’s throne.

Thus the anonymous author of the “Mirror” writes, in one of his most daring passages, “‘I am God,’ says Love, ‘for Love is God, and God is Love. And this soul is God by condition of love: but I am God by Nature Divine. And this [state] is hers by righteousness of love, so that this precious beloved of me is learned, and led of Me without her [working]. . . . This [soul] is the eagle that flies high, so right high and yet more high than doth any other bird; for she is feathered with fine love.’”

The simplest expression of the Unitive Life, the simplest interpretation which we can put on its declarations, is that it is the complete and conscious fulfilment here and now of this Perfect Love. In it certain elect spirits, still in the flesh, “fly high and yet more high,” till “taught and led out of themselves,” they become, in the exaggerated language of the “Mirror,” “God by condition of love.” Home-grown English mysticism tried as a rule to express the inexpressible in homelier, more temperate terms than this. “I would that thou knew,” says the unknown author of the “Epistle of Prayer,” “what manner of working it is that knitteth man’s soul to God, and that maketh it one with Him in love and accordance of will after the word of St. Paul, saying thus: ‘ Qui adhaeret Deo, unus spiritus est cum illo ’ ; that is to say: ‘Whoso draweth near to God as it is by such a reverent affection touched before, he is one spirit with God.’ That is, though all that God and he be two and sere in kind, nevertheless yet in grace they are so knit together that they are but one in spirit; and all this is one for onehead of love and accordance of will; and in this onehead is the marriage made between God and the soul the which shall never be broken, though all that the heat and the fervour of this work cease for a time, but by a deadly sin. In the ghostly feeling of this onehead may a loving soul both say and sing (if it list) this holy word that is written in the Book of Songs in the Bible, ‘Dilectus meus mihi et ego illi, ’ that is, My loved unto me, and I unto Him; understanding that God shall be knitted with the ghostly glue of grace on His party, and the lovely consent in gladness of spirit on thy party.”

I think no one can deny that the comparison of the bond between the soul and the Absolute to “ghostly glue,” though crude, is wholly innocent. Its appearance in this passage as an alternative to the symbol of wedlock may well check the uncritical enthusiasm of those who hurry to condemn at sight all “sexual” imagery. That it has seemed to the mystics appropriate and exact is proved by its reappearance in the next century in the work of a greater contemplative. “Thou givest me,” says Petersen, “Thy whole Self to be mine whole and undivided, if at least I shall be Thine whole and undivided. And when I shall be thus all Thine, even as from everlasting Thou hast loved Thyself, so from everlasting Thou hast loved me: for this means nothing more than that Thou enjoyest Thyself in me, and that I by Thy grace enjoy Thee in myself and myself in Thee. And when in Thee I shall love myself, nothing else but Thee do I love, because Thou art in me and I in Thee, glued together as one and the selfsame thing, which henceforth and forever cannot be divided.”

From this kind of language to that of the Spiritual Marriage, as understood by the pure minds of the mystics, is but a step. They mean by it no rapturous satisfactions, no dubious spiritualizing of earthly ecstasies, but a life-long bond “that shall never be lost or broken,” a close personal union of will and of heart between the free self and that “Fairest in Beauty” Whom it has known in the act of contemplation.

The Mystic Way has been a progress, a growth in love: a deliberate fostering of the inward tendency of the soul towards its source, an eradication of its disorderly tendencies to “temporal goods.” But the only proper end of love is union: “a perfect uniting and coupling together of the lover and the loved into one.” It is “a unifying principle,” the philosophers say: life’s mightiest agent upon every plane. Moreover, just as earthly marriage is understood by the moral sense less as a satisfaction of personal desire, than as a part of the great process of life—the fusion of two selves for new purposes—so such spiritual marriage brings with it duties and obligations. With the attainment of a new order, the new infusion of vitality, comes a new responsibility, the call to effort and endurance on a new and mighty scale. It is not an act but a state. Fresh life is imparted, by which our lives are made complete: new creative powers are conferred. The self, lifted to the divine order, is to be an agent of the divine fecundity: an energizing centre, a parent of transcendental life. “The last perfection,” says Aquinas, “to supervene upon a thing, is its becoming the cause of other things. While then a creature tends by many ways to the likeness of God, the last way left open to it is to seek the divine likeness by being the cause of other things, according to what the Apostle says, Dei enim sumus adjutores .”

We find as a matter of fact, when we come to study the history of the mystics, that the permanent Unitive State, or spiritual marriage, does mean for those who attain to it, above all else such an access of creative vitality. It means man’s small derivative life invaded and enhanced by the Absolute Life: the appearance in human history of personalities and careers which seem superhuman when judged by the surface mind. Such activity, such a bringing forth of “the fruits of the Spirit,” may take many forms: but where it is absent, where we meet with personal satisfactions, personal visions or raptures—however sublime and spiritualized—presented as marks of the Unitive Way, ends or objects of the quest of Reality, we may be sure that we have wandered from the “strait and narrow road” which leads, not to eternal rest, but to Eternal Life. “The fourth degree of love is spiritually fruitful,” said Richard of St. Victor. Wherever we find a sterile love, a “holy passivity,” we are in the presence of quietistic heresy; not of the Unitive Life. “I hold it for a certain truth,” says St. Teresa, “that in giving these graces our Lord intends, as I have often told you, to strengthen our weakness so that we may imitate Him by suffering much. . . . Whence did St. Paul draw strength to support his immense labours? We see clearly in him the effects of visions and contemplations which come indeed from our Lord, and not from our own imagination or the devil’s fraud. Do you suppose St. Paul hid himself in order to enjoy in peace these spiritual consolations, and did nothing else? You know that on the contrary he never took a day’s rest so far as we can learn, and worked at night in order to earn his bread. . . . Oh my sisters! how forgetful of her own ease, how careless of honours, should she be whose soul God thus chooses for His special dwelling place! For if her mind is fixed on Him, as it ought to be, she must needs forget herself; all her thoughts are bent on how to please Him better, and when and how she may show Him her love. This is the end and aim of prayer, my daughters; this is the object of that spiritual marriage whose children are always good works. Works are the best proof that the favours which we receive have come from God.” “To give our Lord a perfect hospitality” she says in the same chapter, “Mary and Martha must combine.”

When we look at the lives of the great theopathetic mystics, the true initiates of Eternity—inarticulate as these mystics often are—we find ourselves in the presence of an amazing, a superabundant vitality: of a “triumphing force” over which circumstance has no power. The incessant production of good works seems indeed to be the object of that Spirit, by Whose presence their interior castle is now filled.

We see St. Paul, abruptly enslaved by the First and Only Fair, not hiding himself to enjoy the vision of Reality, but going out single-handed to organize the Catholic Church. We ask how it was possible for an obscure Roman citizen, without money, influence, or good health, to lay these colossal foundations: and he answers “Not I, but Christ in me.”

We see St. Joan of Arc, a child of the peasant class, leaving the sheepfold to lead the armies of France. We ask how this incredible thing can be: and are told “Her Voices bade her.” A message, an overpowering impulse, came from the supra-sensible: vitality flowed in on her, she knew not how or why. She was united with the Infinite Life, and became Its agent, the medium of Its strength, “what his own hand is to a man.”

We see St. Francis, “God’s troubadour,” marked with His wounds, inflamed with His joy—obverse and reverse of the earnest-money of eternity—or St. Ignatius Loyola, our Lady’s knight, a figure at once militant and romantic, go out to change the spiritual history of Europe. Where did they find—born and bred to the most ordinary of careers, in the least spiritual of atmospheres—that superabundant energy, that genius for success which triumphed best in the most hopeless situations? Francis found it before the crucifix in St. Damiano, and renewed it in the ineffable experience of La Verna; when “by mental possession and rapture he was transfigured of God.” Ignatius found it in the long contemplations and hard discipline of the cave of Manresa, after the act of surrender in which he dedicated his knighthood to the service of the Mother of God.

We see St. Teresa, another born romantic, pass to the Unitive State after long and bitter struggles between her lower and higher personality. A chronic invalid over fifty years of age, weakened by long ill-health and the mortifications of the Purgative Way she deliberately breaks with her old career in obedience to the inward Voice, leaves her convent, and starts a new life: coursing through Spain, and reforming a great religious order in the teeth of the ecclesiastical world. Yet more amazing, St. Catherine of Siena, an illiterate daughter of the people, after a three years’ retreat consummates the mystic marriage, and emerges from the cell of self-knowledge to dominate the politics of Italy. How came it that these apparently unsuitable men and women, checked on every side by inimical environment, ill-health, custom, or poverty achieved these stupendous destinies? The explanation can only lie in the fact that all these persons were great mystics, living upon high levels the theopathetic life. In each a character of the heroic type, of great vitality, deep enthusiasms, unconquerable will, was raised to the spiritual plane, remade on higher levels of consciousness. Each by surrender of selfhood, by acquiescence in the large destinies of life, had so furthered that self’s natural genius for the Infinite that their human limitations were overpassed. Hence they rose to freedom and attained to the one ambition of the “naughted soul,” “I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.”

Even Madame Guyon’s natural tendency to passive states breaks down with her entrance on the Unitive Way. Though she cannot be classed amongst the greatest of its initiates, she too felt its fertilizing power, was stung from her “holy indifference” to become, as it were, involuntarily true to type.

“The soul,” she says of the self entering upon Union—and we cannot doubt that as usual she is describing her own carefully docketed “states”—“feels a secret vigour taking more and more strongly possession of all her being: and little by little she receives a new life, never again to be lost, at least so far as one can be assured of anything in this life. . . . This new life is not like that which she had before. It is a life in God. It is a perfect life. She no longer lives or works of herself: but God lives, acts and works in her, and this grows little by little till she becomes perfect with God’s perfection, is rich with His riches, and loves with His love.” . . .

This new, intense, and veritable life has other and even more vital characteristics than those which lead to “the performance of acts” or “the incessant production of good works.” It is, in an actual sense, as Richard of St. Victor reminded us, fertile, creative, as well as merely active. In the fourth degree of love, the soul brings forth its children. It is the agent of a fresh outbirth of spiritual vitality into the world; the helpmate of the Transcendent Order, the mother of a spiritual progeny. The great unitive mystics are each of them the founders of spiritual families, centres wherefrom radiates new transcendental life. The “flowing light of the Godhead” is focussed in them, as in a lens, only that it may pass through them to spread out on every side. So, too, the great creative seers and artists are the parents, not merely of their own immediate works, but also of whole schools of art, whole groups of persons who acquire or inherit their vision of beauty or truth. Thus within the area of influence of a Paul, a Francis, an Ignatius, a Teresa, an atmosphere of reality is created; and new and vital spiritual personalities gradually appear, meet for the work which these great founders set in hand. The real witness to St. Paul’s ecstatic life in God, is the train of Christian churches by which his journeyings are marked. Wherever Francis passed, he left Franciscans, “fragrant with a wondrous aspect,” where none had been before. The Friends of God spring up, individual mystics, here and there through the Rhineland and Bavaria. Each becomes the centre of an ever widening circle of transcendent life, the parent of a spiritual family. They are come like their Master, that men may have life more abundantly: from them new mystic energy is actually born into the world. Again, Ignatius leaves Manresa a solitary: maimed, ignorant, and poor. He comes to Rome with his company already formed, and ablaze with his spirit; veritably his children, begotten of him, part and parcel of his life.

Teresa finds the order of Mount Carmel hopelessly corrupt: its friars and nuns blind to reality, indifferent to the obligations of the cloistered life. She is moved by the Spirit to leave her convent and begin, in abject poverty, the foundation of new houses, where the most austere and exalted life of contemplation shall be led. She enters upon this task to the accompaniment of an almost universal mockery. Mysteriously, as she proceeds, novices of the spiritual life appear and cluster around her. They come into existence, one knows not how, in the least favourable of atmospheres: but one and all are salted with the Teresian salt. They receive the infection of her abundant vitality: embrace eagerly and joyously the heroic life of the Reform. In the end, every city in Spain has within it Teresa’s spiritual children: a whole order of contemplatives, as truly born of her as if they were indeed her sons and daughters in the flesh. Well might the Spiritual Alchemists say that the true “Lapis Philosophorum” is a tinging stone: which imparts its goldness to the base metals brought within its sphere of influence.

This reproductive power is one of the greatest marks of the theopathetic life: the true “mystic marriage” of the individual soul with its Source. Those rare personalities in whom it is found are the media through which that Triumphing Spiritual Life which is the essence of reality forces an entrance into the temporal order and begets children; heirs of the superabundant vitality of the transcendental universe.

But the Unitive Life is more than the sum total of its symptoms: more than the heroic and apostolic life of the “great active”: more than the divine motherhood of new “sons and daughters of the Absolute.” These are only its outward signs, its expression in time and space. I have first laid stress upon that expression, because it is the side which all critics and some friends of the mystics persistently ignore. The contemplative’s power of living this intense and creative life within the temporal order, however, is tightly bound up with that other life in which he attains to complete communion with the Absolute Order, and submits to the inflow of its supernal vitality. In discussing the relation of the mystical experience to philosophy, we saw that the complete mystic consciousness, and therefore, of course, the complete mystic world, had a twofold character which could hardly be reconciled with the requirements of monism. It embraced a Reality which seems from the human standpoint at once static and dynamic, transcendent and immanent, eternal and temporal: accepted both the absolute World of Pure Being and the unresting World of Becoming as integral parts of its vision of Truth, demanding on its side a dual response. All through the Mystic Way we caught glimpses of the growth and exercise of this dual intuition of the Real. Now, the mature mystic, having come to his full stature, passed through the purifications of sense and of spirit and entered on his heritage, must and does take up as a part of that heritage not merely ( a ) a fruition of the Divine Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, his place within the Sempiternal Rose, nor ( b ) the creative activity of an agent of the Eternal Wisdom, still immersed in the River of Life: but both together—the twofold destiny of the spiritual man, called to “incarnate the Eternal in time.” To use the old scholastic language, he is at once patient and agent: patient as regards God, agent as regards the world.

In a deep sense it may be said of him that he now participates according to his measure in that divine-human life which mediates between man and the Eternal, and constitutes the “salvation of the world.” Therefore, though his outward heroic life of action, his divine fecundity, may seem to us the best evidence of his state, it is the inner knowledge of his mystical sonship whereby “we feel eternal life in us above all other thing,” which is for him the guarantee of absolute life. He has many ways of describing this central fact; this peculiar consciousness of his own transcendence, which coexists with, and depends on, a complete humility. Sometimes he says that whereas in the best moments of his natural life he was but the “faithful servant” of the eternal order, and in the illuminated way became its “secret friend,” he is now advanced to the final, most mysterious state of “hidden child.” “How great,” says Ruysbroeck, “is the difference between the secret friend and the hidden child! For the friend makes only loving, living, but measured ascents towards God. But the child presses on to lose his own life upon the summits, in that simplicity which knoweth not itself. . . . When we transcend ourselves and become in our ascent towards God so simple that the bare supreme Love can lay hold of us, then we cease, and we and all our selfhood die in God. And in this death we become the hidden children of God, and find a new life within us.”

Though the outer career of the great mystic, then, be one of superhuman industry, a long fight with evil and adversity, his real and inner life dwells securely upon the heights; in the perfect fruition which he can only suggest to us by the paradoxical symbols of ignorance and emptiness. He dominates existence because he thus transcends it: is a son of God, a member of the eternal order, shares its substantial life. “Tranquillity according to His essence, activity according to His Nature: absolute repose, absolute fecundity”: this, says Ruysbroeck again, is the twofold property of Godhead: and the secret child of the Absolute participates in this dual character of Reality—“for this dignity has man been made.”

Those two aspects of truth which he has so clumsily classified as static and dynamic, as Being and Becoming, now find their final reconciliation within his own nature: for that nature has become conscious in all its parts, has unified itself about its highest elements. That strange, tormenting vision of a perfect peace, a joyous self-loss, annihilation in some mighty Life that overpassed his own, which haunts man throughout the whole course of his history, and finds a more or less distorted expression in all his creeds, a justification in all his ecstasies, is now traced to its source: and found to be the inevitable expression of an instinct by which he recognized, though he could not attain, the noblest part of his inheritance. This recognition of his has of necessity been imperfect and oblique. It has taken in many temperaments an exaggerated form, and has been further disguised by the symbolic language used to describe it. The tendency of Indian mysticism to regard the Unitive Life wholly in its passive aspect, as a total self-annihilation, a disappearance into the substance of the Godhead, results, I believe, from such a distortion of truth. The Oriental mystic “presses on to lose his life upon the heights”; but he does not come back and bring to his fellow-men the life-giving news that he has transcended mortality in the interests of the race. The temperamental bias of Western mystics towards activity has saved them as a rule from such one-sided achievement as this; and hence it is in them that the Unitive Life, with its “dual character of activity and rest,” has assumed its richest and noblest forms.

Of these Western mystics none has expressed more lucidly or splendidly than Ruysbroeck the double nature of man’s reaction to Reality. It is the heart of his vision of truth. In all his books he returns to it again and again: speaking, as none familiar with his writings can doubt, the ardent, joyous, vital language of firsthand experience, not the platitudes of philosophy. He might say with Dante, his forerunner into the Empyrean:—

“La forma universal di questo nodo credo ch’ io vidi, perchè più di largo dicendo questo, mi sento ch’ io godo.”

It is then from Ruysbroeck that I shall make my quotations: and if they be found somewhat long and difficult of comprehension, their unique importance for the study of man’s spiritual abilities must be my excuse.

First, his vision of God:—

“The Divine Persons,” he says, “Who form one sole God, are in the fecundity of their nature ever active: and in the simplicity of their essence they form the Godhead and eternal blessedness. Thus God according to the Persons is Eternal Work: but according to the essence and Its perpetual stillness, He is Eternal Rest. Now love and fruition live between this activity and this rest. Love would ever be active: for its nature is eternal working with God. Fruition is ever at rest, for it consists above all will and all desire, in the embrace of the well-beloved by the well-beloved in a simple and imageless love; wherein the Father, together with the Son, enfolds His beloved ones in the fruitive unity of His Spirit, above the fecundity of nature. And that same Father says to each soul in His infinite loving kindness, ‘Thou art Mine and I am thine: I am thine and thou art Mine, for I have chosen thee from all eternity.’”

Next the vision of the self’s destiny: “Our activity consists in loving God and our fruition in enduring God and being penetrated by His love. There is a distinction between love and fruition, as there is between God and His Grace. When we unite ourselves to God by love, then we are spirit: but when we are caught up and transformed by His Spirit, then we are led into fruition. And the spirit of God Himself breathes us out from Himself that we may love, and may do good works; and again He draws us into Himself, that we may rest in fruition. And this is Eternal Life; even as our mortal life subsists in the indrawing and outgoing of our breath.”

“Understand,” he says again, “God comes to us incessantly, both with means and without means; and He demands of us both action and fruition, in such away that the action never hinders the fruition, nor the fruition the action, but they strengthen one another. And this is why the interior man [ i.e., the contemplative] lives his life according to these two ways; that is to say, in rest and in work. And in each of them he is wholly and undividedly; for he dwells wholly in God in virtue of his restful fruition and wholly in himself in virtue of his active love. And God, in His communications, perpetually calls and urges him to renew both this rest and this work. And because the soul is just, it desires to pay at every instant that which God demands of it; and this is why each time it is irradiated of Him, the soul turns inward in a manner that is both active and fruitive, and thus it is renewed in all virtues and ever more profoundly immersed in fruitive rest. . . . It is active in all loving work, for it sees its rest. It is a pilgrim, for it sees its country. For love’s sake it strives for victory, for it sees its crown. Consolation, peace, joy, beauty and riches, all that can give delight, all this is shown to the mind illuminated in God, in spiritual similitudes and without measure. And through this vision and touch of God, love continues active. For such a just man has built up in his own soul, in rest and in work, a veritable life which shall endure for ever, but which shall be transformed after this present life to a state still more sublime. Thus this man is just, and he goes towards God by inward love, in eternal work, and he goes in God by his fruitive inclination in eternal rest. And he dwells in God; and yet he goes out towards all creatures, in a spirit of love towards all things, in virtue and in works of righteousness. And this is she supreme summit of the inner life .”