It is impossible for the deaf to form any idea of the nature or significance of music. Nor is physical disability the only obstacle in the way of musical understanding. An Indian, for example, finds European orchestral music intolerably noisy, complicated, over-intellectual, inhuman. It seems incredible to him that anyone should be able to perceive beauty and meaning, to recognize an expression of the deepest and subtlest emotions, in this elaborate cacophony. And yet, if he has patience and listens to enough of it, he will come at last to realize, not only theoretically, but also by direct, immediate intuition, that this music possesses all the qualities which Europeans claim for it. Of the significant and pleasurable experiences of life only the simplest are open indiscriminately to all. The rest cannot be had except by those who have undergone a suitable training. One must be trained even to enjoy the pleasures of alcohol and tobacco; first whiskies seem revolting, first pipes turn even the strongest of boyish stomachs. Similarly, first Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance.
It is the same in the moral world. A man who has trained himself in goodness comes to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world—intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man. Knowledge is always a function of being. What we perceive and understand depends upon what we are; and what we are depends partly on circumstances, partly, and more profoundly, on the nature of the efforts we have made to realize our ideal and the nature of the ideal we have tried to realize. The fact that knowing depends upon being leads, of course, to an immense amount of misunderstanding. The meaning of words, for example, changes profoundly according to the character and experiences of the user. Thus, to the saint, words like ‘love,’ ‘charity,’ ‘compassion’ mean something quite different from what they mean to the ordinary man. Again, to the ordinary man, Spinoza’s statement that ‘blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself’ seems simply untrue. Being virtuous is, for him, a most tedious and distressing process. But it is clear that to someone who has trained himself in goodness, virtue really is blessedness, while the life of the ordinary man, with its petty vices and its long spells of animal thoughtlessness and insentience, seems a real torture. In view of the fact that knowing is conditioned by being and that being can be profoundly modified by training, we are justified in ignoring most of the arguments by which non-mystics have sought to discredit the experience of mystics.
The being of a colour-blind man is such that he is not competent to pass judgment on a painting. The colour-blind man cannot be educated into seeing colours, and in this respect he is different from the Indian musician, who begins by finding European symphonies merely deafening and bewildering, but can be trained, if he so desires, to perceive the beauties of this kind of music. Similarly, the being of a non-mystical person is such that he cannot understand the nature of the mystic’s intuitions. Like the Indian musician, however, he is at liberty, if he so chooses, to have some kind of direct experience of what at present he does not understand. This training is one which he will certainly find extremely tedious; for it involves, first, the leading of a life of constant awareness and unremitting moral effort, second, steady practice in the technique of meditation, which is probably about as difficult as the technique of violin-playing. But, however tedious, the training can be undertaken by anyone who wishes to do so. Those who have not undertaken the training can have no knowledge of the kind of experiences open to those who have undertaken it and are as little justified in denying the validity of those direct intuitions of an ultimate spiritual reality, at once transcendent and immanent, as were the Pisan professors who denied, on a priori grounds, the validity of Galileo’s direct intuition (made possible by the telescope) of the fact that Jupiter has several moons.
The validity of the mystical experience is often questioned on the ground that the mystics of each religion have direct intuition only of the particular deities they are accustomed to worship. This is only partially true. There are good mystics and bad mystics, just as there are good and bad artists. The great majority of artists are, and always have been, bad or indifferent; and the same is probably true of the majority of mystics. Significantly enough it is always among those mystics, whom qualified critics regard as second-rate, that the intuitions of ultimate reality take a particularized form. To the mystics who are generally regarded as the best of their kind, ultimate reality does not appear under the aspect of the local divinities. It appears as a spiritual reality so far beyond particular form or personality that nothing can be predicated of it.
‘The atman is silence,’ is what the Hindus say of ultimate spiritual reality. The only language that can convey any idea about the nature of this reality is the language of negation, of paradox, of extravagant exaggeration. The pseudo-Dionysius speaks of the ‘ray of the divine darkness,’ of ‘the super-lucent darkness of silence’ and of the necessity to ‘leave behind the senses and the intellectual operations and all things known by sense and intellect.’ ‘If anyone,’ he writes, ‘seeing God, understands what he has seen, he has not seen God.’ ‘Nescio, nescio,’ was what St. Bernard wrote of the ultimate reality; ‘neti, neti,’ was Yajnavalkya’s verdict at the other side of the world. ‘I know not, I know not: not so, not so,’ We are a long way from particularized Hindu or Christian divinities.
The biography of most of the first-class Christian mystics is curiously similar. Brought up to believe in the personality of the triune God and in the existence and ubiquitous presence of other divine persons, such as the Virgin and the saints, they begin their mystical career by entering, as they suppose, into relations with supernatural personalities. Then, as they advance further along the path—and all the mystics are agreed that this process is genuinely an advance—they find that their visions disappear, that their awareness of a personality fades, that the emotional outpourings which were appropriate when they seemed to be in the presence of a person, become utterly inappropriate and finally give place to a state in which there is no emotion at all. For many Christian mystics this process has been extremely distressing.
The anguish of losing contact with personality—of having to abandon the traditional beliefs, constitutes what St. John of the Cross calls the Night of the Senses, and it would seem that the same anguish is an element of that still more frightful desolation, the Night of the Spirit. St. John of the Cross considers that all true mystics must necessarily pass through this terrible dark night. So far as strictly orthodox Christians are concerned, he is probably right. In this context, a most valuable document is the Life of Marie Lataste.[25] Marie Lataste was an uneducated peasant girl, completely ignorant of the history of mysticism. She begins by having visions of the Virgin and of Christ. Her mystical experience at this period consists essentially of emotional relationships with divine persons. In the course of time the sense of a personal presence leaves her.
She feels lonely and abandoned. It is the dark night of the soul. In the end, however, she comes to understand that this new form of experience—the imageless and emotionless cognition of some great impersonal force—is superior to the old and represents a closer approach to ultimate reality. Marie Lataste’s case is particularly interesting, because her ignorance of mystical literature precludes the possibility that she deliberately or unconsciously imitated any other mystic. Her experience was wholly her own. Brought up in the traditional belief that God is a person, she gradually discovers by direct intuition that he is not a person; and for a time, at least, the discovery causes her considerable distress. For orthodox Christians, I repeat, the dark night of the soul would seem to be an unescapable horror.
Significantly enough this particular form of spiritual anguish is not experienced by unorthodox Christians, nor by those non-Christian mystics who profess a religion that regards God as impersonal. For example, that most remarkable of the later mediaeval mystics, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, makes no mention of any phase of spiritual distress. The fact is that he has no reason to be distressed. From the first his preoccupation is with God the Father rather than with God the Son; and from the first he assumes that God is impersonal. He is therefore never called upon to make any excruciating abandonment of cherished beliefs. The doctrine with which he starts out is actually confirmed by the direct intuition of ultimate reality which comes to him in his moments
