All the writers in the great tradition of Christian mystical theology have insisted on the necessity of purging the mind, during meditation on the ultimate reality, of all images. From Clement of Alexandria, who died at the beginning of the third century and who was the first Christian writer on mystical theology, down to St. John of the Cross in the sixteenth, the tradition is unbroken. It is agreed that the attempt to think of God in terms of images, to conceive ultimate reality as having form or a nature describable in words, is foredoomed to failure. In the latter part of the sixteenth century there was a complete reversal of tradition.
The subject has been treated with a wealth of learned detail by Dom John Chapman in the admirable essay on Roman Catholic Mysticism, which is printed in Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, and it is unnecessary for me to do more than briefly summarize his conclusions. ‘At this very time (the end of the sixteenth century) the dogmatic theologians were rising up against mystical theology. The great Dominicans, following the example of St. Thomas in his Summa, ignored it; the great Jesuits denied its very existence.’ (The Jesuits, of course, had been brought up on Ignatius’s spiritual exercises in which every effort is made, not to suppress the image-forming phantasy—that worst obstacle, according to St. John of the Cross and all the earlier mystics, in the way of a genuine intuition of ultimate reality—but to develop it, if possible, to the pitch of hallucination.) By the middle of the seventeenth century Cardinal Bona could state that ‘pure prayer exercised without phantasmata is universally denied by the scholastics.’
At the same time, ‘art began no longer to represent the saints as kneeling calmly in adoration, but as waving their arms and stretching their necks and rolling their eyes, in ecstasies of sensuous longing, while they tear aside their clothes to relieve their burning bosoms.’ Contemplation, meanwhile, has come to be regarded as ‘mainly the sensible tasting of mysteries, especially of the Passion.’ (It is worth remarking that ‘the tendency to substitute for a super-rational concentration of will a subrational expansion of feeling’ began, at any rate in the sphere of religion, not in the eighteenth century, as Babbitt has said, but in the seventeenth.) In this unpropitious atmosphere mysticism could not thrive; and, as Dom Chapman points out, there has been an almost complete dearth of Catholic mystics from the late sixteenth century down to the present day. Significant in this context is the remark made by Father Bede Frost, in his Art of Mental Prayer, to the effect that the great age of sacramentalism began in the nineteenth century.
During the Middle Ages far less stress was laid on sacramental religion than is laid at the present time, far more on preaching and, above all, spiritual exercises and contemplation. An unsympathetic observer would be justified in pointing to the fact as a symptom of degeneration. A religion which once laid emphasis on the need to educate men’s wills and train their souls for direct communion with ultimate reality, and which now attaches supreme importance to the celebration of Sacraments (supposed in some way to cause the infusion of divine grace)[26] and to the performance of rituals calculated to induce in the participants a ‘subrational expansion of feeling,’ is certainly not progressing. It is becoming worse, not better.
Systematic training in recollection and meditation makes possible the mystical experience, which is a direct intuition of ultimate reality. At all times and in every part of the world, mystics of the first order have always agreed that this ultimate reality, apprehended in the process of meditation, is essentially impersonal. This direct intuition of an impersonal spiritual reality, underlying all being, is in accord with the findings of the majority of the world’s philosophers.
‘There is,’ writes Professor Whitehead, in Religion in the Making, ‘a large concurrence in the negative doctrine, that the religious experience does not include any direct intuition of a definite person, or individual. . . . The evidence for the assertion of a general, though not universal, concurrence in the doctrine of no direct vision of a personal God, can only be found by a consideration of the religious thought of the civilized world. . . . Throughout India and China, religious thought, so far as it has been interpreted in precise form, disclaims the intuition of ultimate personality substantial to the universe. This is true of Confucian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy and Hindu philosophy. There may be personal embodiments, but the substratum is impersonal. Christian theology has also, in the main, adopted the position that there is no direct intuition of such a personal substratum for the world. It maintains the doctrine of a personal God as a truth, but holds that our belief in it is based upon inference.’ There seems, however, to be no cogent reason why, from the existing evidence, we should draw such an inference. Moreover, as I have pointed out in the preceding chapter, the practical results of drawing such an inference are good only up to a point; beyond that point they are very often extremely bad.
We are now in a position to draw a few tentative and fragmentary conclusions about the nature of the world and our relation to it and to one another. To the casual observer, the world seems to be made up of great numbers of independent existents, some of which possess life and some consciousness. From very early times philosophers suspected that this common-sense view was, in part at least, illusory. More recently investigators, trained in the discipline of mathematical physics and equipped with instruments of precision, have made observations from which it could be inferred that all the apparently independent existents in the world were built up of a limited number of patterns of identical units of energy.
An ultimate physical identity underlies the apparent physical diversity of the world. Moreover, all apparently independent existents are in fact interdependent. Meanwhile the mystics had shown that investigators, trained in the discipline of recollection and meditation, could obtain direct experience of a spiritual unity underlying the apparent diversity of independent consciousness. They made it clear that what seemed to be the ultimate fact of personality was in reality not an ultimate fact, and that it was possible for individuals to transcend the limitations of personality and to merge their private consciousness into a greater, impersonal consciousness underlying the personal mind.
Some have denied the very possibility of non-personal consciousness. McTaggart, for example, asserts that ‘there cannot be experience which is not experienced by a self, because it seems evident, not as part of the meaning of the terms, but as a synthetic truth about experience. This truth is ultimate. It cannot be defended against attacks, but it seems beyond doubt. The more clearly we realize the nature of experience, or of knowledge, volition and emotion, the more clearly, it is submitted, does it appear that any of them are impossible except as the experience of a self.’ This brings us back, once more, to the connection between knowing and being. To those on the common levels of being, it does indeed ‘seem evident, as a synthetic truth about experience,’ that all experience must be experienced by a self. For such people ‘this truth is ultimate.’
But it is not ultimate to people who have chosen to undertake the mystic’s training in virtue and in recollection and in meditation. For these it is evident, ‘as a synthetic truth about experience,’ legitimately inferred from the empirical facts of their direct intuition, that there is an experience which is not the personal experience of a self. Such experience is not properly emotion, nor volition, nor even knowledge of the ordinary kind. Emotion, volition and knowledge are the forms of experience known to selves on the common levels of being. The experience known to selves who choose to fulfil the ethical and intellectual conditions upon which it is possible for an individual to pass to another level of being, is not their own emotion, their own volition, their own knowledge, but an unnamed and perhaps indescribable consciousness of a different kind, a consciousness in which the subject-object relation no longer exists and which no longer belongs to the experiencing self.
The physical world of our daily experience is a private universe quarried out of a total reality which the physicists infer to be far greater than it. This private universe is different, not only from the real world, whose existence we are able to infer, even though we cannot directly apprehend it, but also from the private universes inhabited by other animals—universes which we can never penetrate, but concerning whose nature we can, as Von Uexkull has done, make interesting speculative guesses. Each type of living creature inhabits a universe whose nature is determined and whose boundaries are imposed by the special inadequacies of its sense organs and its intelligence. In man, intelligence has been so far developed that he is able to infer the existence and even, to some extent, the nature of the real world outside his private universe. The nature of the sense organs and intelligence of living beings is imposed by
