In cases where the one-pointed contemplation is of God there is also a risk that the mind’s unemployed capacities may atrophy. The hermits of Tibet and the Thebaid were certainly one-pointed, but with a one-pointedness of exclusion and mutilation. It may be, however, that if they had been more truly ‘docile to the Holy Ghost,’ they would have come to understand that the one-pointedness of exclusion is at best a preparation for the one-pointedness of inclusion—the realization of God in the fullness of cosmic being as well as in the interior height of the individual soul.
Like the Taoist sage, they would at last have turned back into the world riding on their tamed and regenerate individuality; they would have ‘come eating and drinking,’ would have associated with ‘publicans and sinners’ or their Buddhist equivalents, ‘wine-bibbers and butchers.’ For the fully enlightened, totally liberated person, samsara and nirvana, time and eternity, the phenomenal and the Real, are essentially one. His whole life is an unsleeping and one-pointed contemplation of the Godhead in and through the things, lives, minds and events of the world of becoming. There is here no mutilation of the soul, no atrophy of any of its powers and capacities. Rather, there is a general enhancement and intensification of consciousness, and at the same time an extension and transfiguration. No saint has ever complained that absorption in God was a ‘cursed evil,’
In the beginning was the Word; behold Him to whom Mary listened. And the Word was made flesh; behold Him whom Martha served.
St. Augustine
God aspires us into Himself in contemplation, and then we must be wholly His; but afterwards the Spirit of God expires us without, for the practice of love and good works.
Ruysbroeck Action, says Aquinas, should be something added to the life of prayer, not something taken away from it. One of the reasons for this recommendation is strictly utilitarian; action that is ‘taken away from the life of prayer* is action unenlightened by contact with Reality, uninspired and unguided; consequently it is apt to be ineffective and even harmful. ‘ The sages of old,’ says Chuang Tzu, ‘first got Tao for themselves, then got it for others,’ There can be no taking of motes out of other people’s eyes so long as the beam in our own eye prevents us from seeing the divine Sun and working by its light. Speaking of those who prefer immediate action to acquiring, through contemplation, the power to act well, St. John of the Cross asks, ‘What do they accomplish?* And he answers, Poco mas que nada, y a veces nada, y aun a veces dano (‘Little more than nothing, and sometimes nothing at all, and sometimes even harm’). Income must balance expenditure.
This is necessary not merely on the economic level, but also on the physiological, the intellectual, the ethical and the spiritual. We cannot put forth physical energy unless we stoke our body with fuel in the form of food. We cannot hope to utter anything worth saying, unless we read and inwardly digest the utterances of our betters. We cannot act rightly and effectively unless we are in the habit of laying ourselves open to leadings of the divine Nature of Things. We must draw in the goods of eternity in order to be able to give out the goods of time. But the goods of eternity cannot be had except by giving up at least a little of our time to silently waiting for them. This means that the life in which ethical expenditure is balanced by spiritual income must be a life in which action alternates with repose, speech with alertly passive silence. Otium sanctum quaerit caritas veritatis ; negotium jus turn suscipit necessitas caritatis (‘The love of Truth seeks holy leisure; the necessity of love undertakes righteous action’).
The bodies of men and animals are reciprocating engines, in which tension is always succeeded by relaxation. Even the unsleeping heart rests between beat and beat. There is nothing in living Nature that even distantly resembles man’s greatest technical invention, the continuously revolving wheel. (It is this fact, no doubt, which accounts for the boredom, weariness find apathy of those who, in modern factories, are forced to adapt their bodily and mental movements to circular motions of mechanically uniform velocity.) ‘What a man takes in by contemplation,’ says Eckhart, ‘that he pours out in love.’ The well-meaning humanist and the merely muscular Christian, who imagines that he can obey the second of the great commandments without taking time even to think how best he may love God with all his heart, soul and mind, are people engaged in the impossible task of pouring unceasingly from a container that is never replenished.
Daughters of Charity ought to love prayer as the body loves the soul. And just as the body cannot live without the soul, so the soul cannot live without prayer. And in so far as a daughter prays as she ought to pray, she will do well. She will not walk, she will run in the ways of the Lord, and will be raised to a high degree of the love of God.
St. Vincent de Paid
Households, cities, countries and nations have enjoyed great happiness, when a single individual has taken heed of the Good and Beautiful. . . . Such men not only liberate themselves; they fill those they meet with a free mind.
Phib
Similar views are expressed by Al-Ghazzali, who regards the mystics not only as the ultimate source of our knowledge of the soul and its capacities and defects, but as the salt which preserves human societies from decay. ‘In the time of the philosophers,’ he writes, ‘as at every other period, there existed some of these fervent mystics. God does not deprive this world of them, for they are its sustainers.’ It is they who, dying to themselves, become capable of perpetual inspiration and so are made the instruments through which divine grace is mediated to those whose unregenerate nature is impervious to the delicate touches of the Spirit.
The end
A List of Recommended Books
AL-GHAZZALI. Confessions. Translated by Claud Field (London, 1909).
ANSARI OF HERAT. The Invocations of Sheikh Abdullah Ansari of Herat. Translated by Sardar Sir Jogendra Singh (London, I939)-
ATTAR. Selections. Translated by Margaret Smith (London, 1932).
AUGUSTINE, ST. Confessions (numerous editions). AUROBINDO, SRI. The Life Divine, 3 vols. (Calcutta, 1939). BAKER, AUGUSTINE. Holy Wisdom (London, 1876).
BEAUSOBRE, JULIA DE. The Woman Who Could Not Die (London and New York, 1938).
BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX, ST. The Steps of Humility (Cambridge,
Mass., 1940).
On the Love of God (New York, 1937). Selected Letters (London, 1904). An admirably lucid account of
St. Bernard’s thought may be found in The Mystical Doctrine
of Saint Bernard, by Professor fitienne Gilson (London and
New York, 1940).
BERTOCCI, PETER A. The Empirical Argument for God in Late British Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1938).
Bhagavad-Gita. Among many translations of this Hindu scripture the best, from a literary point of view, is that of Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood (Los Angeles, 1944). Valuable notes, based upon the commentaries of Shankara, are to be found in Swami Nikhilananda’s edition (New York, 1944), and Professor Franklin Edgerton’s literal translation (Cambridge, Mass., 1944) is preceded by a long and scholarly introduction.
BlNYON, L. The Flight of the Dragon (London, 1911).
BOEHME, JAKOB. Some good introduction is needed to the work of this important but difficult mystic. On the theological and devotional side the Danish Bishop H. L. Martensen’s Jacob Boehme (trans., London, 1885) is recommended; or from a more philosophical viewpoint A. Koyre’s splendid volume La Philosophic de Jacob Boehme (not yet translated, Paris, 1929) or H. H. Brinton’s The Mystic Will (New York, 1930).
BRAHMANANDA, SWAMI. Records of his teaching and a biography by Swami Prabhavananda are contained in The Eternal Companion (Los Angeles, 1944).
CAMUS, JEAN PIERRE. The Spirit of St. Francois de Sales (London, n.d.).
CAUSSADE, J. P. DE. Abandonment (New York, 1887). Spiritual Letters, 3 vols. (London, 1937).
CHANTAL, ST. JEANNE FRANCHISE. Selected Letters (London and New York, 1918).
CHAPMAN, ABBOT JOHN. Spiritual Letters (London, 1935).
CHUANG Tzu. Chuang Tzu, Mystic, Moralist and Social Reformer.
Translated by Herbert Giles (Shanghai, 1936). Musings of a Chinese Mystic (London, 1920). Chinese Philosophy in Classical Times. Translated by E. R.
Hughes (London, 1943).
The Cloud of Unknowing (with commentary by Augustine Baker). Edited with an introduction by Justice McCann (London, 1924).
COOM ARASWAMY, ANANDA K. Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism
(New York, 1916).
The Transformation of Nature in Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1935). Hinduism and Buddhism (New York, n.d.).
CURTIS, A. M. The Way of Silence (Burton Bradstock, Dorset,
J 937)-DEUSSEN, PAUL. The Philosophy of the Upanishads (London, 1906).
DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE. On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology. Translated with an introduction by C. E. Rolt (London, 1920).
ECKHART, MEISTER. Works, translated by C. B. Evans (London,
1924).
Meister Eckhart, A Modern Translation. By R. B. Blakney (New York, 1941).
EVANS-WENTZ, W. Y. The Tibetan Book of the Dead (New York,
1927).
Tibet’s Great Yogi,
