RELIGION, SCIENCE, AND THE MYSTIC.* SINCE the latter-day arrival of
so many pseudo-sciences of tin soul, the word " mystic " has been bandied about between them in an endeavour to make it suitable for popular con- sumption, until its singular and original meaning has been lost. The first task of Father Butler, as a trained logician of the Benedictine Order, has been to clear away all hazy conceptions and to define the mystic as one who contem- plates. He immediately attacks, therefore, the popular idea —we should, perhaps, say notion—that the mystical mind io vague. We find with joy confirmation of our belief that the mystic, by reason of his constant exercise in the effort to utilize facts towards the creation of an idea of Unity upon which to contemplate God, must become trained to an inten- sity and orderliness of mind that are antithetical to vagueness. It might be said that the most mystical of all people are the mathematician and the historian, who deal in the most un- vague of all material, namely, number and event. According to our conception of the word, the true statistician is a mystic. He collects data ; from them he synthesizes a general and unified Idea ; from that Idea he ascends by contemplation to a true comprehension of the real significance of his subject- matter. On this definition we should not hesitate to call the authors of Back to Methuselah, The Candle of Vision, and The Story of My Heart mystics whose vision is the fruit of three phases of modern thought. Father Butler might dis- agree—but we shall return to this in a moment.
The mystical mind, then, must be constructive ; one that can absorb the purport of facts ; thereby being distinguished from the vague mind, which is overwhelmed by facts. Never- theless, we are not inclined to disagree with Dionysius, the father of mystical theology, when he says " there is that most divine knowledge of God which takes place through_ ignorance in the union which is above intelligence, when the intellect quitting all things that are, and then leaving itself also, is united to the superlucent rays, being illuminated thence and therein by the imsearchable depth of wisdom " ; though we feel that there is a danger in forcing the argument that it is power, not information, intellect and not intelligence, which make the mystic. Surely the pure light of contemplation demands fuel from all as being complementary sources. When, therefore, the author states that many of the mystics whom he cites are not always comprehensible, we suspect that often it is their own fault. For instance, a seventeenth-century Abbot, Louis of Blois, in telling of the flowing of the soul into God, says that it " becomes one with God, yet not so as to be of the same substance and nature as God." Assuming that the translator is not at fault, we see here a direct limitation of the nature of God. If the rapt soul is not of the substance of God, then it is of a substance outside God, and God is therefore a being of finite proportions. The Abbot's spirit was flagging here. It is such lapses as this that afford justification of the appellation " vague " to the mystical mind. We are all of us of the same substance and nature as God, as Spinoza has taught ; and the process of contemplation, or mystical vision, is not a process of becoming, as the Abbot says, but a process of recognition. We recognize that we are of the substance of God, and in so doing we see Him and ourselves really.
It may be contended that St. Augustine, who has been called the Prince of Mystics, confirms the Abbot's error in the following passage : " Having sought to find my God in visible and corporeal things, and found Him not ; having sought to find His Substance in myself, and found Him not ; I perceive my God to be something higher than my soul. Therefore that I might attain unto Him I thought on these things, and poured out my soul above myself." Those who know the intellectual reliability of St. Augustine, however, will at once appreciate the difference. In this passage the great Carthaginian is not renouncing the analytical method of approaching truth, but is demanding that further labours are necessary, the labours of synthesis, since God—a most convenient image of the Unknowable—can never be appre- hended by the mind direct through cognitive processes. A further process is necessary ; the quick linking up of former and affinitive ideas by an intensified operation of the historical faculty, so that above the long chain of relationships looms a vision of directorship. There is no doubt that in this vision of the Guiding Hand is to be found the inspiration of faith.
• waura Mysticism : Negleded Chapter is the litelory o Religion. By Dom. Cuthbert Butler. London : Constable. 1181. net.j It is that aura which rises like a flame above the conflagration of ideas. The mind works, the reason labours, and the effort and friction produce an incandescence which we call by many names—faith, intuition, genius. So we feel convinced that St. Augustine is right, as are all the great creative masters, when he maintains that vision can only be attained after severe mental discipline. Scientists tell us the same thing ; there is the long labour, the drudgery of experiment and the digestive processes of the reason—then suddenly the illumi- nation. Nature works in the same way in the metabolism of the plant. Blake saw a world in a grain of sand ; but that is no contradiction of St. Augustine. The poet's mind had been preparing by infinite ways through many years for that moment when the accumulated strength of his being exploited that experience, and in the twinkling of an eye had brought out all the truth potential therein. Blake had " thought on this thing, and poured out his soul above himself."
On one point we are tempted to criticize nearly all the great mystics. No sooner do they succeed in obtaining that form- less vision of God, that familiar, yet unrecognizable sight which is their goal, than they fall to disparaging all the images by which their ecstasia was reached. It is a weakness in their higher reason, their divine logic. We feel that no matter how pure, how purged the flashing and momentary vision of God, it is but an image. It is not true humility to think otherwise. If we see the Omniscient by anything other than a symbol, an image, then we have seen the whole, and the Unknowable has been known ; which is a blasphemous claim. Therefore, in the disparagement of images, we suspect an unconscious heresy, and certainly a dangerous step towards disruption of all the fine mystical fabric of the seeker of Truth. For seeking truth is a never-ceasing process of unification, and suddenly to cast out the " image " is to break away from physical life and to propound one truth of the spirit and another of the flesh. Herein, we think, is the weakness of mediaeval Christian mysticism, and indeed of all religions in whose stride after truth the leg of contemplation has been longer than the leg of observation.
From the failures of the past we turn optimistically to the present, to find, if possible, what the term " Western Mysti- cism " means to the modern world. We spoke above of the secularization of the word " mystic," which is customary to-day. Father Butler, since he is a cleric, and interested (at least in this work) in mysticism mainly from an historical point of view, says : " It has been identified with the attitude of the religious mind that cares not for dogma or doctrine, for Church or sacraments ; it has been identified also with a certain outlook on the world—a seeing God in Nature, and recognizing that the material creation in various ways symbolizes spiritual realities ; but this is not mysticism according to its historical meaning." We feel, however, that there is a significance in the broadening of the term which should not be deprecated, since the expansion denotes growth and new effort. Now that science has thrust her head above the clouds, she is telling mankind of vistas that comprehend and surpass even the highest reaches of Buddhist thought—hitherto, perhaps, the most exalted of mental achievement.
Creative contemplation, or, in one word, mysticism, is, as we have suggested above, founded in an impulse given by the mental experience of recognizing law in what formerly seemed chaos. It is the enthusiasm engendered by that recognition. But to attain that recognition is the effort of science ! How vast, then, are the mystical possibilities for minds nourished on the ever-expanding doctrines of science. We read in a contemporary article that " the new scientific doctrines go so deep that something more than scientific knowledge is involved in one's reactions to them. . . . Science has arrived at a point where it has obviously far-reaching philosophic—and it may be even religious—implications, and they must be courageously explored." We see what was done on the deliberately restricted food of mediaeval religious dogmatism. The asceticism of that creed was an asceticism of negation ; but that of our doctrine to-day is one of effort and assimilation. Theirs was centripetal, a shrinking purgation of self from dross ; ours is centrifugal, we purify ourselves by diffusing our being into every electron. We forget ourselves by partici- pating in the miraculous activity which upholds the atom. We are working with Nature and not against her. Hereini. then, lies the future of Western Mysticism ; a mysticism' founded not on repression, but on an acceptance of actuality
and the patient discovery within it of that reality which we are still content to call the face of God.
To all who are interested in the subject, Father Butler's book will be of great assistance. It is a work of devotion soundly established in knowledge. Particularly valuable is the chapter which traces the influence of Plotinus and the mysticism of the neo-Platonists on St. Augustine, whose
teaching directed the Christian faith for some centuries. -
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