MYSTICISM (Complete Edition). Evelyn Underhill
according to His essence, activity according to His nature: perfect stillness, perfect fecundity,”45 says Ruysbroeck again, this is the two-fold character of the Absolute. That which to us is action, to Him, they declare, is rest, “His very peace and stillness coming from the brimming fullness of His infinite life.”46 That which to us is Many, to that Transcendent Knower is One. Our World of Becoming rests on the bosom of that Pure Being which has ever been the final Object of man’s quest: the “river in which we cannot bathe twice” is the stormy flood of life flowing toward that divine sea. “How glorious,” says the Voice of the Eternal to St. Catherine of Siena, “is that soul which has indeed been able to pass from the stormy ocean to Me, the Sea Pacific, and in that Sea, which is Myself, to fill the pitcher of her heart.”47
The evolution of the mystic consciousness, then, brings its possessors to this transcendent point of view: their secret is this unity in diversity, this stillness in strife. Here they are in harmony with Heracleitus rather than with his modern interpreters. That most mystical of philosophers discerned a hidden unity beneath the battle, transcending all created opposites, and taught his disciples that “Having hearkened not unto me but unto the Logos, it is wise to confess that all things are one.”48 This is the secret at which the idealists’ and concept of Pure Being has tried, so timidly, to hint: and which the Vitalists’ more intimate, more actual concept of Becoming has tried, so unnecessarily, to destroy. We shall see the glorious raiment in which the Christian mystics deck it when we come to consider their theological map of the quest.
If it be objected — and this objection has been made by advocates of each school of thought — that the existence of the idealists’ and mystics’ “Absolute” is utterly inconsistent with the deeply alive, striving life which the Vitalists identify with reality, I reply that both concepts at bottom are but symbols of realities which the human mind can never reach: and that the idea of stillness, unity and peace is and has ever been humanity’s best translation of its intuition of the achieved Perfection of God. “‘In the midst of silence a hidden word was spoken to me.’ Where is this Silence, and where is the place in which this word is spoken? It is in the purest that the soul can produce, in her noblest part, in the Ground, even the Being of the Soul.”49 So Eckhart: and here he does but subscribe to a universal tradition. The mystics have always insisted that “Be still, be still, and know ” is the condition of man’s purest and most direct apprehensions of reality: that he experiences in quiet the truest and deepest activity: and Christianity when she formulated her philosophy made haste to adopt and express this paradox.
“Quid es ergo, Deus meus?” said St. Augustine, and gave an answer in which the vision of the mystic, the genius of the philosopher, combined to hint something at least of the paradox of intimacy and majesty in that all-embracing, all-transcending One. “Summe, optime, potentissime, omnipotentissime, misericordissime et justissime, secretissime et presentissime, pulcherrime et fortissime; stabilis et incomprehensibilis; immutabilis, mutans omnia. Numquam novus, nunquam vetus. . . . Semper agens, semper quietus: colligens et non egens: portans et implens et protegens; creans et nutriens et perficiens: quaerens cum nihil desit tibi. . . . Quid dicimus, Deus meus, vita mea, dulcedo mea sancta? Aut quid dicit aliquis, cum de te dicit?”50
It has been said that “Whatever we may do, our hunger for the Absolute will never cease.” This hunger — that innate craving for, and intuition of, a final Unity, an unchanging good — will go on, however heartily we may feed on those fashionable systems which offer us a dynamic or empirical universe. If, now, we admit in all living creatures — as Vitalists must do — an instinct of self-preservation, a free directive force which may be trusted and which makes for life: is it just to deny such an instinct to the human soul? The “entelechy” of the Vitalists, the “hidden steersman,” drives the phenomenal world on and up. What about that other sure instinct embedded in the race, breaking out again and again, which drives the spirit on and up; spurs it eternally towards an end which it feels to be definite yet cannot define? Shall we distrust this instinct for the Absolute, as living and ineradicable as any other of our powers, merely because philosophy finds it difficult to accommodate and to describe?
“We must,” says Plato in the “Timaeus,” “make a distinction of the two great forms of being, and ask, ‘What is that which Is and has no Becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never Is?’“51 Without necessarily subscribing to the Platonic answer to this question, we may surely acknowledge that the question itself is sound and worth asking; that it expresses a perennial demand of human nature; and that the analogy of man’s other instincts and cravings assures us that these his fundamental demands always indicate the existence of a supply.52 The great defect of Vitalism, considered as a system, is that it only answers half the question; the half which Absolute Idealism disdained to answer at all.
We have seen that the mystical experience, the fullest all-round experience in regard to the transcendental world which humanity has attained, declares that there are two aspects, two planes of discoverable Reality. We have seen also that hints of these two planes — often clear statements concerning them — abound in mystical literature of the personal first-hand type.53 Pure Being, says Boutroux in the course of his exposition of Boehme,54 has two characteristic manifestations. It shows itself to us as Power, by means of strife, of the struggle and opposition of its own qualities. But it shows itself to us as Reality, in harmonizing and reconciling within itself these discordant opposites.
Its manifestation as Power, then, is for us in the dynamic World of Becoming, amidst the thud and surge of that life which is compounded of paradox, of good and evil, joy and sorrow, life and death. Here, Boehme declares that the Absolute God is voluntarily self-revealing. But each revelation has as its condition the appearance of its opposite: light can only be recognized at the price of knowing darkness, life needs death, love needs wrath. Hence if Pure Being — the Good, Beautiful and True — is to reveal itself, it must do so by evoking and opposing its contrary: as in the Hegelian dialectic no idea is complete without its negative. Such a revelation by strife, however, is rightly felt by man to be incomplete. Absolute Reality, the Player whose sublime music is expressed at the cost of this everlasting friction between bow and lyre, is present, it is true, in His music. But He is best known in that “light behind,” that unity where all these opposites are lifted up into harmony, into a higher synthesis; and the melody is perceived, not as a difficult progress of sound, but as a whole.
We have, then, (a) The achieved Reality which the Greeks, and every one after them, meant by that seemingly chill abstraction which they called Pure Being: that Absolute One, unconditioned and undiscoverable, in Whom all is resumed. In the undifferentiated Godhead of Eckhart, the Transcendent Father of orthodox Christian theology, we see the mind’s attempt to conceive that “wholly other” Reality, unchanging yet changer of all. It is the great contribution of the mystics to humanity’s knowledge of the real that they find in this Absolute, in defiance of the metaphysicians, a personal object of love, the goal of their quest, a “Living One who lives first and lives perfectly, and Who, touching me, the inferior, derivative life, can cause me to live by Him and for His sake”55.
(b) But, contradicting the nihilism of Eastern contemplatives, they see also a reality in the dynamic side of things: in the seething pot of appearance. They are aware of an eternal Becoming, a striving, free, evolving life; not merely as a shadow-show, but as an implicit of their Cosmos felt also in the travail of their own souls — God’s manifestation or showing, in which He is immanent, in which His Spirit truly works and strives. It is in this plane of reality that all individual life is immersed: this is the stream which set out from the Heart of God and “turns again home.”
The mystic knows his task to be the attainment of Being, Eternal Life, union with the One, the “return to the Father’s heart”: for the parable of the Prodigal Son is to him the history of the universe. This union is to be attained, first by cooperation in that Life which bears him up, in which he is immersed. He must become conscious of this “great life of the All,” merge himself in it, if he would find his way back whence he came. Vae soli . Hence there are really two distinct acts of “divine union,” two distinct kinds of illumination involved in the Mystic Way: the dual character of the spiritual consciousness brings a dual responsibility in its train. First, there is the