Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness/Part 1/Chapter VI

by Evelyn Underhill

In our study of theology we saw the Christian mystic adopting, as chart and pilot book of his voyages and adventures, the scheme of faith, and diagram of the spiritual world, which is accepted by ordinary Christian men. We saw that he found in it a depth and richness of content which the conventional believer in that theology, the “good churchman,” seldom suspects: and that which is true of the Christian mystic is also true in its measure and as regards their respective theologies, of the Pagan, the Mahommedan and the Buddhist.

But since the spiritual adventures of the mystic are not those of ordinary men, it will follow that this map, though always true for him, is not complete. He can press forward to countries which unmystical piety must mark as unexplored, Pushing out from harbour to “the vast and stormy sea of the divine,” he can take soundings, and mark dangers the existence of which such piety never needs to prove. Hence it is not strange that certain maps, artistic representations or symbolic schemes, should have come into being which describe or suggest the special experiences of the mystical consciousness, and the doctrines to which these experiences have given birth. Many of these maps have an uncouth, even an impious appearance in the eyes of those unacquainted with the facts which they attempt to translate: as the charts of the deep-sea sailor seem ugly and unintelligible things to those who have never been out of sight of land. Others—and these the most pleasing, most easily understood—have already been made familiar, perhaps tiresomely familiar, to us by the poets; who, intuitively recognizing their suggestive qualities, their links with truth, have borrowed and adapted them to their own business of translating Reality into terms of rhythm and speech. Ultimately, however, they owe their origin to the mystics, or to that mystical sense which is innate in all true poets: and in the last resort it is the mystic’s kingdom, and the mystic’s experience, which they affect to describe.

These special mystical diagrams, these symbolic and artistic descriptions of man’s inward history—his secret adventures with God—are almost endless in their variety: since in each we have a picture of the country of the soul seen through a different temperament. To describe all would be to analyse the whole field of mystical literature, and indeed much other literature as well; to epitomize in fact all that has been dreamed and written concerning the so-called “inner life”—a dreary and a lengthy task. But the majority of them, I think, express a comparatively small number of essential doctrines or fundamental ways of seeing things; and as regards their imagery, they fall into three great classes, representative of the three principal ways in which man’s spiritual consciousness reacts to the touch of Reality, the three primary if paradoxical facts of which that consciousness must be aware. Hence a consideration of mystic symbols drawn from each of these groups may give us a key with which to unlock some at least of the verbal riddles of the individual adventurer.

Thanks to the spatial imagery inseparable from human thinking and human expression, no direct description of spiritual experience is or can be possible to man. It must always be symbolic, allusive, oblique: always suggest, but never tell, the truth: and in this respect there is not much to choose between the fluid and artistic language of vision and the arid technicalities of philosophy. In another respect, however, there is a great deal to choose between them: and here the visionary, not the philosopher, receives the palm. The greater the suggestive quality of the symbol used, the more answering emotion it evokes in those to whom it is addressed, the more truth it will convey. A good symbolism, therefore, will be more than mere diagram or mere allegory: it will use to the utmost the resources of beauty and of passion, will bring with it hints of mystery and wonder, bewitch with dreamy periods the mind to which it is addressed. Its appeal will not be to the clever brain, but to the desirous heart, the intuitive sense, of man.

The three great classes of symbols which I propose to consider, appeal to three deep cravings of the self, three great expressions of man’s restlessness, which only mystic truth can fully satisfy. The first is the craving which makes him a pilgrim and wanderer. It is the longing to go out from his normal world in search of a lost home, a “better country”; an Eldorado, a Sarras, a Heavenly Syon. The next is that craving of heart for heart, of the soul for its perfect mate, which makes him a lover. The third is the craving for inward purity and perfection, which makes him an ascetic, and in the last resort a saint.

These three cravings, I think, answer to three ways in which mystics of different temperaments attack the problem of the Absolute: three different formulae under which their transcendence of the sense-world can be described. In describing this transcendence, and the special adventures involved in it, they are describing a change from the state of ordinary men, in touch with the sense-world, responding to its rhythms, to the state of spiritual consciousness in which, as they say, they are “in union” with Divine Reality, with God. Whatever be the theological creed of the mystic, he never varies in declaring this close, definite, and actual intimacy to be the end of his quest. “Mark me like the tulip with Thine own streaks,” says the Sufi.^[258] “I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man,” says the German contemplative.^[259] “My me is God, nor do I know my self-hood save in Him,” says the Italian saint.^[260]

But, since this Absolute God is for him substance, ground or underlying Reality of all that is: present yet absent, near yet far: He is already as truly immanent in the human soul as in the Universe. The seeker for the Real may therefore objectify his quest in two apparently contradictory, yet really mutually explanatory ways. First he may see it as an outgoing journey from the world of illusion to the real or transcendental world: a leaving of the visible for the invisible. Secondly, it may appear to him as an inward alteration, remaking or regeneration, by which his personality or character is so changed as to be able to enter into communion with that Fontal Being which he loves and desires; is united with and dominated by the indwelling God who is the fount of his spiritual life. In the first case, the objective idea “God” is the pivot of his symbolism: the Blazing Star, or Magnet of the Universe which he has seen far off, and seeing, has worshipped and desired. In the second case, the emphasis falls on the subjective idea “Sanctity,” with its accompanying consciousness of a disharmony to be abolished. The Mystic Way will then be described, not as a journey, but as an alteration of personality, the transmuting of “earthly” into “heavenly” man. Plainly these two aspects are obverse and reverse of one whole. They represent that mighty pair of opposites, Infinite and Finite, God and Self, which it is the business of mysticism to carry up into a higher synthesis. Whether the process be considered as outward search or inward change, its object and its end are the same. Man enters into that Order of Reality for which he was made, and which is indeed the inciting cause of his pilgrimage and his purification: for however great the demand on the soul’s own effort may be, the initiative always lies with the living Divine World itself. Man’s small desire is evoked, met, and fulfilled by the Divine Desire, his “separated will” or life becomes one with the great Life of the All.

From what has been said in the last chapter, it will be clear that the symbolism of outward search and of inward change will be adopted respectively by the two groups of selves whose experience of “union with the Divine” leans (1) to the Transcendent or external, (2) to the Immanent or internal way of apprehending Reality. A third or intermediate group of images will be necessary to express the experience of those to whom mystic feeling—the satisfaction of love—is the supreme factor in the mystic life. According, then, to whether man’s instinct prompts him to describe the Absolute Reality which he knows and craves for as a Place, a Person, or a State—all three of course but partial and inadequate translations of the one Indescribable Truth—so will he tend to adopt a symbolism of one or other of these three types.

A. Those who conceive the Perfect as a beatific vision exterior to them and very far off, who find in the doctrine of Emanations something which answers to their inward experience, will feel the process of their entrance into reality to be a quest, an arduous journey from the material to the spiritual world. They move away from, rather than transmute to another form, the life of sense. The ecstasies of such mystics will answer to the root-meaning of that much perverted word, as a “standing out” from themselves; a flight to happier countries far away. For them, the soul is outward bound towards its home.

B. Those for whom mysticism is above all things an intimate and personal relation, the satisfaction of a deep desire—who can say with Gertrude More, “never was there or can there be imagined such a love, as is between an humble soul and Thee”—will fall back upon imagery drawn largely from the language of earthly passion. Since the Christian religion insists upon the personal aspect of the Godhead, and provides in Christ an object of such intimacy, devotion and desire, an enormous number of Christian mystics inevitably describe their experiences under symbolism of this kind.

C. Those who are conscious rather of the Divine as a Transcendent Life immanent in the world and the self, and of a strange spiritual seed within them by whose development man, moving to higher levels of character and consciousness, attains his end, will see the mystic life as involving inward change rather than outgoing search. Regeneration is their watchword, and they will choose symbols of growth or transmutation: saying with St. Catherine of Genoa, “my Being is God, not by simple participation, but by a true transformation of my Being.”^[261]

These three groups of mystics, then, stand for three kinds of temperament; and we may fairly take as their characteristic forms of symbolic expression the Mystic Quest, the Marriage of the Soul, and the “Great Work” of the Spiritual Alchemists.

I

The pilgrimage idea, the outgoing quest, appears in mystical literature under two different aspects. One is the search for the “Hidden Treasure which desires to be found.” Such is the “quest of the Grail” when regarded in its mystic aspect as an allegory of the adventures of the soul. The other is the long, hard journey towards a known and definite goal or state. Such are Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”; each in their manner faithful descriptions of the Mystic Way. The goal of the quest—the Empyrean of Dante, the Beatific Vision or fulfilment of love—is often called Jerusalem by the Christian mystics: naturally enough since that city was for the mediaeval mind the supreme end of pilgrimage. By Jerusalem they mean not only the celestial country Heaven, but also the spiritual life, which is “itself a heaven.”^[262]

“Right as a true pilgrim going to Jerusalem,” says Hilton, “leaveth behind him house and land, wife and child, and maketh himself poor and bare from all that he hath, that he may go lightly without letting: right so, if thou wilt be a ghostly pilgrim, thou shalt make thyself naked from all that thou hast . . . then shalt thou set in thy heart wholly and fully that thou wouldst be at Jerusalem, and at none other place but there.” “Jerusalem,” he says in this same chapter, “is as much as to say a sight of peace; and betokeneth contemplation in perfect love of God.”^[263]

Under this image of a pilgrimage—an image as concrete and practical, as remote from the romantic and picturesque, for the mediaeval writers who used it, as a symbolism of hotel and railway train would be to us—the mystics contrived to summarize and suggest much of the life history of the ascending soul; the developing spiritual consciousness. The necessary freedom and detachment of the traveller, his departure from his normal life and interests, the difficulties, enemies, and hardships encountered on the road—the length of the journey, the variety of the country, the dark night which overtakes him, the glimpses of destination far away—all these are seen more and more as we advance in knowledge to constitute a transparent allegory of the incidents of man’s progress from the unreal to the real. Bunyan was but the last of a long series of minds which grasped this fact.

The Traveller, says the Sufi ‘Aziz bin Mahommed Nafasi, in whose book, “The Remotest Aim,” the pilgrimage-symbolism is developed in great detail, is the Perceptive or Intuitive Sense of Man. The goal to which he journeys is Knowledge of God. This mysterious traveller towards the only country of the soul may be known of other men by his detachment, charity, humility, and patience. These primary virtues, however—belonging to ethical rather than to spiritual life—are not enough to bring his quest to a successful termination. They make him, say the Sufis, “perfect in knowledge of his goal but deficient in the power of reaching it.” Though he has fraternal love for his fellow-pilgrims, detachment from wayside allurements, untiring perseverance on the road, he is still encumbered and weakened by unnecessary luggage. The second stage of his journey, therefore, is initiated like that of Christian by a casting off of his burden: a total self-renouncement, the attainment of a Franciscan poverty of spirit whereby he becomes “Perfectly Free.”

Having got rid of all impediments to the spiritual quest, he must now acquire or develop in their stead the characteristic mystical qualities, or Three Aids of the Pilgrim; which are called in this system Attraction, Devotion, and Elevation. Attraction is consciousness of the mutual desire existing between man’s spirit and the Divine Spirit: of the link of love which knits up reality and draws all things to their home in God. This is the universal law on which all mysticism is based. It is St. Augustine’s “Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts can find no rest except in Thee.” This “natural magnetism,” then, once he is aware of it, will draw the pilgrim irresistibly along the road from the Many to the One. His second aid, Devotion, says the “Remotest Aim” in a phrase of great depth and beauty, is “the prosecution of the journey to God and in God.”^[264] It embraces, in fact, the whole contemplative life. It is the next degree of spiritual consciousness after the blind yielding to the attraction of the Real, and the setting in order of man’s relation to his source.

The Traveller’s journey to God is complete when he attains knowledge of Him—“Illumination,” in the language of European mystics. The point at which this is reached is called the Tavern or resting-place upon the road, where he is fed with the Divine Mysteries. There are also “Wine Shops” upon the way, where the weary pilgrim is cheered and refreshed by a draught of the wine of Divine Love.^[265] Only when the journey to God is completed begins the “Journey in God”—that which the Christian mystics call the Unitive Way—and this, since it is the essence of Eternal Life, can have no end. Elevation, the pilgrim’s third aid, is the exalted or ecstatic form of consciousness peculiar to the contemplative, and which allows the traveller a glimpse of the spiritual city towards which he goes.^[266]

The Sufi poet ‘Attar, in his mystical poem, “The Colloquy of the Birds,” has described the stages of this same spiritual pilgrimage with greater psychological insight, as the journey through “Seven Valleys.” The lapwing, having been asked by other birds what is the length of the road which leads to the hidden Palace of the King, replies that there are Seven Valleys through which every traveller must pass: but since none who attain the End ever come back to describe their adventures, no one knows the length of the way.

(1) The first valley, says the lapwing, is the Valley of the Quest. It is long and toilsome: and there the traveller must strip himself of all earthly things, becoming poor, bare, and desolate: and so stay till the Supernal Light casts a ray on his desolation. It is in fact, Dante’s Purgatorio, the Christian Way of Purgation: the period of self-stripping and purification which no mystic system omits.

(2) When the ray of Supernal Light has touched the pilgrim he enters the limitless Valley of Love: begins, that is to say, the mystic life. It is Dante’s “Earthly Paradise,” or, in the traditional system of the mystics, the onset of Illumination.

(3) Hence he passes to the Valley of Knowledge or Enlightenment—the contemplative state—where each finds in communion with Truth the place that belongs to him. No Dante student will fail to see here a striking parallel with those planetary heavens where each soul partakes of the Divine, “not supremely in the absolute sense,” as St. Bonaventura has it, but “supremely in respect of himself.” The mystery of Being is now revealed to the traveller. He sees Nature’s secret, and God in all things. It is the height of illumination.

(4) The next stage is the Valley of Detachment, of utter absorption in Divine Love—the Stellar Heaven of the Saints—where Duty is seen to be all in all. This leads to—

(5) The Valley of the Unity, where the naked Godhead is the one object of contemplation. This is the stage of ecstasy, or the Beatific Vision: Dante’s condition in the last canto of the “Paradiso.” It is transient, however, and leads to—

(6) The Valley of Amazement; where the Vision, far transcending the pilgrim’s receptive power, appears to be taken from him and he is plunged in darkness and bewilderment. This is the state which Dionysius the Areopagite, and after him many mediaeval mystics, called the Divine Dark, and described as the truest and closest of all our apprehensions of the Godhead. It is the Cloud of Unknowing, “dark from excessive bright.” The final stage is—

(7) The Valley of Annihilation of Self: the supreme degree of union or theopathetic state, in which the self is utterly merged “like a fish in the sea” in the ocean of Divine Love.^[267]

Through all these metaphors of pilgrimage to a goal—of a road followed, distance overpassed, fatigue endured—there runs the definite idea that the travelling self in undertaking the journey is fulfilling a destiny, a law of the transcendental life; obeying an imperative need. The chosen Knights are destined or called to the quest of the Grail. “All men are called to their origin,” says Rulman Merswin, and the fishes which he sees in his Vision of Nine Rocks are impelled to struggle, as it were “against nature,” uphill from pool to pool towards their source.^[268]

All mystical thinkers agree in declaring that there is a mutual attraction between the Spark of the Soul, the free divine germ in man, and the Fount from which it came forth. “We long for the Absolute,” says Royce, “only in so far as in us the Absolute also longs, and seeks, through our very temporal striving, the peace that is nowhere in Time, but only, and yet Absolutely, in Eternity.”^[269] So, many centuries before the birth of American philosophy, Hilton put the same truth of experience in lovelier words. “He it is that desireth in thee, and He it is that is desired. He is all and He doth all if thou might see Him.”^[270]

The homeward journey of man’s spirit, then, may be thought of as due to the push of a divine life within, answering to the pull of a divine life without.^[271] It is only possible because there is already in that spirit a certain kinship with the Divine, a capacity for Eternal Life; and the mystics, in undertaking it, are humanity’s pioneers on the only road to rest. Hence that attraction which the Moslem mystic discerned as the traveller’s necessary aid, is a fundamental doctrine of all mysticism: and as a consequence, the symbolism of mutual desire is here inextricably mingled with that of pilgrimage. The spiritual pilgrim goes because he is called; because he wants to go, must go, if he is to find rest and peace. “God needs man,” says Eckhart. It is Love calling to love: and the journey, though in one sense a hard pilgrimage, up and out, by the terraced mount and the ten heavens to God, in another is the inevitable rush of the roving comet, caught at last, to the Central Sun. “My weight is my love,” said St. Augustine.^[272] Like gravitation, it inevitably compels, for good or evil, every spirit to its own place. According to another range of symbols, that love flings open a door, in order that the larger Life may rush in and it and the soul be “one thing.”

Here, then, we run through the whole gamut of symbolic expression; through Transcendence, Desire, and Immanence. All are seen to point to one consummation, diversely and always allusively expressed: the need of union between man’s separated spirit and the Real, his remaking in the interests of transcendent life, his establishment in that Kingdom which is both “near and far.”

“In the book of Hidden Things it is written,” says Eckhart, “‘I stand at the door and knock and wait’ . . . thou needst not seek Him here or there: He is no farther off than the door of the heart. There He stands and waits and waits until He finds thee ready to open and let Him in. Thou needst not call Him from a distance; to wait until thou openest is harder for Him than for thee. He needs thee a thousand times more than thou canst need Him. Thy opening and His entering are but one moment.”^[273] “God,” he says in another place, “can as little do without us, as we without Him.”^[274] Our attainment of the Absolute is not a one-sided ambition, but the fulfilment of a mutual desire. “For our natural Will,” says Lady Julian, “is to have God, and the Good will of God is to have us; and we may never cease from longing till we have Him in fullness of joy.” ^[275]

So, in the beautiful poem or ritual called the “Hymn of Jesus,” contained in the apocryphal “Acts of John” and dating from primitive Christian times, the Logos, or Eternal Christ, is thus represented as matching with His own transcendent, self-giving desire every need of the soul.^[276]

The Soul says:—

“‘I would be saved.’”

Christ replies:—

“‘And I would save.’ Amen.”

The Dialogue continues:—

“‘I would be loosed.’

‘And I would loose.’ Amen.

‘I would be pierced.’

‘And I would pierce.’ Amen.

‘I would be born.’

‘And I would bear.’ Amen.

‘I would eat.’

‘And I would be eaten.’ Amen.

‘I would hear.’

‘And I would be heard.’ Amen.”

“‘I am a Lamp to thee who beholdest Me,

I am a Mirror to thee who perceivest Me,

I am a Door to thee, who knockest at Me,

I am a Way to thee a wayfarer.’”

The same fundamental idea of the mutual quest of the Soul and the Absolute is expressed in the terms of another symbolism by the great Mahommedan mystic:—

“No lover ever seeks union with his beloved,

But his beloved is also seeking union with him.

But the lover’s love makes his body lean

While the beloved’s love makes her fair and lusty.

When in this heart the lightning spark of love arises,

Be sure this love is reciprocated in that heart.

When the love of God arises in thy heart,

Without doubt God also feels love for thee.”^[277]

The mystic vision, then, is of a spiritual universe held within the bonds of love: ^[278] and of the free and restless human soul, having within it the spark of divine desire, the “tendency to the Absolute,” openly finding satisfaction and true life when united with this Life of God. Then, in Patmore’s lovely image, “the babe is at its mother’s breast,” “the lover has returned to the beloved.”^[279]

Whatever their outward sense, all true mystic symbols express aspects of this “secret of the world,” this primal verity. But whereas such great visionary schemes as those of ‘Attar and of Dante show it in its cosmic form, in many symbolic descriptions—particularly those which we meet in the writings of the ecstatic saints—the personal subjective note, the consciousness of an individual relation between that one self and the Supernal Self, overpowers all general applications. Then philosophy and formal allegory must step aside: the sacramental language of exalted emotion, of profoundly felt experience, takes its place. The phases of mutual love, of wooing and combat, awe and delight—the fevers of desire, the ecstasy of surrender—are drawn upon and made to contribute something to the description of the great and secret drama of the soul.

To such symbolic transcripts of intimate experience belongs one amazing episode of the spiritual life-history which, because it has been given immortal expression by the greatest mystical poet of modern times, is familiar to thousands of readers who know little or nothing of the more normal adventures incidental to man’s attainment of the Absolute. In “The Hound of Heaven” Francis Thompson described with an almost terrible power, not the self’s quest of adored Reality, but Reality’s quest of the unwilling self. He shows to us the remorseless, untiring seeking and following of the soul by the Divine Life to which it will not surrender: the inexorable onward sweep of “this tremendous Lover,” hunting the separated spirit, “strange piteous futile thing” that flees Him “down the nights and down the days.” This idea of the love-chase, of the spirit rushing in terror from the overpowering presence of God, but followed, sought, conquered in the end, is common to all the mediaeval mystics: it is the obverse of their general doctrine of the necessary fusion of human and divine life, “escape from the flame of separation.”

“I chased thee, for in this was my pleasure,” says the voice of Love to Mechthild of Magdeburg; “I captured thee, for this was my desire; I bound thee, and I rejoice in thy bonds; I have wounded thee, that thou mayst be united to me. If I gave thee blows, it was that I might be possessed of thee.”^[280]

So in the beautiful Middle English poem of “Quia amore langueo,”—

“I am true love that fals was nevere,

Mi sistyr, mannis soule, I loved hir thus;

Bicause we wolde in no wise discevere

I lefte my Kyngdom glorious.

I purveyde for hir a paleis precious;

She fleyth, I folowe, I sought hir so.

I suffride this peyne piteous

Quia amore langueo,”^[281]

Meister Eckhart has the same idea of the inexorable Following Love, impossible to escape,expressed under less personal images. “Earth,” he says, “cannot escape the sky; let it flee up or down, the sky flows into it, and makes it fruitful whether it will or no. So God does toman. He who will escape Him only runs to His bosom; for all corners are open to Him.” ^[282]

We find in all the mystics this strong sense of a mysterious spiritual life—a Reality—over against man, seeking him and compelling him to Its will. It is not for him, they think, to say that he will or will not aspire to the transcendental world. ^[283] Hence sometimes this inversion of man’s long quest of God. The self resists the pull of spiritual gravitation, flees from the touch of Eternity; and the Eternal seeks it, tracks it ruthlessly down. The Following Love, the mystics say, is a fact of experience, not a poetic idea. “Those strong feet that follow, follow after,” once set upon the chase, are bound to win. Man, once conscious of Reality, cannot evade it. For a time his separated spirit, his disordered loves, may wilfully frustrate the scheme of things: but he must be conquered in the end. Then the mystic process unfolds itself: Love triumphs: the “purpose of the worlds” fulfils itself in the individual life.

II

It was natural and inevitable that the imagery of human love and marriage should have seemed to the mystic the best of all images of his own “fulfilment of life”; his soul’s surrender, first to the call, finally to the embrace of Perfect Love. It lay ready to his hand: it was understood of all men: and moreover, it certainly does offer, upon lower levels, a strangely exact parallel to the sequence of states in which man’s spiritual consciousness unfolds itself, and which form the consummation of the mystic life. It has been said that the constant use of such imagery by Christian mystics of the mediaeval period is traceable to the popularity of the Song of Songs, regarded as an allegory of the spiritual life. I think that the truth lies rather in the opposite statement: namely, that the mystic loved the Song of Songs because he there saw reflected, as in a mirror, the most secret experiences of his soul. The sense of a desire that was insatiable, of a personal fellowship so real, inward, and intense that it could only be compared with the closest link of human love, of an intercourse that was no mere spiritual self-indulgence, but was rooted in the primal duties and necessities of life—more, those deepest, most intimate secrets of communion, those self-giving ecstasies which all mystics know, but of which we, who are not mystics, may not speak—all these he found symbolized and suggested, their unendurable glories veiled in a merciful mist, in the poetry which man has invented to honour that august passion in which the merely human draws nearest to the divine.

↑  258. Jámi, “Joseph and Zulaikha. The Poet’s Prayer.”

↑  259. “Theologia Germanica,” cap. x.

↑  260. St. Catherine of Genoa, “ Vita e Dottrina,” cap. xiv.

↑  261. “Vita e Dottrina,” p. 36.

↑  262. This image seems first to have been elaborated by St. Augustine, from whom it was borrowed by Hugh of St. Victor, and most of the mediaeval mystics.

↑  263. “The Scale of Perfection,” bk. ii. cap. xxi.

↑  264. So too Ruysbroeck says that “the just man goes towards God by inward love in perpetual activity and in God in virtue of his fruitive affection in eternal rest” (“De Ornatu Spiritalium Nuptiarum.” I. ii. cap. lxv).

↑  265. I need not remind the reader of the fact that this symbolism, perverted to the purposes of his skeptical philosophy, runs through the whole of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám.

↑  266. See Palmer’s “Oriental Mysticism,” pt. I. caps. i., ii., iii., and v.

↑  267. An abridged translation of ‘Attar’s allegory of the Valleys will be found in “The Conference of the Birds,” by R. P. Masani (1924). See also W. S. Lilly’s “Many Mansions,” p. 130.

↑  268. Jundt, “Rulman Merswin,” p. 27.

↑  269. Royce, “The World and the Individual,” vol. ii. p. 386.

↑  270. “The Scale of Perfection,” bk. ii. cap. xxiv.

↑  271. Compare Récéjac (“Fondements de la Connaissance Mystique,” p. 252). “According to mysticism, morality leads the soul to the frontiers of the Absolute and even gives it an impulsion to enter, but this is not enough. This movement of pure Freedom cannot succeed unless there is an equivalent movement within the Absolute itself.”

↑  272. Aug. Conf., bk. xiii. cap. 9. “All those who love,” says Ruysbroeck, “feel this attraction: more or less according to the degree of their love.” (“De Calculo sive de Perfectione filiorum Dei.”)

↑  273. Meister Eckhart, Pred. iii.

↑  274. Ibid., Pred. xiii.

↑  275. “Revelations of Divine Love,” cap. vi.

↑  276. The Greek and English text will be found in the “Apocrypha Anecdota” of Dr. M. R. James, series 2 (Cambridge, 1897), pp. 1-25. I follow his translation. It will be seen that I have adopted the hypotheses of Mr. G. R. S. Mead as to the dramatic nature of this poem. See his “Echoes from the Gnosis,” 1896.

↑  277. Jalalu d’ Din Rumi (Wisdom of the East Series), p. 77.

↑  278. So Dante— “ Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna legato con amore in un volume cio che per l’universo si squaderna.” (Par. xxxiii. 85.)

↑  279. “The Rod, the Root, and the Flower,” “Aurea Dicta,” ccxxviii.

↑  280. “Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit,” pt. i. cap. iii.

↑  281. “Quia amore langueo,” an anonymous fifteenth-century poem. Printed from the Lambeth MS. by the E.E.T.S., 1866-67.

↑  282. Pred. lxxxviii.

↑  283. So we are told of St. Francis of Assisi, that in his youth he “tried to flee God’s hand.” Thomas of Celano, Legenda Prima, cap. ii.