But the mystic, on the contrary, is in a much larger measure his own critic. He is essentially dialectical. And his dialectic process is very much that of Elaine in the song of Love and Death that Tennyson puts into her mouth. Like Elaine, the mystic is reflecting upon the final goal of his life-journey. That goal for him is the Reality, the Soul, the Self. It is as such infinitely precious to him. But what is this absolute goal, just in so far as it is Real at all? Is it a live Being, or after all is it not rather identical with mere Non-Being, with dreamless sleep, with that “rapture of repose” on the face of the dead that Byron’s well-known lines describe. Or, to use Elaine’s speech, is it Love or Death that the mystic defines as his Absolute? Like Elaine, the mystic equally defines both Love and Death, both the Perfect, and the Nothing; or if you like, he leaves both of them, and the whole difference between them, consciously and deliberately undefined, while his entire doctrine consists in saying, exactly as the adorable Elaine says, “I know not which is sweeter, No, not I.” That, as we in effect saw at the last time, is the precise technical sense of the
- “Nescio, nescio
- Quae jubilatio,
- Lux tibi qualis.”
of Bernard’s hymn concerning the Urbs Sion unica, mansio mystica. That is the sense of Yâjnavalkya’s Neti, Neti. And Mysticism, curiously enough, has inspired whole nations and generations of mankind by saying essentially nothing whatever but what, in her despair, Tennyson’s Elaine so pathetically sings.
