ONE of the commonest of the criticisms which are brought against the mystics is that they represent an unsocial type, of religion; that their spiritual enthusiasms are personal and individual, and that they do not share or value the corporate life and institutions of the church or community to which they belong. Yet, as a matter of fact, the relation that does and should exist between personal religion and the . .’ corporate life of the church frequently appears in them in a peculiarly intense, a peculiarly interesting form; and in their lives, perhaps, more easily than elsewhere, we may discern the principles which do or should govern the relation of the individual to the community.
In the true mystic, who is so often and so wrongly called a “religious individualist:’ we see personal religion raised to its highest power. If we accept his experience as genuine, it involves an intercourse with the spiritual world, an awareness of it. which transcends the normal experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he belongs. The mystic speaks with God as a person with a Person, and not as a member of a group. He lives by an immediate knowledge far more than by belief; by a knowledge achieved in those hours of direct, unmediated intercourse with the Transcendent when, as he says, he was” in union with God.” The certitude then gained-a certitude which he cannot impart, and which is not generally diffused-governs all his reactions to the Universe. It even persists and upholds him in those terrible hours of darkness when all his sense of spiritual reality is taken away.
Such a personality as this seems at first sight to stand in little need of the support which the smaller nature, the more languid religious consciousness, receives from the corporate spirit. By the very term “mystic” .we indicate a certain aloofness from the crowd, suggest that he is in possession of a secret which the community as a whole does not and cannot share; that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise. I think that much of the distrust with which he is often regarded comes from this sense of his independence of the herd; his apparent separation from the often clumsy and always symbolic methods of institutional religion, and the further fact that his own methods and results cannot be criticized or checked by those who have not shared them. “I spake as I saw,” said David; and those who did not see can only preserve a respectful or an exasperated silence.
Yet this common opinion that the mystic is a lonely soul wholly absorbed in his vertical relation with God, that his form of religious life represents an opposition to, and an implicit criticism of, the corporate and institutional form of religious life; this is decisively contradicted by history, which shows us, again and again, the great mystics as the loyal children of the great religious institutions, and forces us to admit that here as in other departments of human activity the corporate and the individual life are intimately plaited together. Even those who have broken away from the churches that reared them, have quickly drawn to themselves disciples, and become the centres of new groups. Surely, therefore, it is worth while to examine, if we can, the nature of the connection between these two factors: to ask, on the one hand, what it is that the corporate life and the groupconsciousness which it develops give the mystic; on the other, what is the real value of the mystic to the corporate life of his church?
As to the first question: What is it that the corporate life does for the great spiritual genius ?-for I think that we may allow the great mystic to be that. First, and most obviously, it gives him a favorable environment. He must have an environment: he must be affected by it. That is a certainty in the case of any living thing: a certainty so obvious that it would hardly be worth stating were it not that those who talk about the mystic craving for solitudehis complete aloofness from human life-seem often to ignore it. The idea of solitude in any complete sense is, of course, an illusion. We are bound, if we live at all, to accept the fact of a living world outside ourselves, to have social relations with something; and it only remains to decide what these relations shall be. The yogi or the hermit who retreats t6′ the forest in order to concentrate his mind more utterly upon the quest of God, only exchanges the society of human beings for the society of other living things. Did he eliminate all else, the parasites of his own body, the bacterial populations of his alimentary system, would be there to remind him that man cannot live alone. He may shift his position in the web of life, but its strands will enmesh him still. So, too, the monk or nun ” buried alive tJ in the cloister is still living a family life: only it is a family life that is governed by special ideals.
Now it is plainly better for the mystic, whose aim is the establishment of special relations with the spiritual order, that the social consciousness in which he is immersed, and from which he is taking color all the time, should have a spiritual and religious tendency: that the social acts in which he takes part should harmonize rather than conflict with his own deep intuition of reality. The difference in degree between that deep intuition and the outward corporate acts-the cult-which he thus shares, may be enormous: for the cult is an expression of the crowd consciousness, and manifests its spiritual crudity, its innate conservatism, its primitive demands for safety and personal rewards. The inadequacy or unreality of the forms, the low level of the adoration which they evoke, may distress and even disgust him. Yet, even so, it is better for him that he should be within a church than outside it. Compared with this one fact-that he is a member of a social group which recognizes spiritual values, and therefore lives in an environment permeated by religious concepts-the accuracy in detail of the creed which that group professes, the adequacy of its liturgical acts, is unimportant.
Next, the demands made and restrictions imposed by the community on the individual are good for the mystic. Man is social right through: in spirit as well as in body and mind. His most sublime spiritual experiences are themselves social in type. Intercourse of a person with a Person, the merging of his narrow consciousness in a larger consciousness, the achievement of a divine son ship, a spiritual marriage: these are the highest things that he can say concerning his achievement of Divine Reality. And they all entail, not a narrow self-realization, but the breaking-down of barriers; the setting-up of wider relationships. It follows that self-emergence in the common life is an education for that self-emergence in the absolute life at which the mystic aims. Such self-emergence, and the training in humility, self-denial, obedience, suppleness, which is involved in it, is held by all ascetic teachers to be essential to the education of the human soul. Union with, and to-a certain extent submission to, the church, to the family-to life, in fact-an attitude of self-giving surrender; this is the best of preparations for that total self-naughting of the soul which is involved in union with God; that utter doing-away of the I, the Me, and the Mine. till it becomes one will and one love with the divine will and love.........from www. sajkaca.com
No comments:
Post a Comment