The Mystic as Creative Artist

Hostile criticism of the mystics almost invariably includes the charge that their great experiences are in the nature of merely personal satisfactions. It is said that they stand apart from the ruck of humanity, claiming a special knowledge of the supersensual, a special privilege of communion with it; yet do not pass on to others, in any real and genuine sense, the illumination, the intuition of Reality, which they declare that they have received. St. Bernard's favourite mistranslation from Isaiah, "My secret to myself," has again and again been used against them with damaging effect; linked sometimes with the notorious phrase in which Plotinus defined the soul's fruition of Eternity as "a flight of the alone to the Alone."

It is true that these hints concerning a solitary and ineffable encounter do tally with one side of the experience of the mystic; do describe one aspect of his richly various, many-angled spiritual universe, one way in which that divine union which is his high objective is apprehended by the surface-consciousness. But that which is here told, is only half the truth. There is another side, a "completing opposite," to this admittedly indescribable union of hearts; a side which is often -- and most ungraciously -- forgotten by those who have received its benefits. The great mystic's loneliness is a consecrated loneliness. When he ascends to that encounter with Divine Reality which is his peculiar privilege, he is not a spiritual individualist. He goes as the ambassador of the race. His spirit is not, so to speak, a "spark flying upwards" from this world into that world, flung out from the mass of humanity, cut off; a little, separate, brilliant thing. It is more like a feeler, a tentacle, which life as a whole stretches out into that supersensual world which envelops her. Life stretches that tentacle out, but she also draws it in again with the food that it has gathered, the news that it has to tell of the regions which its delicate tactile sense has enabled it to explore. This, it seems to me, is the function of the mystic consciousness in respect of the human race. For this purpose it is specialized. It receives, in order that it may give. As the prophet looks at the landscape of Eternity, the mystic finds and feels it: and both know that there is laid on them the obligation of exhibiting it if they can.