Mysticism: It's Use and Abuse

The Speaker, May 31, 1902

A Book of Mystery and vision. By A.E. Waite. London: Philip Welling

It is useless to preach mysticism to us, for we are all mystics now. Whatever other superstitions we may or may not have overcome, at least we have all overcome the immense superstition that cows are only cows, that cabbages are only cabbages, that every stupendous thing in the universe can be explained and got rid of by giving it a name. At least we know that we can explain a two-eyed, two legged, half developed lord of creation by saying "man" just about as much, and no more, as we could explain an angel by saying “hoky-poky." We are all now agreed that there is a second meaning in things, and are only divided into the active and energetic mystics who think that this second meaning is so interesting that we ought industriously to set to work to discover it, and the Agnostics, who think that this second meaning is so interesting that it will never be discovered. Those schools of thought which in the course of the nineteenth century have denied the possibility of any mysticism, of any relation, whether positive or tentative, with the unseen, will almost certainly go into the dustbin of the forgotten sects. Atheism, Materialism, Secularism, will ultimately be classed with Manichaeanism, Gnosticism, Pelagianism, the Fifth Monarchy, the Family of Love, as odd or extreme solutions which, properly speaking, dodged the problem. The energy, the sincerity, the true faith of the Secularists will certainly procure them a place in history. Philosophical chroniclers will discuss the Secularists, a devout Protestant sect, so passionately and exclusively addicted to the study of the Old Testament that they carried it to the point of arguing through the whole length of long and obscure pamphlets about the precise measurements of the Ark and the precise genealogy of Rehoboam. In the same way, future historians will say that there was a school of Materialism, a mystical sect who held that one of the experiences of the mind, the thing called matter, was in truth the cause of all the rest; their theory might be stated mystically in the form that the part was greater than the whole. Thus all the singular theories of the nineteenth century which were once thought to be the end of all religion will be merely pigeonholed as religious oddities, and the great march of the religious world will pass by. We are all mystics now; and if we have need to beat down anything in conflict, it is the loose or evil forms of mysticism. We have no need to beat down Rationalism. That we dig up.

As I am proceeding to make some strictures on the current type of mysticism, as exhibited in Mr. A. E. Waite's last work, A Book of Mystery and Vision, it is really desirable and necessary that I should make this preliminary statement that I am entirely on Mr. Waite's side, in so far as he is a mystic, and that I believe the great majority of modern thinking people are on this point on his side also. Mysticism may be roughly defined as the belief that man lives upon a borderland: and mysticism, in this sense of an admission that anything may happen, is simply the legitimate deduction from Agnosticism. The old Agnosticism of the time of Huxley and Professor Clifford prided itself upon the fact that, like Socrates, at least it knew that it could know nothing. The new Agnosticism is much more humble: it does not pretend to know even what things it cannot know. It holds itself ready to receive evidence of a ghost or a fairy, conscious that no ghost or fairy can be more intrinsically mysterious than a toadstool or a tuft of grass. Everybody knows, of course, and everybody feels (which is more convincing) that there are ultimately things beyond our ken, but there is no hard and fast line to be drawn in the matter. The human spirit is not, as it appears in the old Agnostic philosophy, bounded like a circle by one black line. Its relation with its spiritual environment is a relation of degree. The soul of man is, so to speak, vignetted.

I have thus made, I hope, the preliminary point plain that I do not think Mr. A. E. Waite mad because he is a mystic; if anything, I think that anyone who is not a mystic must be as mad as a hatter. But there are certain general characteristics in Mr. Waite's work which are extremely typical of the current tendencies of mysticism, and which demand an emphatic protest. First, for example, there is his endless insistence, prominent in his verse and especially prominent in his preface, on the fact that only a few can enter into his feelings, that he writes for a select circle of the initiated. This kind of celestial snobbishness is worse than mere vulgarity. When we hear a man talking at great length about the superiority of his manners to those of his housekeeper, we feel tolerably certain that he is not a gentleman; similarly, when we hear a man insisting endlessly upon the superior character of his sanctity to the sanctity of the multitude, we feel tolerably certain that, whatever else he may be, he is not a saint. A saint, like a gentleman, is one who has forgotten his own points of superiority, being immersed in more interesting things. The ideal gentleman is he who, like Louis XIV. in the historic legend, takes off his hat to his washerwoman. And the ideal mystic and saint is he who prostrates himself and grovels in the public road before the stupidest farm labourer he can find. No doubt the farm labourer will be astonished at this conduct. But the astonishment which the farm labourer feels at the mystic will be nothing to the astonishment which the mystic will feel at the farm labourer.

There is, moreover, another error of current mysticism which is apparent in Mr. Waite's work. It is a pity, because there are a great many passages in Mr. Waite's work which indicate that he has some powers as a poet, that he has considerable instinct for colour and form in verse. But he is enslaved by the one great fallacy of the mystics, that mysticism, religion and poetry have to do with the abstract. Thinkers of Mr. Waite's school have a tendency to believe that the concrete is the symbol of the abstract. The truth, the truth at the root of all true mysticism, is quite the other way. The abstract is the symbol of the concrete. This may possibly seem at first sight a paradox; but it is a purely transcendental truth. We see a green tree; it is the green tree which we cannot understand; it is the green tree which we fear; it is the green tree which we worship. Then because there are so many green trees, so many men, so many elephants, so many butterflies, so many daisies, so many animalculaa, we coin a general term "Life." And then the mystic comes and says that a green tree symbolises Life. It is not so. Life symbolises a green tree. Just in so far as we get into the abstract, we get away from the reality, we get away from the mystery, we get away from the tree. And this is the reason that so many transcendental discourses are merely blank and tedious to us, because they have to do with Truth and Beauty, and the Destiny of the Soul, and all the great, faint, faded symbols of the reality. And this is why all poetry is so interesting to us, because it has to do with skies, with woods, with battles, with temples, with women and with wine, with the ultimate miracles which no philosopher could create. The difference between the concrete and the abstract is the difference between the country and the town. God made the concrete, but man made the abstract. A truthful man is a miracle, but the truth is a commonplace.