Читать книгу The End of the Middle Ages - A. Mary F. Robinson - Страница 25

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As an island is surrounded by water, as night surrounds the stars, and air the globe, so beyond the region of the known there stretches an illimitable space of darkness and of silence. All minds know that it is there; to many of us it is a background of repose to the busy scene of life; to some the hidden tract has its chart of faith or dogma. But there are others to whom that vast and dark Unknown is more present than the small and shining certainty of the Universe. They are sucked into the eddy of its vastness and its darkness. These natures turn from the substance to dream of the shadow, they leave the narrow fields of science and go out boldly over those unsounded waters beyond. Souls such as these are never quite at home in life: the dark, the undreamed of, the infinite has enchanted them. They are drawn by the attraction of the Abyss.

Mysticism allures different men by different methods. It draws by various lines the passionate heart, the broken and humbled will, the heated fancy, the indignant spirit wroth at the hardness and evil of the world. It draws no less the reasoning and metaphysical mind, repelled by dogma and yet desirous of the Deity. For Mysticism is not only an affair of dreams, of miracles, and visions, it is not only a satisfaction to disordered imaginations, to diseased and stunted passions; it includes a system of philosophy so logical that who accepts the first easy thesis arrives without negation or amazement at the last. The Mystics have, in fact, made a science of the soul, an elaborate system of abstractions, quite logical in itself, although in contradiction to the truths of physical nature. No one, indeed, is readier to admit this contradiction than the Mystic himself, for the soul, he says, is exactly the contrary of the body. It is therefore natural that as bodily life rises in the scale from simple to complex, so the soul’s existence should be purest when least differentiate. For the soul and the body meet on one level for a moment, but they come from different positions. The human body is the highest evolution of the animate world; the human soul, the Mystics assure us, is the lowest and last descent of Infinite Being. In fact, the soul of man is to Divinity in the same relation as the zoophyte is to us. Only, unfortunately for the simile, in this strange supernatural cosmos the zoophyte is higher than the man. Let us rather say that man, having progressed from the zoophyte to humanity in body, must now in soul ascend from the man to the zoophyte. For the soul, we must remember, is divinest when most simple. It is the last descent of God, and God (the Mystics say) is absolute unity and simplicity. “God,” says Meister Eckhart, “is the simplest essence of existence; and who, thinking of God, sees any distinction from utter simplicity, be sure he seeth not God.”