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Walter Hilton: “The Scale of Perfection"
FROM the twentieth century back to the fourteenth is a far cry: a far cry indeed from the modern scientific illumination to mediaeval superstition, from logical positivists and mathematical rationalists to visionary mystics, from Russell and Huxley to Ruysbroeck and Hilton. The mystic lore, the Holy Writ, the mediaeval sage says, echoing almost the very words of the Eastern Masters, "may not be got by study nor through man's travail only, but principally by the grace of the Holy Ghost." As for the men living and moving in the worldly way, there are "so mickle din and crying in their heart and vain thoughts and fleshly desires" that it is impossible for them to listen or understand the still small voice. It is the pure soul touched by the Grace that alone "seeth soothfastness of Holy Writ wonderly shewed and opened, above study and travail and reason of man's kindly (i.e. natural) wit." What is day to us is night to the mystics and what is day to the mystics is night for us. The first thing the mystic asks is to close precisely those doors and windows which we, on the contrary, feel obliged to keep always open in order to know and to live and move. The Gita says: "The sage is wakeful when it is night for all creatures and when all creatures are wakeful, that is night for the sage." Even so this sage from the West says: "The more I sleep from outward things, the more wakeful am I in knowing of Jhesu and of inward things. I may not wake to Jhesu, but if I sleep to the world."
Close the senses. Turn within. And then go forward, that
is to say, more and more inward. In that direction lies your
itinerary, the journey of your consciousness. The sense-ridden Page – 114 secular man, who goes by his physical eye, has marked in his own way the steps of his forward march and progress. His knowledge and his power grew as he proceeded in his survey from larger masses of physical objects to their component molecules and from molecules to their component atoms and from atoms once more into electrons and protons or energy-points pure and simple, or otherwise as, in another direction, he extended his gaze from earth to the solar system, from the solar system to other starry systems, to far-off galaxies and I from galaxies to spaces beyond. The record of this double-track march to infinity – as perceived or conceived by the physical senses – is marvellous, no doubt. The mystic offers the spectacle of a still more marvellous march to another kind of infinity. Here is the Augustinian mantra taken as the motto of The Scale of Perfection: We ascend the ascending grades in our heart and we sing the song of ascension.! The journey's end is heavenly Jerusalem, the House of the Lord. The steps of this inner ascension are easily visible, not surely to the outer eye of the sense-burdened man, but to the "ghostly seeing" of the aspirant which is hazy in the beginning but slowly clears as he advances. The -first step is the withdrawal from the outer senses and looking and seeing within. "Turn home again in thyself, and hold thee within and beg no more without." The immediate result is a darkness and a restless darkness – it is a painful night. The outer objects of attraction and interest have been discarded, but the inner attachments and passions surge there still. If, however, one continues and persists, refuses to be drawn out, the turmoil settles down and the darkness begins to thin and wear away. One must not lose heart, one must have patience and perseverance. So when the outward world is no more-there and its call also no longer awakes any echo in us, then comes the stage of "restful darkness" or "light-some darkness". But it is still the dark Night of the soul. The outer light is gone and the inner light is not yet visible: the night, the desert, the great Nought, stretches between these two lights. But the true seeker goes through and comes out of the tunnel. And there is happiness at the end. "The seeking is
1 "Ascendimus ascensiones in corde et cantamus
canticum graduum." Confessions of St. Augustine XIII. 9.
Page – 115 travaillous, but the finding is blissful." When one steps out of the Night, enters into the deepest layer of the being, one stands face to face to one's soul, the very image of God, the perfect God-man, the Christ within. That is the third degree of our inner ascension, the entry into the deepest, purest and happiest state – in which one becomes what he truly is; one finds the Christ there and dwells in love and union with him. But there is still a further step to take, and that is real ascension. For till now it has been a going within, from the outward to the inner and the inmost; now one has to go upward, transcend. Within the body, in life, however deep you may go, even if you find your soul and your union with Jesus whose tabernacle is your soul, still there is bound to remain a shadow of the sinful prison-house; the perfect bliss and purity without any earthly taint, the completeness and the crowning of the purgation and transfiguration can come only when you go beyond, leaving altogether the earthly form and worldly vesture and soar into Heaven itself and be in the company of the Trinity. "Into myself, and after... above myself by overpassing only into Him." At the same time it is pointed out, this mediaeval mystic has the common sense to see that the going in and going above of which one speaks must not be understood in a literal way, it is a figure of speech. The movement of the mystic is psychological – "ghostly", it is said – not physical or carnal.
This spiritual march or progress can also be described
as a growing into the likeness of the Lord. His true self, his own
image is implanted within us; he is there in the profoundest depth of
our being as Jesus, our beloved and our soul rests in him in utmost
bliss. We are aware neither of Jesus nor of his spouse, our soul,
because of the obsession of the flesh, the turmoil raised by the
senses, the blindness of pride and egoism. All that constitutes the
first or old Adam, the image of Nought, the body of death which means
at bottom the "false misruled love in to thyself." This
self-love is the mother of sin, is sin itself. What it has to be
replaced by is charity – that is the true meaning of
Christian charity, forgetfulness of self. "What is sin but a
wanting and a forbearing of God." And the whole task, the
discipline consists in "the shaping of Christ in you, the
casting of sin through Christ." Who then is Christ, what is he?
Page – 116 This knowledge you get as you advance from your sense-bound perception towards the inner and inmost seeing. As your outer nature gets purified, you approach gradually your soul, the scales fall off from your eyes too and you have the knowledge and "ghostly vision." Here too there are three degrees; first, you start with faith – the senses can do nothing better than have faith; next, you rise to imagination which gives a sort of indirect touch or inkling of the truth; finally, you have the "understanding", the direct vision. "If he first trow it, he shall afterwards through grace feel it, and finally understand it." It is never possible for man, weak and bound as he is, to reject the thraldom of his flesh, he can never purify himself wholly by his own unaided strength. God in his infinite mercy sent his own son, an emanation created out of his substance – his embodied love – as a human being to suffer along with men and take upon himself the burden of their sins. God the Son lived upon earth as man and died as man. Sin therefore has no longer its final or definitive hold upon mankind. Man has been made potentially free, pure and worthy of salvation. This is the mystery of Christ, of God the Son. But there is a further mystery. Christ not only lived for all men for all time, whether they know him, recognise him or not; but he still lives, he still chooses his beloved and his beloved chooses him, there is a conscious acceptance on either side. This is the function of the Holy Ghost, the redeeming power of Love active in him who accepts it and who is accepted by it, the dynamic Christ-Consciousness in the true Christian. Indeed, the kernel of the mystic discipline – and its whole bearing – consists in one and only one principle: to love Jhesu. All roads lead to Rome: all preparations, all trials lead to one realisation, love of God, God as a living person close to us, our friend and lover and master. The Christian mystic speaks almost in the terms of the Gita: Rise above your senses, give up your egohood, be meek and humble, it is Jesus within you, who embraces your soul: it is he who does everything for you and in you, give yourself up wholly into his hands. He will deliver you.
The characteristic then of the path is a one-pointed
concentration. Great stress is laid upon "oneliness",
"onedness":
Page – 117 that is to say, a perfect and complete withdrawal from the outside and the world; an unmixed solitude is required for the true experience and realisation to come. "A full forsaking in will of the soul for the love of Him, and a living of the heart to Him. This asks He, for this gave He." The rigorous exclusion, the uncompromising asceticism, the voluntary self-torture, the cruel dark night and the arid desert are necessary conditions that lead to the "onlyness of soul", what another prophet (Isaiah, XXIV, 16) describes as "My privity to me". In that secreted solitude, the "onlistead" – the graphic language of the author calls it – is found "that dignity and that ghostly fairness which a soul had by kind and shall have by grace." The utter beauty of the soul and its absolute love for her deity within her (which has the fair name of Jhesu), the exclusive concentration of the whole of the being upon one point, the divine core, the manifest Grace of God, justifies the annihilation of the world and life's manifold existence. Indeed, the image of the Beloved is always within, from the beginning to the end. It is that that keeps one up in the terrible struggle with one's nature and the world. The image depends upon the consciousness which we have at the moment, that is to say, upon the stage or the degree we have ascended to. At the outset, when we can only look through the senses, when the flesh is our master, we give the image a crude form and character; but even that helps. Gradually, as we rise, with the clearing of our nature, the image too slowly regains its original and true shape. Finally, in the inmost soul we find Jesus as he truly is: "an unchangeable being, a sovereign might, a sovereign soothfastness, sovereign goodness, a blessed life and endless bliss." Does not the Gita too say: "As one approaches Me, so do I appear to him." Ye yathÄ mÄm prapadyante.
Indeed, it would be interesting to compare and contrast
the Eastern and Western approach to Divine Love, the Christian and
the Vaishnava, for example. Indian spirituality, whatever its outer
form or credal formulation, has always a background of utter unity.
This unity, again, is threefold or triune and is expressed in those
great Upanishadic phrases, mahÄvÄkyas,
– (1) the transcendental unity: the One alone exists, there is
nothing else than the One – ekamevÄdvitfyam;
(2) the cosmic unity: all existence is one, whatever exists is
that One, there
Page – 118 are
no separate existences: sarvam khalvidam brahma neha nÄnÄsti
kincaña; (3) That One is I,
you too are that One: so' ham, tattvamasi; this may be called
the individual unity. As I have said, all spiritual experiences in
India, of whatever school or line, take for granted or are
fundamentally based upon this sense of absolute unity or identity.
Schools of dualism or pluralism, who do not apparently admit in their
tenets this extreme monism, are still permeated in many ways with
that sense and in some form or other take cognizance of the truth of
it. The Christian doctrine too says indeed, 'I and my Father in
Heaven are one', but this is not identity, but union; besides, the
human soul is not admitted into this identity, nor the world soul.
The world, we have seen, according to the Chris6an discipline has to
be altogether abandoned, negatived, as we go inward and upward
towards our spiritual status reflecting the divine image in the
divine company. It is a complete rejection, a cutting off and casting
away of world and life. One extreme Vedantic path seems to follow a
similar line, but there it is not really rejection, but a resolution,
not the rejection of what is totally foreign and extraneous, but a
resolution of the external into its inner and inmost substance, of
the effect into its original cause. Brahman is in the world, Brahman
is the world: the world has unrolled itself out of the Brahman –
srsti, pravrtti – it has to be rolled back into its, cause and
substance if it is to regain its pure nature (that is the process of
nivrtti). Likewise, the individual being in the world, "I",
is the transcendent being itself and when it withdraws, it withdraws
itself and the whole world with it and merges into the Absolute. Even
the Maya of the Mayavadin, although it is viewed as something not
inherent in Brahman but superimposed upon Brahman, still, has been
accepted as a peculiar power of Brahman itself. The Christian
doctrine keeps the individual being separate practically, as an
associate or at the most as an image of God. The love for one's
neighbour, charity, which the Christian discipline enjoins is one's
love for one's kind, because of affinity of nature and quality: it
does not dissolve the two into an integral unity and absolute
identity, where we love because we are one, because we are the One.
The highest culmination of love, the very basis of love, according to
the Indian conception, is a transcendence of love, love trans- Page – 119 muted
into Bliss. The Upanishad says, where one has become the utter unity,
who loves whom? To explain further our point, we take two examples
referred to in the book we are considering. The true Christian, it is
said, loves the sinner too, he is permitted to dislike sin, for he
has to reject it, but he must separate from sin the sinner and love
him. Why? Because the sinner too can change and become his brother in
spirit, one loves the sinner because there is the possibility of his
changing and becoming a true Christian. It is why the orthodox
Christian, even such an enlightened and holy person as this mediaeval
Canon, considers the non-Christian, the non-baptised as impure and
potentially and fundamentally sinners. That is also why the Church,
the physical organisation, is worshipped as Christ's very body and
outside the Church lies the pagan world which has neither religion
nor true spirituality nor salvation. Of course, all this may be
symbolic and it is symbolic in a sense. If Christianity is taken to
mean true spirituality, and the Church is equated with the collective
embodiment of that spirituality, all that is claimed on their behalf
stands justified. But that is an ideal, a hypothetical standpoint and
can hardly be borne out by facts. However, to come back to our
subject, let us ow take the second example. Of Christ himself, it is
said, he not only did not dislike or had any aversion for Judas, but
that he positively loved the traitor with a true and sincere love. He
knew that the man would betray him and even when he was betraying and
had betrayed, the Son of Man continued to love him. It was no
make-believe or sham or pretence. It was genuine, as genuine as
anything can be. Now, why did he love his enemy? Because, it is said,
the enemy is suffered by God to do the misdeed: he has been allowed
to test the faith of the faithful, he too has his utility, he too is
God's servant. And who knows even a Judas would not change in the
end? Many who come to scoff do remain to pray. But it can be asked,
'Does God love Satan too in the same way?' The Indian conception
which is basically Vedantic is different. There is only one reality,
one truth which is viewed differently. Whether a thing is considered
good or evil or neutral, essentially and truly, it is that One and
nothing else. God's own self is everywhere and the sage makes no
difference between the Brahmin and the cow and
Page – 120 the elephant. It is his own self he finds in every person and every object – sarvabhÅ«tÄsthitam yo mÄm bhajati ekatvamÄsthitah – "he has taken his stand upon oneness and loves Me in all beings."¹ This will elucidate another point of difference between the Christian's and the Vaishnava's love of God, for both are characterised by an extreme intensity and sweetness and exquisiteness of that divine feeling. This Christian's, however, is the union of the soul in its absolute purity and simplicity and "privacy" with her lord and master; the soul is shred here of all earthly vesture and goes innocent and naked into the embrace of her Beloved. The Vaishnava feeling is richer and seems to possess more amplitude; it is more concrete and less ethereal. The Vaishnava in his passionate yearning seeks to carry as it were the whole world with him to his Lord: for he sees and feels Him not only in the inmost chamber of his soul, but meets Him also in and I through his senses and in and through the world and its objects around. In psychological terms one can say that the Christian realisation, at its very source, is that of the inmost soul, what we call the "psychic being" pure and simple, referred to in the book we are considering; as: "His sweet privy voice... stirreth thine heart full stilly." Whereas the Vaishnava reaches out to his Lord with his outer heart too aflame with passion; not only his inmost being but his vital being also seeks the Divine. This bears upon the occult story of man's spiritual evolution upon earth. The Divine Grace descends from the highest into the deepest and from the deepest to the outer ranges of human nature, so that the whole of it may be illumined and transformed and one day man can embody in his earthly life the integral manifestation of God, the perfect Epiphany. Each religion, each line of spiritual discipline takes up one limb of man-one level or mode of his being and consciousness-purifies it and suffuses it with the spiritual and divine consciousness, so that in the end the whole of man, in his integral living, is recast and remoulded: each discipline is in charge of one thread as it were, all together weave the warp and woof in the evolution of the perfect pattern of a spiritualised and divinised humanity. The conception of original sin is a cardinal factor in Christian
¹ The Gita, VI.
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Page – 121 discipline. The conception, of sinfulness is the very motive-power that drives the aspirant. "Seek tensely," it is said, "sorrow and sigh deep, mourn still, and stoop low till thine eye water for anguish and for pain." Remorse and grief are necessary attendants; the way of the cross is naturally the calvary strewn with pain and sorrow. It is the very opposite of what is termed the "sunlit path" in spiritual ascension. Christian mystics have made a glorious spectacle of the process of "dying to the world." Evidently, all do not go the whole length. There are less gloomy and happier temperaments, like the present one, for example, who show an unusual balance, a sturdy common sense even in the midst of their darkest nights, who have chalked out as much of the sunlit path as is possible in this line. Thus this old-world mystic says: it is true one must see and admit one's sinfulness, the grosser and apparent and more violent ones as well as all the subtle varieties of it that are in you or rise up in you or come from the Enemy. They pursue you till the very end of your journey. Still you need not feel overwhelmed or completely desperate. Once you recognise the sin in you, even the bare fact of recognition means for you half the victory. The mystic says, "It is no sin as thou feelest them." The day Jesus gave himself away on the Cross, since that very day you are free, potentially free from the bondage of sin. Once you give your adherence to Him, the Enemies are rendered powerless. "They tease the soul, but they harm not the soul". Or again, as the mystic graphically phrases it: "This soul is not borne in this image of sin as a sick man, though he feel it; but he beareth it." The best way of dealing with one's enemies is not to struggle and "strive with them." The aspirant, the lover of Jesus, must remember: "He is through grace reformed to the likeness of God ('in the privy substance of his soul within') though he neither feel it nor see it." If you are told you are still full of sins and you are not worthy to follow the path, that you must go and work out your sins first, here is your answer: "Go shrive thee better: trow not this saying, for it is false, for thou art shriven. Trust securely that thou art on the way, and thee needeth no ransacking of shrift for that that is passed, hold forth thy way and think on Jerusalem." That is to say, do not be too busy with Page – 122 the difficulties of the moment, but look ahead, as far as possible, fix your attention upon the goal, the intermediate steps will become easy. Jerusalem is another name of the Love of Jesus or the Bliss in Heaven. Grow in this love, your sins will fade away of themselves. "Though thou be thrust in an house with thy body, nevertheless in thine heart, where the stead of love is, thou shouldst be able to have part of that love... " What exquisite utterance, what a deep truth!
Indeed, there are one or two points, notes for the
guidance of the aspirant, which I would like to mention here for
their striking appositeness and simple "soothfastness."
First of all with regard to the restless enthusiasm and eagerness of
a novice, here is the advice given: "The fervour is so mickle in
outward showing, is not only for mickleness of love that they have;
but it is for littleness and weakness of their souls, that they may
not bear a little touching of God.. . . afterward when love hath
boiled out all the uncleanliness, then is the love clear and standeth
still, and then is both the body and the soul mickle more in peace,
and yet hath the self soul mickle more love than it had before,
though it shew less outward." And again: "without any
fervour outward shewed, and the less it thinketh that it loveth or
seeth God, the nearer it nigheth" ('it' naturally refers to the
soul). The statement is beautifully self-luminous, no explanation is
required. Another hurdle that an aspirant has to face often in the
passage through the Dark Night is that you are left all alone, that
you are deserted by your God, that the Grace no longer favours you.
Here is however the truth of the matter; "when I fall down to my
frailty, then Grace withdraweth: for my falling is cause there-of,
and not his fleeing." In fact, the Grace never withdraws, it is
we who withdraw and think otherwise. One more difficulty that
troubles the beginner especially is with regard to the false light.
The being of darkness comes in the form of the angel of light,
imitates the tone of the still small voice; how to recognise, how to
distinguish the two? The false light, the "feigned sun" is
always found "atwixt two black rainy clouds" : they are
"highing" of oneself and "lowing" of others. When
you feel flattered and elated, beware it is the siren voice tempting
you. The true light brings you soothing peace and meekness: the other
light brings always a trail of darkness –
Page – 123 if you are soothfast and sincere you will discover it if not near you, somewhere at a distance lurking.
The ultimate truth is that God is the sole doer and the
best we can do is to let him do freely without let or hindrance. "He
that through Grace may see Jhesu, how that He doth all and himself
doth right nought but suffereth Jhesu work in him what him liketh, he
is meek." And yet one does not arrive at that condition from the
beginning or all at once. "The work is not of the hour nor of a
day, but of many days and years." And for a long time one has to
take up one's burden and work, co-operate with the Divine working. In
the process there is this double movement necessary for the full
achievement. "Neither Grace only without full working of a soul
that in it is nor working done without grace bringeth a soul to
reforming. . . . but that one joined to that other." Mysticism
is not all eccentricity and irrationality: on the contrary, sanity
seems to be the very character of the higher mysticism. And it is
this sanity, and even a happy sense of humour accompanying it, that
makes the genuine mystic teacher say: "It is no mastery to me
for to say it, but for to do it there is mastery." Amen. Page – 124
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