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Where there is no vision, the people perish; ... if those who are the salt of the earth lose their savour, there is nothing to keep’ that earth disinfected, nothing to prevent it from falling into complete decay. The mystics are channels through which a little knowledge of reality filters down into our human universe of ignorance and illusion. A totally unmystical world would be a world totally” blind and insane. From the beginnings of the eighteenth century onwards, the sources of all mystical knowledge have been steadily diminishing in number, all over the planet. We are dangerously advanced into the darkness.
For several centuries now, Europe has been the battleground for an attack upon the very existence of the spirit of man, though it was during and after the eighteenth century that the attack reached its height; and it is man who has been more or less consistently the loser till almost the whole of his heritage has been taken from him. The stature of Christian man was infinite—we speak of Christian doctrine and belief not practice quia omnes nos peccavimus : we betray what we believe but that does not invalidate the beliefs—because seeking first the kingdom of heaven he could find oneness with God and be tilled, and all the other things, the knowledge and love of created things and joy in them, and the whole of a happy human life, were added to him.
Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics. By Aldous Huxley. (Chatto and Windus ; pp. 278 ; 15/-).
2 Op. cit., p. 82
3 Contemplation of persons and their qualities entails: I great deal of analytical thinking and an incessant use of the imagination. But analytical thinking and imagination are, precisely the things which prevent the soul from attaining enlightenment. On this point all the great mystical writers, Christian and Oriental, are unanimous and emphatic ‘ (p. 80).
4 Cf. C. Lebrun: The Mystical Teaching of St. john Eudes, p. 133; E. Underhill: Worship, p. 69. The mystics with whom Mr. Huxley deals are mainly concerned with the lower (introductory) stages of the mystical life; Fr. Joseph himself for example was concerned in his teaching with the prayer of quiet; there was no departure from tradition in associating these forms of prayer with the Passion-has not the very ‘ Dionysian ‘ Tauler left us Meditations on the Passion?- and equally certainly there was no intention of substituting these introductory stages for mystical prayer itself. The ascent of Mount Carsme1 demands a technique, intellectual as well as moral ; it may be held that this particular sort of technique is too cerebral or too ‘ busy ‘ to achieve its object perfectly, or that those who taught it in the days of Fr. Joseph put so much emphasis upon it as to obscure its object; but the main point here is that neither they nor their technique set out to obscure that object, and that the possession of the objective by the highest mystics in its turn does not exclude, but on the contrary implies, active concern for the redeemed word and its Redeemer.
5 Questions de Conscience, p. 153.
6 E.g. that Catholics believe in the ‘magic efficacy of rites and sacraments ‘; that orthodox Christianity has always tended to confuse the merely psychic with the spiritual ‘ ; that petitionary prayer is appropriate only to those when ‘ religion is anthropocentric.’
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