Prayer is the uplifting of the human personality to God. We not only uplift our minds by submission through Faith to his revealed truth, and our wills in acknowledgment of his divine sovreignty, but also our bodies. In prayer the whole man ‘empties himself’ in union with our Saviour to the glory of God. (Phil. 2; 7-11.)

‘But also our bodies’. ‘The antithesis of mind is body’, writes Father Vincent McNabb, and therefore the ‘antithesis to mental prayer should be bodily prayer. But by a figure of speech the whole range of non-mental prayer is called after its chief part, vocal prayer. It would be incorrect to think that the other forms of bodily prayer are neither greatly practised in the Church nor greatly valued. The Church, like her divine Spouse, “knows what is in man” too well to neglect any object or function whereby the impact of the world may be deadened and a new force added to the world of unseen realities.

I Pass on now to Mental pain which is a condition of the soul, and yet I do not wish to put this under the category of actual Spiritual Pain, because I wish to reserve for that category the pain which is entirely due to the actual intervention of God directly, and not due to the ‘growing pains’ of the soul.

We are probing deeper now into the mystery of pain, probing deeper, and at the same time, paradoxically, mounting higher. I speak of the condition of the soul caused by the mental pain of aridity, isolation, desolation, and the insatiable hunger of the soul for God.

Aridity is dryness in the life of the spirit. It sometimes seems as if the very colour, and music, of prayer were dead and silent. We pray, and our very words seem meaningless and hollow; there seems no response from God. We may be even utterly bored and unable to concentrate; vocal prayer seems meaningless, like speaking to a blank wall; mental prayer is impossible. It is indeed as if all the colour of life had turned grey, and all the music was mute. ‘Surely’, the wretched bodies out, ‘I must have sinned very greatly, have displeased God in some terrible way.’

The subject of Liturgy is so vast that only a few can command a deep knowledge of its history, but there is one aspect which does not call for high scholarship, and that is the pastoral—the Liturgy as its affects the average Catholic, especially as his normal means of instruction.

By general agreement these days in which we live have witnessed a general falling away from Bible reading amongst non-Catholics, whilst that practice has not been a strong point amongst English Catholics; then, too, only a small fraction of our people ever hear a sermon, for most come only once to church on a Sunday, and then to a Low Mass, at which they hear only the usual notices. Few in proportion to the sum total study Catholic books on religion, and so thousands have starved minds, a condition responsible in large measure for so much apathy. Apathy is the inevitable prostration of will which follows on after a long period of mental starvation. Now, in the Liturgy, and I am here using that term as equalling the Mass, we have an unequalled book of instruction, and the finest comment ever produced on the meaning of Holy Scripture.

Before proceeding to a detailed discussion of the English spiritual authors, some explanation is required of the order and design of the treatment. For we do not intend to follow a chronological order and indeed we have included the Ancren Riwle which is outside our period, as also William Langland who scarcely deserves the name of mystic though he was a great poet and the mystic is often, if not always, a poet too.

Our plan is to climb up the scale, the ladder of perfection, from the lowest rungs to the topmost, where, like Jacob’s ladder, they disappear into heaven. The theme of this essay has been adopted from Père Garrigou-Lagrange’s now celebrated thesis that the highest flights of infused contemplation and mystical union are on the royal road to holiness open to all. A scheme therefore of tEe normal growth of the generous soul cooperating to the full with the graces offered her, will begin with the first conversion and end with the heights of union described in different terminology by St John of the Cross, Mother Julian, and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing.

The mystic state, surrounded with so much splendour in the lives of the saints—is it really nothing but the ‘normal’ development of the virtues and the gifts? Why, then, do the mystics, a St Bernard, a St Catherine of Siena, a St John of the Cross, seem so different from ourselves? How can the mystical life, which in them abounds in visions, locutions, stigmata and other marvellous experiences, rest on the same principles as our own, devoid of all these things? It would seem to be this consideration that has led many modern theologians and spiritual writers to assume that the mystic state is ‘extraordinary’ in the strict sense, i.e. that it is not in the normal way of sanctity. In fact attempts have been made to divide the spiritual life into two completely separate compartments: the one ascetical and ‘normal’, with an ascetical purgative, illuminative and unitive way, the other mystic and ‘extraordinary’, with the same three ways. There is no necessity to repeat the arguments against this view so convincingly stated by theologians like Saudreau and Garrigou-Lagrange.

The Bible excepted, no other book in Christendom has circulated so widely as ‘The Imitation.’ Prepared during one of the darkest hours in European history, between the dead or dying Middle Ages and the alluring dawn of the delusive Renaissance; and as the picturesque Michelet writes: ‘L’Imitation de Jésus Christ, le plus beau livre chrétien après l’Evangile, est sorti, comme lui, du sein de la mort. La mort du monde ancien, la mort du moyen âge, ont porté ces germes de vie.’

The most precious of the early manuscripts is the famous Antwerp Codex written by Thomas himself, with the subscription Finitus et completus anno domini MCCCCXLI per manus fratris Thome Kempensis in Monte Agnetis prope Zwolles. Before the war there were still in existence sixty dated manuscripts of the fifteenth century, and about thirty undated ascribed to that century.

Although the evidence is overwhelming in favour of Thomas à Kempis as the author, after his death other claimants to that great honour were put forward, the most notable being Jean Gerson, Chancellor of Paris.