Studies in Mysticism and Certain Aspects of the Secret Tradition

THE HITHER SIDE OF THE PORTAL

HERE are many definitions of religion in its absolute consideration, but there is one of them which might include all as their ultimate reduction. There are also many external or official religions and one of them underlying all; there are numerous churches, schools of tradition and doctrine, many differentiations of sect existent in Christendom; but there is one Holy Assembly. It so happens, and this perhaps fortunately, that the definition herein referred to depends on no process in philology, though the word which expresses it indubitably acknowledges a synonym for which a claim of the kind was once made, and plausibly, but it has now, I understand, been voided. The definition is not, therefore, a novelty, which may help to make for its righteousness; it is a variant rather; and because it is no longer considered orthodox in scholarship to say that the word Religion signifies Rebinding, I would suggest alternatively that it is Reunion, which will define also the term desired by the mystic and thus serve fitly as a preliminary to the consideration of his life. Reunion involves the idea of something which has been set loose or has broken away, namely, the individual spirit, the call of which is to return — the reunion of man’s essential nature with the Divine Nature being not so much our condign state and beatitude as the one thing needful. It is in all truth so needful that it is only to avoid misconstruction that it is not described as necessary and, in a sense, inevitable. Under all the politic reservations, shall we not then say that our destiny is to get back somehow to God — with our free will, if we can, but get back we must? Shall we not acknowledge that, begin where one may in the universe, all roads lead ultimately to God — that the path of sin leads there, though it passes through perdition by the way? Docs not the spirit return to God which gave it? It scarcely concerns ns how or why the separation took place originally. We may have many worlds of experience to pass through before we shall sound that silent deep of an immemorial past. It may be true that no written mysticism and no oral traditions of the wise and secret orders can ever expound that mystery, except by the offices of the letters and by such economies as the churches also use; but the end of all mysticism, as of all religion, is to attain that reunion. The possibility is not merely the fundamental doctrine of what is termed in a peculiar manner transcendental religion; it can be said that it is the one doctrine; all else is a question of processes and of such conditions as they involve. Though it is casting the plummet of thought at once into the abyss of a great subject, it seems a question of good counsel to say this, even from the beginning, because it enables us to create a right and valuable distinction between the mystic life and certain extrinsic things which pass as its coincidents and collaterals when they have properly no part therein.