Excerpt from Studies in the Lives of the Saints

Action of the mind on itself has ever been the tendency of the scientific inquirer. If such attempts have any real value, it is in the evidence they bring forward of our profound ignorance of the most simple phenomena of the interior and unseen life - that child sleep ing so peacefully in most of us, only occasion ally stirring in the dreams that we learn in time to disregard. And unlike the aesthetic critic it is impossible for us to ignore the reality of these experiences of the Saints. For they have no intrinsic beauty, being really but a kind of profound logic following on that postulate Let it be granted that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. In the ex periences of St. Teresa or St. John of the Cross there is nothing that is of any pos sible value if the actual experiences told so coldly never really happened. And indeed, when we inquire more closely into the scienceof mysticism, we find scarcely beauty at all, only a kind of tragedy whose end we cannot see - a tragedy that is really after all only a comedy, so that it Should end happily. And mysticism, regarded rightly not as the hysteri cal profession of those who in contemplating some bleeding Christ have lost that temper ance and sanity which it is the profound busi ness of criticism to preserve, but regarded as the hard and crystallized logic of some mighty argument, is really not a beautiful thing at all, in that almost its first requirement is a denial of life, a dislike and contempt for the beauty of the world. Entirely without humour, it has at least to this extent influenced every school of Christian thought in that Christianity gener ally denies humour to God.

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