The purgative life necessarily includes self-discipline:  does it necessarily include what is commonly known as asceticism?  It would be easy to answer that asceticism means nothing but training, as men train for a race, or more broadly still, that it means simply “the acquisition of some greater power by practice.[19]” But when people speak of “asceticism,” they have in their minds such severe “buffeting” of the body as was practised by many ancient hermits and mediaeval monks.  Is this an integral part of the mystic’s “upward path”?  We shall find reason to conclude that, while a certain degree of austere simplicity characterises the outward life of nearly all the mystics, and while an almost morbid desire to suffer is found in many of them, there is nothing in the system itself to encourage men to maltreat their bodies.  Mysticism enjoins a dying life, not a living death.  Moreover, asceticism, when regarded as a virtue or duty in itself, tends to isolate us, and concentrates our attention on our separate individuality.  This is contrary to the spirit of Mysticism, which aims at realising unity and solidarity everywhere.  Monkish asceticism (so far as it goes beyond the struggle to live unstained under unnatural conditions) rests on a dualistic view of the world which does not belong to the essence of Mysticism.  It infected all the religious life of the Middle Ages, not Mysticism only.[20]

The second stage, the illuminative life, is the concentration of all the faculties, will, intellect, and feeling, upon God.  It differs from the purgative life, not in having discarded good works, but in having come to perform them, as Fenelon says, “no longer as virtues,” that is to say, willingly and almost spontaneously.  The struggle is now transferred to the inner life.

The last stage of the journey, in which the soul presses towards the mark, and gains the prize of its high calling, is the unitive or contemplative life, in which man beholds God face to face, and is joined to Him.  Complete union with God is the ideal limit of religion, the attainment of which would be at once its consummation and annihilation.  It is in the continual but unending approximation to it that the life of religion subsists.[21] We must therefore beware of regarding the union as anything more than an infinite process, though, as its end is part of the eternal counsel of God, there is a sense in which it is already a fact, and not merely a thing desired.  But the word deification holds a very large place in the writings of the Fathers, and not only among those who have been called mystics.  We find it in Irenaeus as well as in Clement, in Athanasius as well as in Gregory of Nyssa.  St. Augustine is no more afraid of “deificari” in Latin than Origen of [Greek:  theopoieisthai] in Greek.  The subject is one of primary importance to anyone who wishes to understand mystical theology; but it is difficult for us to enter into the minds of the ancients who used these expressions, both because