“The ascent is through self above self,” says Richard; we are to rise on stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things.  “Let him that thirsts to see God clean his mirror, let him make his own spirit bright,” says Richard again.  The Victorines do not disparage reason, which is the organ by which mankind in general apprehend the things of God; but they regard ecstatic contemplation as a supra-rational state or faculty, which can only be reached per mentis excessum, and in which the naked truth is seen, no longer in a glass darkly.[226]

This highest state, in which “Reason dies in giving birth to Ecstasy, as Rachel died in giving birth to Benjamin,” is not on the high road of the spiritual life.  It is a rare gift, bestowed by supernatural grace.  Richard says that the first stage of contemplation is an expansion of the soul, the second an exaltation, the third an alienation.  The first arises from human effort, the second from human effort assisted by Divine grace, the third from Divine grace alone.  The predisposing conditions for the third state are devotion (devotio), admiration (admiratio), and joy (exaltatio); but these cannot produce ecstasy, which is a purely supernatural infusion.

This sharp opposition between the natural and the supernatural, which is fully developed first by Richard of St. Victor, is the distinguishing feature of Catholic Mysticism.  It is an abandonment of the great aim which the earlier Christian idealists had set before themselves, namely, to find spiritual law in the normal course of nature, and the motions of the Divine Word in the normal processes of mind.  St. John’s great doctrine of the Logos as a cosmic principle is now dropped.  Roman Catholic apologists[227] claim that Mysticism was thus set free from the “idealistic pantheism” of the Neoplatonist, and from the “Gnostic-Manichean dualism” which accompanies it.  The world of space and time (they say) is no longer regarded, as it was by the Neoplatonist, as a fainter effluence from an ideal world, nor is human individuality endangered by theories of immanence.  Both nature and man regain a sort of independence.  We once more tread as free men on solid ground, while occasional “supernatural phenomena” are not wanting to testify to the existence of higher powers.

We have seen that the Logos-doctrine (as understood by St. Clement) is exceptionally liable to perversion; but the remedy of discarding it is worse than the disease.  The unscriptural[228] and unphilosophical cleft between natural and supernatural introduces a more intractable dualism than that of Origen.  The faculty which, according to this theory, possesses immediate intuition into the things of God is not only irresponsible to reason, but stands in no relation to it.  It ushers us into an entirely new world, where the familiar criteria of truth and falsehood are inapplicable.  And what it reveals to us is not a truer and deeper view of the actual, but a wholly