ENDS AND MEANS
treasured belief to give up; therefore enlightenment entails
for him no spiritual anguish.
All the writers in the great tradition of Christian mystical
theology have insisted on the necessity of purging the mind,
during meditation on the ultimate reality, of all images.
From Clement of Alexandria, who died at the beginning
of the third century and who was the first Christian writer
on mystical theology, down to St. John of the Cross in the
sixteenth, the tradition is unbroken. It is agreed that the
attempt to think of God in terms of images, to conceive
ultimate reality as having form or a nature describable in
words, is foredoomed to failure. In the latter part of the
sixteenth century there was a complete reversal of tradition.
The subject has been treated with a wealth of learned detail
by Dom John Chapman in the admirable essay on Roman
Catholic Mysticism, which is printed in Hastings* Ency-
clopaedia of Religion and Ethics, and it is unnecessary for
me to do more than briefly summarize his conclusions.
*At this very time (the end of the sixteenth century) the
dogmatic theologians were rising up against mystical theo-
logy. The great Dominicans, following the example of
St. Thomas in his Summa, ignored it; the great Jesuits
denied its very existence/ (The Jesuits, of course, had
been brought up on Ignatius's spiritual exercises in which
every effort is made, not to suppress the image-forming
phantasy—that worst obstacle, according to St. John of
the Cross and all the earlier mystics, in the way of a genuine
intuition of ultimate reality—but to develop it, if possible,
to the pitch of hallucination.) By the middle of the seven-
teenth century Cardinal Bona could state that 'pure prayer
exercised without phantasmata is universally denied by the
scholastics.* At the same time, 'art began no longer to
represent the saints as kneeling calmly in adoration, but as
waving their arms and stretching their necks and rolling
their eyes, in ecstasies of sensuous longing, while they tear
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