excessive negativity
of their systems.

There is, of course, a negative element or aspect in all genuine
religion. No person can grow rich in spiritual experience or can gain
an intimate acquaintance with a God of purity and truth without
negating the easy ways of instinct, the low pursuits of life which end
in self, the habits of thought and action which limit and hamper the
realization of the diviner possibilities of the whole nature.
Sometimes the eye that hinders must be plucked out or the right hand
cut off and thrust away for the sake of a freer pursuit of the soul's
kingdom. There is, too, a still deeper principle of negativity
involved in the very fibre of personal life itself. No one can advance
without {xxvi} surrender, no one can have gains without losses, no one
can reach great goals without giving up many things in themselves
desirable. There is "a rivalry of me's" which no person can ever
escape, for in order to choose and achieve one typical self another
possible self must be sternly sacrificed. In a very real sense it
remains forever true that we must die to live, we must die to the
narrow self in order to be raised to the wider and richer self.

But the _negative way_ of mysticism is more rigorous and more thorough
in its negation than that. Its negations "wind up the hill all the way
to the very top." Even the _self_ must be absolutely negated. "The
self, the I, the me and the like, all belong to the evil spirit. The
whole matter can be set forth in these words: Be simply and wholly
bereft of self." "The I, the me, and the mine, nature, selfhood, the
Devil, sin, are all one and the same thing."[11] Not only so, but all
_desire_ for any particular thing, or any particular experience must be
utterly extirpated. "Whatever Good the creature as creature can
conceive of and understand is something this or that," and therefore
not the One Real Good.[12] "So long as thy soul has an image, it is
without simplicity, and so long as it is without simplicity it doth not
rightly love God."[13] "Divine love can brook no rival." He who seeks
God must "rid himself of all that pertains to the creature." He that
would find the absolute Good must withdraw not only beyond all his
senses, but beyond all desires, into an inner "solitude where no word
is spoken, where is neither creature nor image nor fancy." "Everything
depends," Tauler counsels us, "upon a fathomless sinking into a
fathomless nothingness.