into a cataleptic state in which she was supposed to be dead, and
was carried out for burial. Her confessor, perceiving that she was
not really dead, awoke her: "Art thou satisfied?" "I am satisfied at
last," said Katrei: she was now "dead all through," as she wished to
be.

Are we to conclude that the logical outcome of mysticism is this
strange reproduction, in Teutonic Europe, of Indian Yogism? Many who
have studied the subject have satisfied themselves that Schwester
Katrei is the truly consistent mystic. They have come to the
conclusion that the real attraction of mysticism is a pining for
deliverance from this fretful, anxious, exacting, individual life,
and a yearning for absorption into the great Abyss where all
distinctions are merged in the Infinite. According to this view,
mysticism in its purest form should be studied in the ancient
religious literature of India, which teaches us how all this world
of colour and diversity, of sharp outlines and conflicting forces,
may be lost and swallowed up in the "white radiance," or black
darkness (it does not really matter which we call it) of an empty
Infinite.

The present writer is convinced that this is not the truth about
mysticism. Eckhart may have encouraged Schwester Katrei in her
attempt to substitute the living death of the blank trance for the
dying life of Christian charity; but none the less she caricatured
and stultified his teaching. And I think it is possible to lay our
finger on the place where she and so many others went wrong. The
aspiration of mysticism is to find the unity which underlies all
diversity, or, in religious language, to see God face to face. From
the Many to the One is always the path of the mystic. Plotinus, the