ECSTASY. Really a Greek word, meaning, in its good sense "a trance." The root from which the word (ekstasis) is derived frequently signifies " to lose one's senses." As Emerson truly says (" Swedenborg; or the Mystic"), " all religions history contains traces of the trance of saints." He adds that " the trances of Socrates, Plotinns, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guion, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes to mind, Is the accompani ment of disease. This beatitude comes in terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver." Since Emer son's day, however, the branch of psychology to which phenomena such as ecstasy belong has become a serious study. Emerson seems to confuse different kinds of trances. A cataleptic trance is no doubt a kind of disease. A trance, in the sense of an ecstasy, while it is certainly not a normal state, is not abnormal to the extent of being a disease. If the claims of religion are to stand, ecstasy must be regarded as natural and intel ligible. For religion not only recognises higher planes of existence and a life above the life of the world. It also asserts that there is, •in human experience, contact between the higher and the lower world. A person in a state of ecstasy ]eaves for a time the life of the body and rises to a higher and a spiritual plane. The sense for spiritual things is quickened and intensified. The experience has been made in all ages. It has not been so common in modern times as it was in the days of the Hebrew prophets, because life has become more and more materialistic. The Hebrew prophets lived in closer touch with Nature and with God than any other prophets seem to have done. The human spirit entered into closer communion with the divine (cp. INSPIRATION). The question has been asked in Germany (O. Boltzmann): Was Jesus ecstatic? Our answer is that naturally he was. Like the great prophets, his predecessors, when he could escape from the crowd, " he walked with God " and was, as it were, lost to the things of the world.
Philo (quoted by W. Sanday in Inspiration, 1903) well describes the state. With reference to Genesis xv. 12, where it is mid that " about the setting of the sun a trance came " upon Abraham, it is explained that the sun represents the light of human reason which sets In order to give place to the Spirit of God. " So long then as our mind shines and stirs about us, pouring as it were noontide brightness into every corner of the soul, we are masters of ourselves and are not possessed; but when it draws to its setting, then it is natural that the trance of inspiration should fall upon us, seizing upon us with a sort of frenzy. For when the divine light begins to shine, the human sets; and when it sets below the horizon, the other appears above it and rises. This is what constantly happens to the prophet. The mind in us is expelled at the arrival of the Divine Spirit and returns again to its home at His removal. For it may not be that mortal dwell with immortal. So the setting of the reason and the darkness that gathers round it generates an ecstasy and heaven-caused madness." It has to be borne in mind that there is a natural (spon taneous) and an unnatural (artificial) form of ecstasy. But it was the ecstasy of natural experience that sug gested the ecstasy of artificial stimulation. There can hardly be any comparison between the ecstasy of a Hebrew prophet and the ecstasy of a dancing Dervish. It is true that the two kinds appear in the Bible, but the Bible itself distinguishes between true prophets and false prophets, and between natural and artificial kinds of inspiration. Cp. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.